Having just returned from a very relaxing sojourn in Cornwall, staying in a National Trust cottage, I really should have no grounds for complaint, and yet... A couple of niggles.
You’re not a holiday-maker if you stay in a NT property, you’re a “supporter”. Heaven knows what that means exactly. And then there was the broken television. Sound, but no picture. What we basically had was a defunct set. Even I could work that one out. The issue of the broken TV was put to the NT rep, who said she would “raise an incident”.
What? How dramatic does that sound? An incident conjures up images of terrorist events, catastrophic fires, motorway pile-ups. No, it was simply a TV past its sell-by date. Inconvenient but no more than that, so less of the drama, please.
Stumbling blindly, as usual, through the City pages, my eye was caught by the following headline: “Bill for Barclays securities blunder rises to $17.6bn”. Intrigued by such an enormous figure, I read on. “It said at the time that it had exceeded a limit set in August 2019 by about $15.2bn and that it would start a rescission order to repurchase the securities and rectify the error.”
“Rescission” had me inevitably scrambling for the dictionary, to discover it means the act of rescinding. Completely new on me, so it’s little wonder I find the world of high finance so baffling.
Equally baffling are advertising slogans. There are a couple at the moment that make absolutely no sense, so opaque are they. Take Audi’s for example - “Future is an attitude”. Stumped? Me too. And what are we to make of this from South Western Railway - “We’re on a journey to better”? As my wife caustically said: “Just run your bloody trains on time.”
• Jonathan Bouquet is an Observer columnist
