Quote of the Week:
“My grandfather was born in 1888 and he didn’t have a lifestyle. He didn’t need one: he had a life.
“He had a hat and a car and a wife and two sons and a housekeeper and a maid and a nanny for the children, and the housekeeper had a dog and the dog had a canker and lived in a kennel.
“My grandfather read Charles Dickens mostly. Sometimes they went on holiday. His house was furnished with furniture.
“There were some exotic things in it, brought back from exotic places. The most exotic things were African carvings and Benares brassware. The African carving had been brought back from a war, possibly the Boer one.
“The brassware was brought back from Benares by my grand-father’s friend Dr Chand, who lived next door but was a Brahmin from Benares.
“Dr Chand didn’t have a lifestyle either. Nobody had a lifestyle then, because there was nobody to tell them to, and anyway they were too busy having lives.
“They were grown-ups. They went about their business. In my grandfather’s case, it was seeing patients and making them better, where possible. In Dr Chand’s case, it was the same, because he was a doctor too.”
–a London Telegraph article adapted from “Big Babies” by Michael Bywater