Journalism (n) :  I know nothing about a subject, and I have 1200 words in which to express it.

[Choose your own links]

Anglo-Catholicism (n) : The Trotskyist wing of the Church of England.¹

1. It is significant that [several young gifted writers of the twenties and thirties] went almost invariably to the Roman Church, and not, for instance, to the C. of E., the Greek Church or the Protestant sects. They went, that is, to the Church with the world-wide organization, the one with rigid discipline, the one with power and prestige behind it. Perhaps it is even worth noting that the only latter-day convert of really first-rate gifts, Eliot, has embraced not Romanism but Anglo-Catholicism, the ecclesiastical equivalent of Trotskyism.

   George Orwell, ‘Inside the Whale’, New Directions in Prose and Poetry. 1940 [↩]

Tradition (n) : 2. Something the English do really well. See binge drinking and rural rioting.

Spring (n) : It’s raining— and don’t the clocks go forward soon, so we miss an hour’s kip?

Autumn (n) : It’s raining— and that makes the leaves slippy underfoot.

Winter (n) : It’s raining— and dark.

Summer (n) : it’s raining.

Tradition (n) : we’ve done it twice.

Opportunity (n) : problem, whose solution I read about in a book once, so it’ll be interesting to see if I can persuade everyone else to read the same book.

challenge (n) : problem for which we hope we have a solution.