Look, I don’t want to appear mean, but I really feel that I must call out Dominic Raab, the deputy prime minister. He was being interviewed by Matt Frei on Channel 4 News last week about events in Ukraine and he began nearly all his replies to a question with the word “look”. It became so annoying that I failed fully to listen to his answers, which could of course have been his intention. It was only marginally less irritating than those who respond to a question with “so”.
Talking of Ukraine, I was reading Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Telegraph last week and he dropped this one in my lap: “Will Russia’s patriotic generals agree to devastate the Varangian cradle of Kievan Mother Rus with cluster bombs? I doubt it.” Varangian cradle? Completely new to me.
Further research unearthed the following: “The principality of Kyiv was founded on the location of contemporary Kyiv in the ninth century by Viking warrior-traders from Scandinavia (also called Varangians or Rus) who mixed with the local east Slavic population.” Fascinating stuff and I’m grateful to Evans-Pritchard for pointing it out.
And as a mere aside to Ukraine, a friend pointed out an interesting development in pub talk. Had I, he asked, noticed how, a year ago, every bar bore was a world-leading epidemiologist or immunologist, but now they are some of the foremost military tacticians? And it’s true. I listened to a couple of men last week who would have given Carl von Clausewitz or Sun Tzu a run for their money.
I wrote last week about great jobs I have missed out on, in that case “scenic ager” (someone who makes set scenes look older). Now another one has popped up – dark sky officer. This is a person who monitors light pollution, especially, it seems, in national parks. As I often have trouble sleeping, I think this could be just the job for me. When I’m not monitoring Dominic Raab’s speech patterns, that is.
• Jonathan Bouquet is an Observer columnist
