Nail clippings

Every so often a bit of stray verbiage will float into my head unbidden and I try to remember to make a note of it for one or other of the books I'll never get round to. Here are a few waifs and strays from the commonplace books...

• He was one of those tall men of indeterminate age and character who populate the middle reaches of the professions.

• Almost at once he had concluded that the visitor was entirely inconsequential and he spent the next hour doing everything humanly possible to make himself stupidly beholden to him.

• It was an old-fashioned door that looked impossibly flimsy but had rattled in the merest breeze for the past thirty-seven years without ever actually blowing open.

• He was tending his vegetable plot. Late Winter had passed into the thin pickings of early Spring: the last of the Brussels sprout tops and savoy cabbages and whatever carrots and parsnips were left in the store. It had been a bad few weeks, what with the cold nights and colder rains, and he was torn between keeping the cloche over the beans in the hopes of a half-decent harvest and taking the cloches off in the near-certainty of wood pigeon for supper.

• It's a good thing to be underestimated in high places. 

• "Every generation sees its economic crash as The Great Depression. The difference this time is that it'll be the harder for the men as write history to forget what it really meant."

• The train was on time. The train was always on time. They changed the station clock religiously to make sure that it was so.

• The two men at the bar spoke French. They spoke French abysmally, as only the French are allowed to do.