Quark’s English for Commercial Travellers No 1

‘Soup magnet’: insurance industry slang for ‘tie.’

The effect of leaves on a post-industrial economy

Trains in England have begun broadcasting warnings that they may not necessarily run on time due to excessive leaf-fall. The leaves fall, and the trains shudder to a halt, like cartoon elephants terrified of cartoon mice. Is Autumn really that stark an innovation, or so profoundly unpredictable - coming as it does every year without fail, around October - that this couldn’t have been guessed at by the timetable boffins, working their dark, macabre arts?

It’s a crisis. Knowledge workers are being kept from their memos, marketers are being kept from their USPs and positioning statements, business managers everywhere are being kept from leveraging whatever they’ve taken it into their heads to leverage. The economy must be wobbling like a jelly.

It’s hard to imagine the Victorians, who bust sinews and bored through hillsides to create the damn railways in the first place, giving in this easily to excessive foliage. Then again, as the railways were probably built with child labour, amongst other things, maybe where we’ve failed isn’t as significant as where we’ve improved.

On utterly unnecessary frost

Fine, if you're in an 80s pop video, I can see the point of lavish amounts of cold: bit of a brisk wind, epic seacape in the background, in come the swirling synthesisers. Makes sense. But for the rest of us, why bother? Why stand shivering on train stations, when there's clearly no danger we're collectively going to pop up in a Flock of Seagulls video - but instead are destined to freeze our (in many cases, metaphorical) nads off? I've already broken out the duffle coat in the manner of a hunter in the Canadian wastes breaking out the last pack of cartridges as all around the wolves howl (and no, I'm sorry, I don't think that's an extreme comparison). If God had meant us to be this cold, this early in the autumn, he wouldn't have given us ears.