Terry affair sparks a few choice words (From The Northern Echo)

Terry affair sparks a few choice words

11:18am Saturday 6th February 2010 in

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FOOTBALLERS aren’t known for their grasp of the finer points of the English language, but their philandering has had me reaching for the dictionary.

“Cuckold”, in reference to the unfortunate Manchester City left back Wayne Bridge, has suddenly been in regular use, a wonderful word that we stole 1,000 or more years ago from the old French for cuckoo – cucuault – because of its naughty habit of laying eggs in another bird’s nest.

John Terry, England captain until yesterday, is accused of being in the wrong nest.

When it emerged Vanessa Perroncel had entertained another six Chelsea footballers in her nest, a radio presenter exclaimed: “Well, she doesn’t hide her light under a bushel.”

Although a bushel is a measurement of corn (again from an old French word, boissel, meaning box), this is a biblical phrase from Matthew, where Jesus is urging his disciples to be “the light of the world”.

“A city that is built on a hill cannot be hid,”

he says. “Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick.”

The bushel here is probably a bushelbox, an earthenware or wooden container that would hold the equivalent of eight gallons of corn – enough to extinguish any flame, although obviously not to dampen Mr Terry’s ardour.

Finally, the wronged Mrs Terry has been displayed looking tearfully forlorn while simultaneously sexy in a state of undress – more make-up than clothes – languishing on a lounger in Dubai. “Hell hath no fury...”

screamed the headline.

I assumed this was Shakespeare, but in fact this phrase came a hundred years later from William Congreve. In his 1697 play, The Mourning Bride, he wrote: “Heaven has no rage, like love to hatred turned,/Nor hell a fury, like a woman scorned.”

It may also be worthwhile Mr Terry recalling the other famous line from that play when he eventually gets to pour oil on Mrs Terry’s troubled waters.

Congreve says: “Music has charms to sooth a savage breast”. Whether that advice works on a savage breast that has been partially displayed in a pink and black bikini in every red-top newspaper, Congreve doesn’t say.

TO birds of a more sensible type. I am indebted to Matty Longstaff, of Hurworth, near Darlington, for sending me the January edition of British Homing World where in an article in Squeakers’ Corner (a squeaker being a young bird), Polam Hall School, Darlington, tells of the King of Rome.

Last week’s column said that 1,653 of Europe’s finest homing pigeons were released for a race from Rome on June 29, 1913. Over the Alps, a violent storm broke, driving hundreds down into the snow and blowing hundreds more hopelessly off course. Of the 1,200 birds from Belgium – a pioneering pigeon country – only 62 made it back.

In Britain, only one bird was believed to have returned. It dropped into its loft in Derby in the last week of July, and was hailed as the King of Rome.

But, on August 18, a blue chequer appeared back in Tudhoe, near Spennymoor. As the Polam Hall pupils worked out in their article, it had flown 1,093 miles and 1,169 yards in 51 days, and for its owners, Mr Vester and Mr Scurr, it earned an £8 prize.

Sadly, The Northern Echo of the day did not record this, but it did earn the pigeon the soubriquet of “the Prince of Rome” – and it is, with the German doodlebug, the most famous thing to have flown into Tudhoe Village.