Summary
If Walls Could Talk by Lucy Worsley Faber & Faber Pounds 20 ? Pounds 15.99 inc p&p HHHHH As chief curator of Hampton Court, Kensington Palace and the Tower of London, Lucy Worsley's usual beat involves glamorous and grand lives. But in this book she drops her gaze a rung or two down the social ladder. It is a sweeping history of what ordinary Britons get up to when they shut the front door, put their feet up and stop pretending to be anything other than their own humdrum selves.
With chapter titles such as The Pungent Power Of Pongs and Were They Drunk All The Time?, Worsley keeps the tone jaunty as she embarks on a whistle-stop tour around the four main areas of the average home: bedroom, bathroom, living room and kitchen. Anecdotes, jokes and fascinating facts come thick and fast. Did you know the phrase 'sleep tight' came about in the days when the bed frame was criss-crossed with straps that had to be tightened every night before getting into bed? Or that 'getting hold of the wrong end of the stick' refers to the fact that the Romans in Britain used to wipe their bottoms with a sponge rammed on to a twig? Or that the first washing machine was designed in 1677? Worsley's eye for quirky detail is so compelling that you quickly find yourself gripped by the most unlikely subjects: never has medieval plumbing seemed like so much fun.See the full content of this document
Extract
A Weird and Whiffy Tour of Home Life
One of the most interesting chapters in the section on bedrooms explains that people in pre-industrial times dealt with the long wi...
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