I was in a bookshop yesterday and there was all the usual range of gimmicky things that you get these days, as well as the books on sale. Along with calendars, note books, rubber stamps, tins with nothing in them but some amusing phrase on the outside… was a pile of little books, about two inches by four. They had pale green canvas covers, and written on the front was ‘Word of the day…’ Inside, the creamy pages (nice quality paper) were blank except for some gold lines on which you could write… your word of the day.

The little note books appealed to me in a naff sort of way, as naff things sometimes do; I wasn’t going to buy one, nor even make my own little booklet. My handwriting is so terrible that anything handwritten, such as a journal or indeed a word of the day in a word of the day book, would just look silly.

I did however, think of how sometimes a word will get stuck in my head for no particular reason. Such a word is ‘nematode’. A nematode is a tiny worm about 2.5mm long, of which there are maybe 30,000 varieties… some of which are very beneficial to farmers because they destroy other pests. Sadly, the Golden Nematode is not golden at all but extremely harmful…. shame…