Wightman

My late father would often quote the famous saying “penny wise and pound foolish” coined by Mathematician, Oxford University Scholar, and vicar of St. Thomas’s Church, Robert Burton in his therapeutical memoir which became a medical textbook, The Anatomy of Melancholy first published in 1621. A person who is “penny wise and pound foolish” is said to be be careful with small amounts of money but wasteful with large sums. I am confident my dad was unaware of the saying’s origin, however that didn’t inhibit its regular use. And like many analogies and idioms and sayings we adapt meaning over time, in this case 400 years, to suit our own interpretation. He would most often refer to the saying when discussing suits. Ill-fitting clothing was his biggest gripe. Suits that “fell off the shoulders” or “were swimming on him” should be avoided at all costs. Dad followed with advice regarding preparedness to pay that little bit extra to ensure the wearer would not return to their chosen purv...

The 35th President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, glimmered hope of bringing the troops home from chaotic war efforts in Vietnam when he prematurely offered in the early 1960’s, “There’s light at the end of the tunnel.” The saying, although not of the president’s pen, was popularised because of his world standing. I found myself in a tunnel this week with family and friends. The Derby Tin Mining Tunnel is an amazing section of the Blue Derby Mountain Bike Trails. The Examiner Newspaper’s Deputy Editor, Zona Black, wrote of the tunnel in 2017 before access was granted on a 29er. “It was built in the late 1800’s to wash away tailings from the mine. It was the means to an end of a feud between three companies who couldn’t decide how to dispose of the by-product. “So one mine’s management took it upon themselves to drill through the granite to make a tunnel, and that was that,” Ms Black wrote in 2017. In the North-East, granite is even more common than potatoes ...