Sublime

The censorship code of 1948 imposed ‘an absolute ban’ on the following: ‘Lavatories, Pre-Natal influences, Marital Infidelity, Effeminacy in Men, Immorality of any kind, suggestive references to Honeymoon couples, Chambermaids, Fig-leaves, Prostitution, Ladies Underwear, Lodgers and Commercial Travellers, and Animal Habits’. Since then, every one

gongoozling – staring idly into water, or space, as the rest of the world passes by.

There We Are Then,

as the novelist Jodi Picoult put it ‘The music we listen to may not define who we are. But it’s a damn good start.’

Take the ‘zarf’, too: the cardboard cupholder dispensed with every barista-brewed cappuccino. This throwaway symbol of modern life could not have had a more prestigious beginning. Zarfs in the Ottoman Empire were honed out of precious metal and encrusted with emeralds and diamonds.