Heard a wonderful story the other day from my friend Eve, who used to be a very superior bureaucrat in the Church of England. One of the more media-friendly bishops, let’s call him Bill, grew very drunk one day — an event not wholly unprecedented — and launched himself at her in a taxi. She fought him off; but when they next had lunch he took her to an unusual and expensive restaurant, where he gave a bravura performance of solicitude and inappropriate touching.
Alas, what he had not reckoned with was that the woman running the front of the house was a close friend of his wife’s. Two days later, Eve had a phone call full of grovelling apology, in which she imagined that the bishop’s halo had been temorarily replaced by a hovering frying pan in the sturdy hands of Mrs Bishop.
“.. he took her to an unusual presence and was all with solicitude..”
Am I being very dim and missing a literary reference, or is there a or two missing there?
the missing is brain.