One of the pleasures of this Ashes series has been Michael Atherton’s daily despatches. (I see your eyes rolling at the word pleasures - I’m sure you have your own epithets.) In his report on the second day of the Test in Melbourne, he managed to wrest some dark humour from another calamitous day with a couple of gags from Australian wits - on England failing to materialise - “Only one team at the ground? That’s how it’s been all series.” Caught Covid? “About the only thing they have caught this series, cobber.” In these dire sporting times, we must take comfort where we can. I mentioned in my last column that my wife was doing an MA in medieval literature and was always turning up fascinating words. This week is no exception. She drew my attention to a review of Personal Pleasures: Essays on Enjoying Life by Rose Macaulay in the London Review of Books, in which the reviewer pointed up Macaulay’s passion for words and cited the following that particularly delighted her: cantiferous, sedilian, empatining and hagiary. Sadly, none of these made it into the OED and they pretty much fox Google, but I feel that we should celebrate her ardour. There was a very decent line from Joanna Lumley in Meltdown, a Radio 4 play, last week: “Social media? Shouldn’t it be antisocial media?” Good point. Finally, to the reader who upbraided me for confusing Augean and Aegean (he wrote: “What a pity that Jonathan Bouquet spoilt his column by mis-spelling the filthy stables - the Augean stables were named after a king of Elis, and have no link with the photogenic Aegean Sea”). This was preceded by the phrase “the most wonderful malapropism”. There was a clue there. Jonathan Bouquet is an Observer columnist