I noticed something rather irritating about my lightwriter yesterday. We were in Costa’s, talking about puns. Lyn and I both like to play with words, and she is especially good at coming up with naff, often cringeworthy ones. I decided to tell her my favourite play on words, which can be attributed to Humphrey Lyttelton, if memory serves: ”this is called orthinology, the art of word-botching” I said, using my lightwriter. This is a deliberate mispronunciation of ornithology, of course, which is bird watching. This pun is, in my opinion, a thing of absolute genius – the pinnacle of wit; but the problem was my lightwriter didn’t pronounce orthinology correctly. The damn thing said it as though there was a C in there somewhere. Needless to say I was extremely dischuffed, and spent about the next five minutes trying to get my lightwriter to say orthinology the right way, by which time all comic effect was lost. I suppose it just goes to show the chaps at Toby Churchill still have some bugs to work out, especially when it comes to things like puns.