At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

that if you took a lump of lime or magnesia and burned it in a really hot flame, it would glow with an intense white light. Using a flame made from a rich blend of oxygen and alcohol, Gurney could heat a ball of lime no bigger than a child’s marble so efficiently that its light could be seen sixty miles away. The device was successfully put to use in lighthouses, but it was also taken up by theatres. Not only was the light perfect and steady, but it could be focused into a beam and cast on to selected performers – which is where the term ‘in the limelight’ comes from.

Curiously, one of the few survivors from this culinary onslaught is one that is most difficult to understand: the fish knife. No one has ever identified a single advantage conferred by its odd scalloped shape or worked out the original thinking behind it. There isn’t a single kind of fish that it cuts better or bones more delicately than a conventional knife does.

Today it holds the boiler, idle suitcases, out-of-season sporting equipment and many sealed cardboard boxes that are almost never opened but are always carefully transferred from house to house with every move in the belief that one day someone might want some baby clothes that have been kept in a box for twenty-five years.

Box-rooms.