‘Don’t mind if I do,’ is one of husband’s stock phrases — jokes he would think them — in this case trotted out if anyone says, of the weather, ‘Bitter’. (The joke must come from Colonel Chinstrap in ITMA, even though my husband wasn’t born then.)

Mr Verdant Green, notionally at Oxford in the mid 19th-century, called drinking bitter beer ‘doing bitters’, a bit of slang he picked up from Mr Bouncer.