Since you are dying to know, let me tell you how I spent Bank Holiday weekend. On Saturday I saw some brilliantly colourful floats being driven into Notting Hill for the carnival. For most of Sunday and Monday I was on a singing tour of southern England with my local choir (and very melodious we were, too — especially after some necessary lubrication of the old throat pipes). And the rest of the time I spent perusing Nigel Rees’s new book, All Gong and No Dinner (Collins).

Three disparate activities, you may think. Yet all trigger the same pleasurable response in my mind. Why? Because in an age when “mass entertainment” too often means us, the masses, gormlessly digesting what’s handed down by the TV networks, Hollywood and the music business, those three pastimes reminded me that the art of making one’s own entertainment did not die with the Victorian parlour and the pub singalong. Bubbling under the surface, mostly unnoticed by cultural commentators, millions of people demonstrate astonishing creativity in countless ways each day.

It might be a handsome bit of DIY home improvement (if that’s not a contradiction in terms). It might be a lovingly tended garden. It might be staging South Pacific in the village hall. What it is doesn’t matter. The vital thing is that it keeps people sane. And sane people tend to create a sane society.

Ah yes, you say, I can see how those gaudily arrayed carnival floats fit into that thesis, and even the inflicting of your croaky baritone on the helpless populace of Dorset. But what does Rees’s book — his latest compilation of “homely phrases and curious domestic sayings” — have to do with all that? The answer is that it entertainingly reveals how people who would never dream of describing themselves as linguistically creative constantly enrich and enhance their everyday discourse with unexpected metaphors and memorable verbal flourishes.

Just recall such fruity exclamations as “I should cocoa!”, or “I wasn’t born on Pancake Day!”, or “I could eat the dates off a calendar!”, or even the one that gives the book its title: “He’s all gong and no dinner!” (and its saucier variant: “He’s all mouth and no trousers”). They are so blissfully surreal as to be, on the surface, virtually nonsensical. And they certainly aren’t the plainest or most obvious way of saying what the speaker wants to convey. Yet instantly, intuitively, we know exactly what they mean.

Or consider mankind’s capacity for giving hackneyed phrases a graphic new twist. One of Britain’s most distinguished opera impresarios (no prizes for guessing which one) once told me that he had decided to “grasp the nettle firmly by the throat” and build a new theatre on his country estate. Of course, such delightful metaphorical soufflés are often dismissed as mere slips of the tongue. Rees quotes a lady who was fond of declaring that “we’ll cross that bridge when we’ve burnt it”. But as Freud said, there are no true “accidents” in life. Subconsciously, that lady liked to advocate courses of action so bold that she scarcely wanted to admit her recklessness to herself. Only her mashing together of two different metaphors gave her away.

To judge from Rees’s book, our brains are frequently at their most fertile when devising insults. He cites one that will be familiar in many households — “My wife’s upstairs, changing her mind” — and, from the other side of the sexist divide, Mrs Thatcher’s quintessential “The cocks may crow but it’s the hen that lays the eggs”. (Some hen, some eggs — as one of her distinguished predecessors might have quipped.)

What’s amazing, though, is the sheer variety of ways in which we can imply that someone is a bit challenged in the grey-cells department. Rees quotes “thick as two short planks” (and makes a stab at explaining why the planks, bafflingly, have to be short). He also cites “daft as a brush” and its delightful Norfolk variant: “He don’t go no further than Thursday” (you have to do it in a rustic accent for the full effect).

But sadly he leaves out the more recent “He’s a few sandwiches short of a full picnic”, as well as the old Cockney insult: “You must have got off at East Ham” (ie, you’re one stop short of Barking). And although he includes that ubiquitous parish-magazine phrase, “a good time was had by all”, he omits its deliciously naughty offshoot: Bette Davis’s description of a fellow Hollywood actress as “the original good time that was had by all”. However, just to show that the English don’t have a monopoly in snide remarks, he does include the time-honoured quip that older French people still utter after enjoying a good supper: “Un autre repas que les Allemands n’auront pas!” (that’s another meal the Germans won’t have).

It must be admitted that a lot of Rees’s “homely” phrases are teeth-grittingly irritating. I will count myself fortunate if I never again hear “bless his little cotton socks”, “not a happy bunny”, “all done and dusted”, “part of life’s rich tapestry”, “I must love you and leave you” and “that’s for me to know and you to find out” — to which I always want to scream: “Which is why I’m asking, you twit!”. I also cringe when I hear “don’t get your knickers in a twist” — though I like the American version cited by Rees: “Don’t get your panties in an uproar”.

Yet what’s indisputable is that, between the tired old clichés, our everyday discourse contains thousands of startlingly vivid linguistic inventions. Keep your ears pinned. Nearly two centuries ago the great literary critic William Hazlitt observed that you could hear “more good things” travelling in the cheap seats of the London to Oxford stagecoach than if you spent 12 months discoursing with the learned members of that university. If he returned today, I think he would be delighted to find that spoken English is alive and well and constantly being refreshed and renewed in homes, offices and bus queues throughout the realm.

I’ll never forget whatsisname

The claws are out in domestic-goddess land. Martha Stewart, whose star has faded since she took an enforced break in an unusually secure domestic environment, describes her British rival Nigella Lawson as “what’s her name who married the Saatchi”. In response the gloriously upholstered Nigella implies that Stewart is jealous because she herself has a “soft spot” for “the Saatchi” in question.

I love the scathingly reductive contempt of the original insult. And it’s so adaptable. Here are six similar epithets which (as Nigella might say) I prepared earlier to evoke the essence of once-famous people whose names may have slipped your mind. See if you can recall who they are, or were:

Whatsisname with the irritating grin who married that mouthy Cherie woman

Thingumybob with the funny ears who married Camilla and talks to vegetables

Oojamaflip with the two Jags and the bit on the side

The dim footballer who married that skinny bird in the pop group (multiple answers permitted)

That creepy valet bloke who claimed to be Diana’s special friend

Wasserface who sang in her corset and made a fuss about adopting an African baby.

Your contributions welcome. Life has few pleasures finer than devising dismissive inscriptions for other people’s tombstones.

Holy sea

How smart of the Vatican to set up its own budget airline to fly pilgrims from Rome to Lourdes. But was it wise to announce that its crews would be trained “in voyages of a sacred nature”? The phrase does trigger rather unnerving thoughts. I wonder what the pre-flight safety announcement will say. Perhaps: “In the unlikely event of the aircraft having to put down on water, you will find last rites and a comforting Irish priest stowed in the overhead locker.”

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