'Rather', as in 'Edith Cull was a rather disappointed woman.'

A little bug has got into my writing and is crawling over my pale limbs. The word ‘rather’ keeps appearing as an adverb - Edith Cull is also sometimes moving rather slowly; or to qualify an adjective — Edith Cull is sometimes rather slow — but I’m not implying a small amount of something or the other, but a large amount of implication — a large implication. ‘Rather’ is sneaky; it implies emphasis but just how much comes down to attitude, tone. ‘Edith Cull was a rather disappointed woman.’ ‘Edith Cull was rather short.’ (Says who?) My ‘rather’ is a put down: a combination of hearsay, that is other people’s opinions of Edith as she hears them echoing around her ‘rather fearful mind’, and those generated by Edith herself. But what’s the difference? Who turned Edith into a rather disappointed woman? My narrator did, a rather busy-bodying sort.

I’m interested in how characters speak to themselves in a self-conscious way through an interfering narrator (the ‘rather’ is her interference); and then the more general interference of rumour and hearsay that comes from a wider communal source: Mr. Jarvis at the chemist whose opinion of Edith follows the opinion of the loudest brayer in the village. All human opinion rests upon a lot of nudging and prodding: the sound of circulating opinion gathering momentum. ‘Rather’ is just that: opinionated sound travelling through my sentences. ‘Buzz, buzz’, says Hamlet in response to Polonius’s witterings: ‘buzz, buzz,’ the idle sound of a fly. Swat her away, she is condemning.

So be careful who buzzes around you, who narrates you. She is responsible for generating all this buzz, and, as in family life, one person usually takes the flack for the ‘rather annoying business’ of things going wrong: the front door keys left inside; the household rubbish still sitting in the kitchen while the rubbish men pull away. All rather annoying, and ripe for breeding lazy opinion.

I must find a way of getting rid of these bugs inside my head.

For Kate, a very fair and noble person.