Why are robust and curmudgeonly older women called 'trouts?' This strikes me as very strange, the trout being as near to a sexless beast as it is possible to come this side of the molluscs. Such women may look variously like a great many members of the animal kingdom, but even so fishes are surely not among them - fish, even in old age, usually being sleek, well-groomed and wrinkle free, qualities not immediately associated with a 'trout' of the elderly female variety. I wonder what the male equivalent is?
Perhaps the word is falling into desuetude; certainly it has a Blandings Castle feel to it, which is probably why it was the critic's word of choice to describe the character played by the redoubtable Eileen Atkins - the stalwart but decrepit Lady Tressilian - in Kevin Elyot's adaptation of one of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple (she would today be Ms Marple, no doubt) stories on the television last evening.
A quite wonderful cameo performance of an old dying lady (who nevertheless contrives to get herself murdered) who lies abed all day, chain-smoking cheroots, as she issues directions and listens to the beguiling conversations among her guests that chance conveniently to drift through her open window. Eileen Atkins manages to combine simultaneously the force of the moneyed matriach with the bathos of the dying as when she exclaims, in a cross but resigned sort of a way, 'Oh what does it matter? We shall all be dead come September?'
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