Words of Others | Do gods get nosebleeds?
I have a British friend who recently went home to London for vacation. While he was there, he went to a football match (the soccer kind) between his team, Chelsea, and Burnley at Chelsea’s West London stadium, Stamford Bridge. Here’s how he described his seats:
You’re up with the gods a bit.
I thought that was a much more poetic way to describe those seats that plain old “nosebleed.”
Posted on November 9, 2009 12:00 pm, in Uncategorized, Words of Others. Bookmark the permalink. 1 Comment.
“The gods” was a common 19th-century British/Irish expression for the topmost seats in a theatre. In the “Circe” chapter of Ulysses, one Mrs. Yelverton Barry accuses Leopold Bloom of sending her a scurrilous letter: “He said that he had seen from the gods my peerless globes as I sat in a box of the Theatre Royal at a command performance of La Cigale.”