Tripped by a bit of idiom

 Roger Deakin’s sense of place is grounded in the natural world. But it also includes bits of history and culture.

He gets a stiff neck staring at the beams of church ceilings with medieval carvings of angels. He gets down on his knees to inspect the undersides of the folding seats in choir stalls, where ancient craftsmen left carvings, sometimes sublime, sometimes obscene, where no one was likely to look.

On one such expedition, Deakin and a friend were rummaging in the choir stalls and found “sweet papers” from the choir children underneath the cushions.

Sweet papers?

Briefly, I imagined it was an idiom for “love notes.”

“Candy wrappers,” more likely.

Maybe I’d be a better compiler of odd lexicons if I were a better crossword puzzler. 

• Roger Deakin, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm; London: Penguin Books, 2009.