Messer-abouter

He’s a gypsy, a wanderer, a general messer-abouter, here today and gone tomorrow and God only knows where the day after.

Alan: It’s obvious really isn’t it? If you haven’t got nothing [no qualifications] you’re going to be a ‘messer-abouter’ really.

She wanted to give me the illusion of freedom now I was a teenager, but still felt it her duty to monitor how much time was spent studying and how much time being a ‘ruckuryu’ — which, loosely translated, means a ‘messer-abouter’ — so instead of asking where I was off to, she’d ask, ‘Am I cooking for you tonight?’

To find out more we travelled west to Manchester, venue for the second annual Jamboree – a festival of educators, makers and messer-abouters focussed on highlighting how engaging the Pi can be.

From Sussex in the UK came a ‘memo to the great heartless transplanter. Well done, Messer-abouter. Transplanting pays you, does it not? If not, by good results, it does pay you from the money viewpoint?’

In the words of Milton Wainwright, a microbiologist and historian of science, Fleming was eccentric, a ‘messer-abouter’. ‘He had a reputation for being a nutter and doing daft things, like creating pictures of the Queen on a petri dish using different bacteria cultures.’