Ridiculously

From another point of view, it was a place without a soul. The well-to-do had hearts of stone; the rich were brutally bumptious; the Press, the Municipality, all the public men, were ridiculously, vaingloriously self-satisfied.

`I was with the ballet back home, but the money was ridiculously low.'

It's a shame; not only are nuts quite ridiculously nutritious but, as anyone who's ever shelled out (sorry) for a tiny glass of pistachios in a pub will know, they're a guaranteed crowd-pleaser. But although I happen to have a soft spot for nut roast – an option often preferable to the meat that emerged from the school kitchen – it seems I'm in a cranky minority. A request for recipe recommendations was met with a polite silence on Twitter: vegetarianism, apparently, has moved on a bit. You don't see Yotam Ottolenghi faffing about with nut roasts, do you? But I'm determined to revive the fortunes of this much-maligned classic. After all, Christmas isn't Christmas without a luxury nut selection.

Thus, after eighteen months of fantastic and ruinous warfare, the companies had come to their senses and agreed to do what they might have done at the start; the only gainers were the passengers who had been carried at ridiculously uneconomic fares.