Wastrel

And so with one thing and other the auld witch raised the fiends of jealousy in that innocent heart. She would cry out that Heriotside was an ill-doing wastrel, and had no business to come and flatter honest lassies.

Mary’s mother—if that was her picture—may have been a wastrel in her spare time (she had thirteen children by a minister of the church), but if so her gay and dissipated life had left too few traces of its pleasures on her face.

Party politics didn’t come naturally to me. I was a twentysomething crypto-anarchist wastrel from the outer suburbs of Bristol who’d spent five years after university moving between jobs and getting distracted.