Doonan's alleged ancientness is a running joke in the household, as is his fictitious weight problem.
Just as we associate the Second World War with valor and Vietnam with paranoia, perhaps we'll come to associate September 11th with a feeling of resurgent ancientness, one that undermined faith in the permanence of the high-tech world.
The sky slumped over a landscape that gave constant reminders of Britain, that Dartmoor feeling of worn-down ancientness.
One dimly remembered observation about the ancientness of the Mass — that it and its antecedents very likely go farther back into the human past than any other existing ceremony — began to haunt me.
I love that stretch of Seventh Street intimately and irrationally, in part because of the relative ancientness of its buildings and in part because of the people who live and work in them.
Water is as different from air as from stones, and you must find your way through its structures, its ancientness, the history of an entity without response to you and yet complicit in your obstinate intrusion.
The pessimistic long view keeps threatening to take over, as on a hot afternoon in the much conquered Afghan city of Balkh, now a dusty outpost of neglect: "The sheer ancientness of the place struck me.
Why not treat all of Egyptian and Biblical history as collapsible, and shuffle their incidents and artifacts as much as we like, under the general rubric of ancientness?
That is fortunate, because the usual full-bore restoration project would wipe out all the aching ancientness of the thing, like reconstructing the Acropolis all fresh and new.
This Romantic and evocative attitude to ancientness flowed out into the work of Morris and Burne-Jones, that great Victorian double act of art and artefacts.
To drive home the sheer ancientness of the book's setting, Rees reminds us that Moll's mother is actually an Elizabethan, born into a time when the smart new things are not coffee and chocolate but potatoes and tobacco.
