So, 150 years on, I decided to retrace the lady's footsteps, with a tatty copy of her Swiss Journal in my bag – a secondhand survivor I'd tracked down, from a batch that were printed in 1963.
That it took two years for the first Observer Magazine to appear says much about the debate that went on in the paper's cramped and tatty offices in Tudor Street, just off Fleet Street.
The building remains elegant, but is now rather worn and tatty.
At the Captain Elias, Namir the biochemist has returned from buying bread pushing two rather tatty bicycles, far from the shiny ones that tourists are riding.
Like most people, I find shopping in our soulless malls and tatty clone high streets an increasingly tedious chore.
Cutting it at the wrong time seems to have left it tatty and reduced the flowers and berries.
Grieve apologises for the provisional feel of the office, a slightly tatty affair in the warren-like overflow-from-the-overflow across the road from Portcullis House.
They sit at the leatherette wheel of their 100-grand Mercs, temporarily emasculated by the 7in disc of red light, and are possessed by a wrenching, envious rage at the tatty bicycle soaring off into the distance.
For me – and, we can assume, for Simon Cowell – to be British is to spend your Saturday afternoons sitting on a tatty sofa in a house that smells of chip fat, watching two fat blokes repeatedly bump tummies in their pants for money.
My God, have you ever seen such a mess of tatty sequins and half-hearted bias cuts?
