chunter

"This is very fair, yes, very fair," they chunter through tight lips, fists scrunched.

The George, from around 1850, is on the left, a grand fobwatched alderman of a hotel, where JB Priestley might have chuntered over his Yorkshire pudding and where retired textile bosses still chunter about putting the world to rights.

Apart from that spectacular blip last year, with the hunting down of Murdoch, the Guardian is in danger of becoming an insular little irrelevance where the right-on Metropolitan middle classes and a few armchair revolutionaries gather around their cosy hearth to chunter about the things that used to make them important.