30 MARCH 1991, Page 25

Choice of stools

Sir: I've been trying to trace the origin of `between two stools'. What stools? I find it in no book of quotations, sayings, folk terms, proverbs or etymologies. Did the original stools offer the careful sitter an important choice? I've found some amus- ing guesses, but no one seems to know. I had given it up, but then came Paul Johnson's recent hard-swiping article about the untimely death of the Listener — which, in the Sixties (he says), `fell between every possible stool'. How do you fall between a stool, even if you can then fall between every possible one?

C. H. Rolph

33 Hitherwood, Cranleigh, Surrey