One of the phrases beloved of Boris Johnson and used over and over in his tenure - to the extent that he actually put a minister in charge of it - is "levelling up". We must, he has repeatedly declared, level up the poorer areas of the country. Everyone has assumed that he means this in a computer games sense of "going to the next level" but it had only recently occurred to me, as mentioned in my other post, that my father sometimes used this phrase about his vegetable garden. And he meant it in a quite different sense. To him it meant "to make the garden flat and even: to level it" in preparation for planting. It meant breaking all the awkward clumped together bits of earth, to smash it all into as fine a soil as he could manage with spade and fork, the rake the surface smooth. This was what he meant if he said "I'll be outside levelling up the garden." From a gardener's point of view "levelling up" means "flattening down". I wonder if that was Boris's meaning all along.