A good deal of is time is spent not listening

[Henry, Duke of Gloucester] He is not at all the stupid man he is thought to be. He simply works on a different system to most ordinary people. He has, to begin with, the royal trait of expecting you to know what he is thinking about, and tosses out apparently irrelevant remarks at intervals which you have to catch ad return like longstop in cricket. He treats himself as if he were somebody else, e.g., coming down to Sunday breakfast: 'I'm sorry to say this wind is going to make me very cwoss and irritable today, very cwoss and irritable I'm afraid.' A good deal of is time is spent not listening.

J. Pope-Hennessy, The Quest for Queen Mary, ed. H. Vickers (2018), 187-88