Barometer

Starting cold Why is US Presidential Inauguration Day always on 20 January? — The date was moved from 4 March in the 20th amendment to the US constitution, passed on 23 January 1933, but it is hard to find any significance to the date. The change was made in an attempt to reduce the lame-duck period of an outgoing president, though it did increase the risk of a repeat of what happened in 1841 when William Henry Harrison was sworn in. Choosing not to wear a coat, hat or gloves, he made the longest inaugural speech of any president, at two hours. Three weeks later he was reported to be suffering from a cold, which developed into pneumonia and then pleurisy, leading to his death on 4 April — although some doubt the connection with inauguration day.

Forgotten anniversaries 2017 is the 100th anniversary of the Russian revolution.

Autumn Budgets Philip Hammond announced that in future the Budget will be held in autumn rather than spring. This is not as revolutionary as some have made out. — In his 1992 Budget Norman Lamont announced that there would be two budgets in 1993, one in spring and one in autumn, and that from then on the date would switch to autumn for good. — The Budget was delivered every November from then until 1996. In 1997, Gordon Brown held his first Budget in July, before reverting to a spring date. — Denis Healey also delivered a November Budget in 1974, soon after the second general election of that year. Tickets please The Department for Transport says it will force train companies to make passengers aware if there is a cheaper ticket available for their journeys.

Bucks for Bucks Buckingham Palace is to be renovated at a cost of £369m, funded through an increase in the sovereign grant. How much have home improvements to the palace cost over the years? — The original house was built by the Duke of Buckingham in 1706 for £7,000. — In 1761, George III spent £21,000 to buy it, and £73,000 on remodelling it. — In 1826, George IV hired John Nash to remodel the building for £450,000. He was fired in 1828, having spent £496,169. — In 1845, Queen Victoria complained it wasn’t big enough for her growing family and added the east wing, using £53,000 raised by selling Brighton Pavilion.

Ape escapes A gorilla got out of its enclosure at London Zoo and entered a keepers’ area, prompting an evacuation of visitors. Other gorillas who tried to emulate King Kong: — Casey, a 400 lb male, scaled a 15-foot wall and a four-foot fence at Como Zoo in Minnesota in 1994 and spent an hour at large before being coaxed back. — Little Joe, a 300 lb male, got out of Franklin Park Zoo, Boston, in 2003 and roamed free before being shot with a tranquiliser dart. Two people were injured. — Jabari, a 300 lb Western Lowland Gorilla, scaled 16 ft walls to escape at Dallas Zoo in 2004. He injured four people, including a boy of three, before being shot dead. A 19-year-old female gorilla escaped briefly at the same zoo in 2010.

Tenement Scots John Cleese referred to the editor of this magazine as a ‘tenement Scot’. Do more Scots live in tenements? — The term tenement became associated in Scotland with 14-storey blocks built in Edinburgh in the 18th and 19th centuries. One collapsed in 1861, killing 35 residents and leading to an Improvement Act which largely did away with the old blocks. — Today, 38% of homes in Scotland are flats or maisonettes, markedly higher than the 21% in England and Wales. But only 14,900 (0.6%) are ‘buildings in multiple occupancy’, with shared facilities like the original tenements. More than a landslide Hungarians voted by 98% to 2% to reject the EU’s plan to resettle a share of refugees in the country.

Lynch lore John McDonnell refused to apologise for a 2014 interview in which he called for former employment minister Esther McVey to be ‘lynched’. — Several Lynches have been credited for giving the term to the language. One was Charles Lynch (1736-96), a farmer, community leader and, remarkably, a Quaker from Lynchburg, Virginia (a town named after his brother John). Suspects were supposed to be sent 200 miles to Williamsburg for trial, but during the war of independence the journey became very difficult. Instead, Lynch and his neighbours dispensed justice themselves — although they did try to do it according to the law.

Underbooked David Cameron is said to be struggling to get a good price for his memoirs, with talk of a £5 million advance shrinking to just £1.5 million. How does that compare with the advances for previous political memoirs? Greenland’s former prime minister said he had no regrets about the country’s vote to leave the EU in 1982, though it took three years to negotiate an exit. What happened to the economy before the vote, during negotiations and after departure from the EU in 1985? Tony Blair, A Journey (2010) £4.6m Lady Thatcher, the Downing Street Years (1993) £3.

Four-letter surveys A judge at Chelmsford Crown Court who was sworn at by a man she was sentencing to jail swore back at him from the bench. How common is swearing? — A study in 1980 by Timothy Jay of the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts analysed 11,609 words of everyday conversation and found 70 taboo words — a rate of 0.7%. — A similar study in Britain in 2006 suggested that between 0.3% and 0.5% of words we utter are swearing, and a 2007 US study suggested a rate of between 0.5% and 0.7%. According to the latter, Americans utter between 15,000 and 16,000 words a day, 80–90 of them taboo.