Christopher Howse

A detail of daily life – scarcely noticed because it is taken for granted – was added to our houses thanks to a campaign pursued by The Spectator. I mean the letter box in the front door. In 1849, nine years after the Penny Post came in, the Postmaster General mildly suggested that time could be saved if householders were ‘to provide a letter-box, except where the outer door is kept open’. The box would function like a mailbox in America today, though a hole or slit in the door would do. In its issue of 21 July that year, The Spectator thought the recommendation ‘ought to be enforced, and might be with little difficulty. Tax every recipient of a letter living in a house which has no letter-box, by charging him an additional penny on delivery of each letter.

Norman Balon, who has died at the age of 99, missed the point when he defined himself as ‘London’s rudest landlord’. There, I think, he mingled self-publicity and self-defence. People didn’t go to the Coach and Horses, Soho, to be shouted at by him; they shouted at each other quite enough. Really he was the actor-manager of a twice-daily claustrophobic, drunken extemporisation in his pub which embodied bohemianism and self-destruction in the last two decades of the 20th century. Remember that 40 years ago the Coach was thick with cigarette smoke, that many customers were drunk daily, at lunchtime, and that no one was fearful of what they said. Things were not then as they are now. The Spectator contributed a lot to Norman’s decades of celebrity.

There are decades when The Spectator is shorthand for a trait: sex (2000s), young fogeys (1980s), free trade (1900s). But I was surprised to find Henry James, a writer not given to shorthand, deploying the magazine’s name to give a sketch of Isabel Archer, the title character of his Portrait of a Lady: ‘She had had everything a girl could have: kindness, admiration, bonbons, bouquets, the sense of exclusion from none of the privileges of the world she lived in, abundant opportunity for dancing, plenty of new dresses, the London Spectator, the latest publications, the music of Gounod, the poetry of Browning, the prose of George Eliot.

Afriend of mine was once delighted to get a job at the Radio Times, where he ‘corrected’ a golfing picture caption to ‘Steve Ballesteros’. Typos, literals or misprints are often committed in an effort to expunge them. Pity the poor subeditor who blanked out the wrong half of the word that is conventionally printed as mother*****r. The harder you try to whack the moles, the faster they come. The other rule is: the bigger, the easier to miss. In 96pt type the front-page headline in the Guardian on 5 November 1980 was: ‘Landside makes it President Reagan.’ That is what optimistic journalists call a ‘self-correcting literal’ – one that readers miss. But there’s the danger.

We’d been told it would be a ‘brat’ summer, characterised by its inventor, the singer Charli XCX, as ‘a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter and a strappy white top with no bra’. It hasn’t worked out like that for me, so I was glad to discover a counter-culture valuing matches over throwaway lighters. Young people, so the Wall Street Journal tells us, are collecting matchbooks and matchboxes and sharing their collecting habit on TikTok. I suppose it’s better than swapping pictures of their burgers. Once things are collected (as anything can be), exclusive rules put half the world in the wrong. To the ‘phillumenists’ of the British Matchbox Label and Bookmatch Society (founded 1945) a great crime is ‘Neighbouring a skillet’.