Christopher Howse

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’.

There was a little number, 223, pasted onto the back of one of the centuries-old wooden seats in Bevis Marks synagogue in the City of London. ‘What are these?’ I asked Rabbi Shalom Morris, who was showing me round. ‘They’re called gavetas,’ he replied, opening the lid of a compartment in the bench. ‘It’s a Portuguese word. They’re for people to leave their personal property here – prayer shawls and things – as we don’t carry anything on Shabbat.’ It was a detail that impressed on me the long history of the Sephardi tradition here, the oldest continuously functioning synagogue in Europe today. And now, Bevis Marks synagogue is under threat.

Fairly odd 1. What had for 50 years been the name for Fanta Pineapple & Grapefruit before it was changed this year? 2. Why did the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Revd Justin Welby, have to pay £510 in fines and costs? 3. Which country overtook France as the biggest buyer of Scotch whisky, despite imposing an 150 per cent import tariff? 4. For whose visit did Papua New Guinea declare a public holiday, only to find he decided instead to fly straight home from the G7 summit in Japan? 5. Which parents named their new son Frank Alfred Odysseus? 6. In which country were six children and two adults rescued by helicopter and zipwire after hours stuck in a cable car dangling 900ft in the air? 7.