Christopher Howse

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.

Cockney is dead, but so is the King’s English. Long live Standard Southern British English. The Cockney Barbara Windsor yelling ‘Ge’ aah-a my pub’ is as fossilised as Eliza Doolittle. And what a shock it is today to hear the late Queen, aged 21, declare: ‘My whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family.’ She seems to say devated, sairvice and end (for ‘and’).

Upstairs rooms in new houses are likely to be darker because building regulations now demand they should be at least 3ft 6in from the floor. Given the stingy heights of rooms these days, this reduces the glazed area. The regulators are worried about window safety. ‘Is there a plague of people falling out of them?’ asks Nicholas Boys Smith of the Create Streets pressure group. He answers himself: ‘Of course not.’ There are two ideas of a window, if the history of words were to be believed. The English language sides with the notion of a vent: ‘wind-eye’ in origin. It’s not only for Anglo-Saxon sparrows flying into mead-halls; the Spanish call it a ventana, a ventilating aperture.

As I sat down on the folding chair at Sunday morning Parish Mass, it sank a little into the mud. We were in a tent with one side open, floored with bruised and quaggy grass, like an agricultural show on a chill bank holiday. There were 13 of us and nine in the choir, who sang a brief setting by Monteverdi. The celebrant, the Revd Kate Harrison, in alb and stole, sat behind the wooden altar on a tall office chair. A server produced clouds of incense with a thurible. A homemade board hanging from the tent-poles gave the hymn numbers: 430, 234, 408, 440. A blackbird joined in after Communion. We were in the fresh spring air because the church of St Mark, in St John’s Wood, had burnt down on 26 January, leaving nothing but empty windows, a shell of walls and a charred steeple.

It was 9.45 p.m. and yellow light beamed from the church windows into the rainy night. As I opened the door the last bars of the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ reverberated from the chancel. This was a rehearsal by the London Docklands Singers. ‘Everyone knows the “Hallelujah Chorus”,’ said the conductor, Andrew Campling. ‘It’s in the DNA of the public.’ In his 33 years’ conducting he has put on Handel’s Messiah ten or 12 times.  He can’t help laughing at the judgment of the librettist of Messiah, Charles Jennens, who in 1743 wrote of Handel in a letter: ‘His Messiah has disappointed me, being set in great haste, tho’ he said he would be a year about it, & make it the best of his Compositions.

Letters to a daily newspaper have a curious power to gain an impetus of their own. ‘I owned a Triumph Herald many decades ago,’ wrote Robert Brown of Crosby to the Telegraph in January. ‘She was my first love. On cold winter nights I would keep her warm with an old mackintosh thrown over her engine under the bonnet. Perhaps it was this that protected her from a thief one night. She was driven off our drive on to the road but steadfastly refused to go any further.’ It soon became clear that we’d hit a seam of experience in recent history, when lives and loves were expressed through small British cars of doubtful reliability.