Christopher Howse

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.

Turn down an alley off St James’s Street (the east side), lined with old painted panelling, and you are in Pickering Place, which pub quizzers say is London’s smallest public square. It is certainly charming, with stone paving, wrought iron railings, Georgian windows and a sundial on a pedestal. A gaslight on a wall bracket used to glow sympathetically in the space. Now Westminster Council has replaced it with an LED. It had threatened to do the same for all its 299 gaslights still under council control, but a rearguard action has halted its plans. The beauty of gaslights may depend on your starting point. They were, at a crucial moment of his life, anathema to John Ruskin.

I have a photograph of Queen Elizabeth II and her parents on the wall of my bathroom, not out of any lack of respect but because the gloom there prevents it fading. It is signed Albert, with an odd droop forward of the bar of the T to join a single flourish beneath, and Elizabeth in a familiar hand. This is not the late Queen’s signature, though, for it was made in 1927, when Princess Elizabeth was hardly into talking, let alone signing. Queen Elizabeth, whom we still think of as the Queen Mother, was a simple royal duchess then. Yet one can’t help thinking that in choosing her style of italic signature she had taken note of that of her namesake: the first Queen Elizabeth.

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.