Christopher Howse

Rather odd In 2021: On which planet did Nasa fly a small helicopter called Ingenuity, bearing a fragment of the Wright brothers’ first aeroplane?A pair of trainers worn by which US basketball star during his first season with the Chicago Bulls in 1984 went for $1.47 million at auction?Which bridge got stuck with its bascules up after opening to let a sailing ship through?Twelve women became drivers on which capital city’s metro after a ban imposed in the 1980s was lifted?What killed 16 people taking selfies on top of a watch-tower in Jaipur? Who had painted a picture sold by Angelina Jolie for £7 million at auction in London?

One of my favourite things on British Muslim TV is Ask the Alim. An alim is a learned expert in the law. He’ll answer anything, live. The 2020 Best Bits highlights programme included a question about divorce. Can a man take back a woman he has divorced? Good question. It depends whether the divorce is revocable or irrevocable, according to the alim. Boris Johnson has been doing something similar on Facebook recently: Ask the Prime Minister. Instead of expertise on Shariah, he offers an ‘irreversible roadmap to freedom’. But there has been something a bit weird recently about the broadcasts (easily viewed and reviewed to your heart’s content on Twitter, too). It’s the music. The alim certainly does not speak accompanied by music.

Even before the first census was made in 1801, the plan was regarded with fear, hatred and ridicule. And this year, on 21 March, households have another chance to mock, embrace or ignore the census. When parliament debated a bill in 1753 for an annual census, Matthew Ridley, MP for Newcastle, warned that his constituents ‘looked on the proposal as ominous, and feared lest some public misfortune or an epidemical distemper should follow’. They were aware that, by the Bible’s account, ‘Satan rose up against Israel and caused David to take a census of the people of Israel’. God was so angry that he gave the King three choices: seven years of famine, three months of fleeing his enemies or three days of pestilence. He chose the last and 70,000 died.

Out of the ordinary In 2020:1. The town of Asbestos voted to change its name to Val-des-Sources. In which country does it lie?2. What town between Dunstable and Milton Keynes was hit by four earthquakes in a fortnight?3. In a heatwave in America where was a temperature of 130˚F recorded? 4. In April a volcano erupted on an island in the caldera of its predecessor, which exploded in 1883 and went by what name?5. Which Mediterranean island nation gave each of its citizens €100 to spend in bars?6. Chad began to send 75,000 cattle as repayment of a debt of $100 million to which other African country? 7. In February, who won the New Hampshire Democratic primary?8.

A parishioner in West Yorkshire has been allowed to put an inscription in Chinese on a relative’s gravestone. ‘There is no general prohibition on the inclusion in inscriptions on headstones of words or phrases in a language other than English,’ said Mark Hill QC, Chancellor of the Diocese of Leeds, sitting in a consistory court. If that is so, why was a family of Irish background forbidden by a consistory court in June from putting an Irish inscription on the gravestone in a Nuneaton churchyard of Margaret Keane, who had died aged 73? The inscription would have said: ‘In ár gcroíthe go deo.' Perhaps not many people in Nuneaton would have known it meant ‘In our hearts for ever’.

Viewers of the BBC News channel, now that Zoom shows talking heads in their own homes, want before anything to have a good look at the sitting rooms or study shelves of daily newspaper reviewers. But often this important task is distracted by disturbing face-foliage grown during lockdown. Jack Blanchard from Politico presents a face mottled with brown and grey like lichen on an old wall, and the curvaceous chin of James Rampton from the Independent bursts out with stubble like a ginger Desperate Dan. This is like queuing for the supermarket in your pyjamas, so different from the profitably energetic habits of Samuel Pepys, who told his diary: ‘Up betimes, and shaved myself after a week’s growth. But, Lord! how ugly I was yesterday and how fine to-day!

They said it In 2019, who said: 1. ‘You have stolen my dreams and my childhood.’ 2. ‘I didn’t sweat at the time because I had suffered what I would describe as an overdose of adrenaline in the Falklands War when I was shot at.’ 3. ‘Ninety per cent of giraffes are gay.’ 4. ‘I have been wondering what the special place in hell looks like for those who promoted Brexit without even a sketch of a plan how to carry it out safely.’ 5. ‘No clapping.’ 6. ‘I’d rather be dead in a ditch.’ 7. ‘Anyone who attempts to split any region from China will perish, with their bodies smashed and bones ground to powder.’ 8.

‘No crib for a bed,’ says ‘Away in a Manger’ rather puzzlingly, since a crib is a manger. ‘No one paid me much attention, lying on the hard stones, a young child in a crib,’ says God made Man in the Old English poem ‘Christ’. At the beginning of his prophecy, Isaiah declares: ‘The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib.’ The crib as a manger lent its name to the whole Christmas caboodle of stable, ox, ass, Mary, Joseph and all the trimmings of magi and shepherds. Francis of Assisi was keen on building cribs that put the Christ Child in his surroundings, and the idea caught on.

You don’t say In 2018, who said: 1. ‘I have the absolute power to PARDON myself, but why should I do that when I have done nothing wrong?’ 2. ‘A piece of cake, perhaps? Sorry, no cherries.’ 3. ‘Frankly, Russia should go away and should shut up.’ 4. ‘It is absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letter boxes.’ 5. ‘I always say that the river flows well to its destiny because of the guidance of a solid rock.’ 6. ‘There are men out here that do a lot worse, but because I’m a woman, you’re going to take this away from me?’ 7. ‘My wife is Japanese. My wife is Chinese. Sorry, that’s a terrible mistake to make.’ 8.

Christopher Howse has just written a book about Soho. He drank there regularly with Michael Heath, The Spectator’s cartoon editor, in the 1980s. Last week, in the editor’s office, they remembered a vanished world. MICHAEL HEATH: I introduced you to Soho. CHRISTOPHER HOWSE: Well, I don’t know if you’re entirely to blame for that. But you taught me a thing or two. HEATH: There were such things as groupies for cartoonists in those days. There were girls hanging round you in Fleet Street waiting for you to finish the drawings for the following day and then they’d go off with the cartoonists and have meals or go to various clubs. The cartoonists were wealthy, really, because it was cash in hand. You couldn’t get a cartoonist who was stable.