Mark Mason

British placenames are so good you can read the map for entertainment rather than navigation. Hardington Mande-ville, Bradford Peverell, Carlton Scroop — they sound like characters in a novel. In fact, P.G. Wodehouse often raided the atlas when writing: Lord Emsworth is named after a town in Hampshire, while a village in the same county gave Reginald Shipton--Bellinger his surname. There’s plenty of silliness out there — Great Snoring in Norfolk, Matching Tye in Essex, Fryup in Yorkshire. Some good old-fashioned smut, too: Lusty Glaze, Pant, Bell End and a couple of Twatts. Kent boasts a Thong — and it’s only a mile or so from Shorne. But enough of your sniggers. Our placenames are educational, telling the history of who was where, when.

The new year is here, so why not kick off 2017 with the Spectator's New Year's Day pub quiz, set by Mark Mason. It's the perfect way to fix a sore head.  Just add water and paracetamol.  ‘I didn’t hit him, but it came close. For reasons best known to him, he came on unwilling to talk.’ That was said by someone who died in January 2016 about someone else who died in January 2016. Which two people? Ingvar Kamprad grew up on a farm called Elmtaryd near the village of Agunnaryd in Sweden. In 1943 he founded something. What? Where, since December 2015, have you been able to find William Shakespeare, Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Anish Kapoor, the Angel of the North and the Titanic?

Inventor of the silky teabag, take a bow. You have achieved something that until now no one would have thought possible. You have taken an item so simple, so perfect, so completely suited to its purpose that the idea of ruining it had occurred to literally no one — and you have ruined it. You have ruined the teabag. I first encountered this abomination a couple of years ago. Shoreditch, inevitably, in one of those places with a blackboard proclaiming their Instagram handle and a witty quote. Ordering a tea, I was presented with a cup, a pot of hot water and a teabag. I put the bag into the water, noticing as I did so the silky texture of its material, more like plastic than paper. It felt nice, a pleasing sensation on the fingertips.

It all began with oysters. Londoners used to eat them as they walked along, throwing away the shells much as they do burger wrappers now. Lord George Cavendish, owner of Burlington House on Piccadilly (now the Royal Academy), was sick of shells littering his garden, and so in 1819 decided to open a shopping arcade down that side of his property to protect it from the ‘tossers’. Nearly 200 years later the place is thriving. You can buy expensive watches and shoes, perfumes and scarves, wallets and pens. Fred Astaire would get ‘lost for days’ in the Burlington, having discovered it when an admirer bought him nine pairs of gold striped slippers there.

They’re called quintas, Joana tells us, because the rich families who owned the land along this stretch of the Douro river used to let others work it in return for a fifth of the profits. And in this part of northern Portugal, ‘work’ means only one thing: wine. We’re here in the Douro Valley to learn more about it all, including this trip to Quinta do Bomfim, the winery where Dow’s port is made. The valley also produces Cockburn’s — but don’t worry, the Portuguese needed those TV adverts telling them that the Scottish name is pronounced ‘Co-burn’ too. The Americans just dispense with the ‘ck’ — hence James Coburn, who was of Scottish descent.

Thirty years ago this week, Queen performed what would turn out to be their last gig, at Knebworth. Their penultimate concert, at Wembley, was shown on Channel 4. I recorded it, and became obsessed. Time after time I watched-Freddie Mercury prance on to the stage sporting a moustache you could have swept a factory floor with. I watched him simulate the act of self-love with his famous sawn-off mic stand. I watched him preen, pout and posture, shaking his backside at the crowd, reappearing at the end dressed as the Queen. The previous year I’d watched him at Live Aid wearing a skimpy white vest and a leather armband studded with metal. Not once did it occur to me that-Freddie Mercury was gay. Those of you born since then-probably won’t believe that.

Strawberries. Ella Fitzgerald. Lying on the beach. They’re three of my ‘guilty displeasures’. You haven’t heard of the guilty displeasure? That’s because the concept hasn’t been invented yet. But it needs to be — and quick. The phrase ‘guilty pleasure’ is widely known. It was coined by the DJ Sean Rowley, who, not content with being the man on the cover of What’s the Story Morning Glory? by Oasis, applied a label to the songs we love despite them being uncool. The idea expanded, and now anything naff can be a guilty pleasure: chocolate spread, knitting, Countdown, you name it. But what about the opposite phenomenon, the supposedly cool things that we don’t like?

In 1981, when I was ten and Ian Botham was 26, I thought he was God. Now, the week after Botham turned 60, the 44-year-old me thinks he’s an arse. And that makes me sad. The world is a simple place when you’re ten. There are heroes and villains, victories and defeats. The very best victories are the ones that were nearly defeats. Headingley 1981, for example. No need for the details — you know them already, not just from the match itself but from the hundreds of documentaries made about it since. I still lap them all up like an addict, silently mouthing along as Richie Benaud describes Botham’s six going ‘into the confectionery stall and out again’.