I’ve just picked up a book which, on the second page, refers to cracking off the chocolate to expose the marshmallow and jam in a teacake. There is no jam in a teacake. Never has been, never will be. This book is a Sunday Times best-seller! You would have thought someone would have pointed out this despicable factual error.

I also seem to remember an error right at the start of J G Farrell’s Singapore Grip and my creative writing tutor starting her novel “I was heading north with the already-hot African sun rising over to my left” (it wasn’t a sci-fi / alternative universe thing either).

Returning to the book of teacake infamy, I now find our heroine “peaking” through a gap in the curtains. COME ON! Even mountaineers don’t “peak” any more – they “summit”. Perhaps she means “peek”…