Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. Here’s one for those of you who can remember the era BC (before computers). There is a Times reader in Dorset who, after she and her husband have finished the crossword and other choice parts of their daily paper, gets to work with the scissors. Her grandson “is at an age where he wants to know about things that happened a long time ago, and we can help him. I am on my third scrapbook containing all the pictures you print from The Times Archive.

“Also I have made up a book of the Young Times puzzle section — great to have on holidays in the caravan when it rains. And I have now started a Saint’s day book so that he can see what saint’s day it is and why. Many thanks for a very informative newspaper.”

Call me old-fashioned, but I’m utterly charmed that in our frenzied, high-speed, high-tech, whizzy world, someone somewhere is still cutting things out of The Times and pasting them in scrapbooks. I just hope the little ones have the good grace to feign deep interest before turning back to their Nintendos. (No, children, a scrapbook isn’t some new version of Facebook.) Plainly British Andy Bowles writes: “An article last Saturday referred to ‘exotic orchids native to Britain’. Such a thing can, by definition, exist only outside Britain: when used of a plant, ‘exotic’ means the opposite of ‘indigenous’.”

Touch of the Oirish
Mike Groushko writes from Hertfordshire: “I have no particular problem with the use of Taoiseach to refer to the Irish Prime Minister (Feedback, June 13), though the logic of The Times’s chief revise editor still escapes me. I become annoyed, however, at references in The Times and other British newspapers to the craic, to mean some perceived Irish spirit of conviviality.

“I doubt whether this spelling existed, even in Ireland, 30 or 40 years ago and suspect it is a pseudo-Gaelic coinage by the Irish Tourist Board or similar. That, of course, is fair enough in the Republic of Ireland. But the spelling ‘crack’, with the same meaning, has been in use in British English since the 18th century, according to my dictionaries. Chambers has it as a Scottish noun and verb meaning ‘chat’. So why have many British publications discarded the British spelling?”

Can’t answer the question I’m afraid, although a quick database search threw up many examples in The Times this year alone.

Not for toffs
Alastair Rellie e-mails: “Americans often assume, because of the adjective, that high teas are rather grand and served in stately drawing rooms. Times leader writers (January 11) should know better: “The Japanese, seduced by the white- napkin elegance of an English high tea, are big buyers of jam.” Actually high teas normally include something cooked (kippers? beans on toast?) and are to be found towards the other end of the social scale.”

Quite right too; at Baker Towers we often enjoy cook’s quince preserve with our afternoon tea on the terrace, while Mellors sets about a nice pair of kippers in his cottage, I expect.

Early sitting
Lots of readers queried how Elizabeth I managed to sit for the portrait that hangs in the Pillared Room at No 10 (June 13) in 1529, some four years before her birth. The curse of the transposed digits, I’m sorry to say; it should have read 1592.

Open book
Simon Stocks says nice things about Feedback but then has a “minor grumble”: The Times’s apparent inability to refer to BSkyB without adding ‘which is 39.1 per cent owned by News Corporation, parent company of The Times’ is particularly tedious, and not only on account of the unnecessary precision of the statistic. Might I question the appropriateness of such habitual self-publicity of the newspaper’s owner embedded within news reports?” Nothing to do with publicity, Mr Stocks, but merely a desire to be consistently transparent about our commercial relationships within the News Corporation family, so that other companies can’t accuse us of covert favouritism in our reporting.

Birthday honours
Periodically a reader asks how we decide whose birthdays to feature on the Daily Universal Register page, and periodically I explain, but not for a few years now, so in response to Gerry Hanson’s inquiry this week — “Sometimes a name appears of someone obscure, so how do you decide from the hundreds of potential names each day?” — here goes.

The selection is entirely in the gift (and at the whim) of the editor of the Register, who aims for as broad a spread as possible of backgrounds and interests. From time to time he extends the existing list of candidates by inviting his Times colleagues to nominate figures of interest in their specialist fields, although not every name will be familiar to every reader, of course. It used to be the case that once on the list, names stayed on it until death did them part, but these days pressures on space and the desire to include new names means that some people may be dropped.