‘Why didn’t they call it Very British Railways?’ asked my husband. Unwittingly (as in most of his remarks), he had put his finger on something odd about the new name for the nationalised rail structure, Great British Railways.

It follows the model of Great British Bake Off. In 2013, the Oxford English Dictionary noticed the tendency in a quotation from a magazine published in 2006: ‘The Great British queuer is a bit of a myth.’