Can you ‘go gangbusters’? 

‘Is it anything to do with cockle-picking?’ asked my husband, confident he was on the right track. Naturally he wasn’t.

We’d just heard that the economy, growing by 0.6 per cent, was ‘going gangbusters’. The nearest my husband could get was gangmasters, a word we had both learned in 2004, when at least 21 Chinese migrants drowned in Morecambe Bay while picking cockles for a gangmaster, later sent to prison. The Gangmasters (Licensing) Act 2004 then made it a crime to be in charge of people harvesting shellfish or agricultural produce without a licence.

Twenty years earlier, the name of the film Ghostbusters was added to the world’s vocabulary. An accompanying song went: ‘If there’s something weird/ And it don’t look good/ Who you gonna call?’ The answer was Ghostbusters, but I wonder whether this formulation subconsciously lay behind the annoying train announcement in which the answer is to text 61016.

Ghostbusters was a blockbuster.