Martin Fone's Blog, page 117

Tappers Brightside Coastal London Dry Gin

It is always brightens up my day and lightens my wallet when the buyers at Waitrose extend the range of gins spawned by the ginaissance that they stock, a recent addition to which is Tappers Brightside Coastal London Dry Gin. Tappers is a proudly independent and unashamedly artisanal distillery based in West Kirby on the Wirral. Founded in 2016 by Steve Tapril, its first gin was Darkside which is the name given by Liverpudlians to the area across the Mersey that is the Wirral. Brightside is, presumably, the Liverpool side.

Darkside was distilled using the cold compound method, in which the selected botanicals are steeped in a neutral spirit, in this instance from grain, to infuse the flavours without distillation. The botanicals are then filtered out leaving a resultant spirit that is packed with flavour and retaining the colouring from the botanicals. Launched in 2020 Brightside uses the same botanicals and neutral spirit as Darkside but they are distilled by a process of boiling and condensation in a small copper still.

It is a bit like putting the same music out in different formats and Tappers are the first distillery to do so, a curious first and one for the purists to digest. Not having sampled Darkside, I am not in a position to compare and contract the resultant gins from the two methods, but Brightside has no trace of any colouring from the botanicals and is crisp and sharp, perhaps the more clinical CD to the earthier, more “natural” vinyl sound of Darkside.

As well as playing with production techniques, Tappers make a point of using local botanicals, foraged from the shoreline and their gins are certified by the Vegan Society. Eight botanicals are used in the mix – juniper, coriander, angelica root, orris root, red clover, chickweed, black cardamom and sea beet, which is found around the coast line in mudflats, between rocks, and among sand dunes. Its leaves have a spinach-like taste while the roots are sweeter, akin to a sweet potato.

Tappers position themselves as archetypal small-time distillers, producing between forty and a hundred bottles per batch. Each one is filled, labelled, sealed with a black wax, and numbered by hand. My bottle came from Batch 2021/11 and is bottle 355, a vintage batch, I’m sure.

The bottle is attractive, dumpy rectangular with rounded corners, leading up to a broad shoulder, a short neck which has a wide lip, so favoured these days, and an artificial stopper. The labelling has a distinctive old-fashioned feel about it, enhanced by a rather dapper gentleman doffing his top hat to the passers-by. At the bottom of the front label is an illustration of New Brighton Tower, which when it was opened in around 1898 was the tallest building in Britain. The lettering stands out against the light mustard background of the label and the rear is informative, explaining that the decision to produce the same gin using different techniques was because there are always two sides of the story.

There is no getting away from it, this is a seriously impressive gin, one which hits all my requirements in a gin. Opening the bottle unleashes a heady aroma of juniper, citrus, and salty floral notes. In the mouth there is an unashamedly bold hit of juniper and pepper followed by a spicy middle passage and a surprisingly light and soft finish. This is pure heaven in a bottle. It is well-balanced, complex, sophisticated, and pulls no punches with an ABV of 47%. It has fast established itself as one of my favourites. I cannot wait to try the Darkside.

Until the next time, cheers!

Hangman’s Curfew

A review of Hangman’s Curfew by Gladys Mitchell

Reading a novel by Gladys Mitchell is always a bit of a rollercoaster. They are never easy reading, always challenging, always stretching the constraints of the genre of detective fiction to their limits, the polar opposite of Patricia Wentworth. This, the twelfth novel in her series featuring the psychoanalyst and amateur sleuth, Mrs Bradley, originally published in 1941, is true to form.

The reader is lulled into a false sense of security by the opening section of the novel, which is superb, beautifully written, sets up the story well, and grabs the attention. Mitchell, though, cannot be accused of giving her reader an easy ride, as the tone and style of the book takes a sudden turn into opacity in the middle section. It is like driving along a quiet country road, admiring the scenery, only to lurch into a morass of confusing identities and obscure clues, which require reference to an old street map of Auld Reekie and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Border lays and ballads of Sir Walter Scott.

It takes a lot of effort to get through this section, but those who do are then rewarded with an entertaining and ultimately satisfying conclusion with an explosion and a siege to boot. It is more of a glorified thriller and mystery than a traditional whodunit as the villain is revealed early in the narrative, laced with humour. When it is all boiled down to its essence, the story is all about one of those inheritances which is tontine-like in its structure, leaving the pot to the last man standing, an arrangement that is bound to lead to a trail of murders committed by a homicidal relative. The pot of gold turns out to be a piece of land underneath which is suspected to lie a rich seam of coal.

Mrs Bradley is reluctantly drawn into the case at the behest of her niece, Gillian, who, to put it mildly, has been unfortunate in love. Having broken up with her boyfriend, she goes to stay with Mrs Bradley to mend her broken heart. Mrs Bradley’s advice is for her to take a holiday and she goes up to Northumberland where she meets another man, who spins her a yarn that his uncle is being poisoned. Gillian immediately thinks Mrs Bradley is the woman to get to the bottom of things and sends her a detailed letter which Mitchell uses as a succinct way of setting up the plot.

Mrs Bradley takes the bait but reckons that there is something fishy about the story as it has all the hallmarks of a famous poisoning case in the early 20th century. On visiting the house where the attempt on the uncle’s life in the depths of Lincolnshire, some of the details do not add up. In solving the mystery, which involves a string of corpses, an attempt to poison Mrs Bradley, the exhumation of a dead body and much more, Mrs Bradley, accompanied by her faithful and amusing chauffeur, George, and independently Gillian and her sister, Lesley, travel to Lincolnshire, Northumberland, and the Scottish borders in pursuit of clues and an understanding of the meaning of the case.

As well as solving the case and seeing that justice is done, the sleuth receives an unexpected bonus. At times funny, but often mystifying, this is a book that is both difficult to categorise and to enjoy. For me, sadly, its flaws outweighed what initially looked to be an excellent story.

Traveller’s Return

A review of Traveller’s Return by Patricia Wentworth

Picking up a Miss Silver book by Patricia Wentworth is the equivalent of comfort eating. You know it is going to be enjoyable, but undemanding. Traveller’s Return, which goes by the alternative and more Trollopian title of She Came Back in America, is the ninth in the series, originally published in 1945, fits the bill perfectly. In some ways it is a follow up from her previous book, The Key, as several of the characters in that book appear here.

The nub of the book is the similarity in appearance of two women, Anne, the wife of Sir Philip Jocelyn, and her cousin, Annie Joyce. Sir Philip and friends make an attempt to rescue the two from occupied France under enemy fire. In the mayhem, one of the women is shot, identified by Sir Philip as Anne and is buried as such in the family graveyard, while the other is accidently left behind to an unknown fate.

With immaculate timing three and a half years later, as Sir Philip is taking up a sensitive position in the War Office and about to propose to one of his wife’s bridesmaids, Lyndall, Lady Jocelyn, Lazarus-like, reappears. She claims that it was she and not Annie that had been left behind and had endured a miserable existence under German occupation. All she desires is to be reunited with her husband and return to normality.

Unsurprisingly, Sir Philip is shocked and is convinced that not only had he identified his wife correctly as the dead woman but that the new arrival is an imposter, likely to be Annie Joyce. However, at a family council summoned to decide the matter the woman is able to convince the family that she is Lady Anne because of the depth of knowledge she has of the minutiae of her former life. Sir Philip has no option but to agree to a trial reunion.

The mystery, if it can be called as such, is whether the woman really is who she says she is. If not, who is she and why has she returned? Lyn spots her going into the backroom of a hairdressers in London. When challenged about it, she convinces Lyn that she was mistaken. A young woman who grew up with Annie and talks to Miss Silver on a train on a way to an appointment to see Lady Anne under the clock at Waterloo station is killed, presumed murdered. She was convinced that she could have recognised Annie without a shadow of doubt. Indeed, anyone who has any intimate knowledge of Annie seems to be in danger of being killed.

Miss Silver, who does not appear until midway through the book and has no official role in the investigation, sets out to solve the conundrum while the police are represented by the familiar duo of Lamb and Abbott. The interaction and repartee between the three are the book’s highlights, Abbott continuing to be in awe of the astute, perceptive spinster while Lamb suffers her interference.

What might have been a case of inheritance seeking – Annie’s branch of the family missed out on its fair share of the estate – takes a much more sinister turn as we learn more about what goes on in the backroom of the hairdressers. It becomes a tale of traitors and secret agents. In the denouement the reincarnated Lady Anne is murdered and the eminence grise of the ring of collaborators is unmasked. The identity of the latter is about the only mild surprise in what is a third-rate mystery.

Wentworth’s female characters may be a little too insipid for modern tastes, but there is no getting away from the fact that she knows how to write a story. Even though it is fairly easy to spot what is really going on, she draws her readers in and keeps them entertained. Sometimes, it is good to give the grey cells a rest.

The First Passenger Airline

It was New Year’s Day, 1914. A crowd of 3,000 spectators, having paraded through the streets of St Petersburg in Florida to the accompaniment of what the local newspaper described as an Italian band, gathered at the waterfront. At an impromptu auction a former mayor, Abram C Pheil, paid $400 to become the first paying passenger on the inaugural flight of the St Petersburg-Tampa Airboat line. He clambered aboard the wooden flying boat, a Benoist XIV, joining the pilot, Tony Jannus, in the open-air cockpit.

The plane took off and completed the seventeen-mile journey across the bay to Tampa in twenty-three minutes, barely rising more than five feet above the water. Commercial aeroplane travel was born. Charging $5 for a one-way ticket and $5 per hundred pounds of freight, the airline carried 1,205 passengers and made 172 flights before it ceased trading on May 5, 1914.

Reflecting on the short life of the St Petersburg-Tampa Airboat line, Thomas Benoist, the plane’s designer, prophesied that “someday people will be crossing oceans on airliners like they do on steamships today”. He was not wrong. In 2019, before the pandemic struck airlines carried 4.5 billion passengers, a staggering figure. Even in 2021 as the world made its first cautious steps to recovery, 2.2 billion passengers took to the air and the numbers this year are set to soar.

Benoist’s flying boat, though, was not the first successful commercial passenger aircraft. That honour goes to the Schwaben, a German rigid airship, which made its first commercial flight on July 16, 1911. It could carry twenty passengers, all of whom were accommodated under cover, and from March 1912 enjoyed the services of Heinrich Kubis, the world’s first air steward. On June 28, 1912, the airship was destroyed after breaking from its moorings in an airfield near Dusseldorf during a gale. By that time, it had made 218 flights and carried 1,553 passengers.

Between the two World Wars, aircraft technology advanced by leaps and bounds, extending the reach and capacity of planes, and making passenger flight commercially viable. The biggest challenge was to find a way to cross the Atlantic, notorious for its bad weather and lack of suitable stopping points. Boeing’s B-314 flying boat, a double-decker with a range of 3,500 miles and able to carry seventy-four passengers, rose to the challenge, enabling Pan American to run the first transatlantic passenger flight between New York and Marseilles on June 28, 1939. Passengers paid $350 for the privilege of crossing the Atlantic more quickly than sailing by liner.

Nowadays we travel to all parts of the globe, often within a day and often without changing planes, barely giving a thought to the technological developments that make this possible. What revolutionised air travel was the jet engine, which enabled aircraft to travel further, and faster, climb faster and fly higher, than planes powered by piston engines. It was the prospect of war and the desire to gain an advantage over the potential enemy rather than commercial forces that drove these advances in aircraft technology as we will find out next time.

Innovation Of The Week (8)

I have so far been able to resist the siren charms of Alexa, a stubborn piece of resistance that raises eyebrows and provokes head shaking amongst the younger generations. I am even less likely to have the gadget if the latest plans for it emanating from Amazon come into fruition.

According to Rohit Prasad, head scientist for Alexa, speaking at the MARS conference in Las Vegas, new AI-based technology has now allowed them the voice assistant to impersonate someone based upon a recording of less than a minute long. In a touching video, Prasad showed a child requesting a bedtime story to be read by Alexa using the voice of their grandparent who had moved on to parts even Amazon cannot reach (for the time being, at least).

While that may be a heart-warming, if slightly disturbing, use of an unnecessary bit of technology, I wonder how voice recognition software would react to Alexa mimicking the voice of a real person. We may all want to be remembered in some way when we have met the Grim Reaper, but I am not sure that I want my voice to be at the beck and call of anyone too lazy to switch on the lights, request a piece of music or tell the time.

O tempora, o morses, as Cicero once said. Now I wonder what his voice sounded like!

Smell Of The Week (4)

Attempts to recreate the past have succeeded in reimagining the look of people and recreating how and where they lived but have rather stumbled on how things smelled. This gaping chasm in our ability to reconstruct the past might be about to be bridged by an ambitious project which goes under the banner of Odeuropa.

A group of chemists and historians have spent more than two years isolating and reproducing scents and smells associated with key places, trades, and events. In Italy teams are scouring through medical texts and cooking manuals to develop the aromas that may have emanated from kitchens while in Germany they are looking at visual representations to conjure up the smells generated by trades, habits, and diets which have long fallen out of fashion. One of the scheme’s earliest successes has been the recreation of the odour emanating from the dirty canals of old Amsterdam.

Smell is the strangest of the senses with no commonly accepted metric for judging the strength and quality of a particular aroma. At best a loose scale of relativity is used and even then one person’s perfume is another’s stench. Of course, the other problem is that our sense of smell is conditioned by the aromas we encounter around us. What we might find objectionable today may well have been deemed to have been acceptable by our ancestors.

However, it would be interesting to be exposed to the smells as well as the sights and sounds of our forefathers and the endeavours of Odeuropa might just be rewarded with the sweet scent of success.

Thirty-Four Of The Gang

In Elizabethan times the seeds of ferns were thought to be invisible, except for a few moments around midnight on Midsummer Eve, when they could be seen falling to the ground. Anyone who caught it in a pewter plate were given the power of invisibility while they were carrying it. To be in Receipt of fernseed was to wear the cloak of invisibility.

For batsmen in the game of cricket, I refuse to use the modern term batters, to register a duck egg was a sign of ignominious failure, to be given out without scoring a run. It became abbreviated to a duck in cricketing parlance, but the term was also used outside of the sporting arena to indicate something of no value.

If you are looking for a less hackneyed alternative to hitting the nail on the head, try right tenpenny on the cranium which had its, admittedly brief, day in the sun in the 19th century. Perhaps an example would be the beggars’ term for a long coat without pockets, a road-starver, because it deprived them of the opportunity to dip their hands in the wearer’s pockets or for anything to fall out, or robbing the barber, used to describe the fashion of wearing one’s hair long.

Sailors would dread Thursdays, which they called rope-yarn Sundays. Sundays saw their food at its best but by the time Thursday came around, the midpoint between the two Sundays, they were living on duff or pudding, which was always long and roly-poly shaped, not too dissimilar to a rope-yarn in look.

Tarquin’s Black Cherry Gin

Thanks to the ginaissance Cornwall is a hotspot for gin distillers, but the man who sparked it all off, arguably, is Tarquin Leadbetter who in 2012 and at the tender age of just twenty-three launched Tarquin’s Cornish Gin, Cornwall’s first gin in over 100 years. The distillery is situated on a windswept hilltop overlooking the Cornish coast in St Ervan near Wadebridge. Their boast is that only the finest hand-selected botanicals, a mix of exotics from around the world and locally foraged, goes into their distillations and that each bottle is individually filled, labelled, waxed, stamped, and signed by hand. It is truly a labour of love.

The results are impressive, too. I have never been disappointed by their gins and, rightly, Tarquin’s is regarded as one of the area’s leading distillers. I was intrigued, therefore, when I came across their Black Cherry Gin, initially launched to capture the Valentine’s Day market for 2022. Late in the day I was sent a bottle to sample ahead of Mother’s Day – a long story I will not bore you with – even more so as it was billed as a limited edition.

Whilst I am not a fan of flavoured gins, black cherry is one of my all-time favourite flavours – I love it in a yogurt. It is distinctive sweet, and slightly tangy and is strong enough to hold its own against other competing flavours. Taking fresh pressed black cherries and some orange zest, these have been infused into a gin based on their award-winning Cornish gin. In the glass soft juniper, rich cherry, and vibrant orange combine well to produce a zingy, tawny purple spirit. The finish is long and lingering, a combination of Maraschino balanced with warm spices. Imagine a Black Forest gateau in liquid form. With an ABV of 38% it has lost some of the potency of the original gin whose fighting weight is 42%, producing a refreshing drink which would be perfect for a summer’s evening.

The bottle is unmistakably from the Tarquin’s stable, a slightly dumpy wine bottle in shape, tapering into an elegant neck and a cork stopper. The glass is frosted and embossed with their logo and the words, “Tarquin’s crafted on the wild Cornish coast”. It relies upon the colour of the spirit to give the bottle a ruby red colour and it makes it easy to see how much is left. For once, red is not a warning to stop!

The signature feature of their bottles, though, is the candlestick drip wax sealant, a striking bronze in colour, and which I always think makes an ideal container to stick a candle in when you have emptied the bottle. True to their claim, the label is handwritten, informing me that it is from Batch no 6 and that its character is Black Forest cherries.

I enjoyed it, but it will be one that I will drink only occasionally. My bottle of Cornish Dry wins out every time.

Until the next time, cheers!     

The Case Of The Late Pig

A review of The Case of the Late Pig by Margery Allingham

This is the ninth in Allingham’s Albert Campion series, originally published in 1937. It has a couple of unusual features compared with the normal Allingham oeuvres. Firstly, it is written in the first person, Albert Campion himself telling the story with typical sub-Wodehouseian, almost self-effacing humour, never resisting the opportunity to point out his shortcomings in solving the case. It is also a more of a novella than a novel, too long for a short story, but what it may lack in word count it more than makes up in entertainment. It is an amusing and entertaining piece.

Campion’s man servant, the ex-con Magersfontein Lugg plays a prominent part in the story, his repartee with and disdain of his employer’s behaviour always a highlight of an Allingham story. Lugg’s disappearance brings the tale to a dramatic conclusion, an event foreshadowed in the opening paragraph when Campion notes “I was pretty nearly brilliant in it in spite of the fact that I so nearly got myself and old Lugg that I hear a harp quintet whenever I consider it”.        

The Late Pig in the title is R I Peters, also known as Pig Peters and Roly Peters, an old school friend in the loosest sense of the word as he was an odious bully, to whose funeral Campion had promised to go when the grim reaper called. Unusually, the grim reaper calls for Peters twice. At the start of the book Lugg reads out Peters’ funeral notice in The Times while Campion is perusing an anonymous and enigmatic letter he has been sent. The funeral is sparsely attended, the victim having succumbed to pneumonia.

Around five months later Campion receives a phone call from a Chief Constable, telling him of a murder at a hotel run by Poppy Burridge in Kepesake. The victim was struck on the head by an urn which fell from the hotel roof while he was sunbathing. The victim is named as Oswald Harris who had just got his hands on the hotel and had plans to build a cinema and race track. When Campion views the body, he is surprised to find that it looks uncommonly like Peters. How could have Peters dies twice? Why was he killed and by whom and why was he masquerading as Harris?

All the guests at the hotel have alibis except for a newcomer, Hayhoe, who was seen with Harris, making him the prime suspect. Another of Campion’s schoolfriends, Whippet, flits in and out of the story and they both receive more anonymous letters which seem to indicate that a mole is central to unlocking the mystery. The body disappears and subsequently found in the river, a vicar is drenched and the doctor takes a more than passing interest in proceedings. When an attempt is made on the lives of both Campion and Lugg, all becomes clear to the amateur sleuth and the tale ends with a thrilling denouement.

This story is fairly clued as to the identity of the culprit, although the motivation is not overly apparent. It is a tale of identity, insurance fraud and greed. Thieves always fall out and the overriding conclusion is that one should be careful who you choose as school friends.

Allingham writes with considerable verve and it is an entertaining, amusing, fast moving tale which is sure to delight those who appreciate their crime fiction laced with humour.

Measure For Murder

A review of Measure for Murder by Clifford Witting

Originally published in 1941, this is the fifth in Witting’s Inspector Harry Charlton series and shows greater ambition in its scope and format than the other novels of his that I have read whilst retaining his characteristic whimsical, tongue-in-cheek style. The story involves an amateur production of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure by the recently formed Lulverton Amateur Dramatics Society (LADS).

Witting has chosen to ape the format of a play, starting with a prologue in which Mrs Mudge, the cleaner, finds a body with a dagger stuck in its back, then two Acts, the first told in the first person, the manuscript of Walter Vaughan Tudor aka Turtle, the LADS’ hon secretary and a local estate agent, while the second reverts to the third person and details the investigations that lead to the solving of the murder. He also chooses to invoke the Muses of tragedy and comedy, Melpomene and Thalia, who provide a running commentary as the story unfolds. More could have been made of this.

Tudor’s autobiography seems unnecessarily thorough and overly long, a little aimless, but in retrospect it provides the reader with much valuable information about the writer’s background, how LADS came to be formed and the tensions and petty jealousies amongst the society’s leading lights. It also provides the most vital clue to solving the murder, dropped while the residents of the guesthouse in which Tudor lives, gather round the wireless to hear Chamberlain’s declaration of war against Germany.  

The relevance of the clue escaped me and after finishing the novel, I pondered on the dangers of dropping a contemporary reference into a work of fiction. While the author’s contemporary readers may have picked up its pertinence, for readers some eighty years or so after the event it was almost impossible to glean its significance. As a result, the identity of the murderer came as a bit of a surprise as did the sudden lurch in the book’s direction from being a cosy tale of petty jealousies, love rivalry, and money problems – the usual fare of a murder mystery – to a tale of fifth columnists, secret service agents, and the attempted escape of a collaborator to Nazi Germany. The book ends in thrilling style with a German plane landing in a neighbouring field and a gunfight, as far removed from a cosy tale about amateur dramatics as you could imagine.

This was not the only surprising lurch in Witting’s plot. The murdered victim turns out to be Tudor himself and his manuscript which formed the first part of the book is missing. Perhaps he was murdered because of what he had already written or, more likely, what he was about to disclose.

For all its inventiveness, the book for me was less enjoyable than the other two books by Witting that I have read, Murder in Blue and Catt out of the Bag. The sudden change of direction at the end seemed to be too abrupt, almost as if he decided to completely change the nature of his novel midway through writing it. There is a sense that with Britain now plunged into a desperate war and the cosiness of the old England long gone, Witting felt he had to make it more relevant.

It is saved, though, by Witting’s fine sense of humour and his acute observations and characterisations. He has an unerring ability to paint a pen picture of even the most minor of characters in just a few, well-chosen words. It was enjoyable enough but there were too many competing and contrasting themes to make the book the success it could have been.