Martin Fone's Blog, page 15

Nun Of The Week

A new pope and an unexpected entry in his in-tray.

There has been a long tradition of monastic brewing and wine making and when Mother Superior Aline Pereira Ghammachi was brought in to help the cash-strapped Monastery of Saints Gervasio and Protasio in Vittorio Veneto, northern Italy, generate a bit of income in 2018, she hit upon the idea of making and bottling their own prosecco. However, for the Cistercians, who shun the outside world, this was a step too far, especially when she was photographed holding a bottle alongside the mayor at a local charity event.

Four of the nuns made the bold move of fleeing the convent and writing a letter to Pope Francis in 2022, accusing Mother Aline of violating their cloistered principles. News emerged on the very day that Pope Francis died that the Abbess had been dismissed. Now Mother Aline is consulting God and a few layers to decide what to do next.

It will be down to Pope Leo XIV to sort out this holy mess. A storm in a vat to be sure.

Website Of The Week (5)

Birthdays are often a time for reflection, when past achievements can be pondered over, missed opportunities rued, and the future surveyed wit a mix of excitement and trepidation. Taken too far it can be a bit of a downer.

Sometimes it is good to take yourself down a peg or two. If you feel the need to convince yourself that you have lived a life wasted, take a peek at Age Geek, produced appropriately enough by Bored Button LLC, which allows you to discover what others achieved at your exact age.

All you have to do is enter your date of birthday and five “achievements” that occurred when you reach a precise age pop up. Worryingly for me, four of the five entries generated by my birth date were deaths. Dying, a privilege reserved for us all, is hardly an achievement but it also prompts the reflection that when you are into your eighth decade is that really all you pretty much have left to do.

Take a look and see what you think.

Death Of A Gay Dog

A review of Death of a Gay Dog by Anne Morice – 250414

After a couple of so-so thrillers I was looking for something light and frothy, an amuse bouche that would revitalise my somewhat jaded palate. The third in Anne Morice’s Tessa Crichton series, originally published in 1971 and reissued by Dean Street Press, fitted the brief perfectly. What I like about the Morice books I have read so far is that coupled with her ability to construct an engaging and clever plot is her light and witty style, her gorgeous turns of phrase and her sharp observations of social life and its conventions amongst the upper middle class. This story has all of this in spades.  

A movie actress by trade, our heroine and narrator Tessa Crichton is resting as there is a dispute between the director and star on her latest film and so she has time on her hands to fall in with the plans of her husband, the up-and-coming Scotland Yard Inspector, Robin Price. He is investigating a series of art thefts that are a version of an insurance scam – selected paintings are stolen and then recovered in time to claim a reward and before the insurance company has to pay the full settlement of a claim – and he believes that the hub of the criminal activity is near the Sussex village of Burleigh.

Of course, Tessa has a friend in the area, Aunt Moo aka Mrs Muriel Hankinson, and so arrangements are made for the couple to stay with her at her house, the Towers. During the course of their stay, in which they immerse themselves into the local society, they encounter a number of eccentric and colourful characters, not least Christabel, an artist who has failing eyesight, Guy Robinson who runs an antique business, the Treasure Trove, with his Russian wife, Xenia, and the Harper Barringtons, Roger, his wife Nancy and gauche daughter Anabel whose speech impediment is harshly mocked.

Christabel is storing a collection of paintings allegedly by the now deceased artist, Daniel Mott, in a barn and mentions to Tessa that someone had entered the barn and disturbed the paintings. She is the tenant of Sir Maddox Brand who is not only anxious to move her on but has been himself a victim of the art thieves. Matters take a sinister turn when at a soiree at the Harper Barringtons at which the highlight is to be a showing of some home travel movies – those were the days! – Brand is found dead in the home cinema, having been poisoned with cyanide mixed into his drink, a Vodkatini about which he was very particular.

Tessa cannot resist plying her amateur sleuthing skills to the problem and investigates Brand’s death in parallel to her husband’s official efforts. Her ability to think outside of the box and adopt unorthodox measures puts her husband’s more conventional and pedestrian approach into the shade. However, paddling her own canoe with the occasional assistance of her cousin Toby Crichton as sounding board does put her in danger. While poking around in Christabel’s barn, she is startled and the next she knows she has a bang on the head and the barn has burnt down, injuring Christabel in the process. While in hospital, Christabel is also murdered, again with cyanide.

It is a case where the two elements, the art thefts and the murders, weave in and out together although the solution is somewhat more complex than that. There are only a handful of credible suspects but Morice maintains the mystery until the very end whilst sprinkling enough clues in her narrative to allow the attentive reader to get on the right track. The wrong pair of spectacles, a lost gold cigarette case, an unexpected but stunning physical resemblance, and secrets from the past all provide clues to put Tessa on the track of solving the case.

To modern eyes, the title is a little dated but the principal murder victim was a man about town who enjoyed life to the full. Strangely, there is also a dog killed in the story, Prince, although whether it was a member of the LGBTQA+ community is unclear!

Great fun and thoroughly recommended.

Monteith Bowls

By the late 18th century two changes in the diet of the British upper classes accentuated the problem caused by the absence of refrigeration. While beer was perceived as safer than water and an essential part of the daily diet, distilled spirits were very much seen as a working class tipple while wine was a more refined drink, reserved for the upper classes. Secondly, as spices arrived from the East in more quantities, foods became increasingly more spicy. Wine needed to be cooled and the fiery palates of the diners needed to be assuaged.

The solution was a monteith, a bowl typically made of silver but also from glass, pewter, or porcelain, similar to the French verrière from which it may have originated. The rim was scalloped and in the notches wine glasses would be placed upside down so that their rims were touching the ice or cool water inside the bowl. In this way the glasses could be cooled in readiness to receive the wine and the drinker could remove them by the stem ensuring that their body warmth did not transfer to the bowl. Often the monteith was displayed off the table so that the servants could access them without being in the way.

Monteiths were very much a novelty in 1683 as the antiquarian, Anthony Wood, noted; “this yeare in the summer time came up a vessel or bason notched at the brims to let drinking glasses hang there by the foot so that the body or drinking place might stand in the water to cool them.” They soon caught on and became a distinctive and decorative feature of many an 18th century aristocratic dining room.

They had other uses too. The rim could be removed to transform the basin into a punch bowl, an increasingly popular tipple at the time. Alternatively, it could be used as a means for rinsing communal and personal wine glasses between wines, as Samuel Johnson noted. They were even used for baptising babies.

They got their name, allegedly, after a Scottish eccentric by the name of Monteith who “wore the bottoms of his cloake or coate so notched UUUU”, the scalloped hem supposedly influencing the design of the bowl. The earliest surviving monteiths date from 1684, a year after Wood’s description.

A fine example, which is pictured above, can be seen at Hanbury Hall, a National Trust property in Worcestershire.

The Tickling Paradox

Tickling someone is somewhat of a divisive practice. Some love the sensation and burst out into uncontrollable laughter, some like it initially but then find a prolonged onslaught distressing while others positively hate the feeling. One curious feature of tickling is that you cannot, with a few rare exceptions, tickle yourself. Why?

The short answer is that it is all to do with our brain, which, as well as being reactive, tries to predict what is going to happen next and uses the knowledge that you are about to tickle yourself and downplays any reaction to the assault.

If you want a longer explanation, when we perform an action, that part of the brain which is responsible for initiating a message, the primary motor cortex, tells other parts of your brain that it should prepare for sensory information that will follow that action. As well as an anticipatory role, the brain also seems to adjust the level and degree of feeling from an action inflicted by an outside agency compared with those that are self-inflicted.

Using brain imaging techniques, scientists have been able to establish that people perceive the intensity of their own touch as weaker than that of an external touch. Neuroimaging confirms that this is not just a perception but that the brain responds less strongly to touches that are self-generated. They are tuned down because they are predictable.

People are sensitive to external stimuli and are on the alert for something that seems, feels or sounds out of the ordinary, a basic survival response. When you come to tickle yourself, the brain knows where your hand is going before you even move it, simultaneously telling those parts of the brain that will sense your fingers attempting to tickle that there is nothing to worry about. The sensation is accordingly attenuated. However, someone else attempting to tickle you catches the brain unawares and in response it amplifies the sensation.

You cannot get the same sensation from tickling yourself simply because of this basic survival instinct.  

Curiously, though, people with schizophrenia are able to tickle themselves and get a reaction. They struggle to recognise things they initiate from those they did not and being unable to predict their movements and the consequent sensations, the brain is tricked into responding in a way that it would had the tickling been initiated by another person.

Fascinating.

Flying Humans

If humans could fly, how large would our wings be? A theoretical question, of course, but one which has exercised the minds of some scientists over the years.

Perhaps the starting point is an equation developed by Robert Nudds, a then senior lecturer in biological sciences at the University of Manchester, which he published in 2007 in the Journal of Avian Biology. In his paper he described the scaling of bird wing parameters with respect to body mass. Using Nudds’s methodology and assuming a human weighing 70 kilogrammes and five feet tall, the requisite wing span would be around twenty feet.

However, just having wings of the requisite size is only part of the answer, some significant anatomical changes would be required. If we were looking for a large pair of feathered wings rather like the typical portrayal of an angel, then they would require a separate shoulder blade and flight muscles wrapping around from the chest to the back. Bat-like wings would require elongated arms and fingers to create the twenty-foot wingspan and a fleshy membrane wing.

To fly, we would require very strong muscles, on average around 16 to 18% of a bird’s muscle mass comes from the muscles used for flying and in some, up to 30% of their muscle mass comes from the chest. This is also true of bats, although the mass is distributed across more muscles.

The there is the type of flight to consider. There are different types of flying style, flapping, gliding, hovering, and soaring, each developed by species of birds to suit their particular evolutionary requirements and each requiring a specific type of wig structure. Birds that flap while flying tend to have shorter, stouter wings while birds that soar, like an albatross or a raptor, tend to have much longer wings relative to their size. With a wing span of twenty feet or more, our flying human is likely to soar.

With wings of this magnitude flapping them to take off is pretty much ruled out. Instead, it is likely that we would have to settle for what is known as a quadrupedal launch. This is a launch from a position where all four limbs are on the ground. According to an article published in Plos One in 2010, this was the take off position that pterosaurs, some of the first vertebrates to evolve the ability to fly, adopted over 200 million years ago. Some species of bats, such as vampire bats, walk and run on all fours to obtain lift off.

It seems as though, from an anatomical and evolutionary perspective, man has missed the boat in terms of developing the ability to fly. However, those foolhardy aviation pioneers who strapped wings on to their backs in the forlorn hope of flying were on the right track!

The Sad Variety

A review of The Sad Variety by Nicholas Blake – 250412

The fifteenth and penultimate novel in Nicholas Blake’s Nigel Strangeways series, The Sad Variety, originally published in 1964, is very much a thriller of its age. A British scientist, Professor Alfred Wragby, who has just completed some vital scientific work which will give Britain an edge in the Cold War and which the Communists would like to get their hands on, is spending the Christmas holidays with his second wife, Elena, a refugee from the Hungarian uprising, and his daughter, Lucy, from his first marriage in a country house in the West Country.

Amongst the other guests at the house are Nigel Strangeways and his artist partner, Claire Massinger. It is no accident that Nigel is there; he has been asked by the government to keep a discreet eye on Wragby and to see that he comes to no harm. In this he fails spectacularly as Lucy is kidnapped and held to ransom, the price being her father’s formula. The kidnappers are an odd couple thrown together by circumstances, Annie Stott a loyal party member, and Paul Cunningham who has been pressurised into participating because evidence of a homosexual tryst has fallen into the wrong hands. The mastermind of the plot is the sinister and ruthless Petrov.

Inevitably, given the time of year and as those with long memories will recall the winter of 1962/63 there is heavy snow which makes the roads temporarily impenetrable, both a handicap to the successful execution of the plot and the attempts to rescue Lucy but also a boon as it keeps the protagonists in the same area. It becomes apparent that someone in the house is leaking information to the kidnappers and while there are a small number of suspects including a petty blackmailer and a seemingly respectable woman who indulged in a spot of shoplifting, the culprit is obvious and their actions in a way understandable.

Wragby decides to take matters into his own hands, agrees to meet Petrov and comes within an inch of his life. This renders him out of action for the rest of the book.

What emotional tension that exists in the book lies with the fates of two young children. When she was escaping across the border Elena was parted from her only son, Ivan aka Evan, and she believed that he had died in the gunfire. However, unbeknownst to her he survived and Petrov is using him as a bargaining chip to get her to force Wagley to leak the information. Ivan is brought by Stott and Cunningham to the nearby Smuggler’s Cottage and when Lucy is kidnapped, she takes his place and Ivan is supposed to return to London. Tragedy strikes when Ivan dies in a snowdrift.

Lucy is a resourceful character, tough, and with an eye for detail. These come together to good effect when she manages to get word out of her fate and whereabouts via a paper aeroplane made out of a sheet of exercise paper containing an offer of a reward and a description of what she can see from her window. This is enough for the local police to go on and soon Nigel and Superintendent Sparkes are leading the rescue.

The contrasting fates of Ivan and Lucy and the impact of them on Elena who sees her world collapse around her make the book interesting but, truth be told, for all the quality of writing and solid plotting I found the book a bit pedestrian, devoid of any real mystery and the thriller aspects rather undercooked. It falls far from the gold standard of Blake’s earlier works and is one for the completist rather than one that demands to be read on its own merits.

Website Of The Week (4)

The worldwide web is such an irredeemably grim place that I like to shine a light on those little corners that try to bring a little happiness into the world. If you are a fun of the pun and wordplay, then you should take a look at PunPages, a directory of the punniest business names.

The website offers the opportunity to restrict the search to your particular locale and helpfully sorts the entries into categories such as shopping, automotive services, loan companies, professional services, and home services.

There are some gems to be found there including “Copse and Loggers”, a tree and hedge trimming service in Gloucestershire, a cleaning service in Brighton called “Spruce Springclean”, a Worcestershire-based fish and chip van that goes by the name of “Starchip Enterprise”, an independent record shop in Shropshire, “The Vinyl Countdown”, an Indiana Jones-themed driving school in Buckinghamshire called “Temple of Vroom” and a loan company in Brick Lane that perhaps very accurately calls itself “Cash 22”.

Still, the Stoke Newington business that goes by the name of “Sellfridges” takes some beating as does “Puff Dad E” Vaping Services.

The plumbing section offers such gems as “Shyte Shifters”, “Stopcocks Women Plumbers”, “Pipe Down Plumbing and Heating”, and “Stop Cock and Two Soaking Flannels”. They all seem to be genuine businesses and the site provides links should you wish to avail yourself of their services.

Glorious stuff and this is what the internet should be all about.

Mimic Of The Week

Congratulations to Cooper Wallace from Chesterfield who has won his second consecutive title at the European Gull Screeching Championship held at De Panne in Belgium recently. The ten-year-old “Seagull Boy”, dressed in a seagull costume, impressed the judges with his ear-piercing ability to replicate the calls of the seabird.

Cooper discovered his talent after he had been bitten by a seagull. His seven-year-old sister, Shelby, is following in his wing, grabbing fourth place. Must be a noisy household, the Wallace’s.

Seventy contestants from 13 countries competed in this year’s event and were judged on a number of criteria including the calls, the competitor’s seagull garb and their ability to emulate sea bird behaviour.

A Danish woman Anna Brynald, who donned white-and-yellow face paint for the event, came in first in the adult category, and an Italian group known as Gabbiani Partigiani, or Partisan Seagulls, came in first in the colony category.

The Secret Of Chimneys

A review of The Secret of Chimneys by Agatha Christie – 250410

Agatha Christie wrote five books featuring Superintendent Battle, the first of which, The Secret of Chimneys, was originally published in 1925, and the last, Towards Zero, appearing nineteen years later. This is much more of a thriller than a murder mystery and has a Campionesque ouch about it with a somewhat ludicrous plot involving political intrigue in the fictitious Balkan country of Herzoslovakia. It is a country where the assassination of monarchs and presidents has been turned into a fine art and one blessed or cursed with natural resources which the major powers, Britain and the United States in competition with each other, are keen to get their hands.

Slightly disconcertingly the novel begins in Africa where we meet our main protagonist, Anthony Cade, somewhat at a loose end passing the time as a tour guide. Cade bumps into an old accomplice, James McGrath, who offers him a share of £1,000, easy money requiring him only to deliver the manuscript of the memoirs of a Herzoslovakian politician, Count Stylptitch, to a London publisher and a packet of letters to Virginia Revel, who spent time as the wife of a British diplomat in Herzoslovakia and is the subject of a blackmail plot.

Easy money is never that easy to come by and when he gets back to Blighty Cade discovers he has accepted something of a poisoned chalice, having to dispose of a dead body when he visits Revel to return the letters and enduring attempts to wrest control of the manuscript. Having travelled back as McGrath Cade gets invited to a house party at Chimneys, the ancestral home of Lord Caterham.

For years Chimneys has been the venue for gatherings of diplomats and politicians, but the present owner is less keen than his predecessors in continuing the tradition. Bowing to pressure from George Lomax, who also is keen to get his hands on the manuscript, he hosts an event at which there are a motley collection of guests, including a representative of a British oil syndicate, an American collector of first editions, and a Herzoslovakian delegation headed by Prince Michael, the would-be next monarch and key to British interests.

Just to add spice to the story, the notorious French jewel thief, King Victor, has recently been released from prison. His claim to fame is having stolen the Koh-i-Noor diamond and substituting it with a paste copy, one of the hiding places of the original is, inevitably, Chimneys. The French police in the form of the shady Monsieur Lemoine are keen to get their hands on the thief.

All roads in the plot lead to Chimneys and a fateful weekend and there are no end of suspects, the plot further complicated because very few of the characters, Cade included, are who they claim to be. There is much for the stalwart Battle to get his teeth into but most of the leg work seems to be done by Cade. One of the letters contains a clue to the whereabouts of the diamond, the murderer of Prince Nicholas is revealed – I did not see that one coming – and in a surprising twist at the end British interests in Herzoslovakia are preserved, the Balkan state gets its monarch, Cade his girl and McGrath his £1,000.

It is a light, fun read, a story where disbelief has to be suspended for the duration and where coincidences abound. For modern sensibilities there is a little too much racist and xenophobic language and even by Christie’s standards the dialogue is both wooden and a tad Wodehousian. From reading it it is hard to imagine that Christie would become the world’s best-selling author.