Martin Fone's Blog, page 152

Sporting Disaster Of The Week

It has been described as the worst day in the sport’s history. For many pigeon fanciers around the country, June 19th will be a day they will never forget.

Up to a quarter of a million birds were released that day in around 50 races staged throughout Britain and yet, belying their strong homing instincts, only 10% made it home in the expected time. Thousands are still missing, and some have turned up as far as Holland and Majorca.

Race organisers are far from clear as to what went wrong. Although there was nothing exceptional about the weather conditions, most organisers reporting overcast conditions in the morning and clearer skies in the afternoon, they can only surmise that something occurred which was invisible to the naked eye which messed up with the birds’ internal navigation system and sent them awry.

Three Lions is not a song many pigeon fanciers have been humming in recent days.

The Devil’s Dictionary (10)

What is madness? To be mad, according to Ambrose Bierce in his The Devil’s Dictionary of 1906, is to be “affected by a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech, and action derived by the conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual. It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced mad by officials destitute of evidence that themselves are sane”.  

Madness, of course, is an attribute of the mind. This is “a mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavour to ascertain it own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with”.

I find something attractive about these two definitions and the accompanying explanation. Magnet: “something acted upon by magnetism” and magnetism: “something acting upon a magnet”. “The two definitions immediately foregoing are condensed from the works of one thousand eminent scientists, who have illuminated the subject with great white light, to the inexpressible advancement of human knowledge”.

Man, Bierce defines, is “an animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be. His chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest then whole habitable world and Canada”. No change there, then.

That Boutique-y Gin Company (2)

I am taking another dip into my Retro Gin Fridge Tin from That Boutique-y Gin Company, a brand of Tonbridge-based Atom Brands. Rosemary is a staple botanical in the gin world, but Smoked Rosemary Gin takes it to a new level. Rather than sitting in the background adding to the general floral and herbaceous feel and flavour of a gin, here it is slap bang in the centre of the stage.

As the name suggests, the rosemary has been set on fire, adding a smoky flavour to the already distinctive taste of the herb. If you did not get the message, the label shows some smouldering rosemary leaves against a background of juniper berries. Add a good helping of juniper and you have an interesting and distinctive drink.

As soon as you unscrew the cap, you can tell that you are dealing with a drink that will take no prisoners. A heady hit of rosemary and juniper assaults your nose along with a peculiarly smoky whiff. In the mouth the rosemary is to the fore before the juniper and peppers make their presence felt while the aftertaste is long and distinctly aromatic. I found it a little too floral for my taste but I would imagine that it would be a good addition to a cocktail.

Rhubarb has long been a favourite of distillers and where better to source the fruit than the Tusky Triangle, the nine-square-mile area of West Yorkshire between Wakefield, Morley, and Rothwell, famed for producing early forced rhubarb. Yorkshire forced rhubarb became a protected name in 2010 but, sadly, the triangle has shrunk in size from its heyday in the early 20th century when it covered the area between Wakefield, Leeds, and Bradford. In 2005 Wakefield Council erected a steel and oak sculpture of a rhubarb plant standing 3.6 metres tall in Holmfield Park to celebrate its importance to the area.   

Rhubarb Triangle Gin, the marketeers have eschewed the Yorkshire name for the fruit, pays homage to the area, the label using a stick of rhubarb to represent each side of a triangle. The only way I can describe the gin is that it is like my favourite pudding, rhubarb crumble, in a glass, adroitly mixing the tartness of the rhubarb with the sweetness of the citrus elements. From the immediate hit on opening the bottle to the initial taste in the mouth through to the long, lingering aftertaste, this is one rhubarb fest. The juniper and spices in the mix make a forlorn attempt to make their presence known, but there is no disputing who is the star of the show. As a rhubarb fan, I am not complaining.

The final one of this week’s trio is a gin that was apparently all the rage in the 1920s, pineapple gin, although, inevitably, That Boutique-y Gin Company put their own twist on it by producing a Spit-roasted Pineapple Gin. Yes, that’s right, the pineapple has been put on a skewer, coated with Demerara sugar, and roasted until they are caramelised. The pineapple is then added to a gin to produce then sort of fruit gin that is all the rage but is really not my cup of tea.

On the nose there is no mistaking that this is a pineapple drink and, in the mouth, it is right there at the fore with some oily juniper and a touch of honey. The drink signs off with a lingering melange of pineapple and caramel. I found it surprisingly syrupy and a tad too sweet and sickly for my taste, but that is the joy of sampling, not every gin will hit the spot for you.

A word of warning. A bottle of it is prone to produce a sediment, a by-product of the interaction between the fruit and the spirit. It does not affect the drink and can either be poured off or dispersed by shaking the bottle.

I will review then last three gins in the pack next time. Until then, cheers!      

The Sussex Downs Murder

A review of The Sussex Downs Murder by John Bude

1936 was an annus mirabilis in Golden Age detective fiction which is great for the readers but makes it difficult for a novel which would be classed as well above average in most other years to gain the recognition it deserves. John Bude, the nom de plume of Ernest Elmore, has long fallen out of fashion, but in my experience, he writes solid, unpretentious, enjoyable novels that are well thought out and executed. Although not as dramatic or flashy as the better-known works of some of his immediate contemporaries, they make for a satisfying read. The Sussex Downs Murder, originally published in 1936 and now reissued as part of the British Library Crime Classics series, is a case in point.   

Bude gives an insight into what he considered the principal components of a good detective novel when his go-to detective, (now) Superintendent Meredith tells a crime writer, Aldous Barnet, that it should be “possible, plausible, and not crammed with a lot of nice coincidences and “flashes of intuition””. This might seem to have been a hostage to fortune as the plot turns on two instances of what even the most charitable of readers would consider to be nice coincidences. How astonishing is it that a piece of human bone should turn up in a sack of lime at the garden of an anatomy professor? How amazing is it that two criminals should go about their unlawful business at night in the same quiet country lane on the Sussex Downs?

Certainly, Meredith cannot be accused of relying on flashes of intuition. He is a hard-working, thorough policeman who follows each clue, particularly the shoal of red herrings that Bude throws in his way, to their logical conclusion before moving on to the next. What triggers the resolution, a clue gained from looking at an ancestral portrait, may also be said to have a whiff of intuition about it but it is the culmination of a number of clues that have been sprinkled through the narrative.

What I particularly like about Bude is that he has a very distinct sense of place and portrays the terrain of the area in which he sets his novel with affection. There is also a gentle humour which pervades his narrative, especially when witnesses are recounting their tales. His portrayal of Meredith shows the detective warts and all, grumpy when things go wrong, longing for his wife’s cooking and taking inspiration from his son’s comments at the dinner table.

As for the story itself, it concerns two farming brothers, John and William Rother. John announces he is going on holiday to Harlech, but the following morning his blood-stained cap and abandoned car are found a few miles away. The presumption is that of foul play. It was the talk of the village that John was overly familiar with William’s wife. William had no satisfactory alibi for the time around the time of the assault on John, shown as 9.55pm on the car’s clock. Was he responsible for the murder? Why, though, did John use half a gallon of petrol to get to a spot less than four miles from the farm?

Conveniently, there is a lime kiln on the farm and body parts are discovered in the lime distributed to local customers. They make a near complete skeleton but where is the skull? William’s body is then found complete with suicide note. The injuries, though, are inconsistent with the theory that he threw himself off the cliff edge. Was William murdered? And what part has the eccentric entomologist who discovered the abandoned car to play in the story?

Eventually, Meredith makes sense of it all, warding off the threat of having to hand the case over to Scotland Yard. Bude’s triumph is in producing an excellent, entertaining read out of it all.

The Laughing Dog

A review of The Laughing Dog by Francis Vivian

This is a fine story, the fifth in Francis Vivian’s Inspector Knollis, first published in 1950 and reissued for a modern readership by Dean Street Press. There is a touch of modernity in the story, with Knollis and, indeed, the culprit taking air trips. No longer does the detective have to rely upon his feet, a bicycle, a car or public transport. Times are moving on. There is also a broadening of horizons as the prologue and the all-important meeting between Dr Hugh Challoner and Aubrey Highton in Algiers.

I have always subscribed to the theory that less is more and this is certainly the case in a story which revolves around just three, possibly four, credible suspects. At first glance, this can seem incredibly limiting and a less skilled writer than Arthur Ashley, Francis Vivian is his nom de plume, could easily find that the reader will quickly put two and two together and lose interest. The restrictions of a limited cast list has forced Ashley to produce a tightly constructed plot with twists and turns along the way. All of the three main protagonists are not who they seem to be and as Knollis works his way through the problems before him, the reader finds that they are on a voyage of discovery which leaves them guessing until the very end.

Knollis is also ahead of his time as he has reservations about the ultimate price that a murderer has to pay. He recognises that it is his duty to endure that the rule of law is enforced but has qualms about the consequences. His conscience telegraphs the ending where justice is seen to be done but not courtesy of the hangman’s knot.

To date, Knollis has been a bit of an enigma, a dedicated, thorough police officer going about his duty but about whom we know very little. During the course of the story we learn that he has a wife and two boys and that he studied mechanical engineering, likening the process of detection to taking a machine apart and seeing how it works. He has a human face.

Challoner is a doctor and Aubrey Highton an artist who makes a living from drawing caricatures, claiming to see humans as birds or animals or even flowers. In Algiers the two meet and Highton depicts Challoner with the face of a laughing dog. Challoner reacts angrily to the drawing. Months later Challoner is found dead in his surgery with a cord around his neck and a doodle of a laughing dog in his desk diary.

Highton, now in England and found accommodation by Challoner, was due to be the last patient to see the doctor but a lady by the name of Madelaine Burke allows him to go in first. Knollis soon finds out that Challoner and Burke are more than just doctor and patient and that Challoner’s daughter and fiancé, Eric Lincoln, are bitterly opposed to the proposed marriage and were both on the premises at the time of the murder. Highton’s room is directly opposite the surgery and he has a bird’s eye view of what is going on and even draws a helpful sketch of what he saw when he entered the consulting room after the murder.

One or more of these four did the deed but as to motive this only becomes clearer as the murky secrets of each of their lives emerge. The plot does rely a little on concidence and the reader who wants to crack their grey cells in the hope of getting to the solution ahead of Knollis would be well advised to study the maps of the Doctor’s house and the street plan provided. The denouement lacks nothing in drama and poignancy. And, of course, the laughing dog provides the key to the mystery.

Whether you want to play sleuth or just enjoy a well-written, beautifully plotted story, this is worth putting on your reading list.

John Stringfellow (1799 – 1893)

Richard Pearse and the Wright brothers may have made the earliest powered manned flights, but the first unmanned powered flight was made over six decades earlier in then unlikely venue of the Somerset town of Chard. John Stringfellow was the man who accomplished this astonishing feat.

An engineer making bobbins for lace-making machines in the Chard area, Sheffield-born Stringfellow spent his spare time working on propellor-driven balloons, one of which landed on nearby Windwhistle Hill in 1831, now curiously a hotbed for supernatural sightings. Later that decade he met up with William Henson, who ran Oram’s Lace Mill, and the pair pursued their dream of building a self-propelled flying machine capable of carrying people and goods. By 1840 they were busily observing bird flight and studying stuffed rooks to establish the optimal ratio of wing size to weight to achieve lift-off.

Abandoning the idea of moveable wings, they fixed on static wings set an angle and a steam engine as the source of power for their machine. To the undoubted astonishment of his fellow passengers, Stringfellow occupied his time on a train journey to London by throwing out of the window models with different wing shapes and sizes to test which would be most suitable. 

They patented the “Aerial Steam Carriage” in 1842 and the following year established the “Aerial Transit Company”, potentially the world’s first airline. Discernible progress was slow, though, and by 1845 Henson had lost interest, got married and migrated to America where he patented a safety razor.

Stringfellow was made of sterner stuff and had to be.

His attempts to achieve lift-off exposed him to the ridicule and scorn of the worthy denizens of Chard, so much so that he conducted his experiments under the cover of night to evade the attentions of the scoffers. Judging that his machine, now boasting a twenty-foot wingspan, was ready to fly, he had it carried down to Bala Down, half a mile west of Chard. Alas, the early morning dew had made the fabric on the wings heavier than anticipated and the engine had insufficient thrust to take off. Every day for seven weeks Stringfellow tried to get the machine to fly but each time it stubbornly refused to. He had to admit defeat.

Undaunted, John made significant alterations to the design. Steam was the only viable form of propulsion at the time, but by developing a paper-thin copper boiler weighing just twelve ounces he was able to produce a lightweight engine. For the plane itself he deployed a lightweight wooden frame and bat-like wings covered in silk, halved the span to ten feet and used two huge contra-rotating propellors to provide lateral stability. It weighed around nine pounds.

Lacking a vertical fin, it would lurch sideways if it encountered even the slightest bit of turbulence. Sensibly, Stringfellow conducted his trials in a large empty room in Oram’s Lace Mill. Although the air was still, the constraints of the space meant he had little room for error and so the machine ran down a wire to ensure it was travelling in the right direction and at the right speed for take-off.

Even so, the first trial in the summer of 1848 ended in disappointment, the aircraft rising sharply, then stalling before dropping back on its tail. The second attempt saw the machine fly for more than ten yards at a speed of around 12mph before punching a hole in the canvas screen at the end of the mill. Stringfellow had created the world’s first unmanned air vehicle.

His son, Frederick, had also caught the flying bug and together and individually they built several steam-powered flying machines. At the 1868 exhibition at the Crystal Palace, John’s triplane left the guide wire and got off the ground on several occasions. He even scooped first prize for his design for a six-unit boiler. Despite these successes, the onset of old age and his eventual death, in 1883, meant his dream of building a plane capable of carrying him aloft was unfulfilled.

A bronze model of Stringfellow’s machine can be seen in Chard’s Fore Street, but it was not until May 30, 1912 that the first aeroplane visited the town, Henri Salmet landing his Bleriot in front of a crowd of some three to four thousand. Even though the Frenchman was late, having followed the wrong railway line, he still found time to pay his respects at Stringfellow’s grave. The scoffers were finally proved wrong.

Sadly, though, John’s achievements have long since flown under the world’s radar screen.

Discovery Of The Week (10)

A painting fell off the wall of a country home outside Rome in 2016 and was sent off to an art restorer, Antonella Di Francesco, to be patched up. As she stripped off centuries of varnish Antonella became increasingly interested in what she was uncovering. It was not just any old painting but Rembrandt’s Adoration of the Magi, painted around 1632-33 and considered to have been long lost.

Copies of the painting had survived, the most famous being in Gothenburg and St Petersburg. The French Academy of the Villa Medici were called in to authenticate the painting and have recently confirmed that it is the real McCoy.

Although it is estimated to have a sale value of up to $240 million, the family have no intentions of putting it under the hammer. Instead, they propose to lend it out to galleries and museums which is jolly sporting of them.

At least, they should now be able to afford some plaster for the hole in the wall.

Car Of The Week

Tired of sitting in traffic queues? Keen to drive without any restrictions? Then this may be just what you are looking for.

A Slovakian company, Klein-Vision, has just announced that its prototype flying car, known as AirCar, has completed a 35-minute flight between the airports at Nita and Bratislava, reaching a cruising speed of 118 mph. Powered by a 160 horsepower BMW engine, it can convert into a sports car by an operation controlled by buttons which takes about three minutes to complete.

Having proved the concept, Klein-Vision is now working on a more powerful version, complete with a 300-horsepower engine and capable of speeds of 182 mph and, more crucially, a range of 621 miles.

Will the idea take off?

The Devil’s Dictionary (9)

Intimacy, according to Ambrose Bierce in his The Devil’s Dictionary, published in book form for the first time in 1906, is “a relation into which fools are providentially drawn for their mutual destruction”. Kindness is “a brief preface to ten volumes of exaction” while to be jealous is to be “unduly concerned about the preservation of that which can be lost only if not worth preserving”. Love is “a temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder”. Whether love kills you or not it is worth knowing that to kill is “to create a vacancy without nominating a successor”.

Laughter, they say, is the best medicine. Our sage defined it as “an interior convulsion, producing a distortion of the features and accompanied by inarticulate noises. It is infectious and, though intermittent, incurable. Liability to attacks of laughter is one of the characteristics distinguishing man from animals”.    

Life is “a spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay. We live in daily apprehension of its loss; yet when lost, it is not missed. The question “Is life worth living?” has been much discussed; particularly by those who think it is not, many of whom have written at great length in support of their view and by careful observance of the laws of health enjoyed for long terms of years the honours of successful controversy”. Longevity is the “uncommon extension of the fear of death”.

Turning our attention to matters judicial, a lawyer is “one skilled in circumvention of the law”, a liar “a lawyer with a roving commission” and a litigant “a person about to give up his skin for then hope of retaining his bones”. The process of litigation is “a machine into which you go in as a pig and come out as a sausage”, as I know only too well.

That Boutique-y Gin Company

Atom Brands do not beat about the juniper bush. “We make and select liquids that are the best they can possibly be, and package them in a way that is awesome” is their bold claim. The Tonbridge-based company, whose stable includes the rather clunkily named That Boutique-y Gin Company brand, have certainly set about adding some pizzazz into the gin drinker’s world, if their Retro Gin Fridge Tin is anything to go by.  

The presentational pack is quirky and eye-catching, consisting of a turquoise-coloured tin, shaped like a retro fridge that you may remember from the 1950s, nestling inside of which are eight 50ml miniature bottles, each containing a different gin from the company’s range, all with an ABV of 46%. It makes for an attractive gift for the gin lover in your life as well as offering a low-risk way to explore the company’s wares.    

The first bottle that my rheumy fingers prised from the secure packaging was a London Dry styled Yuzu Gin. The bell-shaped bottle pictures a pile of juniper berries with a yuzu atop, a citrus fruit from East Asia, particularly favoured in Japanese style gins, such as Nikka Coffey, Roku and Jinzu. Shaped like a small grapefruit with a knobbly, uneven skin, it is tart and fragrant, a blend of grapefruit and mandarin orange.

I was expecting a citrus-led gin and I was not disappointed. On removing the small black cap, the welcome aroma of juniper was permeated with that of the citrus notes, not overpowering but confidently stating their presence. In the glass, the spirit was surprisingly creamy in texture and the citric elements were prominent and sharp with depth provided by the spiciness of the juniper. This rather impressive gin signed off with a lingering aftertaste bringing in ginger and the earthiness of the spices to temper the sweet and sour of the other botanicals.

A gin that is out of this world, literally and metaphorically, is Moonshot Gin, a vacuum-distilled London Dry Gin. Its particular claim to fame is that all the botanicals used in the mix have all been sent into the stratosphere at an altitude of at least 20 kilometres where they were exposed to extremely low pressures to preserve their particular flavours. There may seem to be a certain randomness, if not eccentricity, for this criterion for botanical selection, but, fortunately, the cast list includes all the firm favourites you would expect to find in a classic London Gin; juniper, coriander, cubeb pepper, fresh lemon peel, chamomile flowers, cardamom, dried bitter orange peel, cinnamon, liquorice root, angelica, and, to bring an outer space element to the experience, a bit of rock from a lunar meteorite.

On the nose the juniper is prominent along with the citrus peels while in the mouth the spirit has a curiously sherbet-like texture to it with a sweetness generated by the citrus elements. The tarter, spicier, pepperier elements do a fine job in bringing the balance back on to a more even keel as the spirit orbits around your mouth before producing a long, lingering aftertaste of citrus and spice as its contrail marks its progress down into your stomach.

I had concerns that this gin might be overly gimmicky, but I found it well-balanced with a quite distinctive taste and one that I would be more than happy to try again.

I will explore three more gins from the tin next time. Until then, cheers!