Martin Fone's Blog, page 181
October 1, 2020
Gin O’Clock (109)
It is always an exciting moment when I spot a gin I have not tried on the shelves of our local Waitrose supermarket. Not content with having Gordons and Tanqueray in its stable, Diageo has decided to move into what is termed as the “super-premium gin” sector, one that has grown by 38.6% in volume and 41.3% in value here in the UK over the last year or so, with its Villa Ascenti, launched in the spring of 2019. It is the first offering to come out of the Distilleria Santa Vittoria, a distillery they built in the central Mosche region of Italy at a cost of €420,000. The ginaissance offers attractive rewards to those who succeed, clearly.
Villa Ascenti, after which the gin is named, is to be found high up in the Piemonte hills of Italy and the idea behind the gin is that it showcases botanicals that are found and sourced locally, allowing them to be distilled within hours of harvesting. Master distiller, Lorenzo Rosso, is a trained winemaker who hails from the area and so should know his onions. We are promised a heady infusion of fresh mint and thyme, triply distilled in a base spirit made from Moscato grapes, picked in August and September. During the third distillation, the Moscato grapes are infused with juniper berries that hail from Tuscany. The taste of Italy captured in a bottle, as the marketeers would say.
I have always been a bit wary of gins where the base spirit is made from wine. I have found that it adds a degree of astringency to the spirit which, no matter how many botanicals are added to the mix and whatever taste and flavour combinations they may bring, the distillers struggle to mask. At least, the Moscato grapes are generally sweet.
The bottle’s design has a very Italian feel about it, with a light green hue, with “Prodotto in Piemonte” embossed above and “Santa Vittoria D’Alba” below the wavy label which screams, in large type, “Villa Ascenti Gin”. The Villa appears on the label together with depictions of the botanicals that go into the mix. The cap is bronze with an artificial stopper. At the rear of the bottle, the label informs me that it is “a home-grown, Italian gin made from signature ingredients from the hills of Piemonte. Crafted with special distillation of fresh mint, thyme and Moscato grape, alongside select Italian botanicals”. As to their identity, there is no clue. “The result is a unique, velvety smooth gin with the freshest taste”.
Well, did it live up to its promise. On the nose, it was fairly subdued. Juniper was detectable as was the mint, but I struggled to detect any of the other elements. It seemed a little undercooked, none of the ingredients either powerful enough to make their presence truly felt or to overwhelm the aroma. In the mouth the juniper was bright, leading nicely into the fruitier more citric elements, with the mint and thyme giving a leafy edge to it. The grape elements in the base spirit gave the whole a subtly sweet feel. There was a lot going on in the mouth, but nothing jarred or felt out of place. It was pleasant, smooth, but, frankly, unexceptional. The aftertaste was long and minty.
Having feared the worst, I was pleasantly surprised. At 41% ABV it has a bit of life in it and is probably best served as a cocktail component. It is not the worst gin I have tasted but, by a long chalk, is far from the best.
Until the next time, cheers!
September 30, 2020
Book Corner – September 2020 (5)
The Pursuit Of Love – Nancy Mitford
I am going through a phase of reading, often for the first time, novels from the mid-20th century by authors whose popularity has somewhat waned. This, her fifth novel, published in 1945, is the first of Mitford’s books I have read. I’m not sure what I was expecting but I rather enjoyed it.
It seems to me to work on two levels, a light, romantic comedy, gently satirising the behaviour and attitudes of an eccentric upper-class family, closely modelled on Mitford’s own. But there is a darker side to the book, a feeling that the pursuit of love for love’s sake is doomed to failure. The book’s rather curt and tragic ending underlines this sense that there is more to the book than meets the eye.
The book is written from the perspective of Fanny Logan, whose mother, nicknamed the Bolter, has palmed her off to be looked after by her sister, Emily, in order that she can pursue a series of ill-fated and unsuitable flings. Emily regularly takes her charge to visit her other sister, Sadie, in Gloucestershire. Sadie’s husband, the formidable Uncle Matthew, aka Lord Alconleigh, is a short-tempered, overbearing man, who disapproves of educating women, and despises intellectuals and foreigners, whom he calls sewers. He uses his pack of bloodhounds to hunt down his children. Surprisingly, they don’t seem to mind.
The children, there are six, spend much of their time in the only warm part of the house, the airing cupboard, and while away their time, dreaming of love. The eldest daughter, Louisa, marries the eminently suitable but dull John Fort William, but Linda, the book’s main character and the most beautiful of the sisters, is determined to pursue love. Her romantic decisions, though, prove disastrous.
As Mitford admits herself, there was something bipolar about the Radletts; they “were always either on a peak of happiness or drowning in black waters of despair; their emotions were on no ordinary plane, they loved or they loathed, they laughed or they cried, they lived in a world of superlatives”. Linda takes this bipolarity of emotions to the ultimate.
The family disapprove of her first choice, but she goes ahead and marries Tony Kroesig. They quickly realise they are unsuited and drift apart – to modern eyes, Linda’s treatment of her daughter from the marriage, Moira, seems cruel and callous. She then takes up with a communist activist, Christian Talbot, and spends time on the front line in the Spanish Civil War before losing patience with his indifference and falling for the charms of the raffish Fabrice de Sauveterre whilst in distress on the platform of the Gare du Nord. The latter part of their love affair is conducted in wartime London against a background of the Blitz.
Mitford’s world view is unremittingly upper class, the plebs barely get a look in, and this may partly explain why she is now out of favour. You can imagine, though, that, as Britain was lurching towards victory, the book was seen not only as a bit of top-class light entertainment, which it is, but also a record of a world that was vanishing, never to be seen again.
Mitford can be witty, ironic and then almost at with the flick of a switch acerbic and cruel. She is not averse to some purple prose or an image that remains with you. When describing a family photograph of the Radletts, Fanny comments, “there they are, held like flies in the amber of that moment-click goes the camera and on goes life; the minutes, the days, the years, the decades, taking them further and further from that happiness and promise of youth, from the hopes Aunt Sadie must have had for them, and from the dreams they dreamed for themselves. I often think there is nothing quite so poignantly sad as old family groups.”
There is much to savour in a book that I was not sure about when I picked it up.
September 29, 2020
Cyber Terrorist Of The Week
We associate cyber terrorists with shadowy figures working on behalf of governments trying to make life difficult for ourselves or bored teenagers with too much time and technical know-how on their hands. The cyber terrorist who brought down the broadband service in the Welsh village of Aberhosan without fail at 7am for eighteen months had a decidedly retro feel about them, though.
The sudden burst of electrical interference that occurred like clockwork each morning perplexed the experts and broadband providers – there may be a difference. Extensive tests were carried out and even part of the cabling was replaced.
The problem, it seems, was what experts call SHINE or, to you and me, single high-level impulse noise, which testers tracked down to a particular property in the village. It is heart warming to hear of a track and trace success.
Further investigation revealed that the sophisticated equipment the hacker was using to bring down Aberhosan’s digital connection with the outside world was an old television set which the elderly resident switched on in the morning for a bit of company and background noise. A case of rise and shine, perhaps. Old people, eh?
Since the unnamed culprit has agreed never to switch it on again, broadband connection has been as right as rain.
To add to the villagers’ delight, they are moving on to fibre cabling later in the year.
September 28, 2020
Why Do Insects Avoid My Windscreen Now?
I call it soap star syndrome. Take a character away from the cobbles of Wetherfield or the squares of Walford and usually some dreadful disaster befalls them. There was a time when I wondered whether I too was a victim. Leaving the sanctuary of suburbia to savour the delights that the countryside has to offer on a summer’s night in my car, I soon found I had turned into a mass killer. So delighted were the hordes of flies, gnats, moths and other assorted bugs at the advent of my headlights that they would fling themselves selflessly at the windscreen in a kind of invertebrate suttee.
And what a mess they made. The screen soon became a mass of blotches and smears, made worse by the injudicious use of windscreen wipers. Instead of clearing the smudges, they simply spread them more evenly over the surface of the glass. Often the only way to see where I was going was to stop the car, unfurl a dampened chamois leather and manually clear the screen, before setting off again. Occasionally, I had to repeat the exercise several times before I reached my destination.
That was then, but these days I cannot honestly remember the last time that my windscreen took on the appearance of an insect charnel house. Perhaps it has something to do with the design and shape of my car. The shape of later models I have bought has been more aerodynamic, or, at least, that was what the gushing sales representative always told me, than the angular shapes of the older cars. Did this mean that the insects attracted to the glare of my headlights were confronted with a lower obstacle to negotiate to escape the oncoming windscreen?
Or was there some Darwinian evolutionary thing going on? We are told that the survival of species is dependent upon weeding out those characteristics which are likely to lessen the creature’s chances of survival and encouraging those traits which are likely to put it on top of its specific pile. Clearly, having a propensity to throw yourself at the nearest on-coming windscreen is not a characteristic that is conducive to ensuring the long-term future of your species. Have those insects which have survived or avoided their motoring Armageddon developed a breed that can eschew the momentary attraction of a glaring headlight?
On the other hand, could it be something to do with the increased density of traffic, even in our country lanes? With a greater number of windscreens to crush themselves on, the carnage is spread around. The same number of insects may be killed but the individual motorist sees a reduction on their individual windscreen.
Or is it simply that there are fewer insects as a result of climate change, alterations in land use, enhanced deployment of insecticides and the like, notwithstanding the considerable conservation effort directed at improving the lot of invertebrates?
Fortunately, there are people with greater brains and more time on their hands to give the decline in the number of insect-splattered windscreens, the windscreen phenomenon as it is known in scientific circles, some serious consideration. One of the earliest pieces of research was carried out in Denmark. Each summer from 1997 to 2017, the researchers made sixty-five car journeys along the same road at the same speed and collected data about the number of dead insects on their windscreens. Over the twenty-year period they noted a decrease of around 80%, a phenomenal reduction.
Here in Britain, in 2004 the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), recognising the environmental link between insects and birds, prey and predator, encouraged motorists to attach a PVC film to their freshly-cleaned car number plate, what they called a splat-o-meter, and count the number of insects they squashed during a journey. The experiment recorded 324,814 splats, which boiled down to a splat every five miles travelled.
The survey was not repeated, the results rather hung in the air. For the purists there were a couple of serious deficiencies in the way that the survey was set up, no attempt being made to differentiate between the results from short and long journeys nor between the ages of the vehicles involved. In 2019 Paul Tinsley-Marshall and his team from Kent Wildlife Trust decided to address these shortcomings, whilst repeating the RSPB splat test, and to compare results fifteen years on.
The same methodology was used, a splat-o-meter attached to a number plate, but participants were asked to differentiate their results between journeys within the boundaries of Kent and those which crossed county lines. Classic car owners were actively recruited, ensuring that there were cars ranging in age from 1957 to 2018. The results revealed that there was a statistically significant reduction in splat density between the two surveys of the order of 50%, the Kent survey recording a splat every ten miles. Interestingly, they discovered that newer vehicles had a positive effect on splat density, meaning that more invertebrates were squashed by newer cars than older ones.
Fascinating as these results are, it is always satisfying to see rigorous research confirm one’s empirical findings, it doesn’t get us very far with the most important question, the why. There is more work to be done, as Kent Wildlife Trust admit, building up a trend over time to confirm whether there is really a decline or whether other factors such as the weather have had an effect, to increase confidence in the findings over the variations in vehicle ages and to extend the geographic reach of the survey. Even this, though, doesn’t get to the nub of the problem, whether the insect population really has declined to the extent that the data suggest.
In a strange kind of way, I miss having to clear my windscreen of dead insects and I hope it isn’t a harbinger of a bigger problem.
September 27, 2020
Fountain Of The Week (2)
Council officials are often accused of being heartless, but at least the heart of a former mayor of the Belgian city of Verviers, Pierre David, has been recovered.
David died in 1839 after falling off a building. In 1883 the grateful denizens of the city clubbed together to erect a fountain in his honour, underneath which was buried his heart in an ethanol-filled jar in a small metal box. In case you thought the citizens were themselves heartless, David had earned their heartfelt gratitude by organising their first fire brigade and letting the public attend council sessions.
The whereabouts of his heart had been forgotten in the mists of time, although there was an urban myth that it was underneath the fountain. Recently, diggers moved in to carry out some excavation works and the box was unearthed.
It is now on temporary display at the Verviers Museum of Fine Art and Ceramics and will be returned to the Fontaine David in the city’s Place Verte, when the renovation work has been completed.
September 26, 2020
Covid-19 Tales (13)
I recently qualified for a Senior Citizen’s bus pass and the application process required me to provide a digital photo of my face. It struck me as a bit odd as if and when I board a bus, all the driver will see of me is a mask with a pair of spectacles atop. Perhaps the pass needs two photos, one with and one without a mask.
At least face coverings provide an opportunity for expressing a degree of individualism. Take the man who was spotted on board a bus from Swinton to Manchester, wearing a light brown serpent with diamond=shaped markings wrapped around his mouth and neck. The snake, which was alive, seemed unconcerned about it being used as an impromptu mask, although it might have gained some insight as to its fate when it died, and the other passengers found it amusing.
Not so Transport for Greater Manchester. A spokesperson advised that although there was “a small degree of interpretation” in the matter of face coverings, “we do not believe it extends to the use of snakeskin – especially when still attached to the snake”.
Spoilsports! At least he was wearing a covering, until it slithered off, that is. Back to the drawing board, methinks.
September 25, 2020
Cantering Through Cant
Our language is wonderfully rich and varied with many synonyms available to describe a concept or thing. Sometimes, though, it suits the speaker and their auditor to speak in a way that is intended to hide the meaning of their words from any eavesdropper. This deliberate attempt to exclude or mislead people, popular amongst groups keen to keep their true intentions secret, such as thieves or plotters or groups otherwise prone to persecution, led to the development of jargon or, perhaps even a language of its own, known as cant. Cant was rarely a complete stand-alone language in itself but allowed the speaker to sprinkle their sentences liberally with words that were mystifying to the uninitiated. Polari, popular with homosexuals, is a form of cant.
One of my favourite repositories of such words and phrases is Francis Grose’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, first published in 1785 and regularly reprinted after his death. In this series I will dip into the dictionary randomly or thematically and pick out some colourful words or phrases that have, lamentably, dropped out of fashion. Perhaps I will encourage a revival of their fortunes. You can never tell.
As a man who has been known to sup the odd flagon of ale from time to time, I would have been anxious to keep in the good books of the Admiral of the Blue, the landlord of a licensed establishment, so called, according to Grose, because of the custom amongst gentlemen of that vocation of wearing a blue apron. If I had been serving in His Majesty’s army, I would been keen to claim my Act of Parliament. This was a military term for small beer, “five pints of which, by Act of Parliament, a landlord was formerly obliged to each soldier gratis”.
I would be careful not to cast up my accounts, a rather colourful phrase for doing what the Australians call doing an upchucky, that is to say, to vomit. If I was lucky enough to secure a seat, I would want to avoid an admiral of the narrow seas, defined by Grose as “one who from drunkenness vomits into the lap of someone sitting opposite to him”.
After a session, a bit of tucker might not go amiss. I might want to get stuck into an Alderman, “a roasted turkey garnished with sausages. The latter are supposed to represent the gold chain worn by those magistrates”. Replete, I might want to take a boat or ferry back to my home. Best to be on the lookout for Ark ruffians. These, Grose described as, “rogues who, in conjunction with water-men, robbed, and sometimes murdered, on the water, by picking a quarrel with the passengers in a boat, boarding it, plundering, stripping, and throwing them overboard”.
More anon.
September 24, 2020
On My Doorstep (20)
I am always interested in tracking down famous people whose earthly remains lie in the graveyard of my local church, St Peter’s, in Frimley Green. Lucean Arthur Headen certainly fits the bill, an African American inventor and engineer who spent the latter part of his life in the area.
Born to former slaves in Carthage, North Carolina, in 1879, he learnt to fly in 1911, one of the first African Americans to do so. Part of the reason he was keen to earn his wings was to more easily test an aeronautical stabiliser he had developed. During the First World War Lucean demonstrated to the American and British navies a form of optical camouflage which allowed spotter planes on the hunt for German U-boats to evade detection.
By the 1920s he had turned his hand to designing and building sports cars, his factory in Chicago producing the “Headen Pace Setter”, “the Headen Six”, and by the middle of the decade the “Headen Special”. Not only did Lucean make cars but he also raced them, forming the first national African American car racing association.
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What sparked Lucean’s move to Blighty was his battle with racial prejudice and segregation in his homeland which, he believed, frustrated his attempts to capitalise on his inventions. With Henry Petit, a fellow inventor but, importantly, a white man, he had developed and patented in 1930 the Headen-Petit spark ignition system which allowed vehicles designed to run on petrol to make use of the plentiful supplies of cheap, crude oil. Lucean had also that year been granted a patent, this time without having to share it with anyone, for a device which turned thick, crude oil into a dry, fine vapour, thus improving its combustibility. But he found attracting investment and sales difficult.
Lucean took the momentous step to board the S.S Majestic in May 1931 to sail to Britain, ostensibly to demonstrate his invention to the Royal Automobile Club. Finding that England was more amenable to a man of his talents, he never returned. What was America’s loss was Britain’s gain. By the time of his death in 1957, Lucean had received eleven patents for his inventions, some relating to ways of improving the way vehicles burnt crude oil, but others included a replaceable plough tip which tripled the life of a plough, raingear for cyclists, and, in 1939, an apparatus for de-icing aircraft propellers.
Lucean established his first company with George Hamilton, Headen Hamilton Engineering Ltd, and opened his first factory just off Victoria Avenue in Camberley, producing an engine converter kit which allowed petrol engines to run on vapourising oil. By 1934 he had changed business partners, teaming up with James Keil to form Headen Keil Engineering Ltd which produced gaskets and carburettors. By 1937 Lucean was regarded as one of the leading lights in the development of Camberley as an industrial centre.
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The outbreak of the Second World War brought with it petrol rationing and Lucean’s convertor kit became increasingly more sought after, as it allowed farmers to continue to use their farm machinery, particularly their tractors, without diminishing the military’s supply of precious petrol. His invention made a significant contribution in allowing the vital production of domestic foodstuffs to continue unabated.
Despite never relinquishing his American citizenship, Lucean answered the King’s call by joining the Camberley regiment of the Surrey Home Guard’s 1st Battalion in September 1940, one of the few Americans to do so. Once the war ended, he married a local girl from Frimley Green, Gladys Hollamby, and moved to the village, settling at 153, Worsley Road and later adopting a child, whom they named Lucean Arthur Headen Jr. Lucean Senior suffered a heart attack, dying on September 17, 1957 and was buried seven days later.
Although a lifelong Methodist, he was buried in the graveyard of St Peter’s church, later to be joined by Gladys. The photographs are of his grave which I tracked down and visited when I was putting this article together.
To find out more about Lucean, follow the link
I am grateful to Penny Drage for setting me on Lucean’s trail.
September 23, 2020
Book Corner – September 2020 (4)
The Voice of the Violin – Andrea Camilleri
Published in 1997 and translated int o English in 2003, this is the fourth in Camilleri’s Inspector Salvo Montalbano series. If you are going to dip your toe into the blue Sicilian waters of Camilleri’s creation, I strongly advise you to start with the first book. Whilst each book is a stand-alone and a discrete story in itself, you would miss out on the development of the characters of Montalbano and his team of police colleagues as well as some of the aspects of Montalbano’s convoluted personal life, the backstories to which are only briefly alluded to in this book.
I may have become more hardened to Camilleri’s style, but I did not find his descriptions of the fare that Montalbano consumed too overwhelming or irksome. He may not have eaten as many meals in this book; I did not count. I also found the book less compelling than his earlier ones. It is entertaining enough, a light read for someone who doesn’t want to think too deeply about what they are reading. There is clearly a huge market for such books but I find I reach for a Camilleri when I feel my reading palate a little jaded and I need an amuse-bouche to pep it up.
At the end of the third book, The Snack Thief, Montalbano had sidestepped a promotion and, surprise, surprise, he doesn’t get on with his new boss. The book opens with him being driven by the police station’s official driver, to a funeral. Not only do they arrive late and to the wrong church, but along the way they plough into a parked car. Montalbano leaves a number on the windscreen and is surprised that the owner has not called to complain about the damage.
Montalbano decides to return to the car and finding the note still there, decides to go to the house. There is no answer, he walks in and finds a beautiful, naked woman face down on the bed, suffocated to death. Leaving, he gets a friend to make an anonymous call tipping off the police about the murder. When forensics get to the scene, they find Montalbano’s fingerprints at the scene and after some shenanigans, he is taken off the case, replaced by his new boss who promptly “solves” the case, at the cost of shooting the suspect dead, a socially disadvantaged man who had been stalking the victim.
With help from his mafia contacts, who saw the stakeout, and his friend in the local TV station, Montalbano dishes the dirt on his rival and get himself reinstated on to the case. He solves the case with the help of his mother-like friend, Clementina Vasile Cozzo, who every Friday morning listens to a concert over the telephone, performed by her neighbour, a former professional violinist, Cataldo Barbera. The violin he is playing holds the key to the mystery.
I won’t say anymore for fear of spoiling the denouement. Suffice to say it is a clever plot and believable. There are the usual descriptions of the Sicilian countryside, its food, the complexities of Montalbano’s personal life and the borderline incompetence of his likeable colleagues. The translation, once again, is exemplary and it is a page turner, As a book, though, I founded it lacked the intensity of the earlier trilogy. It may just be me.
September 22, 2020
Names Of The Week (6)
Although it reflects the town’s mining heritage, you have to admit that the name Asbestos, given to a Quebec town, is not the most appealing. The Council have finally decided to change the name and drew up a shortlist of four to put before the electorate in mid-October.
Very worthy choices they were too – Phenix, the French word for a phoenix, Apalone, a species of turtle, Trois-Lacs, and Jeffrey, the name of the man who owned the town’s first asbestos mine. Unfortunately, none of them set the locals on fire with enthusiasm and the Council has decided to postpone the vote and seek some fresh options.
I’ve always said, once you have got asbestos, it is difficult to get rid of.
