Martin Fone's Blog, page 182
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.
September 21, 2020
The Streets Of London (116)
Queen Victoria Street, EC2
In the 19th century the City of London was even more of a warren of streets and lanes than it is now. As the volume of horse-drawn traffic was increasing and journeys were becoming more protracted and frustrating, something had to be done. The Metropolitan Improvement Act of 1863 gave planners powers to make improvements to the metropolis, some proved more radical than others, and one of the schemes that found favour was to build a brand new, wider thoroughfare that ran from the Bank in the east to Blackfriars in the west and one of my favourite pubs, The Blackfriars, a distance of 0.7 miles in all.
Work had begun in 1861, although specific powers were retrospectively given in the Act, and many of the old streets were demolished. Amongst those lost in whole or in part were Five Foot Lane, Dove Court, Old Fish Street Hill, Earl Street, Bristol Street, White Bear Alley, White Horse Court and parts of Lambeth Hill, Bennet’s Hill, and St Peter’s Hill. The cost of the construction was £1 million, but it was not all plain sailing.
According to Henry Harben in his A Dictionary of London, published in 1918, “considerable difficulties were experienced in the formation of the street owing to the steep gradients from Upper Thames Street to Cheapside, in some cases, the existing streets had to be diverted in order to give additional length over which to distribute the differences in level…subways for gas and water were constructed under the street and house drains and sewers below these”.
The street was built and opened in sections, the final section to be constructed being the Blackfriars end. After due deliberation, the Metropolitan Board of Works accepted a recommendation in 1869 that the new thoroughfare should be named after the monarch, Queen Victoria. The official opening was on one Saturday afternoon at 3.30 in November 1871, with a procession of worthies starting out from the western end to the Mansion House. Proceedings were concluded with speeches from the Chairman of the Metropolitan Board of Works, Colonel Hogg, and the Lord Mayor.
Perhaps one of Queen Victoria Street’s most lasting contribution to the story of our metropolis is that it hosted London’s first telephone exchange. Sited at the Post Office Savings Bank building on the street it opened for business on March 1, 1902, serving 200 subscribers, including the Treasury, War Office and Fleet Street, over a two-and-a-half square mile area. Demand for the new-fangled speaking contraption grew exponentially so that by 1905 there were some 10,000 subscribers. The exchange’s capacity was hit in 1908. Fortunately, a new common battery exchange had been installed in 1906, with a capacity of 15,000 lines along with an added feature, the ability to link subscribers to connect to the Electrophone exchange in Gerrard Street which relayed performances from theatres and music halls direct to the subscriber’s home.
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The large white building on the street, Faraday Building, was built in 1933 and stands on what was the site of Doctors’ Commons, mentioned in Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, which had housed the Admiralty and Probate Courts and the principal English ecclesiastical court. From its opening Faraday Building was the site for the international telephone exchange and in 1935 it housed an automatic exchange with 6,000 working lines. It took a team of 60 engineers over 15 months to make the switch.
If you want to get a sense of what the buildings developed at the time of the street looked like, no 146 is as good as any. Built in 1866 it was probably one of the first to be constructed, in a classical Italian style for the British and Foreign Bible Society by architect, Edward l’Anson. It is grade 11 listed.
Nowadays, the street is little more than what it was intended to be, a direct route from the heart of the city to the west.
September 20, 2020
Museum Of The Week (3)
This week’s moral poser is: just how do you dress when you visit a museum?
A French literature student by the name of Jeanne recently decided to visit the Musée d’Orsay in Paris to gaze upon its impressive collection of Impressionist art, peppered with the occasional nude. She was refused entry because some jobsworths took a dim view of her low-cut dress, which they deemed to be “not acceptable”.
Never thinking that her “cleavage would be any subject of disagreement” and feeling that the incident “had reduced her identity to her breasts and sexualised her as a woman”, she nevertheless complied with the officials’ request to cover up by donning a jacket. Her chagrin was increased when she noticed other visitors were wearing halter tops and other revealing clothes. The only difference seemed to be that her breasts were considerably larger.
The museum has since apologised to Jeanne, but the incident has set me thinking. I will wear a dinner jacket and bow tie next time I visit a museum.
You just can’t be too careful!
September 19, 2020
Covid-19 Tales (12)
The district head of Cerme in East Java, Suyono, has come up with a novel way of enforcing mask wearing in public. Eight people who refused to wear a mask have been made to dig graves at a public cemetery in Ngabetan village for victims of Covid-19.
Two people were assigned to each grave to help the gravediggers, one to dig the grave while the other placed wooden boards in the whole to support the corpse.
Mourners were doubtless relieved to learn that the mask refuseniks were not allowed to attend the funerals.
September 18, 2020
What Is The Origin Of (300)?…
One’s trumpeter is dead
We’ve all heard of blowing your own trumpet, a phrase denoting that you are being boastful. It is always preferable, I feel, to have someone else singing your praises, your own trumpeter, as it were. Of course, if your own trumpeter is dead, then you are forced to extol your own virtues yourself. Our phrase is used by someone who feels the need to boast or to describe a person who is a habitual boaster.
Benjamin Franklin seemed enamoured of the phrase, using it on a couple of occasions at least. In a letter he wrote to Andrew Bradford on February 4, 1729 under the nom de plume of The Busy Body he was being unduly modest, with tongue pressed firmly to his cheek, when urging the editor to allow his organ, The Weekly Mercury, to be used as a platform for Franklin’s views; “my Character indeed I would favour you with, but that I am cautious of praising my Self, lest I should be told my Trumpeter’s dead”.
In another letter, this time to the clergyman and agronomist, Jared Eliot, written on February 13, 1749, Franklin commented on the natural inclination to sing one’s own praises; “that this natural inclination, appears, in that all children show it, and say freely, I am a good boy; am I not a good girl? and the like; ‘till they have been frequently chid, and told their trumpeter is dead; and that it is unbecoming to sound their own praise…” Ephraim Doolittle, on finding that his character was b eing blackened, felt obliged to pen a missive to The Farmer’s Library, a Vermont publication, on April 15, 1793. In his defence the unfortunate Doolittle, perhaps wishing he had lived up to his name, wrote, “I am not conscious to myself, that I have ever wittingly or willingly injured any man to the value of one copper; but perhaps my trumpeter is dead, or only sick”.
Given the examples cited above, you would be forgiven in thinking that the phrase is an Americanism. This is not necessarily so as the expression appears in the distinctly English A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, compiled by Francis Grose and published in 1788. In the section devoted to the trumpet, Grose defines the phrase to sound one’s own trumpet as “to praise one’s self”. He then goes on to define the King of Spain’s trumpeter as “a braying ass” and “his trumpeter is dead, he is therefore forced to sound his own trumpet”. Trumpeting is clearly associated in Grose’s mind and, presumably in the colloquial speech of the English common folk, with stupidity and pomposity. We can, perhaps, assume, that the phrase found its way to the Americas.
Incidentally, some commentators regard the association of the King of Spain’s trumpeter with a braying ass as a pun on the word donkey, Don being the title for a Spanish nobleman. It might just be, but it does seem a little far-fetched to me.
Without wishing to be informed that my trumpeter is dead, I have enjoyed putting together these etymological excursions. Having reached the three-hundredth post, I have decided that I will stop these regular Friday posts. Rest assured, there will be more word-related posts, but in a different format.
September 17, 2020
Gin O’Clock (108)
The final bottle of the quartet of gins from the southwest I procured through Drinkfinder.co.uk’s exemplary mail order service was Salcombe Gin. Salcombe is on the mouth of the Kingsbridge estuary in southwest Devon and is renowned for its sailing. Indeed, the duo behind the gin, Howard Davies and Andrew Lugdsin, first met when they were sailing instructors there. In 2014 they decided to surf the ginaissance and create their own version of the spirit, taking the excellent Tanqueray 10 as the standard to aim at and to develop a London Dry Gin which put fresh citrus foremost.
The fruit bias is the distillers’ homage to the Salcombe Fruiterers, copper bottomed boats, crewed by locals, who imported between the 1820s and 1880s around 80% of the fresh citrus that was imported into the country. Their idea was to source citrus from the countries that were on the Fruiterers’ trading routes. In the mix we find juniper, fresh grapefruit, lemon and lime peels, coriander, cinnamon, cardamom, cubeb, liquorice, chamomile, bay leaves, orris and angelica. To maintain maximum freshness the citrus fruits are peeled immediately before maceration in a 450 litre Holstein still called Provident.
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The gin is made using a one-shot method, where the botanicals are allowed to macerate in a pot with the base spirit, made from English grain, and then the still is run with the botanicals in the spirit. The botanical distillate is then proofed with water, sourced from Dartmoor, and then bottled at its fighting ABV of 44%. One unusual feature of the production method is that use a helping of the tails from the previous run, claiming that the tail contains the majority of the angelica which puts some backbone into their spirit. Most distillers separate the heads and tails from a batch, only using the middle section for their final product, on the basis that the tails are generally low in alcohol and fairly unpleasant to taste.
The bottle is elegant, using a slightly dumpy wine bottle and crisp lettering and bronze edging, black print and white labels to good effect. It gives a distinctly crisp and clean look. The bottle is embossed with “SDCo” in the middle and “Born of the Sea” at the bottom. The neck of the bottle, just below the bronze cap with its artificial stopper, contains an image of the Kingsbridge estuary. The labelling tells me that the gin’s secondary name is Start Point, a reference to the “iconic lighthouse built in 1836, [which] stands guard on one of the most exposed peninsulas on the English coastline and marks the beginning and end of the 19th century voyages of the Salcombe Fruiterers”. My bottle is from batch number 341, a good vintage, I’m sure.
The gin did not disappoint. To the nose the immediate impact is one of a sweet, earthy smell, quickly followed by a welcome hit of juniper and almost an overload of citrus. There was a little hint of spice at the end, but the aroma was sufficient to satisfy me that I had a classic London gin on my hands. In the mouth it is remarkably soft, complex with each of its elements playing their part. The first to play is the liquorice, then a hint of peppery heat, before the sourer citrus elements start to make their presence felt. There is a distinctive earthiness to the taste, perhaps they are right about the used angelica giving the spirit an extra boost, and the last impression leading on to the aftertaste was of spiciness.
I was a little surprised that the juniper was so subdued. This all changed, though, when I put a mixer in. The juniper burst into life and the citrus elements made a game attempt to play their part. Remarkably, the gin took on two different characters, with or without mixer, a versatility that demonstrates its complexity and the care that has gone into its design. As a fan of juniper-led gins, I preferred it with a tonic, but that is just my preference. An excellent gin.
Until the next time, cheers!
September 16, 2020
Book Corner – September 2020 (3)
Judgment on Deltchev – Eric Ambler
I am a bit of a late convert to Eric Ambler and all I have read of his were published before the outbreak of the Second World War. Judgment on Deltchev, published in 1951, is set following the ending of the Second World War, with Communist regimes having been established behind the Iron Curtain. What immediately struck me about the tone of this book is just how much Ambler’s enthusiasm for socialism seems to have waned over the intervening decade.
The other thing that struck me is how often the basic premise from which Ambler works is the same, a self-confident but ultimately naïve Englishmen plunged into the shady machinations of a foreign country and finding himself, often unintentionally, in situations where nothing is quite what it seems, where friends are not really so friendly and people who seem initially hostile have his interests at heart. As much as anything Ambler’s books are about the process by which the scales fall from the protagonist’s eyes and he realises the gravity of his predicament. This leads to a gripping final third or so of the book where the pace, even in this rather pedestrian story, livens up as he battles to escape from the country with his life.
That we know that the English playwright, Foster, does escape from this fictional Balkan country is clear from the fact that he narrates the story and from his knowing asides as the narrative progresses. That does not spoil the enjoyment of the story, the reader often pauses to consider how on earth Foster is going to get out of that scrape as escape he must, but the impact of the thriller element is toned down.
Foster has been sent, rather unexpectedly by an American newspaper, to the unnamed Communist state to cover the show trial of the former Prime Minister, Yordan Deltchev. Whilst we have some sympathy for Deltchev’s plight at the outset, it looks as though the trial is a straightforward kangaroo trial and that he is being set up for a fall, as the story unfolds it becomes clear that Deltchev’s motivations are more convoluted than appeared at the outset. Those of his family, his wife, daughter and son are also complex and appear to be designed to frustrate the objectives of the politician.
There are two femme fatales in the plotline. Mrs Deltchev remains confined in her house and barely moves from her chair when she appears in the book. But she is an eminence grise, pulling the strings of power. Her daughter is more active in the sense that she sets in train a series of events which imperil Foster further when he discovers a murder victim and she does escape her house arrest, but in reality she is cipher-like, simply a plotting device to move the story along in a different direction.
Foster, too, is a rather odd character. He seems rather too oblivious to the dangers that he is getting into and the conflicting political forces encircling him. It is this which gets him into difficulties as he doggedly pursues the clues that have come his way rather than realising that it would be more prudent to get the hell out of there.
The book was enjoyable but not a patch on Ambler’s pre-war novels. There was a good atmospheric feel to the book and I could see why the likes of Graham Greene and John Le Carrê had enormous respect for him and that he was a forerunner of the modern thriller. The plot’s twists and turns were not too unbelievable as to cause me to throw it down in disgust, but it was just a tad pedestrian for my taste.
September 15, 2020
Voter Of The Week
I’m still old-fashioned enough to think that my voting intentions are something between me, the ballot box and the odd cyber snooper, but some like to do their civic duty wearing their colours firmly fixed to their chest.
A woman arrived at the Talbot Gymnasium in Exeter Town with the intention of voting in the New Hampshire primaries, wearing a top with the slogan “McCain hero/ Trump zero” on it. Whilst it mangled the English language, you could easily get its drift. The moderator, Paul Scafidi, sidled up to her and told her that her top was in breach of state laws which prohibit persons attending a polling place from distributing, wearing, or posting any campaign material.
The woman pointed to a woman wearing a top with the American flag emblazoned on, only to be told by Scaldini that it was not electioneering, but a show of patriotism. A moot point, m’lord, methinks.
She then informed Scafidi that she wasn’t wearing a bra and asked whether he wanted her to remove the offending article. Almost before he had got the words, “I would rather you didn’t” out of his mouth, she had whipped off her top. Recognising defeat and humiliation staring him in the face, the harassed official let her proceed to the polling booth and vote topless.
A win for democracy and self-expression!
September 14, 2020
Why Do Zebras Have Stripes?
Quite why zebras have stripes is a question that has long fascinated scientists. Theories abound including the obvious one that they provide the animal some form of camouflage against their natural predators. However, the fly in this particular ointment is that it isn’t particularly effective. Zebras are the prey of choice of lions and other large predators and they seem to get through their fair share of the ungulates, camouflage or no.
It was in the 1930s that the idea of stripes having something to do with controlling the number of flies that land on and bite zebras gained some traction. After all, they live in parts of the world where flies carry deadly disease and where the constant draining of blood can affect the animals’ general well-being. A big step forward was made in 2014 when Tim Caro of the University of California and his colleagues published the results of their research in the journal, Nature Communications in a paper entitled The function of zebra stripes. I will shut my eyes to the fact it was published on April 1st.
They looked at various species of zebras, horses and asses, and sub-species, trying to establish whether the ecology of the area in which they lived had any influence on their propensity to have stripes. The scientists found that where there was a preponderance of inimical insects, particularly the tsetse flies, the equids were more likely to have stripes. Moreover, those areas of the body most vulnerable to attack generally had a greater density of stripes.
These findings lent some credence to the theory that the zebra’s stripes may have evolved to ward off biting flies. But how? After all, an insect wouldn’t be able to distinguish between a striped animal and a plain one until it was close by. Some further field research was needed to put some flesh on these theoretical bones.
The indefatigable Tim Caro and his team took up the challenge by examining the behaviour of tabanids, horse flies to you and me, on striped zebras and plain horses on a farm in Britain. Their results, published in the journal, Plos One, on February 20, 2019 in an article entitled Benefits of zebra stripes: Behaviour of tabanid flies around zebras and horses, revealed that fewer flies landed on the zebras than the horses although there was no noticeable difference in the number buzzing around them. Interestingly, flies seemed to be surprised to encounter stripes, they were British, after all, and either veered off or were so discombobulated that they were unable to land on the animal’s skin.
Their research was followed up by a series of ingenious experiments conducted by a team of Japanese scientists, led by Tomoki Kojima. In a paper intriguingly entitled Cows painted with zebra-like striping can avoid biting fly attack, published in Plos One on October 3, 2019, they revealed that they took six pregnant Japanese black cows, painting on two of them white stripes some 4 to 5 centimetres wide. Two they painted black and the other two were left as nature intended them.
The process was repeated twice more so that each cow spent three days striped, painted black or unpainted. The scientists also took high-resolution photographs of the cows at different times of the day, the more easily to count the number of insects that had landed on them. They were also interested to see whether the animals exhibited any behavioural traits suggestive of being bothered by insects, such as flicking their tails or stamping their feet.
When the results were analysed, the scientists found that only 55 flies visited the cows with white stripes, compared with 111 on the black-painted cows and 128 on the plain ones. Behaviours designed to repel flies were deployed less frequently by the white-striped cows than the others, 40 times every thirty minutes compared with 53 and 54 respectively.
The stripes were not completely fool proof as the ersatz zebras were bitten, perhaps because the flies use other senses such as smell to locate their victims, but the implication is that stripes do have some deterrent effect on flies. Clearly, more research is needed and an efficient way of striping cattle has to be found. It took the scientists around five minutes to paint the stripes on each cow, so it may be some time before we see farmers deploy this technique to give their animals a modicum of respite when flies are at their most active.
But I will tell you one thing. Since I bought a zebra onesie, there have been no flies on me!
