Martin Fone's Blog, page 185
August 20, 2020
Gin O’Clock (106)
I have never been to the Isles of Scilly, an archipelago of islands around 25 miles off the southwestern tip of Cornwall. I have considered a visit occasionally, but it just seemed too much effort to get there. Perhaps with staycations in vogue, now is the time to take the plunge. Remote as the islands may be, they are not too remote to be unaffected by the ginaissance. Yes, they have their own offering, Scilly Spirit Island Gin, a bottle of which I got my hands on, thanks to the Drinkfinder.co.uk mail order service.
Regular readers will have realised by now that I am a sucker for a beautiful or unusual bottle design. Island Gin’s bottle is up there with the finest. Bell shaped, it looks like a lighthouse stuck on top of a rock and the glass is that pale greeny blue that you associate with a clear patch of sea. The labelling at the front shows a perspective of the islands and the name of the gin in white and tells me that it is “beautifully crafted on the Isles of Scilly”. If I had one criticism it is that the writing does not really stand out from the background colour of the glass, leaving the bottle’s shape to do all the work in attracting a purchaser’s interest.
The neck is long, it is representing a lighthouse after all, leading to a wide wooden stopper with an artificial cork inside. My bottle came from Batch No 14 and was crafted by Art & Al, if I have deciphered the hieroglyphics on the label correctly.
The bottle then goes on to tell of the gin’s backstory – every self-respecting gin must have a back story. In 1665 a ship carrying a cargo of Javan pepper was shipwrecked off Bishop Rock. The crew were rescued by the crews of the Pilot Gig boats, six oarsmen and a cox in each boat, which set out from St Mary’s. Based in Old Town on the island of St Mary’s the distillers decided to commemorate the rescue in a gin which features pepper and uses, as well as the natural waters of the island, a total of six botanicals to represent the crews. The bottle promises a taste of the Isles of Scilly with every sip.
In the Scilly Spirit distillery in Old Town they have two stills and, yes, they do have names – Bishop and Daisy. Into the mix, as well as pepper, there is juniper, cardamom, orange for the citrus notes, lime leaf, and cassia. Oddly, you would normally expect coriander to be there, but they reckon that the lime leaf is more than up to the job of supplementing the citrus kick. With an ABV of 44% it is punchy enough without being too overpowering.
It was with some eager anticipation that I opened the bottle. To the nose it smelt well-balanced, each of the principal elements, the pine of the juniper, the sharpness of the cardamom, the citrus, and the warmth of the cassia detectable but combining to make an inviting drink. In the glass the spirit is clear and the juniper and citrus immediately make their presence felt before allowing the subtlety of the peppers and spices and the herbs their moment in the sun. The aftertaste is warm and lingers in the throat, serving as a reminder of what you have just experienced and an invitation to have some more.
It is a wonderful gin, well-balanced with well chosen botanicals, each allowed to play their part in making for a very distinctive and enjoyable taste. If you like your gin juniper-led and appreciate a drink that plays on the contrasts between spice and citrus, then this is a gin for you. I have a feeling I may be buying another bottle soon.
Until the next time, cheers!
August 19, 2020
Book Corner – August 2020 (3)
The 12.30 from Croydon – Freeman Wills Crofts
This superb reissue, part of the British Library Crime Classics series, was originally published in 1934, and a cracking story it is too. I hadn’t read any of the full-length books of Dublin-born writer, Crofts, before but this was a beautifully crafted story and a good place to start. Although Crofts was a railway engineer by training and his stories often featured the railway, the 12.30 from Croydon referred to in the title is an air flight, from the airport there to Paris, although, because of fog, it was cut short at Beauvais.
Structurally, this book is very similar to Richard Hull’s The Murder of My Aunt, also published in 1934, in that there is no mystery, from a reader’s perspective, anyhow, as to whodunit and the majority of the book is written from the murderer’s perspective, showing his planning of the crime, its execution and his attempts to cover it up. Unlike Hull’s book, though, where the fate of the perpetrator is not revealed until the last page, Charles Swinburn is arrested midway through the book and faces a trial for his life. There is courtroom drama as the narrative follows the twists and turns of the case, Charles’ hopes continually raised and dashed as the evidence and the legal arguments are rolled out.
Unusually, once the verdict has been passed, the focus and pace of the book changes completely and focuses on the detective acumen of Inspector Joseph French, Crofts’ principal detective. Seated comfortably in a club after dinner, French gives his audience, including Swinburn’s defence team, a blow by blow account of his meticulous investigation and the flaws in Swinburn’s planning and execution of his nefarious acts. This section invites the reader to compare and contrast the account of Swinburn’s meticulous planning and his confidence that he had thought through all of the angles. With murder, as with most things, less is more, it would seem.
The ending does sit rather oddly with the rest of the book and some have considered it to be an unnecessary addition, an attempt to bring French, who had spent the rest of the book pottering away in the background, asking strange questions and, from Swinburn’s perspective at least, being widely off the mark, back into the centre of things. I disagree, the device giving the reader a different and balancing perspective to the events hitherto seen previously through Swinburn’s perspective. I think it concludes a fine story in a satisfying style.
The story itself is straightforward. A retired industrial manufacturer, Andrew Crowther, is found dead when the plane he is travelling on lands in Beauvais. Murder is suspected by way of prussic acid secreted into one of his indigestion tablets. Prime suspects, Charles Swinburn and Peter Morley, stand to gain from the deceased’s will and both are beset with financial problems because of the economic downturn. Both applied to Crowther for loans with varying success shortly before his death. Who did it, how and what did the butler, Weatherup, see?
The book takes a little while to get going but once the tale is underway it is a page turner, well written, the plotting believable and the psychological insights into Swinburn fascinating. If you haven’t read any Crofts, this is a good place to start.
August 18, 2020
Belly Of The Week
The government has announced an obesity drive and it makes sense, I suppose, that we should aspire to get into a shape that does not resemble a barrel. Sometimes, though, a protruding stomach comes in handy as a 28-year-old Chinese man, named as Liu from Fuliudian Village in Henan Province found.
He stepped on some wooden boarding that covered a well at his family’s property. Because of his weight the wood gave way and Liu tumbled into the well. Fortunately, though, Liu was blessed with a Buddha-like belly and found himself wedged in the well, upper torso above ground.
It took at least five firefighters and a strong rope to extract him from his predicament. Liu was patience personified, remaining calm with arms crossed throughout his ordeal.
He was uninjured and, I would imagine, not eager to go on a diet.
August 17, 2020
You’re Having A Laugh – Part Forty Seven
The Calaveras skull, 1866
While the implications of Darwin’s theory of evolution were rumbling around the world, creationists were not going to give up with a fight. Josiah Whitney, the State Geologist of California and a Professor of Geology at Harvard, had promulgated the view in 1865 that humans co-existed with mastodons and mammoths. The following year what seemed proof positive that man was older than had been originally thought fell into his hands.
On February 25, 1866 a miner working at a mine near the Angels Camp in Calaveras County discovered a human skull in gold-bearing alluvial gravels at a depth of 130 feet that were later buried by millions of years’ worth of volcanic deposits. There were also artefacts found. The skull was sent to Whitney in late June and when he examined it, even though it looked remarkably like that of a Native American, he considered it to be proof positive that it was part of the remains of “the oldest known human being”. When Whitney delivered a paper describing the skull, it caused a sensation, the San Francisco Alta commenting that “it is scarcely necessary to say that the announcement and remarks of Professor Whitney made a profound sensation”.
Not everyone was convinced that the skull was all that it seemed. Doubts as to its authenticity surfaced almost immediately, culminating in a story printed in 1869 in the San Francisco Evening Bulletin that local minister had told the correspondent that “miners freely told him that they purposely got up the whole affair as a joke on Prof. Whitney”. Camps full of gold miners were notorious for their propensity to play practical jokes on each other and their roguish sense of humour, not for nothing did Mark Twain set his notorious Jumping Frog shaggy dog tale in Calaveras County, and some miners may have considered a gullible Whitney, anxious to find proof positive of his theories, as fair game. It may just be a coincidence that calaveras is Spanish for skull.
Shortly after Whitney announced the skull’s discovery, Bret Harte, who is buried in my local churchyard, wrote a poem entitled To The Pliocene Skull. It opened, “Speak, O man less recent”/ fragmentary fossil!/ primal pioneer of Pliocene formation,/ hid in lowest drifts below the earliest stratum/ of volcanic tufa!”. When the skull eventually answers entreaties to speak, it tells us, “my name is Bowers, and my crust was busted/ falling down a shaft in Calaveras county,/ But I’d take it kindly if you’d send the pieces/ home to old Missouri!”. In 1879 Thomas Wilson, a scientist from Harvard, ran the first ever fluorine analysis on human bone on the skull. His conclusion was that it was of recent origin.
Whitney, though, maintained that the skull was genuine.
In 1899 William Holmes, a Smithsonian archaeologist, decided to dig deeper and conducted a field trip to the site. He looked at the fossils of animals and plants found at the site, many of which were of species long extinct and were of great geological age. The human skull and artefacts, though, matched those of the indigenous Native American peoples. Holmes concluded, “to suppose that man could have remained unchanged physically; to suppose that he could have remained unchanged mentally, socially, industrially, and aesthetically for a million years, roughly speaking…is to suppose a miracle”. He concluded that the skull had been placed in the mineshaft as a practical joke.
There matters should have remained, especially as radiocarbon testing conducted in 1992 dated the skull as no older than 1,000 years. Over the last 100 years, though, those seeking to discredit man’s evolution have seized on the skull and Whitney’s attestation as proof of their theories. A good hoax will never die, it seems.
[image error]
If you enjoyed this, try Fifty Scams and Hoaxes by Martin Fone
https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/business/fifty-scams-and-hoaxes/
August 16, 2020
Advice Of The Week (4)
Last August I was tramping around the mountain paths of Alaska. It was only when I had completed my walk that I came across a sign telling me what to do if I encountered a bear, something, frankly, I had not given much thought to.
Further south, in the Yellowstone area, there has been a record number of grizzly bear attacks in 2020 and the National Park Service has enhanced the level of advice that it is giving to anyone foolhardy enough to offer themselves as a potential source of sport to bears.
You should “move away closely and sideways; this allows you to keep an eye on the bear and avoid tripping. Moving sideways is also non-threatening to bears”. The obvious first reaction, to run as quickly as you can, apparently is the worst thing you can do because, the helpful signage tells you. “like dogs they will chase fleeing animals”, or to climb up a tree, as the bears are far better at it than you.
It is recommended, the notice continues, that you identify yourself as a human, suggesting that you use your voice. Unfortunately, the sign doesn’t list any topics of conversation that might engage the bear in deep philosophical thought and allow you time to make your escape. Perhaps, throwing out a comment on man’s encroachment on to their natural terrain or how awful human flesh tastes might do the trick.
Finally, the notice warns, “DO NOT push a slower friend into its path”, no matter how tempting it may seem or how fraught the friendship has become. “We apologise”, it concludes, “to any “friends” who were brought on a hike as the “bait” or were sacrificed to save the group. You will be missed”.
If only I had known.
August 15, 2020
Names Of The Week (5)
The marketeers of Hell’s Basement, a brewery in Canada, were scratching their collective heads t find a snappy name for a new beer they were about to launch. As it was supposed to be a light beer, some genius thought that they should call it a feather. Light as a feather, geddit?
As a name feather is a bit naff so to give the product some extra zing, they surfed the internet and came up with the Maori word Huruhuru, which, amongst other things, means “feather”. The problem is that amongst its other meanings and the one most commonly understood in the Maori vernacular, is “pubic hair”. Red faces all round.
Still, they are not the only ones to have fallen into the Huruhuru trap. A leather store in New Zealand, owned by Ercan Karakoch has also used the name for branding purposes.
Moral of the story; indiscriminate surfing and cultural appropriation can be fraught with dangers.
August 14, 2020
What Is The Origin Of (295)?…
The Vicar of Bray
The village of Bray nestles on the banks of the river Thames, about a mile and a half to the south of Maidenhead and, amongst its attractions, it boasts two Michelin starred restaurants. Perhaps because of its eminently rhymable monosyllabic name, Edward Lear namechecked it in his More Nonsense Rhymes, Pictures, Botany etc, published in 1872, in this limerick; “there was an old person of Bray/ who sang through the whole of the day/ to his ducks and his pigs/ whom he fed upon figs/ that valuable person of Bray”. Not one of his finest, but there you go.
A much more famous resident of the village of Bray than Lear’s old man is its vicar, whose notoriety made his position a satirical description of someone who trims his sails to suit the prevailing conditions. Francis Grose in his A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, the first edition of which was published in 1785, provides more colour to the definition; “Bray; a vicar of Bray; one who frequently changes his principles, always siding with the strongest party. An allusion to a vicar of Bray, in Berkshire, commemorated in a well-known ballad for the pliability of his conscience”.
But was there such a character and, if so, who was he?
The starting point in our investigation involves a survey of religious turmoil in England. One period in which the official religion of the country vacillated wildly ran between 1533 and 1559, when to remain in post a clergyman would have had to move from Catholicism to Protestantism, following the Reformation and the schism with Rome, back to Catholicism during the reign of Mary and then once more embracing Protestantism upon the accession of good Queen Bess. Another fraught period ran from 1633 to 1715 which saw the emergence of Puritanism, the restoration of Protestantism, the dalliance with Catholicism under James, before the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Protestant ascendancy.
Thomas Fuller, in his History of the Worthies of England, published in 1662, tells the tale of what he calls the vivacious vicar of Bray, who “living under King Henry the 8, King Edward the 6, Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, was first a Papist, then a Protestant, then a Papist, then a Protestant again. He had seen some Martyrs burnt (two miles off) at Windsor, and found this fire too hot for his tender temper. This vicar being taxed by one for being a Turn-coat, and unconstant Changeling, not I, said he, for I alwaies kept my Principle, which is this, to live and die the Vicar of Bray”. Sadly, Fuller doesn’t name this tactical genius but clearly places him in the midst of the Tudor’s religious shenanigans.
William Brome claimed in a letter he wrote on June 14, 1735 to a Mr Rawlins that he had solved the identity of the vicar. “I am informed it is Simon Aleyn or Allen, who was vicar of Bray about 1540, and died 1588, so was Vicar of Bray near 50 years”. Sadly, Brome was misinformed. Simon Aleyn was only vicar between 1557 and 1565, but still he would have to have turned from Papistry, under Mary, to Protestantism, under Elizabeth. His predecessor, Simon Symonds, was the incumbent between 1522 to 1551, a period straddling the Reformation. Perhaps, changing sides went with the position at Bray, irrespective of who held the post.
Francis Grose throws some further confusion onto the subject by his reference to the popular ballad. It is clearly set in the 17th century, starting off with the reign of Charles I. The chorus proclaims the vicar’s philosophy, if not his theosophy; “and this be law, that I’ll maintain until my dying day, sir/ that whatsoever king may reign, Still I’ll be the Vicar of Bray, sir”. Francis Carswell was vicar, from 1665 to 1709, which would have seen him navigate, presumably successfully, the dalliance with Catholicism under James.
Whilst the ballad has immortalised the Vicar, we cannot dismiss Fuller’s identification of the characteristics of the postholder a century earlier. It may just be the way that rural clerics survived in those troubled times and there is no specific need to pinpoint one such postholder.
The Vicar of Bray has also lent his name to a hypothesis, also known as the Fisher-Muller Model, which attempts to explain why sexual reproduction may have advantages over asexual reproduction. But, that’s another story.
August 13, 2020
This Blog….
Is now in its ninth year. Thank you for your support.
Here’s a link to the first ever post.
https://windowthroughtime.wordpress.com/2012/08/12/hello-world/
If you want to find out more about me, have a look at my website by following the link below.
August 12, 2020
Book Corner – August 2020 (2)
The Secret of High Eldersham – Miles Burton
Every now and again I read a book for which the description truly bonkers is the only way to summarise it succinctly. Miles Burton’s The Secret of High Eldersham falls into that category. Burton, one of the many noms de plume of Cecil John Street, was a prolific author, writing more than 140 novels during his writing career.
Structurally, there are signs of a tension in the planning of the story, starting off as a conventional detective yarn before veering wildly into more of a thriller as it gets going. Then there is no obvious focal point in the book in relation to the detection. The officer in charge is Inspector Young from the Yard but he is flummoxed by it all, the strange atmosphere of the village and the unhelpfulness of the locals. Desperate for some inspiration that would allow him to solve the murder of the landlord of the village’s pub, Whitehead, he calls in gentleman sleuth Desmond Merrion who appears in around 60 of Burton’s stories.
Merrion is a square-jawed, practical sort of chap who enjoys cracking his grey cells on some fiendish criminal plot. Unlike some other amateur sleuths of this type, he does not have an antipathic relationship with the police. He is more than happy to work alongside and sublimate his ego to the police, or at least his friend, Young. Rather like Lord Peter Wimsey, he brings along his man but, to Burton’s credit, Newport is more sympathetically drawn, capable of acting in his own initiative and not handicapped with a comedy working class accent. Altogether, he is less of a cipher than the hapless Bunter.
Merrion’s arrival, though, rather derails the story. His theory, building upon Young’s initial suspicions, is that this isolated village on the East Anglian coast with a reputation for strangeness and hostility to anyone not born there is in the grips of a tradition that goes back centuries, the practice of witchcraft. Merrion researches the subject and, lo and behold, there is a coven in operation in the village, involving most of the locals. That said, fascinating, amusing and, at times, thrilling as the episodes involving the application of these fantastical ceremonies are, they have barely little to do with the crime that is being investigated, being at best tangential and at worst a considerable amount of padding.
Merrion introduces a further distraction by somewhat improbably falling in love at first sight with the daughter of the local magistrate, Mavis. No shrinking violet is she, and her ownership of a powerboat proves conveniently useful as the denouement draws close. Little much is added to the plot by this dalliance, save that Merrion secures his prize at the end.
And if I was going to be blunt, it is not by sleuthing second to none or the application of faultless logic that the case is solved. Young rather blunders into the solution. The case revolves around drug smuggling – am I just on a run of novels around the period in which drugs feature or was it a particular problem at the time? – and Whitehead’s murder specifically revenge for an arrest. I won’t say any more for fear of spoiling your enjoyment.
I have been overly critical, I fear, as the book could easily have been pruned considerably without losing much. But Burton’s characterisations are good, his writing style encourages the reader to persevere even if they may have doubts about the sanity of the plotting and the overall result is a satisfying piece of entertainment. Great literature it isn’t but British Library Crime Classics has revived an easy and absorbing read. Often that is all we need at times.
August 11, 2020
The Last Biscuit On The Plate
On a plate of biscuits, once the chocolate digestives and the custard creams have gone, it is a toss up between Rich Tea and Garibaldi. Why are the unique currant biscuits named after an Italian freedom fighter? My latest article to feature on Country Life magazine’s social media platform reveals all.
