Martin Fone's Blog, page 187
August 2, 2020
Feat Of The Week (3)
We have met Malaysian, Ashrita Furman, before in 2018, when he cut through 26 watermelons placed on his stomach with a machete in a minute.
He has just set another Guinness World Record in Karambunai, Sabath, by chopping through 50 watermelons with a machete inside 60 seconds. The fruits were placed on the head of his very trusting friend, Homagni Baptista.
Alas, I don’t know whether they are still friends or whether it was the same machete. I would love to know.
August 1, 2020
Trader Of The Week
Demi Skipper from San Francisco has set herself a bit of a challenge. Starting with a hairpin she is trying to trade up to a house, in what is dubbed a Trade Me Project.
She has had some success to date, swapping a vacuum cleaner for a snowboard and an iPhone 11 Pro Max for a Dodge Ram van. Some way to go then and under the rules of the challenge she is prohibited from offering money or dealing with people she knows. Skipper claims that since she started and word got out, she is inundated with messages offering her swaps.
Her day job is working for a restaurant reservation app. I wonder if she will swap my reservation for a better restaurant in a more exclusive location.
I’m sure we will hear if she reaches her goal of a house.
July 31, 2020
What Is The Origin Of (293)?…
Neither fish nor flesh
Rather like the later phrase, betwixt and between, neither fish nor flesh and its alternative formulation, neither fish nor fowl, means something that is indeterminate or difficult to classify, something that is neither one thing nor another.
For Christian folk, at least until the schism between Catholics and Protestants, fasting was part of their religious observances. During Lent and on every Friday throughout the year, they were meant to restrict their intake to one full meal which excluded meat. It was therefore of importance to determine what fell into what category and the ecclesiastical authorities helpfully categorised foodstuffs into flesh, meaning the flesh of land animals, fish and fowl. Thomas Aquinas, writing in his influential Summa Theologica in the 13th century, summed up the church’s attitude to meat. As animals were more like man in body, they gave greater pleasure as food and were, therefore, inimical to the purpose of fasting, namely “to bridle concupiscences of the flesh”.
Over time, though, what constituted a fish, particularly important to those following a pescatarian diet during Lent, became more open to interpretation. The Bishop of Quebec, in the 17th century, decreed that a beaver, of which there was a plentiful supply in the area, were fish and as recently as 2010 the Bishop of New Orleans advised his flock that “alligator is considered in the fish family”. These vagaries of classification gave rise to our phrase.
However, the earliest recorded instance of its usage, to describe Cardinal Wolsey and the Catholic clergy in a satire entitled Rede me and nott be wrothe for I say no thynge but trothe by William Roy and Jerome Barlow in 1528, is as an insult; “whom they call Doctour Standisshe/ wone that is neither fleshe nor fisshe/ at all tymes a comen lyer”. The transposition of the terms is merely to preserve the rhyme. I suspect Henry Standish, one time Bishop of St Asaph, was singled out because of the rhyming quality of his surname.
The epigrammatist, John Heywood, provided an extended version of the phrase in his A dialogue conteinying the number in effect of all the prourbes in the englishe tongue, published in 1546. There he records, “she is nother fishe nor fleshe nor good hearyng”. Apparently, herring cured in saltpetre turns a reddish colour.
One of Shakespeare’s best characters, in my humble opinion, is the bluff and boastful, John Falstaff. In Henry IV Part 1, Act 3, scene 5, when discussing the charms and qualities of mine hostess of the Boar’s Head Tavern, Mistress Quickly, he compares her with a beast. When asked by the concerned Quickly which beast, we are treated to this exchange, Prince Hal making up the threesome; “Falstaff: What beast? Why an Otter. Prince: An otter sir John, why an otter? Falstaff: Why? Shees neither fish nor flesh, a man knows not where to haue her”. Interestingly, Shakespeare plays on the fluid status in the theological system of the taxonomy of creatures that look animals but spend a good proportion of their time in the water. The Bishop of Quebec may have taken note.
A later development, perhaps, of the phrase was to turn into an expression denoting the making of an invidious choice or to show partiality by adding or implying the verb to make to it. A correspondent to the Fife Free Press on December 3, 1892 has been outraged by the decision to arraign a draper, one Mr Skinner, for displaying his goods on the pavement. “Why should”, he fumed, “they pounce upon any one individual to make a test case of, while others, who offend more heinously, are allowed to continue unmolested? This, however, is generally the way in Kirkcaldy, Fish of one, flesh of another”.
These days, though, we talk of neither fish nor fowl b ut the principle and the original derivation is the same.
July 29, 2020
Book Corner – July 2020 (5)
The Batch Magna Caper – Peter Maughan
I find the best antidote to difficult times is to immerse yourself in a bit of light-hearted escapism and Maughan’s Batch Magna series, there are five in all, fits the bill admirably. This is the third of the series and whilst it avoids third album syndrome, I didn’t find it as good as the earlier two. Perhaps that is down to the introduction of characters extraneous to the quirky, motley crew who inhabit the sleepy village of Batch Magna, nestling on the banks of the river Cluny, half in Wales and half in Shropshire.
On opening the book, the reader is in for a bit of a shock. Instead of finding themselves in the heart of the countryside, the reader is taken to a shady pawnbroker’s shop where a gang of criminals, incompetent, naturally, and an unlikely mix of characters, are plotting a wages snatch on an engineering firm in Shrewsbury. They anticipate getting away with £100,000, still a tidy sum in the 1970s. As there is no honour amongst thieves, though, each member of the gang has their own plans to run off with the whole of the loot.
The raid takes place, news of it makes the front page of the local papers and even percolates into the consciousness of the residents of the Batch Magna. The carefully worked out getaway plan misfires and the money ends up in Batch Magna, triggering a farcical comedy of errors as various members of the gang try to recover it, whilst at the same time trying to do down their colleagues, and when the money is found in an outhouse of the Manor, the locals, who cannot resist a gossip and making two plus two equal five, think that the American lord of the manor, the flamboyant Sir Humphrey Strange, call me Humph, is the mastermind behind the operation, obviously he must have Mafia connections, and try their best to protect his reputation.
If you have criminals, you must have the police and a pretty inept lot they are. They regularly call in at the Manor to sample Shelly’s renowned hot dogs, a source of consternation to the gang, but they are too interested in feeding their faces to spot what is going on under their noses. The case is solved at a Civil War re-enactment in the grounds of the Manor in Ealing Comedy style by the downtrodden female sergeant, the fiancée of the incompetent Inspector Worth, much to his chagrin as he has made a point of eschewing traditional police methods in favour of modern psychological techniques.
The characters we have met before are all there, the Commander with his collection of glass eyes decorated for all occasions and his wife, Priny, who are moving off the water to live on dry land, Owain and Annie Owen, Humph, his wife Clem, and his mother, Shelly, Jasmine and her brood of children and, of course, the rouê that is Phineas Cook. Phineas manages, on a drunken night, to get engaged to the female police sergeant and both spend much of the book trying to disentangle themselves from the unsuitable arrangement.
Maughan does a sterling job in pulling all these strands together and there are genuine moments of farcical comedy interspersed with sharp observations of human nature. I did find, though, that the large cast and the competing themes and sub plots meant that the gentler innocence of the earlier books and the opportunity to immerse yourself in the trivia and petty squabbles of the carefree inhabitants of Batch Magna were somewhat lost. It was a brave decision by Maughan to deviate from a tried and tested formula. It did work but made for a less enjoyable book.
July 28, 2020
Job Of The Week (4)
What with furloughing and redundancies, jobs are thin on the ground. Taking advantage of the surplus labour force, a company called Vintage Roots, an organic wine seller from Heckfield, are offering to pay someone £250 to drink and review their wine.
It’s a WFH opportunity as they will deliver the wines to your door, a selection of red, white, and rose wines from their Organic Everyday Case and Rose Summer Six selections of wine.
The application process is straightforward. All you have to do is post a picture of yourself enjoying a glass of wine and post it on the usual social media platforms with the tag @VintageRootsltd on Facebook or Twitter and @VintageRootsWines on Instagram. You should also use the hashtags #summerwinetaster and #comedinewithme.
There is one downside, it is a one-off opportunity, so you will not be able to make a career of it. It will look good on the CV, though.
July 27, 2020
The Streets Of London (112)
Gower Street, WC1
Running from Euston Road at its northerly end to Montague Place at its southern end where it becomes Bloomsbury Street, Gower Street boasts one of the longest sets of Georgian terraces in the capital. They were not universally admired when they were built, John Ruskin, prompted to go all Prince Charles, calling them “the nec plus ultra of ugliness in British architecture”. To relieve the boredom of the brown-bricked frontages some stuccoed entrances were added. By the standards of many of the London streets I have looked at, Gower Street is relatively modern, being initially laid out in the 1780s. It takes its name from Lady Gertrude Leveson-Gower who, in 1737, became the second wife of Bloomsbury landowner, the 4th Duke of Bedford aka John Russell.
The street had a part to play in the development of the railway. Near what is now Gower Place a circular track was built in 1808 to allow the engineer, Richard Trevithick, to display his new-fangled steam locomotive, a Hazeldine and Rastrick single cylinder engine imaginatively called Catch Me Who Can. The intrepid could, for a fee of 2 shillings, sit in a carriage, originally designed for road travel, and experience the thrill of being pulled along, making it the world’s first steam locomotive to pull a carriage of fare-paying passengers. Unfortunately, the experiment did not last long, the engine and carriage being too heavy for the brittle tracks and after a few weeks, following a derailment, Trevithick had to admit defeat.
Gower Street also had a part to play in London’s developing underground system. The Metropolitan Railway opened the first line in 1863 and a station at the northern end of the street was one of the original stations. It was renamed Euston Square on November 1, 1909.
At the northern end of the road, too, a plot of land was taken in the 1820s to build an alternative university to the Anglican dominated institutions at Oxford and Cambridge. It was known as “the godless institution of Gower Street” and its first building, the Wilkins Building, opened its doors in 1828. What is now the University College of London gradually expanded over time to occupy much of the eastern side of the street, including the land behind.
On the west side of the street a teaching hospital, initially known as the North London Hospital and later University College hospital, opened its doors in 1834 to provide clinical training for the “medical classes” of the university, its development prompted by the refusal of the governors of the Middlesex Hospital to allow students access to its wards. The first major operation using ether as an anaesthetic in Europe was performed there on December 21, 1846. The teaching hospital brought a mix of qualified surgeons and doctors and medical students to the area. The students, when not busy at their studies, found time to develop a form of slang known as Marrowskying or Medical Greek or the Gower Street dialect. Essentially it was a form of Spoonerism, swapping around the first or first two letters of words in a phrase, doubtless to confuse those not in the know. So, a mutton chop would become a chutton mop, and smoking a pipe poking a smipe. You get the picture.
These days many of the buildings not used by the university of hospital are so-called boutique hotels, following a tradition from the middle of the 19th century when many of the houses were illegally converted into boarding houses. The Bedford Estate fought a losing battle to close them down in a desperate attempt to preserve the area’s reputation for providing “genteel residences”.
One famous resident was Charles Darwin who rented number 110 on December 29, 1838, moving in two days later. According to his daughter, Etty, Darwin christened the house Macaw Cottage, “laughing over the ugliness of their house in Gower Street and the furniture in the drawing-room, which he said combined all the colours of the macaw in hideous discord”. He worked on his theories of evolution there, before his health forced him to move to Down House in Kent in 1842. The was damaged during the Blitz and became part of the University’s Biological Sciences building in 1961 and the garden part of a car park. An evolution of sorts.
July 26, 2020
Find Of The Week (3)
Like your coffee with a bit of a kick? Want that sip of coffee to give you a high?
The Guardia di Finanza in Florence were put on alert when customs officers found a package addressed to Santino D’Antonio, the fictional mafia boss from the film John Wick: Chapter Two.
On opening it they found that the parcel contained around 500 coffee beans. Each bean had been hollowed out, stuffed with a total 4.5 ounces of cocaine, and made to look whole again.
A 50-year-old man who claimed the package at a tobacconist’s shop had his collar felt.
I will stick to an Espresso.
July 25, 2020
Bread Of The Week (2)
Bread is the staff of life, they say, but have you thought what is used to fertilise the wheat?
French self-styled eco-feminist, Louise Raguet, has taken to collecting women’s urine from a public toilet to use as a fertiliser for the wheat she then uses for her “Boucle d’Or”, Goldilocks bread. She dilutes it 20 times before spraying it on the crops. She claims it is packed with nutrients and doesn’t contain the chemicals and pollutants that normal fertilisers contain. And, she adds, it can be stored for up to three months before use as it is sterile.
What is wrong with men’s urine?
July 24, 2020
What Is The Origin Of (292)?…
A1
I worked for most of my career in the insurance industry in London. During my time that curious mix of private and corporate capital channelled into annual businesses called syndicates operating under the organisational umbrella of Lloyd’s was considered to be the bee’s knees when it came to underwriting and accepting risks. I was never quite so convinced that it really merited its world-class reputation, but after nearly driving itself into financial oblivion in the late 80s and early 90s and ruining many of its private investors along the way, Lloyd’s managed to pick itself up and regain much of its former glory.
It all started at Edward Lloyd’s coffee house, opened originally in 1688 in Tower Street, before migrating to Lombard Street. Although Edward died in 1713 the coffee shop continued to thrive. In 1760 a group of merchants, who met there to swap information and strike deals, formed an independent society by the name of the Lloyd’s Register of Shipping with the aim of surveying ships to ensure that they complied with designated standards of construction and maintenance. Their annual publication, The Register, which first saw the light of day in 1764, was designed, through a survey of the physical structure and equipment of merchant ships, underwriters and merchants some idea of the quality of the vessels they were respectively insuring and chartering.
By the 1775-6 edition a more systematic approach to characterising the quality of a ship, wooden in construction, by using a combination of letters of the alphabet, interestingly just vowels, and numerals. As the Register itself elucidated in its edition for 1800, “the vessels marked A are of the first class, E the second, I the third, O the fourth and U the fifth. The Materials of the Vessel with the Figure 1 are of the First Quality, with 2 of the Second Quality and 3 of the Third Quality”. A vessel rated as A1 was of the highest quality.
The phrase was originally A1 at Lloyd’s and was worn as a badge of honour by shipowners, eager to convince passengers of the quality and seaworthiness of their vessel. An example is this advert placed by Messrs Bain, Grahame & Co in The Daily Southern Cross, a newspaper in New Zealand, on June 25, 1859 promoting their latest vessel which was travelling to Sydney: “The fine new fast sailing Brig “Prince Edward” A1 at Lloyd’s. 170 tons register, Nowlan, Commander, will load alongside Queen-street Wharf, and have immediate despatch”.
Inevitably, this shorthand descriptor for the finest quality moved outside of the world of insurance, sometimes losing the reference to Lloyd’s along the way. Sam Weller and Mr Roker, discussing a man after my own heart in Dickens’ The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, published in 1837, had this exchange: “One of ‘em takes his twelve pints of ale a-day, and never leaves off smoking, even at his meals. “He must be a first-rater”, said Sam. “A,1”, replied Mr Roker”.
However, the Lloyd’s reference remained in nautical contexts. In Edward Oxenden’s poem entitled A1 at Lloyd’s, published in The Leeds Times on March 19, 1892, a sailor is extolling the virtues of his inamorata, Sue: “there are lasses, lads, that a tar can love;/ there are lasses a tar avoids;/ But my darling Sue is sweer and true -/Aye, she’s classed A1 at Lloyd’s”.
With the introduction of iron ships and to avoid confusion with a rating system that had stood the test of time for a century, Lloyd’s introduced in 1872 a classification in the format of 100A1 to describe the quality of construction of these more modern vessels. A1, though, usually without any reference to Lloyd’s, is the shorthand still used today to refer to something or someone of the finest quality.
July 23, 2020
Gin O’Clock (104)
It is important if you are going to make a bit of a splash in the world of the ginaissance to be able to stand out from the crowd. A slick, punchy marketing message with a quirky backstory, as we have seen, certainly helps. The shape and design of the bottle is another. After all, that is the first thing you notice about a gin on the shelf and an attractive or unusual design can catch your attention. The irony of it all, of course, is that the more distillers who put some of their energy not designing an eye-catching bottle, the less likely it is that any one bottle will stand out. Indeed, you could argue that in those circumstances it is the plain, dull bottle that will look unusual on the shelf. And you need to consider the impact of an unusual bottle on the overall price.
There’s a lot to consider but there is no getting away from the fact that there are some beautiful bottles around. Those of you who have followed these posts will have realised by now that I take some time in a review to consider the design and aesthetics of the bottles and their labelling. I find it is part of the overall experience. Here, in no particular order, as they say on all good reality shows, are some of my favourites.
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For elegance, simplicity and a touch of its heritage, you cannot beat the Plymouth Gin bottle. The glass is a beautiful pale green, embossed with the name of the distillery and the year it was founded (1793), topped off with a copper coloured screwcap. And the gin is superb. I was so enamoured with the white bottle with floral designs in black which the French gin, Generous Gin, comes in that it is still standing on my shelf, even though, alas, its contents have long since gone.
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I also think the classic wine bottle shape, as favoured by the excellent Portobello Road No 171 Gin, one of my absolute favourite gins, adds some elan to the gin shelf, a style also adopted, albeit in a slightly more elongated form and in an almost fluorescent green, by Crawshay Welsh Dry Gin, whose distillery at Hensol Castle I shall enjoy visiting when I can safely cross the Severn.
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A bottle that is simply a stunner is Silent Pool’s beautiful pale blue cylindrical number, etched in gold with motifs of some of the flowers and botanicals that go into the mix. The cynic in me fears that the more effort that is put into the look, the more disappointing will the end product be. My fears on this occasion were ill-founded. The gin was as good as the bottle looked. The City of London range, I love their Christopher Wren Gin, is contained in a bottle with the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral leading up to the neck. A lovely shape.
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Bottles need not be round and there is something distinctive about a geometric shape, particularly one that is in synch with the product itself. No 3 London Dry Gin from Berry Bros & Rudd is in a distinctive pale green triangular bottle, while the New Zealand Scapegrace Premium Dry Gin is in a square one. The gorgeous Caorunn Small Batch Scottish Gin is in a pentagonal bottle, representing the key Scottish botanicals, Heather, Rowan Berry, Dandelion, Bog Myrtle, and Couls Blush Apple, while, not to be outdone, the Japanese Roku Gin is in a hexagonal bottle, each side representing one of the six traditional Japanese botanicals that go into the mix.
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I’m also a sucker for a metallic plate, Puerto de Indias Sevillian Premium Gin using a brass one to particularly good effect. Gin bottles really do come in all shapes and sizes.
Until the next time, cheers!
