Martin Fone's Blog, page 189
July 11, 2020
Covid-19 Tales (10)
The use of face coverings in public spaces, particularly on public transport and in shops, is now increasingly de rigueur around the world. But how do you encourage people to wear the coverings properly?
Berlin transport operator, BVG, has hit on a novel approach. Increasingly concerned that their passengers were not covering their noses, they have launched a tongue-in-cheek advertising campaign to encourage those who use their services to forego deodorant. They reckon that confronted with the smell of hundreds of smelly, sweaty armpits on a crowded underground train in the peak of summer, recalcitrant users will rush to cover their nose. The strap line is “So, now do you still want to leave your noses out?”
It’s worth a try.
July 10, 2020
What Is The Origin Of (290)?…
The dog’s letter
It is a long time since I had to learn the alphabet. There are two aspects to, recognising the shape of the letter, usually by having a mnemonic consisting of a word that begins with said letter such as a for apple, b for bee and so on, and the sound of it using some form of phonic tag. The letter r is normally sounded in English as if it was spelt like ruh, but a more dramatic and spittle-laden (and Covid-19 unfriendly) way of pronouncing is to roll it with the tongue. In some languages, the Spanish word for a dog, perro, is a good example, the letter r is formed by rolling the tongue and making a more nasal sound.
The Roman satirist, Persius, in his first Satire, when lambasting his fellow satirists, noted the propensity for the letter r to sound like the growl of a dog; “sonat hic de nare canina/ littera” (1.109 – 110), translated as “here there is the nasal sound of the canine letter”. Some of the texts of Persius survived the cull of Pagan literature by the early Christians, the depredations of vermin, moths, bookworms and the like, to reach the sunny uplands of the Renaissance. In the developing phonetics for the printing industry, his observations on the resemblance of the pronunciation of the letter r with the growl of a dog took hold.
The French printer and librarian, Geoffroy Tory, compiled a treatise in typography, published in 1526. When he reached the letter r in the alphabet, he called it “lettre Canine”, citing Persius as his source. A century later Ben Johnson gave a detailed explanation in The English Grammar, published in the year of his death, 1637, of the letter r. “R” he wrote, “is the Dogs Letter, and hurreth in the sound; the tongue striking the inner palate, with a trembling about the teeth. It is sounded firme in the beginning of the words; and more liquid in the middle, and ends: as in rarer, riper. And so in the Latine”.
The association of the letter with a dog was certainly current in the 16th century. Alexander Barclay, a poet and clergyman, wrote in his The Shyp of Folys of the Worlde, published in 1506, that “this malicious man who is troubled with wrath/ sounds nothing else but the hoarse letter R/ though all be well, yet he has no answer/ save the dog’s letter”. Shakespeare got into the act in Act 2, Scene 4 of Romeo and Juliet when the nurse says, “doth not Rosemarie and Romeo begin both with a letter…Ah, mocker, that’s the dog’s name”. Not a direct usage, for sure, but his audience would surely have picked up this well-signposted but indirect reference to the dog’s letter.
By the 19th century, though, it was consigned to obscurity, the plaything of critics who wanted to display their erudition. Reviewing Satan, a collection of poems by a Mr R Montgomery, a correspondent in the Westminster Review of April 1830 wrote, “we are somewhat startled by these three words on the next page, To My Friend. As there is only the difference of the dog’s letter between friend and the quality of the subject, we looked to the Errata, thinking it probable there was a misprint of fiend”. Of course, misprint there was none.
Perhaps the dog’s letter is overdue a renaissance.
July 9, 2020
Gin O’Clock (103)
What with one thing and another, I have hardly been out over the last few months, save for a weekly trip to the local Waitrose. It has meant that the opportunities to explore the world created by the ginaissance have been limited. There have been two positives, though. My enforced bout of reclusiveness has afforded me the opportunity to revisit some of my favourite gins, ones that I go back to even though I am keen to sample the new and unusual, and to give some thought to the state of the gin industry.
It is no use distilling the finest gin in the world, if no one has heard of it, let alone drunk it. One of the trends that come through loud and clear is that distillers must have a strong marketing message. It is a crowded market, almost saturated and verging on the unsustainable, I would suggest, and to break through and survive, it is almost obligatory to have a back story, the quirkier the better. Some, frankly, are just plain daft and barely survive even the most cursory inspection, and I have highlighted some of them. Some seem to be straight out of a Marketing 101 manual – tell me in a sentence what is distinctive about your product. Others seem designed to aim the gin at a very distinctive subset of the market.
Here are two, neither of which I have sampled (yet), which have gone out of their way to differentiate themselves wildly from the rest of the pack. I have come across Arbikie before, enjoying their Highland Estate Kirsty’s Gin (https://windowthroughtime.wordpress.com/2019/09/05/gin-oclock-part-seventy-four/), whose USP is that it is a single estate gin ie all the components are sourced from the distiller’s locale. Even the spuds which make the base spirit are grown on the farm, a sort of from soil to bottle approach.
It was probably, therefore, a fairly natural step for the master distiller, Kirsty Black, to have developed what Arbikie claim to be the world’s first climate positive gin. Called Nàdar, which is Gaelic for nature, it has a carbon footprint of -1.54 kg CO2e per 700ml bottle. How do they do it, I hear you cry? The secret ingredient is the peas which are used in the distillation process. The leftover parts of the peas from the distillation process are mixed with spent yeast to produce something known as pot ale, which is then fed to the animals.
You are helping to save the planet by drinking the gin, something we can all raise a glass to. Of course, where all these initiatives go wrong, laudable as they are, is that the distribution process is reliant upon carbon emitting transport, but you have to start somewhere. I will be intrigued to sample it.
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The fad for throwing more and more botanicals into the mix is a tad time consuming and it is tempting to introduce a middleman into the process. This seems to have been the thinking of South African couple, Paula and Les Ainsley, when they developed their Ibhu Indlovu Gin. Its principal constituent is elephant dung, a batch of 3 to 4,000 bottles requiring five large bags of dung. The dung is dried, washed and then crumbled to leave behind the remnants of the fruits, leaves and bark eaten by the elephants. It can be a bit hit and miss, the taste changing dependent upon the season and what the donor elephants have actually consumed. The taste is described as woody, earthy and almost spicy. I wonder what the aftertaste is like.
Our gin is shit is an interesting marketing strategy.
Until the next time, cheers!
July 8, 2020
Book Corner – July 2020 (2)
Family Matters – Anthony Rolls
Many best-selling and well-regarded books from the Golden Age of detective fiction, the two qualities are not always mutually exclusive, have long languished in obscurity, often out of print. One service that the British Library Crime Classics series has performed for the reading public is making some gems of the genre more readily available. Published in 1933 Family Matters is one that has been wrested from the clutches of neglect.
Technically, the book is an inverted mystery in that we know someone will be murdered and, pretty early on, the identity of the victim. What we do not know is who will do it and how. The action is set in Shufflechester, described as “one of the most English of English towns”.There the Kewdinghams live and their household is not a happy one. Robert, unemployed, spends his time curating his collection full of artefacts which are probably Roman but to the rest of his family and acquaintances are little more than boxes and cupboards overflowing with junk. Bertha, his wife, half-French, there is an element of xenophobia in the narrative, is attractive and spirited, leading the menfolk to wonder how on Earth Robert came to marry her and the womenfolk to think that she should be doing something to make Robert buck up his ideas. Robert also believes that in a former life he was a priest in Atlantis. Added to this, he is a hypochondriac and keeps a large stock of poisons to hand.
I won’t be spoiling the book by telling you that the victim is intended to be the infuriating and annoying Robert. Both Bertha and his physician, Dr Bagge, plot to poison Robert. Whilst trying to stop Robert drugging himself with his own medications, Bagge, somewhat disturbingly, views his patient as human guinea pig upon whom he experiments with potions of increasing toxicity. To the bafflement of both poisoners, Robert appears to be remarkably resilient to the industrial amounts of poison pumped into his system. The reason, of course, is that the poisons are cancelling each other out. Eventually Robert does die but how and who killed him?
Unlike many an inverted mystery where the reader knows both the identity of the victim and the perpetrator, here Rolls does an excellent job in keeping the reader somewhat in the dark. We have our suspicions about who does it but cannot be certain until the very end. This means that the book is much more of a page turner than less skilfully written books of this type. As Rolls says in the opening, “everything was foreseen – everything except what actually happened”.
Rolls enjoys himself depicting the humdrum nature of middle-class life, their petty squabbles, irritations and conventions and the story is laced with humour. The characters are drawn well, not just Robert and Bertha, but the others too in the Kewdingham circle. It is not a demanding story, just a good yarn with a slight twist to it. The book gets better as it goes on and the denouement well crafted.
It is worth looking out for, if you are interested in well-written crime novels.
July 7, 2020
Error Of The Week (10)
Betting may be a mug’s game, but it is so much easier when you know the result in advance of placing your wager.
Recently, I understand, almost 50 bets were placed using self-service kiosks at the Bellagio “resort” in Las Vegas between 1.30 am and 3am West Coast time on a number of Korean and Chinese baseball games. One was a $250 ten-leg accumulator.
The only problem, for the bookies, was that the games started between 1am and 2am and the accumulator paid out $137,100. Over $250,000 was paid out on the bets in all in what is thought to have been the largest sportsbook loss in Las Vegas’ history.
It is thought that the wrong start times were put in the system due to a manual error.
Just to prove that the odds are weighed in the bookies’ favour, the incident is being investigated by the Nevada Gaming Control Board, who will rule on whether the bets should be honoured.
July 6, 2020
You’re Having A Laugh – Part Forty Four
Charles Waterton and the Nondescript (1825)
It is a curious thing that until relatively recently those who were most enthusiastic about the animal kingdom were just as keen to kill and stuff and mount them. Take the eminent traveller, naturalist and taxidermist, Charles Waterton (1782 – 1865), someone we have met before when I was exploring eccentrics.
Waterton revolutionised the stuffy world of taxidermy with a new technique for preserving specimens. Using a mix of mercuric chloride and alcohol to preserve the skin, he would fill the body cavity and other parts with cotton and then stitch it all back to preserve the animal’s natural shape. The legs were kept in place through a series of careful stitches and for birds, bees wax was used to ensure the beak was closed. The carcass was then placed into a box filled at one end “three-fourths up to the top, with cotton, forming a sloping plane”. The advantage of Waterton’s technique was that the whole skin could be manipulated to ensure a natural posture.
The redoubtable Waterton kept most of his prize specimens in his home at Walton Hall, where, during the 1830s, he also created a walled enclosure and what was effectively the world’s first nature reserve. It proved a hit with the public, the most popular attraction being a caiman alligator which Waterton had captured himself by jumping on its back and riding it to exhaustion, or so he said.
In 1821 and again in 1824 Waterton made two trips to Guiana, coming back with hundreds of specimens of exotic South American wildlife, all carefully preserved and stuffed. In 1825 he wrote a book, Wanderings in South America, which became a best-seller and an inspiration to Charles Darwin. Bringing exotica back into the country caused Waterton some trials and tribulations with the customs officers, especially a zealous Mr Lushington who forced him to pay the highest import duty on his specimens. He ran into further difficulties in 1824 when he had in his possession the head and shoulders of what appeared to be a new species, albeit with vaguely human features.
Waterton wrote at the time, “I also procured an animal which has caused not a little speculation and astonishment. In my opinion, his thick coat of hair, and great length of tail, put his species out of all question; … he was a large animal, and as I was pressed for daylight, and moreover, felt no inclination to have the whole weight of his body upon my back, I contented myself with his head and shoulders, which I cut off, and have brought them with me to Europe”. To look at, what he called the Nondescript, resembled a human, albeit with a thick coat of fur around the face.
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When he displayed the exhibit at Walton Hall, it caused a sensation. Rumours, however, soon circulated to the effect that it was the head of a tribesman who Waterton had killed and that the authorities were complicit in a cover up of his crime. Others, though, that there was something fishy about the Nondescript. Waterton’s style was to preserve carefully his exhibits whole and here we only had the bust. Although Waterton had provided an explanation that due to its size and weight, he had trimmed it down, other experts were not convinced and soon realised that it was formed from the rear end of a howler monkey, sculpted to resemble a human. And not just any human. It is thought to have resembled the custom’s official who had given him so much trouble in 1821, Mr Lushington.
A Catholic aristocrat who had refused to swear the Oath of Allegiance, Waterton had form in what was known as anthropomorphic taxidermy. Many of his exhibits were given satirical titles like “Martin Luther after his Fall” and “John Bull and the National Debt”. He was making a monkey out of the custom’s official.
The rather gruesome exhibit still exists and can be seen at the Wakefield Museum.
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If you enjoyed this, why not try Fifty Scams and Hoaxes by Martin Fone
https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/business/fifty-scams-and-hoaxes/
July 5, 2020
Smell Of The Week (2)
There is something intoxicating about the smell of old books, that heady mix of dust and mustiness with a dash of fragrance from the paper or parchment on which the text was reproduced. I had not really given it much thought but do certain books have such a distinctive smell that you could discern one from another? Is having a whiff of a book another way of enhancing your enjoyment of it? If blindfolded, could you identify a book simply by its odour?
Well, now, or at least when and if the Covid-19 restrictions are over, you will have the opportunity to find out, courtesy of the Institute of Digital Archaeology. They have captured the distinctive odours from books dating back as far as the 13th century that form part of the collections of the Bodleian Library in Oxford and the New York Public Library, which will form part of their Sensational Books exhibition.
Each book has been put into a sealed chamber for 72 hours and bombarded with purified air, filters capturing particles that come from the pages. These then are turned into a paste, using high-powered centrifuges, from which the essence of the book’s smell is extracted. They also establish the chemical recipe of the smell so that it can be reproduced.
According to the curator, Roger Michel, you can establish from the smells the types of paper, ink and bindings used. You can even discover something of their previous owners or their history. Books from C S Lewis’s collection are heavily redolent of his cigars, whilst the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays have retained the scent of the pipe of their editor, Edmond Malone. Those books that survived the Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 smell of, you guessed it, molasses.
Fascinating.
July 4, 2020
Bender Of The Week (12)
With pubs reopening today after their enforced closure, it is timely to pass on this salutary warning.
A 40-year-old man from Zhejiang, known as Mr Hu, downed 10 bottles of beer during a heavy drinking session. Unfortunately, when he fell asleep or, perhaps, passed out, he had forgotten to answer a call of nature.
Waking up, he experienced severe abdominal pains, the pain was so intense that he could not lie flat or relieve his bladder. A CT scan at the local hospital revealed that his bladder had ruptured in three places, one of the holes rupturing towards Mr Hu’s abdominal cavity and forcing part of his intestines to spill into the bladder, a potentially fatal complication.
Happily, Mr Hu, after emergency surgery, has made a complete recovery. Such bladder explosions are rare, but not unheard of, and binging on beer can increase the odds of it happening.
You have been warned. Stay alert!
July 3, 2020
What Is The Origin Of (289)?…
Tyke
Neighbours always seem to like to get one over each other, co-existing in a spirit of friendly rivalry. Lancastrians and people from Yorkshire like to think they are better than each other, laud their own virtues and poke fun at the characteristics of their so-called rivals. To those who live outside of the county of the white rose, the good folk of Yorkshire are known as tykes. Where did this name come from and is it pejorative or neutral in its connotations?
Our quest for an answer starts with an Old Norse word, tik, meaning a female dog. It was adopted into English as tyke sometime around the 15th century and it assumed a broader range of meanings. First, it was applied to a dog, irrespective of sex, and usually one of dubious lineage like a mongrel. By extension it was used as a description of a man, unpleasant and coarse in demeanour and manners, and then to denote a child, especially a small, mischievous one. I recall people saying of a particularly cheeky boy, “come here, you little tyke”.
Quite when and why it was associated with the denizens of Yorkshire is far from certain. That it had is clear from a helpful definition provided by the pseudonymous B E Gent in his A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew, published in 1699. There he tells us, “Yorkshire-tike, a Yorkshire manner of Man”. An entry in the glossary of the canting crew, members of the lower orders, especially professional thieves and mendicants, for whom Francis Grose named 64 job description in his New Canting Dictionary of 1725, suggests that it was slang. As to why Yorkshire it is suggested that they used the term as a noun for a dog. Perhaps.
The term appeared in a poem printed in the Gentleman’s Magazine in May 1739 about the notorious highwayman, Dick Turpin. Turpin had only recently been hung for his crimes, on April 7, 1739 in York, and had spent the latter part of his career, from 1737, in Yorkshire under the alias of John Palmer. The poet clearly saw the term not only as pejorative but also as a synonym for someone who is poor and down on their luck. “What cou’d he do, in that dire starving case,/ but take the trade peculiar to the place?/ Turn Yorkshire tike and steal a horse or two/ so hang at Tyburn ‘midst the jockey crew?”
Matthew Prior’s The Wandering Pilgrim, published the following year in 1740, also uses the term in a derogatory fashion to denote someone who is poverty-stricken; “could Yorkshire-Tyke but do the same,/ Than He like Them might thrive,/ But Fortune, Fortune, Cruel Dame,/ To starve Thou do’st Him drive”.
By the start of the 20th century, if not earlier, Yorkshire folk had adopted the term as a descriptor of themselves and their county of origin and it was a matter of pride, a code for the characteristics that they considered especially appropriate. Charles Harper sums all this up ably in his The Great North Road: The Old Mail Road to Scotland, published in 1901. He starts by confirming that “we call a dog a tyke” but then explains, that, “tyke, applied to a Yorkshireman, is to be taken in the complimentary sense. Indeed, the Yorkshireman’s good conceit of himself does not allow him to think that any other sense could possibly be intended. He generally prides himself on being sly, devilish shy. That he is so, too, those who have tried to overreach him, either in his native wilds or elsewhere, have generally discovered”. Harper goes on to describe them as deep ‘uns, taciturn and difficult to fathom, and rounds off with a proverb which, perhaps, bears testimony to the county’s association with Turpin; “shake a bridle over a Yorkshireman’s grave, and he will rise and steal a horse”.
As a Lancastrian by birth, I’m saying nowt.
July 1, 2020
Book Corner – July 2020 (1)
The Moon and Sixpence – W Somerset Maugham
Published in 1919 and based, loosely, on the life of the painter, Paul Gaugin, this book takes its title from a review of Maugham’s masterpiece, Of Human Bondage, in which the critic described Philip Carey as “so busy yearning for the moon that he never saw the sixpence at his feet”. In many ways this is a perfect summary of the principal character of this book, Charles Strickland, one of the least likeable men an author has ever based a book around.
The story is simple enough. Strickland, a rather dull stockbroker forging an unremarkable career in the City, suddenly abandons his wife of seventeen years, his two children and his partnership in the business to pursue a career as an artist in Paris. He is befriended by a fellow artist, Dirk Stroeve, who even nurses him when he is desperately ill. Strickland repays him by persuading Stroeve’s wife to move in with him, simply because he wants to paint her. When the relationship inevitably dissolves and Stroeve’s wife has committed suicide, Strickland, after bumming around southern France, eventually ends up in Tahiti. There he goes native, paints before dying of leprosy.
What makes Strickland so unappealing is that he is totally incapable of forming any emotional attachment with any other human being. He is totally selfish and single-minded in his pursuit of his over-riding ambition, to be a truly great artist. To those acquaintances, Strickland’s art seems naïve, gaudily coloured and exhibiting inferior draughtsmanship. They wonder why he is so driven. Strickland has no commercial interest in his art, he is happy to live a barely human existence, surviving on handouts and the charity of his friends whom he abuses. He is a driven man in pursuit of perfecting his art. Inevitably, it is only after his death that Strickland’s art is appreciated for what it is and his work is worth a fortune.
Strickland’s story is told by an unnamed narrator who relates in the first person the occasions when he came across Strickland or unravels key events in the artist’s life through interrogating witnesses. The narrator’s dialogue does not hide his disgust at the excesses and extremes of Strickland’s behaviour, but at the same time seems in awe of his single-minded determination to achieve his goal, irrespective of the cost. “He was single-hearted in his aim, and to pursue it he was willing to sacrifice not only himself – many can do that – but others. He had a vision. Strickland was an odious man, but I still think he was a great one”.
The writing is sparse, sometimes austere, but as the reader works through the book, they realise that little by little seemingly trivial incidents or off-the-cuff comments build up into a comprehensive portrait of the protagonist. Driven by the tyranny of art, Strickland, an unfathomable loner is compelled to commit inhuman acts.
There are some wonderful passages, moments of acerbic wit or gentler satire of which Dirk Stroeve is often the butt. He is described as “one of those unlucky persons whose most sincere emotions are ridiculous”. Despite that and his ill-treatment at the hands of Strickland, Stroeve is the only one of his acquaintances who can see the spark of genius in the painter’s work. Perhaps it is because Stroeve is also a painter. As Maugham writes, “Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it”. Only an artist can see the true merit of a fellow artist.
I found the book a little hard to get into at first, the opening chapters read more like a learned treatise of an artist’s life and hardly seem designed to lure the casual reader in. Once you have made that investment, though, you will find you have discovered an astonishing book.
