Martin Fone's Blog, page 191
June 20, 2020
Covid-19 Tales (9)
Marmite has centred its marketing campaign around the fact that its taste polarises opinion – you either love it or hate it. Here’s some news that is going to further polarise opinion.
The staple ingredient of Marmite is yeast extract, a by-product of the brewing of beer. Since the closure of pubs, bars and restaurants, many brewers have either reduced or stopped brewing and, as a consequence, the yeast extract that Marmite lovers crave is now in short supply.
Unilever, Marmite’s manufacturer, have announced that stock levels have been affected and to eke them out, “as a temporary measure they have stopped production of all sizes apart from their 250g size jar which is available in most major suppliers”.
It’s a question of going sparingly with your jar or indulging in a bit of panic buying if you want to keep experiencing that all-important Marmite hit.
You have been warned.
June 19, 2020
What Is The Origin Of (287)?…
Foxglove
We have not seen our grandchildren now for almost four months. My wife and I have (briefly) considered separating so that we can create our own separate social bubbles, so bizarre has the current situation become. We have to make do with videos and photos but one thing that has gratified us is their discovery and love of nature. Last weekend we received a picture of them standing in front of an impressive Digitalis purprea, foxglove to you and me. The photo came with a request for grandad to tell them why the plant is called a fox glove because it looks neither like a fox nor a glove nor are its distinctive bell shaped flowers big enough to be used as a glove by a fox.
A royal command cannot be ignored, so here goes.
Their puzzlement is shared by the poet, Christina Rossetti. In the second and final stanza of her poem, The Peacock, published in her 1872 collection of nursery rhymes and children’s verse entitled Sing-Song, she recognised the difficulty in interpreting the plant’s name literally; “no dandelions tell the time,/ although they turn to clocks;/ cat’s-cradle does not hold the cat,/ nor foxglove fit the fox”.
As a name to describe the Digitalis purprea foxglove has an impressive pedigree, dating back to Anglo Saxon times, when it was known as foxes glofa. No one has successfully and incontrovertibly explained why it was so called, although the glove part does seem settled. The shape of the flowers do look like fingers, a feature recognised in the botanical name, digitalis being an adjective derived from the Latin word for a finger, digitus. The plant’s similarity with something worn on the hands is ecoed in French where it is known as gantelée, meaning little glove, and in the German fingerhut, a thimble.
But why a fox?
The Norwegian word for the plant is revbielde which means foxbell, which suggests there may be a Viking influence in its name. There have been some charming stories developed to explain the association of a fox with a foxglove, not least that a crafty fox, they are always characterised as sly, put the bells of a foxglove flower on to his feet to muffle their sound so that he could creep up on some chickens. Another version of the tale credits the suggestion to an evil fairy.
There is a long association between the foxglove and fairies. This has led some, including the aptly named William Fox, to concoct an elaborate theory suggesting that fox is a corruption of folk’s. In his English Etymologies, published in 1847, Fox wrote, “in Welsh this flower is called by the beautiful name of maneg ellyllon or the fairies’ glove. Now, in the days of our ancestors, as everyone knows, these little elves were called in English “the good folks””. Fox concluded that the flowers were originally called the good folk’s gloves and then abbreviated to fox gloves. Unfortunately, there is little evidence to suggest that the Anglo Saxons believed in fairies and this all may be a bit of convenient retro-fitting.
Perhaps we are on firmer ground when we remember that many plants bear the names of animals with which they have little or no association. You just need to think of fowl’s bean, cowslip, ox-heal, dog rose, wolfsbane, catmint and hound’s fennel. There is a fox grass. It may just be that our ancestors named the plant after one of the indigenous creatures. Digitalis had a number of variant names through the centuries including fox-fingers, ladies’ fingers and dead-men’s bells.
My take on this is that there is no particular association between digitalis and a fox, that it may have been so called in accordance with a naming convention that associated plants with indigenous animals and that if there is any more deep rooted explanation, it is lost in the mists of time.
The foxglove is one of my favourite flowers. Just enjoy it for what it is.
June 17, 2020
Book Corner – June 2020 (3)
Bel-Ami – Guy de Maupassant
I have mused before about what makes a novel a classic and my conclusion always has been that it has a sort of universality and is able to speak to and resonate with its readers through the centuries. Maupassant’s Bel-Ami, published in 1885, has this in spades with a plot line featuring corrupt politicians, sleazy journalism, and a lust for sex, women and power.
We follow the protagonist, Georges Duroy, on his climb up the greasy pole to success. Working in a job without prospects Duroy bumps into an old army friend, Charles Forestier, and through his good offices lands a position as a journalist on an influential newspaper, La Vie Francaise. Without any writing experience, he finds the task of writing his piece daunting and is persuaded to seek help from Forestier’s wife, Madelaine. The resultant piece is a success.
Duroy, possessing a moustache described as irresistible, “crisp and curly, it curved charmingly over his lip, fair with auburn tints, slightly paler where it bristled”, soon discovers that the cachet of being a journalist provided him with opportunities to chase the ladies. Soon gaining the nickname of Bel-Ami, Duroy’s first conquest is Madame Clotilde de Marelle with whom he has a passionate affair.
Forestier has tuberculosis and his deathbed scene with Madelaine and Duroy in attendance is poignant and moving, the fear of death heightened by Maupassant’s own predicament, having contracted syphilis by the time he penned this. Duroy further cements his rise up the greasy pole by marrying Madelaine, whilst still conducting affairs. Madelaine comes into a sizeable inheritance which Duroy forces her to share with him and then makes a small fortune by trading on insider information. When Duroy discovers that Madelaine has been cheating on him, with a French minister of state, he unmasks her and divorces her, leaving him free to marry an heiress to an even greater fortune.
What makes the book for me is the development of Duroy’s character. He is the focal point of the book and the fulcrum around which the plot turns. At first, we are encouraged to be sympathetic towards him, he comes from a poor background and through a combination of luck and strength of character makes something of his life. But there is a restless energy to him, he is never content with what he has got, always searching to better himself, highly opportunistic. By the time the book ends, any scintilla of sympathy for him has been stripped and he stands before us a s a character who is a nasty piece of work.
The takeaway from Maupassant’s book is that whilst native cunning laced with mediocrity can lead to success, there is a sort of natural justice in operation when Duroy realises the basic futility of ambition. Despite all his trappings of success, he is so envious of the triumphs of others that he cannot enjoy what he has and, we assume, never will.
The female characters are well drawn, they are not just doll-like figures, and they give as good as they take. The translation I read was sympathetic and made reading the book an enjoyable experience. Maupassant takes delight in skewering Parisian society and showing that all is not as it seems. There is a darker side lying underneath, fuelled by hypocrisy and unseemly ambition. With the spectre of death looming large over the narrative, we are left to ponder whether grasping ambition is really worth all the effort.
I had only come across Maupassant before through his short stories but I thoroughly recommend this novel.
June 16, 2020
Covid-19 Tales (8)
One of the consequences of the lockdown, compounded by furloughing, is that people have too much time on their hands. While the devil may not have exactly made work for Charli Lello’s hands, she got a fit in her head to see if she could incubate and hatch some eggs from a carton of Clarence Court Gladys-May’s Braddock Whites she had bought from her local Waitrose.
Inspired by a video of someone hatching quail eggs, she took some of the duck eggs, free-range (natch), and popped them in an incubator she happened to have lying around. About a month later Charli was astonished to hear a beeping sound from the eggs and shortly afterwards three Braddock White ducklings emerged. She has named them Beep, Peep and Meep and they will spend the rest of their natural living with Charli’s chickens.
A spokesperson from Waitrose said that fertilised eggs were safe to eat and “entirely indistinguishable” from normal eggs, unless incubated.
June 15, 2020
The Streets Of London – Part One Hundred And Nine
Cowper’s Court, EC3
If you walk down Cornhill in an easterly direction, then on the right-hand side, just before you get to Birchin Lane, you will come across a passageway named Cowper Court. Unprepossessing as it may appear today, just another alley in the warren that characterises the area, it has its own share of stories to tell.
Originally known as Fleece Lane, which is its moniker in John Rocque’s Map of London and Westminster of 1746, or Fleece Passage according to other contemporaneous maps, it took its name from a tavern in the vicinity, the Golden Fleece. This seems to have been a substantial building as it had to pay tax on sixteen hearths in 1662.
From around the middle of the 18th century the Passage hosted one of the bustling coffee houses of the time, the Jerusalem, popular amongst members of the East India Company and the venue where shipping news, gossip and opinions were shared. It rivalled the Lloyd’s coffee shop as the place to go to for breaking maritime news and was also frequented by traders associated with the South Sea Company.
The Jerusalem earned a particularly unique place in detective history in 1845 with the arrest there of one John Tawell for murdering his mistress, Sarah Hart, by giving her prussic acid to prevent his affair coming out in the open. What was ground-breaking about Tawell’s arrest was that for the first time the police, stationed in Slough, used a new fangled device known as the telegraph to alert their London colleagues that a person matching Tawell’s description had boarded a train to Paddington. The police tailed him to the Jerusalem where they effected the arrest the following day. Despite spinning a line that the unfortunate Hart had eaten an apple whose pips had contained the poison, did not find salvation and was hanged in Aylesbury on March 28th the following year. Shortly afterwards, although for unrelated reasons, the Jerusalem fell out of fashion and eventually closed down.
I have noted on numerous occasions that fire had a major role to play in the development of the metropolis and this area of Cornhill was to suffer the largest fire to hit the city between the Great Fire and the Blitz. Starting in Mr Eldridge’s periwig-making establishment in Exchange Lane at around 1am on Friday March 25, 1748 it quickly spread due to poorly constructed housing lacking brick built dividing walls in attic spaces and inadequate fire fighting measures, its progress only arrested because the wind blew the flames towards more solidly built buildings and a wide road over which they could not cross. Nevertheless, over 100 buildings were destroyed, and six people died in the fire, the wig maker and his family together with a worker and a tenant, the latter breaking his back when he jumped out of a window.
The conflagration prompted an improvement in municipal firefighting capabilities including more effective equipment and the installation of turncocks in the streets, and the rise of house insurance. By 1750 most houses were insured. Of particular relevance to our street, the area was redeveloped and what was Fleece Lane was renamed Cowper’s Court, after Sir William Cowper, the first Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, who once had a house there.
Today it is a rather scruffy, undistinguished back alley, most of whose buildings are internally modern sitting behind facades, lined with striking white tiles to help reflect light into the windows of the nearby offices.
June 14, 2020
Record Of The Week (4)
That man, David Rush from Idaho, has done it again, sealing his 150th Guinness World Record.
After last week breaking the world record for drinking a litre of lemon juice, he decided he may as well go for the lime juice version. In just 17.29 seconds he downed the litre glass of unsweetened lime juice through a straw, smashing the previous record of 21.81 seconds set by Andrew Ortolf.
He told reporters that he was giving up drinking records for fear of the damage he was doing to his stomach.
David’s record-breaking run is all in a good cause, to promote STEM education. He has also just brought a book out, Breaking Records: 21 Lessons from 21 Record Attempts. I can tell him now, that won’t earn him another record.
June 13, 2020
Covid-19 Tales (7)
Mon dieu!
The collapse of the pub, bar and restaurant trade as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic has meant that French winemakers have a lot of wine on their hands.
To make room for this year’s crop, French vineyards have been given permission to sell their unsold stock, some 2 million hectolitres, to 33 distilleries to transform it into ethanol or hydro-alcoholic gel for hand sanitisers.
They will even get paid for it, €78 a hectolitre for appellation wine and €58 for plonk and have until next Friday to apply to join the scheme.
What a waste!
June 12, 2020
What Is The Origin Of (286)?…
Know on which side your bread is buttered
Bread is the staff of life, they say, and I do enjoy a nice slice from a crusty loaf. In my rather half-hearted attempt to control my cholesterol intake, I eschew butter. In days when the range and supply of foodstuffs was not as plentiful as it is today, a coating of butter, freshly made preferably, would be the veritable icing on the cake, topping off a nourishing and filling repast.
The custom was to plaster only one side of the bread with butter, we will come on to the concept of buttering both sides later, so that the eater had a side they could hold without getting greasy, smeared fingers. The buttered side held the riches of the repast and was the enjoyable part. The phrase to know on which side your bread is buttered uses the image of a slice of bread in a figurative sense to denote that someone has the sense to realise where their best interests lie.
The 16th century in England was a period of religious turmoil and if you were a public figure, or at least a courtier, you needed to be particularly savvy and back the right horse in the ongoing battle for ascendancy between the Catholics and Protestants. Our phrase originates from at least the middle of the 16th century, appearing in a compendium of proverbs compiled by the playwright and epigrammatist, John Heywood; “thou knowst not who doth ye harm, who doth ye good/ yes yes (quoth she) for all those wyse words vttred/ I knowe on whiche syde my brease is buttrd”. The sense has remained the same to this day.
Having both sides of a piece of bread buttered is not only extremely messy and makes it difficult to eat but also be seen to be a tad on the greedy side. Rather like wanting your cake and eat it, the phrase want one’s bread buttered on both sides is used to denote wanting something more than is practicable or reasonable to expect. There is a French equivalent, on ne peut pas avoir le beurre at l’argent du beurre, which translates along the lines of you can’t have the butter and the money for the butter. It is one or the other.
It is a phrase likely to have been used in common speech from at least the 18th century, although the earliest printed usage appeared, without a gloss, suggesting that it would have been understood by the readership, in The Morning Post and Gazetteer on August 13, 1801; “there will be no want of money while the terms are so good for the Lenders, who expect to have their slices of the Loan buttered on both sides”.
While we are on the subject of bread and butter, there is also a phrase used to denote that someone is well provided for, to have one’s bread buttered for life. Again, its early appearances in print were with quotation marks, suggesting that it was proverbial and understood by the reader. The Carlisle Journal printed on December 28, 1849 a story about one Colonel Grey who interposed himself between the gun of Lord Canning and the Prince of Wales who had inadvertently strayed into range. They had the good grace, or was it lordship, to admit it was a hoax, noting that “the story is truly a good one; and the Colonel’s bread appears to be buttered for life…but…the Colonel’s chances of promotion at once cut short by the announcement…that the whole is a fabrication!”
That’s enough bread. I’m off to make a sandwich.
June 11, 2020
Gin O’Clock (101)
The seemingly unstoppable impetus of the ginaissance has, rightly, had me focussing on the enormous range of so-called premium gins that are now available. Such is the range and so wide is the taste spectrum that it is almost impossible to find a gin that doesn’t suit, unless you have a pathological hatred of the spirit. I have always found it a little strange, though, that with so much attention focussed on the gin, the botanicals used, the aroma, taste and aftertaste, the backstory of the distillers, the look and feel of the bottle, and the marketing, there is little focus on what you mix it with. There is little point, it seems to me, to go to enormous lengths selecting a gin that suits your taste or the mood of the moment, and then pour any old mixer into it. One size does not necessarily fit all.
I am wired psychologically to resist the blandishments of market leaders and like from time to time cast my net out wider. Bored with the hegemony of Fever-Tree and Schweppes 1783, my normal mixers, and finding my favourite spirit a little heavy for an evening’s session when taken neat, I was attracted to investigate Double Dutch Indian Tonic Water, available at my local Waitrose and with a price enticingly discounted. I am on a pension, after all.
The name, Double Dutch, refers to the founders, twins Joyce and Raissa de Haas, who were raised in the Netherlands, the spiritual home of gin. Frustrated that the spirit of innovation and experimentation amongst gin makers was not being matched by the providers of mixers, they decided to take matters into their own hands. The initial two flavours they developed were Pomegranate & Basil and Cucumber & Watermelon. Now the range has been extended to include Ginger Ale, Double Lemon, Soda Water, Indian Tonic Water, Ginger Beer, and Cranberry & Ginger. Something for everybody’s taste, it would seem.
The duo’s aim was to produce a mixer that stood up on its own as well as being a perfect accompaniment to a spirit and that they were natural and free from preservatives. Despite the name the drink is manufactured in the United Kingdom, using natural ingredients, according to their website, and the highest quality (natch) spring water from the North of England. They are also slimline, for those who care about such matters, with just 66 calories.
As I prefer a tonic that enhances the flavours of the gin I’m drinking rather than setting itself up as a rival, I decided to err on the side of caution and go for the unflavoured Indian tonic. It comes either in a bottle or a can, I bought the canned version. Emphasising the Dutch origin of the idea if not the manufacture of the tonic, the can is an appealing orange colour with a logo of two girls, perhaps the De Haas twins, facing each other with glass in hand and the motto “perfectly balanced”. There is a strangely Masonic feel to the design between the two women, but that may just be me.
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I decided I would try the tonic on its own before adulterating my gin. It had a slightly spicy note to its aroma and in the glass had enough bubbles to convince you that it wasn’t flat without unleashing a torrent. To the taste it was not as bitter as some tonics I have tasted. The spicy elements were present as was the citrus, but they seemed well balanced and unobtrusive, making it an interesting, if somewhat bland, drink.
Mixed with a gin, if anything it improved immeasurably and seemed to enhance the flavours of the juniper-led spirit I had selected. I suspect with the spicy element that you need to be careful which gins you decide to add it to, but I found it a perfectly acceptable alternative to the tonics I normally use. And with all the other flavours in their cabinet, some a little too recherche for my taste, they are well positioned to make a splash in their market.
Until the next time, cheers!
June 10, 2020
Book Corner – June 2020 (2)
Of Human Bondage – W Somerset Maugham
I’m on a bit of Somerset Maugham roll at the moment and Of Human Bondage, published in 1915, is rightly acclaimed as his masterpiece. It is a wonderful book and I cannot understand why it has taken me so long to find it. Perhaps it was its length that was off-putting or simply that Maugham is an author who is rather passé these days. Anyhow it is a wrong that I am delighted to have put right.
Described as a Bildungsroman, a novel which follows the emotional and moral development of an adolescent, the book is the story of Philip Carey from the age of nine to around 30. Philip is born with a club foot, which sets him out from the crowd, and is raised by a stern, unsympathetic, selfish clergyman uncle. Trapped in a late-Victorian vicarage, the book opens in 1885, and praying for a cure to his disability to a God whom he realises is indifferent to his plight, Philip is looking for a way out of his life of bondage.
Carey is sent to boarding school, but he finds it hard to fit in and is bullied. There are strong echoes of David Copperfield, and Rose, although he eventually disappoints him, is a quasi-Steerforth character. The lengthy account of his schooldays allows us to get to know him better and understand his search for love. After school he escapes to Heidelberg where he studies and then spends time in Paris in the hopes of becoming an artist. When it dawns on him that he is never going to be any better than second-rate, Philip returns to London to study medicine, his late father’s occupation.
It is while he is in London that Philip meets his femme fatale, Mildred Rogers. Their relationship is very much a one-way street, Philip giving and Mildred taking. So desperate and needy is Philip for the love and affection that he was deprived of as a child that he is almost prepared to do anything to cling on to a woman who betrays him by having another man’s child. This section of the book is the most poignant and moving of the section.
Mildred’s behaviour, though, eventually becomes too much for Philip and they part, leaving him all but destitute. He is rescued by the kindly Athelney family and in a rather twee and slightly disappointing ending, he finds a sort of contentment and a place in the world that he desperately wanted. Along the way he loses his faith and with the aid of an Arabian carpet discovers the meaning of life.
Maugham’s masterful portrayal of the development and growth of a young man, the birth and death of his hopes and aspirations and the compromises he has to make to find his way in life is powerful and gripping. There are no narrative tricks, we follow Carey’s life on a strictly linear timeline, and no real set pieces. It is a series of rather mundane and ordinary scenes which reflect the mundanity of most of our lives but, over the course of time, come to shape who we are and how others perceive us.
The book is highly autobiographical, although Maugham was at pains to call it an autobiographical novel rather than an autobiography. Maugham had a disability, a stammer, and was brought up by an aunt and uncle. He too studied medicine and had aspirations to be a painter, although he was never an artist. Maugham’s talent is to understand and portray emotions and to create a central character who is no super-hero but, really, no different from any of us mere mortals.
It is a powerful and enjoyable book, lit up with moments of humour, Maugham’s sharp observations of human traits and characters, written in an unpretentious prose which makes it a delight to read. Thoroughly recommended.
