Martin Fone's Blog, page 201
March 5, 2020
Gin O’Clock – Part Ninety Four
In the ginaissance, things move quickly, it would seem. It was only in mid-2018 that I was reviewing a delightful bottle of Warner Edwards’ Honeybee Gin. By the time I had got my hands on a bottle of Warner’s London Dry Gin, courtesy of our local Waitrose store, Sion Edwards, one of the founding duo of this distillery that operates out of a converted barn in Harrington in Northamptonshire, had moved on, in 2016, and the labelling, from around 2019, has now caught up to reflect the fact. With so many brands jostling for space, name changes can cause confusion and, initially, I was left wondering whether they were one and the same.
Having cleared that up, I was keen to see what their take on my favourite type of gin, a classic no nonsense London Dry Gin, was going to be like. It seemed a strange route for Warner’s to take, having already produced a perfectly acceptable Dry Gin, Harrington, and a barn-storming Rhubarb Gin, quite innovative in 2014 and perhaps leading the way for surfeit of flavoured and coloured gins that are on the market now. If you are going to be a serious gin distiller, though, you need to have a classic London Dry in your armoury.
My bottle was rather dumpy in shape, with frosted glass and a wax seal with an artificial stopper. The bottle is a work of art with illustrations of Harrington, Curiosity, their still, the wildflower meadow, Falls Farm, the botanical gardens, and the beehives. Think of a Wainwright illustrated map and you will get the general idea. The front of the bottle has a triangular label with a dragon and lion holding a glass and the legend “Farm Born British Gins”. Underneath that is a blue rectangular label which tells me that it is a “London Dry Gin, fragrant, rich and spiced, distilled with our farm’s spring water”. The seal on the neck informs me that it was “handmade in small batches on Falls Farm and distilled by Conor and born in 2018”. Developed in 2018 it may have been, but it was only marketed in 2019 and so is a relative new addition to their impressive range.
At the rear of the bottle, there is more information, in white print, telling me that they “are gin farmers. Our gins are crafted with nature on Falls Farm. This classic London dry gin, distilled with our farm’s spring water, is elegantly balanced with juniper and spice”. It then goes on to give serving suggestions. My bottle also came with a little square booklet tied to the neck, giving brief details of their range of gins. They certainly cram a lot on to the bottle and it is good to see a producer imbuing the slickness of their marketing message with a passion for their product. My only cavil, a bugbear of mine, is that the botanicals are not listed.
I have always held that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, no matter how attractive it seems. What really matters is what it tastes like. With the stopper off, the aroma is piney with some citrus elements and a spicy undertone. In the mouth, the crystal-clear spirit is sensational, juniper and cardamom immediately coming to the fore, then lemon and, possibly, orange, followed by a fresh, almost menthol-like sensation, before a peppery after-finish leaves a warming glow in your throat. It was a complex and well-balanced drink, with all the elements discernible, all playing their part but not overwhelming the mix. And with an ABV of 40% it is a fine addition to any drinks’ cabinet.
March 4, 2020
Book Corner – March 2020 (1)
Buddenbrooks – Thomas Mann
I had a health scare a little while back and it made me ponder on my mortality. Surprisingly, one of the themes that kept cropping up was; Which authors would I kick myself for not reading before my time was up? It may just be me but it made me quite anxious and once I was given the all clear I decided to rectify some obvious lacunae in my reading before it was time to meet the great librarian in the sky. Thomas Mann was one such.
I had come across Buddenbrooks, his first novel, published in 1901, when I was researching Advent calendars and, as it had some good notices, I decided to give it a go. Frankly, I found the ending profoundly depressing. I’m rarely ever moved by what I read, I have a heart of stone, but the sense of futility and despair that Mann engenders is truly moving.
The book recounts the long and slow decline in the fortunes of a patrician mercantile family in the Hanseatic town of Lübeck over four generations. Initially, through the endeavours of Johann Buddenbrook the elder, son of the founder of the family business, the family is thriving, influential and wealthy enough to move into one of the principal houses in the town. Everything is rosy and the book opens with Johann dandling his eight-year-old granddaughter, Tony, on his knee. During the course of the book, spanning some 42 years, the family’s fortunes have crumbled.
Tony at the end is the only surviving member of the family. Even her young nephew, the only male heir, has died bring the line to a juddering halt. Thomas, Johann’s successor, has died and Christian, Tony’s other brother, the black sheep of the family, is locked away in an asylum. Worse still, the grand house has had to be sold, to their arch-rivals to boot, and the family business has been liquidated.
What went wrong?
While the world around them changed, the 1848 revolution and the Franco-Prussian wars intrude, the family has stayed pretty much the same. They have their standards, their own way of doing things, their codes of honour. They become dinosaurs. Worse still, the mercantile zeal and spirit which was the foundation of the family’s fortunes has been eroded. The pursuit of luxury and leisure activities and, yes, an immersion into a particularly austere form of Protestantism become more attractive. On the rare occasions that they engage with the wider world, they come off second best. And the dread hand of disease stalks them and leads to the premature deaths of the principal heirs.
The book gave rise to what is known in business theory circles as Buddenbrook Syndrome, describing a phenomenon whereby successive generations of a mercantile family lose the business acumen, preferring to put their time and money into leisure activities.
The book runs over such an expanse of time that by definition the narrative has to be episodic. It is easy to get swamped in the detail of marriages and distant relatives. But the central characters of Tony, Thomas and, towards the end, little Hanno, hold the narrative together and they are the conduits through which all of the disparate strands pass. I found I enjoyed the book and it wasn’t the heavy, intense read that I had anticipated. My problem, though, was that it was difficult to feel any sympathy for them. They had had it all and managed to throw it away.
March 3, 2020
Line Of The Week
If I had to choose between Eastenders and Coronation Street aka Coronavirus Street, I cannot imagine the scenario but bear with me, I would go for the northern soap anytime. It has that happy knack of lacing its take on gritty reality with huge lacings of humour.
Take the storyline about domestic abuse featuring Geoff Metcalfe and Yasmeen Nazir. Furious that Yasmeen had lost track of time cleaning out the chicken coop and not prepared his meal, Metcalfe killed the chicken named after the author of Jane Eyre and served it up for dinner.
On the one hand, you have to suspend belief that an amateur could kill a chicken, pluck and eviscerate it and then roast it in the time it took Yasmeen to go upstairs and have a lie down, Geoff is a stage magician, after all, but on the other this somewhat contrived plotting did set Yasmeen up to utter the best line I’ve heard on British TV for a long time.
Realising that she had just put the flesh of her favourite hen into her mouth, Yasmeen screamed, “You killed Charlotte Bronte and you made me eat her”.
Priceless.
March 2, 2020
There Ain’t ‘Alf Some Clever Bastards – Part One Hundred And Two
Paul Otlet (1868 – 1944)
There was a time, not so long ago, when you couldn’t get an answer with varying degrees of veracity to any question by the press of a switch. In the days before the internet, we had to resort to books, a time-consuming practice. The breadth of our knowledge was much more restricted but, perhaps, the likelihood of it being correct is greater. Some, though, before the age of the computer, imagined a repository of all the world’s knowledge sitting in one place where anybody’s query could be answered in a relatively short space of time. One such was Belgian, Paul Otlet.
In 1895, along with a lawyer friend, Henri La Fontaine, Otlet established what they called the International Institute of Bibliography, an attempt to bring order to and categorise the sum of human knowledge, at least in printed form. It was an ambitious and audacious task.
The adoption of the Dewey Decimal System, devised in 1876 by the American librarian, Melvil Dewey, had brought some order to the contents of a library by dividing all knowledge into ten discrete groups. Building upon this, the duo published in 1904 what they called the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) system, which broke knowledge down into nine categories, leaving a tenth free for future expansion, and 70,000 sub-divisions. UDC is still used today in over 130 countries.
In 1910 Otlet and La Fontaine proposed the next stage of their vision, a repository of the world’s accumulated information, held in an organised and accessible format. This city of knowledge, a successor to the great library of Alexandria, was to be called the Mundaneum and was to be located in Brussels. The cornerstone of the venture, as well as their UDC system, was to be the paper index card, whose size had been standardised to its now recognisable three by five-inch format by Dewey.
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Over time the Mundaneum was crammed with drawers, stuffed full of index cards holding bibliographic information of some 15 million books. Otlet’s institute, staffed by an army of women, offered a research system where, for a fee, a user could telegraph a question and, eventually receive, an answer. The constraints of a paper-based system, even one well organised, meant that it was a time-consuming job to thumb through the cards, copy out the information and send it on to the customer. It also proved difficult to copy and transmit bulky documents.
Naturally, Otlet pondered over the problem and in 1906 proposed a form of microphotography as a way of storing information, documents, and even complete books compactly on microfiche. In 1937 this way of storing data was lauded as the way to create a “World Brain” by an international documentation congress but Otlet was never able to implement this stage of his idea.
Otlet was an idealist, an apostle for internationalism, envisaging that the harnessing of new industrial technologies and man’s growing intellectual output was a way to foster greater world harmony and understanding. What put a spoke in his wheel, as well as the limitations of the then available technology, was the looming spectre of Nazism. When Belgium was occupied, Otlet desperately tried to save his life’s work from their clutches.
The Nazi censors duly made an inspection and were rather non-plussed by what they saw. “The institute and its goals cannot be clearly defined. It is some sort of … ‘museum for the whole world,’ displayed through the most embarrassing and cheap and primitive methods… The library is cobbled together and contains, besides a lot of waste, some things we can use. The card catalogue might prove rather useful”, a report stated.
A little while later, Nazi troops seized 63 tons of books and much of Otlet’s card index system. He soldiered on with his dream but died four months after the occupation ended.
Still, he had sown the seed for what ultimately became the world-wide web. Otlet may, though, have been horrified by what it has become. What remains of the Mundaneum was moved to Mons in 1998 and is still open to visitors.
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If you enjoyed this, check out the stories of other inventors who have been consigned to the footnotes of history in Martin Fone’s new book, The Fickle Finger, out now
https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/computing-science-education/the-fickle-finger/
March 1, 2020
Survival Tip Of The Week
It’s always handy to know a few survival skills, I feel, even if you hope you will never have to use them. Take fending off an attack from a great white shark, for example.
A surfer, Nick Minogue, was doing his thing off Pauanui Beach in New Zealand’s Coromandel region when he was hit on the side of his elbow and forearm. The next thing he knew was that the shark had sunk its teeth into the front section of his surfboard.
Apparently but not surprisingly, sharks don’t like being punched in the nose or eye. Armed with this knowledge, the redoubtable Minogue shouted a few choice expletives and went to punch the creature in the eye, but missed. His second attempt was more successful, hitting the shark square in the eye with such force that it decided to look elsewhere for its next meal.
Worth knowing.
February 29, 2020
Tattoo Of The Week
There is an old saying, act in haste, repent at leisure, advice that is pertinent for those who are considering a tattoo or body art, as it seems to be called today. Some tattoos seem designed to tempt fate.
Take Donald Murray from Indiana who has had the slogan “Crime Pays” tattooed across his forehead. On February 17th he led officers from Terre Haute Police Department on a chase before having his collar felt. He’s now behind bars, facing charges of resisting law enforcement, reckless driving, possession of amphetamines, maintaining a common nuisance and stealing a vehicle.
It’s not his first run-in with the law. In December last year he was involved in another car chase which was featured on A&E’s Live PD. The chase ended in dramatic style when he crashed into a tree and legged it, before being caught by pursuing officers.
If I was him, I would ask for my money back.
February 28, 2020
What Is The Origin Of (271)?…
First catch your hare
Cookery books are the staple fare of the book trade, Publisher’s Weekly reporting that sales rose by 21% in 2018, compared with 2017. It has been ever thus. The 19th century blockbuster, Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, published between 1859 and 1861, and its 18th century equivalent, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy by Hannah Glasse, published in 1747 and a best-seller for over a century, were the go-to books for culinary advice.
In this age of supermarkets and an inexhaustible supply of ingredients to hand, it is easy to forget that there was a time when often the only way of getting what was to be the centre of your culinary masterpiece was to hunt or catch it yourself. The phrase “first catch your hare”, other variants include fish or carp, is now used figuratively to indicate the first step you must take when undertaking a task or project. A tongue-in-cheek statement of the bleedin’ obvious it undoubtedly is, but how often have you reached into the cupboard and found that you are out of what you need to make your dish? You can never overstate the need to assemble all your ingredients before you start.
A variant of the phrase can be traced back to the 13th century to the English legal commentator, Henry de Bacton. In his De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae, he wrote, “and the common folk say that you must first catch your stag, and after it has been caught skin it”. Sensible advice and the fact that he is talking about a stag rather than a hare is no matter, the type of fauna was interchangeable over the centuries. What is also interesting is that Bacton claims that, as a piece of advice, it has an almost proverbial status. It was a well-known saying at the time.
That said, as a phrase it seems to have fallen out of favour, at least in the written word, only reappearing in the 19th century, and then in the figurative sense. Thackeray, in The Rose and the Ring, published in 1855, wrote, “a soldier, Prince, must needs obey his orders; mine are…to seize wherever I should light upon him. First catch your hare, exclaimed his Royal Highness”. The Times lamented on August 25, 1858: “bitter experience has taught us not to cook our hare before we have caught it”.
Earlier examples from the 19th century attribute the saying to Hannah Glasse. The Tyne Mercury used the phrase in its edition of July 18, 1815 thus; “first catch your hare, says Mrs Glass”. The Morning Advertiser of February 11, 1819 when reporting on the steps the Spanish government were going to take towards foreigners fighting on the side of South American insurgents, noted, “this is something like the recipe of Mother Glasse for dressing carp – first catch your carp and then kill it”.
The problem, though, is that nowhere in her crowd-pleasing cookery classic does Hannah Glasse use the verb catch immediately before any member of the animal kingdom, be they animal, fish or fowl. The doyenne of 18th century cooking was not keen to get her hands dirty with the unpleasant and intensely frustrating task of catching and killing the main ingredient. The nearest she got to the phrase was in a recipe for roasting a hare was “take your hare when it is cas’d (skinned) and make a Pudding”. Her common formulation was to use the imperative of the verb to take and position it before the creature.
What are we to make of all this?
A variant of the phrase existed in the 13th century, if not earlier. It may have fallen into disuse over time, at least in printed form, before having a renaissance in the 19th century. To add a touch of celeb-glitz to the phrase, users dragged Hannah Glasse’s name into the equation. Still, it meant her name lived on.
February 26, 2020
Book Corner – February 2020 (4)
The Provincial Lady In America – E M Delafield
They call it third album syndrome. The first is full of energy and fresh ideas, the second is more rounded as the artist learns the tricks of the trade but the third is a disappointment, repetitive and devoid of ideas. Although a prolific and accomplished author, the same comments can be made of Delafield’s third novel in The Provincial Lady series, published in 1934 and parts of which were serialized in Punch magazine.
The Provincial Lady (PL) is now an established writer and, at the behest of her publisher, is encouraged to go to North America to fulfil some speaking engagements and plug her book. As this is the 1930s, it wasn’t just a question of jumping on a plane but a sea voyage, courtesy of Holland America Line and the SS Statendam. The early part of the book is taken up with PL’s concerns about how to break the news of a prolonged absence to her husband, how she was to break the news to her staff and friends, preoccupations about what to pack and wear and, the continual theme of the books, how much it was all going to cost and how she could possibly afford it.
She is treated to a first class on the trip out, somewhat wasted as she is terribly sea-sick, whilst on the return she has to make do with tourist class. Such is the treatment of authors by their publishers. Photographed and fêted when she lands in New York, PL is engulfed in a whirlwind of parties with the literati and a tour of the lecture circuit. Throughout the trip PL is outside of her comfort zone, continually fretting about the suitability of her clothing and how to avoid being saddled with the inevitable bores.
Part of the charm of the PL series is getting to know some of the characters that she interacts with. The nature of her trip to North America, she pops across the border into Canada, is that we have a multitude of characters to contend with, most of whom rarely engage us for more than a page or two. It adds to the sense of a whirlwind, but the book loses some of Delafield’s acerbic barbs as a consequence.
It is a bit of a literary commonplace for an English writer to visit America and regale the reader with their views. Charles Dickens was particularly sniffy about what he found there and his disdain for the uncouth American way of life came through loud and clear in Martin Chuzzlewit. The PL is a more sympathetic guest, overwhelmed by the hospitality and vivacity that she encounters. She does, though, seem to have a bit of a cloth ear as to what is going around her. At the time of PL’s visit America was in the depths of the Great Depression, not that you would know it from the text. Perhaps the wealthy, who had survived the Wall Street Crash, and those who lionized literary figures were impervious to the economic downturn. It struck me as a bit odd, though.
Although PL does not go down to the southern States, there is a lot of comment about the Southern accent. To English ears it does sound odd, but it is hardly worthy of a major leitmotif for the book.
PL has definitely changed since her debut and not for the better. She is still a bundle of insecurities, but her warmth and observational powers which made her such an endearing character have been blunted. There is one more in the series in which she turns her hand to Land work in support of the war effort and another, which most critics regard as a stand-alone. I think I will leave PL here back in the bosom of her family. Her husband, surprisingly, seems to have missed her.
February 25, 2020
Coincidences Are Spiritual Puns – Part Ten
I’ve always enjoyed the Asterix series of comic books, featuring the eponymous wily Gaul in his battles against Roman oppression. The 37th book in the series, Asterix and the Chariot Race released in October 2017, sees our hero battling his way across Italy in a chariot race against the Romans.
Fascinating as this is, what has brought the book into the spotlight now is the name of a masked Roman villain who will stop at nothing to win. His name?
Coronavirus. Spooky!
February 24, 2020
You’re Having A Laugh – Part Thirty Six
Alfred Hummel (1898 – 1954), the last German Prisoner of War
It is tempting to think that when a war is declared to be over, the combatant sides would be eager to exchange their prisoners as quickly as possible. After all, why would the winning side want to saddle itself with extra mouths to feed? But that doesn’t seem to always be the case. After the First World War, France retained its German combatant prisoners of war until the spring of 1920 and moved other rank prisoners to the northern battlefields and put them to work, partly to put pressure on the German authorities to accept the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.
It was only in 1930 that the French authorities were able to assure the Germans categorically that every prisoner they had had been released. Anyone who hadn’t made it back to the Fatherland could be presumed to be dead. Imagine the stir, then, when in May 1932 a soldier by the name of Oscar Daubmann made his way back to Germany, claiming to have spent the last sixteen years in a French PoW camp.
Daubmann’s tale was one of misfortune and fantastic derring-do. Captured in October 1916 at the Battle of the Somme, he was sent to a camp, where he killed a guard during an unsuccessful attempt to escape. The French authorities came down hard on him, sentencing him to twenty years’ hard labour and shipping him off to Algeria. After being kept in solitary confinement, tortured and starved, the unfortunate Daubmann was transferred to a prison tailor’s shop where he worked until he was able to effect his escape. Still, he had to walk some 3,000 miles along the African coastline before being picked up by an Italian ship which took him to Naples. He then made his way back to Germany.
Daubmann was treated as a national hero, partly because his remarkable return gave a scintilla of hope to those families whose relatives were missing that they might still be in camps somewhere in the French empire and partly because it fed nascent anti-French sentiments. The remarkable return of Daubmann seemed to suggest that the French had been lying. In particular, the Nazis used him as a poster-boy, a living epitome of German strength and virtue, and he regaled thousands at their rallies with stories of his ill-treatment at the hands of the French. A book detailing his life story was rushed into print and sold 180,000 copies and Daubmann was made an honorary citizen of 18 towns and cities.
However, not everyone was convinced by his story. Supporters of a rapprochement with France began to make enquiries of the French authorities about Daubmann and drew a blank. The French notified Berlin that they could find no record of an Oscar Daubmann, a claim that was poo-pooed by the Nazis as a typical example of French duplicity. Supposed former comrades, though, failed to recognise him. In September 1932 he was unmasked as a fraud.
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There are two versions of how this came about, one prosaic and the other more dramatic. It may well have been that the weight of evidence that the French authorities were able to produce convinced the naysayers amongst the powers that be. The other version is that when Daubmann was about to begin his usual account of his amazing experiences in a Bavarian town, a man stood up and shouted, “You are not Daubmann. You are my son, Alfred Hummel, Get down from that platform, you faker!”. Daubmann fainted and confessed all.
The truth soon came out. Daubmann was really Alfred Hummel, a tailor from Offenbach, who had spent ten years in jail on a burglary charge. He had never served in the army and upon his release, had bought a second-hand army uniform in a shop. Inside he found some papers relating to Daubmann, who had been killed in the war, and decided to assume his identity.
Quite why is not known but the Nazis came down on him like a ton of bricks. He was sentenced, in July 1933, to two and a half years in prison on charges of serious forgery and fraud and, upon his release, was held in preventive detention at Schwabisch Hall until his release by American forces in 1945. He worked as a tailor until his death in 1954.
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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/
