Martin Fone's Blog, page 205
January 23, 2020
Gin O’Clock – Part Ninety One
One of the ways to muscle your way past the crowd generated
by the ginaissance is to have a decent marketing edge and there is no better
race to concoct a riveting tale than our friends the Irish. I had been eying up
a bottle of Drumshanbo Gunpowder Irish Gin on the shelf of one of our
local supermarkets and what had always put me off was paying £30 or more for a
50cl bottle, a tad expensive when there are so many other gins to try. A drop
in the price and running out of options persuaded me to take the plunge and
sample the product of the curious mind of drinks entrepreneur, P J Rigney, and
his bold experimentation, allegedly, in a shed in the Irish town of Drumshanbo,
on the shores of Lough Allen in Country Leitrim.
Rigney claims that originality is not just about innovation
but also about “bringing together unrelated things for the first time”
and “seeing the possibilities that others don’t”. His website, for a gin
distiller, is unusually informative and a work of art, a delight to wander
around and explore, complete with sound effects. Even if you go no further, I
urge you to visit it.
It is tempting, as we are talking about an Irish product, to
associate the gunpowder in the gin’s name with the black explosive stuff, a
terrible piece of racial stereotyping but there you are. In fact, it refers to
gunpowder tea, a form of green tea which has been slowly dried and whose leaves
have been rolled carefully into pellets resembling bullets and makes a bold
bright, slightly spicy cuppa, a key ingredient of the gin. The other
distinguishing feature of the gin is the use of exotic oriental botanicals.
As you would expect from a distiller who has invested so
much into creating an image and developing a story, the bottle is a work of art
too. It is short and dumpy, blue in colour with vertical ridges in the glass, a
wooden stopper complete with a copper collar stamped with Gunpowder Irish Gin
and an artificial cork. The label is a light brown colour with serrated edges,
rather like a large postage stamp. The front label tells me that it is made of oriental
botanicals with gunpowder tea. Beneath that is a picture of a jackalope, a
cross between a jackrabbit and an American antelope, a mythical creature for
sure but one that conveys the sense of a bizarre or unusual concoction. What
baffled me, though, was that it was North American and nothing else about this
gin is about that continent. For good measure, some oriental characters appear
to the right of the creature.
The label at the back informs me that “the ordinary is
made extraordinary” and that Rigney is a “boundary-pushing begetter of
hand-made spirits who slow stills gin with nature’s finest oriental botanicals
and gunpowder tea”. As well as a red seal the bottle has “DGIG 19/07”
stamped on it. It also comes with a little booklet affixed to the bottle’s
collar with a red tie, each edge of which is delicately snipped.
There are twelve botanicals which make up this gin, eight of
which are added to the neutral grain base spirit in the copper still –
meadowsweet, cardamom, juniper, coriander, angelica, orris, carraway seed and
star anise – and four – gunpowder tea, Chinese lemon, Oriental grapefruit and
Kaffir lime – are put into the vapour basket. After a long, slow distillation
process, the spirit is reduced to an acceptable fighting weight of 43% ABV and
then bottled and labelled by hand at Rigney’s Shed Distillery.
Is the gin worth all the effort that has gone to its
production and the marketing?
Surprisingly, yes. I was worried that the juniper may have
just sunk without trace as can happens with a more contemporary style and this
concern was heightened when I opened the bottle and took a sniff. It seemed to
lack the intense hit of juniper that I look for and was very citrusy. In the
mouth the initial sensation came from the citrus but then the juniper announced
its presence, hand in hand with a taste analogous to green tea before finishing
with a perfect balance of sweet and spicy. The aftertaste was warming, finishing
off an interesting and well-balance drink. A definite hit with me.
Until the next time, cheers!
January 22, 2020
Book Corner – January 2020 (4)
The Shape of Water – Andrea Camilleri
The adventures of Inspector Salvo Montalbano were a hit on BBC4
and have run for six series. I haven’t watched any of them, I find it hard
enough to avoid falling asleep in front of the TV at the best of times without
having to worry about concentrating on subtitles. With Camilleri dying in 2019,
his books are undergoing a bit of a renaissance, a grim irony that is all too
familiar those in the writing game, I decided it was time to see what all the
fuss was about.
The Shape of Water is the first of the series, there are 27
in all and nine collections of short stories, and was published in 1994,
although it was not until 2002 that it appeared in English, courtesy of Stephen
Sartarelli’s translation. The English reader’s impressions of a book are at the
mercy of the veracity and felicity of the translator but, from what I can tell,
Camilleri’s translator has done a pretty good job, the book being a racy and
entertaining read.
Like many a detective, Montalbano seems to be more concerned
about uncovering the truth and letting natural justice prevail than observing the
due processes of the law. In this tale he plays God, even if only a fourth-rate
god as his girlfriend, marooned in Northern Italy, cuttingly comments, by
ignoring a gun in a beach house, thus allowing the nephew of the initial murder
victim to exact his revenge, and destroying evidence that might have given rise
to unnecessary complications.
The plot revolves around the body of a prominent local
politician found in a compromising position in an area of ill-repute. He
appears to have died of natural causes. A regrettable and embarrassing end to a
local Mr Big but, hey ho, that’s life. Shortly before two rubbish collectors
find the body in a car, one of them finds a valuable necklace. Montalbano is
not convinced that all is what it seems. The car entered the outside brothel
from a direction that most vehicles don’t venture because of the harshness of
the terrain. The rubbish collectors seem to have something to hide. Despite
pressure from the powers on high, Montalbano gains enough time to start his
investigations and, naturally, unravels the truth, involving ruthless power
grabs and attempts to incriminate rivals.
When Montalbano reveals the truth to his boss, the
Commissioner remarks, “What you’ve told me is an exercise
of the highest intelligence; at moments you seemed like an acrobat on a
tightrope, with no net underneath”.
His detection is a triumph of intuition and dogged
perseverance.
The style is staccato and episodic.
There are many characters introduced in a short space of time and initially it
can get a bit bewildering but eventually it starts to settle down and make
sense. What comes through loud and clear is the lack of urgency about the
place. Things happen in a languid sort of way accompanied by shrugs of
shoulders. Because Montalbano is not Sicilian his energy and perseverance are
in sharp contrast with the other characters.
I quite enjoyed the book, although
it is not my usual glass of Marsala and I will certainly sample another, if
only to see how the character of Montalbano and his tetchy relationships
develop.
January 21, 2020
Wheelie Bin Of The Week
One of my weekly tasks is to take the wheelie bin out for the dustmen to empty. Apart from storing my waste in, I’ve never really considered what else I could do with one.
I’m indebted to Andy Jennings from Swindon for this idea. Fitting his wheelie bin with a rear axle from a go-kart, a 110cc four-speed pit bike engine, a bicycle saddle, handlebars from a child’s scooter, and a seat post and steering mechanism from a mobility scooter, he has turned it into a vehicle. On its first outing, on private land on an industrial estate, he got up to a racy 36 miles per hour.
Now Andy’s sights are set on a Guinness World Record for the fastest wheelie bin and officials will be watching him put his machine through its paces in May.
I wonder if he wears a trash helmet.
January 20, 2020
The Streets Of London – Part One Hundred and One
Royal Mint Street, E1 (Part Two)
It’s not often that I have returned to a London street in
this series but Royal Mint Street, formerly known as Rosemary Lane until 1850
and the home of the Rag Fair, has such a rich and varies history that I cannot
let it go.
One of its residents in the 1640s was one Richard Brandon, a
ragman. His claim to fame is that he is thought to have been the man who
beheaded King Charles I, the only person, so far, to have removed an English
monarch’s head from his neck. He is said to have been paid £30 in half-crown
coins for his work – there may be a pun or a hint of irony in the choice of
denomination or the coins may just have been easier to spend – and Brandon took
an orange stuffed with cloves and a handkerchief from the king’s pocket as his
body was being removed from the scaffold. Offered twenty shillings for the
orange by a gentleman in Whitehall but Brandon refused to sell, although he did
later cash in on the orange by selling it in Rosemary Lane for ten shillings.
Two Colchester weavers, Richard Farnham and John Bull, died
of the plague in a house in Rosemary Lane in January 1641. They were in London
because they believed themselves to be the two great prophets who must visit
Earth, as foretold in the Book of Revelations, before the world came to an end.
They had spent some time in the gaols of Old and New Bridewell for their pains
and although their efforts came to naught, they had planted the seed of
religious dissension in the area.
Their baton was taken up a decade later by cousins and
tailors, John Reeve and Lodowicke Muggleton, who not only lived in Rosemary
Lane, it is tempting to think the same house, but also believed themselves to
be the great prophets referred to in Revelations and set about, in public
houses, proposing a new religion.
They were fervently anti-Quaker and roused the fury of the
authorities, Oliver Cromwell ordering them to be whipped through the streets
and, after Reeves had died in 1658, Muggleton spent some time in the stocks.
But their sect, known as Muggletonians, took root and, although avoiding all
forms of worship, preaching and proselytising, met for discussions and
socialising. They were egalitarian, apolitical and pacifist, the latter trait,
though, not precluding them from gaining some notoriety by cursing those who
reviled their faith, a practice they continued up until the middle of the 19th
century. One of the last to be cursed in this way was Sir Walter Scott.
Political activism is often a bedfellow of religious dissension
and so it is no surprise that the area was the centre of Chartism. Some of the
leaders were men of colour and two such, David Duffy and Benjamin Prophet,
hailed from Rosemary Lane. Duffy was described as “a determined and
powerful-looking fellow”, was known to the police for vagrancy and went
around the area “without shirt, shoe or stocking”. The two men were among
the ringleaders of the demonstration in Camberwell in March 1848 which
developed into a riot. They were both arrested and transported, Duffy for 7
years and Prophet for 14.
At No. 41, Royal Mint Street was to be found a warehouse for
the United Sponge Company, it was demolished in the 1970s, and stored sponges
and chamois leather later sold in stores on the Minories. This was an organised
successor to one of the trades that Henry Mayhew described in 1851 for which
Royal Mint Street was known; sponge selling “is one of the street-trades which
has long been in the hands of the Jews, and, unlike the traffic in pencils,
sealing wax, and other articles of which I have treated, it remains so
principally still”.
The arrival of the railway in the 1860s didn’t do much to
improve the area, Henry Wheatley rather sniffily commenting in his London Past
and Present of 1891, “Royal Mint Street has hardly so evil a reputation as
Rosemary Lane, but it is a squalid place..”
Today, it may not be squalid, but it has lost much of its
character from former times.
January 19, 2020
Competition Of The Week
The good news element of this story is that Manchester City Council have just invested £960,000 in eight salt spreaders as part of their on-going commitment to keep their 435 miles of road as snow and ice free as possible.
The story goes downhill from there as for some unaccountable they not only decided to name each of the vehicles but also, via Twitter (natch) invited the great and good of Manchester to nominate suitable names.
Mancunians, noted for their razor sharp with and repartee as they are, responded in their droves, coming up with over 2,000 suggestions. These were whittled down to 24 and then put to the public to choose the final eight.
The winners, in no particular order, were: Basil Salty, Grit Astley, Gritter Thunberg, Slushay Away, Snowbi-Gone Kenobi, Snowel Gallagher, Spreaddie Flintoff, and Spreaddie Mercury. The new lorries will have their names emblazoned on them.
My faith in democracy is waning as every day goes by.
January 18, 2020
Town Of The Week
After presiding over a decade of austerity, it is heartening to see that the new Tory government are committed to breathing new life into our ailing towns. What’s needed, obviously, is a competition to identify the country’s Town of the Year.
It was launched by the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government no less, Robert Jenrick, in the place of his birth, Wolverhampton. The only teeny problem is that of all the places from which he could have launched the scheme, he chose a place, which, along with Brighton and Preston, was declared a city in 2000.
Trying to put some spin on this egregious error, his department helpfully pointed out that Wolverhampton’s elevation to city status just shows what a go-getting, aspiring town can achieve. Mind you, the last time I was in Wolverhampton, its exalted status didn’t seem to have made it immune from high street closures.
Just admit it, it was a cock up.
January 17, 2020
What Is The Origin Of (265)?
Pub crawl
One of the (admittedly very few) joys of following a
football club around the country is that you get the opportunity to sample
different ales in different pubs. The old greybeards amongst my team’s
following often reckon that a game of football gets in the way of a good day’s
drinking and the more experienced will have planned an extensive tour of public
houses, timings set with military precision, to ensure sufficient alcohol is
consumed to anaesthetise the senses for what is to come. We call this a pub
crawl.
I had always assumed that the phrase came from the state of
the toper after (s)he had visited a few establishments over a few hours. All
they were capable of was crawling home. But I was wrong. It had a very specific
origin from the world of politics.
In the days before radio and television and way before the
dread days of social media, it was difficult for politicians to engage with
their growing electorate. Newspapers were, as they are today, partisan and not
everyone could be bothered to attend an election meeting. The Conservatives, at
least in Cambridge in 1909, sent individuals from pub to pub to drum up
support. Argus, the nom de plume of the correspondent who penned Our Local
Letter published in the Cambridge Independent Press on May 21, 1909, takes up
the story with some gusto and bluster.
Feigning surprise that the brains of the Conservative party
should come up with so uninspiring a phrase as pub crawling, he consoled
himself by noting, “assuming that they sally forth to advocate Imperialism,
true religion, national defence, and other great topics of that sort, to the
thirsty denizens of the Pig and Whistle, such a mission might surely be given a
better title than the one I have mentioned”.
Clearly on a roll – had he sniffed a cork or two? – Argus continued
to froth from his lofty perch. “I suppose they do crawl from “pub” to “pub”,
if I may use their own somewhat contemptuous abbreviation. Some men would find
such duties arduous and irksome, but tastes differ, and I doubt not that … some
who can make such a duty a delight. And in addition to satisfying an honest
thirst for information and for other things the pub crawler has the inspiring
consciousness that he is helping the cause. That knowledge, together with the
beer, must be peculiarly soothing. Pub-crawling is very popular in both West
and East Cambs”.
Opponents quickly picked up on these new tactics and thought
it advisable to warn their supporters of the dangers posed by these seemingly
affable chaps visiting drinking establishments. At the time, 1909, British
politics was polarised between advocates of free trade and protectionists, the
latter, known as The Tariff Reform League, deploying the pub-crawling tactics. The
Framlingham Weekly News in its edition of December 25, 1909 thought it
necessary to alert its readers to the dangers of pub crawlers.
“Hired men”, it reported, “are being sent out to
haunt the street corners and the public houses and catch you in your homes.
They pretend to be independent, non-political gentlemen, grieved by the sad
results of Free Trade. Sometimes they pretend that they are unfortunate victims
“out of work through Free Trade”. The Tariff Reform League seems proud to call
these men its “Missionaries”. Others, more truly, call them “Pub-Crawlers””.
These days the phrase has lost all its associations with
political campaigning and is now commandeered by stag and hen parties, and
other revellers.
January 16, 2020
Gin O’Clock – Part Ninety
For those who have put up with my ramblings on the
ginaissance will know by now, I have long been an advocate of less is more.
There is a detectable trend amongst some distillers to throw the botanical
version of the kitchen sink, perhaps a herb garden, into the mix and to attempt
to impress us by making something vaguely drinkable from a wide range of
disparate ingredients. There is a skill in doing that, for sure, but the
benefits to the drinker are marginal compared with the effort and ingenuity
that has gone in to making it. I like to have a fighting chance of identifying
the individual botanicals.
To help make my case, I call upon the second bottle I bought
from the City of London Distillery (COLD), their Christopher Wren Gin. I
had mentioned elsewhere that COLD had experienced a bit of a rocky start but
this gin, which was a winner of a Double-Gold Award at the San Francisco World
Spirits Competition of 2016, can fairly be said to have put the distillery back
on its feet. In a change of direction Their Christopher Wren Gin, launched in
2015, was designed by Jonathan Clark in conjunction with Tanqueray’s former
master distiller, Tom Nichol.
It comes in the distinctive trademark bottle of COLD with a
dome resembling that of nearby St Paul’s, appropriate as the cathedral was Sir
Christopher Wren’s architectural masterpiece. Unlike the bottle of Authentic
London Dry Gin, which is blue, it is a light, almost carbon, grey in colour.
However, like its companion gin, it has that infernally tight artificial cork
stopper which is a so-and-so to remove, both initially and on subsequent
occasions. The labelling, apart from the obvious change for the name of the
gin, and the embossing on the bottle are the same.
As for botanicals, there are just five in the mix – juniper,
coriander seed, angelica, liquorice root and sweet orange. On removing the
stopper, it is remarkably light on the nose, perhaps designed to lull us into a
false sense of security, because it reveals its full colours in the mouth. The
first sensation is one of orange but soon the juniper and angelica make their
presence known before the liquorice rounds the drink off, giving it depth and
long aftertaste.
It is a gorgeous drink, complex, well-balanced and smooth,
and with an ABV of 45.3% packs the punch that the Authentic London Dry Gin
seems to lack. There are a lot of London Dry Gins on the market but this one
hits the spot, providing a welcome hit of juniper and, because of the decision
to use a small number of but complementary botanicals, a touch of complexity
and balance as the other flavours get to work. The quality of the gin was not
diminished by the addition of a premium tonic, if anything the gin tasted even
more moreish.
I can see why this gin has turned the fortunes of COLD
around and once I have finished my bottle, I will be ordering another. You can’t
say fairer than that.
Until the next time, cheers!
January 15, 2020
Book Corner – January 2020 (3)
The Incredulity of Father Brown – G.K Chesterton
Of the so-called Premier League detective fiction writers, I
have found G.K Chesterton the hardest going. I persevere because, on the whole,
he produces some well-written, satisfying stories. My problem, I think, is that
they are heavily laced with the author’s Catholicism, something I could do
without, and his pontifications can make the stories overlong.
This book was published in 1926 and is a collection of eight
stories, all featuring his unobtrusive priest-cum detective, Father Brown, and
all but the first story, The Resurrection of Father Brown, having been
published previously in Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine between 1924 and 1925, other
than The Ghost of Gideon Wise which appeared in Cassell’s Magazine. The fact
that most of the book has appeared elsewhere in short story form makes for a bit
of a disjointed read. Brown is introduced, at length, to the reader each time
and each story takes a bit of time to get going.
The Catholic priest has an unerring knack of being at the
right place at the right time. Using his powers of observation and heightened
sense of intuition, Brown solves a mystery which is beyond the ken of mere
mortals. Father Brown is content to unmask the killer rather than see that
justice is done. No one seems to be arrested or brought before the courts.
Brown’s role is to provide a rationale for a series of events, some of which
strain credulity, which have been set in train by a convoluted, some might say
over-convoluted, plot. As Chesterton said in 1930, “the essence of a mystery
tale is that we are suddenly confronted with a truth which we have never suspected
and yet can see to be true”. That, in a nutshell, is what a Father Brown
story is all about.
There is also an element of the supernatural in the stories,
a sense of forces or spirits which are operating at another level and impelling
the unfortunate characters towards their doom. Brown, whilst acknowledging that
there is such a thing as the devil and that miracles do happen, takes great
delight in stripping a series of inexplicable events of their patina of the
preternatural. The Catholic priest emerges as the least superstitious of the
characters, perhaps Chesterton’s way of affirming the strength and veracity of
the church.
Of the eight, my favourite was The Doom of the Darnaways,
featuring a family curse which doomed the seventh heir at the seventh hour of
the day. But all was not what it seemed, and the priest unravelled the mystery.
I had read The Oracle of the Dog before and enjoyed it more second time round. Rather
like Conan Doyle, Chesterton resurrects his sleuth in dramatic circumstances in
the opening story but, unlike Conan Doyle, hadn’t bothered to kill him off in
spectacular style in an earlier story. Opening a collection of stories with the
death of your hero is always an anticlimactic way to go.
What makes Chesterton’s stories for me is his use of language and his wit. I enjoyed his portrayal of the Manichaean forces of capitalism and bolshevism in The Ghost of Gideon Wise. And as an opening to a story, The Arrow of Heaven, you can’t get better than this; “It is to be feared that about a hundred detective stories have begun with the discovery that an American millionaire has been murdered; an event which is, for some reason, treated as a sort of calamity.” Quite.
January 14, 2020
Game Show Of The Week
There was me thinking that the apogee of the British TV game show was the final of the second series of The Voice UK in 2013 which visually impaired chanteuse, Andrea Begley, won. We had a show which started out with four judges who couldn’t see the singers being won by a singer who couldn’t see the judges.
But I hadn’t taken into account ITV’s latest horror, The Masked Singer, which I had the misfortune to encounter last Saturday, based on the South Korean singing competition, King of Mask Singer. From what I could make out, we have a panel of four celebs I had barely heard of seeking to identify a singer wearing a mask, who I had certainly never heard of, whose performance the audience had deemed to be the worst of the lot.
I won’t make it to the final but the point, if indeed it can be so-called, of the show is for the winner to preserve their anonymity. The logical conclusion, therefore, is that they will not be identified when they win, perhaps ensuring that they won’t have an indelible stain on their CV for ever more.
And we wonder why we are in the state we are in.
