Martin Fone's Blog, page 215
September 28, 2019
Error Of The Week (7)
One of my bugbears with buffets rather than sit-down jobbies
is that you are never quite certain what you are putting into your mouth.
Sometimes you can be in for a big surprise as happened to this unnamed Israeli
woman in her late sixties, according to an article in the BMJ Case Reports
2019.
Attending a wedding party she tucked in with some gusto into
a dip which she thought was avocado. Five minutes later she began to feel a
burning sensation in her chest and down her arms. Not wishing to be a party
pooper she grinned and bore her discomfort but the following day, still feeling
uncomfortable and weak, she went to the quacks.
An ECG revealed that she had suffered what the medics
describe as Takutsubo cardiomyopathy or broken heart syndrome which, in lay man’s
terms, causes left ventricular dysfunction, typically in older women,
especially after sudden, intense physical or emotional stress.
And what had caused the woman’s stress?
Well, what she had tucked into was a bowl of wasabi paste, made
from the hot Japanese root vegetable, which I enjoy but a sparing application
seems to be the sensible thing. According to the article, this is the first
recorded instance of broken heart syndrome to have been brought on by wasabi so
that is something to boast about when the woman next sees her friends.
The moral of the tale, though, is stick to what you know.
September 27, 2019
What Is The Origin Of (250)?…
Paul Pry
My favourite pub in Worcester is the Paul Pry, a marvellous Victorian boozer with well kept, good quality ales. It was always a pleasure to visit clients in the area because it gave me the excuse to pop in. The character after whom the pub is named is someone who could fairly claim to be someone who went viral in a non-internet world, quite some phenomenon when you come to think of it.
Paul Pry was the comic invention of the English playwright, John Poole, and the three-act play bearing Pry’s name premiered at London’s Haymarket Theatre on September 13, 1825. He was a meddling, interfering character with an overpowering sense of curiosity. His party piece was to leave his umbrella behind, giving him an excuse to return and continue his eavesdropping. He even had a catchphrase; “I hope I don’t intrude”.
It was an overnight sensation. The review in the Globe the day after the premier of Paul Pry concluded with this sentence; “the house was crowded at an early hour, and when at the conclusion of the comedy Mr Pry came forward to “ask just one more question”, viz whether it might be repeated? the long and universal applause which followed, conveyed an answer which must have been equally gratifying to the feelings of the actor, the author, and though last not least, of the manager”.
To give a sense of how quickly Paul Pry not only captured the nation’s imagination but became part of its vernacular you need only look at a court case reported in the Morning Advertiser on November 24, 1825, little more than ten weeks after the play made its debut. Sarah Stevenson was up before the magistrate at the Marlborough Street police court, charged with assaulting Frances Kirkham. The report stated that, “and with the exception of Paul Pry, Miss Kirkman did not believe that there was upon the face of the earth so curious or impertinently inquisitive a being as Sarah Stevenson”. The word on the street, indeed.
The provinces were not impervious to Paul Pry mania, the play touring the country and reaching Worcester’s Theatre Royal on July 13, 1826. By 1829 there was a stagecoach running daily from Worcester to London’s Broad Street named the Paul Pry and in the 1840s a satirical periodical akin to Private Eye called Paul Pry hit the streets of Worcester. It was short-lived but had a picaresque existence, writers being arraigned in court for alleged libel and even horsewhipped. The Paul Pry pub first made an appearance in the annals in 1834.
The take up of the name in Worcester amply illustrates one commentator’s observation that Paul Pry was “first a play and then within weeks virtually every other category of cultural practice.” It had become so established as a synonym for an inquisitive person that Ebenezer Brewer thought fit to include it in his Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, published in 1870; “An idle, meddlesome fellow, who has no occupation of his own, and is always interfering with other folk’s business – John Poole, Paul Pry (a comedy)”.
Paul Pry was to the nineteenth century what a nosey parker was to the twentieth. We saw the transition last week in the exchange recorded in E Hesse-Kaye’s Eastward Ho! published in Belgravia: A London Magazine in May 1890; “lookey ‘ere, Mr Poll Pry, you’re a askin’ too many questions for me, there’s too much of Mr Nosey Parker about you”.
Paul Pry rather sank into obscurity but I rather like it as a term for an annoyingly inquisitive person.
September 26, 2019
Gin O’Clock – Part Seventy Six
It is not just in what goes into the mix that, thanks to the ginaissance, distillers seek to differentiate themselves from the rest of the crowd but the way they make it. I first came across vacuum distillation when I bought a bottle of Oxley Cold Distilled London Dry Gin and, lo and behold, here’s another.
Based in Ian Hart’s home in Highgate in London the Sacred Micro Distillery has no truck with traditional copper stills and the like, pinning their faith on a vacuum created in a Heath-Robinsonish collection of glassware. The result is range of gins going under the brand name of Sacred. The one I selected from drinkfinder.co.uk is Sacred Juniper Gin, which has been around since 2011 and what particularly attracted me to it was the description that “it packs as much juniper as you can get in a bottle”.
Let’s deal with the name first. It doesn’t reflect any idolatrous thoughts about the position of gin in the firmament of spirits but, rather, is taken from the Latin name for Hougary frankincense, boswellia Sacra, one of the twelve botanicals which made up the original Sacred Gin which was released in May 2009. Of course, you can always make that connection.
In terms of the botanicals it is a very simple gin, being made from Bulgarian juniper berries, angelica root and orris. Less is often more and the trick is what you do with the botanicals you choose to use. The base spirit is made from English wheat grain and each botanical is distilled separately through three different maceration processes, once with alcohol and the other two with water before being distilled in the glassware under reduced temperatures and under pressure in a vacuum. The process is more complex than this sounds and the final blend to make up the gin which weighs in with an ABV of 43.8% is 95% juniper with the balance being made up by angelica and orris.
The bottle is tall and cylindrical with a long, thin neck and a cork stopper. The labelling is well worth studying as there is more to it than meets the eye. The background colour is purple with Sacred in white against a depiction in gold of iron gates. These are supposed to represent the gates of Highgate cemetery. Look even more closely and you will see birds which represent the Nightingales which populate the woods of Highgate and there are even some laboratory bottles, reflecting Ian Hart’s approach to distilling.
The second label on the front of the bottle provides some information about the spirit, notably that it is “a crystal clear London Dry Gin simply expressed with dominant notes of natural Juniper communis berries”. It also tells me that my bottle is number 903 from batch 16 and that the ABV is 43.8%. The label on the rear gives some more details and a cocktail suggestion, reassuringly stating that it is “distilled with Juniper lovers in mind”.
Of course, the proof of all this is in the drinking. On the nose it has a very intense juniper aroma with a hint of spice and to the taste it is heavily juniper led with hints of citrus bursting through. The aftertaste is long and powerful providing a warm peppery sensation. I never thought I would say this as someone who loves juniper led gins but I think there was a bit too much juniper and not enough to balance it out. This is not a complex gin but if you want to overdose on juniper, this may just be the one for you.
Until the next time, cheers!
September 25, 2019
Book Corner – September 2019 (4)
Deep Waters: Mysteries on the Waves – edited by Martin Edwards
I am a fan of Martin Edwards’ archaeological efforts to resuscitate some of the better shorter stories from the so-called Golden Age of detective fiction. This is the thirteenth such themed anthology. Perhaps it’s a case of thirteen being unlucky for some as I found it the least satisfying of those that I had read.
I guess part of my dissatisfaction lies with the choice of theme. At first blush you would think that this will be a collection of mysteries and crimes set at sea but in order to get to sixteen stories and a satisfying length, Edwards has had to broaden his brief to include swimming pools, hardly depths or waves, methinks, and a couple of stories that are as recent as the 1960s and 70s. Ironically, though, H C Bailey’s story involving his medical detective, Reggie Fortune, called The Swimming Pool, is probably the best of the lot with an excellent twist to it. It will make you think twice before diving into a pool.
One of the most bonkers stories I have read is The Pool of Secrets which was written in 1935 by Gwyn Evans. It has an element of science fiction about it with a robot assisting the investigation and the use of a prototype of what we would now call a drone. The way the murder was committed also has a splash of ingenious eccentricity about it.
The collection starts off with a Conan Doyle story, and one featuring the greatest detective creation, Sherlock Holmes, to boot. It is the sleuth’s first case, The Adventure of the Gloria Scott, but in truth it is one of Doyle’s weakest. There is little in the way of detection or intellectual intuition that Holmes was famous for as the case was solved by a letter. I should have realised at this point that the collection was not going to reach the heights of some of the earlier collections.
That said, there are some gems and highlights along the way. C S Forester, he of the Hornblower series, makes an interesting contribution with The Turning of the Tide which tells of a well-planned murder which went wrong because of a failure to plan for all eventualities or, depending upon your point of view, a spot of bad luck. I found it gripping in more senses than one.
Nautical knowledge solves the mystery in The Thimble River Mystery by Josephine Bell and if seeing a murderer hoist by his own petard is your bag, you will enjoy Andrew Garve’s story, Seasprite. C St John Sprigg’s Four Friends and Death is an amusing and clever take on a poisoning which has gone wrong. Its only connection with the sea is that the poisoning took place on a boat. The most recent story dating to 1975 by Michael Innes, Death by Water, involves a fish out of water that turns a suspected suicide into a murder.
If you are prepared to give Edwards some latitude on his choice of theme and are prepared to navigate your way round some of the weaker contributions, I always approach a R Austin Freeman story with some dread and he rarely fails to disappoint, it is a book worth splashing out on. But if you are looking for an anthology to start out with, there are many better.
September 23, 2019
You’re Having A Laugh – Part Twenty Seven
The Taxil hoax
There’s nothing like a good conspiracy theory and, even better, a sinner who spectacularly renounces his sins. The incredible story of Léo Taxil, the nom de plume of Marie Joseph Gabriel Antoine Jogand-Pagès, has these elements and more.
Despite, or perhaps because, being earmarked by his parents for a life as a Catholic priest in France, Taxil developed fervent anti-religious, anti-Catholic views. As a journalist he wrote a series of satires exposing the perceived follies of the Catholic church, his pièce de resistance being the semi-pornographic book, the Secret Loves of Pius IX, published in 1881 and for which he was accused of libel. Then, to the astonishment of many, in 1885 Taxil publicly converted back to Catholicism, renouncing his past indiscretions and swearing to rectify the damage he had brought on the Church through his satirical exposés.
During the latter half of the nineteenth century the Catholic church had had an increasingly fractured relationship with the Freemasons. In 1884 Pope Leo XIII had issued an encyclical entitled Humanum genus in which he set out a Manichaean vision of a struggle between those who served “the kingdom of God” and those who served “the kingdom of Satan”. The Pope’s particular ire was directed at the Masons and gripped by a serious case of conspiracy theory he wrote “the partisans of evil seem to be combining together, and to be struggling with united vehemence, led on or assisted by that strongly organised and widespread association called Freemasons”.
What better way for Taxil to demonstrate his newly found Catholic zeal than to use his investigative skills to penetrate into the deepest recesses of the world of freemasonry. He began to publish a series of pamphlets denouncing the freemasons in the 1890s and in a book on Satanism claimed to have met a woman called Diana Vaughan. Vaughan was no ordinary woman, her memoirs, penned by Taxil, claiming that she had penetrated into the heart of the Palladian Order, a sect of the American Freemason movement. Through their offices she had visited Mars, had seen demons summoned by Masons during their black masses, and gave details of a secret factory in the arctic which produced anti-Church and pro-Satanist propaganda.
No matter how outlandish and bizarre the claims Vaughan made were, they were manna from hell for Pope Leo who promulgated them as evidence of the fact that Satanists were amongst God-fearing folk, determined to frustrate the workings of the Church. Those of an anti-masonic disposition were also prepared to believe Vaughan’s testimony but Masons were not convinced, challenging Taxil to produce this remarkable woman. Bowing to the pressure, Taxil agreed to give a public lecture on April 19, 1897 at which all would be revealed.
In front of a packed house in Paris, including several priests priests, Taxil revealed that he was a serial prankster with a string of elaborate hoaxes to his name. This was the most elaborate and he thanked the Church for allowing the oxygen of publicity to expose the fanatical hatred of masonry amongst the Church establishment. He the produced Diana who was his typist and had gone along with the deception for a laugh.
The audience was in uproar and the police had to be summoned to escort Taxil off the premises to the safety of a nearby café. Taxil soon left Paris and saw out his days in Sceauxin until his death in 1907.
But his legacy lived on. In fundamentalist Catholic circles his work was accepted as proof of a Satanist plot to control the world. After all, we do like a good conspiracy theory, even if it is hogwash.
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/
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September 22, 2019
Comma Of The Week (2)
Where do you stand on the Oxford Comma? Are you a
Rees-Moggite or do you think it has a place?
A couple of years ago I pointed out what can go wrong if a
comma is omitted or incorrectly placed (https://windowthroughtime.wordpress.com/2017/03/26/comma-of-the-week/)
and the issue has raised its head once more.
Some time ago you would have taken it as read that the
British Library would have the last word on all matters grammatical. But not
these days. A new sign erected outside its prestigious London building has
divided the social media world. Should the sentence “The whole wealth of
human knowledge, endeavour and experience to date” have had a comma after
endeavour?
I’m no grammarian but I always use an Oxford comma if I am
listing three or more items so by my yardstick, there should have been one on
the sign. Others, though, think it is just a vulgar Americanism and if the
sentence makes sense without one, leave it out.
I think this debate will outrun even Brexit.
September 21, 2019
Café Of The Week (2)
I’m partial to a faggot, balls made of minced off-cuts and
offal, swimming in a sea of onion gravy. In these more politically correct
times they seem to have been relabelled as meat balls but faggots they were
when I had them as a child for school dinners and faggots they will remain, as
far as I’m concerned.
Jo Evans-Pring is the owner of Fanny’s Rest Stop Café in
Newport in South Wales and faggots are on the menu. In an attempt to drum up
custom, the enterprising Jo ran some adverts on Google and noticed that sales
were increasing, especially of her faggots, amusingly dubbed Fanny’s faggots.
To consolidate her success, she posted a photo of a delicious plate of faggots
replete with peas and gravy.
That is where her troubles began.
The censors at Google, happy to allow extremist propaganda
and pornographic content through with nary a comment, wrote to Jo, pointing out
that her photo of the faggots had been removed for containing “inappropriate
and offensive content”.
Jo saw red. Still, there’s no such thing as bad publicity
and sales continue to rocket. Try some, if yu get a chance, they are delicious.
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September 20, 2019
What Is The Origin Of (249)?…
Nosey parker
A nosey parker is someone who cannot resist the opportunity to stick their nose into other people’s business, someone who is overly inquisitive or likes to pry. But where does it come from and was there a historical nosey parker?
In etymological terms it is a fairly modern phrase, first appearing in a story published in the Belgravia: A London Magazine in May 1880 entitled Eastward Ho! by E Hesse-Kaye. The narrator, who hails from the West End of London makes an intrepid expedition into the Badlands of the east, notably Shoreditch and Hoxton. Part of the article is devoted to recording the scraps of conversation he overhears. In one of the exchanges he hears, “lookey ‘ere, Mr Poll Pry, you’re a askin’ too many questions for me, there’s too much of Mr Nosey Parker about you”.
That it was well established in the vernacular of London folk seems to be confirmed by one of those court cases that make local newspapers a treasure trove of social insights. In its edition of October 21, 1896 the Daily News reported a case which had troubled the beak at Southwark police court involving a certain Elizabeth Waddell, described as “a determined-looking woman” who was accused of smashing up a barrow load of toys. In her defence, Waddell is reported as saying, “if the complainant had not been such a Nosey Parker, she would have escaped the row”.
Not unsurprisingly, when we look at the development of the meaning of nosey, we find that it was used at least from the seventeenth century to describe someone with a large nose. Thomas Shelton undertook the enormous task of translating Cervantes’ Don Quixote into English, a feat he achieved in 1620. In one passage, he wrote “the story leaves them, to tell who was the Knight of the Glasses and his nosier Squire”. Although not clear in excerpt form, the context shows that the adjective was used to describe a physical attribute of the squire, not where he stuck it.
It was not until the early nineteenth century that the word began to be used in a more figurative sense, to suggest that the nose was used to pry into matters not necessarily concerning the bearer of the snout. This transition in meaning can be seen in Robert Montgomery’s satire of 1828, The Age Reviewed, in which he writes, “the sycophantic gang Whine through the kingdom with deceitful slang; Till nasty, nosy gabble mouth’d for hire, Puff their mean souls into Presumption’s fire”.
The other component of the phrase had a rather literal meaning, a parker was someone who looked after a park. One of the temptations or occupational hazards of the job may have been inadvertently, or deliberately, observing a person or persons unknown getting up to no good. But this perk of the job is not necessarily the origin of our phrase but it does attract me.
It almost certainly not a reference to the sixteenth century Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker. We have illustrations of him and whilst he has a fine snout, it is not particularly prominent and, in any event, he was not known for being particularly inquisitive. The gap of four centuries, even allowing for it to be in oral use before it made its way into print, tends to argue against him as the phrase’s origin. There was a postcard from 1907 entitled The Adventure of Nosey Parker but this appeared after the first recorded use of the phrase.
As is often the way, there is no definitive answer to our conundrum but I do like the image of an inquisitive park attendant.
September 19, 2019
Gin O’Clock – Part Seventy Five
There’s no getting away from it. The boom in the interest in and the proliferation of makers of gin, what I call the ginaissance, has created a wide range of types and styles of the nation’s favourite spirit. Some, though, are a little too wacky for my taste, some a little too clever for their own good and some strain the boundaries of what a gin really should be a little too hard. If I was pressed against a cellar wall and asked to describe my favourite type of gin it would have to be one that was heavily juniper-led with citrusy and peppery notes. It’s not much to ask for but the desire for market edge and differentiation makes it increasingly difficult to find.
So, it is a rare pleasure to come across a gin that is unmistakeably gin and old school gin, at that. Undoubtedly falling into this latter category is the third of my gins supplied by the on-line ordering system offered by drinfinder.co.uk, Burleigh’s London Dry Gin.
It comes from Leicestershire, specifically Bawdon Lodge Farm, adjacent to Burleigh’s wood, part of the Charnwood Forest in the north-west of the county. The story goes, there is always a story with gin these days, that the inspiration for the spirit came during a walk through the woods, Jamie Baxter seeking to summon up the essence of the area. The Dry Gin was the first they produced, launched in July 2014, quickly followed by a number of others, including Leicester Dry Gin (40% ABV), Distiller’s Cut (47% ABV), Export Strength Gin (again 47% ABV) and, regrettably in my view, a Pink Gin (again 40% ABV).
There is something rather no nonsense with the London Dry Gin, starting with the bottle. It is a bell-shaped, black bottle with minimalist labelling in silver and a cork stopper. Alas, there is no clue as to what botanicals are included in the mix, always a bugbear of mine, save that it is made in England and, at the rear, that they are “spirits of adventure”.
Fear not, dear reader, a little bit of research revealed that the local ingredients consist of silver birch, elderberry, dandelion and burdock root. The base ingredients of the gin are juniper, coriander seed, angelica root, orris root, cardamom, cassia and fresh orange, all solid and traditional components of gin as a gin should be. The distillation process, which takes about ten hours and produces around 600 bottles a batch, takes place in a 450 litre Holstein copper pot still which has a four-plate side column.
So, what does it taste like?
On the nose, the aroma is a distinctive one of citrus and juniper, fresh and redolent of old school gin. In the glass the spirit is crystal clear and is a very crisp drink, robust, no nonsense but one which allows the more subtle flavours provided by the likes of cardamom and orris to have their fleeting moment in the sun. The aftertaste is long and peppery.
All in all, with an ABV of 40% it is a good solid gin which ticks all the criteria I am looking for in a gin. I am old enough to remember the days when lorries used to tour around selling soft, carbonated drinks, a health hazard on wheels or an obesity truck it would be dubbed these days, and my particular favourite was the very distinctive dandelion and burdock. But the thing that baffles me is that I could not detect those elements in the gin. It may be my taste buds, of course, or that these elements have been toned down to make a better gin. If that is the case, why include them, other than for marketing edge? A strange one.
Until the next time, cheers!
September 18, 2019
Book Corner – September 2019 (3)
The Wheel Spins – Ethel Lina White
One of the many advantages of hardly ever watching a film is that when you come across a book which was the basis for a classic piece of cinematography, the basis of the plot is not spoilt for you. Take Ethel Lina White’s 1936 novel, The Wheel Spins, which formed the basis of the plotting for Alfred Hitchcock’s classic, The Lady Vanishes. As I had not seen the film, my loss I’m sure, the twists and turns of the plot were new to me and made the book more enjoyable.
Mysteries on a train are a bit of cliché now and were even in 1936 when White’s novel was published. They allow the writer to add a splash of glamour to an environment where a motley collection of characters are thrown together in close proximity and where during a journey the passengers are effectively imprisoned. What could have been a rather down-market version of Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express is saved by the quality and elegance of White’s writing, her ability to build up and sustain suspense, and her underlying humour and willingness to tease the reader and send up British stereotypes.
In some ways the plot is a bit far-fetched. The protagonist, Iris Carr, is a society gal who with her rich pals have had a riotous holiday in an Italian resort, at the same time annoying the rather staid English guests staying there, plus ca change. She travels back to Blighty later than her other chums but at the railway station becomes unwell and just catches her train by the skin of her teeth, bundled into a carriage occupied by an Italian family, a rather formidable woman dressed in black and a middle-aged English woman, Miss Froy.
Invited for some tea in the restaurant car by Miss Froy, Iris is perturbed to find the guests from the hotel whom her party had disturbed are on board. Irritated by her companion’s incessant chattering, Iris returns alone to the compartment and falls asleep. Miss Froy doesn’t return. The English guests, all of whom have their own reasons for not wanting any unseemly investigations delay the train in Trieste, deny seeing Miss Froy and when Iris enlists the help of a Professor and his young student who speak the local lingo to interrogate the other travellers in the compartment, they all too deny the existence of Miss Froy. The woman in black, who turns out to be a Baroness (natch), goes as far as to suggest that Iris is hysterical and suffering from delusions brought on by sun stroke.
What has happened to Miss Froy and will anyone believe Iris?
I won’t spoil the story and, indeed, it is all a bit obvious. But that doesn’t spoil the tale and for those looking for something a little deeper in their reading material, this book obliges. It explores the reliability and integrity of witnesses. Do they have their own motives that colour their perception of what they have seen or encourage them to deny seeing what they have seen? Iris descends into a Kafkaesque nightmare where she begins to doubt her own sanity but with plucky British perseverance she soldiers on.
Another nice touch is White’s portrayal of the Brits abroad. The youngsters are loutish and the older ones impervious to the culture and mores of the country they happen to grace with their presence. When she cannot make herself understood by these foreign Johnnies, Iris just shouts louder, in English, of course.
An interesting narrative touch is that throughout the book White cuts to Miss Froy’s parents who, with mounting anticipation, await the much longed for return of their daughter, a device which adds an extra layer of pathos to the tale.
White is a much underrated writer and this book, I found, is gripping, well written and, I’m sure, much better than the film.
