Martin Fone's Blog, page 232
April 5, 2019
What Is The Origin Of (225)?…
A word in edgeways
There is an art to conversation. In a perfect world, a conversation is between two or more people, each of whom has the time and opportunity to put forward their point of view. Comments may be laced with wit, sarcasm or may just be downright rude and the subject matter may veer from one thing to another. It is one of the joys of having the gift of language to engage in witty, illuminating conversations with friends, family and acquaintance.
But not everyone abides by the unwritten rules of conversation. Often, more often than I care for, I encounter someone who likes the sound of their own voice, who is full of their own opinions and unwilling to pass the baton of conversation on to others in the circle. In these circumstances, I find it hard to get a word in edgeways, to break into the conversation.
The root of the phrase is the word edgeways and, perhaps unsurprisingly because of our nautical heritage, it owes its origins to our nautical friends. Bringing a boat into harbour is a tricky business, with all the other boats moored at anchor to avoid. The experienced captain would slowly inch their way slowly to their intended destination by turning the boat to the starboard and then to port, a manoeuvre known as tacking. A painstaking business, to be sure, and to the observer the boat seemed to be edging its way forward.
This form of tacking, edging, was used particularly by captains of ships that were either not so adept at handling windy conditions or when it was blowing a gale. One of the first uses of it, in print at least, is to be found in Captain John Smith’s account of The generall historie of Virginia, New England and the Summer Islands, from 1624; “it being but a faire gale of wind, we edged towards her to see what she was.”
But edgeways, a compound word formed from edge and way, made its appearance in the English language midway through the 16th century and meant “with the edge turned forward or towards a particular point.” That it predates Smith’s usage of edge in a nautical sense does not necessarily mean that it did not come from the argot of sailors. England was already a maritime nation by then and edging was a technique in the armoury of any competent sea-captain.
It didn’t take much longer for edging to be used in a figurative sense and, in particular, in relation to that everyday human activity, talking. David Abercromby in his Ars artium; or the art of Divine Converse, published in 1683, wrote, “without giving them so much time as to edge in a word.” The inability to break into a conversation or to get your point of view across was clearly not a modern-day predicament.
The use of the adverb edgeways in the context of conversation seems to have been a 19th century development. In 1821, in a one-act play called Twelve precisely! Or A night at Dover, one of the leading characters, Sir Ferdinand Frisky (great name) says, “Curse me, if I can get a word in edgeways.” Three years later Mary Russell Mitford, in a collection of rural sketches called Our Village, wrote, “As if it were possible for any of us to slide in a word edgewise!”
And there we have it.
April 4, 2019
Gin O’Clock – Part Sixty Two
Is Camberley in Scotland?
I only ask the question because I thought that Aldi’s tie up with Eden Mill distillery was limited to Scottish stores. But, lo and behold, there nestling in the spirits section of our local store is a bottle of Eden Mill Botanical Project Traditional Batch Gin. Perhaps the ginaissance has played havoc with the traditional concepts of geography.
And a lovely bottle it is too. It is a stoneware bottle with one of those weird metal swing top contraptions, similar to those found on a Grolsch lager bottle, that force the cap down and which you have to lift up to open. A word of caution, mine fell apart after the second time I used it. If you like those fiendish Japanese metal puzzles, you will easily put it back together again.
The labelling is in green, presumably to emphasise the botanicals in the mix. Unusually for a gin to be found in Aldi, the rear of the bottle is quite helpful in describing what you might encounter inside. Although it only comes in a 50cl bottle, so it is relatively expensive, at £19.99, on an Aldi gin price spectrum when compared to its 70cl rivals, any disappointment on that score is more than made up by its ABV of 43%.
Eden Mill operates out of St Andrew’s in Fife, better known for being the spiritual home of golf than the producer of spirits. But the team are setting out to change that. Originally a brewery, it branched out to produce gins and whisky in 2014. They use pot stills for distilling their gin, bringing in the neutral grain spirit which makes up the base.
There are a number of gins that have come from The Eden Mill distillery, principally Original, Oak Gin, Sea Buckthorn Gin, Love Gin and Golf Gin. The Botanical Project Gins that can be found in Aldi include Chilli and Ginger and Blueberry and Vanilla, as well as the Original which, given my dislike of weirdly flavoured gins, I considered the safest to try.
The botanical of note in the mix is caraway seed. This is not the first time I have encountered it in a gin, it is one of the botanicals in Boodles’ British Gin London Dry. Used extensively in European and Mediterranean cooking, the caraway seeds, when roasted gently under a low flame and then ground, provide a warm, sweet, and slightly peppery flavour. Tradition has it that it was used to ward off witches as well as freshening your breath, perhaps one and the same function, and others swear by its medicinal properties to counter digestive problems. I’m always looking for an excuse to drink gin and perhaps I’ve found another one.
The mix in this gin also includes lavender, mint and liquorice. To the nose the juniper is less prominent than I would have liked but the spices and pepper come through loud and clear. To the taste it is smoother and better balanced than I had anticipated with the liquorice and peppers coming to the fore and creating a lingering aftertaste. Despite not being able to abide liquorice in its raw state I found it fine as an ingredient in this gin. And I haven’t had indigestion since.
Until the next time, cheers!
April 3, 2019
Book Corner – April 2019 (1)
Silent Nights – edited by Martin Edwards
Christmas. Not my favourite time of year, for sure, but there is little better than settling down in the warmth and immersing yourself in crime stories with a Christmas theme. As always, Martin Edwards has served up a delightful serving of 15 short stories and as always, the quality is variable. But that is the way of anthologies and there are more gems than duds here.
There is probably no better way to open up proceedings than with a Sherlock Holmes story. Given the seasonal theme of the collection it is inevitably The Blue Carbuncle, a take I have read on many occasions but one that this reader never tires of.
Another old favourite to be found in these pages is G K Chesterton’s The Flying Stars which sees the diffident Father Brown exercise his wits against his old foe, Flambeau. Lord Peter Wimsey crops up in Dorothy L Sayer’s The Necklace of Pearls which is an amusing story of a jewellery theft, set in a country house. A country house gathering is also the setting for Edgar Wallace’s comic tale, Stuffing.
But part of the joy of collections like this is to discover writers who were popular in the Golden Age of detective fiction but who have fallen the wayside in recent times. Fashion is a fickle companion. Perhaps the darkest and most atmospheric story in this collection is H C Bailey’s tale of a serial killer, The Unknown Murderer. And The Waxworks, by Ethel Lina White, an author I am going to have read more of, is one for those who like the traditional mix of spooks and murder. An intrepid female reporter opts to spend a night in a waxworks museum in an attempt to get to the bottom of why it has been the scene of a number of mysterious deaths. There is an interesting twist at the end.
There are a couple of stories where the reader is invited to exercise their little grey cells to solve the crime. Solutions are provided at the back of the book for those who can be bothered. The most satisfying of the two, perhaps because I don’t play chess and so the intricacies of Raymund Allen’s A Happy Solution went over my head, was Nicholas Blake’s A Problem in White. The tale, set on a train, marooned in the snow, features a jewellery heist and a murder and ends with the cliff-hanger sentence, “But who did the Inspector arrest for the murder of the disagreeable Arthur J. Kilmington? And why?”. There are enough clues scattered through the text for the attentive reader to unmask the culprit and, if nothing else, it forces you to read it again to gather up the evidence.
Less satisfying for me was Marjorie Bowen’s Cambric Tea, too long-winded, and Ralph Plummer’s Parlour Tricks, a fun read but a bit too obvious for my taste. On the other hand, Joseph Shearing’s The Chinese Apple hit the spot, a mix of gothic and crime, featuring an ex-pat returning from Italy, somewhat unwillingly, to take care of a niece.
Suffice it to say, there is something for everyone in the anthology and it is a splendid way to wind down from the rigours and stresses of a modern Christmas.
April 1, 2019
The Streets Of London – Part Eighty Six
Gerrard Street, W1
Running from north-east to south-west, parallel to the western stretch of Shaftesbury Avenue, and joining Wardour Street at its western end, Gerrard Street these days is right in the heart of Chinatown. If you want a (reasonably) cheap meal before sampling the cultural delights that the centre of our metropolis boasts, a restaurant on Gerrard Street is as good a place as any to go to.
It takes its name from a military leader, the 1st Earl of Macclesfield, Charles Gerard – quite where the extra r came from is anybody’s guess. Prior to its development as a residential area, the land which is now occupied by Gerrard Street was slap bang in the middle of what was known as the Military Ground, used by the Military Company of Westminster who were formed in 1615. They were granted permission by the Privy Council at the time to exercise under the direction of the Commissioners of Muster for Middlesex “in anie place neere the suburbs of the citie.”
The Military Company secured two parcels of land for their purposes, the western portion, some two acres in size and on which Gerrard Street now runs, leased and the eastern part, one and a half acres, purchased from Susan Lamb and Thomas and Elizabeth Garland in 1619. A nine-foot brick wall was built around the perimeter of the grounds and an Armoury House, at a total cost of £294, which was a two-storied brick building with two wings and a tiled roof.
Quite what the Military Company actually did, other than parade up and down and enjoy convivial evenings in the Armoury House, is unclear. They do not warrant a mention in the annals of the Civil War and their only formal duty, which has survived in any records, was that they supplemented the forces of law and order each Shrove Tuesday to keep an eye on the apprentices of London who enjoyed their day off with some gusto.
However, what is certain is that by 1656 the Company had fallen on hard times and entered into a lease-back arrangement with Edward Haynes, a cook, who bought the land and occupied the Armoury House. Then, in 1661, Gerard enters our story.
A royalist and a soldier who had spent time in the United Provinces and, following the Restoration of Charles II, a gentleman of the bedchamber, Gerard paid Haynes £500 for his land. His attempts to gain possession of the whole of the Military Ground was frustrated by a gardener called Browne, who refused to vacate the land he had leased. Gerard resorted to threats, vowing to “Cutt the Members of the said Military Company in peeces if ever they came on the said Ground.” Gerard even dismantled part of the Armoury House and the library but it was not until 1676 that he eventually got legal title to the whole of the Military Grounds.
On 5th July 1677 Gerard leased the land to the physician, Dr Nicholas Barbon, and a timber merchant, John Rowley, and they, taking advantage of the permission “to erect and build in or upon any part or parts of the said Military Ground any houses and buildings whatsoever leaveing a convenient way and passage for Coaches and Carriages,” started building residential properties. Gerrard Street, in its modern incarnation, took shape between 1677 and 1685. One of Barbon’s houses was occupied by Gerard, until he had to flee, having been convicted of treason for his part in the Rye House conspiracy, an attempt to assassinate Charles II and his son, James.
The poet, John Dryden, lived at number 43 for a while and Edward Burke spent some time at number 37. A plaque outside number 9 commemorates the formation of a dining club, in 1746, following a meeting between Samuel Johnson and Joshua Reynolds at the Turk’s Head. And in Great Expectations, Mr Jaggers lived on the south-side of the street in “rather a stately house of its kind, but dolefully in want of painting.” But by the middle of the 18th century, the street was better known for its coffee houses than its residential properties and nowadays you can substitute Chinese restaurants for coffee shops.
Of the streets that formed Barbon’s development of the Military Ground, only Gerrard and Macclesfield Streets bear their original name.
March 31, 2019
Cock Up Of The Week (2)
If there is one thing I have learnt in life, it is never tempt fate. The National Health Service seem to make a habit of it, deeming certain circumstances as never events, errors of such gravity that they should never happen. Of course, they do, not with alarming regularity but with a frequency that suggests that they should be renamed as “things we would rather not happen but, hey ho, that’s life (or death in extremis)”.
A report on the University of Leicester NHS Trust just published includes a list of never events that, belying their name, have happened on their watch. The one that brought tears to my eyes was a poor chap who was booked in for a bladder cystoscopy. However, his notes were mixed up with another patient’s and he ended up with a circumcision.
Not the end of the world, for sure, but something that would take some explaining to the wife.
The moral of the story? Never say never.
March 30, 2019
Luggage Of The Week
I have just got back from an enjoyable week’s trip to Spain. Unfortunately, my luggage decided that a six-day break was more than enough, thank you very much. It is somewhat disconcerting to receive an email as you get off the plane to receive an email informing you that your luggage did not make it on to the plane. I was reunited with my bag some 36 hours later.
A first world problem, for sure, and one that did not inconvenience me as much as Peter Messervy-Gross’ lost bags did him. Getting off a plane at the airport of the Mongolian capital, Ulaanbaatar, he hung around the luggage carousel forlornly as it began to dawn on him that his bags weren’t there. As he was there to compete in the Mongol 100, a race across the frozen Khovsgol Nuur lake in northern Mongolia, it was a bit of a disaster.
A search for replacement running shoes proved fruitless as his plates are size thirteen and the largest size available was eleven.
But instead of settling down for a few days swilling fermented yak’s piss as most of us would have done in the circumstances, Peter is made of sterner stuff. He did the run in his four-year-old work shoes, a pair of brogues, which stood up well to the test, although Peter suffered painful blisters.
Even more amazingly, he completed the course in temperatures dropping down to as low as -25C. Peter didn’t win but it is the taking part that is the main thing, after all.
March 29, 2019
What Is The Origin Of (224)?…
Fathom out
To fathom something out is to deduce something or work something out. Often it is an involved process, involving the assimilation and sifting through of information from disparate sources. It can be a drawn-out process but suddenly the light dawns on you. You have fathomed something out.
As a unit of measure a fathom is a source of mystery to me. As a confirmed landlubber I hear nautical types talking glibly of fathoms and I haven’t a clue how long it is. It comes from the Old English word fæðm and dates from around the beginning of the 9th century. Principally, it was used to describe an embrace and, by extension (ahem), the length of the outstretched arms. In crude terms, a fathom became the length from finger tip to finger tip of two outstretched arms.
The problem, of course, with a rule of thumb measurement like this is that not everyone’s arms are the same length. The variances that deviations of physique could bring to determining the length of a fathom led to inconsistencies. In 1728 Ephraim Chamber’s Cyclopaedia noted that “there are three kinds of Fathoms. The first, which is that of Men of War, contains six feet; The middling, or that of Merchant Ships, five Feet, and a half; and the small one, used in Flyts, Flyboats, and other Fishing-vessels, only Five feet.” Whether this relected the differences of stature in the matelots who sailed these different boats, I know not.
In an effort to standardise the measurement, the British Admiralty decreed that a fathom was the equivalent of a thousandth of a nautical mile, making it 1.85 metres or about 6feet one inch. Recognising the confusion that relying on fathoms could cause, nautical charts used feet to denote depths of less than 30 feet and fathoms for deeper waters. Perhaps they had fathomed out that the need for precision only pertained in shallower waters.
From the 14th century onwards, the verb fathom was used to describe the act of encircling someone or thing with your arms and so, if you were embracing someone, you were fathoming them. And by the 16th century fathoming out was a phrase used to measure something by embracing it with your arms. Describing the attempt of seven men to measure some large trees by putting their arms around them, Richard Eden wrote in The Decades of the Newe Worlde, in 1555; “with theyr armes stretched further were scarsely able too fathame aboute.”
It took no great leap of imagination to use the phrase in a figurative sense. After all, in order to understand something you needed to get your arms around all the information at your disposal. So, in 1625, in A New Way to Pay Old Debts, don’t we all need that, a comedy by Philip Massinger, we find; “The Statesman beleeues he fathomes/ the counsels of all Kingdomes on the earth.”
Fathoming out was used around the same time to describe a method deployed by sailors to determine how close they were to the bottom of the sea. In Sir William Brereton’s Travels in Holland from 1634 we find this passage; “fathoming the depth of the water over against the Brill, we found it there…that we had not above two feet more water than the ship drew.”
But for landlubbers, Massinger’s figurative usage won out.
March 28, 2019
It’s The Way I Tell ‘Em (34)
As the world seems to be going to hell in a handcart, I thought I would try to cheer us all up.
“Crime in multi-storey car parks. That is wrong on so many different levels.” Tim Vine (2011)
“I have downloaded this new app. Its great, it tells you what to wear, what to eat and if you’ve put on weight. Its called the Daily Mail.” Hayley Ellis (2016)
“When I was younger I felt like a man trapped inside a woman’s body. Then I was born.” Yianni (2015)
“I was playing chess with my friend and he said, ‘Let’s make this interesting’. So we stopped playing chess.” Matt Kirshen (2011)
“I usually meet my girlfriend at 12:59 because I like that one-to-one time.” Tom Ward (2015)
“I used to be addicted to swimming but I’m very proud to say I’ve been dry for six years.” Alfie Moore (2013)
“I was raised as an only child, which really annoyed my sister.” Will Marsh (2012)
“You know you’re working class when your TV is bigger than your book case.” Rob Beckett (2012)
“Most of my life is spent avoiding conflict. I hardly ever visit Syria.” Alex Horne (2014)
“Life is like a box of chocolates. It doesn’t last long if you’re fat.” Joe Lycett (2014)
“You can’t lose a homing pigeon. If your homing pigeon doesn’t come back, then what you’ve lost is a pigeon.” Sara Pascoe (2014)
“My Dad said, always leave them wanting more. Ironically, that’s how he lost his job in disaster relief.”Mark Watson (2014)
“One thing you’ll never hear a Hindu say… ‘Ah well, you only live once.”Hardeep Singh Kohli (2014)
“As a kid I was made to walk the plank. We couldn’t afford a dog.” Gary Delaney (2010)
“I saw a documentary on how ships are kept together. Riveting!” Stewart Francis (2012)
“Today… I did seven press ups: not in a row.” Daniel Kitson (2012)
“People say I’ve got no willpower but I’ve quit smoking loads of times.”Kai Humphries (2014)
“My friend got a personal trainer a year before his wedding. I thought: ‘Bloody hell, how long’s the aisle going to be’.” Paul McCaffrey (2014)
“Golf is not just a good walk ruined, it’s also the act of hitting things violently with a stick ruined.” John Luke-Roberts (2016)
“Oh my god, mega drama the other day: My dishwasher stopped working! Yup, his visa expired.” Alexander Henry Buchanan-Dunlop (2014)
March 27, 2019
Book Corner – March 2019 (4)
The Spoilt City – Olivia Manning
The second of what is known as Manning’s Balkan Trilogy, The Spoilt City, published in 1962, continues the tale of Guy and Harriet Pringle. The storm clouds of war are gathering around Bucharest, rumours abound that the Germans are going to occupy the country, or perhaps the Russians, and there are fascist marches, uprisings and, eventually, a coup.
Bizarrely, but true to form, the Brits, marooned in the city, go about their business, trying to go about their daily business. Part of what they perceive to be the role of the British is to preserve the cultural life of the city. So a distinguished academic, Lord Pinkrose, is flown in on the pretext of delivering a few keynote lectures on English poetry, just what the locals need. And Guy, fresh from his triumph of staging Troilus and Cressida, immerses himself in running a summer school for the dwindling band of students who are able or minded to continue their studies.
Although the book is structured as a stand-alone story, many of the characters we came across in the first book, The Great Fortune, populate its pages. The comic sponger, Prince Yakimov, is now living with them and a new waif and stray, a potentially dangerous one at that, Sasha, a deserter and a Jew to boot, has joined the Pringles, hiding away in the attic. Inevitably Manning has to allude to events that featured in the first book to allow new readers to catch up, a mildly irritating feature for those readers to whom the first book is still fresh in the memory but an understandable ploy, nonetheless.
The newly wed Harriet is becoming more and more irritated by her husband, Guy. Universally admired, a good egg, she sees that his willingness to immerse himself into projects that seem futile is his way of coming to terms with the gravity of the situation in which he finds himself and into which he has brought his young bride. But she also detects that Guy sees her as part of himself rather than a separate individual. Gut automatically assumes that what he wants, she wants, a tension that comes to the fore in the second half of the book, when je stubbornly refuses to leave Bucharest when all the other ex-pats are fleeing.
Eventually, after the assualt on his boss, Inchcape, the discovery of Sasha and the raid on their flat, Guy reluctantly agrees that Harriet should leave Bucharest for Athens. The book ends with the assumption that Guy will join her, as soon as he is able.
In real life, Manning arrived as a newly-wed in Bucharest at the outbreak of the war and it is tempting, and probably correct, to assume that her experiences informed her vivid portrayal of a city whose confidence and resistance is crumbling, apprehensive of its future. The characterisation is vivid and the use of small, often comic, sometimes chilling, vignettes to illustrate the mundanities, indignities and frustrations of everyday life and the perils facing an eclectic and eccentric group of Brits thrown together is well judged.
It is a fast read and there is more action and drama contained within its pages than in the first volume. If I had a criticism, it is that Manning’s narrative didn’t involve and immerse me as I thought it might. I felt as though I was a bystander, watching the action from the sidelines.
Still, on to the third!
March 25, 2019
Double Your Money – Part Thirty Nine
Adele Spitzeder (1832 – 1895)
If you are short of money, why not set up your own bank?
Adele Spitzeder, an aspiring German actress, was familiar with moneylenders. After all, she had to visit them regularly to fund her lifestyle. Having observed their business techniques, she decided to launch a money-lending scheme of her own in the autumn of 1869, which bore all the hallmarks of a Ponzi scheme, half a century before Charles appropriated that form of fraud as his own.
Adele’s first investor was the wife of a carpenter, who lived in Munich’s poor district, Au. Lured by the promise of a return of 10% per month, she gave Adele 100 Gulden and, sure enough, received 20 Gulden a month later. News of this money-making phenomenon spread like wildfire amongst the poorer quarters of Munich and soon our entrepreneur found herself inundated with willing investors. At the height of its success she employed around 40 people.
To say Adele’s business methods were unconventional is an understatement. Deposits were kept in sacks in her house or, occasionally, in a safe in a nearby hairdresser’s salon. Her staff, unfamiliar with the requirements of accountancy, merely kept records of who had deposited what. Because most of the investors were illiterate, the receipts they signed often bore little more than a series of crosses and scratches. Not that that deterred the investors. Adele kept meeting her obligations, in that valuable commodity, cash, and that was good enough for them. Another point in her favour was that she wasn’t Jewish, the faith of most moneylenders.
To give the scheme the patina of respectability, Adele called her operation Spitzeder Privatbank, but it also went under the name of Dachauer Bank, to appeal to those clients who lived on the northern side of Munich. It was inevitable that her success would attract the attention of the authorities. In the spring of 1871 the Bavarian government tried to find a reason to shut down her operation but as Adele was paying the stated interest at the appropriate time, they could not find a reason to do so. And Adele was a fighter. When later that year the Munich city authorities sought to tax her operation as a bank and impose a greater degree of regulatory scrutiny, she successfully fought off the challenge.
But you can only delay the inevitable for so long. The principal problem with a Ponzi scheme, which pays interest out of depositors’ capital, is that it is vulnerable if investors demand their principal back. In February 1872, the Munchner Neueste Nachricten ran a series of articles intended to discredit Adele’s scheme. Proving that there is no such thing as bad publicity, the newspaper led to more investors enrolling than worried souls withdrawing their savings.
Towards the end of 1872, the court in Munich ruled that Adele’s business had to be registered formally and that it had to abide by the accounting standards of the day. Forty investors, corralled by the police, presented a petition to the courts requesting a formal audit of Adele’s books. On 12th November five auditors turned up on Adele’s doorstep, along with another group of 60 investors, recruited by a rival bank, demanding the return of their capital.
It was all too much. Adele didn’t have enough readies to meet demands and despite, like all good fraudsters, attempting to flee, she was arrested carrying what money she had. The police took control of her offices to prevent it being raided by angry customers. It was estimated that some 32,000 investors were defrauded of some 38 million Gulden and only 15% of the deposits were ever recovered. The news of the scheme’s collapse prompted a wave of suicides.
Adele served three years in chokey for improper accounting but, surprisingly, not for fraud. The laws of the time did not deem her scheme illegal. Still, she spent her time inside profitably, writing her memoirs, and then slipped away from the pages of history.
If you enjoyed this, try Fifty Scams and Hoaxes by Martin Fone
https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/business/fifty-scams-and-hoaxes/
