Martin Fone's Blog, page 264
April 21, 2018
Verdict Of The Week (3)
On the thoroughfares near Blogger Towers we have poles with lights on top. In the days before austerity the lights used to come on just before dusk and would be extinguished shortly after dawn. Nowadays they seem to come on when it is light and go off halfway through the night, rendering them of little use to the carousing pedestrian.
But they are of use to beast, or at least dogs, serving as a handy upright against which they can cock a leg and unleash a stream of steaming urine. And they can continue this practice, thanks to a judgment handed down by the High Court, I read this week.
Richmond Council were seeking to impose a ban on dogs peeing on lamp posts and against properties and generally causing a nuisance to honest, law abiding citizens. Any hound found to be in breach would lead their owner to have a visit to the beak. This not unreasonable restriction was challenged by a group of dog walkers in the area and the court ruled that the intended Public Spaces Protection Order was a step too far.
So, there we have it, dogs are free to cock a snook at all and sundry.
A word of warning though – the right does not extend to humans. If you are caught short, you will still have to find a phone box.
I enjoy the hustle and bustle of a market and the sound of the costermongers shouting their wares. But Lymington and Pennington Town Council have caused a public outcry by slapping a ban on a fruit and veg stall-holder because his voice is too loud.
His name? Wayne Bellows, of course.
You couldn’t make it up!
April 20, 2018
What Is The Origin Of (176)?…
Blue-blooded
When you look at your veins poking through your skin, they appear blue and you might be forgiven, if you had no anatomical knowledge, in thinking that the blood coursing through them is blue. As soon as you puncture a vein, though, the blood that spurts or trickles out is red. Does this mean that as soon as the blood comes into contact with the outside, it changes colour from blue to red because of some sort of chemical reaction?
Sorry to disappoint you but the answer is no.
It is all down to the interaction between light and subcutaneous fat. The fat which forms a barrier between your skin and what is inside – we all have it – only allows blue light to penetrate to the veins and back. Other colours, such as red, cannot make it back to your eyeballs and so the only hue you can associate with your veins is blue. Deoxygenated blood, which is what veins principally push around the body, is a darker red than oxygenated and so as a result of the way light permeates our skin will seem darker. If you look at different veins around your body you will see that they are not uniform in colour – this is because the diameter and thickness of the walls allow more or less of the blue light to reach your line of vision.
The reason for this rather discursive explanation in what is meant to be an etymological discussion is to nail on the head the idea that members of the royal family and the aristocracy have blue blood. Now that any Mike, Kate or Meghan – a distinctly unroyal trio, if you ever saw one – can marry into the royal family, it would be hard to defend seriously the proposition that our so-called betters have blood of a different colour coursing through their veins. When royals and aristocrats studiously intermarried within their own charmed circle, it might have been possible to hoodwink the masses into thinking so but the odd execution of a royal – to be encouraged in my view – would have scotched that theory.
So why do we call royals blue-blooded?
Blame the Spanish and subcutaneous fat. The proud boast of some of the oldest and proudest families in Castile was that their stock was pure, having resisted the temptation to intermarry with Moors, Jews and the like. The consequence was that their skin colouration was lighter than the other indigenous population and their veins seemed darker. This phenomenon gave rise to the term sangre azul or blue blood.
By the 19th century the term established itself in the English language. Save for making a direct translation of it, we did little else. Maria Edgeworth testified to its origin in her 1834 novel, Helen; “from Spain, of high rank and birth, of the sangre azul, the blue blood.” By the time Anthony Trollope came to write The Duke’s Children in 1880, it was a familiar sobriquet for the oldest and most aristocratic families to be used without the aid of a gloss; “It is a point of conscience among the – perhaps not ten thousand, but say one thousand of bluest blood – that everyone should know who everybody is…It is a knowledge which the possession of the blue blood itself produces. “
It takes one to know one, it seems.
April 19, 2018
Some People Are So Poor All They Have Is Money – Part Four
Illegal aliens
It’s always dangerous to draw too many generalised conclusions from odd snatches of conversation but I couldn’t help thinking that there is a rising sense of nationalism in India. In particular, in southern India there was overt antipathy towards their fairer skinned brethren of Indian-Aryan ancestry, characterised as invaders from Afghanistan, and criticism was directed at the hitherto sainted Mahatma Gandhi for vacillating on the Moslem question. With Moslem birth rates far outstripping those of other religious communities there is a heightening of tensions that have always lurked beneath the surface. It would be a shame if they erupted into violence but it was hardly coincidental that religious tensions had erupted again in nearby Sri Lanka at the time of our visit.
Foreigners have been part of the landscape on the sub-continent for centuries and it was appropriate that our tour began at the coastal city of Chennai (Madras in old money) which was the site of the first manifestation of permanent British presence in the area. The East India Company bought a strip of coastal land called Chennirayarpattinam and proceeded to build a fort there, to better protect the harbour and their trading activities. Completed on 23rd April 1644 it was christened Fort St George and over time was developed into an impressive fortification with thick walls some 20 feet high.
Notwithstanding its ramparts and large garrison, it fell into French hands between 1746 and 1749, eventually being restored to the Brits following the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. Today it is the administrative headquarters of the Tamil Nadu state government and is the garrison to some Indian troops. There is a museum which houses relics from the British occupation – worth a visit, although the curatorship is distinctly 1950s – and the church, St Mary’s, is the oldest Anglican one in India. Built between 1678 and 1680 it was where the nabobest of nabobs, Robert Clive, was married and its graveyard contains the oldest British tombstones on the sub-continent.
Despite the maps of the British Empire I pored over when I was a schoolboy, India wasn’t entirely red. Pondicherry was and is still distinctly French. The French East India Company established their headquarters there in 1674 and the area was fought over incessantly over the next two centuries by those implacable enemies, the French and British. When the British finally took control over all of India in the late 1850s, they rather magnanimously allowed the French to remain there and, oddly, even beyond Indian independence the area around Pondicherry was under French control. It was not until 1st November 1954 that it was incorporated into the Indian state.
Pondicherry has a very distinctive European feel with a broad promenade along the shoreline which boasted a pier until it collapsed in 1953 – this may have presaged the departure of the French – and a series of four broad boulevards running parallel in what is known as White Town. Even the local police sport jaunty red caps a la gendarmerie. The cathedral is a mini version of the Notre Dame and as the congregation dispersed we were mobbed by groups requesting us to pose for photos with them. We never did find out why!
Less welcoming to the Brits was Tipu Sultan, who along with his dad, Hyder Ali, did not quite see the benefits of being absorbed into the domains controlled by the East India Company. In all, the Brits fought four wars between 1767 and 1799 against these two, before finally winning a decisive victory at the Siege of Srirangapatna, during the course of which Tipu was killed. We saw the spot where he died. Tipu’s major military innovation was the use of rocket-propelled artillery, the like of which the Brits had not encountered before. However, sheer weight of numbers and Tipu’s folly of pissing off his wife, who then sided against him, and of relying on the French saw the Brits ultimately prevail.
April 18, 2018
Book Corner – April 2018 (2)
The Saint-Fiacre Affair – Georges Simenon
I am working my way through the welcome Penguin Classics’ reissues of the Maigret series and the 13th book, the Saint-Fiacre affair, is a curious one. Maigret returns to the village of his birth – the original book, published in 1932, was called Maigret Goes Home – because an anonymous note has been sent to the Paris police claiming that a crime would be committed during the first mass held there on All Souls’ Day. Despite his attendance at the service, he notices an old woman, whom Maigret recognises to be the Countess of Saint-Fiacres, sitting motionless in her pew with her head in her hands. She is dead.
How did she die and who was responsible for her death? Maigret encounters a range of potential suspects who seem to come out of the pages of Agatha Christie – a gigolo masquerading as the Countess’ secretary, a spendthrift son, the estate manager who has been salting away some of the family’s money and his son. Indeed, the denouement is straight out of Christie where all the suspects are assembled in one room, although not by Maigret but by the Countess’ son, and the felon is revealed. It is a rather unconvincing finale and, in many ways, the novel betrays a hastily constructed plot which hardly satisfies the hardened crime fan.
Perhaps, though, there is more to this book than meets the eye and the key may be that it is for Maigret a nostalgic return to the village of his birth. The last time he visited was for the funeral of his father – he visits the grave and is appalled by its poor state of maintenance – and he wanders around the village unrecognised, shocked by the change in those he meets and the deterioration in the fortunes of the village. My sense is that for Maigret there is something cathartic in the return and it allows him to put the past to rest. George Orwell treated the theme more satisfactorily in Coming Up For Air seven years later. The moral of the story is never try to recreate your past.
The Flemish House
The 14th book in the series, originally published in 1941, is a darker affair. Maigret arrives at the border town of Givet, on the Meuse, at the request of one of his wife’s relatives, to look into the disappearance – it turns out that she has been murdered – of Germaine Piedboeuf. The suspects are a Flemish family, the Peeters, the son having put the unfortunate Geraldine in the family way.
The atmosphere in the town of Givet is antagonistic with the well-to-do Flems despised by the local French residents. The crime and the obvious inference that the Peeters’ got rid of the girl to enable their beloved son to marry into a respectable Flemish family, as was originally intended, stokes up the ill-feeling. The Peeters are a family under siege.
Simenon is at his best here when with a few words he describes the grim town, worsened by a river in full spate and torrential rain. You can almost see and smell the steam coming off Maigret’s overcoat as he trudges around the town, observing, rarely asking questions but it is clear that he is ahead of the local police, led by the comically inept Machere, in understanding the motivation behind the crime. Simenon’s characterisation of the Peeters family is spot on and Anna is a striking and, ultimately, complex character.
As often is the case with a Maigret novel, the felon eludes criminal justice – Maigret decides not to reveal what happened to the local police – but from the final chapter it is clear that a more natural and eternal justice has been meted out. That’s Catholics for you but I do wonder how Maigret keeps his job!
April 16, 2018
Our Crime Against Criminals Lies In The Fact That We Treat Them Like Rascals – Part Four
The Gardner Museum Heist, 1990
If you go to the Gardner Museum in Boston, you will find thirteen picture frames hanging on the wall, devoid of contents. They do not form part of a post-modernist art collection but hang there both as a reminder of an audacious robbery which deprived the museum of their prize exhibits worth around $500 million but also as a beacon of hope that someday, somehow the pictures will be recovered.
They haven’t so far.
The key to a successful robbery is perfect planning a keeping it simple. Too many moving parts in the plan merely increase the chances of something going wrong. And the Garner Museum heist was simplicity personified.
As a city with a large Irish community, St Patrick’s Day in Boston is one of the highlights of the year. March 17th 1990 was no exception and there were celebrations, some rather noisy and drunken, around the city and one in close proximity to the Museum. At 1.24 am on the 18th someone dressed in a police uniform rang on the museum’s bell. When a security guard – there were only two on the site at the time – opened the door, the policeman and his colleague said that they were responding to a report of a disturbance at the Museum and requested that they be let in.
The security guard, Richard Abath, wasn’t sure whether his orders to prohibit anyone from entering extended to include the police and so, on his own initiative, let the officers in. One of the officers looked him up and down and said that Abath looked familiar and that there was a warrant out for his arrest. Ordering Abath away from the security desk where the only security button was, the policeman handcuffed him. It was only then that Abath realised anything was amiss – the police officer was wearing a false moustache.
The second security appeared on the scene minutes later but was quickly handcuffed. When he enquired why the police had arrested him, he was told that they were not policemen but robbers about to steal from the gallery. The guards were taken to the basement and handcuffed to pipes and bound.
Although the museum had motion detectors and local alarm systems, the bogus policemen went about their unlawful duty, removing some of the gallery’s most prized exhibits, including Rembrandt’s only seascape, The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, Vermeer’s The Concert, five Vermeer drawings and an eagle finial which lay on top of a Napoleonic flag. They were unable to unscrew the flag from the wall and the mess that they left suggested that they had been unsuccessful in attempting to make off with other works of art.
In all, the robbery took around eighty minutes to accomplish and the thieves had enough time to make two trips to their car, a red Daytona, with their haul. They then went back to the basement to tell the guards that they would be hearing from them again in about a year. The guards never did hear from them and were not rescued, nor was the robbery detected, until 8.15 in the morning when other staff arrived.
Despite the fact that the thieves’ movements around the gallery could be tracked on the motion detection system, the police had no images to give them a clue as to the perpetrators. The FBI believe that it was the work of a criminal organisation based in New England, that the artwork was offered for sale in Philadelphia and that they have a good idea of the identities of the duo, both now dead. But there was not enough to press charges.
It seems those frames will be empty for quite a while.
April 15, 2018
Toilet Of The Week (14)
It’s enough to make Henry David Thoreau turn in his grave or at least be very pissed.
Walden Lake, near Concord in Massachusetts, immortalised by the naturalist and philosopher in Walden, or, Life in the Woods and described as lovelier than diamonds, is far from it now, according to a study I came across this week.
According to Dr Jay Curt Stager of Paul Smith’s College, the lake’s water is far from the pure, pristine state it was in Thoreau’s day in the mid 19th century. No surprise there, I suppose, but what is damaging it is the high levels of nitrogen and phosphorus in the water which in turn causes algae to spread, blocking out the rays of the sun which the fish need.
And what causes these high levels of nitrogen and phosphorus? The report does not beat about the bush – swimmers pissing in the lake. It goes on to recommend the introduction of “swimmer-education programmes or construction of a separate swimming pool nearby to relieve pressure on the lake.”
I think relieving pressure on the bladders of the swimmers is the key to it all. At least Thoreau didn’t call it the Golden Pond.
April 14, 2018
Demolition Of The Week
If I had my time again, one of the things I would like to have been is a demolition man. There must be something intensely satisfying in pressing a button and seeing some monstrous carbuncle which has blotted the skyscape for ages tumble down in a cloud of dust.
But occasionally something can go disastrously wrong.
Take this story of the demolition of a 173 foot silo tower in the Danish town of Vordingborg, which I came across this week. Months of meticulous planning went into organising the exercise and an area was cleared into which the debris was intended to fall.
The button was pressed but instead of the silo tumbling into the intended area, something went horribly wrong. To the astonishment of all – there was quite a crowd there to witness the event – the building toppled the other way – a phenomenon known amongst the demolition fraternity as a standup – smashing into a library and cultural centre, causing extensive damage.
Fortunately, no one was injured but an inquiry has been launched to find out what went wrong. Bit obvious, I would have thought.
If you want to see more, click the link
April 13, 2018
What Is The Origin Of (175)?…
Hoity-toity
One of the joys of looking at the origins of words and phrases we use today is to see how they have changed in meaning over the centuries. A perfect example of this phenomenon is the glorious reduplicated phrase, hoity-toity, which we use rather pejoratively to describe someone putting on airs and graces, who is pretentiously self-important, haughty or pompous. I had always assumed that it was a bit of nonsense, the toity serving to enforce the sense through rhyme of the opening part of the phrase, hoity.
I was right to think that the point of interest in the phrase was hoity but wrong in thinking that it was just a nonsense word. There was a verb hoit, now long fallen out of fashion, I’m afraid, which meant to “indulge in riotous and noisy mirth.” It is thought that the verb was linked in some way to the noun hoyden which was used to denote a noisy or energetic girl or an ignorant or clownish chap, both owing their genesis to the Middle Dutch word, heiden, meaning a yokel and from which we also derived our word heathen.
This sense of frivolity and Bacchanalian revelry is amply illustrated in its first appearance in print in Sir Robert L’Estrange’s translation of The visions of Don Francisco de Quevedo Villegas, published in 1668 and a blockbuster if there ever was one. In it he wrote “the Widows I observ’d..Chanting and Jigging to every Tune they heard, and all upon the Hoyty-Toyty, like mad Wenches of Fifteen.” It is interesting to note that hoity was already hitched up with toity. L’Estrange used the phrase to describe women of a certain age acting as youngsters but it also could be used to describe a certain type of young girl, as this rather unflattering and sexist example from The History of Emily Montague, written by Frances Brooke and published in 1769, shows; “By the way, Jack, there is generally a certain hoity-toity inelegance of form and manner at seventeen, which in my opinion is not balanc’d by freshness of complexion, the only advantage girls have to boast of.”
The handy New Dictionary of the terms ancient and modern of the canting crew, compiled by the modestly anonymous B.E, who described himself as a Gent, around the beginning of the 18th century, reveals that there were at least variants. He defines Hightetity as a Ramp or Rude Girl, prompting suggestions that hoity may have been pronounced at the time in the same way as we do height today. In 1785 Francis Grose, in his A classical dictionary of the vulgar tongue, squared the circle by pulling all the strands together with his definition; “Heighty toity, a hoyden or romping girl.”
But almost contemporaneous with Grose’s definition was an altogether different usage as illustrated by this quotation form John O’Keefe’s comic opera in three parts, Fontainebleau, from 1784; “My mother..was a fine lady, all upon the hoity-toities, and so, good for nothing.” Here we are not dealing with a rumbustious wench but rather with a woman who is rather haughty. Quite how this abrupt about-turn in meaning came about is not quite clear. It may have been that the original meaning of hoity-toity was the preserve of the lower orders and that the pronunciation of hoity as heighty led to a misunderstanding which caused it to be associated with haughtiness. We will never know but it is the latter meaning of the phrase that won out and is used to this day.
April 12, 2018
Some People Are So Poor All They Have Is Money – Part Three
Trains and boats and planes
You can see why the British administration chose to summer in the beautiful hill station that is Udhagamandalam aka Ooty, which nestles on a plateau high up in the Nilgiri hills at an elevation of 2,200 metres. The scenery is breath-taking and the air cool, providing a welcome change to the stifling heat of the lowlands.
The problem was how to get up there and for most of the British occupation it was a laborious exercise involving bullock carts, horses and the odd elephant. By 1873 a railway line had been opened that took passengers as far as Mettupalayam, some 330 metres above sea level, but there was still a hell of a hill to climb and a tortuous journey of 46 kilometres to make. It was not until 1908 that the railway finally reached Ooty and quite an engineering feat it was to get there.
The track is just a metre wide and has 250 bridges and some 208 curves, the sharpest of which is 17.5 degrees and 90% of them have a curvature of 10 degrees or more. Oh, and there is a small matter of 16 tunnels. The line deploys a rack system between Kallar and Coonoor, two bars of teeth jutting above the running rails, to give the train the extra purchase needed to negotiate the steep inclines and sharp bends – the only railway in India to use such a system.
The original engines were steam locomotives but these days they have been replaced by steam-powered diesel engines. There are plans to reintroduce steam engines but just before our visit the trials were abandoned because the engines ran out of puff.
Being a bit of a railway buff I couldn’t resist the opportunity to take the downhill journey. It is not a journey to be done in a hurry – it takes 3.5 hours to get to Mettupalayam, the upward journey taking an hour longer. The stately progress is punctuated by prolonged stops at some of the stations for the train to be refilled with water and the passengers hop out to take photos, buy refreshments from the platform vendors and avoid the attentions of the voracious monkeys on the look-out for food.
There were three carriages on our train and we were at the very rear. Each carriage was sectioned off into little compartments and so there was no opportunity to move up and down the train. The air conditioning consisted of open windows. We shared our compartment with a couple of Indian families, who graciously accommodated our wish to get a panoramic view of the spectacular scenery afforded by the train as it wheezed and clung precariously to the cliff edge. The finest views were between Coonoor and Mettupalayam and if you wanted to truncate your journey, that is the section to do.
We had a great time and it was certainly a highlight of our tour.
You can’t go to Kerala and not get on a boat. Despite the gothic horror show that was our previous trip along the Alleppey backwaters, we signed up for a two day trip which, mercifully, passed without incident. The décor of our boat resembled the interior of a Parisian brothel but the crew were cheery, friendly and helpful and stuffed us full with the most delicious Keralan delicacies.
We also had a trip down the Poovar backwaters – these are mangrove lined and very different from the ones further north. The wildlife was spectacular and it was well worth doing.
Our hotel in Bangalore was opposite a bus station and we were fascinated from 9pm onwards by the river of night sleeper buses that set off taking their passengers to all points on the Indian compass.
And as for planes, well, it may be an age thing but I am increasingly finding airports a bit of a trial. I hate rushing and a tight transfer of an hour at Mumbai gave me the collywobbles, my anxiety heightened by a twenty minute delay at Trivandrum. The Jet Airways staff did a good job in whisking us through security and immigration. Before we had time to draw our breath, we looked up at the departure board to find that the London flight had been delayed by a couple of hours. There was nothing for it but to retire to the bar to recover our composure.
The joys of travelling!
April 11, 2018
Coincidences Are Spiritual Puns – Part Three
Wilmer McLean (1814 – 1882)
If you are looking for someone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time twice, then Wilmer McLean, a wholesale grocer and plantation owner from Virginia, would feature high up on your list.
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, McLean was too old to enlist for the Confederate army but soon found himself engulfed in the early skirmishes of the conflict.
The problem was the location of his plantation which was situated near Manassas junction. More crucially, a small stream called Bull Run meandered through his land and this is where the first major battle between Union and Confederate troops took place, in July 1861.
Not only was his house commandeered by the Confederate General, P G T Beauregard, for use as his headquarters but it was struck by a Union shell during the Battle of Blackburn’s Ford which, as well as tearing into the fireplace, ruined the General’s dinner. Three days later on 18th July, during the First Battle of Bull Run McLean’s barn was used as a makeshift hospital to treat wounded Confederate soldiers and as an impromptu prison to hold captured Union soldiers.
If that was not enough, the Second Battle of Bull Run in August 1862 caused more damage to his plantation. As McLean commented later, “these armies tore my place on Bull Run all to pieces, and kept running over it backward and forward till no man could live there.”
Sensibly, McLean decided to move to pastures new and in the autumn of 1863 moved to the quiet hamlet of Appomattox Court House, some 120 miles to the south-west, on the other side of Virginia. If he thought he had escaped the ravages of the Civil War, he was sadly mistaken.
On 9th April 1802 a Confederate Colonel, Charles Marshall, rode into Appomattox Court House and upon encountering McLean, asked him if he could suggest somewhere to host a meeting between Union and Confederate commanders. As McLean’s first suggestion, a run-down, vacant house, didn’t pass muster, he was forced to offer up his own well-furnished abode. And so it was that on that very afternoon that General Lee offered the Union’s surrender to General Grant in McLean’s front room. By astonishing coincidence, McLean’s two properties had served as bookends to the American Civil War.
But McLean’s travails were not over. Union officers went on the rampage, carrying out the chairs and tables used by Grant and Lee, a stone inkstand, brass candlesticks and even his seven-year old daughter’s rag doll. His cane-bottomed chairs were torn apart, strips of upholstery were cut from his sofas and as recompense the soldiers threw some loose change on the floor. The crestfallen McLean observed, “And now, just look around you! Not a fence-rail is left on the place, the last guns trampled down all my crops, and Lee surrenders to Grant in my house.”
A year later McLean put the house, by now referred to the as the Surrender House, up for sale but there were no takers. He gave up on the house which was eventually sold at public auction in 1869 and he moved back to the Manassas area. He was one of the few Virginians given a position in the post-bellum administration, working for the Internal Revenue Service, and voted for his temporary house guest, Grant, in the 1872 election. But as John Cleese might have said, don’t mention the war.
