Martin Fone's Blog, page 266
March 29, 2018
Some People Are So Poor All They Have Is Money
Losing my religion
I’ve seen the future and it’s a golf ball.
“Imagine there’s no countries/ It isn’t hard to do/ Nothing to kill or die for/ And no religion too/ Imagine all the people/ Living life in peace.”
I’ve always been mildly irritated by John Lennon’s tiresome, idealistic nonsense but about ten kilometres north of Pondicherry in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu is to be found a curious and rather disturbing manifestation of the chanteur’s vision. Auroville, the city of the dawn, actually predates the song by some three years, and was founded on 28th February 1968 when a crowd of 5,000 including representatives of 124 countries bearing gifts of soil assembled around a banyan tree.
During the inauguration ceremony, the soil was tipped into a lotus-shaped white marble urn, which sits in the centre of the golf ball aka the Matrimandir. The aim of the community is to be a universal town where people from all countries live in peace and harmony, rising above all creeds, politics and nationalities. Its purpose is to realise human unity.
It has been going for 50 years and has had oodles of money pumped into by the Indian government and various United Nations’ funds. The tenets by which the adherents abide, currently around 2,500 representing 49 countries, were established by the Mother.
It was impressive in an oddly cultish, 1960s sci-fi movie sort of way but it seemed to me that all they had done was swap established religions for a bizarre set of tenets. Disturbingly, there seemed little way out of the community for any children born there. Child abuse of the worst sort.
The Mother was a French woman, Mirra Alfassa, who became interested in spiritual development. When she visited Pondicherry in 1914 she met up with Sri Aurobindo who, whilst banged up the Brits for agitating on behalf of Indian independence, saw the light and devoted the rest of his life to yoga and inner meditation. A PhD thesis can be written on which was the worst outcome.
Anyway, these two set up an ashram in Pondicherry – we visited it, as you do – and the very profound sense of calm there was only disturbed by the ring of the cash register and the swipe of the credit card machine.
The Mother was a prolific writer and her books, a mix of the bleedin’ obvious and the bonkers, seem to sell like hot chapatis and fuel this very obvious money-making machine. But, fair play to them, they saw a gap in the market and went for it.
If I felt the need to buy a golden ticket to ensure my admission through the pearly gates, I’m not sure I would have thrown my rupees at the grotto which graces the rear of the grounds of the peaceful church that is St Mary’s on the banks of the backwater at Champakulam in Kerala, standing on the site of one of the seven churches that St Thomas is reputed to have founded in 427 CE.
It is hard to describe how truly grotesque it is with its blue boulders that look as though they have been made out of fibre glass. It is modelled on the grotto at Lourdes, I’m told. The religious icons housed in it draw quite a crowd of devotees each day.
If I was St Peter, I would have a list of the subscribers to the grotto at the ready and if any of them had the audacity to show their face, I would direct them downstairs.
There is only so much one can take, after all.
March 28, 2018
Everything Is Possible For An Eccentric, Especially When He Is English – Part Eighteen
William Beckford (1760 – 1844)
Whether William Beckford was truly an eccentric or just behaved in a way that was untypical of his time – but perhaps that is a definition of eccentricity – is a matter for debate. A modern biographer wrote of him; “he was as much a martyr as Wilde, and almost certainly a more interesting and civilised man” while Lord Byron called him “the Great Apostle of Pederasty.” Sex was at the heart of the scandal which engulfed Beckford, having been caught in 1784, at least according to the story promulgated by his paramour’s uncle, “whipping Courtenay in some posture or another.”
Married at the time and bisexual if not primarily homosexual, Beckford tried to see out the furore. Although he was never charged – Courtenay was a minor at the time and George III not only refused Beckford’s application for a peerage but wished that he could be hanged – he eventually went into exile, spending most of the next decade in Portugal before returning to Blighty. It was in Portugal that he wrote the extraordinary History of the Caliph Vathek, published in 1786, in which the Caliph is satiated with sensual pleasures and builds a tower so he can penetrate the forbidden secrets of heaven itself – a blueprint for the rest of his life.
The primary source, though, of Beckford’s troubles was his fabulous wealth, which he inherited at the age of ten upon the death of his father, whose sugar plantations and other interests provided his son with an annual income of around £100,000. Whilst this funded a splendid education – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was briefly his piano tutor – it meant he could spend with gay abandon. Like many of his class Beckford was a collector of art but eschewed the classical marbles that were the rage, concentrating on Italian quattrocento paintings and exotic objets d’art or, as William Hazlitt rather sniffily put it, “idle rarities and curiosities or mechanical skill.” Beckford was notorious for compulsive purchases and just as readily selling pieces only to often buy them again at vastly inflated prices.
The other money pit was the transformation of Fonthill Abbey into a gothic cathedral-like structure, the impetus for the building work being Beckford’s acquisition of the library of Edward Gibbons and the need for somewhere to put his ever-growing collection of art. With the assistance of architect James Wyatt he built an enormous tower which stood 300 feet tall and had four bedrooms some 120 feet off the ground. Although it was far from complete Beckford organised a grand opening party in 1800 and whilst most of respectable society shunned the event, Lord Nelson and Emma Hamilton attended.
Beckford’s lifestyle and his collection of fey attendants, including a dwarf who guarded the38 feet tall doors at the entrance, excited comment and rumours about homosexual orgies and practices. His neighbour, Sir Richard Hoare from Stourhead, asked for a tour in 1806, an act which so scandalised the neighbourhood that Hoare was forced to apologise for his actions and never saw Beckford again.
By 1822 Beckford was in debt and put the Abbey and his art collection up for sale, an event which excited much excitement. John Farquhar, who had made his fortune selling gunpowder in India, bought it for £330,000 and sold off much of the art collection, part of which the irrepressible Beckford, back in funds again, bought once more. By this time he had moved, complete with entourage to Bath, buying 20, Lansdowne Crescent and 1, Lansdowne Place West which he connected by building an archway and in 1836 acquired nos 18 and 19, the former he left empty to ensure peace and quiet. When he died in 1844, his assets amounted to just £80,000.
His tower at Fonthill Abbey also had an unhappy ending. It was so badly built and unstable, due to inadequate foundations, that it collapsed five times, Beckford rebuilding it each time, but then on 21st December 1825 it fell down for the final time, the new owners not bothering to reassemble it and so very little of his folly remains today.
March 26, 2018
You’re Having A Laugh – Part Ten
The Great Lunar hoax of 1835
The moon has always held a certain fascination. After all, it is the nearest heavenly body to planet Earth and on a clear night, not that we have too many here in Blighty, you can easily see its contours and shades of light and dark. The more fanciful amongst us speculate whether there may be life lurking in amongst the craters. It was this stream of thought that the New York Sun tapped into with its elaborate lunar hoax.
It all began with a discrete announcement on page two of the edition for 21st August in which the paper announced that it had got its hands on some reports, from a publisher in Edinburgh, of some astronomical discoveries which the eminent scientist, Sir John Herschel, had made whilst out in South Africa. The full details were to be provided exclusively in the paper over six days the following week. And so it was. The articles ran to around 17,000 words in total and were supposed to have been based on articles that had appeared in the Edinburgh Courant which had taken the account from the Edinburgh Journal of Science.
Of course, to be able to inspect the moon so closely and with such clarity, Herschel would have needed a telescope far more powerful than those currently deployed. So the first article, published on Monday 24th August, went into great detail about Herschel’s immense telescope – it was said to be 24 feet in diameter – built on new principles and so powerful that it could be used to study “even the entomology of the moon, in case she contained insects upon her surface.”
Having established the fact that Herschel had the means to explore the surface of the moon in minute detail, the article published on the Tuesday recounted the moment on 10th January 1835 when the scientist first trained his telescope on to it. He wasn’t disappointed finding rocks “profusely covered with a dark flower” and then, more sensationally, herds of brown quadrupeds, a goat and “a strange amphibious creature, of a spherical form, which rolled with great velocity across the pebbly beach.” Day three brought even more discoveries – a wide variety of flora and fauna, including bipedal beavers which lived in huts “constructed better and higher than those of many tribes of human savages.” Naturally, they had fire.
Day four revealed the discovery of bat-like humans, dubbed Vespertilio-homo, whose appearance was a “slight improvement upon that of a large orang outing.” They spent their time conversing and copulating in the open. In the fifth extract the discovery of a mysterious abandoned temple was announced and the cliff-hanger for the weekend was what did it all mean. The answer was revealed in the sixth and final extract – a superior version of Vespertilio-homo who lived near the temple, spending their time collecting fruit, flying, bathing and conversing in a “universal state of amity.”
The discoveries caused a stir. When Herschel heard about them – he was alive and blissfully unaware that his name had been taken in vain – he was naturally pissed, initially commenting “it is a most extraordinary affair! Pray, what does it mean?” and later complaining “I have been pestered from all quarters with that ridiculous hoax about the Moon — In English French Italian & German!!” The story was quickly declared a hoax by the Journal of Commerce which pointed out, amongst other things, that the Edinburgh Journal of Science did not exist and named the perpetrator as one of the Sun’s staff, Richard Adams Locke. More detailed exposes appeared in the New York Herald.
But the genie was out of the bottle and throughout the rest of the 19th century, the moon hoax was the gold standard against which anything suspicious was measured. In Van Kempelen and His Discovery, Edgar Allan Poe used the term moon hoaxy. Quite what Locke was hoping to achieve by such an elaborate and time-consuming hoax has been lost in history.
March 25, 2018
Flag Of The Week
You would have thought that by now our betters would have realised the perils of having the hoi polloi comment on matters of high importance.
But if this story from Estonia I stumbled across this week is anything to go by, the lesson has not sunk in.
A new municipality, Kanepi, has been created out of what were formerly three councils in the south-eastern part of the country and to celebrate the administrative and financial efficiencies that were doubtless to be achieved, the council decided to waste some money on a referendum to design a new logo and flag.
The good folk of Kanepi, all 15,000 of them, decided on a bold green design which can only be described as looking like a cannabis leaf. Hardly surprising as kanep is Estonian for hash.
The Council did have the sense to establish the referendum as a consultative exercise – David Cameron, take note – but the people have spoken. In a smoke-filled room the Council have decided that they will stick with it but in a more stylised form.
We will see what transpires.
March 23, 2018
What Is The Origin Of (172)?…
Like billy-o
This phrase is, somewhat quaintly, used as a comparator of the most extreme type. This exchange from the fifth series of Downton Abbey aptly illustrates its usage; “Lord Grantham – But darling, you don’t want to rush into anything.” Rose: “But I do. I want to rush in like billy-o.” Perhaps it illustrates a paucity of vocabulary on the part of the speaker or reflects that there isn’t a word that can reflect the extent of the experience.
But what does billy-o mean and where did it come from? There is a bewildering array of explanations to pick our way through. Perhaps the most beguiling is that it is a reference to the hell-fire and brimstone preacher, Joseph Billio, who turned up in the Essex town of Maldon in 1696, built a chapel in Market Hill and treated the (un)lucky residents to passionate and lengthy sermons each week. There is even a plaque in the town claiming that the preacher gave his name to the phrase like billio.
The problem with accepting this story at face value is that the earliest recorded usage of the phrase in print is some two centuries later. The Fort Wayne Daily Gazette, in March 1882, described some unfortunate was described as “lay[ing] on his side for about two hours, roaring like billy-hoo with the pain, as weak as a mouse.” Leaving aside the slight variation in the spelling – and bear in mind the Essex origin requires the word to be spelt as the preacher’s surname was – the sense is as we would use it today. In the edition of 9th August 1885 of the Referee we have, perhaps, the earliest example of something more analogous to the modern spelling; “shure it’ll rain like billy-oh.” The use of shure adds another intriguing element to the story – perhaps it is Irish in origin.
As well as the fulsome preacher, another candidate to be proclaimed the progenitor of the phrase is an Italian soldier and contemporary of Garibaldi, Lieutenant Nino Bixio. He is said to have charged into battle exhorting his troops to fight like Bixio. This theory requires us to accept that the English mangled the Italian’s name – there are many examples where words of foreign origin are not assimilated into English unscathed – and chose to use it instead of some more obvious home-grown candidates such as the Puffing Billy, an early steam engine whose progress, stately by modern standards, would have been shockingly daring in contemporary terms, or William the Third, the victor of the Battle of the Boyne, who was known as Good King Billy.
The clue to the phrase’s origin surely lies in a piece of doggerel printed by the Bismarck Tribune in September 1883; “and the people cheered him like billy-be dang”. The phrase looks like a corruption of Billy-be-damned which appeared in Robert Burt’s novel, The Scourge of the Ocean, published in 1837; “They knocked off their deviltries, and became all on a sudden as sanctified as Billy Be-damned.” We may well be in the territory of minced oaths – swear words which were modified to avoid blasphemy.
The phrase like the devil dates back to Elizabethan times and the goat has often been associated with the devil. A male goat is colloquially known as a billy. Perhaps our phrase is just an oath where a goat has been substituted for the devil. This clearly is what is happening with billy-be-damned and another odd phrase, like billy hell. By the 20th century the phrase was part of the vernacular. Examples include “And they fight? Like billy-o” from W J Locke’s Fortunate Youth (1914) and “The Holy Rollers were going at it like billy-oh” from the Observer of 1927 – pretty much the era that the Downton dialogue was replicating.
March 21, 2018
Book Corner – March 2018 (2)
The Spy Who Came In From The Cold – John Le Carre
When I was young, I fondly imagined myself as being recruited as a spy. I waited in vain to be approached by one of the dons at Cambridge to meet some interesting chaps who had an unusual proposal for me. I scoured the small ads in the Telegraph for an intriguing opportunity but all to no avail. With my mild lapses into absent-mindedness I thought I would be able to carry off sitting on a park bench in St James’ Park and leaving behind a briefcase with aplomb. Perhaps I viewed espionage more through the rose-tinted spectacles of Ian Fleming than the cynical, bottle-thick lenses of Le Carre.
I might well have been thankful for my lucky escape if I had read Le Carre’s third novel, published in 1963, earlier than I had. The world of espionage portrayed here is sordid, treacherous and downright dangerous. As the protagonist, Alec Leamas, states in probably the most quoted passage in the book, “What do you think spies are: priests, saints, martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors, too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.” Best out of it, methinks.
The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (TSWCIFTC) is an unremittingly dark, cynical tale of a triple-bluff perpetrated by the clever johnnies of the Circus – George Smiley et all – against their equivalents in communist East Germany, as was. As the tale unfolds, Leamas realises that instead of being the tool of vengeance as he thought when he signed up for the escapade he is really a powerless pawn in an even greater and more complex game. Part of Le Carre’s mastery is the way he spins the story so that the realisation of what really is happening dawns on the reader at the same time as the pfenning drops for Leamas.
The title of the book is an indication of the complexities that are at play in the novel. On one level, it can be read as the final operation before a veteran is pulled out of his life of deceit and deception. But for Leamas, there is another side to the story. His liaison with the naive, tragically-doomed Liz Gold sees him developing an emotional, human side to his character. He has a crucial decision to make atop the Berlin Wall and the heart overcomes the reflexes of a professional spy. In this sense, Leamas has come out of the emotional cold.
The portrayal of Liz Gold is heartless. She is innocently sucked into something that she doesn’t understand and cannot control. She is played mercilessly by the British to achieve the result that Smiley, but not Leamas, was hoping to get. And it is not difficult to see that her experiences of life behind the Iron Curtain were designed to open the eyes of those who considered life in a Communist state to be a kind of nirvana.
It is hard to write about TSWCIFTC without giving the game away, something even the most amateur practitioner of espionage should avoid. Suffice it to say, if you chose only to read one spy story, you should choose this one. It is a masterpiece, a page-turner, thought-provoking – a work of a writer at the top of his game.
March 19, 2018
Double Your Money – Part Twenty Nine
Ivar Kreuger (1880 – 1932)
When things get a bit sticky for businessmen, there is a tremendous temptation to cook the books in an attempt to trade out of their difficulties. The chef par excellence or, as J K Galbraith described him, “the Leonardo of larcenists”, was Swedish born businessman, Ivar Kreuger, who monopolised at first the Swedish safety match business and then, at his height, controlled about 75% of the world’s match production and retail business. These days safety matches are hardly used but in the early part of the 20th century they were essential for lighting lamps, stoves and the like as well as igniting the almost ubiquitous cigarettes and other smoking materials.
Although an engineer by trade and co-founding Kreuger & Toll Byggnads AB, which specialised in developing and promoting new building techniques, in 1911 he turned his attention to his family’s ailing match factories. Rolling them up into his own firm and introducing cost and production efficiencies as well as controlling the supply of the natural resources needed to manufacture them, Kreuger soon cornered the market. He improved the quality of the matches and sold them at a lower price than his competitors who had no option but to go to him, cap in hand, to sell their businesses to them.
But he did not stop there – world domination was his aim. To fund his ambitious expansion plans, Kreuger raised money through issuing shares and bonds. With a sizeable war chest at his disposal and governments on their knees trying to fund reconstruction work after the ravages of the First World War, Kreuger was able to offer loans. In return he demanded that they granted him a monopoly in the production and sale of matches in their countries. At the height of his power, Kreuger owned some 200 companies with interests in such diverse industries as forestry in Northern Sweden, where he had a monopoly, mines, telephone companies, ball-bearing manufacturers and banks such as Deutsche Unionsbank and Union de Banques a Paris.
The more monopolies he acquired, the more attractive his company became to investors. Kreuger began to live an extravagant lifestyle, buying art, houses and attracting lovers by the score. Everything in the garden seemed rosy but underneath the surface he was stoking up enormous problems. The continuous programme of expansion was designed to deflect attention from the true state of his finances. Promising high dividends to make his companies more attractive, the profits generated from these businesses were insufficient to meet his obligations, particularly as he was often forced to pay high levels of interest to access funds.
The answer to these problems, of course, was to indulge in a spot of financial engineering. He would sell off the shares of every company he acquired to inflate the balance sheet whilst, at the same time, exaggerating the profitability of his companies to secure more credit. But to secure the level of credit he needed and to offset the demands of dividend payments and maturing debt, he needed more and more money. In despair, Kreuger turned to highly risky speculative deals and when these failed, even forged millions in Italian bonds which his obliging accountants included in the tally of his company’s assets.
Although Kreuger survived the Wall Street crash, what did for him was the ensuing credit squeeze. Deprived of the credit needed to fund his activities and maintain investor confidence, the only way out for Kreuger was to shoot himself. After his death, the authorities found two holes – one in his chest from the bullet with which he killed himself and the other, some $250 million, in his company’s accounts.
Although his latter-day activities smacked of a Ponzi sceme, Krueger did have a genuine business underpinning it all. He just got greedy.
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March 18, 2018
March 16, 2018
What Is The Origin Of (171)?…
Understrapper
Such is the dynamism of our native tongue that words come in and out of fashion. One such word which is languishing in undeserved obscurity is understrapper which is a synonym for an underling, a subordinate, someone who takes orders. The prefix, under, is straightforward enough to understand and conveys the sense of inferiority of status and rank. What is of more interest is the second part of the word, strapper. The origin of that part of our word can be seen in the now obsolete verb, to strap, which meant to work tirelessly and energetically. The noun strapper conveyed this sense to describe a labourer or someone who groomed horses. So someone who was answerable to someone engaged in menial tasks was truly the lowest of the low.
The one word we still use in everyday speech from this root is strapping which we use to describe someone who is large, robust, and muscular. It is almost exclusively reserved as an adjective to describe younger people of both sexes but when it first emerged in the middle of the 17th century, it was used exclusively to describe young women. In George Thornley’s translation of Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, from 1657, we find; “And, now and then, one of the bolder strapping girles would catch him in her arms, and kisse him.”
By the start of the 18th century understrapper was firmly established as a description of someone performing a menial task. The satirist, Thomas Brown, produced a book of hoax letters, purportedly written by people who had recently died, called Letters from the Dead to the Living, published in 1702. Brown imagined his fellow satirist, Joseph Haines, to have written; “and as I shall have upon occasion now and then for some Understrapper to draw teeth for me, or to be my Toad-eater upon the stage, if you will accept so mean an Employment … I’ll give you Meat, Drink, Washing, and Lodging, and Four Marks per annum.”
In 1742 Charles Knight in his Popular History of England, attributed to Jonathan Swift this sentence; “I have put an understrapper upon writing a twopenny pamphlet..” – clearly the job was not worthy of one of our finest satirists. Francis Plowden wrote in his History of Ireland from its Union with Great Britain in 1811, “at the vulgar insistence of some secretary’s secretary’s secretary, some understrpper’s understrapper’s understrapper…” giving little room for doubt as to where that individual featured in the hierarchy.
Thomas Hardy used the word in a rather contrived simile in his novel of triangular love, A Pair of Blue Eyes, published in 1873; “said Stephen, rather en l‘sir and confused with the kind of confusion that assails an understrapper when he has been enlarged by accident to the dimensions of a superior, and is somewhat rudely pared down to his original size.” Alas, by the 21st century, the word had almost disappeared from sight.
A variant, also obsolete, was under-spur-leather, the spur-leather being a strap securing a spur to a rider’s foot, a vivid description of the lowliness of someone so described. It was contemporaneous with understrapper, appearing in John Dennis’ Remarks upon Mr Pope’s Translation of Homer of 1717; “who from an under-spur-leather to the Law, is become an understrapper to the Playhouse..”
The restoration of either or both to our modern-day language would be welcome, methinks.
March 15, 2018
Gin o’Clock – Part Thirty Six
The ginaissance shows no signs of running out of steam. The UK now produces some 500 gins and, according to the tax man – and he should know – there are now 273 distilleries producing hooch. The surge in gin production has given rise to a new term, ginterpreneur, to describe those individuals who are beavering away mixing botanicals to base spirit in the hope of finding the latest elixir to take the market by storm.
Bombay Sapphire in 1988 was the first to try to do something different with gin, bottling the spirit in a distinctive blue bottle and making a great play in detailing the botanicals that went into the mix and their provenance. With bottles of so-called premium gin retailing at prices upwards of £30 a time, it is not unreasonable for the consumer to be told what has gone into it and where it has come from. Of course, you cannot judge the taste by the listing of the ingredients but you can get a sense of what it may be like, whether it is going to have a classic flavour, going to be spicy or have a more citrusy feel.
There is also a definite trend towards what may be termed field to bottle, where producers are sourcing ingredients from their own locality. This is a particularly so with the ever-increasing number of Scottish gins and perhaps the example par excellence is the gins coming from the Chase distillery where the base spirit is made from apples and potatoes grown in the orchards and fields at the farm.
Another classic example is our featured gin, Waddesdon Housekeeper’s Rhubarb Gin, which has only recently hit the market in September 2017 and is distilled in very small batches, the first of which was only 96 bottles. It is difficult to get hold of but Santa rather kindly delivered me a bottle to enjoy. The eponymous housekeeper was a certain Mrs Boxall who, amongst her other duties, was responsible for making liqueurs from the fruit grown on the Waddesdon estate, the weekend retreat of the Rothschild family and now bequeathed to the National Trust. One of her most successful liqueurs was Rhubarb gin and it is her recipe that the estate is following some 117 years later.
The starting point, unsurprisingly, is rhubarb grown in the house’s Eythorpe garden, which is carefully washed to remove any impurities as well as any green sinewy parts and dead flowers, and then chopped up into one-inch squares to leave mainly pink rhubarb, full of those vital Anthocyanins which give it its distinctive colouration. About 450 grams of rhubarb goes into each bottle. The rhubarb is then put into a base spirit comprising of 48% ABV London dry gin and left to macerate for around 4 to 5 weeks before the resultant liquid is blended with a sugar solution. The finished article has an ABV of 21.5% and for those who are sugar conscious contains around 130 grams of sugar per litre.
The bottle is delightfully bell-shaped with an artificial cork stopper. On removing the stopper, there is a delightful aroma of rhubarb. To the taste it is smooth and very rhubarby. I tried it neat and then with a tonic. The labelling on the bottle suggests that it is served with ginger beer – I have not tried that – or with Prosecco. It is a very refreshing drink and would go down a treat with a slug of ice on a warm summer’s evening. The bonus is that its low alcoholic content means you can sup a lot of it before it catches up on you.
It is worth seeking out.
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