Martin Fone's Blog, page 270
February 7, 2018
Book Corner – February 2018 (1)
Capital Crimes – London Mysteries – edited by Martin Edwards
Perhaps Sherlock Holmes was right after all. In The Adventure of the Copper Beeches Conan Doyle’s greatest fictional creation avers that “the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.” The reason – “The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.” It may be that this is why I found Edwards’ collection of stories from the 1890s to 1940s centred on London less satisfying that its countryside companion.
As someone who commuted regularly on the London underground, John Oxenham’s A Mystery of the Underground struck a contemporary and disturbing chord. It tells of a stalker who terrorises the District line using made up newspaper stories. So disturbing was the story when it was first published that passenger numbers on the line slumped in 1897. The book opens with a Conan Doyle story but one that doesn’t feature the famous resident of 221b Baker Street. The Case of Lady Sannox is a macabre story of revenge in which an arrogant surgeon undertakes one last procedure before a secret assignation with his paramour. The story ends with a horrific twist.
H C Bailey’s The Little House also has a modern twist. The detective, Reggie Fortune, is called upon to investigate what seems to be a simple case of a missing kitten but leads to him unearthing a disturbing case of child cruelty. The Tea Leaf by Robert Eustace and Edgar Jepson is a classic example of a locked room mystery. Two men enter a Turkish bath, argue loudly but only one leaves alive. The case centres on how the murder was committed and the solution is intriguing, if not ingenious.
But for every good story, there is one that defies belief. The Finchley Puzzle by Richard Marsh features an amateur sleuth, Judith Lee, who can lip read. This ability has earned her the enmity of London’s criminal fraternity and they try to do away with her using a box of poisoned chocolates. And poisoned confectionary features in Anthony Berkeley’s The Avenging Chance. R Austin Freeman’s Magic Casket taps into the threat of the yellow peril as Japanese criminals harass an elderly woman while J S Fletcher’s The Magician of Cannon Street is just plain daft.
Still, in a collection of 17 stories which tries to represent fairly the diversity of crime writing using the metropolis as its focal point, there is enough good material to keep the reader pleasantly entertained. I particularly enjoyed Ethel Lina White’s The Wheel Spins upon which Alfred Hitchcock based his film, The Lady Vanishes, and The Hands of Mr Ottermole by Thomas Burke which builds up to a shocking finale.
It is well worth a read but follow Sherlock’s advice – seek out the countryside first.
February 5, 2018
Quacks Pretend To Cure Other Men’s Disorders But Rarely Find A Cure For Their Own – Part Sixty Four
Cigares de Joy
Smoking is rather frowned upon these days and with good reason, given its linkage with cancer, strokes, heart attacks and the like. Cigarette packets are decorated with lurid pictures of some of the problems consuming tobacco cause and smokers with a penchant for a spot of gallows humour take delight in trying to collect the full series of pictures. I suppose they make a useful self-diagnostic kit.
That being the case, it seems somewhat strange to the modern eye that smoking some form of cigarette could be healthy, let alone being helpful to asthmatics but such were the claims for the delightfully named Cigares de Joy. The advert showed a rather vacant-looking young woman, Joy perhaps but not personified, puffing away at a cigarette. The copy advised the reader that said cigarettes “afford immediate relief in cases of asthma, wheezing and winter cough and a little perseverance will affect a permanent cure.” What not to like?
Naturally, the Cigares de Joy were “universally recommended by the most eminent physicians and medical authors” and were so safe to use that you could liberally dispense them to the weaker members of your family or, as the advertising copy claimed, “agreeable to use, certain in their effects, and harmless in their action, they may be safely smoked by ladies and children.” A box of 35 reefers would set you back half a crown and were available from most chemists and stores. Alternatively, you could send your money to Wilcox & Co of 239, Oxford Street in London who would dispatch them to you pronto, without passing on the postal charge.
The Cigares de Joy were described in the Medical Times and Gazette of 1875 as “very useful little agents for inhaling the smoke of stramonium.” So what was stramonium? To give it its full name, Datura stramonium is a member of the nightshade family and was known by a variety of names in England including jimsonweed, Devil’s snare, the wonderful Hell’s bells and Thornapple, to name but a few. The Elizabethan herbalist, John Gerard, was an enthusiastic exponent of Thornapple, writing in his Herball of 1597, “the juice of the Thornapple, boiled with hog’s grease, cureth all inflammators whatsoever, all manner of burnings and scaldings, as well of fire, water, boiling lead, gunpowder, as that which comes by lightning and that in very short time, as myself found in daily practice, to my great credit and profit.”
In Ayuverdic medicine, stramonium was used to deal with the symptoms of asthma, the leaves being smoked in a cigarette or a pipe. It is thought that the practice was introduced into Europe by the Physician General of the East India Company, James Anderson, towards the end of the 18th century. So there would seem be some medical provenance for the efficacy of the Cigares de Joy.
There was one significant downside about the use of stramonium. It was used in certain parts of the world as an analgesic in surgery or for the setting of bones and was known to be a powerful hallucinogen and deliriant, producing intense visions. Indeed, the tropane alkaloids that it contained were fatally toxic in doses only slightly higher than would be used for medicinal purposes. If you smoked too many of the Cigares in too short a time, you would feel high and run the risk of causing yourself harm at best or killing yourself at worst.
They were still available to buy shortly after the end of the Second World War. Unlike many of the cures we have seen, there is a plausible case for arguing that the Cigares de Joy did some good, in moderation, and ingesting was the quickest way of getting the drug into your lungs. But to modern sensibilities, it all seems a bit odd.
February 4, 2018
Sporting Event Of The Week (9)
Last Sunday saw what to many observers is the culmination of the Australia Day celebrations – the Tuna Tossing World Championships held at the Tunarama Festival in Port Lincoln in South Australia.
Fifty contestants, thirty men and twenty women drawn from locals and tourists, battled it out for the crown and the prize pot of a thousand Aussie dollars. A variety of styles were deployed but the most successful seemed to be one that was akin to hurling a discus. Contestants had to throw the tuna as far as they could whilst remaining inside a circle.
Local, Estie Mayer-Stander, won the women’s event with a throw of 9.6 metres and Levi Proude proudly won the men’s competition hurling his fish an impressive 18.9 metres. Proude’s throw, though, was a long way short of the all-time record of 37.23 metres, recorded by former Olympic hammer thrower, Sean Carlin.
The idea for the competition came from watching dock workers hurl fish from the decks of boats moored in the harbour and from 1979 until fairly recently real tuna, albeit dead, were used. These days the fish are rubber with a string attached to the tail to give the contestants a better grip.
February 3, 2018
Social Media Tool Of The Week
I have to admit it, I don’t rely understand social meejah. I have the obligatory Facebook and Twitter accounts but the number of my followers remains steadfastly at a level that they were when I pretty much set up the wretched things.
Fans of these forms of digitised social interaction seem fixated on statistics, particularly on numbers of followers and or so-called friends. They will go to enormous lengths to boost them, thus increasing the chances of their latest inanities trending, as I think the term is. The thinking is that success begets success and the more followers you have the more likely your fan club is to grow exponentially.
One company called Devumi, I read this week, buys and sells fake followers so that those who subscribe to their services appear to be more influential than they really are. For just $17 you can generate a thousand followers and they claim to have at least 3.5 million automated accounts to offer.
If you are going to use them, you had better move sharpish. Allegations have surfaced that this is a fraud, that their address in Manhattan is a fake and that the founder’s LinkedIn career summary is somewhat questionable. The New York prosecutor is investigating Devumi as I write.
It was only in November that Facebook revealed that as many as 60 million of its accounts are generated by automated bots. Not all is at it seems in the digital world, it would appear.
And there was me thinking that it was going to be the brilliance of my apercus that would see my numbers soaring into the stratosphere. A man can dream!
February 2, 2018
What Is The Origin Of (165)?…
Toffee-nosed
While we are on the subject of pejorative terms for our social superiors, we may as well look at toffee-nosed. It means snobbish, supercilious or stuck-up, never a good look. From an etymological standpoint, it has nothing to do with toffee. In fact, the derivation is from tuft via toff.
Our voyage of discovery starts among the dreaming spires of Oxford University. During the 18th and 19th centuries sons of the landed aristocracy were allowed to wear ornamental gold tassels on their mortar boards. Very fetching they must have looked too. These were known as tufts and, by extension, the wearers were known as tufts. By the 1870s wearing tufts went out of fashion, although there were some who tried to cling on to the tradition. The Westmoreland Gazette reported in March 1894 that “Lord Rosebery was one of the last undergraduates of Christ Church who wore the gold tassel, known by the name of tuft.” And the tradition was sufficiently well-known amongst the hoi polloi for WS Gilbert to lampoon the fashion in Princess Ida, written in 1884; “you’ll find no tufts/ to mark nobility, except such tufts/ as indicate nobility of brain.”
At some point during the early to middle 19th century the noun tuft, used to describe these scions of nobility, morphed into toff, almost certainly via toft. Quite how, no one knows. What seems clear, though, was that it was a term used by the lower orders to describe stylishly or fashionably dressed men. Henry Mayhew, in his London Labour and the London Poor, published in 1851, reported, “if it’s a lady and gentleman, then we cries “A toff and a doll”.” The adjectival form, toffy, soon followed and through etymological ignorance this was transformed into toffee, to trick the unwary in later years into thinking that it has something to do with the sugary brown sweet that plays havoc with your fillings.
The phrase toffee-nosed, though, emerged during the First World War as a description of officers who adopted a superior air. Perhaps the most graphic illustration of its usage is from TE Lawrence’s account of war-time life, The Mint, published in 1922 under the pseudonym of JH Ross. There he wrote, “China got into disgrace there. ‘I wasn’t going to f**k about for those toffy-nosed buggers, so I got back after f**king twelve, and they shoved me on the fizzer!” The ever useful Notes and Queries defined in an article entitled English Army Slang as Used in the Great War on 10th December 1921 toffee-nosed as stuck up, as did Fraser and Gibbons in their 1925 book, Soldier and Sailor Words.
Stuck-up had a longer legacy, appearing in Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby, published in 1839. Mrs Squeers describes the eponymous hero to her husband thus; “he’s a nasty stuck-up monkey, that’s what I consider him.” The idea behind the image of stuck-up is that of haughtiness, being superior to others, perhaps even to avoid the whiff of the great unwashed. This is the sense of nosed in our phrase.
Before we leave this subject completely, for collectors of obsolete but rather splendid words, I leave you with tufthunter. This was a noun used to describe those who fawned before and sucked up to the aforementioned tufts. Thackeray was spot on when he wrote of one, a Mr Brandon, in Shabby Genteel Story, published in 1840; “Mr Brandon was a tufthunter of the genteel sort; his pride being quite as slavish, and his haughtiness as mean and cringing, in fact, as poor Mrs. Gann’s stupid wonder and respect for all the persons whose names are written with titles before them.”
February 1, 2018
The Most Wonderful Plant In The World
Charles Darwin may have gone a bit overboard in his praise but there is something deeply fascinating about a Venus flytrap, unless of course you are an insect. Dionaea muscipula, to give it is botanical name, lures flies and spiders on to its leaves and a complex system of tiny hairs springs its trap shut. The poor creature is then slowly digested. Apparently the Venus flytrap is a bit fussy and will only start the digesting process if there have been half a dozen triggers of the trap mechanism. After all, it doesn’t want to waste energy.
I share Darwin’s enthusiasm and have long thought that a flytrap might be fun to have. If it does its job properly then there should be a marked reduction in the number of insects that seem to delight in flying around the inner chambers of Blogger Towers. So during a recent trip to the local Garden Centre I couldn’t resist the siren call that was a lurid blue card inviting me, courtesy of Fun Seeds, to grow my own Venus Flytrap. It was clearly aimed at children – although not the under-fives because of small parts – but now that I have reached grandfather status, albeit vicariously, I think I can indulge myself from time to time in reverting to my former childlike state.
The card contained a small red pot, a desiccated piece of Sphagnum moss, a packet of infinitesimally small black seeds, and some rudimentary instructions. The starting point was to dunk the moss into water but not any old water would do. It had to be rain water or, failing that, distilled or filtered. Fortunately, we have buckets of rain water assiduously collected during the not infrequent downpours we have experienced over the winter. As soon as the moss tablet hit the water, it began to swell and break up. After a while I scooped up the moss, squeezed it to remove most of the surplus water and put it into the red plastic pot.
The next stage of the operation was to sprinkle the seeds on to the moss. The instructions were very clear – they weren’t to be buried but had to rest in the moss. It suggested the use of a spoon to achieve the desired results although I found the seeds just stuck to the spoon. My fingers seemed to do the trick.
The pot was then placed on a saucer which contained a small amount of water – rain water (natch) – to keep the moss moist. Then I placed a plastic bag over the pot and placed it on the windowsill of my study.
Frustratingly, it will take the seeds up to 12 weeks to germinate and three years for a fully developed flytrap to grow so I will have to exercise a modicum of patience and .
I will keep you posted on progress.
January 31, 2018
I Predict A Riot – Part Thirty
The Richmond Women’s Bread Riot of 1863
Fortunately, I have not experienced wartime conditions and their concomitant deprivations (yet) but it is easy to understand how things can get desperate. Take Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy in the American Civil War.
The population had tripled in pretty short order as civilians and soldiers took refuge there. The Union blockade meant that little in the way of imported foodstuffs was making its way to the capital. The problems were compounded by the fact that most of the menfolk who worked on the land were now fighting for the Confederate cause, farmland had been destroyed during the fighting and what food was available was used to feed the troops. The consequence of all this was that the cost of food increased tenfold from their pre-war levels.
In March 1863 the city was struck by a massive snowstorm which, when the snows melted, made the roads impassable, further exacerbating the logistics of feeding a population that was growing daily as a consequence of the influx of wounded soldiers. A call from the President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, for a day of fasting on March 27th went down like a lead balloon.
A group of women, led by Mary Jackson and Minerva Meredith, the latter described by Davis’ wife as “tall, daring, Amazonian-looking,” decided that enough was enough. They summoned a meeting of like-minded women at the Belvedere Hill Baptist Church on 1st April and decided to march on the Governor’s office to demand that he, John Letcher, do something to alleviate the food shortages. So the following day a group of some one hundred women, armed with axes, knives, and other assorted weaponry, assembled in front of the Governor’s office, shouting “Bread, bread” and “Bread or blood.”
Letcher came out and tried to pacify the crowd, to no avail. Instead, his words seem to have inflamed the situation and the women – by now their numbers had grown considerably to upwards of a thousand, broke into the government’s storehouses and neighbouring shops and took whatever they could lay their hands on. Although Letcher summoned the public guard, their numbers and resolution were insufficient to hold the crowd back. Order was eventually restored when the Confederate President, Davis, summoned some troops, and climbing on top of a wagon, threatened to order them to shoot, if the crowd didn’t disperse. He pulled out his watch, ostentatiously measuring the passage of time.
At first, it seemed as though the rioters would defy the President but as the fifth minute was beginning, they started to disperse and make their way home. Some 60 rioters, including Mary Jackson, were arrested and indicted on charges of rioting and theft.
Did the bread riots make any difference? There were no further civil disturbances in Richmond because the authorities increased the security around the city by positioning cannons at strategic points. But the authorities did redouble their efforts to improve the distribution of foodstuffs to the poorer residents. A case of carrots and sticks. Interestingly, the Confederates realised that news of the riots would have an adverse effect on the morale of their troops and did their best to suppress the story. However, you cannot keep a good story down and rumours of the disturbance gained a wider circulation, thanks to some Union prisoners who had been in the city at the time, and made the front page of the New York Times on 8th April. The civil war, of course, rumbled on for another couple of years.
January 29, 2018
Everything Is Possible For An Eccentric, Especially When He Is English – Part Sixteen
Louise Elisabeth de Meuron (1882 – 1980)
The Swiss get a pretty bad press. They are considered to be uber-boring, solid, reliable, conservative, up for a bit of crossbow practice every now and again and prone to exploit the economic vacuum caused by their bellicose neighbours. Not stupid but deadly dull. Seen in this light, perhaps being an eccentric in Switzerland is not a particularly challenging accomplishment. But by any nation’s standards Madame de Meuron, as Louise was known as, was up there with the best.
She was a member of the Swiss aristocracy, inheriting Amsoldingen castle from her father, Ludwig von Tscharner, and Rumligen Castle, which became her main residence in later years, from her mother, Anna von Wattenwyl. Added to that she owned a number of houses in the old part of Bern and her estate included some Alpine meadowland. But breeding and pots of money do not necessarily guarantee happiness. Louise’s parents refused her permission to marry the love of her life and she had to make do with her cousin, Frederic-Alphonse de Meuron, whom she married in 1905. The marriage ended in divorce in 1923, leaving Louise with a son and a daughter.
We are beginning to see a bit of a trend with eccentrics, namely that there is some traumatic event which prompts the descent into bizarre and unusual behaviour. In Louise’s case, it was the tragic death of her son in 1939 – he committed suicide. Thereafter, she cut what can only be described as a bit of a dash, wearing full mourning dress for the rest of her life including old-fashioned widow’s weeds and sporting a walking cane and a rather splendid, highly decorated ear-trumpet. When asked why she carried it, de Meuron retorted, “so that I hear only what I want to hear” – a privilege available only to the hard of hearing. The striking spectacle on the Bernese streets was completed by her ever—resent pack of Russian greyhounds.
Louise was conscious of her aristocratic breeding and considered that with it went a lot of privileges that the great unwashed could only aspire to. She was above those petty laws and customs which make life a trial for us. She would order her servants to park her car anywhere she wanted to. When an officer of the law had the audacity to suggest that it be moved, she would state in no uncertain terms, “that stays here.” When she deigned to grace the tram system with her presence, Louise would not entertain buying a ticket. After all, she explained, “I was here before the tram.”
There was one occasion, though, where she wasn’t quite able to rise above the law. Louise caught a vagrant woman who had the audacity to steal some fruit from the grounds of her castle and taking matters into her own hands, locked the unfortunate woman in the coach house for a couple of days. Louise was up before the beak on a charge of false imprisonment but in her defence, produced a document dating from the Middle Ages which gave owners of Rumligen Castle the right to administer justice for petty misdemeanours. She was let off with a small fine and a lecture about modern justice and legal practices.
Heaven help you if you tried to sit in her church pew. One farmer had the audacity to do this. Louise put him straight by saying, “Up in heaven we will all be equal, but in the meantime down here, we’ll have some discipline.” Quite. And she had a rather disarming habit of asking total strangers, “are you someone or do you get a salary?” By Swiss standards, as I say, she was quite an odd ball.
January 28, 2018
Culinary Tip Of The Week
One of my tasks in the kitchen is to peel the spuds and prepare them for roasting. I cut each potato into half and then half again. They are then popped in the oven and eventually they become crispy.
But according to some hospitality students from the University of Essex’s Edge Hotel School I’m doing it all wrong. In conjunction with the mathematics department at Samuel Whitbread school, they set about finding the formula for the perfect roast potato, I read this week.
It’s all about maximising the potato’s surface area. Their research found that the optimal way to prepare the spud was to cut it lengthwise and then cut each half at an angle, creating a point of approximately 30 degrees. This increases the surface area exposed to the oven by 65%, resulting in a crispier and more delicious roast potato.
I’m happy to pass this on. I will be interested to see what difference it makes.
January 27, 2018
Projectile Of The Week
I’m worried. Blogger Towers isn’t exactly on an air path but we are visited regularly enough by aeroplanes on holding patterns for it to be a concern.
What’s the problem? Blue ice, that’s what.
The phenomenon first came to my attention this week when I read of a mysterious object which landed in a field in the Indian village of Fazilpur Badli. The locals thought it might have been a meteorite but when officials arrived to investigate, they found that it was a ball of frozen human faeces, or as those in the aviation industry call it, blue ice referencing the hue it takes from the detergents in an aircraft’s carsey.
I suppose they should consider themselves lucky. On 17th December 2016 60-year-old Rajrani Gaud was hit on the shoulder in the Sagar district of Madhya Pradesh by a ball of frozen poo and urine which had been dropped from an aircraft. Her injuries could have been worse had the ball not struck the edge of her terrace house before hitting her.
And nearer to home, in 2013, Caroline Gray was woken up by an explosion. On rousing herself she found that a brown and yellow block of ice had plummeted into the bathroom of her static caravan in Pattingham in Staffordshire before crashing through the floor.
I am relieved to learn that aircraft are prohibited from ejecting passenger waste whilst in flight and that the pilots don’t have a button they can press in any case. But as we all know, accidents can happen.
