Martin Fone's Blog, page 290
July 8, 2017
Road Of The Week
The Tories’ famed magic money tree was found last Saturday – it is somewhere on the Epping New Road near Buckhurst Hill in darkest Essex.
In an impromptu piece of quantitative easing, hundreds of tenners and twenties were seen blowing around in the wind, prompting an unseemly scramble as motorists ditched their cars and pedestrians rushed into the road to scoop up the loot.
The cash has not been claimed and those who got their hands on the cash have got away scot-free. The old bill only attending the scene after it was all over, having being alerted to the fact that a motorcyclist was seen driving off with wads of notes.
There is no truth in the rumour that a group of Irishmen wearing orange and broad grins were spotted leaving the area.
Filed under: Humour, News Tagged: DUP agreement with the Tories, Epping New Road in Buckhurst Hill, magic money tree, motorists stop to scoop up money blowing in the wind, quantitative easing
July 7, 2017
What Is The Origin Of (135)?…
But and Ben
One of my all-time favourite restaurants is the But’n’Ben which is to be found in the little hamlet of Auchmithie, near Arbroath in Scotland. Apart from the restaurant, Auchmithie’s claim to fame was that it was where the Arbroath Smokie comes from. The smokie is haddock which is smoked in a pit inside a half of a whisky barrel. Hessian sacking is used as a cover to trap the smoke inside. The fishwives who perfected the technique moved to Arbroath at the start of the 20th century and so the delicacy bears the name of the larger town which is now the centre of its production.
Naturally, it was delicious as a starter and the seafood platter never disappointed. On one of my visits the house next door was for sale and I was for a moment tempted, although it was an awfully long way to go for my supper. The houses in the row were all single storey affairs and I often wondered what the story behind the name of the restaurant was. Well, a but and ben north of Hadrian’s wall is a type of house, the characteristics of which are that the dwelling is single storey, has one external door and consists of two rooms, one in front of the other.
The Scottish novelist Samuel Crockett described the arrangement in his novel, The Dew of their Youth, published in 1910, thus: “the cottage had originally consisted of the usual but-and-ben, that is to say, in well regulated houses (which this one was not) of a kitchen – and a room that was not the kitchen. The family beds occupied one corner of the kitchen…” The room that was not the kitchen, to adopt Crockett’s clunky description, was often kept for best, entertaining visitors and the like, and usually boasted a better standard of furniture and décor than the kitchen which was used for daily living.
As for the origin of the two words, we need look no further than Old and Middle English. The but component is a derivative from the Old English word be-utan which meant without, except or outside. Ben is a regional variant of the Middle English word binne which meant inside or within and which itself owed its origin to the Teutonic binnen. So the but was the outside room (the kitchen) and the ben was the inner room.
So far, we have restricted our understanding of the phrase to the layout of a modest Scottish dwelling place but it is clear from Robert Burns that in the Scottish dialect it had a wider meaning. In Blithe Was She, included in his collected works of 1800, Burns wrote “blithe, blithe and merry was she/ blithe was she but and ben:/ blithe by the banks of Ern,/ and blithe in Glengurit glen”. From the context we can take it that the lassie was being blithe everywhere, not just in two rooms of a small house. Going but and ben meant going backwards and forwards, perhaps initially from one room to the other but then figuratively as going to and fro. And those whose houses were two roomed apartments separated by a common passage were said to be living but and ben.
Gastronomy and etymology – a perfect mix in my book.
Filed under: Culture, History Tagged: Arbroath smokies, Auchmithie, going but and ben, living but and ben, origin of but and ben, Robert Burns, Samuel Crockett, the But'n'Ben restaurant
July 6, 2017
I Don’t Want To Belong To Any Club That Will Accept People Like Me As A Member – Part Thirty Nine
The Garrick Club
There was a time, perhaps those conditions still pertain, when the acting profession was not seen to be a respectable one. The Garrick Club – it still exists with some 1,300 members and a seven-year waiting list – was formed on 17th August 1831 with the avowed intent of regenerating the theatre and enhancing the status of actors by providing them with a place where they could hob-nob with men of refinement on an equal footing. The five founding fathers met in the Committee Room of the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane and decided to draw up a list of names to invite to become the initial members of the club to be named in honour of the famous Georgian thespian, David Garrick.
The Club found some premises on King Street in Covent Garden and it opened its doors on 1st February 1832. The first member to pass through the portals was the novelist and journalist, Thomas Gaspey, at 11 o’clock sharp and ninety minutes later a Mr Beazley ordered the first bit of tucker, a mutton-chop. The initial membership consisted of many of luminaries of the London stage together with a smattering of men of literature and artists. In accordance with its original aim the membership also included its fair share of the aristocracy and judiciary.
Success, however, can be just as much a problem as failure and by the 1860s the size of the membership had rather outgrown the modest club premises. Covent Garden at that time wasn’t the spruce and trendy area that it is today and was surrounded by some of the worst slums to be found in London. The decision to clear some of the worst slums gave the Club the break it was looking for and it secured some now vacant land around the corner from the original clubhouse upon which it built much larger premises. These are on what is now known as Garrick Street and were opened to the membership in 1864. They still serve as the club’s headquarters today.
The popularity of the club meant that the Committee had to keep a careful eye on numbers. Any potential applicant had to be proposed by an existing member and then his candidature was voted upon in a secret ballot. This gave the members the opportunity to blackball a candidate, the Committee remarking at the time that they instituted this process that “it would be better that ten unobjectionable men should be excluded than one terrible bore should be admitted”. Whether they succeeded in their aim is a matter of conjecture. The famous actor, Henry Irving, though, fell foul of the dread black ball, although, interestingly, one of his quotes appears as a banner on the Club’s website. The club is still men only but it can only be a question of time before this changes.
For those who visit the club, the undoubted highlight is its phenomenal collection of theatrical memorabilia. The Garrick has over 1,000 paintings, drawings and sculptures as well as a library containing over 10,000 books, manuscripts and ephemera, fulfilling one of the Club’s original aims of “the formation of a theatrical library, with works on costume“. If you find a bore, take refuge in the library is my advice.
Filed under: Culture, History Tagged: blackballing, David Garrick, Garrick Street, Henry Irving, King Street in Covent Garden, The Garrick Club, Thomas Gaspey
July 5, 2017
Book Corner – July 2017 (1)
The Four Just Men – Edgar Wallace
I have drunk in the Edgar Wallace many a time but had never read a word of this prolific author – England’s answer to Georges Simenon – until I picked up this book, his first. The old joke was that someone rang up to speak to him, only to be told he had just started a new book. “Oh, I’ll hang on until he finished”, came the reply. It was a phenomenal best-seller upon publication in 1905. It is remarkably well written in a taut style and Wallace is able to paint a picture of place and time using very few words.
In construction, it is the antithesis of a traditional whodunit. We are introduced to the perpetrators of the proposed crime right at the start – three wealthy vigilantes, George Manfred, Leon Gonsalez and Raymond Poiccart who have recruited a fourth, Thery, who has the special skills required to carry out the assassination. What those skills are we are not told. The mission of the four just men is to punish those they regard as wrongdoers who appear to operate outside of the law.
Their target, rather curiously, is the British foreign secretary – now there’s a thought – Ramon, who is determined to push through Parliament legislation aimed at extraditing a Spanish freedom fighter which would result in his almost certain imprisonment and execution. The would-be assassins are open as to their intentions. They send notes and threats detailing what they are going to do and precisely when the assassination is to occur.
Unlike crime writers before him, Wallace does not use an amateur sleuth. The whole of the resources of the Metropolitan Police are deployed to protect the Foreign Secretary who is determined to see through his legislation. They lock Ramon in a room. It is impossible for anyone to enter or leave – a classic feature of crime fiction, the locked room murder. But at the appointed hour Ramon meets his maker and the question is how it is achieved. I will not spoil that for you.
There are some twists in the plot. The pocket book of one of the Four Just Men is stolen by a small-time pick-pocket, Billy Marks. When he is arrested, the book is taken to the head of police leading the operation. Will this enable to force of law and order to thwart the crime? And then Thery, who is an unwilling participant in the venture, is tempted by the reward offered to hand himself in and give information about his colleagues. What happens next adds extra dimensions of tension and drama to the story.
The Four Just Men are shadowy characters and we are never allowed to get too close to them. Is this because Wallace realised that there was a danger that he would make these terrorists attractive and sympathetic to the reading public? After all, the overriding dilemma presented to the reader is how to react to a group of psychopaths and how is it right that they should be allowed to take the law into their own hands? The police are rather ineffective and there is a sense that the system is in some sort of crisis, almost powerless to intervene when two stubborn parties – the terrorists and the minister – collide. There is a feeling that the system is in crisis and the moral compass has been mislaid.
A short novel which can be read in an evening, it is witty and well-paced and the characterisation of Billy Marks is sympathetically handled. I’m not sure, though, that I will read too much more of his phenomenal output.
Filed under: Books, Culture Tagged: antithesis of whodunnit, Billy Marks, Edgar Wallace, first detective novel without an amateur sleuth, Four Just Men, Phillip Ramon, Thery
July 4, 2017
A Measure Of Things – Part Six
The Googol
What is the largest number you can think of? The ancient Greeks, who on the whole were pretty clever chaps, constructed a numbering system which had a myriad myriad as its largest descriptor of quantity. A myriad was ten thousand and so ten thousand ten thousands or a hundred million to you and I was quite enough to be going on with.
As Homo sapiens became increasingly aware of the immensity of the universe in which he was just the teeniest speck and as computing power allowed him to perform even more abstruse calculations at the click or two of a button, the search was on for descriptors of even bigger numbers. And so we have millions, billions and trillions. With numbers greater than a thousand million, there is the opportunity for confusion because some countries – continental Europe and Spanish and French-speaking countries – use the long scale where the next new term is a million times greater than the previous. However, the Americans, and the Brits since 1974, use the short scale where every term greater than a million is a thousand times greater than the previous. A French billion is considerably bigger than a British one. Confusing, eh?
Although these terms may have been sufficient to describe most numbers that we encounter, they were not enough for theoretical mathematicians. The American mathematician, Edward Kasner, conceived of a number which consisted of 1 and a hundred zeroes. He was searching for a name for it and during a walk with his nephew, Milton Sirotta, in the New Jersey Palisades, the nine-year old suggested the term googol. The youngster was not finished there. He conceived of another number, still finite, which consisted of a 1 and as many zeroes as you could write before you got tired. This he called a googolplex.
In 1940 Kasner co-authored a book with James Newman called Mathematics and the Imagination in which he introduced the terms googol and googolplex to the unsuspecting world. By that time the googolplex had changed from its very imprecise definition – after all, some people tired more quickly than others – to 10 to the power of googol or in decimal notation a 1 followed by a googol of zeroes. For a person to write a googolplex down it would take longer than the accepted age of the universe and a bloody big piece of paper.
Although as a symbol of quantity they have very limited application, the terms have made their mark on modern life. Larry Page and Sergey Brin named their company which was developing a search engine for the world wide web after a misspelling of googol – yes, Google – and their headquarters in California was called Googolplex.
And then there was the coughing major. In more innocent times the nation was enthralled by the odious Chris Tarrant and his show, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire – they seem long and distant times. The major, Charles Ingram, was one of the few contestants to win the top prize of a million smackers. His m.o was to repeat the multiple options slowly as if he was pondering his options but the allegations, which surfaced after the show, was that he had an accomplice in the audience who would cough when he mentioned the correct answer. Ingram and his accomplices were charged with fraud and received suspended sentences and hefty fines. Ingram was stripped of his army rank, although they all protested their innocence.
And the million pound prize? “A number one followed by a hundred zeroes is known as what? As any fule kno, it is a googol.
Filed under: History, Science Tagged: Charles Ingram, Edward Kasner, Google, googolplex, long scale and short scale for numbers, Milton Sirotta, origin of myriad, what is a googol, Who Wants to be a Millionaire quiz show
July 3, 2017
Motivated By Curiosity And A Desire For The Truth – Part Thirty
Why do shoe laces keep coming undone?
When I was a small boy one of the rites of passage was to be able to demonstrate the ability to tie up one’s own shoe laces. It was a tricky business and required great perseverance and phenomenal powers of concentration. Eventually I cracked it and have never looked back since. These days, with Velcro fastenings and the penchant for wearing trainers without laces it is less of a vital accomplishment and, I’m sure, we will all be the poorer for that.
When you think about it, though, and I have the luxury of being able to, tying shoe laces is a rather odd and inefficient way of making sure that your shoes stay on your feet. Invariably, the laces work loose and at some point in the day you find that you have to bend down and tie them up again. I find round laces the worst and when I buy a pair of shoes, try to avoid them. For the enquiring mind the obvious question is why do shoe laces, however well tied, work loose of their own accord.
Fortunately, some research carried out by Oliver O’Reilly, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California Berkley and published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society may provide the clue to understanding this conundrum. As often is the case, the starting point was to take a couple of PhD students who were rich and uncool enough to own a pair of lace ups. They were asked to sit on a chair and swing their legs and stamp their feet. What they found was that these tow actions independently do not cause the laces to loosen. However, it is when you combine these two actions that trouble begins.
A runner was put on a treadmill and their actions were filmed using a slow-motion camera. What the scientists found was that when running, the foot strikes the ground with a force that is seven times that of gravity. As the fabric of the shoe squashes down on impact with terra firma, extra lace is freed at the top of the shoe, causing the knot to loosen imperceptibly. The trailing leg causes the free ends of the laces to move backwards and forwards, resulting in them being tugged outwards. The knot loosens causing a reduction in the friction which is holding the knot in place and eventually the free ends lengthen and the knot unravels.
It doesn’t happen all the time, the scientists say, but once the tension holding the knot decreases as a result of the movement of your feet, you will soon be bending down to tie your laces up again. It seems that some types of knot are more prone to coming undone than others. I use a granny knot but the tests conducted by O’Reilly show that these knots are five times more likely to come undone than a square knot. With a square knot you cross the end that is in your right hand behind the one in your left rather than passing the ends of the bow and knot over each other.
I doubt whether I will be able to obliterate a process that has been hardwired into my subconscious for over half a century. I find double knots help immeasurably but at least I now know why my shoe laces come undone. Perhaps I should invest in some slip ons.
Filed under: Science Tagged: granny knot, Oliver O'Reilly, Proceedings of the Royal Society, square knot, University of California Berkeley, why do shoe laces come undone
July 2, 2017
Job Of The Week
This blog isn’t becoming a recruitment agency but if you live in the vicinity of Ripon in North Yorkshire and have a bit of puff in your lungs, you have until noon tomorrow to apply for a job with a difference – to become one of the city’s three part-time hornblowers.
Ever since Alfred the Great gave the place a horn on a visit in 886CE, a curious nightly ritual takes place in the square at nine o’clock sharp. Resplendent in a fawn frock coat and a black tricorn hat set at a jaunty angle, the official hornblower sounds a blast at each corner of the obelisk, checks with the mayor that the night watch has been set and then gives the horn another three toots. For these not overly strenuous duties, you can pick up £8.72 an hour and a further £21.12 for every civic ceremony you attend.
The last full-time hornblower was George Pickles who called time on his role in 2015. If you get the job, let me know. After all, it never does to blow your own trumpet!
Filed under: Humour, News Tagged: Alfred the Great, George Pickles, Ripon in North Yorkshire, Ripon seeks to recruit a hornblower, the Ripon hornblower
July 1, 2017
Trend Of The Week (3)
When I was a lad it was sufficient to carve your initials or write the ever witty “Kilroy was here” if you wanted to leave your mark on a famous landmark. These days, tourists take more drastic action, if these stories from Northern Europe are anything to go by.
I was still reeling from the news last week that tourist had carved the words “send nudes” into the side of one of Iceland’s famous moss-clad hills near Nesjavallaleið – authorities reckon it will take decades for the moss to regrow – when I learned that the famous Trollpikken rock formation in Stavanger has been badly damaged. Joggers discovered that the rock, famous for its striking phallic shape, had cracks and closer inspection revealed drill holes, suggestive of vandalism.
I don’t know how much Viagra will be needed to get it back to its former glory but campaigners are already raising dosh to fund its repair. Let’s hope they succeed and that this is the end of this lamentable trend.
Filed under: Humour, News Tagged: defacing landmarks, Iceland's moss hills defaced, Kilroy was here, Nesjavallaleið, Stavanger, Trollpikken rock formation, Trollpikken rock vandalised, Viagra
June 30, 2017
What Is The Origin Of (134)?…
Argy-bargy
One of the admittedly few moments of pleasure I used to get from watching an episode of the mystifyingly long-running soap, Eastenders, was when some of the characters decided to go for a meal at the local Indian restaurant, delightfully called the Argee-Bhajee. The second part of the name of the gaff was a reference to that staple of British Indian restaurants, the bhajee. Inevitably, as was the way with this programme, the characters would have an argument, illustrating the meaning of this rather curious expression in its totality – to have a heated argument or quarrel.
What we have here is something that the grammarians call a reduplication where the second word rhymes with and emphasises the first. Often a characteristic of reduplication is that the second word is a made up or fictional word, selected for alliterative or rhyming purposes.
As you might expect, if you had given the matter a bit of thought, the argie component of the expression owes its origin to the verb, argue, which has been with us since Middle English and came from the Latin argutari, to prattle, via the Old French verb, arguer. One of the joys of English is that it is full of regional variants. Our friends from north of Hadrian’s wall have always liked to take liberties with the mother tongue and argle was a Scottish variant of the verb to argue. This variant was joined by a piece of nonsense, bargle, which has the virtue of rhyming with and having the same number of syllables as argle. There is no record of the word bargle existing other than in association with its soul mate, argle.
One of the first appearances in print of the Scottish variant of the phrase is in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped which was published in 1886. There we have “last night ye haggled and argle-bargled like an apple wife”. Apple wives sold apples, surprisingly enough, and had a reputation for the ripeness of their language, a characteristic which may not have been shared by their wares. The English variant appeared ten years later in JM Barrie’s Margaret Ogilvy. “Ten minutes at the least did she stand at the door argy-bargying with that man”.
Barrie, of course, was born in Scotland but spent most of his time south of the border. Is it too fanciful to think that he brought the phrase down with him and then removed the harsh, guttural l and replaced it with the softer I to appease the more sensitive English ears? I don’t think so, although I won’t get into an argle-bargle with anyone who takes the contrary view. I have to say I prefer the Scottish variant.
One of my favourite examples of reduplication is arsy-versy. This is one of the many phrases that litter the English language, describing a disturbed state of affairs. The sense is that something is arse about face or, to put it more politely, backwards. It dates back to at least the 16th century and first appeared in print in Richard Taverner’s Proverbes or adages with newe addicions, gathered out of the Chiliades of Erasmus, published in 1539. “Ye set the cart before the horse – cleane contrarily and arsy-versy as they say”. The addition of as they say leads me to suspect that it was used in everyday speech much earlier than the first written example.
Filed under: Culture, History Tagged: Argee Bhajee in Eastenders, argle-bargle, J M Barrie, origin of argie-bargie, origin of arsy-versy, Richard Taverner, Robert Louis Stevenson
June 29, 2017
Quacks Pretend To Cure Other Men’s Disorders But Rarely Find A Cure For Their Own – Part Fifty Six
Hall’s Wine
It’s a strange thing but for the late Victorians nervous complaints were as endemic as allergies are for us today. For those who felt a little below par and were in need of a pick-me-up, there was a bewildering array of tonics to choose from. One such was Hall’s Wine which was introduced to the unsuspecting public in 1888 by Stephen Smith & Co of Bow in East London.
Marketing is everything and Henry James Hall, the proprietor, hit on the wheeze of offering free tasting samples to anyone who bothered to write in. They were overwhelmed by the demand, so much so that they had to take out adverts in the press advising that “our offer…has brought us so many applications that our staff has been unable to attend to them on arrival. We are dealing with the letters in rotation, and hope to clear off arrears in less than a week”. I imagine the poor overworked staff had to glug copious amounts of the stuff to keep them going as they made strenuous efforts to reduce the backlog.
At its launch the potion, which sold at 2 shillings and 3 shillings and sixpence a time, was known as Hall’s Coca Wine and Hall was perfectly upfront about what was in it. “It is necessary to state”, the same advert goes on, “that Hall’s Coca Wine contains nothing but the extractive principles of the coca leaf and although a powerful nervine, is practically harmless”. So dosing yourself up with cocaine is practically harmless, is it? There was more than just coca leaf in the Wine – Old High Douro and Priorato Port. I hope the bottle was passed to the left.
In 1897 the Wine was rebranded, the Coca being dropped. It was not because Hall had any qualms about the cocaine content of his product, rather that he found that he was boosting the sales of inferior coca-based products. The adverts continued to boast about the efficacy of the tincture. It was ideal for when “you are neither one thing nor the other” and would allow you to regain “the last five or ten per cent of health, without which all is dullness”. Hall even garnered some glowing testimonials from distinguished organs such as the Lancet and the British Medical Journal. But trouble was looming.
Interestingly, it was not the cocaine that attracted opprobrium but the alcoholic content of the potion. Teetotallers were fooled, so some temperance worthies claimed, into thinking that they were knocking back some medicated substance which, despite the name, didn’t contain alcohol. For some, it was the start of the very slippery slope to alcoholism. The President of the Royal College of Physicians opined “the prescription of medicated wines is in some cases responsible for the starting of the drink habit, especially in women” and one anonymous contributor thought “the devil in disguise is more dangerous than the devil with his fork and tail”.
Eventually, of course, the cocaine content did for it but it is a fascinating insight into the views of the time that the evils of the demon drink outweighed those of a variant of the Colombian marching powder. There was a school of thought, though, that considered that less than enthusiastic abstainers saw the use of medicated wines as a way of getting their fix without overtly breaking their pledge. Whether the tonic did anything for the nerves is unclear but it certainly took the market by storm.
Filed under: Culture, History Tagged: coca leaf, Hall's Coca Wine, Hall's Wine, Henry James Hall, medicated wines, Old High Douro Port, Priorato port, Stephen Smith & Co of Bow
