Martin Fone's Blog, page 66

Word Of 2023

It comes as no surprise given all the chatter about it, that Collins, the publishers of the dictionary, have awarded the title of Word of the Year to AI, the abbreviation for artificial intelligence, which they define as “the modelling of human mental functions by computer programs”. Perhaps I am being unduly pedantic but can an abbreviation really be a word? Have the lexicographers been hacked by a rogue piece of AI?

The shortlist included a couple of horrors where the prefix de- is used to denote a negative – de-influencing, an influencer who warns their followers to avoid certain products, lifestyle choices etc, and de-banking, having your bank account closed for reasons other than financial status. Nepotism or cases of Bob’s your uncle have given rise to nepo baby someone who owes their start in life or success to the influence of their famous parents, while a canon event is something that is “essential to the formation of an individual’s character or identity”.

Another prefix that has become trendy is ultra-, appearing in two words that made the shortlist, ultra-processed as in foods made up of “ingredients with little or no nutritional value” which have been “prepared using complex industrial methods”, and ultra-low emissions zone, which now embraces all of London in an attempt to drive out polluting vehicles.

A wonder drug, semaglutide, supposed to suppress appetite and cause weight loss, appears on a list which could have done a shot of it itself, and for the sports fan Bazball, a deluded attempt to change the style of test cricket, makes what is likely to be a short-lived but lively appearance at the crease.

For better or worse, AI is likely to outlive all the neologisms that 2023 has spawned.

London’s Eiffel Tower (2)

Fired with enthusiasm for the project to build a tower that would out do the Eiffel Tower, Sir Edward Watkin formed the International Tower Construction Company but investors did not match his zeal, a public subscription raised just £87,000, two-thirds of which came from his own railway company. Inevitably, this meant that the design had to be scaled back. One of consequences was that instead of being supported by eight legs, the revised design used just four, a decision that was to have ominous consequences for the structure’s viability.

Nevertheless, the foundations were laid in 1892 and construction work began in June 1893. At the same time a park was created, boasting boating lakes, waterfalls, ornamental gardens, cricket and football pitches, and various attractions and restaurants. A new station at Wembley Park was opened on the Metropolitan line, offering a journey of just twelve minutes from Baker Street, allowing visitors to reach it with ease and boosting the railway’s revenues. Opened in May 1894 the park quickly proved a success, attracting some 100,000 visitors that year.

The tower, however, was anything but. Watkin’s company soon ran into financial problems, resulting in further compromises on the design, and, because of the marshy conditions of the site, construction work fell dramatically behind schedule. Visitors to the park had to put up with the noise of construction making it anything but a haven of peace and tranquillity and numbers dropped with only 120,000 sampling its attractions in 1895. This in turn put further pressure on the project into which Sir Edward had ploughed £100,000 of his own money.

By September 1895, against all the odds, the first stage of the tower was completed, consisting of four enormous legs supporting a platform 155 feet in the air, which was accessible by lifts. Opened to the public in 1896, it was poorly patronised with only 18,500 of the 100,000 visitors to the park that year paying to go to the top. Part of the problem was that on the outer fringes of London the tower did not offer much of a view, certainly nothing to compare with the panoramic vistas seen from the Eiffel Tower.

Watkin’s recherché and far from altruistic choice of location had done nothing to ensure the ultimate success of his project. Indeed, what was envisaged as London’s tallest structure, ten times taller than the then tallest building, St Paul’s Cathedral and dwarfing even the Shard, quickly became an object of ridicule, dubbed variously as “Shareholders’ Dismay”, the “London Stump” and “Watkin’s Folly”.

Worse was to follow. The marshy soil on which the tower’s foundations were built coupled with the compromises in its design meant that the structure began to subside and lean dangerously. Watkin suffered a stroke and resigned his position as chairman of the Metropolitan Railway. Without his drive and vision, the project ran out of steam, the tower, still just a platform astride four legs, began to rust and deteriorate, and by 1899 the International Tower Construction Company had filed for voluntary liquidation.

In 1902, a year after Watkin’s death, the tower was declared unsafe and closed to the public and then was dismantled, the demolition team blasting the foundations to smithereens, an ignominious end to London’s rival to the Eiffel Tower. Watkin’s ambition was no stranger to failure, his vision of linking his railway with the French via a Channel tunnel collapsed when his Anglo-French Submarine Railway Company ran out of money in 1881 after drilling tunnels from Shakespeare Cliff and Sangatte 1.2 miles and one mile long respectively.

Nevertheless, the park still attracted visitors and had put the obscure hamlet of Wembley on the map. The Tower Construction Company, now reconfigured as the Wembley Park Construction Company in 1906, concentrated on building housing in the area and the British Empire Exhibition Stadium, opened in 1923 and better known as Wembley Stadium, was built on the spot Watkin had chosen for his tower.

In 2002, when the stadium was being redeveloped, workmen found four large concrete foundations underneath the pitch, the first and last vestiges of the tower. Once a nearby public house, The Watkin’s Folly, had closed in 2018, only Watkin Road, to the east of the stadium complex, remained as a reminder of London’s Eiffel Tower that never was.

Durham Mustard

Mustard had reached the North-East of England by at least the 15th century, monks on the Farne Islands off the coast of Northumbria, whose community was linked to Durham Cathedral, using quern stones to grind “mwstert” in 1496. It was an extension of this idea, developed in 1720 by a Mrs Clements, whose first name has been lost in the mists of time, that was to transform the taste and look of English mustard.

By grinding mustard seeds in a mill to remove them from their stems and then repeating the process several times to produce a fine powder, a process rather akin to making flour from wheat, Durham-based Mrs Clements discovered that the mustard retained its full flavour, making for a more pungent and powerful paste. Encouraged by the reaction to this new smooth and fiery mustard, she enterprisingly saw a commercial opportunity and travelled the country drumming up orders for her product.

On one of her trips to London Mrs Clements managed to get her mustard in front of King George I whose imprimatur brought her orders from those wishing to follow the latest royal fashion. Other local industries benefited from the boom with farms growing mustard seed which fetched up to £100 an acre and a Gateshead pottery specialising in making ceramic mustard pots.

The power and popularity of Durham mustard made its mark on popular culture. The satirical cartoonist Isaac Cruikshank’s painting entitled Durham mustard too powerful for Italian capers, or the opera in uproar (1798) shows the Bishop of Durham striding on to the stage to protest at the antics of the opera chorus girls, crying “Avaunt thee Satan, I fear thee not. Assume whatever shape or form thou wilt, I am determined to lay thee”. Fired by the taste of Durham mustard, no enemy was too daunting to face. A Durham man, according to Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1786), was slang for someone who was knock-kneed, walking in a manner that suggested they were grinding mustard seeds between their joints.

Lost Word Of The Week (88)

On August 1, 2023 UK duty on still wine with a strength of over 11% ABV went up by 20% from 11.5% to 14.5% plus VAT, the biggest tax hike since 1975. Chancellors see taxing alcohol as fair game but one who bucked the trend was William Gladstone. In 1861 to foster the entente cordiale, he slashed the duty on French wine from twelve shillings to two shillings per dozen bottles. His action led to the country being flooded with French wine of dubious quality.

Although his name is best known in association with a bag, Gladstone was also slang for cheap French wine, appearing in John Hotten’s Slang Dictionary of 1864. In Walter Besant’s and James Rice’s The Golden Butterfly, published in 1876, we find “Claret certainly good too, none of your Gladstone tap” while Birrell in 1885 reports “to make him unbosom himself over a bottle of Gladstone claret”.

The days of Gladstone’s largesse are a distant memory.

Head Of The Week

Instantly recognisable amongst sea creatures, the starfish’s distinctive body shape is divided symmetrically into five sections. It gives them a starlike shape, hence their name. Unable to discern a head, scientists have long believed that the creatures have evolved to do without a head.

However, new research, recently published in the journal Nature, has turned this assumption on its head. Using advanced molecular and genomic techniques, a team of researchers at Stanford University created a 3D map showing where specific genes were expressed during a starfish’s development. They discovered that the genes typically in the patterning of the trunk of an animal were not expressed, leading to the inevitable conclusion that the starfish was all head.

I will never look at a starfish in the same way again!

That’s Football – But Not As We Know It!

A review of That’s Football – But Not as we Know it! By Neil Sambrook – 231102

Many a football manager, facing the serried masses of the press to explain away a 6-0 thrashing, has resorted to the trite excuse that it is a game of fine margins. And it is true to a certain extent. A dodgy offside decision, a piece of instantly convincing simulation in the box, a flash of brilliance, a calamitous mistake can turn the course of a tightly contested match. What ifs are a vibrant topic of conversation as fans leave the stadium and discuss what they have just witnessed and continue the discussion in a nearby hostelry.

Drawing on his encyclopaedic knowledge of the 1960s and 70s, football writer, Neil Sambrook, has turned what-ifery from the trivial matchday incident to a macrocosmic level, wondering what would have happened if certain events in 1960s and 1970s football had turned out differently. How would Celtic have fared if they had entered the English Football League the season after they had won the European Cup? What would have happened if England had scored an equaliser in their decisive World Cup qualifier at Wembley against Poland? Would things have turned out differently if Gordon Banks had been in goal instead of Peter Bonetti in the 1970 World Cup quarter-final?

And then there is the enigma of George Best. Would his career been any different if he had signed for Chelsea? A pale and somewhat larger shadow of his former stuff did strut his stuff for Fulham briefly, the only time I saw the legend play in the flesh.

For football fans tired of anaemic ghosted “autobiographies”, this is both a nostalgic trip to the time when football was football and also a thought-provoking alternative look at many of the era’s key moments which is sure to provoke many a debate over a pint or three. Excellent stuff.

Dry Gin XII

Distilleries et Domaines de Provence emerged in 1974 out of the Distillerie de Lure, which was founded in 1898 at Forcalquier in Provence. It is perhaps best known for its range of absinthes, liqueurs, and Rinquinquin, a rather tasty peach wine. Given its locale and the distillery’s use of botanicals in its other products, it is not surprising that they have ventured into the world of the ginaissance. Dry Gin XII, the fourth gin I picked up on my recent visit to Constantine Stores, the home of Drinkfinder UK, is the result and it is quite distinctive.   

The clue to what is going on is in the name, the Roman numerals indicating that there are twelve botanicals in the mix. The botanicals are actually named on the front of the bottle, a welcome and refreshing touch of openness from the distillers. As is right and proper for a product that has come from the south of France, their names are in French. Drinking authentic non-British gins has the added benefit of allowing you to polish up your rusty language skills and a mix of half-forgotten schoolboy French and an on-line translator allowed me to identify them as juniper, coriander, sweet almond, thyme, angelica, grains of paradise, iris, cardamom, basil, rosemary, eucalyptus, and mint.

This is a gin that is rooted in the terroir of the Haute-Provence and draws its inspiration from the aromas that abound in the shrubby garrigue. On the nose it is redolent of herbs, principally basil and rosemary with a hint of pine. In the glass the spirit is clear but offers an immediate surprise. While the juniper is detectible, it is very much in the background, offering a base for the cooler flavours and textures of the floral and herbal elements to strut their stuff. Like a long-awaited bloom on a flower, it is gone almost as soon as it arrives with the aftertaste an initial burst of sweet, cool eucalyptus followed by a moreish spicy finish.

With an ABV of 42% it has some punch, but rather than hitting the toper with a slug of juniper, it bathes them in the deceptively strong and distinctively tasty herbs and flowers of the Provence. In a blind tasting, it might be difficult to recogniser that it is a gin, so toned down is the juniper. My strong preference is for a juniper forward gin and so I was a tad disappointed with this one. I could appreciate the skill that went into developing this complex gin and it struck me as a very pleasant, refreshing contemporary gin that showcased the region it came from, perfect for a warm summer’s evening. For that alone it is worth a look.

The bottle design is elegantly French, using pale blue frosted glass. Circular, with rounded shoulders, and a moderately sized neck which leads to a white glass stopper. The twelve botanicals are listed on the front, six above and six below the name of the gin and the botanicals are illustrated in a circle around the front of the bottle. Like the gin itself, it is chic, confident, cool, yet in an understated way.

Until the next time, cheers!

The Undetective

A review of The Undetective by Bruce Graeme – 231102

I have come across the works of Bruce Graeme, a pseudonym of Graham Montague Jeffries, through following his series of bibliomysteries featuring bookshop owner, Theodore Terhune, which Moonstone Press had reissued. The Undetective, originally published in 1962, again has books and the book industry at its heart, but is a standalone novel which seemed to have slid into unwarranted obscurity, once more to be rescued by Moonstone Press. This is a thoroughly enjoyable book, written in an undemanding style which I raced through.

As a piece of entertainment it has much to commend it. However, if I was to be overly critical it came across to me as a mish-mash of good eyes which Graeme did not quite gell into a satisfying whole. In essence, there are three themes running through it. First of all, it can be seen as a satirical take on the publishing industry, but it is also partly a police procedural and partly a murder mystery. It also delivers quite a twist at the end and just to spice things up it features the Crime Writers Association of which Jefferies was Chairman in 1956 and namechecks several of its members.

The story features Iain Carter, a struggling crime fiction writer, who has the luck to have Edward as a brother-in-law, a slightly indiscreet detective whose inside knowledge Carter decides to use for a new series of books. He develops a bumbling detective superintendent based on Edward’s boss, Waller, the antithesis of a brilliant intuitive sleuth, an undetective you might say. Published under a pseudonym, John Ky Lowell, it and its successors are a great success, although the police are down on an author who has chosen to show them in such a poor light.

As an experiment, Carter goes to elaborate and extraordinary lengths to keep the identity of John Ky Lowell a secret, revealing how complicit the publishing industry can be in pulling off such a sleight of hand. His troubles start when the tax man, inevitably, interests himself in Lowell’s success and earnings and are exacerbated by the murder of a bookmaker, Naughton. To his horror, Carter learns from his indiscreet brother-in-law who is investigating the case with Waller, that Lowell is a prime suspect.

The reasoning behind the police’s suspicions, apart from having an animus against the author, boils down to the need for a clever mind to pull off a murder and the victim had in his possession a page of a newspaper carrying an advert for Lowell’s latest book. As a piece of plotting to bring a suspect into a story, its is as wafer thin as the mint that finished off Mr Creosote. Nevertheless, Carter goes to elaborate and humorous lengths in staging break ins and doctoring evidence to divert suspicion from him/Lowell, but only succeeds in implicating Edward.

With one last throw of the dice and a rather mawkish one at that, Carter succeeds in placing the blame for Naughton’s death elsewhere and we can breath easily or can we? Graeme is not finished yet and in the final chapter comes up with a major plot twist which involves a motive that just comes out of nowhere with the reader having no inkling that it might have been plausible. A fair clued murder mystery this is not.

Publishing books under a pseudonym is no crime, even if the author has good reasons to keep their identity secret, providing all appropriate taxes are paid to the authorities. The perceptive reader might begin to wonder why Carter was going to extraordinary lengths to conceal his identity and whether the police had a more cogent reason for linking Lowell to Naughton’s murder. Whether deliberately or not, Graeme does not really tie these strands together convincingly.

The denouement, while extraordinary, as a consequence appears to come out of nowhere, leaving Edward with a moral dilemma that family honour resolves. Graeme seems to be playing with some interesting ideas without being able to pull them together into a satisfying whole. Nevertheless, as a piece of entertainment, it is first rate.        

London’s Eiffel Tower

The twin towers of Wembley Stadium were an iconic symbol of English football until they were demolished in 2003 but Wembley Park would have boasted an even more impressive structure had the ambitions of railway entrepreneur and Liberal Unionist MP, Sir Edward Watkin, come to fruition. Irked by the rapturous acclaim that had greeted the opening of the Eiffel Tower, the world’s tallest structure, at the World Fair in 1889, he declared that “anything the French can do, the English can do bigger!” and laid plans to build an even taller tower.

“In another eighteen months”, Freeman’s Journal trumpeted in 1892, “London will rejoice in a New Tower of Babel, piercing the skies some 150 feet higher than the renowned Eiffel Tower of Paris. Not only will the Watkin Tower look down 150 feet on the Eiffel Tower, but it will be capable of taking up three times as many passengers at a time”.

Rather than ape the French and place it in the centre of the metropolis, Watkins chose a 280-acre plot of land that he had bought in the Wembley area, the pièce de resistance of a grandiose plan to build a new community connected to London by the Metropolitan Railway of which he just happened to be the chairman. As Sir John Betjeman observed, when telling the story of the suburbs that grew along the Metropolitan line in a 1973 TV documentary, Metro-Land, “beyond Neasden there was an unimportant hamlet where for years the Metropolitan didn’t stop. Wembley. Slushy fields and grass farms. Then out of the mist arose Sir Edward Watkin’s dream: an Eiffel Tower for London”.

The obvious designer, Gustave Eiffel, refused the commission, remarking that if he did his countrymen “would not think me so good a Frenchman as I hope I am”. Undaunted, Watkin then launched a competition in 1890 to solicit designs for the tower, which had to be at least 1,200 feet tall, topping the Eiffel Tower by some two hundred feet. A prize of five hundred guineas was offered to the winning design.

Sixty-eight designs were received from as far afield as Australia and the United States, showing a bewildering range of imagination, ingenuity, and often impracticality. Designs included a tower 2,000-feet tall looking like a multi-layered wedding cake with a working railway spiralling up it while another, described as an “aerial colony”, came with hanging vegetable gardens and a one-twelfth scale replica of the Great Pyramid on its summit. Some drew their inspiration from other notable landmarks including the spire of Bow Church in Cheapside and, appropriately as it would turn out, the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

The winning design, number 37, was submitted by Stewart, McLaren, and Dunn and, in truth, looked remarkably like the Eiffel Tower, only taller at 1,150 feet, with four levels instead of three, and made of steel rather than iron. Inside there were two observation decks containing restaurants, theatres, dancing rooms, exhibition halls, Turkish baths, and a ninety-room hotel. The top of the tower was reached by a series of lifts where there were viewing platforms, a fresh-air sanatorium, and an astronomical observatory “because freedom from mists at that altitude would mean that the stars could be clearly photographed”.

Tewkesbury Mustard Balls

Bright yellow with a relatively thick consistency, made from a combination of yellow and brown seeds and stronger than many other types due to its low acid content, English mustard is now indelibly associated with Norwich, home to Colman’s, part of the Unilever group. However, it was not always so. An 18th century saying described the city of Durham as being famous for seven things – wood, water, and pleasant walks, law, gospel, old maids, and mustard. Even earlier, Falstaff portrayed Ned Poins to Doll Tearsheet in Henry IV Part II (1597, Act 2, scene 2) as “having a wit as thick as Tewkesbury mustard”. Both in their time had justifiable claims to be the mustard capitals of England.

Mustard was probably introduced into England in the 12th century and initially seeds were roughly ground at the table using a mortar and was eaten in its natural state to flavour meats. The Forme of Cury, the oldest known instructive cookery book in the English language compiled in 1390, included a recipe for mustard. The most popular form of processed mustard from late mediaeval times was the Tewkesbury mustard ball, a fiery amalgam of ground mustard seeds and horseradish, both picked from the local river banks and meadows where they grew in abundance.   

Dried mustard seeds would be crushed into a flour before being sieved or tossed. At the same time the horseradish would be grated into a sinewy paste, and then steeped in apple cider vinegar or cider for twenty-four hours. The two components were then moulded into balls or “pills” and left to dry. Looking rather like a small potato, they were sold in their rough and hardened form around the country. A bit was broken off, and immersed in milk, cider, or vinegar to make a pliable paste. So pungent was the mustard that it usually dominated all the other flavours on a plate, often for the better.

Tewkesbury mustard balls, albeit wrapped in gold leaf to mask their mundane appearance, were presented to Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn when their Royal Progress reached the town on July 26, 1535. Sadly, there is no record as to whether they met with royal approval. There is no doubting Thomas Fuller’s enthusiasm for them, declaring them to be “the best in England” in his The History of the Worthies of England (1662), and finding them “very wholesome for clearing the head, moderately taken”.

A contrary view, though, was taken by James Bennett who, in The History of Tewkesbury (1830), described them as “extremely hot, biting and pungent” and noted that “if he be on the right stamp, and a true Tewkesbury man, he is a choleric gentleman and will bear no coals”. In the same vein, Thomas Thistleton-Dyer observed in The Folk-lore of Plants (1889) that someone with “a sad, severe and terrific countenance…always looked as if he lived on Tewkesbury mustard”.

Manufacture of Tewkesbury mustard died out only early in the 19th century, although there is now a mini-revival, thanks to the Tewkesbury Mustard Company. Mustard balls are also served on special occasions, such as the re-enactment of the Battle of Tewkesbury every July. Its demise was hastened by the emergence of a smoother form of English mustard, developed in Durham, as we shall see next time.