Were my choice of a desert island book to be canvassed, I would unhesitatingly demand Alan Davidson's Dictionary of Food. It is quite simply the most entertaining book I have read in years - and the largest. It is to food what Richard Burton was to Melancholy. It took Davidson,cook, gourmet and former diplomat, and a team of food lovers twenty years to compile and not a moment of their time was wasted. It is crammed to the cover with scholarship, humour and forkfuls of arcane lore on any comestible you care to name.
Fish and Chips? Certainly. Fried fish is a traditional Hebrew dish sold cold on street corners in Victorian times. Not all Davidson's piety nor wit can discover when that happiest of marriages with the chip took place but it probably came to Britain via Ireland. I may be able to help there. Potato chips were a Renaissance dish invented in Florence, the home of gastronomy and the birthplace of the fork. When Marie de Medici of that sublime city married the Throne of France, she was so afraid of being poisoned she brought her chef Ranieri with her(the restaurant he founded in Rome still trades at the foot of the Spanish Steps. Try the Alpine strawberries in red wine). So called French cuisine is Florentine and, I have no doubt, included chips, erroneously claimed as "French fries".
Pikelets are light-weight muffins. The name is a Midlands corruption of the
Welsh bara pyglyd, a griddled batter of flour and milk. The fine old dish
“flummery” began as porridge but by Mrs Beeton's day had become a jellified custard with generous amounts of sherry. Flummery too is a corruption of Welsh, llymru.
The book even solves the mystery of the Welsh singing voice. Leeks. They were first cultivated in Ancient Egypt and were also popular in classical Greece and Rome. The Emperor Nero was so convinced they improved his singing and ate so many he was known as Porrophagus (leek eater). The Romans introduced them to Wales and the Welsh wore them when they defeated the Saxons in the 7th century. In those days “leac” was the generic term for any kind of onion or garlic (garleac).
Lobscouse, according to the Dictionary, is really a variety of Baltic dishes brought by seamen to Liverpool and to North Wales where it is the national dish. A street chant parodies the Charge of the Light Brigade:
“Half a leg, half a leg, half a leg of mutton,
Into the pan of scouse rolled the six onions.”
Scouse should be thick enough for a mouse to trot on and mushy enough to make a lobby butty.
Another cook book I would attempt to sneak in would be “Lobscouse and Spotted Dog” (Norton Books) by New Yorkers mother and daughter Ann and Lisa Grossman.
The book is the most brilliant concept for a cookbook that can be imagined. It is the gastronomic companion of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin sea novels and contains the recipes of the dishes they ate with such relish in the books. The Grossmans insist that lobscouse is a Viking dish, lapskaus (hodge podge), and point out that in Hamburg it is served with fried egg. Their authentic recipe
includes corned beef and smoked ham, juniper berries and various spices and sounds delicious.
Like all the best cookbooks, “Lobscouse” is a joy to read and a feast of knowledge. Each recipe which they have collected from cookbooks of the period is preceded by the excerpt from the novel in which it is mentioned. No other collection, I wager, includes recipes for Burgoo, Skillygalee, Drowned Baby, Figgy Dowdy,Solomongundy or Soused Hog's Face. You may omit roast rat, though the authors tried and enjoyed it.
For Welsh rarebit they recommend soaking the bread in porter (I use Guinness) and sprinkling mustard over the cheese, which should be melted by passing a red hot implement over it.
Another old favourite for purely nostalgic reasons (I hope a TV producer sees a copy) is broadcaster Allan Barham's hilarious book “Tales of the Old Waterloo” (Toby Books, P.O.Box 1274, Conwy, £4.99).
The Welsh Fawlty Towers, the Waterloo was a derelict Betws-y-Coed hotel which Barham's father took over in the Sixties. The stories are a delight and include such gems as the guard dog that kept guests awake with its barking, the girl in the kitbag, the day that Barham fell for the world's biggest pig and the water tank that went berserk. If I were casting it, Michael Crawford would get the Barham role since he has an attraction for disaster which amounts to genius, and Allan's father was John Cleese to a T.
The Waterloo, in Barham's own phrase, was “boozer with bedrooms”, which I remember with affection, though reading this book I am glad I was never tempted to stay there when the bar finally closed.
His latest book “My Years of Fun as a BBC Radio Reporter” is autobiography. He writes of his time when we were colleagues on BBC Wales, and as an instruction manual on how to be a broadcaster - and he was the best - it should be on the curriculum of every media studies course.
THE ULTIMATE EXAMPLE OF ONE THAT GOT AWAY...........................
“Uncle Henry Skidmore told me about coming to Texas. He said that he and Davy Crockett intended coming together from Tennessee and had made all arrangements to meet at a certain place for the start. When Crockett reached the place and did not find Skidmore there he concluded Skidmore had gone on without waiting so he struck out for Texas, expecting to overtake his friend. Skidmore arrived at the starting point the next day and found that Crockett had already gone, so he in turn struck out, expecting to overtake Davy.
Each was riding hard, each expecting to overtake the other, but Skidmore never caught up with Crockett until after they got to Texas. That winter Uncle Henry and some others went prospecting up Red River. There was a heavy snow fall. Provisions were running low and Uncle Henry said things looked serious, when one of the party killed a buffalo. They figured they were setting pretty nice, and went to work skinning the animal and cutting it up. They got the skin off and, as they turned the carcass on its back, the buffalo got away from them and made its escape. After letting one wonder how a skinned buffalo could escape, Uncle Henry would tell about it. The ground was frozen and covered with snow and ice and the carcass was near the river bank where the ground sloped. When they turned it over it got too far on the sloping bank and slid into the water and could not be recovered."
(extract from “Tales of Early Times in Lamas County” by Diane Skidmore Karas, a history of western characters)
CLIMATE CHANGE OF MIND
“What makes you sure that you’re right and all those scientists out there saying the opposite are wrong?”
‘I’m a geologist. We geologists have always recognised that climate changes over time. Where we differ from a lot of people pushing AGW is in our understanding of scale. They’re only interested in the last 150 years. Our time frame is 4,567 million years. So what they’re doing is the equivalent of trying to extrapolate the plot of Casablanca from one tiny bit of the love scene. And you can’t. It doesn’t work.’
What Heaven and Earth sets out to do is restore a sense of scientific perspective to a debate which has been hijacked by ‘politicians, environmental activists and opportunists’. It points out, for example, that polar ice has been present on earth for less than 20 per cent of geological time; that extinctions of life are normal; that climate changes are cyclical and random; that the CO2 in the atmosphere - to which human activity contributes the tiniest fraction - is only 0.001 per cent of the total CO2 held in the oceans, surface rocks, air, soils and life; that CO2 is not a pollutant but a plant food; that the earth’s warmer periods - such as when the Romans grew grapes and citrus trees as far north as Hadrian’s Wall - were times of wealth and plenty.
All this is scientific fact - which is more than you can say for any of the computer models turning out doomsday scenarios about inexorably rising temperatures, sinking islands and collapsing ice shelves. Plimer doesn’t trust them because they seem to have little if any basis in observed reality”
Professor Ian Plimer, Australian geologist whose new book “Heaven and Earth, Global warming the Missing Science” talking to James Delingpoil in the Spectator
How did I get to be 80
My friend Ken Ashton draws my attention to this latest nonsense. My mother would have described Denbighshire council as “Pots for Rags”. It is a phrase I find myself using almost hourly.
“ A raft of measures that could see teachers rifle through children’s lunch boxes and confiscate junk food in a bid to tackle childhood obesity have been passed.
School meal bosses in Denbighshire said a generation of children had been “let down” by being served unhealthy food like chips.
Now in a bid to tackle the issue councillors have passed a range of measures to encourage the uptake of healthy school dinners.
Other ideas approved for consideration include staggering lunch breaks, larger canteens, and keeping pupils in school at lunch time.
Yesterday the cabinet also voted to increase the price of school meals by around 50p a week to pay for healthier meals “.
Saturday, 18 July 2009
Saturday, 11 July 2009
WHO DUNNIT
I used to have this fantasy where a spaceship landed just as I was stepping into a pub and disgorged dozens of little green men with a dozen arms apiece, carrying pencils and notebooks. Their leader explained they were doing market research. Their own planet had become uninhabitable and they were looking for somewhere else to live. Would I mind answering a few questions. Naturally I said I would be happy to oblige and when they said, “Where are you going now?” I said, “The Pub”.
“????????????” they said, pencils hovering uncertainly.
“It is a building where I stand in front of a long counter and buy beer and spirits,” I explain.
“???????????????????”
“Liquids that make one do silly things and sometimes vomit and is eventually poisonous.”
“What a terrible punishment.....................”
“No, I do it for pleasure.”
Little wonder that in my fantasy the spacemen scurried off to a more balanced planet.
Now I think Oscar Wilde was quite right. Nature does imitate art. There is evidence of an actual invasion from Outer Space. In making this ground breaking discovery I must give credit to the influence of Doctor Who, whom I discovered by accident on a Freeview Channel last month and have been obsessed with ever since. Made in Wales, it is the new Mabinogion. Though I do wish they would stop running everywhere.
Alarm bells rang when scientists announced they had evidence that the Soya sheep in the Outer Hebrides have been shrinking by 81g a year for the past 25 years. One scientist reassured us that we won't be seeing pygmy sheep being herded by Chihuahuas. We are not convinced, the good Doctor and I. Similar symptoms have been discerned in cod, sticklebacks, Marine Iguanas, North American squirrels and Blue Tits.
Worse, I have it on the authority of The Times that the long winged bushheaded cricket is flying further as its wings lengthen. In their innocence, the scientists claim this to be the result of global warming. A likely tale.
The Times in the same week carried the story of a tree stump in Co Limerick which is being worshipped because it is roughly shaped like the Virgin Mary. In vain the parish priest has said, “It's a tree. There is nothing there, it's just a tree. You cannot worship a tree.” Clearly he has not read Sir James Frazer's fascinating work “The Golden Bough”, an anthropological study of the days when tree worship had a very large fan club.
The Times took the opportunity to tell of earlier Alien interventions. There was the Welsh family who claimed to have seen the face of the Virgin on a tin of Marmite. Or the family in California who insisted their house smelled of roses after homemade salsa spattered their wall in resemblance of the Virgin. In Warwickshire this much travelled lady appeared on a pregnancy scan which the proud mother claimed meant the virgin was looking after her child.
She has a considerable market value. A ten year old toasted cheese sandwich on which her face appeared sold on E-bay for $20.000 and attracted 1.7 million hits.
Jesus has been seen in mildew, a rock surface, cement, cereal, a soya oil and a turtle. The jury is still out on claims that he also appears on the backside of a Los Angeles terrier.
In an impish moment on the Mirror, a Catholic picture editor and I launched a pilgrimage to a cow shed in Tintwistle, Lancashire. The Virgin Mary had appeared in full detail on a wall of the shed. We subbed out the explanation that a light flooding through a stained glass window from a demolished church which had been stored in the shed was throwing an image. I believe we encouraged 10,000 pilgrims to visit.
Doctor Who shares my belief that at the bottom of all these happenings is The Master, Anthony Gormless, who is spreading life forms which send whole populations insane. Its influence emanates from a pedestal in Trafalgar Square where humanoids take turns to stand, dressed in one case in a suit resembling human excreta to draw attention to the shortage of clean water, and where a man will play hip hop on a gramophone whilst making tea and an architect will mount a pink folding bike and pedal furiously to power a pink-lighted suit.
Most bizarre is a living sculpture where a near naked, middle-aged, 6 ft 2in tattooed skinhead will sit in a children's paddling pool, bathing in a gallon of fake blood mixed with real blood taken from his close friends and family.
On the beach at Crosby, near Liverpool, The Master's earlier madness from outer space, his Iron Men, have had a makeover. Supporters of the Crosby Housing Association checked the tide tablesand then took 40 different fashion outfits down to clothe the men, who rise from the sand where the waves break as the tide rises and falls.
Suits, gowns and - of course - beachwear were fitted, photographed and filmed before the statues were left naked again, apart from 40 blue balloons, by 7.30am.
Working in three shifts, seamstresses in the North of England are making a suit of tails for the giant Winged Spaceman with which the aliens announced their presence on the planet and which is now an object of worship.
The alien presence is most obvious in The Media. The impressive technology - HD, digital, 3D - that no one can afford proliferates and boggles the humanoid mind. The truth is they are toys for Alien Suits. In all the debate over them, no one has pointed out that the content these sophisticated machines deliver, which is the human contribution, is crap. This can be the only reason that the proliferation of networks is dominated by repeats. Alien scheduling ? Whatever programme you want to watch, it's on somewhere. And if you miss it one night, don't worry, it's on again the next night.
Our poor brains are not the equal of our New Masters.
The purpose of this control of humanoid minds is not yet clear, either to the Doctor or myself, but we are both convinced that the race has undergone dramatic change. The corruption in parliament, the police force, the BBC and now, we discover, the Civil Service, is so widespread we cannot believe it is accidental, nor can we blame it on the weather.
Every day brings fresh evidence of wrong doing. Even the News of the World is at it.
Parenthetically, if a Council induces a Chief Constable to take a job by offering a new car to his wife and a public school education for their children, where does that differ from bribery?
Five hundred years ago our greatest human brain counselled us “Neither a borrower nor a lender be”. We have corrupted Africa with our gifts and at home devices in the shape of small oblong plastic cards have been introduced to enable people who cannot afford it to borrow money. When Governments discovered we were deep in a world of debt, their answer was to spend more. Our army is ill-equipped. We take on new wars, when the obvious answer is to fight fewer. Our Banana Monarchy demands more money to keep up its five homes. Wiser heads would have solved the problem by having fewer homes. They solve it by asking for more money at the same time as they are giving their old houses to their kids and cousins at a bargain price. The Royals could, maybe, share the good fortune of parliament where members are allowed two homes and the tax payers, some of whom are being thrown out of their only home, pay for one of them.
As Doctor Watson wisely said, “These are deep waters, Holmes.”
“????????????” they said, pencils hovering uncertainly.
“It is a building where I stand in front of a long counter and buy beer and spirits,” I explain.
“???????????????????”
“Liquids that make one do silly things and sometimes vomit and is eventually poisonous.”
“What a terrible punishment.....................”
“No, I do it for pleasure.”
Little wonder that in my fantasy the spacemen scurried off to a more balanced planet.
Now I think Oscar Wilde was quite right. Nature does imitate art. There is evidence of an actual invasion from Outer Space. In making this ground breaking discovery I must give credit to the influence of Doctor Who, whom I discovered by accident on a Freeview Channel last month and have been obsessed with ever since. Made in Wales, it is the new Mabinogion. Though I do wish they would stop running everywhere.
Alarm bells rang when scientists announced they had evidence that the Soya sheep in the Outer Hebrides have been shrinking by 81g a year for the past 25 years. One scientist reassured us that we won't be seeing pygmy sheep being herded by Chihuahuas. We are not convinced, the good Doctor and I. Similar symptoms have been discerned in cod, sticklebacks, Marine Iguanas, North American squirrels and Blue Tits.
Worse, I have it on the authority of The Times that the long winged bushheaded cricket is flying further as its wings lengthen. In their innocence, the scientists claim this to be the result of global warming. A likely tale.
The Times in the same week carried the story of a tree stump in Co Limerick which is being worshipped because it is roughly shaped like the Virgin Mary. In vain the parish priest has said, “It's a tree. There is nothing there, it's just a tree. You cannot worship a tree.” Clearly he has not read Sir James Frazer's fascinating work “The Golden Bough”, an anthropological study of the days when tree worship had a very large fan club.
The Times took the opportunity to tell of earlier Alien interventions. There was the Welsh family who claimed to have seen the face of the Virgin on a tin of Marmite. Or the family in California who insisted their house smelled of roses after homemade salsa spattered their wall in resemblance of the Virgin. In Warwickshire this much travelled lady appeared on a pregnancy scan which the proud mother claimed meant the virgin was looking after her child.
She has a considerable market value. A ten year old toasted cheese sandwich on which her face appeared sold on E-bay for $20.000 and attracted 1.7 million hits.
Jesus has been seen in mildew, a rock surface, cement, cereal, a soya oil and a turtle. The jury is still out on claims that he also appears on the backside of a Los Angeles terrier.
In an impish moment on the Mirror, a Catholic picture editor and I launched a pilgrimage to a cow shed in Tintwistle, Lancashire. The Virgin Mary had appeared in full detail on a wall of the shed. We subbed out the explanation that a light flooding through a stained glass window from a demolished church which had been stored in the shed was throwing an image. I believe we encouraged 10,000 pilgrims to visit.
Doctor Who shares my belief that at the bottom of all these happenings is The Master, Anthony Gormless, who is spreading life forms which send whole populations insane. Its influence emanates from a pedestal in Trafalgar Square where humanoids take turns to stand, dressed in one case in a suit resembling human excreta to draw attention to the shortage of clean water, and where a man will play hip hop on a gramophone whilst making tea and an architect will mount a pink folding bike and pedal furiously to power a pink-lighted suit.
Most bizarre is a living sculpture where a near naked, middle-aged, 6 ft 2in tattooed skinhead will sit in a children's paddling pool, bathing in a gallon of fake blood mixed with real blood taken from his close friends and family.
On the beach at Crosby, near Liverpool, The Master's earlier madness from outer space, his Iron Men, have had a makeover. Supporters of the Crosby Housing Association checked the tide tablesand then took 40 different fashion outfits down to clothe the men, who rise from the sand where the waves break as the tide rises and falls.
Suits, gowns and - of course - beachwear were fitted, photographed and filmed before the statues were left naked again, apart from 40 blue balloons, by 7.30am.
Working in three shifts, seamstresses in the North of England are making a suit of tails for the giant Winged Spaceman with which the aliens announced their presence on the planet and which is now an object of worship.
The alien presence is most obvious in The Media. The impressive technology - HD, digital, 3D - that no one can afford proliferates and boggles the humanoid mind. The truth is they are toys for Alien Suits. In all the debate over them, no one has pointed out that the content these sophisticated machines deliver, which is the human contribution, is crap. This can be the only reason that the proliferation of networks is dominated by repeats. Alien scheduling ? Whatever programme you want to watch, it's on somewhere. And if you miss it one night, don't worry, it's on again the next night.
Our poor brains are not the equal of our New Masters.
The purpose of this control of humanoid minds is not yet clear, either to the Doctor or myself, but we are both convinced that the race has undergone dramatic change. The corruption in parliament, the police force, the BBC and now, we discover, the Civil Service, is so widespread we cannot believe it is accidental, nor can we blame it on the weather.
Every day brings fresh evidence of wrong doing. Even the News of the World is at it.
Parenthetically, if a Council induces a Chief Constable to take a job by offering a new car to his wife and a public school education for their children, where does that differ from bribery?
Five hundred years ago our greatest human brain counselled us “Neither a borrower nor a lender be”. We have corrupted Africa with our gifts and at home devices in the shape of small oblong plastic cards have been introduced to enable people who cannot afford it to borrow money. When Governments discovered we were deep in a world of debt, their answer was to spend more. Our army is ill-equipped. We take on new wars, when the obvious answer is to fight fewer. Our Banana Monarchy demands more money to keep up its five homes. Wiser heads would have solved the problem by having fewer homes. They solve it by asking for more money at the same time as they are giving their old houses to their kids and cousins at a bargain price. The Royals could, maybe, share the good fortune of parliament where members are allowed two homes and the tax payers, some of whom are being thrown out of their only home, pay for one of them.
As Doctor Watson wisely said, “These are deep waters, Holmes.”
Friday, 3 July 2009
CHIN,CHIN! CHINAMAN......................
The fact that China is about to take over the world worries me not a jot. Not because I will have shuffled off this mortal uncoiling before it happens. I have been besotted with Chinese culture for as long as I can remember.
I love Chinese food, which tastes good and has such lovely names. I have a small collection of Chinese objets d'art and a large collection of Chinese literature. I have just finished a Japanese garden with a koi pond and shrubs so costly I dare not publish them. I am slowly gathering to my bosom a Bonsai Forest. I admire and endeavour to understand Zen: I prefer it to Confucionism which is a sort of socialism with chopsticks.
The result, I thought, of reading in early youth three books: “The Importance of Living” by Lin Yutang, a collection of Chinese poetry made by Arthur Whalley and the works of Leonard Cottrell which brought a number of ancient cultures to life.
Dr Lin is the Eastern equivalent of the incomparable Western essayist Robert Lynd. He was a refugee from China, living in America, who wrote books about the ancient culture which was being crushed in his own country, something the present rulers had learned from the first Emperor, Cottrell's 'Tiger of Ch'in' who burned every book in the land.
“Living” is an anthology of ancient masters. Its chapters include “The Feast of Life”, “The Importance of Loafing”, “The Enjoyment of the Home”, “The Enjoyment of Living” and the “Enjoyment of Culture”, with sub-headings on lying in bed, growing old gracefully, wine and food, games and the inhumanity of Western dress.
It has a serious purpose. Dr Lin explains: “The Chinese philosopher is one who dreams with one eye open, who views life with love and irony, who mixes his cynicism with a kindly tolerance.”
I warm to Chinese poets more readily than I do the pallid 'greenery yallery' poets of the West. Frankly, if were sitting on a bus and Shelley or Browning or Keats got on, I would get off at the next stop.
Modern poets? R.S. Thomas, as disagreeable a man as any I have ever met, once said to me that modern poets were no more than gifted copy writers, about the only thing he said outside his magnificent poetry I didn't quarrel with. He was a man who could not express himself in prose.
I will never forgive Dylan Thomas for getting drunks such a bad name and I have spilt more ale down my shirt than he supped.
The Chinese took wine with infinitely more grace. Su Tung Po, the recluse of the Eastern hillside, Dr Lin's 'Gay Genius' (using both words in their original sense), is my favourite drunk of all time. A civil servant constantly in trouble with his bosses, he wrote a poem “Pine Wine in the Middle Mountain”:
“How much have I drunk today? Ah, I feel I can escape now from the fetters of mortality. I soar over running deer in the mountain peaks and join the leaping monkeys on the overhanging cliffs. Thence do I plunge into the billowing clouds of a vast ocean - Heaven in tumult.”
Those books were seminal, yet they were not the reason. Somewhere among the sad slab of prose about the death of Jackson was the proposition that if you want to know why Christ was betrayed you should look at the childhood of Judas.
In a shop last week I saw a tiny pottery model of a Mandarin fishing, and I remembered my mother's bowl. Pottery and filled with sand. A lake was represented by a mirror, by which just such a mandarin sat, perennially fishing. There was a porcelain pagoda, bushes made of loofah, a wooden bridge over the mirror and a tea house with tiny geishas. I thought it was the most marvellous object in the world. In those days you could buy the components from Woolies and they were all the rage on our council estate. At No 5 the Chinese micro world was in a constant state of flux as lake, geisha, mandarin and tea house suffered endless regeneration at my hands.
On that little bowl, which must have cost all of half a crown, I have built my intellectual life. I wonder what Tao Te Ching would make of that.
DAMN CLEVER PEOPLE THESE CHINESE>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Height-wise, there is not a lot of my Chinese friend Josie Fung. She could pole vault with a chopstick. But, as Lloyd George pointed out, we measure people from the neck up.
On that basis, Josie was a giant. She ran three restaurants, lectured on oriental cuisine, and, as liaison officer for a Sixth Form college, she toured China and Hong Kong recruiting oriental students. Yet she still found time to commute between her sister in Hong Kong and her daughter at university in the States. And went into business as a champagne importer. A Chinese champagne importer, would you believe?
I have long complained that Chinese food, which I love, kills the taste of most wines known to man. Purely academic to on-the-wagon me but selflessness is my watchword.
I did not expect my little Chinese cracker to come up with an answer to bring universal pleasure to punters both on and off the wagon. Non-alcoholic Chinese champagne, which not only lifts the heart (its prime ingredient is ginseng) but also fills the mouth with springtime. Stand on me. If they could bottle a bouquet of your favourite flowers, it would taste like this delicious brew.
Ginseng shares with the grape a very impressive power of spirit elevation. It would make the Merry Widow even merrier.
For some inscrutable oriental reason, this ambrosia is called Happi Camper. A wine of such quality deserves poetry. Ambrosia? Printemps, perhaps? Merry Widow, even?
Josie, as I say, is not tall - around five feet in fact, four feet, nine inches of which is heart. On her last visit to the States she saw a statuette of the Chinese god of Wealth and Health, who, with the dwarf Boboli in the eponymous Gardens in Florence, is a rare representation in art of a spinnaker belly bigger than mine. This particular statue is about a foot high, and heavy. So I was greatly touched that she lugged it across the Atlantic to the UK, where she presented it to me. It stands at the rim of my Koi pool, a constant reminder of a happy friendship.
THE UNKINDEST CUTTING...................
In 1972, the Sunday Express carried a story about a wedding that went wrong. The vicar had objected when a bagpiper marched down the aisle playing Amazing Grace, drowning the organist who was playing the theme music from Dr Zhivago, at the bride’s request. The organist responded by playing louder. It was not this the vicar objected to but that one of the guests was filming the bagpiper.
The cutting continues: “The bride’s father - a former paratrooper - intervened to say ‘if the Queen can have her wedding filmed, so can my daughter. The bagpiper is a relative. This do cost me a tenner and I have thrown it away.’ So saying, he challenged the vicar to a fight.”
It was from the Daily Telegraph that I culled this tale of a young soldier obviously destined for High Command.
“Henry ......, aged 17, set out a week ago from his home near Rhayader (Powys) taking the first train ride of his life to the Army Centre at Sutton Coldfield near Birmingham.
“He arrived at Birmingham and then got lost. On Saturday, after four police forces had been alerted, he was found walking along a road near Wimbourne in Staffordshire. He told a policeman he was trying to find the Army Centre.
“Henry’s mother said: ‘He could not find the right train from Birmingham. After a while he gave up and decided to get back home and start all over again.'
“But it took him three days to get out of Birmingham. Even when he was found, Henry was walking in the wrong direction.
“Accompanied by relatives he will report to the Centre today. He is hoping to start a career in the Army’s administration service.”
Another newspaper reported:
“Zimbabwe’s Minister of Finance Bernard Chidzero upset a number of Harare luminaries when he failed to turn up after agreeing to be the guest of honour at a business luncheon. When the organiser phoned his office for an explanation the Minister’s secretary told her: ‘He was not hungry.’”
And finally in the paper last week:
“Swansea artist Sue Williams has been given a lottery grant to study women's bottoms.”
It reminded me of the column I wrote in 1984 mocking the Welsh Arts Council Sculpture committee attending a luncheon dished up on a service created by sculptor Beryl Cheame from mouldings of her body. “My breasts did for soup bowls and my tummy for plates,” she said. “Later I added a casserole made from a cast of my buttocks.............................”
The ultimate anal retention?
I love Chinese food, which tastes good and has such lovely names. I have a small collection of Chinese objets d'art and a large collection of Chinese literature. I have just finished a Japanese garden with a koi pond and shrubs so costly I dare not publish them. I am slowly gathering to my bosom a Bonsai Forest. I admire and endeavour to understand Zen: I prefer it to Confucionism which is a sort of socialism with chopsticks.
The result, I thought, of reading in early youth three books: “The Importance of Living” by Lin Yutang, a collection of Chinese poetry made by Arthur Whalley and the works of Leonard Cottrell which brought a number of ancient cultures to life.
Dr Lin is the Eastern equivalent of the incomparable Western essayist Robert Lynd. He was a refugee from China, living in America, who wrote books about the ancient culture which was being crushed in his own country, something the present rulers had learned from the first Emperor, Cottrell's 'Tiger of Ch'in' who burned every book in the land.
“Living” is an anthology of ancient masters. Its chapters include “The Feast of Life”, “The Importance of Loafing”, “The Enjoyment of the Home”, “The Enjoyment of Living” and the “Enjoyment of Culture”, with sub-headings on lying in bed, growing old gracefully, wine and food, games and the inhumanity of Western dress.
It has a serious purpose. Dr Lin explains: “The Chinese philosopher is one who dreams with one eye open, who views life with love and irony, who mixes his cynicism with a kindly tolerance.”
I warm to Chinese poets more readily than I do the pallid 'greenery yallery' poets of the West. Frankly, if were sitting on a bus and Shelley or Browning or Keats got on, I would get off at the next stop.
Modern poets? R.S. Thomas, as disagreeable a man as any I have ever met, once said to me that modern poets were no more than gifted copy writers, about the only thing he said outside his magnificent poetry I didn't quarrel with. He was a man who could not express himself in prose.
I will never forgive Dylan Thomas for getting drunks such a bad name and I have spilt more ale down my shirt than he supped.
The Chinese took wine with infinitely more grace. Su Tung Po, the recluse of the Eastern hillside, Dr Lin's 'Gay Genius' (using both words in their original sense), is my favourite drunk of all time. A civil servant constantly in trouble with his bosses, he wrote a poem “Pine Wine in the Middle Mountain”:
“How much have I drunk today? Ah, I feel I can escape now from the fetters of mortality. I soar over running deer in the mountain peaks and join the leaping monkeys on the overhanging cliffs. Thence do I plunge into the billowing clouds of a vast ocean - Heaven in tumult.”
Those books were seminal, yet they were not the reason. Somewhere among the sad slab of prose about the death of Jackson was the proposition that if you want to know why Christ was betrayed you should look at the childhood of Judas.
In a shop last week I saw a tiny pottery model of a Mandarin fishing, and I remembered my mother's bowl. Pottery and filled with sand. A lake was represented by a mirror, by which just such a mandarin sat, perennially fishing. There was a porcelain pagoda, bushes made of loofah, a wooden bridge over the mirror and a tea house with tiny geishas. I thought it was the most marvellous object in the world. In those days you could buy the components from Woolies and they were all the rage on our council estate. At No 5 the Chinese micro world was in a constant state of flux as lake, geisha, mandarin and tea house suffered endless regeneration at my hands.
On that little bowl, which must have cost all of half a crown, I have built my intellectual life. I wonder what Tao Te Ching would make of that.
DAMN CLEVER PEOPLE THESE CHINESE>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Height-wise, there is not a lot of my Chinese friend Josie Fung. She could pole vault with a chopstick. But, as Lloyd George pointed out, we measure people from the neck up.
On that basis, Josie was a giant. She ran three restaurants, lectured on oriental cuisine, and, as liaison officer for a Sixth Form college, she toured China and Hong Kong recruiting oriental students. Yet she still found time to commute between her sister in Hong Kong and her daughter at university in the States. And went into business as a champagne importer. A Chinese champagne importer, would you believe?
I have long complained that Chinese food, which I love, kills the taste of most wines known to man. Purely academic to on-the-wagon me but selflessness is my watchword.
I did not expect my little Chinese cracker to come up with an answer to bring universal pleasure to punters both on and off the wagon. Non-alcoholic Chinese champagne, which not only lifts the heart (its prime ingredient is ginseng) but also fills the mouth with springtime. Stand on me. If they could bottle a bouquet of your favourite flowers, it would taste like this delicious brew.
Ginseng shares with the grape a very impressive power of spirit elevation. It would make the Merry Widow even merrier.
For some inscrutable oriental reason, this ambrosia is called Happi Camper. A wine of such quality deserves poetry. Ambrosia? Printemps, perhaps? Merry Widow, even?
Josie, as I say, is not tall - around five feet in fact, four feet, nine inches of which is heart. On her last visit to the States she saw a statuette of the Chinese god of Wealth and Health, who, with the dwarf Boboli in the eponymous Gardens in Florence, is a rare representation in art of a spinnaker belly bigger than mine. This particular statue is about a foot high, and heavy. So I was greatly touched that she lugged it across the Atlantic to the UK, where she presented it to me. It stands at the rim of my Koi pool, a constant reminder of a happy friendship.
THE UNKINDEST CUTTING...................
In 1972, the Sunday Express carried a story about a wedding that went wrong. The vicar had objected when a bagpiper marched down the aisle playing Amazing Grace, drowning the organist who was playing the theme music from Dr Zhivago, at the bride’s request. The organist responded by playing louder. It was not this the vicar objected to but that one of the guests was filming the bagpiper.
The cutting continues: “The bride’s father - a former paratrooper - intervened to say ‘if the Queen can have her wedding filmed, so can my daughter. The bagpiper is a relative. This do cost me a tenner and I have thrown it away.’ So saying, he challenged the vicar to a fight.”
It was from the Daily Telegraph that I culled this tale of a young soldier obviously destined for High Command.
“Henry ......, aged 17, set out a week ago from his home near Rhayader (Powys) taking the first train ride of his life to the Army Centre at Sutton Coldfield near Birmingham.
“He arrived at Birmingham and then got lost. On Saturday, after four police forces had been alerted, he was found walking along a road near Wimbourne in Staffordshire. He told a policeman he was trying to find the Army Centre.
“Henry’s mother said: ‘He could not find the right train from Birmingham. After a while he gave up and decided to get back home and start all over again.'
“But it took him three days to get out of Birmingham. Even when he was found, Henry was walking in the wrong direction.
“Accompanied by relatives he will report to the Centre today. He is hoping to start a career in the Army’s administration service.”
Another newspaper reported:
“Zimbabwe’s Minister of Finance Bernard Chidzero upset a number of Harare luminaries when he failed to turn up after agreeing to be the guest of honour at a business luncheon. When the organiser phoned his office for an explanation the Minister’s secretary told her: ‘He was not hungry.’”
And finally in the paper last week:
“Swansea artist Sue Williams has been given a lottery grant to study women's bottoms.”
It reminded me of the column I wrote in 1984 mocking the Welsh Arts Council Sculpture committee attending a luncheon dished up on a service created by sculptor Beryl Cheame from mouldings of her body. “My breasts did for soup bowls and my tummy for plates,” she said. “Later I added a casserole made from a cast of my buttocks.............................”
The ultimate anal retention?
Saturday, 27 June 2009
The Wrong Arms of the Laws
I was sorry to learn that the police, when not mowing down passersby with gun or motor car, are expected to catch criminals on a miserly budget . Sad that our police forces are now run by gun- happy accountants. It is an article of faith with me that everything run by accountants breaks down. Including neo-Tory governments like the one we are saddled with.
Crime in Liverpool in my day was sorted by Assistant Chief Constable Bert Balmer and his deputy Jimmy Morris. I would not wish to have been the number cruncher who tried to put them on an inadequate budget. They and the Force they ran in the Fifties were dedicated to 'thief taking' and ready to work round the clock on a diet of chips and draught bass.
I was expressing this view one night as we drove home when the Head Ferret, who was chauffeuring, was stopped by a police car. The driver gestured the Ferret to wind down her window and said: “Don’t worry, you have not committed an offence, but your exhaust is loose.”
Fellow passengers and a mechanic subsequently confirmed there was nothing wrong with the exhaust. I wondered why the policeman had stopped us until the Ferret said: “That poor policeman had a terrible cold. He was sniffing all over me.”
A policeman so ready to break the law to get a breath test conviction makes it very difficult to support Law and Order. Yet can we blame him when the standard of public morality is so low and our rulers live above the law? I read that the new Speaker 'flipped' his second home from his constituency to a £540,000 flat in London and claimed the maximum possible allowances for it, avoided capital gains tax on two property sales and twice hired a chartered accountant to complete his annual tax return. Sportingly, now he is Speaker, he will no longer charge us £20,000 for living in London. Instead he will make do with a rent free set of chambers of unparalleled luxury in the House. No word about his past behaviour in avoiding tax. I recall that the most powerful man in the Government, Lord Mandelson, once failed to declare a loan to parliament or building society on which he did not pay capital gains tax either. The Inland Revenue allowed him to declare his other house as a second home. I know that the Speaker holds a traditional role in parliament but had not realised how many 'traditional' roles were set by Lord Meddlesome.
This profligacy of the privileged is nowhere more blatant than at the BBC, which has admitted spending £47,800 in a year on champagne and £1,000 a month on West End luncheons, five-star hotels and trophy events such as Wimbledon and the Proms, with gourmet buffets and white wine. The top ten executives claimed £145,000 on expenses last year. Most of the money, claimed David Elston, a former chief executive of Channel 5, went on entertaining MPs, who, of course, fix the BBC's license fee. I listened with some amazement when the half a million a year Director General defended the reimbursement of the travel expenses of his entire family when his holiday was interrupted by the Jonathan Ross debacle.
The week that has brought us this further evidence that we have become a Banana Monarchy had other riches in store (literally). The bosses of Notwork Rail have given themselves a bonus of a million pounds FOR DOING WHAT THEY ARE PAID TO DO. Except they haven't. You cannot "Take the A Train ". It doesn't come in until Z.
Some years ago the Inland Revenue investigated me and told my accountant I was liable for Capital Gains tax on my only house. I sold it and lost £40,000 on the deal. Balked, the Inland Revenue petulantly reduced tax allowances on my income, which they had agreed thirty years earlier. Although I have always been scrupulously honest in tax dealings, I expect any day now a retrospective demand. I cannot pay. No doubt they will retrospectively make me bankrupt.
So nice to live under New Labour in a Just and Equable society, and, even better, one that allows us to abandon the stiff upper lip and explore cowardice as an art form, not to mention Releasing Our Emotions. My much loved district nurse ticked me off for saying “The Brave Don't Cry”. “You SHOULD cry, it is good for you,” she told me. I believe you should always do what the nurse tells you in case of something worse and I have taken to it like a duck to water. I practise it all the time. Although I do say it myself, I am getting quite good at it. The next time I get a headache I am going straight into counselling.
When I think of all those years I wasted pretending to be brave! Discovering cowardice is a joy akin to removing tight corsets or changing from shoes that pinch into slippers. The trick is to admit, in a manly way: “I would like to but frankly I would be scared stiff.”
None of my contemporaries believes me of course. They are so used to that dreadful old British thing about putting a brave face on things they do not realise that in this grave new world cowardice is cool.
Asteroids miss us by a million miles and humanity quakes. A Swine Flu Pandemic and A World of Killer Water wait in the wings with The End of the World. A medical magazine published a report of tentative research to suggest danger in triple injections and British mothers united to ululate on the six o’clock news. The prospect of measles injections terrify.
Those silly friends who fought in several wars and a number of marriages think I really have another secret reason for not wanting to climb mountains. They cannot accept I am so frightened of heights that if I had been born a woman I would not have been able to wear high heels.
Alas, constructive cowardice does limit opportunity. I am forced to say a regretful ‘no’ to tempting offers of hang-gliding, water skiing and wind-surfing. Even arm-wrestling can give you a nasty bruise, and, despite a long career in the mouth-boxing booths of the BBC, competitive name calling is out of the question. I claim my B.Sc. (Bachelor of Supreme Cowardice).
OBITUARY
As a tree lover, I wonder how many martyred forests were felled to provide the newsprint which warned us of the threat to the job of the Archangel Gabriel?
Entertainers, world leaders and fans may have paid tribute to Michael Jackson. It must have provided a pleasant alternative to trying to decide whether Iran or Korea will be the first to declare nuclear war on the West; how we are going to prevent international bankruptcy; how do we deal with religious leaders who call for the execution of political protesters against a corrupt regime. Or, my own major concern, how many of our young men will have to die now that Kipling's Great Game has become a political ego booster.
Useful though his death has been to them - and a Pop Expert puts him among the Ten Top Entertainers of all time - I have to say that his talent missed me by a wide margin. To me he will always be the middle aged man with arrested development who dyed his face white. A pathetic Peter Pan who lived in a zoo, dangled his baby out of a top floor window, wasted enough money to fund research for most known diseases or feed millions of starving fellow blacks, and liked to sleep with small boys.
A caterwauler whose legacy to the rest of us was the ability to walk backwards in pale imitation of the Thirties music hall act, Wilson, Kepple and Betty.
A 'father' who also attracted the postmortem headlines about his children: “Uncertain Times Ahead for Jackson Three”.
About his fans: “Fans who paid up to £1,300 for '02' tickets may never receive a refund.”“Cancelled dates will cost London economy millions.”
Rest In Profit loss.
ends
Crime in Liverpool in my day was sorted by Assistant Chief Constable Bert Balmer and his deputy Jimmy Morris. I would not wish to have been the number cruncher who tried to put them on an inadequate budget. They and the Force they ran in the Fifties were dedicated to 'thief taking' and ready to work round the clock on a diet of chips and draught bass.
I was expressing this view one night as we drove home when the Head Ferret, who was chauffeuring, was stopped by a police car. The driver gestured the Ferret to wind down her window and said: “Don’t worry, you have not committed an offence, but your exhaust is loose.”
Fellow passengers and a mechanic subsequently confirmed there was nothing wrong with the exhaust. I wondered why the policeman had stopped us until the Ferret said: “That poor policeman had a terrible cold. He was sniffing all over me.”
A policeman so ready to break the law to get a breath test conviction makes it very difficult to support Law and Order. Yet can we blame him when the standard of public morality is so low and our rulers live above the law? I read that the new Speaker 'flipped' his second home from his constituency to a £540,000 flat in London and claimed the maximum possible allowances for it, avoided capital gains tax on two property sales and twice hired a chartered accountant to complete his annual tax return. Sportingly, now he is Speaker, he will no longer charge us £20,000 for living in London. Instead he will make do with a rent free set of chambers of unparalleled luxury in the House. No word about his past behaviour in avoiding tax. I recall that the most powerful man in the Government, Lord Mandelson, once failed to declare a loan to parliament or building society on which he did not pay capital gains tax either. The Inland Revenue allowed him to declare his other house as a second home. I know that the Speaker holds a traditional role in parliament but had not realised how many 'traditional' roles were set by Lord Meddlesome.
This profligacy of the privileged is nowhere more blatant than at the BBC, which has admitted spending £47,800 in a year on champagne and £1,000 a month on West End luncheons, five-star hotels and trophy events such as Wimbledon and the Proms, with gourmet buffets and white wine. The top ten executives claimed £145,000 on expenses last year. Most of the money, claimed David Elston, a former chief executive of Channel 5, went on entertaining MPs, who, of course, fix the BBC's license fee. I listened with some amazement when the half a million a year Director General defended the reimbursement of the travel expenses of his entire family when his holiday was interrupted by the Jonathan Ross debacle.
The week that has brought us this further evidence that we have become a Banana Monarchy had other riches in store (literally). The bosses of Notwork Rail have given themselves a bonus of a million pounds FOR DOING WHAT THEY ARE PAID TO DO. Except they haven't. You cannot "Take the A Train ". It doesn't come in until Z.
Some years ago the Inland Revenue investigated me and told my accountant I was liable for Capital Gains tax on my only house. I sold it and lost £40,000 on the deal. Balked, the Inland Revenue petulantly reduced tax allowances on my income, which they had agreed thirty years earlier. Although I have always been scrupulously honest in tax dealings, I expect any day now a retrospective demand. I cannot pay. No doubt they will retrospectively make me bankrupt.
So nice to live under New Labour in a Just and Equable society, and, even better, one that allows us to abandon the stiff upper lip and explore cowardice as an art form, not to mention Releasing Our Emotions. My much loved district nurse ticked me off for saying “The Brave Don't Cry”. “You SHOULD cry, it is good for you,” she told me. I believe you should always do what the nurse tells you in case of something worse and I have taken to it like a duck to water. I practise it all the time. Although I do say it myself, I am getting quite good at it. The next time I get a headache I am going straight into counselling.
When I think of all those years I wasted pretending to be brave! Discovering cowardice is a joy akin to removing tight corsets or changing from shoes that pinch into slippers. The trick is to admit, in a manly way: “I would like to but frankly I would be scared stiff.”
None of my contemporaries believes me of course. They are so used to that dreadful old British thing about putting a brave face on things they do not realise that in this grave new world cowardice is cool.
Asteroids miss us by a million miles and humanity quakes. A Swine Flu Pandemic and A World of Killer Water wait in the wings with The End of the World. A medical magazine published a report of tentative research to suggest danger in triple injections and British mothers united to ululate on the six o’clock news. The prospect of measles injections terrify.
Those silly friends who fought in several wars and a number of marriages think I really have another secret reason for not wanting to climb mountains. They cannot accept I am so frightened of heights that if I had been born a woman I would not have been able to wear high heels.
Alas, constructive cowardice does limit opportunity. I am forced to say a regretful ‘no’ to tempting offers of hang-gliding, water skiing and wind-surfing. Even arm-wrestling can give you a nasty bruise, and, despite a long career in the mouth-boxing booths of the BBC, competitive name calling is out of the question. I claim my B.Sc. (Bachelor of Supreme Cowardice).
OBITUARY
As a tree lover, I wonder how many martyred forests were felled to provide the newsprint which warned us of the threat to the job of the Archangel Gabriel?
Entertainers, world leaders and fans may have paid tribute to Michael Jackson. It must have provided a pleasant alternative to trying to decide whether Iran or Korea will be the first to declare nuclear war on the West; how we are going to prevent international bankruptcy; how do we deal with religious leaders who call for the execution of political protesters against a corrupt regime. Or, my own major concern, how many of our young men will have to die now that Kipling's Great Game has become a political ego booster.
Useful though his death has been to them - and a Pop Expert puts him among the Ten Top Entertainers of all time - I have to say that his talent missed me by a wide margin. To me he will always be the middle aged man with arrested development who dyed his face white. A pathetic Peter Pan who lived in a zoo, dangled his baby out of a top floor window, wasted enough money to fund research for most known diseases or feed millions of starving fellow blacks, and liked to sleep with small boys.
A caterwauler whose legacy to the rest of us was the ability to walk backwards in pale imitation of the Thirties music hall act, Wilson, Kepple and Betty.
A 'father' who also attracted the postmortem headlines about his children: “Uncertain Times Ahead for Jackson Three”.
About his fans: “Fans who paid up to £1,300 for '02' tickets may never receive a refund.”“Cancelled dates will cost London economy millions.”
Rest In Profit loss.
ends
Saturday, 20 June 2009
A BROKEN READ
Apart from going blind, the worst thing that I can imagine is happening to me now. I am losing the joy of reading. A large volume daunts where once it delighted.
I cannot remember a time when I couldn't read. I was an only child. I had three dolls, Mitzie, a collie dog and a Teddy Bear who were as real as my parents. But mostly the cover of a book was a door into another, better world. The best books, like Dickens and Rider Haggard, had a life before their stories began which you interrupted by opening a book and a life which went on after you closed its covers. Somewhere in a parallel universe Mr Pickwick picnics still and the Zulu warrior Umslopgas wrestles lions.
I read, marked and inwardly digested anything. A book, a comic, even the labels on tins. Every night there would be knock on our front door. It would be one of my friends with a pile of comics to swap. We changed The Dandy, The Hotspur, Film Fun, The Rover and Beano until they were threadbare.
I can still read, occasionally mark, but inwardly it is indigestion all the way. There was a time when I had difficulty remembering the surnames in Russian novels. Now I keep having to turn back to the cover to find what book I am reading.
My father and I fought a silent war over my reading. He forbade reading at the table and then discovered I was reading the labels on the sauce bottle. To prevent me reading in bed, he hid our torch. I smuggled a candle to bed and lit it under the blankets. Fortunately there was little air and it went out before I immolated.
I refused to be evacuated in the war and became one of a small group who were given an hour and a half of schooling a day so I never got into the habit of full time schooling. I did, however, have two magical teachers whose lessons I never missed. They had been brought out of retirement in the war. Miss Mort despised the curriculum and spent her lessons telling us stories. Mr Holland had a face like a Mars crater in constant eruption. He taught us Shakespeare by acting it for us and then encouraging us to act it ourselves. I was, in turn, Juliet, Macbeth, Mercutio (my favourite role) and Hamlet himself. I was never put off Shakespeare because I did not know it was a classic.
Later, in the army, we were given the opportunity when our service was ending of learning the trade we hoped to take up in civilian life. The RSM was only nonplussed for a moment when I insisted I was going to be a poet. Then he brightened when he discovered English courses at the University of Gottingen. An inspired NCO in the Army Education Corps there thought the best education for a writer was reading. I not only spent a month reading in the magnificent University library and on fine days in the town square under the statue of the goose girl who once saved the town: he wangled me a second unofficial month and found me tickets nightly for the local opera house. I even had time to fall in love with the daughter of a Japanese professor.
With neither grammar nor shorthand, I managed to make a living in journalism. I began as a printer's apprentice at what was then the Allied Newspaper building in Withy Grove, Manchester. Cruelly underpaid, I used to steal books from Morton's market stall in nearby Shudehill, just around the corner from the warehouse where the originals of Dickens' philanthropic Cheryble Brothers had worked. I also met Howard Spring, my favourite novelist, who advised me to keep a notebook and write in it any new word I came across and its meaning. He told me: “The act of writing it down will mean you will never forget it.”
One book would suggest another and gradually I became well-read.
After a spell on a variety of national newspapers, I went freelancing in Chester where I met Walter Payne, a literary barman. Walter inherited a fortune whilst still a student at Trinity College in Dublin and spent it by the time he graduated. When he invited a pretty student to the opera he meant the one in Milan and he was the only man I know who actually made love on a bed of roses. It took them two hours to cover a bed with rose petals. “Very slippery” was the verdict. He had read every worthwhile book in English, it seemed, and joyfully shared his love of them, particularly classics like Socrates' Phaedra, Sir Thomas Browne, Montaigne, Rabelais and poetry.
My brother-in-law Francis Lucas, a gifted teacher, developed my love of the classics. It is forty years ago but I still vividly remember an afternoon when I was stricken with 'flu and Francis sat on my bed for two hours, talking about the classical world and particularly Homer, about whom he lectured at the Open University. I think that was the most valuable two hours in my life. Homer has been the closest of all writers to my heart. I truly believe the Iliad and the Odyssey to be the finest works of literature in the history of mankind.
Now my reading is confined to my E Book on which I have loaded old favourites like “Vanity Fair”. Since I already know them, that part of the brain which evaluates new material can take a day off. I am also building a library of audio books and the first of these, predictably, was Robert Fagles' vivid translation and Derek Jacobi's magnificent reading of the Iliad.
I just hope I don't go deaf. As my oldest friend says “ Growing old is not for Cissies
I cannot remember a time when I couldn't read. I was an only child. I had three dolls, Mitzie, a collie dog and a Teddy Bear who were as real as my parents. But mostly the cover of a book was a door into another, better world. The best books, like Dickens and Rider Haggard, had a life before their stories began which you interrupted by opening a book and a life which went on after you closed its covers. Somewhere in a parallel universe Mr Pickwick picnics still and the Zulu warrior Umslopgas wrestles lions.
I read, marked and inwardly digested anything. A book, a comic, even the labels on tins. Every night there would be knock on our front door. It would be one of my friends with a pile of comics to swap. We changed The Dandy, The Hotspur, Film Fun, The Rover and Beano until they were threadbare.
I can still read, occasionally mark, but inwardly it is indigestion all the way. There was a time when I had difficulty remembering the surnames in Russian novels. Now I keep having to turn back to the cover to find what book I am reading.
My father and I fought a silent war over my reading. He forbade reading at the table and then discovered I was reading the labels on the sauce bottle. To prevent me reading in bed, he hid our torch. I smuggled a candle to bed and lit it under the blankets. Fortunately there was little air and it went out before I immolated.
I refused to be evacuated in the war and became one of a small group who were given an hour and a half of schooling a day so I never got into the habit of full time schooling. I did, however, have two magical teachers whose lessons I never missed. They had been brought out of retirement in the war. Miss Mort despised the curriculum and spent her lessons telling us stories. Mr Holland had a face like a Mars crater in constant eruption. He taught us Shakespeare by acting it for us and then encouraging us to act it ourselves. I was, in turn, Juliet, Macbeth, Mercutio (my favourite role) and Hamlet himself. I was never put off Shakespeare because I did not know it was a classic.
Later, in the army, we were given the opportunity when our service was ending of learning the trade we hoped to take up in civilian life. The RSM was only nonplussed for a moment when I insisted I was going to be a poet. Then he brightened when he discovered English courses at the University of Gottingen. An inspired NCO in the Army Education Corps there thought the best education for a writer was reading. I not only spent a month reading in the magnificent University library and on fine days in the town square under the statue of the goose girl who once saved the town: he wangled me a second unofficial month and found me tickets nightly for the local opera house. I even had time to fall in love with the daughter of a Japanese professor.
With neither grammar nor shorthand, I managed to make a living in journalism. I began as a printer's apprentice at what was then the Allied Newspaper building in Withy Grove, Manchester. Cruelly underpaid, I used to steal books from Morton's market stall in nearby Shudehill, just around the corner from the warehouse where the originals of Dickens' philanthropic Cheryble Brothers had worked. I also met Howard Spring, my favourite novelist, who advised me to keep a notebook and write in it any new word I came across and its meaning. He told me: “The act of writing it down will mean you will never forget it.”
One book would suggest another and gradually I became well-read.
After a spell on a variety of national newspapers, I went freelancing in Chester where I met Walter Payne, a literary barman. Walter inherited a fortune whilst still a student at Trinity College in Dublin and spent it by the time he graduated. When he invited a pretty student to the opera he meant the one in Milan and he was the only man I know who actually made love on a bed of roses. It took them two hours to cover a bed with rose petals. “Very slippery” was the verdict. He had read every worthwhile book in English, it seemed, and joyfully shared his love of them, particularly classics like Socrates' Phaedra, Sir Thomas Browne, Montaigne, Rabelais and poetry.
My brother-in-law Francis Lucas, a gifted teacher, developed my love of the classics. It is forty years ago but I still vividly remember an afternoon when I was stricken with 'flu and Francis sat on my bed for two hours, talking about the classical world and particularly Homer, about whom he lectured at the Open University. I think that was the most valuable two hours in my life. Homer has been the closest of all writers to my heart. I truly believe the Iliad and the Odyssey to be the finest works of literature in the history of mankind.
Now my reading is confined to my E Book on which I have loaded old favourites like “Vanity Fair”. Since I already know them, that part of the brain which evaluates new material can take a day off. I am also building a library of audio books and the first of these, predictably, was Robert Fagles' vivid translation and Derek Jacobi's magnificent reading of the Iliad.
I just hope I don't go deaf. As my oldest friend says “ Growing old is not for Cissies
Wednesday, 10 June 2009
SCAPE MY GOAT
Time is a majority verdict. If a thousand clocks struck twelve it would be a bold watch which insisted it was 3 pm. It was not always thus. Differentvillages used to operate on different times. The coming of the railways united time since one could hardly have the Flying Scotsman arriving in Edinburgh before it left Crewe.Very much the same can be said of events. They vary by the position in which one views them.
This startling thought came to me in, of all places, that little gem of aGreek temple, the Lady Lever Art Gallery at Port Sunlight on Merseyside. The gallery boasts a collection of the paintings by Holman Hunt including one of the saddest images in the whole history of art. It is the "Scapegoat", a rather sorry looking animal which has the woebegone look much worn by our luckless Prime Minister in these difficult times. It depicts the goat that on the Day of Judgement is goaded and beaten and driven from the Temple carrying all the sins of the congregation. How similar, I thought, to the political life of our own dear Mr Brown.I am apolitical but I cannot see that Mr Brown is any worse than many of his predecessors. I except Mrs Thatcher. The only thing I have against her is that, in a drunken evening at the British Embassy in Paris, she agreed to the creation of the Channel Tunnel. Her apart, they have been a sorry lot.Callaghan, Wilson, Major, Blair. As grey a bunch of second-raters as you could shake a stick at.
I cannot for the life of me see what Brown has done wrong apart from selling our gold. Of course he wouldn't call an election he was pretty well bound to lose. Who can blame him?He had just got the job he had been lusting after for ten long years.
He was the only leader who had a plan to prevent the world from going bankrupt. He handled the last foot and mouth crisis with despatch and I believe he is trying to disentangle us in Iraq and Afghanistan, to which he is sending a token force rather than the massed battalions the Americans sought.He has been blamed for Labour's defeat in recent elections. The turn out in European and Local Government elections is always low and in this election there has been a reaction from rural areas for all the punishing laws in which country folk are drowning. And a reaction against the pettifogging new laws which every three quarters of an hour pour forth from Brussels.
Above all there has been the glaring evidence from the European andWestminster communities that our MPs are every bit as idle, as corrupt andas incompetent as the rest of us. Their sin is that they are blocking our way to the trough.So out into the desert limps this woebegone Presbyterian Scotsman, goaded by a congregation anxious to escape .blame.
I think, like the late lamented Douglas Home, the main reason we don't likehim is that he does not look good on TV. The Media is the other can attached to the goat's tail. The daily attempts to whip up a story are a pathetic attempt to match exclusives that have been pouring out ofthe Daily Telegraph in recent weeks.
Let me make it clear. I am not a fan of Brown. I cannot respect anyone who would bring to his cabinet Hain, Sugar or Lady Kinnock.and who longs for thecompany of Balls.
THOSE WHO CAN
I was angry to hear the phrase "carry the can" used in connection with the parliamentary shenanigans. "Carry the can" is the property of my family,coined by my Great Uncle Jeremy, for thirty years the Earl of Dudley's principal mining engineer, and the phrase may only be exported under licence.
Uncle Jeremy was called to give evidence in a court case at Stourbridge,Worcestershire. A lady was prosecuted for selling beer without a licence after a boy was seen carrying beer away from her premises. Her defence was that she brewed it for her son, the charter-master at a neighbouring pit who gave a daily allowance of beer to his men. Uncle Jeremy confirmed the boy was carrying cans of beer because it was the practice of employers to give every miner in South Staffordshire a quart of beer a day.It was usually the youngest boy who had the job of "carrying the can".Older boys ambushed them and drank from the cans which resulted in can boys getting their ears cuffed by the miners who got short measure. "Carrying the can" became synonymous with punishment.
The Birmingham Post of 9 November 1889 poured scorn on the notion of pit beer:"Are we to believe," it demanded, "that day after day, at the same hour, the spirit of loving kindness swells the breast of every coalmaster and contractor in the district and fills him with the same spontaneous desire to give a quart of beer to every man he employs? Preposterous."
From the sixteenth century onwards there were so many Skidmores round Stourbridge they were identified in the Welsh way. Prurient friends might envy my ancestor Ben Skidmore o' the Bonk. Unnecessary. In this case bonk was the dialect form of bank.
Indeed,so many Skidmores were there that they became the stuff of legend.
It was said the devil started out with a big bag of Skidmores intending to drop one here and there as he jogged along. St Kenelm saw him and pursued him with a bottle of holy water. When he saw the saint was gaining, the devil dropped his bag near Stourbridge and all the Skidmores wriggled out. Nice to be so well thought of by one's neighbours.
Another ancestor invented the phrase "Scotch Mist." but more of that anon.
This startling thought came to me in, of all places, that little gem of aGreek temple, the Lady Lever Art Gallery at Port Sunlight on Merseyside. The gallery boasts a collection of the paintings by Holman Hunt including one of the saddest images in the whole history of art. It is the "Scapegoat", a rather sorry looking animal which has the woebegone look much worn by our luckless Prime Minister in these difficult times. It depicts the goat that on the Day of Judgement is goaded and beaten and driven from the Temple carrying all the sins of the congregation. How similar, I thought, to the political life of our own dear Mr Brown.I am apolitical but I cannot see that Mr Brown is any worse than many of his predecessors. I except Mrs Thatcher. The only thing I have against her is that, in a drunken evening at the British Embassy in Paris, she agreed to the creation of the Channel Tunnel. Her apart, they have been a sorry lot.Callaghan, Wilson, Major, Blair. As grey a bunch of second-raters as you could shake a stick at.
I cannot for the life of me see what Brown has done wrong apart from selling our gold. Of course he wouldn't call an election he was pretty well bound to lose. Who can blame him?He had just got the job he had been lusting after for ten long years.
He was the only leader who had a plan to prevent the world from going bankrupt. He handled the last foot and mouth crisis with despatch and I believe he is trying to disentangle us in Iraq and Afghanistan, to which he is sending a token force rather than the massed battalions the Americans sought.He has been blamed for Labour's defeat in recent elections. The turn out in European and Local Government elections is always low and in this election there has been a reaction from rural areas for all the punishing laws in which country folk are drowning. And a reaction against the pettifogging new laws which every three quarters of an hour pour forth from Brussels.
Above all there has been the glaring evidence from the European andWestminster communities that our MPs are every bit as idle, as corrupt andas incompetent as the rest of us. Their sin is that they are blocking our way to the trough.So out into the desert limps this woebegone Presbyterian Scotsman, goaded by a congregation anxious to escape .blame.
I think, like the late lamented Douglas Home, the main reason we don't likehim is that he does not look good on TV. The Media is the other can attached to the goat's tail. The daily attempts to whip up a story are a pathetic attempt to match exclusives that have been pouring out ofthe Daily Telegraph in recent weeks.
Let me make it clear. I am not a fan of Brown. I cannot respect anyone who would bring to his cabinet Hain, Sugar or Lady Kinnock.and who longs for thecompany of Balls.
THOSE WHO CAN
I was angry to hear the phrase "carry the can" used in connection with the parliamentary shenanigans. "Carry the can" is the property of my family,coined by my Great Uncle Jeremy, for thirty years the Earl of Dudley's principal mining engineer, and the phrase may only be exported under licence.
Uncle Jeremy was called to give evidence in a court case at Stourbridge,Worcestershire. A lady was prosecuted for selling beer without a licence after a boy was seen carrying beer away from her premises. Her defence was that she brewed it for her son, the charter-master at a neighbouring pit who gave a daily allowance of beer to his men. Uncle Jeremy confirmed the boy was carrying cans of beer because it was the practice of employers to give every miner in South Staffordshire a quart of beer a day.It was usually the youngest boy who had the job of "carrying the can".Older boys ambushed them and drank from the cans which resulted in can boys getting their ears cuffed by the miners who got short measure. "Carrying the can" became synonymous with punishment.
The Birmingham Post of 9 November 1889 poured scorn on the notion of pit beer:"Are we to believe," it demanded, "that day after day, at the same hour, the spirit of loving kindness swells the breast of every coalmaster and contractor in the district and fills him with the same spontaneous desire to give a quart of beer to every man he employs? Preposterous."
From the sixteenth century onwards there were so many Skidmores round Stourbridge they were identified in the Welsh way. Prurient friends might envy my ancestor Ben Skidmore o' the Bonk. Unnecessary. In this case bonk was the dialect form of bank.
Indeed,so many Skidmores were there that they became the stuff of legend.
It was said the devil started out with a big bag of Skidmores intending to drop one here and there as he jogged along. St Kenelm saw him and pursued him with a bottle of holy water. When he saw the saint was gaining, the devil dropped his bag near Stourbridge and all the Skidmores wriggled out. Nice to be so well thought of by one's neighbours.
Another ancestor invented the phrase "Scotch Mist." but more of that anon.
Friday, 5 June 2009
INVITE THE QUEEN TO WATERLOO
Three centuries separate me from my aristocratic ancestors. From the 17h century my forbears have been determinedly working class and yeomen. Farmers, miners, glassblowers. Lay preachers, land agents policemen and soldiers. The French may have snubbed us over the D Day celebrations So be it. I have a special reason for celebrating the Battle of Waterloo next Thursday and I will ask the Queen to join in the festivities.
Three members of my working class family won the Waterloo medal. William, a trooper in Captain Clayton's Company of the Royal Horse Guards, John, a private in Lt Col the Hon H.P.Townshend's Company of the 3rd Grenadier Guards, and George, a private in Lt Col West's Company of the 2nd Grenadiers. (Insert;Picture of the 1815 "reunion" of the Black Watch (RHR)with the French at Quatre Bras)
As a family we have never been pro-French. Two Skidmores were killed at Trafalgar: Joseph, who was press ganged on HMS Arab, and a Royal Marine George on HMS Mars. I had a great uncle who rode with the Duke of Lancaster's Yeomanry in the Boer War as a gentleman trooper. Troopers had to supply their own horses and his was bought for him by his father, a grocer. (A rather special variety of grocer. On his marriage certificate he described himself as a "gentleman", even though his father was a coachman) My father, grandfather and uncle all served in the 1st Battalion of the Royal Scots in World War One with nary a stripe between them. A second uncle served in the Dandy 9th Royal Scots but he was killed in the Gretna Green train disaster on his way to France. I did achieve the dizzy rank of Local Acting Sergeant but lost all three stripes in separate courts martial over a six week period, as I have recounted here.
But it's a long way from James who fought at Agincourt "...as a man of arms with vj. [6] archer sin his company, all on horsbak and wele chosen men, and likely personnes wele and suffisantly armed, horsed and arrayed ev'ry man after his degree; that is to say, that the seid James Skidmore have hernis complete wt basnet or salade, with viser, spere, axe, swerd and dagger; And that all the seid archers specially to have good jakks of defence, salades, swerds and sheves of xl. [40] arwes atte least."
Forbye, my working class pedigree is beyond question, I am heavily disguised because I have always married above myself. My future widow is the step-daughter of a Clan Chieftain and her uncle was knighted. So I know not to wear a kilt south of the River Tay, never to drink soup at lunchtime and at dinner parties to talk to the lady on my left during the first course, the lady on my right during the second and to the table at large over pudding. My tie never matches my breast pocket handkerchief and I would not dream of wearing a handkerchief at all in my breast pocket in a city suit. Nor, whatever the fashion of the peasant Beckham, would I wear brown boots with a dark suit. I have become used to my wife's insistence on a napkin at every meal but what I once thought a charming middle class frivolity is now a grim necessity. My napkin is better fed than I am.
The napkin is like much else in my life. I used to long to be old enough to wear a monocle and walk with a stick, dressed in an alpaca jacket. The monocle is out. Such is the state of my rheumy eyes I would need to wear two; but the stick and the alpaca jacket are old friends.
Only one thing betrays me. True, I now take more than one bath a week but it is a 'bath' not a 'barth' and I cannot keep peas on a fork. Why no one has ever made proper the habit of scooping them up with a teaspoon I will never know. I do know that crowding them and crushing them on the back of a knife, rather like the conductors did in double decker buses in the rush hour, does not work with peas. They leap to freedom like so many captured air crew fleeing from Colditz. I am sure if you examined them you would find cunningly forged passports. When more than one pea foregathers the first thing they do is appoint an escape committee. To invert the form and use the fork like a slotted spoon is unsporting and against some secret rule. I have never seen anyone do it but neither has anyone labelled it as ill-bred. Alternatively, one could use the fork as a spear, poniarding a pea on each prong, though that would make a career out of dinner.
There are potato and apple peelers, de-corkers, slicers, choppers, machines for darning socks. I know that is true because the father of my first wife invented one. I used sell them to miners' wives on Doncaster market. I would demonstrate what I laughingly called my ability to darn a sock and they sold like hot cakes. As one rock faced lady explained, “ If tha' can do it, any bugger can.”
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Oh, that this too, too solid flesh, which I have been seeing in excess in recent weeks, would melt.
After a course of cancer, I emerged fully fit and two stones lighter. Now it has come rushing back from exile with many a glad cry, except from the wife who puts it down to the drink. My doctor, bless him, says, “Eat, drink and be merry.”
The trouble with being stout is that one is made merry of by the ill-disposed. We are an odd race.
It gets one laughed at in some circles. Did you see ”The Full Monty” and wonder, like me, at a society that can make a comedy out of the humiliation of the long-term unemployed? Can someone tell me what perversity in the human race decrees that nothing should excite it more than the exposure of the body’s waste disposal outlets?
Regular readers of this blog will know that I am deeply in favour of God but have some doubts of his ability as a design engineer. Now that I carry all my plumbing in my “bay window”, I realise I have lost any authority as an architectural critic. I will merely say the body would not look well on His celestial CV.
If He can create a world in six days, built-in contact lenses should not have been beyond him.
Take limbs. When the Good Lord attached those extraordinary dangling bits to each corner of the body you would have thought, would you not, that He would have given a thought to how we were going to dispose of them at night? Did it not occur to Him that wherever you turn to lay your weary head, your limbs will always get there first?
I think He relied too much on the ball and socket. Excellent in its place, I grant you, but a screw thread would have been better. Then, when we got into bed at night, we could unscrew them and rest them against the wall ready for morning.
Hands, those curious fringe-like objects, can get you into terrible trouble. I keep a file of cuttings of improbable newspaper stories. One tells how a man was gaoled for giving a judge a two-fingered salute. Recalled later to purge his contempt, he apologised profusely. He said he had mistaken the judge for the Mayor of Teeside. The apology was accepted and he was released.
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