JOST A MON

The Shampoo Sheikh

2012-01-12T21:36:00.001Z

[I wrote this article on Space Bar's invitation in August 2008 and it appeared on Blogbharti. A little while ago, Blogbharti ceased to exist, my computer crashed, and I thought I'd lost this piece. Luckily, the Wayback Machine had snapped it up all those months ago, and I was able to retrieve it. So here you go, for archival purposes only: this is how it appeared on Blogbharti.]

[ This is Essay No. 31 in our Spotlight Series. Click here for the archives.]

By Fëanor
———-

During the height of the Regency, it was the very thing to betake oneself to Brighton, there to enjoy the sea, dance with the best people, flirt with dashing Army officers, be introduced to the Princes Royal, and play genteel parlour games [Picture credit: The Republic of Pemberly]. And when all the whirling and swirling was done and one was exhausted, the place to go to recover and refresh was Mahomed’s.

To miss going to Mahomed’s is like going to town and forgetting to take a peep at St Paul’s… ¹

Inside an imposing building on King’s Road in Brighton, a man in Mughal court dress welcomed the gentry. He offered a luxurious establishment at the height of ton, and a series of medicated vapour baths. The specialty of the house was a massage with medicated oils. Customers sweated their poisons out in a hot aromatic bath, and then moved into a tent with flannel sleeves. Here, an unseen masseur would pummel them invigoratingly, with his arms through the cloth walls. This last, the man said, was the Indian art of the Shampoo, and it would cure all ills.

[The Baths are] daily thronged, not only with the ailing but the hale … their powerful efficacy … have brought foreigners to him from all quarters of the world …

What was this Shampoo? And how did this word become English? The tale is a curious one, intercontinental in its reach, transcending origins, race and class.

It begins in 1759 in Patna where was born a scion of the Nabobs of Murshidabad. A noble lineage is one thing; the reality of life is another. The Nabobs were a shadow of their former selves after the disaster at Plassey, and Din Mohammed’s father, having set aside all pride, was a minor soldier in the East India Company’s Bengal Army. When Din was eleven years old, his father was killed, his elder brother took on the parental commission, and despite his mother’s vigilance - she knew Din was already smitten by the glamour of soldiery - he ran away from home to become a camp follower. Soon, he was in the service of a Captain Baker, under whose watchful eye he bloomed into a well-read man, widely travelled and keenly observant.

There is scarcely any disease to which the human frame is liable which may not be relieved by the use of these baths.

In 1784, Baker returned to Ireland, taking Din with him. Din perfected his English in Cork, and, after Baker died two years later, married a young Irishwoman, Mary Daly. They spent the next 25 years in Ireland, where Din’s charm and intelligence endeared him to the Irish upper class [Picture credit:Brighton Ourstory].

A popular genre of books at the time was the epistolary travelogue, and Din jumped into the business with panache. The Irish gentry² paid 2 shillings 6 pence for “The Travels of Dean Mahomet, A Native of Patna in Bengal, Through Several Parts of India, While in the Service of The Honourable The East India Company Written by Himself, In a series of Letters to a Friend.” It was a charming read, in turns poetically descriptive and hair-raisingly adventurous. Interspersed in true intellectual style with quotations from Seneca and Goldsmith, among others, he wrote of the Company’s conquest of India, the gracious Mughals and the elegance of the Company’s Calcutta; he waxed eloquently on the riches of Dacca, and the terrors of being hunted by peasants, wrathful at Din’s tax-collection, baying for his blood.

This unlikely tome turned out to be the first book in English written by an Indian, and it brought to its readers a particular sensibility - an appreciation for victorious England and her East India Company, but also an unapologetic love for the grandeur of India that Din missed so sorely.

You will here behold a generous soil crowned with plenty; the garden beautifully diversified by the gayest flowers diffusing their fragrance into the bosom of the air; and the very bowels of the earth enriched with inestimable mines of gold and diamonds. ³

In 1807, Din and his family moved to London, where he opened an Indian restaurant. The Hindustanee Coffee House in the Portman Estate [Picture credit: BBC News] was the first ever in a series of Indianised British eateries that has continued to this day. While his intention had been to attract the Indian gentry, they tended to look down upon his establishment as one fit only for ignorant Londoners. The British loved it.

Here the gentry may enjoy the Hooakha, with real Chilm tobacco, and Indian dishes in the highest perfection, and allowed by the greatest epicures to be unequalled to any curries ever made in England.⁴

Simultaneously, in the service of a Basil Cochrane, he was providing a full body massage service at steam baths opened in Portman Square. Din could easily counter imitators, stating that his was the only genuine massage; only an Indian native could provide a treatment superior to all others; only he, equipped with the correct medicinal herbs, could cure illnesses. In a time of burgeoning excess and a thirst for the exotic, Din was able to provide each in luxuriant quantities.

But setting a trend to be followed by most curry houses after him, Din’s outgoings overwhelmed his income, and he declared bankruptcy in 1812. He let it be known that he was ready for employ as a butler or a valet, with no objection to town or country, and this advertisement brought him to Brighton’s bath houses.
Brighton was the Nonesuch town of the Regency, its wealth and fashion attracting the finest artists and bon viveurs in the land. The Prince Regent’s fanciful Royal Pavilion was then being constructed. The demand for Oriental chic and exotica continued unabated. Din began to purvey esoteric Indian medicines, aromatic herbs and oils, treatments, and promoted steam baths and Shampooing.

shampoo (v.)
1762, “to massage,” from Anglo-Indian shampoo, from Hindi champo, imperative of champna “to press, knead the muscles” ⁴

The last two became immensely popular; the Prince of Wales invited Din to supervise the construction of an aromatic steam bath in the Pavilion. Din so impressed the Prince that he was anointed Royal Shampoo Surgeon. The gentry poured into his establishment, allowing him to expand, build the elegant Mahomed’s Baths [Picture credit:Victorian Turkish Baths] overlooking the sea, and create new branches in London.

Meanwhile, Din worked on his magnum opus, “Shampooing, or, Benefits Resulting from the Use of the Indian Medicated Vapour Bath,” a book of testimonials from satisfied clients, dealing with the putative medical benefits of massages, aromatic oil therapy and sea-water baths, claiming to cure rheumatism, fix problems of the muscles, and restore ailing joints. His book was a bestseller, going into further editions in 1826 and 1838, adumbrated with fulsome praise from a fawning clientele.

The greatest blessing that we know,
In health is said to be;
That blessing, under God I owe,
Oh Mahomed! to thee;
My lips the gratitude shall show,
That in my heart doth glow,
For ah! I feel too well assured,
(Let all deride, and laugh who will,)
That had I never try’d thy skill,
I never had been cured!!’ ⁶

The royal warrant by George IV was the final imprimatur on his social eminence, but his financial situation was precarious, dependent as he was on his sleeping partner, Thomas Brown, for funding. Brown died in 1841, and Din was unable to raise the capital required to win the auction of his baths. He offered to manage the property on behalf of the higher bidder, but unfortunately, his services were no longer required, and he had to relocate to a small property on Black Lion Street. He tried to compete with his old establishment, continuing to advertise his services till 1845. He became more and more impecunious in the ensuing years, and in 1851, this extraordinary Renaissance man died.

References:

Victorian Turkish Baths, Malcolm Shifrin.
Sake Dean Mahomet: Traveller and Shampooing Surgeon, Niaz Zaman.
The Travels of Dean Mahomet, Michael Fisher.
An Indian with a triple first, William Dalrymple, The Spectator, Jan 3, 1998
shampoo. (n.d.). Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved May 14, 2008, from Dictionary.com: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/shampoo
Shampooing, Sake Dean Mahomed..

Movie Quiz - Answers

2012-01-07T20:46:00.000Z

All right, all right, hold your horses. I know that all 8 of you that attempted this quiz are desperate to see the solutions. So here you go.

1. Am positive a lamb leg will make things loads better: Shawshank Redemption
2. Jesus’s Granddad: Godfather
3. Mother Theresa, Hitler and John Merrick: The good. The bad, the ugly
4. Jarvis Cocker isn’t real: Pulp Fiction
5. Batman sees no moon or stars: Dark Knight
6. Nice guys: Goodfellas
7. A white Spanish house: Casablanca
8. Join for a barney: Fight Club
9. They stole Noah’s sat nav: Raiders of the Lost Ark
10. Not this lot in the lineup again! The Usual Suspects
11. Rectangular numbers: The Matrix
12. I can’t hear the baaas: Silence of the Lambs
13. This helps a community member walk: Citizen Kane
14. Keep Malibu and Santa Monica secret: LA Confidential
15. Canines playing in the water supply: Reservoir Dogs
16. Return to tomorrow: Back to the Future
17. Wet karaoke: Singing in the Rain
18. Bannister was an environmentalist: The Green Mile
19. Contender, Are you ready? Gladiator
20. Blindfolded and handcuffed underwater and got out, wow: The Great Escape
21. Expiring isn’t easy: Die Hard
22. Lottery win for poor Lassie: Slumdog Millionaire
23. A regal roar: Lion King
24. An expensive offspring: Million Dollar Baby
25. Blown away my dear: Gone With the Wind
26. There’s the 2184214 to Paddington: Trainspotting
27. It will have cost this toy boy at least £9k a year: The Graduate
28. Cloughie’s story: Life of Brian
29. Get me out of this womb or else! Bourne Ultimatum
30. I’m looking for one that leaves it all to me: Good Will Hunting
31. The story of Harry S.? The Truman Show
32. Filthy gyrating: Dirty Dancing
33. An expensive digit: Goldfinger
34. Don’t show him red…..too late: Raging Bull
35. I do, I do, I do, I do…..so sad: Four Weddings and a Funeral
36. The Queen’s one who needs treatment: The English Patient
37. There’s at least a couple decent chaps: A Few Good Men
38. Satan’s lawyer: Devil's Advocate
39. Don’t even have a hint: Clueless
40. Mind if I butt in young lady: Girl, Interrupted
41. Insomnia in Washington: Sleepless in Seattle
42. It’s the end of the world: Armageddon
43. The King's Wife rules over dry lands: Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
44. Indian junior keeps it beating to stay alive: Braveheart
45. He may be a predator but he's such a nice man: Deer Hunter
46. They just upped and left: The Departed
47. Tee it high and she will bloom, but she's no English rose: Driving Miss Daisy
48. 23.5 miles to bring Frank and us together: The French Connection
49. Rented bacon: Hamlet
50. Painful storage: The Hurt Locker
51. Knight of the Crop Landings: Lord of the Rings
52. He's here all year long - winter spring summer or fall: A Man for all Seasons
53. On the cusp of tomorrow the Indian's foe arrives: Midnight Cowboy
54. The wife doesn't believe it was arson: Mrs Doubtfire
55. Stateless for geriatric dudes: No Country For Old Men
56. Swiss elevators rock from side to side: Schindler's List
57. Amorous Bard: Shakespeare in Love
58. Friendly Party Animal connects over WiFi: The Social Network
59. A Creepy crawly male friend ....... as well: Spiderman 2
60. It's a contracted affection ... even fondness: Terms of Endearment
61. A prostitute's target meets the bootmaker: Tom Jones
62. Read the book on Ali G's home turf: West Side Story
63. Addition for those that enjoy the sun on the back: Some Like It Hot
64. Route to Hades: Road to Perdition
65. Uncle's son is related to Mr Jones ... : My Cousin Vinny
66. Insurrection for coconut candy: Mutiny on the Bounty
67. William II brings a regal finality north of Hadrian's Wall: The Last King of Scotland

Gourmets in Mannheim

2012-01-03T10:33:00.000Z

Just when I was beginning to despair of fine food in literature from Northern Europe, I come across Bernhard Schlink's Self's Deception, in which an ex-Nazi public prosecutor-turned-private-eye likes to devour delicacies in the midst of antagonising his girlfriend and making enemies of various other folks. Gerhard Self lives in Mannheim, and he wants to have a spot of breakfast.

On the third day, I was in the mood to go out for breakfast. Since the Café Gmeiner has been replaced by a restaurant serving foie gras in Jurançon gelée and monkfish slices in mustard seed and similar fripperies, I go instead to the Café Fieberg in the Seckenheimer Straße. The waitress there is a boisterous but kind soul who has taken me under her wing and has made sure that the kitchen knows how I like my eggs - fried eggs flipped over just before being served.

She brought pepper and nutmeg. 'Another pot of coffee?'

Zinaida Serebryakova

2012-01-02T18:11:00.000Z

The name of Zinaida Serebryakova (née Lanceray, also spelt Lansere) (1884 - 1967) is widely known among lovers of art world-wide. Her works are found in many countries, most often in the collections of Russian emigres of the first wave. Still, in the Ukraine, her fame is insufficient, and true glory is still in the future.

At the dressing table. Self-portrait. 1909.

The explanation for this lacuna lies in the tragedy of the history of the twentieth century, when 'aristocratic' art was aggressively replaced by the 'proletarian', with the ensuing triumph of the so-called 'socialist realism' over the Miriskusniki. The example of Serebryakova confirms this harsh rule. After her departure to Paris, numerous fans and collectors undoubtedly recalled the creator of the paintings 'At the dressing table', 'Bath house', 'Harvest', 'Bleaching the cloth', all lovely representations of women. Still, until her solo exhibition in 1965 in her homeland, her works were for several decades hidden in private collections, her name mentioned only in an undertone.

The efforts of the artist's children and the Leningrad-based art expert V P Knyazev resulted in the Commemorative Exhibitions in 1965, held in Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev. These presented to the Russian and Ukrainian art world a true picture of Serebryakova's life and accomplishments.

In 1965, the eighty year-old artist fulfilled a long-held dream - she travelled from Paris to Moscow for the opening of her exhibition, held for the first time in the USSR. That was when her name resounded in full force throughout the motherland. In Paris, she had often thought back fondly to her native Kharkov, but even though she was able to make it to Moscow, her childhood places remained an unfulfilled memory. She had less than two years more to live. But we have the fortune of being able to look to the focus of her memories where were born the best of her paintings.

Fields at Neskuchnoye. 1916.

The Lansere family estate 'Neskuchnoye' (Fun) lay 30 miles from Kharkov; three miles beyond this was the village named 'Merry'. Both these placenames express precisely the nature of the historic region at a time when there were noisy fairs, thunderously loud weddings, gambols and promenades. In the early years of the 20th century, villagers from these estates would head off to Kharkov for trade and return after dusk. In those days, against the background of peasant huts stood the Lansere family estate, all columns and orchards, situated near the swift flowing rivulet 'Muromka', and the family chapel where the artist's father, the famous Russian sculptor E. A. Lansere lay buried. He had succumbed to consumption aged forty, when Zinaida was not even two years old.

Zinaida owed her own artistic development to her maternal uncle, Alexandre Benois, and her elder brother, Eugene Lansere, both outstanding figures of Russian art, founders of the Benois-Lansere school from which emerged an entire galaxy of famous artists and architects. Both the estate and the chapel are attributed to a Lansere, although exactly which from that talented family was responsible is still unclear.

Winter Landscape. Village Neskuchnoye. 1910.

In 1886, Zinaida's widowed mother took her six children to her paternal home in St Petersburg. The atmosphere in the Benois family was special, dominated by the worship of classical art and spiritual interest. Zinaida's grandfather, Nikolai Leontyevich Benois, was a living encyclopedia of art. His tales of his travels in Italy, of antiquity and the Renaissance, and frequent visits to the theatre and the Hermitage as well as exposure to the books in her family's extensive library revealed a world of beauty to Zinaida. All members of her family were constantly engaged in creative work; Zinaida as well began to passionately engage with art.

During Zinaida's youth appeared the creative movement known as 'World of Art' (1898) (Mir Iskusstva), pioneered by her uncle Alexandre Benois and his friends, L. Bakst, K. Somov, S. P. Diaghilev and others. The associated exhibitions became an automatic part of her life. In 1911, the association was newly restored and Zinaida herself became a member, to promote the revival of the traditional artistic heritage. During that decade, there was much emphasis on the classical heritage, and many related magazines were published, such as 'Old Times' and 'Apollo.' A great investigation of the legacy of the past was being undertaken, seeking to find aesthetic, artistic and moral values from which contemporary culture could draw inspiration. Many of the articles bewailed the wait for artistic greatness in Russia as it revived itself spiritually. The humanist ideals of the new art were being defined, and the heroic image of the world was sought in the celebration of beauty, goodness and joy. These were the sentiments that surrounded the budding artist.

While her talent had been kindled in her family homestead, it was in St Petersburg that Zinaida's artistic identity was fully formed. Immersed in the cauldron of contemporary Russia, she personally knew many prominent litterateurs and artists from home and Europe. If only she had taken up the pen along with the brush! We would then have had literary portraits of those greats: A. Benois, E. Lansere, K. Somov, Anna Akhmatova, Y. Annenkov, Sergei Prokofiev. It was in 1917 that Zinaida's friend, the critic S. Ernst began writing the first monograph on her work.

From that time on, Zinaida's life would become a chiaroscuro of bright moments and dark bitterness.

Since 1898, scarcely a summer had passed without Zinaida repairing to her ancestral home to spend time with her extended Benois-Lansere clan, happily tearing herself away from gloomy St Petersburg. Not far from the Lansere estate, on the other bank of the Muromka, was the cottage of the Serebryakovs.

Boris Serebryakov. 1908.

Boris Anatolyevich Serebryakov was a cousin of Zinaida's, his mother being her father's sister. Zinaida and Boris had been brought up together since childhood. Now they fell in love with each other, and the family approved. The difficulty was that the Russian Church disapproved of marriages of close relatives. Additionally, while Zinaida was Catholic, Boris was Orthodox. After many appeals to the spiritual authorities in Belgorod and Kharkov, the couple finally got married on September 9, 1905. Zinaida engaged herself enthusiastically in painting while Boris studied to become a railway engineer, and both made the most optimistic plans for the future.

Boris was a thoughtful, progressive and resolute man. During the first Russian revolution, he was present at meetings in St. Petersburg, supporting the farmers' demand to own land. Even as a student at the St Petersburg Institute for Railway Engineering, he dreamed of working in Siberia. This drive to the far lands and new activity so filled with risk was shared with Zinaida. In the midst of the Russo-Japanese war, Boris chose to work in Manchuria, and to the dismay of his loved ones, ended up in Liaoyang when the Russian army suffered a crushing defeat there.

After their wedding, the couple visited Paris. During the trip, each had their own special plans. Zinaida visited the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where she painted from nature, while Boris joined the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées as a surveyor.

Autumn Greenery. 1908.

After a year of new experiences, the couple returned home. Zinaida was hard at work in her ancestral home - creating studies, portraits and landscapes. Boris, as a skillful and devoted esquire, planted apple orchards, kept a keen eye on his land and crops, and became an enthusiastic photographer. Both husband and wife were like-minded, deeply in love and yet realistic in their vocations, be they artistic or technical. Boris and Zinaida were in temperament very different people, but these differences supplemented and unified them. And when they were apart, which happened often, Zinaida's mood was ruined and she lost her focus on her work. From August 1914, Boris was Head Surveyor in the construction of the railroad from Irkutsk to Bodaibo; later, up to 1919, he was involved in the Ufa-Orenburg line. Still, the happy couple had four children, two sons and two daughters, all of whom subsequently linked their lives to the creative arts, becoming architects, artists, interior decorators.

Farmers. 1914.

Sorrow erupted during the Civil War. On the way to Kharkov in a military carriage, Boris contracted typhus and died of heart failure. The war and her own personal tragedy forced Zinaida to leave Russia for the land of her early ancestors, France. In a letter to a friend, Zinaida, usually so reticent in matters of the emotions, wrote on February 28, 1922: 'I have always thought that to be loved and to be in love - that is happiness. I was always in a trance, unnoticing of life around me, and I was happy, although even then I knew sorrow and tears ... It is so sad to realize that that life is over, that that time has run out, and nothing more than loneliness, old age and misery lie ahead, while my heart is still so full of tenderness and feeling.' And in 1952, Zinaida wrote from Paris to her daughter Tatyana in Moscow: 'You won't believe that more than a quarter century has gone by without him!' All these years she lived continually thinking of her husband, silently seeking his advice on matters of importance. Four paintings of Boris by Zinaida remain in the collections of Tatyana and Eugene Serebryakov, in the Tretyakov Art Gallery, and in the Novosibirsk Picture Gallery.

Harvest. 1915.

But let us return to oeuvre of this wonderful painter.

Starting in 1899, Serebryakova spent nearly every spring and summer at her ancestral homestead. The labour of young peasant girls in the fields grabbed her attention. Her interest became concrete in 1906 after her return from Paris. Although 1915 (the year she painted her famous work 'Farmers in the fields') was still long in the future, studies and portraits of peasant men and women filled up her albums.

The seventh exhibition of Russian artists in Moscow in 1910, brought fame to Zinaida. In the Tretyakov Art Gallery were exhibited her self-portrait 'At the dressing table' as well as the gouache 'Autumn Greenery', which had been finished at her estate. The perfection of technique, the freshness of colour, and the cleanliness of the tones - these for the first time drew attention to her landscapes. Human figures and buildings were included in the artistic composition as an element of spatial organisation. In the landscape 'Autumn Greenery' (which could also be called 'Windmills') they attract attention and become the centre of the image. Zinaida was very fond of this angle. Windmills reminded her of her beloved Don Quixote, serving as a symbol of life itself, which is driven by the wind just like the mill's wings, never stopping for a moment, grinding like grains the fates of men. (However, even her windmills hardly proved eternal. The last ones disappeared at the end of the 1930s.)

Zinaida's 'Harvest' became a classic. It is impossible not to admire the mastery of her composition, the purity and sonority of her palette.

The bather. 1911.

On the Muromka, she painted her sister Ekaterina for 'The bather'. Here in the valley was a small yet important field of hemp: from its seeds, her peasants pressed oil, and from its fibre they wove cloth. Here Zinaida accumulated her observations for the painting 'Bleaching the cloth' (1917). In the Muromka in 1914, a peasant girl named Polya Molchanova drowned; she had served as a model for the portrait 'Polya' and also in an étude for the 'Harvest'. (The Muromka no longer exists - it has dried up, covered with grass. It is just about possible to discern traces of its overgrown bed.)

Her finest works, such as 'At the dressing table', 'Bath house', 'Harvest', 'Bleaching the cloth', were all done at her estate. With pencil and brush, she recreated the unique Serebryakov landscape of Kharkov. During the Revolution and the ensuing Civil War, the house and studio of the artist were burned by gangs of anarchists (to the great grief of the local peasants, who had held the family Lansere in high regard). During World War II, invaders destroyed the family chapel as well. The graves of Zinaida's family didn't survive either. Today only the Serebryakov landscapes remain to give an idea of how the village once looked.

Bath house, 1913.

The October Revolution found Zinaida in Kharkov. She worked at the newly established Archaeological Museum at the Kharkov University. In the autumn of 1920, she received offers to transfer to the Petrograd Department of Museums, or to take up a professorship at the Academy of Art. Not only did she receive papers to return to Petrograd, but also passes for free travel for her entire family. By December 1920, Zinaida was already in Petrograd. She decided not to participate in the museum or teaching activities, preferring to work in a studio.

Undeniably, Zinaida could have become a master of Soviet art. But being modest and shy, and critically attached to her own oeuvre, in the 1920s, Serebryakova did not take up tasks such as the design of campaign posters or the decoration of public buildings or revolutionary celebrations. During these years, she was busy painting portraits, landscapes of Tsarskoye Selo, and interiors of palaces. To her great joy, Zinaida was given permission to be behind the scenes during performances at the Mariinisky Theatre. Her interaction with the dancers over three years is reflected in her amazing series of ballet portraits and compositions.

In the early post-Revolutionary years, a lively culture of exhibitions began in the country. Zinaida participated in several exhibitions in Petrograd. In 1924, she promoted a large exhibition of Russian fine art in America, which was set up for the purpose of financial support to painters. Of Zinaida's fourteen paintings, two were sold immediately. Burdened with taking care of her family (four children and her mother) she used the money to travel abroad with a view to promoting further exhibitions and to obtain commissions. In early September 1924, Serebryakova went to Paris.

Bleaching the Cloth. 1917.

As fate would have it, Zinaida was to spend the major part of her life in France. For many years, she didn't have a studio, and her earnings were miserly. Many of her creative ideas could not be implemented owing to lack of funds. She led a closed life in Paris, socialising only with Russians. Brighter periods in her life were associated with Zinaida's travels with her daughter to Brittany, to the south of France or Switzerland. In 1926, she began a series of portraits of local Breton fishermen and farmers. In 1928 and 1932, she was able to work in Morocco. In the 1920s and 1930s, she was celebrated in Paris among the advocates of realist art. Of her was said that Serebryakova is an outstanding master of European values. However, her voice as a painter in the realist mode was drowning in the contemporary vogue for abstract art and modernist masterpieces.

Portrait of E.I. Finogenova. 1920.

In the middle of the 1930s, Zinaida attempted to return to the USSR. But protracted commissions in Belgium delayed her, following which World War II intervened. After the war, she was invited back to Russia by the Soviet Academy of Arts, urged by her children and notable artists such as D. A. Shmarinov and S. V. Gerasimov. However, old age and illness prevented her from travelling. Then, the Soviets decided to hold a large commemorative exhibition of Zinaida's art. And so she managed to return to her motherland for the last time.

Time flies and takes away the generation that was captured in Serebryakova's études and portraits. Until recently, many of those painted by Zinaida in Kharkov during the Civil War and who worked at the Archaeological museum of the university. In those days when her husband suddenly succumbed to the typhus, leaving her to take care of her four children and mother, those friends had rallied around her in her sorrow. Among them were G. I. Teslenko and E. I. Finogenova, whose visages were immortalised by the artist's brush. Among the many portraits of beautiful Kharkov women, there are two of Lena Nikolskaya who in 1920 was a researcher at the Archaeological museum. The first impression when comparing portrait with photograph is that Serebryakova embellished her model: enlarged pupils, elongated eyebrows, exaggerated tone. But such is the method of the artist. Delicately having observed the subject's personality, she sharpens them to bring them to the aesthetically appropriate limits. And so Serebryakova's portraits of women are considered the embodiment of a harmonic beginning, of the primordial female essence.

[Loosely translated from Zinaida Serebryakova, based on notes from a book by V. D. Berlin (2004).]

Christmas 3

2012-01-01T20:34:00.004Z

Clearly the muscle memory involved in cycling has little to do with ice-skating. The boy, you understand, is an expert cyclist. So is his father. Ice-skating, we found, is another thing entirely.

We took the boy the other day to the Tower of London where part of the moat has been converted to an open-air skating rink. For the princely sum of £12.50 each, we managed to get an hour's worth of skating practice. The boy fell more times than he stayed up. Throughout, he remained cheerful. Inordinately wet, but cheerful.

This is nothing like the rink in Kuwait, moaned the wife. Why is there so much water on the ice? She had been dragged into the cold water when the boy fell for the fifth time. While she was back on her feet in a fraction of a second, he was content to flap about like a beached walrus. Then he flailed his legs and caused nearby learners to shy away and fall as well.

'Stand up!' I roared.

'I am trying!' he roared back.

He flailed some more and amputated the feet of some skatersby.

Presently we were following the rest of the learners who, like lemmings, were moving in the same direction. Anticlockwise we shuffled, good Borg that we were. The experts whizzed about expertly around us, executing stylish flourishes and curtsies. Occasionally the wife would nip away ('I learned to skate,' she said, 'in Kuwait.' She likes to talk in rhymes.) When she got back to join us, the boy would screech, 'Amma!' and fall again.

In the last ten minutes of the allotted hour, the boy managed to make small shuffling steps on the ice. 'Success!' he announced.

Now it was my turn to shine. I shimmered off into the centre of the rink to practice my balance. A mother and daughter pair, holding hands and keeping each other aloft, suddenly materialised in front of me. I couldn't brake in time. 'Excuse me!' I yelled. They reared up like startled rhinos. Aghast, they watched me looming ever closer, my arms askance, my feet proceeding in different directions. A desperate manoeuvre caused me to spin 180 degrees. My left foot shot up and my right hand scraped painfully against the ice. A second before I was going to plough the rink with my nose, I righted myself, scarcely an inch away from the mother's face. It was a dance move Flawless would have approved.

'Wow,' the mother breathed.

'Minty,' I thought.

'Impressive,' she said, clutching at her equally frightened daughter.

Self-deprecating as ever, I staggered off.

Christmas 2

2011-12-29T11:44:00.000Z

Santa brought a Playstation Move for the boy. While he had expected a Wii or an Xbox Kinect (having written a small note to Santa requesting either device), the fellow was quite pleased. He spent six hours whacking demons and skeletons on a medieval quest to obtain a jewel. Every time he was stymied, he'd yell at me. "It's because you're not telling me what to do!"

"Shield, shield!" I would shout. "Arrows! Shield, shield!"

"Don't shout at me!" the boy would yell back.

"Don't shout at the boy," the wife would say.

"I'm telling him what to do," I would say.

"Let him figure it out," the wife would say.

Flying crosses would fly at Deadmund and he would sag and grunt with every impact.

"I'm running out of life," the boy would say. "Help me, acha!"

"Shield, shield!" I would shout. "Arrows! Shield, shield!"

"Don't shout at me!" the boy would yell back.

"Don't shout at the boy," the wife would say.

Et cetera ad eternam.

Another Random Tootle

2011-12-28T12:50:00.000Z

And again, instead of going to the gym, I go on a random walk around my part of London. I walk briskly, honest. I cover about 3 miles in 45 minutes, burn 320 calories, and see some sights and witness some events and overhear some chats. And read some petitions and speak some French.

The initial and fastest leg is from Bank over Southwark Bridge to Borough High Street. I nip past Borough Market, observing the long queues at Neal’s Yard Dairy (a fine British cheesemonger). Desperate Christmas shoppers throng the place. Some of my colleagues have recently received boxes of Neal’s Yard cheeses from their brokers and I am delighted to see that such specialties as Appleby’s Cheshire and Sparkenhoe Red Leicester have pride of place on Neal’s Yard’s shelves. I haven’t had either cheese but I intend to as soon as I have this cholesterol thing beat, and shall report at length. 2012, here I come.

There are even longer queues at local pubs. What’s with people drinking at 3pm, I ask you?

At 67 Borough High Street, I see a lovely red building on which appears the following legend: W H & H Le May Hop Factors. Surely that’s worth a brief investigation? Yes, it is.

[Sketch by Amy Walters.]

I find that the Le Mays were a famous supplier of hops to brewers and the like. (The Le Mays were a well-to-do family. One of them, Lt Algernon Le May, aged 34, perished in the Great War – his name appears on a nearby war memorial.) The hop trade was a major part of Southwark till nearly the 1970s. For centuries, Borough High Street and Old London Bridge were the only means of ingress into London from the south. The area, therefore, was dotted with inns and taverns. Recall Harry Bailey who led the pilgrims in Chaucer’s tale? He was a proprietor of a local tavern, and very rich to boot. Hop factors were warehousers and intermediaries between the growers and the breweries.

Southwark is rich in listed properties, many pre-dating the 19th century. This building though is rather modest inside. 19th century developers liked to apply a bit of embellishment to the exterior to aggrandise their creations.

Not fifty metres away at 77 Borough High Street is George Inn, one of the last extant hostelries in Southwark. This was built in the 17th century. These inns catered to horse-drawn traffic, and were situated on long plots with a narrow frontage onto the main street. These survive mainly in name only. I don’t go inside George Inn Yard to inspect the inn itself. I’ll leave that for another time I shirk off gym. It’s a National Trust property, which helps as I am a member. But here’s a picture of its lovely galleried front.

[The George Inn by Nick Garrod, on Flickr]

A little further along and a quick left onto Talbot Yard reveals a non-descript office building on which appears a plaque. Here stood Chaucer’s Tabard Inn, from where the pilgrims set off on their grand trip to Canterbury. Just like the George, it had burned down in the 17th century and was reconstructed; unlike the George, it didn’t survive the Industrial revolution, and exists only in literary memory. Luckily, we have engravings of it from the 180o’s when it looked a bit like this:

[The Tabard Inn, c. 1850. Wikimedia Commons]

I retrace my steps to Borough High Street and shift left on Newcomen Street. I hope there might be a plaque or some memorial or the other to the only Newcomen I’ve heard of, who invented the steam-powered pump and inspired James Watt’s steam engine. But he was a Devon man, and I am not sure if he had much to do in London.

Like many of the side-streets in Southwark, this street too used to be coaching inn yard (once called Axe Yard). In the 17th century, it came to be owned by two charities. One building bears the name of one of the charities – John Marshall’s. The street, however, is named after the other – Mrs Newcomen’s. She owned three messuages – ha! I learn a new word – one of which was in Axe Yard, and she bequeathed them upon her death in 1675 for "the clothing of poor boys and girls with a suit of linen and woollen once a year, whereof two-thirds . . . [were to] be out of the Borough side, and the other third . . . out of the Clink Liberty . . . and for . . . teaching them to read and write and cast accounts, and for . . . putting forth boys apprentice at 5l a piece, at their age of 14 years." (Quote from here.)

As I continue along Newcomen street – not the prettiest street in Southwark, admittedly – I note signs everywhere of King’s College and Guy’s Hospital. Every time I look up, I see the immense Shard. It looms over the entire borough. Guy’s Hospital is so much more to human scale. There is a courtyard with an arch. It is another memorial to the fallen soldiers of the Great War.

[John Keats at Guy’s Hospital, by Mike Paterson]

Beyond is a colonnade separating two inner courtyards. In one of them stands Lord Nuffield, a benefactor of the hospital, and in the other is a seated John Keats, a bronze-work by Stuart Williamson inaugurated in 2007. The great poet had trained as a surgeon in the hospital, and quit, undone by the gruesomeness. As far as I can tell, the only bit of medicine that ever appeared in his poetry are these lines from Ode to Fanny:

Physician Nature! Let my spirit blood! 
O ease my heart of verse and let me rest; 
Throw me upon thy Tripod, till the flood 
Of stifling numbers ebbs from my full breast.

Across St Thomas’s street is the Old Operating Theatre and Herb Garret. It is closed, unfortunately, till the New Year. As I head away from it, a lovely girl steps out in front of me, followed by a young man who tells her, 'I have an entire archipelago of mistresses.'

Say what? Before I can react, they disappear into a side street. Scratching my head, I continue along St Thomas’s Street till I get to Crucifix Lane. I see a sign for the Fashion and Textile Museum. There’s no time to take a gander at that; I turn towards the Shard. Construction all around has wrecked views and entrances and my neck hurts from craning. I see BVAG petitioning against the demolition of Southwark’s heritage (London Bridge is the first city-centre railway terminus, it thunders, it should not be treated so shoddily; prevent the demolition of prime Victorian-age train sheds), and I see an interesting art gallery. It is called the Underdog Art Company, exhibits graphic art and has live music shows, and I’m afraid I have no time for that either.

[Silk Screen Print by Tony Lee at Underground Art Co. Image by Shuby, on Flickr.]

I am accosted by a couple of young women. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ says one. ‘The Underground?’ She has a strong French accent, and waggles her fingers down. West African, I surmise, so in my best French I respond, ‘Suivez la rue 300 mètres et tournez à droite.’ They grin at me happily. ‘D’accord!’ says the other woman, and giggling at my accent (I hope) they head away.

The rest of my walk is even brisker than ever – onto Barnham Street to Tooley Street, left onto Tower Bridge Road and over that fruitcake bridge back to the City. I don’t stop anywhere, just burn my soles on Tower Hill and Tower Street and Eastcheap and King William Street, all the way back to Bank.

Christmas 1

2011-12-26T11:32:00.002Z

I took the boy to the office on Friday. He was excited, although not quite as much as some of my colleagues. They'd heard of his wisecracks and were looking forward to meeting him in person.

'How do we keep him entertained?' asked Frei.

'Shall we show him the table football?' said Pitt.

'No,' said Parker. 'That will give him the wrong impression of what goes on in the office.'

'You mean the right impression,' said Pitt, and everybody fell about laughing.

The boy was on his best behaviour. He shook hands very cordially with everybody and only confused the names of two people. He looked at my Bloomberg console and noticed that the Euro was falling in value against the dollar. He walked around the office and came back to sit at my desk.

'You can use this screen and I'll use this one,' he said generously to me.

We fought each other briefly for possession of the mouse.

Frei made a bet with the boy. 'Look,' he said, pointing at the intraday tick chart of Euro-dollar. 'One Euro is 1.3067 dollars. I'm going for lunch in fifteen minutes. Do you think this chart will be down or up at that time?'

'Down,' said the boy.

'Given how we've been doing so far, I wouldn't be surprised if the boy wins,' said Frei to me confidentially and laughed like a hyena.

Meanwhile, the boy had noticed the football table. It was surrounded by four eager men playing desperately for victory. He waited patiently for them to finish, but they kept switching sides, playing game after game.

Adebayor noticed that the boy was looking at bit forlorn. He went into the football room and muttered something to the men. They looked at the boy sheepishly. They trooped out. 'We got carried away,' said one.

'That's okay,' said the boy.

'I told them that your son was about to cry,' said Adebayor smugly. 'It always works.'

We went in and whacked the ball a few times. It rolled into the goals at random. The boy giggled happily.

When Frei was about to leave for lunch, we took a look at the currency chart again. The Euro chart had been dropping jaggedly all that time, but as we watched, it suddenly spiked up.

'Oh dear,' said Frei. '1.3077. I'm afraid you lost, mate.'

'That's okay,' said the boy.

We also went for lunch soon thereafter.

Movie Quiz

2011-12-22T19:43:00.000Z

All right, all you cryptic clue lovers. Here's a Christmas quiz: each is a clue to an English film. Send me answers - if you like - at j o s t a m o n at h o t m a i l . c o m:

Am positive a lamb leg will make things loads better.
Jesus’s Granddad.
Mother Theresa, Hitler and John Merrick.
Jarvis Cocker isn’t real.
Batman sees no moon or stars.
Nice guys.
A white Spanish house.
Join for a barney.
They stole Noah’s sat nav.
Not this lot in the lineup again!
Rectangular numbers.
I can’t hear the baaas.
This helps a community member walk.
Keep Malibu and Santa Monica secret.
Canines playing in the water supply.
Return to tomorrow.
Wet karaoke.
Bannister was an environmentalist.
Contender, Are you ready?
Blindfolded and handcuffed underwater and got out, wow.
Expiring isn’t easy.
Lottery win for poor Lassie.
A regal roar.
An expensive offspring.
Blown away my dear.
There’s the 2184214 to Paddington.
It will have cost this toy boy at least £9k a year
Cloughie’s story.
Get me out of this womb or else!
I’m looking for one that leaves it all to me.
The story of Harry S.?
Filthy gyrating.
An expensive digit.
Don’t show him red…..too late.
I do, I do, I do, I do…..so sad.
The Queen’s one who needs treatment.
There’s at least a couple decent chaps.
Satan’s lawyer.
Don’t even have a hint.
Mind if I butt in young lady.
Insomnia in Washington.
It’s the end of the world.
The Kings Wife rules over dry lands.
Indian junior keeps it beating to stay alive.
He may be a predator but he's such a nice man.
They just upped and left.
Tee it high and she will bloom, but she's no English rose.
23.5 miles to bring Frank and us together.
Rented bacon.
Painful storage.
Knight of the Crop Landings.
He's here all year long - winter spring summer or fall.
On the cusp of tomorrow the Indian's foe arrives.
The wife doesn't believe it was arson.
Stateless for geriatric dudes.
Swiss elevators rock from side to side.
Amorous Bard.
Friendly Party Animal connects over WiFi.
A Creepy crawly male friend ....... as well.
It a contracted affection ... even fondness.
A prostitutes target meets the bootmaker.
Read the book on Ali G's home turf.
Addition for those that enjoy the sun on the back.
Route to Hades.
Uncle's son is related to Mr Jones ....
Insurrection for coconut candy.
William II brings a regal finality north of Hadrians Wall.

Delhi Durbar

2011-12-18T14:51:00.000Z

When I arrive at Indar Pasricha Fine Arts on 12 December, I am met with some consternation. I have seen on their website that there is an exhibition of photographs of the grand Durbar of 1911. An Anglo-Irishwoman named Lilah Wingfield attended that imperial event, and recorded it in her diaries. Pictures from that time are on display until 17 December. But when I enter the gallery, they are still being put up, and Maggie, the enthusiastic arranger, is somewhat nonplussed.

"The exhibition's being opened at 6pm," she says. "We are going to have drinks and canapes."

Still, she is very welcoming and invites me to look around. It takes me about fifteen minutes to cover the seventy-odd pictures that have been affixed on the walls. There are photos of Lilah's family, and her trip to India, and the Coronation maidan where the Indian nobility and the British ruling castes put up their shamianas, and the Grand Durbar itself, and commoners who came to see their Emperor, and other pictures of her travels around the country. Copies are available for sale at prices from £100 upwards, but the photos are somewhat blurred when viewed up close. They are an interesting relic and record of the time, however, and worth preserving.

Lilah Wingfield at Chandni Chowk, Delhi, 1911.

I notice copies of a book titled A Glimpse of Empire by Jessica Douglas-Home. It turns out that Jessica is Lilah Wingfield's granddaughter. She has recently recovered Lilah's diary and written the book based on its entries. I ask if I can buy a copy, and Maggie tells me that there is to be a book-signing after the opening.

"Jessica is just powdering her nose," she says.

I am unable to stick around for the drinks. Maggie disappears to ask if Jessica can sign a book for me. When the author turns up presently, she asks where I am from. "Delhi," I say. "Oh," she says, "I just got back from there. The book was launched in Delhi."

She inscribes the book to the wife and dates it. "The Durbar was exactly a century ago," she says.

"I'm afraid I can't stay for the opening," I say. She is unperturbed by this revelation.

"I didn't know there was to be an opening and a book-launch," I continue. "The website just gave the dates of the exhibition."

She doesn't stick around after signing the book. A photograph falls off the wall and is hurriedly reattached. Maggie asks me to leave a note in the visitors' book. I scrawl some platitude or the other. Another couple enters and are greeted happily by Maggie. I say goodbye and leave.

Check these out:

1. Glimpse of Empire photographs page.
2. The photographs were on display in Delhi, as Jessica said. India Today carried an article on Lilah Wingfield.
3. And it appears I missed royalty at the opening of the exhibition. The Duke of Kent was there.

Vive La Difference

2011-12-17T10:21:00.000Z

Even when the French try to use flexibility to nudge the other side to compromise, cultural misunderstandings can make the process difficult. Araud told the story of the torturous negotiations with an American counterpart in 1999 over new strategic rules for NATO. Araud took the position that the text had to specify that any military intervention should be in accordance with the UN Charter; the American diplomat rejected that condition.

"What happens if you want to intervene and the Russians block it with a veto?" the American asked.

"I intervene," Araud replied.

"I don't understand," the American said. "You want us to say 'according to the UN Charter,' and you tell me that you're ready to violate the UN Charter?"

"Wait a minute," Araud said. "When you marry, you say that you'll be faithful to your wife. After that, they there is real life."

The American looked at him in horror.

"Obviously, we had a cultural misunderstanding," Araud later recalled. "I was trying to say that in life, you need principles. You do your best to stick to your principles, but it happens that you don't stick to your principles. But here, there was a cultural impasse. So I said to him, 'Okay, forget it! Forget it! Bad example!'"

The story had a happy ending. "The matter was resolved by the two presidents, Jacques Chirac and Bill Clinton," said Araud. "They both knew a lot about marital fidelity."

[From Elaine Sciolino's La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life.]

A Gift

2011-12-12T23:53:00.000Z

The boy attended a birthday party on Sunday and returned with a helium balloon. As I put him in bed, he caught my face in his hands and brought his face close to mine. 'If you get scared at night,' he whispered, 'don't worry. I've put a present over your bed. It will keep you safe.'

The present was his balloon. It hovered over us bluely as we slept.

The night was riven by a 'thp, thp, thp' sound that then changed to a 'SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.'

We juddered awake, panicked, gasping.

The balloon had been sucked into the fan.

That was the end of that night's slumber.

[Before you ask why we have the fan on in winter, let me say two words: 'stuffy' and 'without'.

The boy was alternately mirthful and sympathetic when next morning we told him what had happened.]

Directions

2011-12-04T09:38:00.001Z

There's a story about a Berliner who visits Vienna and loses his way to the railway station. He accosts a local and demands, "Which way to the station?" The Viennese is taken aback but replies politely, "Sir, wouldn't it have been nicer to say, 'Good evening. I would appreciate it if you would show me the way to the station.' ?"

The Berliner stares at the Viennese in disbelief, emits a 'Ha!' and stalks off.

A few months later, the Viennese man happens to be in Berlin, and, having lost his way, asks a local for directions. The Berliner responds with a rapid-fire, "Straight 100 metres, left, then right, proceed 200 metres, turn right again, then an immediate left, and 400 metres straight."

Completely bemused, the Viennese manages to stammer out a thanks.

"Never mind the thanks!" barks the Berliner. "Repeat the instructions!"

This story, admittedly, has less to do with giving directions than with cultural differences between Prussians and the Viennese. Still, it points to a social compact - a person who is lost expects to be guided to his destination.

I suspect this is a fairly recent development in human history. For long periods, most people tended to stay within a day's walk of their homes. They were intimately tied to the local landscape. When they had to go farther, they would likely make use of networks of contacts, stepping from cousin to friend to customer. In a new village, they might stop a stranger and say, 'Do you know the way to Gulbadan the perfumer's house?' and - because most people in a village knew each other - would be guided appropriately.

The development of cities probably did little to stymie this network of connections, although perhaps the links became somewhat more tenuous. The problem was to locate a particular person because a random man on the street would be unlikely to be acquainted with them. This was when landmarks and specific locales became important. One would ask then, 'Do you know Gulbadan who lives by the Friday mosque?' or 'Which way to the Friday mosque?' and once there, ask more specific queries.

This is all speculation - I have not done any research into the matter at all. But as street maps and particular addresses are very recent, and - even where they exist, they are not always reliable - I guess that people still need others more than ever to give them directions.

Culture affects even this relationship. I'm not talking about the gender stereotype of men not wanting to ask for directions at all. I refer rather to the deep reluctance of some peoples to appear unhelpful, who then offer wrong or misleading directions, because some directions are better than none. Not everyone is as militarily precise as the Berliner; luckily, not everyone is as vague as the fellow at my old alma mater who sent me on a totally wild goose-chase because he either didn't want to appear ignorant, or wanted to appear helpful.

This was shortly after I first moved into the Indian Institute of Science, a rather sprawling campus with the various department buildings hidden helpfully behind dense vegetation. Seeking the swimming pool, I stopped to ask a student for directions.

'Ah, yes,' he said, and looked around him in every direction. 'Go down this alley and turn right at the end. You'll pass the Physics department and the library. You then turn left, go through the lecture halls, and turn right. Clear?'

I nodded.

'Then ask somebody there,' he said, and walked away.

I thought even then that the instructions were hilarious. Still, given their precision, I thought it would be a small matter to locate the swimming pool once I passed the lecture halls. Unfortunately, though, the pool was nowhere near those halls. Worse, there was nobody around to ask either. In my four years at the campus, I never ceased to marvel at the ridiculous precision and complete wrongheadedness of that student's directions.

I never learned to swim either, but that's another story.

Epicure

2011-12-03T18:36:00.000Z

My meat shall all come in Indian shells,
Dishes of agate, set in gold, and studded,
With emeralds, sapphires, hyacinths, and rubies...
My foot-boy shall eat pheasants, calvered salmons,
Knots, godwits, lampreys. I myself will have
The beards of barbels served instead of salads;
Oiled mushrooms; and the swelling unctuous paps
Of a fat pregnant sow, newly cut off,
Drest with an exquisite and poignant sauce;
For which, I'll say unto my cook, "There's gold,
Go forth and be a knight."

The name [Ben] Jonson gave to this mad pleasure-seeker is Sir Epicure Mammon.

(From The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began By Stephen Greenblatt.)

It Doesn't Suit

2011-11-17T19:00:00.000Z

Came to work today and realised that my suit jacket didn't match my trousers. Granted both were dark colours. Still, one was dark blue and the other was deep black.

Ever the masochist, I pointed out the faux-pas to a colleague.

'You numpty,' he said, smirking.

'You wally,' said another, passing by. 'What is this - American-style?'

This contretemps points to several things:

People on the train looking my way were not admiring me.
I don't wear suits as often as I should.
I should be a bit more organised in keeping suit jackets and trousers together.
I should not dress in the dark. Even if the light wakes the wife up and subsequent life is less worth living.

War and Peace

2011-11-11T11:11:00.005Z

Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace has several references to grand feasts and the preparations for them. Much as one would expect to find in this glorious encyclopaedia of Russian life. But seekers of rustic Russian cuisine may be slightly disappointed. Look at this.

At the beginning of March, old Count Ilya Rostov was very busy arranging a dinner in honor of Prince Bagration at the English Club.

The count walked up and down the hall in his dressing gown, giving orders to the club steward and to the famous Feoktist, the Club's head cook, about asparagus, fresh cucumbers, strawberries, veal, and fish for this dinner. The count had been a member and on the committee of the Club from the day it was founded. To him the Club entrusted the arrangement of the festival in honor of Bagration, for few men knew so well how to arrange a feast on an open-handed, hospitable scale, and still fewer men would be so well able and willing to make up out of their own resources what might be needed for the success of the fete. The club cook and the steward listened to the count's orders with pleased faces, for they knew that under no other management could they so easily extract a good profit for themselves from a dinner costing several thousand rubles.

"Well then, mind and have cocks' comb in the turtle soup, you know!"

"Shall we have three cold dishes then?" asked the cook.

The count considered.

"We can't have less - yes, three... the mayonnaise, that's one," said he, bending down a finger.

"Then am I to order those large sterlets?" asked the steward.

"Yes, it can't be helped if they won't take less. Ah, dear me! I was forgetting. We must have another entree. Ah, goodness gracious!" he clutched at his head. "Who is going to get me the flowers? Dmitri! Eh, Dmitri! Gallop off to our Moscow estate," he said to the factotum who appeared at his call. "Hurry off and tell Maksim, the gardener, to set the serfs to work. Say that everything out of the hothouses must be brought here well wrapped up in felt. I must have two hundred pots here on Friday."

Reading in Italy

2011-11-03T17:00:00.000Z

A recent paper (PDF!) by Mancini, Monfardini and Pasqua reveals that reading among Italian children is prompted directly by the reading done by parents. That is to say, if a parent reads in the presence of the child, the child is likelier to read than one whose parent doesn't read.

The researchers found as well that reading by mothers is more important than reading by fathers. There is both a short-term and a long-term effect. When a child sees a parent reading, he or she is more inclined to do the same (short-term effect). In households where parents read, children appear to be more inclined to read as well, even when the parents are not at that particular moment reading. Curiously, however, children tend to read for longer periods than their parents. In fact, the average amount of time spent by the Italian parents under survey was quite small - 12 minutes for mothers and 10 for fathers (with a deviation of 27 minutes for mothers and 24 for fathers). Even more curiously, if a parent reads in the presence of a child, a younger child is less likely to read than an older child.

When I was growing up, my parents used to read in my presence, my mother more than my father. I don't think they read for hours on end. I did, and so did my sister. In this, we are bang in the centre of representation in the Italian study. I can't say, however, that my sister (younger) read any less than I did. So in that, we are a bit different from the Italians. Of course, you can't infer anything about Indians' reading habits from just my example. For all I know, the same effect of parental behaviour on offsprings' reading habits applies anywhere in the world.

Although I still read quite a bit, I rarely do so at home. I'm not sure this has much of a deleterious effect on the boy's reading. After all, the Italians have established that the mother has more power to influence the kid than the father. Huzzah. If the boy ends up a lumpen element, it won't be entirely my fault.

But being unable to read at home is a source of some frustration for me. Reading while commuting is not quite as satisfying as reading while lying on the sofa with a pack of peanuts to munch on. At home, however, as soon as I try to read, I'm interrupted by the boy. He might want to read (which he does loudly), or he might want to go to the park, or he might want a drink of water, or he might want me to admire his latest Lego creation. Distractions galore.

Still, it's heartening that the boy does enjoy reading. How long that will last is anybody's guess. Will he become a lifelong slacker on the sofa with peanuts and a book? Or will he be a lifelong slacker on the sofa with beer and TV? The possibilities for slackerdom are endless.

Bunyip Bluegum and Others

2011-10-23T20:44:00.000+01:00

I must confess I have not - as far as I can recall - ever read any children's books by an Australian author. Until fairly recently, that is to say. Norman Lindsay's The Magic Pudding is a beaut, however, a peach of a book, positively rollicking with humour and verse and good companionship.

And, of course, food - lots of it, every variety of pudding and pie.

The PUDDIN'-OWNERS' EVENSONG

"Let feeble feeders stoop
To plates of oyster soup.
   Let pap engage
   The gums of age
And appetites that droop;
   We much prefer to chew
   A steak-and-kidney stew.

"Let yokels coarse appease
Their appetites with cheese.
   Let women dream
   Of cakes and cream,
We scorn fal-lals like these;
   Our sterner sex extols
   The joy of boiled jam rolls.

"We scorn digestive pills;
Give us the food that fills;
   Who bravely stuff
   Themselves with Duff,
May laugh at Doctors's bills.
   For medicine, partake
   Of kidney, stewed with steak.

"Then plight our faith anew
Three puddin'-owners true,
   Who boldly claim,
   In Friendship's name
The noble Irish stoo,
Hurrah, Hurrah, Hurroo!"

A Gibb In India

2011-10-19T21:51:00.000+01:00

Matthew Gibb (1849-1920), great-grandfather of the Bee Gees, was a military man. According the Scottish records office, he was 5’ 5¾” tall at enlistment at the age of 18 in the 60th Rifles (which later became known as Scottish Rifles, The Cameronians). He was a shoemaker in the parish of Abbey, Paisley, Scotland when he joined up. His eyes were hazel, and his hair was brown. He served in India (1867-1878, 1880-81), Afghanistan (1878-1880), South Africa (1881-1882) and back home in 1882. He was discharged in 1905 with a rank of Quartermaster, after having served nearly four decades with the Forces. His conduct was reported as ‘Exemplary’ and was awarded the Good Conduct medal and the Long Service medal, and another one for combat in Afghanistan.

“In spite of the above mentioned good conduct and decorations, it appears that in 1874 while serving in India, he was arrested for drunkenness, tried, and reduced in rank from Corporal back to Private.”

To his descendants today, this seems entirely out of character, for all his sons were teetotallers, and he himself appears as unbending and stern in his photographs. And yet how could something as trivial as drunkenness result in so harsh a punishment?

The Regimental Headquarters of the 60th Rifles is in Winchester, and the details of Gibb’s service are available in greater detail there.

He was one among the many BOR – British Other Ranks – soldiers from these isles who served in India, along with the much larger native forces. They bivouacked in Cantonments waiting to be called out on campaign. When he joined, India was the largest and most important of British colonies. The Army acted as a vast Imperial police force, maintaining law and order and British interests in the region. Gibb was one of sixty thousand white soldiers living and working along with Indian army men in garrison towns across the subcontinent.

It was for the most part a fairly uneventful routine. Gibb’s battalion was moved around from station to station: Benares, Bara Gali, Rawalpindi, Changla Gali, Fatehgarh: carrying out peacekeeping duties and training exercises, ready to be called upon when trouble broke out. He was promoted fairly quickly to Lance Corporal soon after his arrival in India.

A Lance Corporal is not a rank but an appointment. Gibb’s performance was evaluated whilst he remained in this probationary state. Clearly he did well, and was soon made Corporal with attendant privileges, more pay, better pension.

At the time, there were no serious engagements for the Army. There were occasional skirmishes, but in the main, his existence consisted of waking up, parading, facing the odd inspection, guard duties, a never-ending dullness that prompted the bored infractions of military life. For many soldiers there was little to do during the day except go to the wet canteen and drink. And drink they did, hard drinks like rum and arrack. And they gambled, and they lost their money, and they drank more and gambled more in a bottomless spiral.

This drunkenness was a serious problem at the time, and in many pubs were signs ‘No Red Coats or Dogs’ because the soldiers would drink to excess. But alcohol had long been a part of army life. It was long believed that it would help the troops withstand the heat, and was certainly healthier to drink than water in India. By the 1860s, however, there was growing concern about the effects of alcohol on discipline and well-being. Soldiers were encouraged to join Army Temperance Groups. Severe punishments were meted out to anyone found drunk on duty.

In Gibb’s case, he was found so drunk that he was hauled up before his commanding officer, sentenced to two weeks’ solitary confinement and reduced in rank. That was the end of his hitherto stellar rise through the ranks, a serious blow to his hopes of bettering his life.

Matthew Gibb was not completely crushed, however, for by the end of that year, he had obtained an Army Certificate of Education, Second Class. This was in recognition of his effort to become literate, having gone to school to educate himself. And then it took him another eight years to regain his rank of Corporal, in 1882. Eventually he ended up being a Staff Sergeant.

This was a man of determination, who had managed to pull himself by his bootstrings to a dignified station in life.

[Matthew Gibb’s early life had been a stark contrast. He was one of several children listed as living in the William Gibb household in the 1851 Census. William was a handloom weaver, a craftsman of that cloth mimicking cashmere that came to be known after the Scottish town of Paisley. But in the 1861 census, Matthew was no longer living with his parents: aged 12, he was in the East Lane Ragged School.

A Ragged School, or Industrial School for Destitute Children, was for orphans or indigent children to receive a good education and vocational training and three square meals a day. Boys received training in shoemaking, tailoring, to inculcate in them a work ethic and discipline. This was one of several institutions set up in the Victorian period out of a deep sense of philanthropy and Christian imperative to do good. The Paisley Ragged School was part of that national movement, much of which was driven not by the wealthy but by common folk such as the Portsmouth cobbler who trained up children in his trade from 1818. By the middle of the 19th century, there were nearly 700 Ragged schools throughout Britain providing a home, a basic education and a trade for society’s poorest children.

In Paisley, only children from the margins of society were selected to the Ragged School. In particular, those begging on the street or in danger of falling into crime were given priority. In the 1850s, during the so-called Golden age of the Paisley looms, Matthew’s father had been earning well, despite frequent fluctuations in labour demand. The Paisley shawl was in favour during that time, with even Queen Victoria promoting it. But as the decade wore on, the condition of the weavers gradually worsened. Mechanised looms began to replace craftsmen as the Industrial revolution trundled remorselessly. The craftsmen tried to compete by producing larger amounts of the cloth, but only ended up flooding the market and driving down prices. Although the power loom could never weave a pattern as complex as a Paisley, its cheaply produced shawls began to undercut the prices of the real thing as well. The result for Matthew’s father and his cohorts was disaster.

In 1854, Matthew’s mother died; shortly thereafter, William left his children destitute as he went in search of work elsewhere in Scotland. He was away for two years, leaving his children to be cared for by the parish, effectively abandoned. In 1857, Matthew was in the Ragged School; in 1863, his father was institutionalised, driven insane by depression. By the 1870s, the Paisley shawl works were for all purposes extinct, and William Gibb died in a poor-house in 1874.

From BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? – Robin Gibb.]

Indianisms and DMello

2011-10-05T17:10:00.000+01:00

A chap called Daniel DMello recently wrote a piece titled "10 Classic Indianisms: 'Doing the needful' and more". It has been doing the rounds of the web and eliciting chuckles from Indians and others. I am the first to concede it is amusingly written. But the author's smugness and condescension are palpable. He evidently believes that the God of Grammar has revealed rules of English usage to him. He does little to verify that his 'Indianisms' really are limited to the subcontinent. Worse, he hasn't even bothered to check if his assertions on grammar hold water at all. He is funny. If you are only interested in his humour, stop reading right here. But if you have any inclination towards accuracy, read on. His piece, I'm sorry to say, is specious. It is vacuous. It makes me, dare I say it, bilious.

Prescriptivists of language usage very often don't know what they are talking about. Consider the widely held injunction against the passive voice. Prescriptivists in many ways are hidebound people with little understanding of how languages develop. They are conservatives with pet peeves. They would do well to go to the superb Language Log and learn about grammar and language from real experts. This is not to say that all of DMello's complaints are unsound. Let us examine them one by one.

0. What is your good name? Clearly this is a literal translation of the Hindi आपका शुभ नाम क्या है? Why is this any less valid an addition to the corpus than anything invented by, say, the Romans? English abounds in Latinisms. After all, they said 'cum grano salis' and we have translated it to 'with a grain of salt' and nobody scoffs. Languages admit new usages all the time, some of which become entrenched while others fall by the wayside. Survival of the fittest, what?

1. Pass out. DMello says that to pass out is to faint. He dislikes its use to mean 'to graduate from an institution'. He says only the Indians say 'pass out from college.' Bunkum. In Britain, if you graduate from a military college, you are said to pass out. I can't say for sure, but isn't it possible that the usage was extended to mean to graduate from any college when the Brits came to India?

2. Kindly revert. DMello says that 'revert' means 'return to a former state'. It is incorrect to use it to mean 'reply'. Well, it's not just Indians who are culpable. So are the Singaporeans and Malaysians. And in the Caribbean, too, it's used to mean 'get back', as in 'I will revert (get back) to you.' True, it originates from Indian English. But the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary has accepted this usage in its latest edition. DMello should check his facts before pontificating.

3. Years back. DMello insists it should be 'years ago'. It's true that the usage of 'years ago' vastly outnumbers 'years back'. Searching on Google, 'years ago' brings up about a billion hits, while 'years back' brings in only 33 million (about 30 times fewer). But DMello again makes the mistake of attributing the phrase to Indian English. A member of the English Stack Exchange checked both the British and American corpora of contemporary usage, and discovered that 'years ago' is used about 10-20 times more often than 'years ago', both in formal and informal speech/journalism/fiction (although the Brits don't use 'years back' at all in academic literature). But Americans and Brits do use this expression. How about Jeffrey Kluger in this article in Time? Is Kluger desi, DMello? (DMello also resents the use of 'backside' to mean 'back'. As in 'put the suitcase in the backside of the car'. What can I say, DMello, you are correct here.)

4. Doing the needful. Ha. Okay... It's a fair cop, guv. Except it isn't! It's an Englishism - search for it and you'll find uses from the Law Journal of 1833, and Marine Insurance documentation of 1866, and in Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers, and letters from some incensed Glaswegians to the abdicating King Edward VII in the 1930s, and the Kenya National Assembly Official Record of 1986 and, for heaven's sake, what the Dickens are you on about, DMello?

5. Discuss about. Why add the 'about', asks DMello. Good question. It appears to be unnecessary. And yet it's not just Indians who say this. There are 6 million hits on Google for this expression, not all by desis. The occasional Iranian bureaucrat has been heard to use it. Even the New York Times has stumbled.

6. Order for. DMello doesn't like ordering 'for' anything. 'For' is gratuitous. I agree.

7. Do one thing. I suspect this comes from the Hindi एक काम करो. It is a colloquial expression that generally precedes a suggestion. It is an Indianism - I haven't seen or heard this used anywhere else. I'm no oracle, of course, so you are free to do your own investigation. DMello says, drolly, that a person who says 'do one thing' usually proceeds to suggest five. Yup, that can happen. But that's a matter for logic, not usage, surely?

8. Out of station. This, like 'pass out', comes from British (and American) military usage. DMello's complaint is that this is archaic. A brief online search reveals that it is not all that dated. It's not particularly restricted to subcontinentals either. In West of the West: Imagining California (by Leonard Michaels et al, University of California Press), page 283, appears the sentence 'One continues to run into people who, literally and metaphorically, are out of station.' And a little later, 'The out-of-station are to be met with at every twist and turn.' The book was published in 1995. There were no desis involved in writing it.

9. Sleep is coming. DMello objects to the anthropomorphism here. On the other hand, finer writers than him have written "Winter is coming", and "Night is coming", and, well, it's all very portentous when they say it, and it loses a bit of that sense of awe when someone is about to clunk into bed, so, okay. Point taken. I think.

10. Prepone. DMello doesn't object to this Indianism and an Indianism it is, to be sure, a very logical one, a most apt one indeed, as DMello himself is eager to add. This is clearly a neologism, and that's yet another way languages change. Were it not for neologisms, there wouldn't be 'laser' and 'photon' and 'torpedo' and Star Trek would have been that much duller and the wife and I wouldn't have watched it, or if we did, one of us would have hated it, and then had we ever met, we wouldn't have gotten on as well as we did, and that doesn't bear thinking about.

So there you have it. What do you have to say, DMello?

Miniatures

2011-10-03T19:05:00.059+01:00

I was at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin a while ago. It is famous for its enormous reconstructed artefacts from the Near East - the Ishtar Gate of the Babylonians, and the Market Gate of Miletus of the Romans. An even bigger treasure is the Pergamon Altar depicting the Greek myths of the war between the gods and the giants. These alone are worth the price of visit.

The large section on Islamic Art, however, is equally valuable. Series of rooms flow from one to the next, tracing the history of Muslim creativity from the earliest to the early modern. There are sculptures, friezes, paintings, furniture, vessels, mihrabs, weapons, clothes, coins, carpets. Amongst them is a series of Mughal miniatures, from Shah Jahan's time to that of the daughter of Aurangzeb, and beyond. These are part of an exhibition (until 16 October) of festivity in Indian Islamic royal art. I took pictures of them as I walked by, and here they are:

Shah Jahan accepting tributes from a vassal (1640-7)

Kushal Khan, a noted musician of Agra (mid-17th century)

Dervishes in a trance (17th century)

Dara Shikoh enters Lahore Fort (17th century)

Aurangzeb's daughter Shebannissa celebrating Shab-i-Barat (17th century)

Noble lady with servants (1775)

Lovely, aren't they?

Jenever

2011-09-24T12:05:00.001+01:00

In Janwillem van der Vetering's Outsider in Amsterdam the chief inspector is dismissive about pseudo-Buddhism and nuts who want to improve the world.

"... He buys an old rackety house at the Haarlemmer Houttuinen, fixes it up a little and whitewashes all its walls. He buys a second-hand imitation of an Asiatic statue and puts it in the hall, lights an incense stick and sells health food. Unwashed tomatoes and grains. The kind that sticks in your throat. A rat couldn't digest it. And carrot juice."

He interrogated the detectives with his eyes. Both nodded.

It was clear that the chief inspector had no liking for carrot juice. They knew what he liked. He liked Dutch gin, and shrimp cocktails, snails and peppersteak. Pineapple with whipped cream. And cognac.

"There's a bar as well," Grijpstra said.

The chief inspector looked surprised.

"A what?"

"A bar," repeated Grijpstra, "downstairs, as you go in, on the right, a bar where they sell gin and beer."

"Good idea," the chief inspector said. "With a glass of jenever you can get through to the other nuts. And when you have weakened their defences you can make them eat unpeeled rice."

Muhawbelly

2011-09-16T12:06:00.000+01:00

It was Onam the other day. I only noticed because fellow Malayalis were busy congratulating each other. The wife was gallivanting around Budapest and the boy and I didn't feel like a sadhya. Not that the boy knew anything about sadhyas. He is a simple soul. Give him a chapati and dal followed by a gulab jamun and he is happier than Larry.

Still, I ought to do my part as a Malayali parent, I thought. I'm not much by way of religiousness, but a festival is a festival, innit? And there are legends. Everybody likes legends. I called the boy over.

"Today is Onam," I said.

"Okay," he said. "Can I go and play now?"

"Let me tell you about Onam," I said.

He sighed.

"It is the biggest festival in Kerala," I said.

He didn't say anything.

"There was a king many many years ago," I said. "He was a good king and everybody loved him."

"Were there dinosaurs?" said the boy.

"No," I said. "When dinosaurs roamed the earth, there were no people."

"Were the people all with Krishna?" said the boy.

"Yes, maybe," I said. "Now, the name of the king was Mahabali."

"Was I with Krishna when you and Amma got married?" said the boy.

"Yes, yes," I said. "Mahabali took care of his people. He was so good that the gods got worried."

"Why?" said the boy.

"Well," I said, "I guess the gods thought the people would forget them if they were so happy with their king."

He looked puzzled but kept mum.

"What was the king's name?" I said.

The boy mumbled something.

"Mahabali," I said.

"Muhawbelly," he said, deuced Englishman that he is.

"So Vishnu was born as a little man," I continued. "He came to Mahabali's court. Mahabali saw him and said, 'Ask me for a boon.'"

"Was he a carnivore?" said the boy.

"Eh?" I said, momentarily confused. "No, not 'bone'. 'Boon'. A boon is a wish."

"Okay," said the boy.

"Mahabali said, 'Do you want riches? Gold? Food? Whatever you want, it's yours.'" I continued. "But the little man said, 'I only want as much land as I can cover in three footsteps.'"

We thought about this for a while. The boy took three steps on the carpet.

"That's not a lot," he said. "Why didn't he ask for a toy or something like that?"

I shrugged.

"Mahabali agreed," I said. "And suddenly the little man grew enormous. E n o r m o u s. With one step, he covered the earth. With his next step, he covered the skies."

The boy's eyes first grew round and then narrow. Before he could speak, I continued, "'Where shall I place my foot for the third step?' asked the giant. Mahabali realised then that God Himself was before him. He bowed his head and asked Vishnu to place his foot on it. Vishnu did so and pushed him deep into the underground."

"Did he die?" said the boy.

"Nobody knows," I said. "But Vishnu was so pleased with Mahabali's generosity that he granted the king a boon as well. Every year he could come out of the underworld for a day, and his people would see him and be happy. And his land, Kerala, would be lovelier than heaven. And that day is Onam, and people every year await their king."

We sat and looked at each other. The boy didn't look very impressed.

"Is the story finished?" said the boy.

"Yes," I said.

"Is the king here?" said the boy.

"No," I said. "He is in Kerala."

"Did anyone see him?" said the boy.

"I'm sure someone said they did," I said.

"If the king was so good, why did Vishnu kill him?" said the boy.

I was afraid this would happen. Logic is not best served in legends.

"Er," I said. "Mahabali was a good king, but he was a demon, so the gods didn't like him much."

"But if he was good, how can he be a demon?" said the boy.

"I think you should ask Amma that when she comes back," I said.

[For anyone curious about Onam, Maddy's got a nice write-up.]

1759

2011-09-14T22:27:00.000+01:00

Frank McLynn's 1759: The Year Britain Became Master of the World explains that 1759 ought to be as well known in British history as 1066 and all that. That was the year that British defeated French around the world, destroyed pretty much the last chance of Indian opposition on the subcontinent, gained absolute mastery of the seas, and began the long yoke of colonialism over the benighted peoples of the world.

Here is a time line of events of that year.

Pastry! Pastry, Pastry! Pastry!

2011-09-13T09:09:00.000+01:00

The multi-talented American writer Adriana Trigiani (Funny, charming and original, says Fannie Flagg) is not so disconnected from her Italian heritage that she misses an opportunity to describe the preparation of a fine pasta. It's a long, long section in her book Milk Glass Moon, which I shall not copy out here. Instead, here's a small passage that should appeal to every sweet-tooth out there.

"Here we go." Pete takes my hand and leads me up a small staircase into a quiet bistro filled with mahogany antiques, odd chairs with needlepoint seats, and benches along the wall. The only light is coming from a refrigerator case that holds some of the most ornate pastries I've ever seen: tortes layered with frosting, eclairs festooned with tiny pink roses on their chocolate sleeves, a strawberry napoleon with stripes of custard and jam nestled between paper-thin crust.

"They have real food too."

"This is real food," I insist.

In Da Country

2011-09-11T11:38:00.000+01:00

At Polesden Lacey, a country house with landscaped gardens and rolling hills, I showed the boy some bees flitting from flower to flower. As long as I was right by him, he was not fussed by the critters. Later we walked across the lawns and he found himself amidst a bank of blooms with about four or five bees buzzing in them.

'Bees, bees!' he yelled.

'Relax,' I said. 'They will not bother you. Just keep walking. What did you expect? This is the countryside.'

'Ohmigod, this is the countryside?' he exclaimed in horror. 'I don't want to be in the countryside. I want to be somewhere natural - like London!'

Urban brat.

Italian Noir VII

2011-09-10T22:01:00.000+01:00

The town of Bologna has given rise to another crime writer, one who brings a journalistic rigour to his fiction. This is Carlo Lucarelli, the most successful and high-profile author of Italian noir, is famous as the star of a TV show where he casts himself as a lead investigator of real crimes. He aims to combine in his writing the best of investigative journalism, history and fiction. Nowhere is this extraordinary methodology more evident than in his researches into a serial killer for his best-selling novel Almost Blue.

“I went to a psychiatrist,” he says, “and told him: ‘suppose that my character were sitting here, his name is Alessio Crotti, he comes from Cadoneghe in the Padua province…’ That place has nothing to do with the serial killer, but I once went there to present a book and got lost… I wanted to punish the place by making it the birthplace of my serial killer. ‘He hears bells ring and kills people. Why?’

“And we carried out a real psychiatric test on a fictional character. The psychiatrist began by asking, ‘Where does he come from?’ ‘Cadoneghe.’ ‘What kind of place is it?’ ‘Who are his parents?’ And this gave life and a voice to my serial killer.”

Sometimes my shadow is darker than other people's. I’ve seen it sometimes when I am walking along the street. It stains the wall alongside me… Sometimes I get scared that someone will notice it but I can’t run away from it because it would follow me. It would spread out, sticky and black, alongside me. That’s why I stay close to the wall.

The reader is inside a psychotic mind. That is more important than in the world we see of some other Italian crime writers, that informs everything. Everything is paranoid, everything is strange, schizophrenic and disturbing. It is the first Italian crime novel (says Maxim Jakubowski) that perfectly integrated the best of English and American hard-boiled noir elements and brought them to life in an Italian context.

Lucarelli also impressively researched Italian history of the Fascist era for Carte Blanche, set in the final months of that regime. He was frustrated by his country’s inability to investigate the Mussolini period. “It is where you find the roots of the many contradictions and problems we have today,” says Lucarelli. “The failure to overcome fascism, what happened after the end of the Second World War, a number of important things…”

He tracked down a former policeman who had served in the Fascist period. “I went to interview a policeman,” he says. “He had been a member of the political police from 1941 to 1981, forty years. I remember how he told me that at the beginning, he was a member of Mussolini’s political police, and he used to arrest anti-fascists and communists.” What shocked Lucarelli was that this Fascist officer had been allowed to continue as a policeman in the post-war Italian democracy.

“You, a Fascist, in the police force? ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I was a good policeman, there was a need for social order…’ He found himself arresting the fascists who had been his previous employers.”

These interviews would form the basis of the character of Commissioner De Luca in Carte Blanche, who would go on to feature in a further two novels, to form a period crime trilogy. “I felt,” says Lucarelli, “that De Luca with all his contradictions is on the one hand a good person, a policeman, a detective, the man who, in the crime novel, will lead us to the truth. Yet at the same time he is also the instrument of dictatorships and so on. So he is a man full of contradictions who can live through Italian history and tell us about the contradictions of each period. This is why I have kept him alive for three novels and why I am now thinking of a fourth.”

By tackling Italy’s painful history, and embracing the lack of any certain resolution, Lucarelli can trace his methods back to the roots of Italian noir. He identifies in his fellow writers a shared commitment to write more than just simple crime stories. “We belong to a literary style that prefers to tell a story rather than describe a scene. Our detectives are all characters who see what is happening in society and suffer. They understand that there is nothing they can do about it and this brings a state of despair.”

This is the authentic voice of Italian noir.

[From BBC Four’s Italian Noir – The Story of Italian Crime Fiction.]

Italian Noir VI

2011-09-09T22:00:00.000+01:00

The location of the terrorist attack of August 1980 was significant. Bologna, a rich and intellectual town, has often been called ‘Red Bologna’ for its reputation as a centre of leftist politics. And today this politically radical city has inspired a young female author to write a crime novel that profiles the rise of sexual violence against women.

In 2010, Barbara Baraldi’s The Girl with the Crystal Eyes introduced a new character into the Italian crime novel – the female vigilante. “[It] originated from a scene I had in my mind of a woman who killed,” says Baraldi, “who killed a man but more than one man, and therefore there arises an important question - ‘what in this day and age brings a woman to kill someone?’”

She removes her magic wand from the top of her hold-up stockings and caresses his throat. He hasn’t time to scream. The artery in his neck has been sliced open with a small bronze razor that looks like a prop from some old film. The blood sprays everywhere, staining the filthy walls.

It covers her.

It colours her.

“In Italy, very often sex crimes remain unpunished,” says Baraldi, “in the sense that men are released immediately, and therefore I thought about creating this provocative character of a woman vigilante who roams the city of Bologna at night which was considered once a calm city, a university city; but in reality it hides a dark side. And this vigilante dresses provocatively and when she is attacked, she kills. She only kills men with bad intentions.

“Certainly current stories in the news affect my novel because when I wrote it, there was an explosion in crimes – almost all of a sexual nature. I remember the most serious one, however, was treated quite lightly: a girl in broad daylight at the bus stop was dragged into the nearest park and raped. So in broad daylight, a young student… I mean, I was very angry when faced with all these things.”

They start laughing.

Crack.

Crack.

Two pistol shots.

Two bodies lying on their backs. The blood of one merges with the blood of the other in a macabre dance of bodily fluids.

Baraldi’s writing has a cinematic quality to it that readers can quickly relate to at once. She employs the literary equivalent of fast cutting and cutting between scenes to dramatic effect. There is a minimum of exposition, a minimum of explanation, as though she dares the reader to keep up with her. The reader may struggle initially, but it will be worth it in the end. Baraldi is of the generation where film has informed her writing as much as anything she has read.

She found her horror writing style from literary classics familiar to British readers. “Lately I have been dubbed an exponent of new Italian Goth,” says Baraldi. “I grew up with romanticism, and with mystery, and I’m passionate about Mary Shelley, and the atmosphere of Dracula.”

“When I was a child,” she continues, “I read fairy tales. What struck me was the fact that these were actually rather violent fairy tales being told: the Wicked Witch, or Bluebeard who hanged his wives in a room you could not enter without staining the key with blood.”

She takes the hairpin from her hair and drives it into his eye, punching through to the brain.

Barbara Baraldi has to make her way in a society that is not entirely propitious to women. There were several avenues of protest open to her, and she chose a rebellious, punkish mode. She has attracted a younger readership, one that is not easily shocked or squeamish. She is one among several female Italian crime writers, a set of women who do not write cosy novels of the Miss Marple genre. The books of the new Italian women are bloody and edgy, and a wonderful opposition to their contemporary male counterparts.

[From BBC Four’s Italian Noir – The Story of Italian Crime Fiction.]

Italian Noir V

2011-09-08T21:59:00.000+01:00

Massimo Carlotto’s first-hand experiences of Italy’s violent underworld has heralded a new wave of Italian writers who base their novels on real characters. From the other side of the law, a top Roman judge has dipped into his casebook to write an explosive novel set in the Italian capital, about the city’s notorious gangsters.

Giancarlo de Cataldo’s debut novel, Romanzo Criminale, was inspired by his work as an investigative magistrate in Rome, a role that took him both to crime scenes and prisons. Writers long for the sort of access he has, he says. If one is talented as a writer and has inside knowledge, it is a crime not to put it to use. He based his novel on a real street gang, the Banda della Magliana, a suburban gang that became a real criminal power in the city, “collecting money and imposing a kind of law as if the Mafia had for the first time, taken place in Rome.”

“I first met one of those people from the gang,” said de Cataldo, “he was a repented, he was under protection of justice, but those judges didn’t believe him, so he was set free and then murdered. The second chance was working in a trial against some of the members of these gangs, the survivors, because many of them were dead. They were real criminals, but they were old style criminals at the same time.” Set over a period of a decade, de Cataldo imagines that these people were involved in the darkest parts of the Years of Lead, a time that continues to intrigue Italians to this day.

One of the achievements of Romanzo Criminale is to fold in the lives of real people into the events de Cataldo describes in a responsible way. In 2005, a cinematic treatment with hip characters was released, dubbed the Italian Goodfellas. A pivotal moment in the film deftly flicks between real newsreel coverage of the kidnapping of Aldo Moro and the action of the book, reflecting the twin focus of the book.

De Cataldo also explores the bloodiest event from the Years of Lead, which took place at Bologna railway station in August 1980. In a dramatic moment in the film, a gang member Ice finds himself at the wrong place at the wrong time. A fictional character placed in that situation allows the reader to be involved in what might have occurred at the time. Ice arrives at the station at 10:23, and we know that at 10:25 the bomb has to go off. The explosion behind him is an effective reconstruction of the events, extremely disturbing, bringing us directly into the heart of the Bologna bombing, putting us there among the dead, showing us this is not just a fun gangster film.

De Cataldo explains that the film is different from the book, in that there is no coincidence between the gang and the bombing in the book. However, he adds, he wanted to emphasise that much of Italian history is criminal history, and there is a deep link between the lives of the ‘normal’ citizen and offices of the state, and the underworld. “And that is why Romanzo Criminale is more than a thriller – it is a historical and political crime novel.”

[From BBC Four’s Italian Noir – The Story of Italian Crime Fiction.]

Italian Noir IV

2011-09-07T21:58:00.000+01:00

One of the victims of the Years of Lead would write stories that drew upon his experience of the time. In 1976, Massimo Carlotto was a left-wing activist who found a severely injured person and reported it. As a member of a militant organisation, he was implicated, arraigned and condemned by a right-wing judiciary as a murderer. Seeing no salvation for himself in Italy, he fled to Paris and then to Central America, remaining on the run for five years. He faced torture in Mexico and was returned to Italy where he began an extraordinary legal battle prove himself innocent. It was a poignant, deeply disturbing story of corruption and miscarriage of justice.

Eventually pardoned and released in 1993, Carlotto, the most prosecuted man in Italy for a single crime, decided to write a book of his experiences. The Fugitive became a best-selling novel. He then went on to write violent crime fiction set in contemporary Italy. Having been in one of the toughest prisons in Italy, he gained an insight into the criminal demi-monde. “It was very useful for my profession because I met a lot of seedy people with whom to this day I keep in touch,” he said. “They supply me with a lot of information, useful for my novels.” Carlotto’s run ins with the law shaped the cruel terseness of his writings.

Carlotto was influenced by the political shades of Leonardo Sciascia, but he went on to add a brutality all his own in stories such as The Goodbye Kiss. His books look at white slavery, prostitution, drugs; there’s nothing cosy or easy about them. He subverted the tradition of a detective by introducing an amoral, violent terrorist as a lead character. “Giorgio Pellegrini, the character in The Goodbye Kiss, was the first character in Italian crime fiction to be not only an anti-hero but a ruthless one at that,” Carlotto said. “He is extremely true to life.”

The killings in Carlotto’s stories are realistic and highly stylised. His male characters are macho, ruthless, aggressive. They are singular in their misogyny, much more than one would expect from a typical hard-boiled protagonist. Women in his novels are marginal, hapless victims, pawns in the men’s terrible games. There is much violence against them and yet they seldom fight back. “It allows us to describe and criticise reality,” Carlotto says. He wants to bring a more journalistic approach to his work than what he sees in Anglo-American crime writing. “No one does investigative journalism with respect to changes in criminal phenomena in Italy any more,” he declares. “No one writes about major crimes any more, especially organised crime. Anglo-American novelists have remained novelists, for us it has been necessary to become something more.”

[From BBC Four’s Italian Noir – The Story of Italian Crime Fiction]

Italian Noir III

2011-09-06T21:58:00.000+01:00

In the period following the defeat of Italy in the Second World War, a young writer began gathering material for crime stories that would challenge another sinister force that would dominate the country. Into the 1960s, Leonardo Sciascia’s novels would expose the power of the Sicilian Mafia. The Mafia had become deeply entrenched in the country in the post-war period, during the occupation by US forces. Sciascia’s 1961 novel, The Day of the Owl, told the story of a detective’s battle to solve the murder of a local businessman. At every turn, his investigations are hampered by murky Mafia forces. It is a novel that reveals how deeply the Mafia has permeated Sicilian society, not just economically but also culturally, and how its reign of terror has changed the behaviour of the islanders. The social cohesion of communities is punctured by the fear to speak freely and the sense of distrust that weighs on them all.

The novel begins with a murder by the Mafia. Nobody has seen or heard anything, a denial emblematic of the corrosion in civic values in Sicily. Nobody on the bus saw a thing. It was a hell of a job to find out who was on the bus. The passengers said that the windows were so steamy that they looked like frosted glass. Maybe true.

Sciascia didn’t see himself as just a crime writer. He was a social commentator, but much more than Gadda, he was also deeply alive to the sense of Sicily, its landscape and its culture. His writing reflected that beautifully. Dawn was infusing the countryside. It seemed to rise from the tender green wheat, from the rocks and dripping trees that mount imperceptibly towards a blank sky. The Gramole, incongruous in green uplands, look like a huge black whole sponge soaking up the light flooding the landscape.

Like Gadda, Sciascia chose to reject the conventional model of detective fiction. Instead, his detective, Inspector Bellodi, is forced to confront the corruption that surrounds him. He is on a quest for knowledge very nearly like a spiritual warrior; he learns the limits of what he can do and, more importantly, what he can’t; even when he finds the criminal, he finds no closure. Readers of the crime genre crave a final resolution, but Sciascia, like the other great Italian writers, refuses to grant them that grace.

By the late 1960s, Sciascia began to inject political intrigue into his stories, mirroring the collusion of politics and terrorism and its bane upon Italian society. This was an era that came to be known as the Years of Lead. A bag containing explosives placed in a central piazza in Milan by neo-fascists in 1969 was the start of this era, a decade of carnage by both right and left wing terrorists. Sciascia took on politics, and in 1971, in Equal Danger, wrote about the murder, one by one, of some of the country’s top judges. In the book is a plot to blame the murders on left-wing extremists. You might think that such a plot would reveal Sciascia a leftist himself, but instead you would find nuance as Sciascia takes on both sides, following the delicate undulations of the Italian everyman’s political opinion.

In the Years of Lead, 374 Italians were killed and 1,170 wounded, in a series of brutal attacks that tore the country apart. At the time, people could scarcely imagine whether the criminals were from within the state or without. In 1978 came the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, a former Prime Minister of the country. Was he killed by the Marxist militant group, the Red Brigades, or was he killed by sinister forces in the government? The popular speculations that troubled Italians about who were the culprits prompted Sciascia to conduct his own researches, which he published in The Moro Affair. He drew the reader’s attention to the discrepancies in the official version of events. It all contributed to an atmosphere of political turmoil in which there were frequent miscarriages of justice.

[From BBC Four’s Italian Noir – The Story of Italian Crime Fiction]

Italian Noir II

2011-09-05T21:57:00.000+01:00

The lack of resolution in Inspector Montalbano’s casebooks owes its origins to a novel published in Rome in 1927. During Mussolini’s fascist regime, Carlo Emilio Gadda wrote That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, a crime story to explore the country’s fascist era. He uses the tropes of crime fiction – the burglary, the murder, the ensuing investigation – as a way of examining society, and what has caused the fascist state in Italian society.

The book begins with the murder of an old woman in an upmarket Roman apartment. The body of the poor signora was lying in an infamous position. A deep, terrible red cut opened her throat fiercely… It had taken half the neck, from the front toward the right, that is towards her left, the right to those who were looking down. But Gadda shows how pointless it is to investigate a single crime when society around it is itself so corrupt. The crime was the effect of a whole list of motives which had blown in on a whirlwind. The story revealed how subtly fascism had penetrated the lives of ordinary Italians. In a patriarchal society, one of the main female characters represented what Italian women faced in the Mussolini years. Liliana couldn’t have children, so she has ambiguous relationships with the young women of the apartment block who are ‘adopted’ by her, and these relationships form the swirl and colour of the crime.

Gadda was an established literary figure aiming his criticism at the fascist regime. He used colourful slang and local dialect to satirise Italy’s dictator. He pointed out Mussolini’s penchant for fancy uniforms, his posturing; there is a fair amount of name-calling that goes on. He mocked Mussolini in a way that Italian readers could recognise at once.

In his book, he is as wildly inventive and playful as James Joyce in The Dubliners. He uses terseness and academic text, digressions and word-play; he twists the convention of detective fiction to tell his larger story; his characters are types; his investigations are of a certain kind; his story is ultimately unresolved. The complexity of reality, he seems to say, are banally simplified by fascism.

[From BBC Four’s Italian Noir – The Story of Italian Crime Fiction]

Italian Noir I

2011-09-04T21:56:00.001+01:00

Unlike the Scandinavians, that other major force in criminal fiction, who follow the Anglo-American tradition of the genre, murder, puzzle, psychology, the Italians write books that much more relevant to the world they live in. No-nonsense, no-frills, and based in a society where almost nobody can be trusted, they take particular delight in mysteries that can scarcely be resolved to anybody’s satisfaction. They write more noir than thrillers because they are more pessimistic about the world than the British or the Americans. They live in a noir world with no happy endings.

The detective novels of Andrea Camilleri are set in contemporary Sicily. They deal with the casebook of the worldly Inspector Montalbano of the local police force. He is a stereotypical Italian man, a staunch Sicilian, passionate. In the television series based on the novels, a long lunch is par for the course. He sits at a favoured location in his favoured restaurant, where the staff are in no doubt about his passion for food. A waiter brings out a dish for him. He makes appreciative noises as he is served. The waiter asks him if he’d like the fish at the table. ‘No,’ he replies. ‘Keep it warm for me.’

Montalbano is as enthusiastic when investigating the intricacies of a menu as he is searching for clues to a crime. “It is absolutely deliberate,” says Andrea Camilleri. “Highlighting how he loves to eat, to participate, how he loves life. There is a beautiful saying: ‘Primum vivere deinde filosofari.’ First you live, then you philosophise. For Montalbano it could be ‘First you live then you investigate.’”

Camilleri has imbued Montalbano with a dry wit.

‘My dear friends!’ said the lawyer upon entering the room. ‘Please don’t get up! Can I get you anything? I have whatever you want.’

‘No, thank you,’ said Minutolo.

‘Yes please, I’d like a daiquiri,’ said Montalbano.

The lawyer gave him a befuddled look.

Like all Sicilian policemen, Montalbano has to deal with the Mafia. Camilleri handles this confrontation in a surprising way. “In most of the Montalbano novels there is always a page or two where he meets a member of the Mafia,” says Camilleri. “But it is marginal. I would say this marginality is deliberate on my part. Not that I am trivialising the problem. Not mentioning it would be hypocritical. The problem exists and it is important.”

In a community where nobody can be relied on, Camilleri’s stories are a web of intrigue where nothing is ever as it seems. Montalbano often realises that underneath what appears to be a simple crime there are layers of meanings. In his dealings with the Mafia, he talks to them as though they are a bureaucratic organisation. Camilleri rejects the Hollywood treatment of the Mafia, refusing to put them centre-stage in his stories. “Fiction somehow gives them a noble character,” he avers. “Take for example The Godfather. Marlon Brando’s incredible performance makes us forget that he is someone ordering killings by the dozen. This is the risk that you run that in some way the Mafia is glamorised, and I won’t do that.” Instead, Camilleri chooses to focus on Montalbano’s commitment to the law. He makes no judgments, he listens sympathetically, he is cool and rational in his investigation, and he is implacable in his hunt.

But faced with a corrupt society, Montalbano is rarely able actually to solve a crime. This sets him apart from the traditional detective of crime fiction. “In truth,” says Camilleri, “There are few cases that are resolved with definite certainty. In Italy there is no longer even the certitude of a punishment. So at this point the poor crime fiction writer begins to ask himself some questions. He says ‘do I really have to be the one to sew the torn fabric of society?’ Why do I have to do it? Why is this up to me? Is it fair for me to declare this person is guilty beyond reasonable doubt? Let us leave him with an alternative so it is difficult to reach an absolute truth. One could even question whether an absolute truth exists.”

[From BBC Four’s Italian Noir – The Story of Italian Crime Fiction]

Tsamba Time

2011-08-31T11:55:00.002+01:00

Those of us that went to the North Campus of the University of Delhi in the late 80s (and probably even those of earlier vintage) might recall the Tibetan camp nearby where one could obtain some inexpensive and rather tasty food. The world remains unaware of the tastiness of Tibetan cuisine, and I attribute it to laziness. After all, nearly 80 years ago, Peter Fleming trekked across the land and talked about how a Tibetan staple sustained him:

Tsamba has much to recommend it, and if I were a poet I would write an ode to the stuff. It is sustaining, digestible and cheap. For nearly three months we had tsamba for breakfast and tsamba for lunch, and the diet was neither as unappetizing nor as monotonous as it sounds. One of the great virtues of tsamba is that you can vary the flavour and the consistency at will. You can make it into a cake or you can make it into a porridge; and either can be flavoured with sugar, salt, pepper, vinegar, or (on special occasions for you only had one bottle) Worcester Sauce. And, as if that were not enough, you can make it with cocoa instead of with tea. I would not go so far as to say that you never get tired of tsamba, but you would get tired of anything else much quicker.

The non-Tibetan may suffer from a serious lack of expertise in the preparation of barley-based food, and Fleming is kind enough to provide some tips:

You fill your shallow wooden bowl with tea, then you let the butter melt in the tea (the butter is usually rancid and has a good cheesy flavour); then you put a handful of tsamba in. At first it floats; then like a child’s castle of sand, its foundation begins to be eaten by the liquid. You coax it with your fingers until it is more or less saturated and has become a paste; this you knead until you have a kind of doughy cake in your hand and the wooden bowl is empty and clean. Breakfast is ready.

(from Shadow Tibet. Check it out for an exemplary exposition on all things tsamba. Man, I'm hungry again.)

Fruits of Angels

2011-08-28T21:35:00.004+01:00

Eugenio Fuentes is a writer of slow-burning fiction peopled with characters limned with a tender sympathy. The most tragic of them have a dignity that shines through the vicissitudes of their fortunes. In The Blood of Angels, these qualities are visible in ample quantities. There is not much food, not really. But then there comes a passage such as the following that is so, so moving.

He went into the house and, without once looking into the living room, at the pictures on the fireplace and everything he left behind, went down the stairs into the cellar. The fruit he'd picked over the last month hung from the roof beams: melons from a reed-rope, strings of beans, garlic, grapes, peppers, chilli and laurel. On the floor, heaped on a tarpaulin were figs, apples, potatoes and quinces. The mixture of scents coming from the different ripening fruits created an intense, sickly-sweet smell in the cellar.

Before, when all the members of the household had lived and were hungry, they picked many of the fruits hanging on the trees, shiny without artificial help, plump like coloured light bulbs - the whole farm lit up by the glow of pears, peaches, cherries and apples. Those reserves of food lasted until Christmas. Yet in the last couple of years, although the crops had dwindled and they kept little for themselves, they ended up throwing a good part of it away, uneaten by them and their younger son. Dried fruit became impossibly hard to swallow; it felt like the pears and quinces had turned sour, grapes left a smoky taste in their mouths and cherries left their mouths full of stones. When his elder son had lived that never happened; when he had lived the harvest never seemed sufficient. Before he'd started to die he would come home full of energy, always hungry, and if dinner was late, he would go down to the cellar and take whatever fruit he liked. But in the last couple of years such a big store made no sense.

Very slowly, almost fondly, he tied the slipknot and made sure it slipped properly before slinging it over one of the roof beams.

The Food Demon

2011-08-23T20:28:00.010+01:00

Kanoko Okamoto's A Riot of Goldfish comprises two novellas, one the eponymous one and the other eponymous to this blog's title. Eponymity, don't you know. At any rate, in The Food Demon, there's an intense young man called Besshiro who bullies his wife and wants to be known as Sensei. Unfortunately, in the Japan of his time, there's little respect accorded to a chef, even to one as skilled as he.

His best friend brought out the best in him:

The sorts of things he usually ate, such as soupe a l'oigninon served baked in a small bowl covered in cheese, rice with stewed ox tongue, or salad with haricots verts and vinaigrette, were easy enough for Besshiro to prepare. But dishes like duck simmered in duck blood or eel medallions with vinegared aspic were new to Besshiro and more challenging to make even with the detailed instructions his friend would rattle off from his bed. Simmering the duck blood on an alcohol burner made a rich and sticky broth, like a good red-bean soup, in which the slices of duck were cooked along with salt and pepper. He tasted the meat after cooking it very lightly and was surprised to find that it did not taste badly. His friend explained that it was the specialty of a famous duck restaurant in Paris and was considered quite an elaborate and extravagant dish.

Another time, Besshiro, insulted by what he considered the superficiality of an art lover's criticism, invites her and her husband to dine with him. He is convinced that she will reveal the shallow nature of her understanding of art, and is determined to outdo himself in his culinary attempt just to show her up:

But Besshiro proceeded on the assumption that the woman was a connoisseur and busied himself ordering foods that could stand up to a connoisseur's scrutiny, like moroko fish straight from the Moroko River in Sakamoto, and pepper tree bark from Kurama.

The woman looked impressed and thanked him as she began to eat. 'This catfish roe is gorgeous!' 'And the stewed ebi imo potatoes are exquisite!' As her lips took on a coat of oil from the kara-age, she said simply 'Delicious!' 'Delicious!' and ate on single-mindedly.

Obstinacy Leads Nowhere

2011-08-21T20:41:00.000+01:00

Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss has a cook as one of its heroes, and so one would expect much gustatory peroration. One wouldn't be disappointed. One could be slightly underwhelmed. Some passages remind me of shopping in a Soviet department store. The Soviets had no alternative. Why is this judge so pigheaded as to insist on dining at this absolutely appalling joint?

The judge walked into the kitchen and found two green chilis looking ridiculous in a tin cup on a wooden stand that read "Best Potato Exhibit 1933."

Nothing else.

He went to the front desk. "Nobody in the kitchen."

The man at the reception was half asleep. "It is very late, sir. Go next door to Glenary's. They have a full restaurant and bar."

"We have come here for dinner. Should I report you to the management?" Resentfully the man went around to the back, and eventually a reluctant waiter arrived at their table; dried lentil scabs on his blue jacket made yellow dabs...

"Roast mutton with mint sauce. Is the mutton tender?" asked the judge imperiously.

The waiter remained unintimidated: "Who can get tender mutton?" he said scornfully.

"Tomato soup?"

He considered this option but lacked the conviction to break free of the considering. After several undecided minutes had passed, Bose broke the spell by asking, "Rissoles?" That might salvage the evening.

"Oh no," the waiter said, shaking his head and smiling insolently. "No, that you cannot get."

"Well, what do you have then?"

"Muttoncurrymuttonpulaovegetablecurryvegetablepulao..."

"But you said the mutton wasn't tender."

"Yes, I already told you, didn't I?"

Hasawi

2011-08-19T23:25:00.003+01:00

In the London Review of Books, Safa al Ahmad wrote about her visit to her ancestral village in Hasa in eastern Saudi Arabia. It is a Shiite area, and has faced constant oppression and intimidation by the majority Sunnis that rule the kingdom. Hospitality, however, is honour, and food is a major part of it.

Lunch was ready. Set on the floor was a square plastic mat with a big platter of white fluffy rice, fried fish and chicken on top. Around it were plates of salad, vegetable stews and the Hasawi signature – sticky dates, to be eaten before, during or after a meal.

The Saudi leadership has tried a carrot and stick approach to Hasawis. They pumped money into the area to help build up the infrastructure. At the same time, they clamped down on any sign of dissension.

As the men started to leave, I remembered a friend’s story about his encounter with a fisherman. To catch grouper fish, the fisherman would use a three-pronged hook with a shiny bit of metal attached to it. The fish would be attracted by the glitter. ‘Don’t you worry the fish will catch on to your trick?’ my friend asked. The man laughed. ‘One fish I caught was covered in these hooks. The fish make the same mistake over and over again.’ ‘Shia in Saudi Arabia,’ my friend said, ‘are a bit like grouper fish. The government knows exactly how to catch us every time.’

Chartier

2011-08-16T20:50:00.011+01:00

When the boss worked in Paris, nearly thirty years ago, he was wont to go several times a week to Brasserie Chartier in the ninth arondissement. Cheap and cheerful food, he said, very uneven in quality. Sometimes decent, sometimes brilliant. He recommended I check it out on my recent visit to that city.

Over the years, others have reached the same conclusion. It has become a veritable tourist magnet. When I presented myself the other day, there was a queue of quivering visitors snaking out of the passage leading to the restaurant, down the Rue du Fabourg Montmartre and up to the Boulevard Montmartre. I looked at the line acerbically (it was unaffected) and stalked off.

Waiter at Chartier. Fancy, innit?

I came back the next day when Chez Casimir, the place I wanted to go to for its eat-all-you-can buffet, was too full to accommodate a sweaty visitor. It was nearly 14:30, and there were no lines at Chartier. Inside, the place was abuzz. Waiters in traditional waitering outfits whizzed around efficiently. One of them ushered me to a table for four. All the four seats were occupied, although only two had humans on them. The other two chairs had their belongings. The waiter urged the diners to collect their stuff, and plonked me on one of the newly vacant chairs. The diners smiled tightly at me.

I looked around. The interior was all brass and hanging lights, very French in that turn-of-the-century way. Before I could blink twice, the waiter had brought the day's menu card. There were main courses for 10 euros, side dishes for 2 to 3 euros, half-bottles of wine for 6 euros, desserts for 3 euros. Bliss! When my fish main course and champignons made an appearance, even the tightly smiling couple next to me were impressed.

Mancunian at Chartier.

I hadn't paid attention earlier to what they were saying. We had spoken brief bits of French to each other, and my own is not so good that I can discern accents. I sent a text to the wife ('Eating in a traditional brasserie next to a couple of Frenchies'); shortly thereafter I realised the couple were visiting Mancunians. ('The Frenchies are from Manchester!' went the next text.)

"What's he havin'?" said the man.

"Fish," said the woman. "And mushrooms."

I refused to let on that I spoke English. Their conversation was suitably entertaining. They compared Expedia and Thomas Cook. They agreed that the steak they had just eaten could quite well have been English food. They wondered whether they should take the funicular to Montmartre. They wondered what the Chartreuse dessert was. It turned out to be whipped cream dipped in Chartreuse syrup. Yuck, I thought.

My fish wasn't great, but the Champignons a la Provence were crunchy and munchy. The rose I had was refreshing, but otherwise forgettable. (I can only vaguely recall that I had a rose, in fact.) Dessert was good - a sorbet of cassis. The Mancunians looked on enviously.

They took a picture of me. I offered to take a picture of them. Their camera batteries were discharged. They asked me where I was from. I pretended to be Nepali. They had no idea what I was talking about.

"Kathmandu?" I urged. "No, no," they said. "We don't have any more batteries."

Service compris, said the menu card, so when it was time to pay, I did not plonk down a tip. The waiters courteously encouraged me to enjoy my Sunday and hoped to see me again.

They may have dressed like traditional French garçons, but by thunder they didn't behave like them.

Lucknow in Paris

2011-08-15T21:12:00.000+01:00

A few weeks ago, I was in Paris where I snuck into the Guimet Museum to see their brilliant exhibition on Lucknow during the rule of Awadh. Originally created by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, this exhibition revealed the luxury and opulence and the artistic and musical splendour of the Nawabs. The exhibition ended mid-July, but I managed to dig up a French newspaper article about it, and translated it at Tangentialia.

That reference to Felice Beato, the photographer who took pictures of the aftermath of the 1857 Mutiny? Check out that fish-shaped boat of the Nawabs, and the awful post-bellum ruins of Lucknow at my Tumblr.

An American Equestrian Writes Home From Russia

2011-08-13T10:52:00.002+01:00

“When Cornelius Kingsley Garrison Billings, the millionaire founder of petrochemical giant Union Carbide, took his prize-winning trotters on a goodwill tour of Eastern Europe in 1909, he brought along horse-racing journalist Murray Howe to chronicle the trip in weekly dispatches to The Horse Review magazine.” (from the Moscow Times.)

Murray Hove took 400 photos in Moscow and St Petersburg (recently published on Flickr by his great-grandson, occasioning much excitement in the Russian blogosphere), and wrote letters home, complete with foodiness:

“The zakouski [appetizers] table has no seats, you simply walk up and take a plate and a fork — then you spear a couple of bites of caviar, a pickled sterlet’s fin, a toasted sturgeon’s ear and a liberal portion of sunflower salad. All this you wash down with a small whiskey glass full of vodka. If you are thirsty you can increase the number of vodkas without drawing attention.”

A Tramp Abroad

2011-08-08T08:32:00.005+01:00

Poor Mark Twain. There he was, A Tramp Abroad, sorely missing that good ol' fashioned food which America is rightly known for - size and succulence entirely its own.

To particularize: the average American's simplest and commonest form of breakfast consists of coffee and beefsteak; well, in Europe, coffee is an unknown beverage. You can get what the European hotel-keeper thinks is coffee, but it resembles the real thing as hypocrisy resembles holiness. It is a feeble, characterless, uninspiring sort of stuff, and almost as undrinkable as if it had been made in an American hotel. The milk used for it is what the French call "Christian" milk - milk which has been baptized.

After a few months' acquaintance with European "coffee", one's mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with its clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream, after all, and a thing which never existed.

Next comes the European bread - fair enough, good enough, after a fashion, but cold; cold and tough, and unsympathetic; and never any change, never any variety - always the same tiresome thing.

Next, the butter - the sham and tasteless butter; no salt in it, and made of goodness knows what.
Then there is the beefsteak. They have it in Europe, but they don't know how to cook it. Neither will they cut it right. It comes on the table in a small, round pewter platter. It lies in the center of this platter, in a bordering bed of grease-soaked potatoes; it is the size, shape, and thickness of a man's hand with the thumb and fingers cut off. It is a little overdone, is rather dry, it tastes pretty insipidly, it rouses no enthusiasm.

Imagine a poor exile contemplating that inert thing; and imagine an angel suddenly sweeping down out of a better land and setting before him a mighty porterhouse steak an inch and a half thick, hot and sputtering from the griddle; dusted with a fragrant pepper; enriched with little melting bits of butter of the most unimpeachable freshness and genuineness; the precious juices of the meat trickling out and joining the gravy, archipelagoed with mushrooms; a township or two of tender, yellowish fat gracing an outlying district of this ample county of beefsteak; the long white bone which divides the sirloin from the tenderloin still in its place; and imagine that the angel also adds a great cup of American home-made coffee, with a cream a-froth on top, some real butter, firm and yellow and fresh, some smoking hot-biscuits, a plate of hot buckwheat cakes, with transparent syrup - could words describe the gratitude of this exile?

Age

2011-08-05T18:24:00.002+01:00

Our team secretary turned thirty recently. She brought cakes, which were demolished by investment professionals in sore need of a sugar rush. When I stopped by her desk to felicitate her on her achievement, she was clutching her head in despair.

'Why so despondent?' quoth I.

'It's the end,' she moaned. 'It's all downhill now.'

'Oh come on,' I said. 'It is not that bad. You're still young.'

She looked at me in disbelief. Then she looked at my bald head, and cheered up momentarily.

'How old are you, if you don't mind my asking?' she said.

'Forty-two,' said I.

'Well, you, um, you look, er, younger than that,' she said.

Clearly, her innate honesty was struggling against her tact.

'You look,' she began again, and her voice faltered. 'You look about, er, thirty-five.'

I burst out laughing. She went back to clutching her head.

Trade and the Rashtrakutas

2011-08-03T12:11:00.000+01:00

In Al-Hind: the Making of the Indo-Islamic World, André Wink makes the claim that the Rashtrakuta kingdom's rise in the Western Deccan and the Gujarat area was a direct consequence of a sharp rise in trade with the Persian Gulf, following the establishment of the great Arab caliphate of Baghdad and the Arab conquest of Sindh. He adds that the demise of the Rashtrakutas (AD 743-974) coincides with the fall of that trade in the late 10^th century, when the Fatimid caliphate gained ascendancy in Egypt.

During the early period of consideration, trade between the Middle-East and India was predominantly between the Persian Gulf and Gujarat, with the great ports of Cambay, Somnath, Asawal and Broach all documented by Arab geographers and merchants. al-Biruni, for instance, writes: 'the reason why in particular Somnath has become so famous is that it was a harbour for seafaring people, and a station for those who went to and fro between Sofala in the country of the Zanj and China.' There was a Jewish trading outpost at Broach, and Parsis thrived along the west coast. The Arabs imported large quantities of teakwood, important for shipbuilding, as well as perfumes, bamboo, ginger, indigo, and cotton cloth of every colour. Much of the trade was conducted by foreigners; the Gujarati Hindus and Muslims were not, at this point, dominant.

Towards the late 10^th century, however, the great ports of Gujarat began to decline. According to Wink, the proximate cause was the steady erosion of the Persian Gulf trade as the Red Sea and Egypt became more important. These countries dealt more with Malabar and Coromandel. The resultant decline in wealth and power of the Rashtrakutas was matched by the growing clout of the Cholas in the south of India, with the predictable result.

Still, during the reign of the Rashtrakuta kings, their domain with its capital at Mankir (present-day Malkhed) was considered to be the greatest in al-Hind (as the Arabs called India). 'The kings of al-Hind are not subject to a single king: each of them alone possesses authority in his own country; but the Ballahara is the king of kings (malik al-muluk) of al-Hind.' What is this Ballahara? Well, it's the Arabicised form of the Sanskrit title Vallabharaja, 'beloved lord and husband king'. Both Sanskrit and Arabic sources assert that the Rashtrakuta kings were paramount overlords over India for nearly 200 years. Indeed, the temple of Krishneswara at Rameswaram proclaims the Rashtrakuta advance into the deep south of India; Kanauj was a major conquest in the north. The great art works of Elephanta and Ellora exemplify the high culture and wealth of the Rashtrakutas.

The Arab chronicler Masudi says of this kingdom:

The most powerful king in al-Hind of our time is the Ballahara, king of the city of Mankir ... the greatest centre (of the country). ... This was the name of the first sovereign (of this kingdom), but it has become the dynastic title of his successors on the throne of Mankir and so it remained until the present ... Most of the kings of al-Hind turn their faces towards him whiel they are praying and prostrate (salla) themselves before his ambassadors when they arrive at his court ... He owns horses, numerous elephants and great riches ... He has a large kingdom, and his country has vast stretches of cultivated lands, abundant commerce and plentiful resources. He receives large amounts of revenues and his wealth is enormous ... The Ballahara lives in the city of Mankir. This city is forty parasangs in length, is made of teak, bamboo, and other sorts of wood. It is said that there are a million elephtants to transport the goods of the people. In the king's own stable there are sixty thousand elephants, and one hundred and twenty thousand elephants belong to the cloth-bleachers there. In the idolhouse, there are about twenty thousand idols made of a variety of materials such as gold, silver, iron, copper, brass, and ivory, as also of crushed stones adorned with precoius jewels ... In it there is also an idol made of gold, which is twelve cubits in height. It is on a throne of gold, under the centre of a golden dome, adorned with jewels, pearls and precious stones.

Interestingly, no Rashtrakuta coinage has been found! Indeed, there are no coins from their predecessors in Gujarat, the Chalukyas, either. That's not to say there were no coins at all in Gujarat - there's considerable evidence of large quantities of unminted bullion in the land, much of which served to decorate temples or become idols. Furthermore, the main coinage of the medieval world was the gold dinar and the silver dirham, and the lands of the Indian Ocean were fully integrated in that economy. Wink suggests that the Rashtrakutas were part of this Arab monetary network of dinars and dirhams. While there were also silver pieces circulating in the Rashtrakuta kingdom that were remarked upon by Arab chroniclers: '... the monetary means are constituted by the tatariya dirhams which each weigh 1½ dirham and are minted as the coin of the king', the dominance of the Arab coinage suffices to resolve the paradox of a wealthy kingdom that did not issue its own coin.

Not PMS, After All

2011-08-02T18:20:00.008+01:00

U-bahn line 2. Berlin. 4pm. An English couple board the train.

"Didn't you get a map?" he says.

"You know I didn't. Why do you keep asking me that?" she says.

"Why didn't you?" he says.

"Leave me alone, okay. Just leave me alone," she says.

"But why didn't you?" he says.

"Fucking leave me alone," she says.

"I really want to know. I'm asking an honest question. Why didn't you get the map? It's not a rhetorical question," he says.

"..." she says.

"Why are you so pissed off?" he says.

His face suddenly clears, as though life's great questions have been answered in his mind.

"Look, do you want food?" he says.

Railways Cultural

2011-08-01T19:55:00.046+01:00

There's an entire world of poetry, literature and art devoted to the railways. Imagine three London stations, and imagine the references that suffuse them: Sherlock Holmes at St Pancras, or Harry Potter at King's Cross, or Dombey at Euston. What is the source of the railways' mystique? And why have they inspired litterateurs from William Wordsworth to J. K. Rowling?

Locomotives and the atmosphere they brew have been a source of inspiration for writers and poets for the past two hundred years. In Edwardian times, the railways were the lifeblood of the nation, the starting point of all adventures. A big station like York was a microcosm of the society it served. Here a writer like Andrew Martin could bring together characters like travelling gentlemen and chimney sweeps on the move. Station guards contended with cutpurses and station loungers and other species of railway riffraff. Stations teemed with life.

Martin set his novels in the Edwardian period because that was the zenith of the British rail network. His father had worked in the finance department of British Rail at York, and forever having to come up with cut backs. His novels were his vicarious revenge.

His father was railway aristocracy; not only was he able to travel at will in first class, but so was his family. Martin would occasionally take the train to London as a fourteen-year old boy, lounging comfortably in a first class seat, reading a book. A harassed-looking businessman would huff up to him and say, 'Are you aware you are in a first-class seat, young man?' to which he would reply, 'Yes, I am, thanks.' and return to his book.

Trains, he said (and I heartily agree), are superior to cars. You can read on trains. You will only feel sick in a car. Trains have a wgealth of culture behind them. Cars have not.

Train travel was not always so sedate. A hundred and fifty years earlier, you might have been gripping the armrests of your seat in quiet panic rather than read a book. Imagine your shock of a speeding train when the fastest thing you had ever seen before was a stagecoach. You thought your brains would fly out of your ears at that speed.

Turner's Rain,Steam and Speed [Wikimedia Commons]

One day in 1843 the artist Turner was travelling on the Great Western Railway. He stuck his head out of the window of a first class carriage during a rainstorm. He was most forcibly impressed. He was met with the demonic force of speed through a cloud of smoke and rain. The experience gave birth to his painting 'Rain, Steam and Speed - the Great Western Railway'. If you want to be pedantic about it, you would say that the painting shows a Gooch Firefly 222 locomotive. That's hardly the point. The image to the viewer is that of a bullet aimed straight at the heart.

Andrew Martin got into trouble at the National Gallery when he leaned too close to the painting when showing his son the hare running ahead of the locomotive. The hare, a very fast animal, is being caught up by the engine. Man is getting the upper hand over nature.

The advent of the railway in Britain was cataclysmic, concentrated into a few frenetic years. Nine-tenths of the current mileage were authorised in three years from 1844. These vast iron gatecrashers thundered through back gardens, cellars, beautiful meadows and social conventions. From the outset, they attracted the scornful eye of writers and anyone with a vested interest in contemplation. In 'a just disdain', Wordsworth wrote of England being blighted by steam.

Now, for your shame, a Power, the Thirst of Gold,
That rules o'er Britain like a baneful star,
Wills that your peace, your beauty, shall be sold,
And clear way made for her triumphal car

A lightning rod for the railways anxieties of the time was Charles Dickens. His railway novel Dombey and Son contains one of the first descriptions of the landscape flickering past the train window.

Through the hollow, on the height, by the heath, by the orchard, by the park, by the garden, over the canal, across the river, where the sheep are feeding, where the mill is going, where the barge is floating, where the dead are lying, where the factory is smoking, where the stream is running, where the village clusters, where the great cathedral rises, where the bleak moor lies, and the wild breeze smooths or ruffles it at its inconstant will; away, with a shriek, and a roar, and a rattle, and no trace to leave behind but dust and vapour: like as in the track of the remorseless monster, Death!

A theme of Dombey and Son is the destruction wrought by the building of the London to Birmingham line that runs to Euston station. This was the first railway to come into North London. Unfortunately when it came to be built in the 1830s, Camden happened to be in the way. Dickens was a man attached to the idea of Merrie England, and much attached to the stagecoach. In his book, he referred to Camden as Staggs' Gardens. He knew the area well, having been brought up here when it had been more or less a village. During the construction of the railway he saw places he knew, including part of his old school, being destroyed. He was morbidly fascinated by the process.

The railways were omnipotent, and so like many other works of the time, Dombey and Son features a death by locomotive. The treacherous Carker is run over by a train; he

felt the earth tremble—knew in a moment that the rush was come—uttered a shriek—looked round—saw the red eyes, bleared and dim, in the daylight, close upon him—was beaten down, caught up, and whirled away upon a jagged mill, that spun him round and round, and struck him limb from limb, and licked his stream of life up with its fiery heat, and cast his mutilated fragments in the air.

It wasn't just the gutting of towns and villages that seemed wrong to the sensitive literary folk. The locomotives themselves appeared to be demonic powers, with a killing edge to them. In Anthony Trollope's The Prime Minister, the villain Lopez is 'knocked to bloody atoms' by a shrieking Scottish express. In Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, the heroine commits suicide by leaping in front of an oncoming engine. Locomotives didn't just appear to be murderous figments of the imagination - they did have an unfortunate habit of killing people. Steam engines, scary enough when stationary, were whirled about the country at fantastical speeds. At the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830, a Cabinet Minister, William Huskisson, was knocked down and killed. No wonder the government has been so reluctant to fund the railways ever since.

It was a simple equation: more railways meant more deaths. The 1860s were the darkest period when gory stories of mayhem caused by trains were rarely off the headlines. These 'smashes', as they were known, magnetised and repelled the Victorians in equal measure. Here was a very modern way to die.

In the 1860s, there were more trains on the same lines, going ever faster, the chances of collision ever so greater. The authorities did little to enforce safety standards till the 1880s.

Cartoonists portrayed the locomotives as beasts, dragon-like, intent on the destruction of mere humans. Returning from France on 9 June 1865, all of Charles Dickens' fears of the railways came true, when he was involved in a terrific crash near Staplehurst in Kent. The accident was caused by a work-gang lifting tracks off a viaduct. They had reckoned without the 2.38 from Folkestone to London.

Dickens helped soothe the injured and the dying with a flask of brandy and cool water in his top hat. Ten people died in the crash, and for the rest of his life, all of Dickens' anxieties would be subsumed by the greater one over Staplehurst.

The accident prompted him to write one of his greatest ghost stories, 'The Signal-Man'. A superbly gloomy version appeared on TV every Christmas during Andrew Martin's childhood. The story concerns a signal-man stuck in a cutting next to a glowering red light. He is at the mercy of an electric bell and the necessity of showing his red flag as a train rolled past. He is a fascinatingly neurotic man with many interests. He has taught himself a language whilst in his signal box, he has worked at decimals and fractions. But he is tormented by the loneliness of his job, the memory of two previous accidents, and a premonition of a third. He constantly feels the urge to send the telegraphic signal 'Danger. Take care.' but he can't say why. Of course, a smash is looming.

Dickens has often been described as the last victim of the Staplehurst accident. Later in life he attributed his ill health to 'railway shaking'. He died on the fifth anniversary of the crash.

In the 19th century, the railways shaped culture in other, benign, ways. People began to read on trains, and so in 1848, W.H. Smith opened their first railway bookstore at Euston Station. Books sold in stations were the forerunners of the airport novel: a new genre, inexpensive, with plots that could hold a passenger's attention throughout the distractions of a train journey, all that stopping and starting and 'Excuse me, is this the train for Birmingham?' As Cecily said in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest : "One should always have something sensational to read in the train."

An entire industry of sensationalist literature developed, with writers competing for the riders' attentions, and for shelf-space on W.H.Smith's stores. Between garish covers, there was everything the man or woman on the 2.22 desired: sex, insanity, and above all, violent death.

Cheaply bound thrillers were known as 'yellow backs' and their authors, such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, sold in their thousands from the railway bookshops. The success of Braddon irritated George Eliot, who wrote to her publisher: 'I suppose the reason my own six shilling editions are never on the railway stalls is that they are not so attractive to the majority.' One reviewer of Braddon's work expressed regret that a book 'without a murder, a divorce, a seduction, or a bigamy, is not apparently considered either worth writing or reading.'

The Victorian sensation stories would play upon their readers' anxieties about railway travel. A woman sitting alone in a carriage might read about a woman sitting alone in a carriage, except that in the story, a strange man would leap in through the window, a strange man with a top hat and a moustache. Such breaches of compartment etiquette would be depicted later in the cinema, as in Alfred Hitchcock's version of John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps where Robert Donat's character bursts in on Madeline Carroll, while she is reading, alone.

Hitchcock was no trainspotter, and his film contains one notorious mistake (notorious among the persnickety sticklers, that is). When Hannay leaves for Scotland, he is on the London and Northeastern train, as he should be. Hitchcock cuts away here, and when he cuts back, the train that is next shown is a Great Western emerging from Box Tunnel near Bath.

In the original novel, trains are marginal, but Hitchcock uses them to boost the speed and tension of the narrative. But he also made use of another tension involved in train travel: that of not being entirely sure who your travelling companions are. Walter de la Mare wrote: 'It's a fascinating experience, railway travelling. One is cast into a passing privacy with a fellow stranger, and then it is gone.'

By the end of the 19th century, trains had been tamed and were no longer a danger in themselves. They had become comprehensible. When Sherlock Holmes rode on a train, the journey was not a worry in his mind.

"We are going well," said he, looking out of the window and glancing at his watch. "Our rate at present is fifty-three and a half miles an hour."

"I have not observed the quarter-mile posts," said I.

"Nor have I. But the telegraph posts upon this line are sixty yards apart, and the calculation is a simple one..."

Holmes and Watson depart from every terminus in London save Marylebone. The only reason for that lacuna is that it was built too late, in 1899, by which time they were almost done. And they were never above recourse to that humble document, the railway timetable.

Until the 1960s, British railway timetables were called Bradshaws, after the man who started publishing them in 1841. They were thick as bricks, and filled with exasperating footnotes such as 'except Mondays' and 'should the arrival of the steamer be late, the train will not stop.' In those days, a man would have a Bradshaw as readily to hand as one would have car keys today. But often Dr Watson didn't need a Bradshaw - he knew the times of the trains without having to look them up. In 'The Retired Colourman', for instance, Holmes asks Watson to look up the train times to Little Pearlington in Essex, and despite the bizarre obscurity of the destination, the latter immediately replies, 'There is one at 5.20 from Liverpool Street.' We have the beginnings of that fantastic sub-genre of literature where the pedantry of detective fiction is combined with the even more pedantic railway timetable, resulting something evermore pedantic: a murder mystery with train timings at its core.

Take Agatha Christie's novel, 4.50 from Paddington. A timetable and a map provide Miss Marple with vital clues to a murder witnessed on a passing train. In the snappily titled film version ('Murder, She Said', 1961, directed by George Pollock), Miss Marple says:

"Ah yes, here we are. Now, I calculate the 5 o'clock express to Brackhampton overtook my train somewhere about here."

"But how can you be sure?" "I remember the ticket collector saying 'Five minutes to Brackhampton', and it couldn't have been more than a minute after the murder that he came in. So that makes it six minutes before Brackhampton, at, say, 30 miles an hour. So that makes it about ... there."

The apex (or nadir) of this sub-genre is The Cask, a 1920 novel by Freeman Wills Crofts, which is all about the logistics of transporting by rail a particular barrel, which contains a dead body. Crofts was an engineer, and he wrote like an engineer. His novel seemed as full of numbers as of letters:

He looked at the timetable again. The train in question reached Calais at 3.31 and the boat left at 3.45. That was a delay of 14 minutes. Would there be time, he wondered, to make two long-distance phone calls in fourteen minutes?

Obsession with numbers could then easily be satirised, as in this sketch from Monty Python.

Oakworth Station (from here)

By the 20th century, it appeared that no part of England was untouched by the railways. Even obscure little towns such as Oakworth in Yorkshire appeared to have several dozen passenger and goods trains trundling through them every day. Today there is a well-preserved station in Oakworth, famous for being the site for both film and television adaptations for E. Nesbit's The Railway Children.

The book came out in 1906, and by then the British were thoroughly used to railways in their every day lives. Trains could be seen as cosy and whimsical, as well as potentially dangerous. Far from being despoilers of the landscape, they had become an integral part of it. They were no longer Gothic, but sentimentalised and loved. For the Railway children, the trains were an idyll and a joy. Nesbit writes: 'The rocks and hills and valleys and trees, the canal, and above all, the railway, were so new and so perfectly pleasing that the remembrance of the old life in the villa grew to seem like a dream.'

John Hassall (printed for the LNER by Waterlow & Sons Ltd London)

Almost any novel of the early 20th century is a railway novel, as long as a character moves along any distance. The notion of the railway and the landscape coexisting in harmony may appear natural, but it was a deliberately fostered one. Train companies of the time were very image-conscious. They might be said to be pioneers in public relations. The poster was their primary medium, so evocative of a mellower, sunnier age.

Giving names to trains, such as the Flying Scotsman, only added to the mystique of train travel. The romance of rail lasted well into the 1950s. In that time, the weirdos and the misfits were the boys not interested in trains. Between 1911 and 1950, The Wonderbook of Railways for Boys and Girls went through twenty-one editions. It is filled with detailed accounts of railway workings. A chat with an engine driver, and Mr Brown the signal-man. At the same time, railway stories were being written for children in their thousands: Life or Death, The Indian Rail Yarn, The Missing Mail Bag...

The perfect evocation of the railways in England is often taken to be in the form of a poem, Adlestrop by Edward Thomas. On the face of it, the poem recalls a non-event. Thomas' train makes an unscheduled stop in Adlestrop in Gloucestershire. Nothing happened, but the tranquillity of the moment and the sense of time suspended across the sunny English countryside stayed with Thomas.

Yes, I remember Adlestrop –
The name because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontendly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop – only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

That kind of poignancy could only have been generated retrospectively. His diary records the date of the stop: June 23, 1914. But the poem was written when he was serving in the British Army in the World War I, in which he would be killed. The view of the railways became firmly imprinted on the nation - through a haze of nostalgia.

During the Great War, the railways took on another significance - they took soldiers to the front, and brought them in rather fewer numbers back. As the public gained familiarity with terms such as 'ambulance carriage' and 'hospital train', the word 'departure' took on a more ominous meaning. Marcel Proust said railway stations were inherently tragic places because they carried people into the unknown. Imagine how much the stakes were raised for wartime departures. Thomas Hardy's poem 'In A Waiting Room' from a collection published in 1917 captures the leave-taking on a wet morning, described as being 'sick as the day of doom.'

A soldier and wife, with haggard look
Subdued to stone by strong endeavour;
And then I heard
From a casual word
They were parting as they believed for ever.

In the poem, the soldier and his wife are only two characters in a waiting room filled with others. The narrator's attention is quickly diverted by some laughing children. The private agony of the parting couple is swiftly put aside.

In WWII, the collision of personal misery and mundane chatter in the waiting room was brought to the cinema. David Lean's 'Brief Encounter' beautifully realised this. In the film, the railway station is described as 'the most ordinary place in the world', but where an earlier tormented heroine might have flung herself onto the tracks like Anna Karenina, in the 1940s, the worst a locomotive can do is to fling a bit of grit into Celia Johnson's eye.

(Titfield Thunderbolt film poster, Wikimedia Commons)

After the war, Britain focused on becoming a modern nation, and the feelings of affection it had held for the train were transferred, for a while at least, onto the motor car. The railways were nationalised, and the romance began to wear off. It was the car that could now take you to picturesque backwaters of the land, and you no longer had to share space with people who picked their teeth in an annoying way, or were just plain murderous-looking. Like a man with a mid-life crisis, trying not to look old-fashioned, people began to look upon trains as second class, a social service for those who were too poor or decrepit to drive. That moment of transition was captured by the 1953 film, 'The Titfield Thunderbolt'. Here a cherished branch line is threatened by a local bus service, and the competition between rail and road is played out for the cameras.

Ironically, in real life, that branch line had already been closed. A BBC crew filmed the making the movie, including the famous scene of the runaway train. The scriptwriter was a neighbour of Dr Beeching, the future chairman of the British Railways Board, and slayer of branch lines.

Given the aesthetic appeal of the railways, it is not surprising that a poet became their greatest champion when they came under attack. 'Rumble under, thunder over, train and tram, alternate go' he wrote:

Rumbling under blackened girders,
Midland bound for Cricklewood,
Puffed its sulphur to where that Land of
Laundries stood.
Rumble under, thunder over, train and
tram alternate go,
Shake the floor and smudge the ledger,
Charrington, Sells Dale and Co.,
Nuts and nuggets in the window

Such a dynamic thrust from such unpretentious lines.

For Betjeman, the railways' appeal was their permanence, a treasure bequeathed by our forefathers, 'a Victorian's world and the present, in a moment's neighbourhood.' In his poetry, the railway station stands for a world that is fading or has vanished completely. 'Monody on the Death of Aldersgate Street Station' began:

Snow falls in the buffet of Aldersgate station,
Soot hangs in the tunnel in clouds of steam.
City of London! before the next desecration
Let your steepled forest of churches be my theme.

Betjeman appears to elide churches and railway stations, with both offering a refuge from the modern world. It is apt that he was behind the impetus to save St Pancras from demolition; St Pancras being a Christian saint and a railway station.

As Dr Beeching's cuts took hold, so did come the end of the reign of steam. Carnforth, where David Lean's Brief Encounters was filmed, became the dumping ground for the disused locomotives.

Diesel had none of the romantic elegance of the old steam. And today, even locomotives appear to be on their way out. Instead, we have multiple units that are as graceful and aerodynamic as wardrobes, with charmless names like 365 class. They are functional, and like worms, they can still move after being chopped in half. But they are hardly going to inspire our writers.

The great stations of times past are distressingly anodyne today. At York, the signal cabin is now a Costa Coffee; the night station master's cabin (a location for a strangely, even satanically, compelling job description) is a tourist information centre; the old booking hall is a Burger King. Stations are no longer about the business of railways. They are in the business of retail. The mysterious soot-blackened hinterlands have been tidied away. We are passengers no longer. We are officially customers, consumers, of course.

The railway satirist who writes under the name Tyresius has updated Adlestrop for the modern day:

Haycocks and meadows sweet, I wouldn't know.
I never looked outside the train.
Just canned beer from a plastic cup.
Until the damned thing started again.

The few people who write about the railways today are writing about what doesn't exist today, or even what never existed at all. Note that the Hogwarts Express of Harry Potter fame is not a diesel multiple unit. Its departure platform, the fabled nine-and-three-quarters, is a portal to a fantasy land a world away from modern King's Cross. And in the self-consciously cool series of Bourne films, Matt Damon arrives in London not on a plane, but on the Eurostar. This is highly promising.

For a revival of literary focus on the railways, the high-speed Eurostar may offer the only hope in Britain. Two hundred mile-an-hour trains. Champagne on tap in the buffet. Smartly turned out railway staff. A long undersea tunnel - anything could happen in that. For the future of trains to be assured, they much once again become the vehicles of our dreams.

[This is a (very) paraphrased rendition of Andrew Martin's 'Between the Lines: Railways in Fiction and Film', shown on BBC Four.]

Gourmandy Normandie

2011-07-31T11:45:00.000+01:00

Just outside the Passage Jouffroy is a bright yellow sign of a grinning girl. The bilious ochre attracted my attention and in somewhat of a dazed haze, I drifted 30 metres into the passage where I saw some grinning women handing out little nibbles to passers-by. I took a nibble myself, and saw (like God) that it was good. At the back of my mind was the thought that this was a confectioner's place, and not just any confectioner but a confectioner from Normandy.

There were beautifully packed boxes of sweets - fruit pastilles, sugar candy, chocolate, fruity chocolates, biscuits. I saw calissons, and my eyes narrowed.

'These are calissons,' I said in a vaguely threatening manner to a grinning attendant. The threat probably stemmed more from my dismal French than my outrage.

'Yes, they are, sir,' she replied.

'But calissons are not Norman,' I continued. 'They are from Aix.'

'Yes, absolutely. A southern French delicacy,' said the woman, still grinning happily.

'But why are you selling them in a Norman confectionery?' I said.

The woman looked puzzled, yet still happy.

'Norman?' she said.

I pointed wordlessly at the big yellow sign with the grinning girl. 'La Cure Gourmande' it said.

I did a double-take. Gourmande? Not Normande? It was my turn to grin, sheepishly.

'I shall take that box,' I said, and walked out with a big box of assorted Gourmandies, and 32 euros lighter.

Toasting Butter Toast

2011-07-28T00:37:00.001+01:00

Sidin Vadukut waxes eloquently on the pleasures of toasted bread with butter. He had, he said, fallen out of the habit, until an all-nighter of antakshari at some friend's wedding rekindled his enthusiasm.

Half an hour later someone brought us a pot of tea and one of those small wicker baskets lined with foil and stacked with 8 slices of thick toasted sliced white bread generously buttered. I mean serious generosity. If the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation decided to butter toast–and they should–this is how they would butter it. The chef had kept going with the fat till the toasted bread could absorb no more and the remaining fat just stayed on the surface. Yellow, soft and shiny. Before this I had only ever seen butter stay yellow on bread on Amul butter billboards.

This simply never happened in real life.

And the toast. Oh the toast. The toast was of the perfect temperature and consistency. It was not so hot that you could hardly ruminate–as you must–between the imminent delight of biting and the animal violence of chewing. It was not so cold that the butter was beginning to coagulate into grease. And the texture. Toasted stiff, but not so much that at each bite the corners of your mouth hurt from the crumbs. Yet the centre was tender, without getting soggy under the pressure of all that cholesterol.

Worcester? Wooster.

2011-07-26T09:55:00.000+01:00

Recently, a letter allegedly written by Bertram Wooster was discovered in America. It was published in the Conning Tower column of the New York Tribune, and complained about the graphic nature of Grantland Rice's writings on boxing:

Grantland, Priceless Old Bea, Is Off in Florida, But He Shall Ever So Well Be Spoken To, We Mean to Say
My Dear Old Soul:
I hate to bother and all that sort of thing, but if you've a spare moment I wish you'd toddle down the passage and speak to Grantland Rice. I mean to say, all that stuff he wrote in yesterday's jolly old issue about chappies being "chopped into pink ribbons" and the blighter with the "red grin that bubbled gore." What I mean is, he doesn't seem to realize that we lads who take in the Tribune read it at breakfast, and, believe me, dear old son, when Jeeves, my man, slipped a couple of fried eggs in front of me just at what you might call the psychological moment, it was a near thing, laddie, a very near thing. Jolly old Rice, I've no doubt, is one of those healthy, hearty fellows who skip out of bed like two-year-olds and feel perfectly topping before breakfast, but in my case - well, you know how it is. I'm never much of a lad until after the morning meal. And, when it comes to having to breakfast on red grins and bubbling gore, well, I mean to say, what! I mean, you know what I mean, I mean!
Well, that's all. Cheerio and all that sort of rot! Godd-bye-ee!
Bertie Wooster
(per pro P. G. Wodehouse, Secy.)

Bly's Curry

2011-07-25T00:39:00.003+01:00

The indomitable Nellie Bly wanted to go around the world faster than Phileas Fogg. She did - in 1890 - and wrote a book about it: Around The World in Seventy-Two Days. She particularly enjoyed curry, she said - in Sri Lanka:

At tiffin I had some real curry, the famous native dish of India. I had been unable to eat it on the Victoria, but those who knew said it was a most delicious dish when prepared rightly and so I tested it on shore. First a divided dish containing shrimps and boiled rice was placed before me. I put two spoonfuls of rice on my plate, and on it put one spoonful of shrimps; there was also chicken and beef for the meat part of the curry, but I took shrimps only. Then was handed me a much divided plate containing different preserved fruits, chuddah and other things hot with pepper. As instructed, I partook of three of this variety and put it on top of what had been placed first on my plate. Last came little dried pieces of stuff that we heard before we saw, its odor was so loud and unmistakable. They called it Bombay duck. It is nothing more or less than a small fish, which is split open, and after being thoroughly dried, is used with the curry. One can learn to eat it.

After all this is on the plate it is thoroughly mixed, making a mess very unsightly, but very palatable, as I found. I became so given to curry that I only stopped eating it when I found, after a hearty meal, curry threatened to give me palpitation of the heart.

Endangered

2011-07-22T20:11:00.005+01:00

We focused our attention on Aka (also called Hruso)—with a total number of speakers estimated under 2,000—as a perfect case study of a small language currently existing in a fragile equilibrium yet already showing signs of possible endangerment that could lead to eventual extinction.

Aka is already in decline among some segments of the community and is being abandoned by some in favor of Hindi. But we observed other members of the community—language activists—making strategic efforts to widen the use of the language and thus prevent its decline. We witnessed creative uses such as the performance of songs (including in the hip-hop genre, performed by Sange Nimasow, age 20+), and the telling of traditional stories and sayings by elder members of the community (Nyetom Nimasow, age 60+). Efforts such as theirs will help determine the future of Aka, which has little socio-economic value outside the half dozen remote villages where it is spoken.

Aka has much to teach science: For example, it has a phenomenally complex sound system that is not typical for languages of the region. We were also able to obtain a thorough photographic documentation of the culture—including traditional activities such as barley harvesting, house-building, hunting, musical performance, and traditional cultural celebrations.

(From National Geographic's "Synopsis of Enduring Voices Expedition to Arunachal Pradesh", India, November 2008)

Redemptive Fish

2011-07-19T12:42:00.001+01:00

In Patrick Süskind's The Pigeon, a story of terror and psychological breakdown occasioned by the most innocuous of events, is a redemptive passage on the restorative qualities of simple food:

... He sliced the little sardine bodies lengthwise with his pocket-knife, speared a half, spread it over a scrap of bread, and shoved the bite into his mouth. As he chewed, the tender, oil-drenched fish flesh blended with the insipid pitta bread into a delicious lump. It lacked perhaps a few drops of lemon, he thought - but this came very close to frivolous gourmandising, for after each bite, as he took a small swallow of red wine from the bottle, let it run across his tongue and shifted it between his teeth, the steely aftertaste of the fish blended with the lively, acidic bouquet of the wine in such a convincing fashion that Jonathan was certain he had never dined better in all his life than at that very moment. The can held four sardines - that made eight bites, chewed deliberately with the bread, and eight swallows of the wine to go with them. He ate very slowly. He had once read in a magazine that eating hurriedly, especially when you were very hungry, was not healthy and could lead to digestive problems, even to nausea and vomiting. He also ate slowly because he believed this meal to be his last.

Kheer and Chapati

2011-07-16T12:28:00.000+01:00

The extract about kheer at Lashings and Lashings of Ginger Beer reminded me of this short story I'd read a while ago. In Parini Shroff's The Hijras, Samiya is worried that her mother-in-law's intransigence and dislike for the eunuchs will bring their curses upon her new-born baby.

That night Samiya attempted to make kheer once more. The coconut milk and rice didn’t scorch this time, but she did not allow herself to feel any pride until the pudding had thickened with the rose water and raisins. She prepared the dessert the way Mrs. Hayat preferred, with slivered almonds and pistachios on top. When it was finished, she stared down at the bowl of white cream; the green and brown ovals of the chopped nuts squinted up at her like lopsided eyes.
Skin slapping against the linoleum floor followed by the tapping of a cane reminded Samiya of where she was. Her hands quickly covered the dish and carried it to the back of the refrigerator. By the time Mrs. Hayat entered the kitchen, Samiya was focusing on the dinner she had started before making the kheer.

Mrs. Hayat took a rolling pin and flattened the small balls of dough Samiya had shaped for the rotis. Samiya slid the perfect circles on an oiled pan over the stove. They worked in silence for a few minutes. Her mother-in-law seemed at ease; Samiya watched the older woman’s hands as she worked. She could see blue-green veins under the nearly translucent skin. Mrs. Hayat wore two thick golden bangles, one on each wrist, and they swung up and down her thin wrists as her body jerked to iron out the dough.

Samiya flipped the rotis back and forth more times than she would have if she had been alone. Careful not to char either side, she spun the dough with twirling fingers around the pan. Her own mother had taught her this way, showing her how to make her fingers dance so fast the heat couldn’t quite catch up.

Anglo-Saxon

2011-07-15T11:54:00.000+01:00

The English, it seems, can catch no break. The French pooh-pooh them as Anglo-Saxons. The French lump them with Americans. The Scots disparage them Sassenachs. We won't get into what the Welsh say of them, even in their politest moments.

And yet why excoriate them as Anglo-Saxons? They are as much French as the French. Remember 1066? They are also as German as the Germans. The French are mainly German.

Who is not German, in the ultimate analysis? We are all Germans. Or at least we'd all like to be - in the current economic climate. And especially after the way they played at the last football World Cup.

Say what you will about the Anglo-Saxons, though. They have some things going for them. They don't jump queues. They don't barge into a train before alighting passengers have had a chance to exit. They don't honk at pedestrians crossing a road at a pedestrian crossing. And they don't blame the Anglo-Saxons for the ruination of the world since 2007.

In short, it's okay to be Anglo-Saxon.

Scurvy

2011-07-14T11:46:00.124+01:00

The Chinese knew of it and its cure as early as the fifth century, growing fresh ginger in pots aboard their mercantile vessels. Possibly their trade partners in Southeast Asia did as well. Possibly these passed on that knowledge to the Dutch merchantmen that later arrived on their shores in search of spices. The Dutch, in turn, may have passed on the knowledge to their European competitors.

Still, the sailors:

...began to fall sick. Failure of strength and persistent breathlessness were the first sign that the body was beginning to weaken and many could no longer climb the rigging. Next, their skin turned sallow, their gums tender and their breath rank and offensive. 'The disease that hath consumed our men hath bene the skurvie,' wrote Edmund Barker...¹

Scurvy! All caused by a lack of fresh fruit.

In 1536, French sailors under Jacques Cartier close to death of the disease were advised by the natives in coastal Canada to drink an infusion of the needles of the spruce tree. They were cured almost immediately. In 1595, an English admiral claimed that the lives of ten thousand sailors could have been saved had the quartermasters arranged to have lemon juice available on board their ships.

The Englishman James Lancaster took a bottles of fresh lemon juice with him on his second voyage to the Orient in 1601. On his flagship, sailors showing symptoms of the dreaded disease were given some of the juice. Men on the other ships of the fleet steadily wasted away; the Red Dragon remained immune. 'And the reason why the general's men stood in better health than the men of other ships was this; he brought to sea with him certain bottles of the juice of lemons, which he gave to each one, as long as it would last, three spoonfuls every morning, fasting; not suffering them to eat anything after it till noon ... by this means the general cured many of his men and preserved the rest.'

Tragically, of course, the cure was forgotten or ignored for nearly 170 years, until James Cook's voyages around the world. This, despite there having been published accounts for the treatment of scurvy: James Woodall's The Surgeon's Mate (1617) prescribed lemon juice; William Cockburn's Sea Diseases, or their Nature, Cause and Cure (1697) recommended fresh fruit and vegetables (although, to be fair, also suggested whey and vinegar and cinnamon, which were useless).

The first clinical study to prove the efficacy of citrus juice in preventing and curing scurvy was done in 1747 by a Scots doctor James Lind. Twelve men suffering from scurvy were given identical diets of sweetened gruel, mutton broth, boiled biscuits, sago, rice, raisins, currants, barley, and wine. Two of the men were given vinegar, two diluted sulfuric acid, two seawater (half-pint twice daily), two a concoction of nutmeg, garlic, mustard seed, gum myrrh, cream of tartar and barley water. The last two were given two oranges and a lemon daily. Within six days, these men were fit for duty. Lind published his study in A Treatise of Scurvy, but it still took the Admiralty fifty years to enforce the issue of lemon juice on board the British Navy.²

Why did it take so long? There were chemical, logistical and medical reasons. We know today that Vitamin C, the active ingredient preventing scurvy, is destroyed by heat or light, and decreases in fruit when they are stored for a long time. It was not clear to the navies how to keep sufficient quantities of fresh citruses for all their sailors. Concentrating the juice was time-consuming and costly. There was also the prevailing medical orthodoxy that ascribed scurvy to the excessive consumption of salted meat.

Remarkably, as late as 1911, the hapless Robert Falcon Scott believed that scurvy was caused by tainted meat. He didn't equip his South Pole expedition with enough fruit. Coupled with all the other disasters that befell him, it is unsurprising that he and his men suffered grievously on their assault of the pole. Roald Amundsen, on the other hand, took the threat of scurvy seriously, and equipped himself appropriately.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Check out:

1. Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg: How One Man's Courage Changed the Course of History
2. Penny Le Couteur Napoleon's Buttons: How 17 Molecules Changed History

Stew Away

2011-07-10T12:37:00.000+01:00

In John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure, a snobbish voluptuary Tarquin Winot waxes eloquently about all manner of food. His life, he likes to observe, is best represented in vignettes of gastronomy. And so nearly every page of the copy I recently borrowed from the local library has dark streaks - left, I imagine, by the tongues of drooling readers. And why not? Check out this litany of fish stews.

The conditions and prohibitions with which the making of a successful bouillabaise is hedged around make it a problematic dish for the home cook, at any rate for the home cook who lives more than an hour or so's drive from the coastline between Toulon and Marseille. My house in the Vaucluse is an hour and forty minutes from Marseille, assuming good weather which is necessary on the twisting roads of the Lubéron. Other fish soups are less contentious in their composition, a fact which may make them appealing for those who are less beguiled than I am by what Spinoza called 'the deep difficulty of excellence'. In any case, over the years at my homes in Provence and Norfolk (less so in Bayswater) I have cooked burrida, the hearty and accommodating Genoese specialty; cotriade, the warming and economical potato-oriented Breton dish (sometimes seasoned simply through the addition of seawater); the soothing matelote normande, of which more shortly; the exuberant Portuguese fisherman's stew caldeirada, enough to make any one of us into a lusophile, and graced with the additional blessing of reheatability in the form of the excellent fish has ropa velha de peixe; the fiery but somehow light, refreshing, life-affirming fish stews of Thailand, spiked with chilli and lemon grass and the glamorous but refreshing exoticism of that suddenly convenient country (only hours away!); the paradoxical red-wine-using matelotte and raito, the former with its disturbingly phallic and alive-seeming eel, the latter with its elusive but comforting taste of cod; the equally coddy Basque ttoro, its origin betrayed by its telltale unpronounceability (my brother was fond of speculating whether, in Basque versions of the game of Scrabble, values were reversed, so that players only won a single point for using letters such as q and x); the crude Greek kakavia and the egg-and-lemon-enhanced psarosoupa avgolemono; the tasty Provencal soupe de poisson with its punchy rouille and promiscuous willingness to accept whatever is put into it (perhaps the most adaptable and portable of all these national soups); the chowders (from chaudière, stewpot, a word which also refers to the kind of domestic gas boiler whose explosion was to kill my parents) of North America, expressive of that continent in their hearty emphatic blandness; the delicate Bergensk fiskesuppe, which the unfortunate Mitthaug used to prepare with great displays of energy in his attempts to get the freshest possible, indeed the freshest imaginable, cod and coley, rising before dawn to go to Billingsgate and returning with fish, which, as my father observed, a competent veterinarian ought to have been able to resuscitate; indeed, our own grey little country is almost the only one which fails to have its own indigenous version of fish soup, even the Scots having their surprisingly edible Cullen Skink.

An Audenian Martini, Anyone?

2011-07-07T11:30:00.002+01:00

Another fine recipe for a martini, this time from the elaborately curlicued and filigreed work of gastronomic fiction that is John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure.

In what I subsequently came to think of as my aesthetic period, during my early and mid-twenties, I used to serve a seven-to-one martini of Beefeater gin and Noilly Prat vermouth, stirred with large ice cubes and then poured into chilled cocktail glasses; twist of lemon on top, releasing a fine invisible spray of citric juices. As a subsequent refinement I borrowed W.H.Auden's technique of mixing the vermouth and gin at lunchtime (though the great poet himself used vodka) and leaving the mixture in the freezer to attain that wonderful jellified texture of alcohol chilled to below the point at which water freezes. The absence of ice means that the Auden martini is not diluted in any way, and thus truly earns the drink its sobriquet 'the silver bullet'.

Tumbling Away

2011-07-06T12:19:00.001+01:00

Just a little while ago, I stopped my food-in-art-and-culture blog and slowed down on the translation blog, thinking I didn't have the enthusiasm to maintain three separate instances of creativity. Shortly thereafter I got withdrawal symptoms, and succumbed finally. A graphical J O S T A M O N appears somewhat magically at Tumblr to archive images (for now, mine) that I find of particular interest.

Now that I've posted half a dozen times at that site, several lacunae present themselves. It has a lovely graphical display, but its formatting capabilities are sadly lacking. And then I observed that of the thousands of pictures in my collection, there's scarcely a dozen that I'm really fond of. So I might run out of material before the end of the month. Wouldn't that be something?

Please take a look, if you like, and do let me know what you think.

Sports Day

2011-07-05T16:31:00.085+01:00

Unlike other pusillanimous schools where competition is frowned upon and everyone is concerned about children's sense of self-worth, the boy's school is fairly rough and tough, and sports day is as fiercely competitive as one would like. Among the senior students, that is; the juniors are a bit more lax.

I took a day off work to see what all the excitement was about. I had missed last year's do, and was rather keen to see what all the moolah I was shelling out in private education was doing for the boy's sportiness. Fair play, that traditionally British norm, and giving it one's uttermost was evident all over the field.

In the case of the little fellow, there was more emphasis on the former attribute than on the latter. He has such a perfect understanding of fair play that he scarcely bestirred himself to outrace his classmates. In his heats for the obstacle course, he ran languidly, grinning happily at the spectators, casually bringing up the rear. While the winners scarpered off to get their medals, he dashed back to the starting line at a considerably quicker pace than his race. He then waved at us.

His next race was a relay. Ever helpfully, he offered to run the last leg. Owing to some mix-up or the other, his team ended up with more runners than the others. After the last of the other teams scrambled home, the boy got his hands on baton. He then ran - grinning happily again - to the finish line, scarcely touched it, and rushed back to join his team. By then, of course, everyone's attention had moved on to the other competitions taking place elsewhere on the field.

What a peculiar organisation, observed the wife. In her time, the sports day took place in a stadium in Kuwait, complete with march past and sequentially arranged competition. She was a champion runner-up, perpetually coming second in the sprints and long jump. (She never ceases to rub this in my face.) The boy's sports day, on the other hand, was a cheerful riot of parallel races. Shortly after the relay, he and his classmates were hurried to another side of the field for the tennis ball throw. Most of his classmates appeared to be rather ineffectual chuckers of the ball, spraying it in random directions. There were a couple of boys, however, who hurled it in masterful fashion. We clapped laconically; the parents of the successful boys screamed themselves hoarse. My boy's performance was strictly middle-of-the-pack.

The parents were then invited to a tug-of-war. The idea was for parents of kids from the same house to be on the same team. By the time I hurried over to my son's house team, it had lost the tug-of-war. The boy was not concerned - he only wanted to see me participate. So I joined another house and pulled so prodigiously that we won in less than a minute. The boy shrieked in celebration, jumped on me, and then went off in search of the bouncy castle.

My own stellar athletic career was kindled in middle school. I remember a 200 metre race in my fifth grade. I ran against a fat fellow, a little fellow and a tall fellow. The fat fellow and the little fellow handily beat me, and the tall fellow brought up the rear. I was incensed to discover that there was no third prize.

At short put, I competed against the fat fellow and the tall fellow. The former tossed the iron ball as though it was a tennis ball; the latter had arms long enough that by the time the ball left his hand, it was already farther away than my first effort. I figured that I could only beat them by using brains instead of brawn. Having read somewhere that projecting the ball at a 45 degree angle would send it farther off for the same unit of effort, and using my legs for liftoff rather than my spindly arms, I hurled the ball so felicitously that even the headmaster stopped to gape.

'Disqualified,' intoned the sports master. I had stepped over the line. Disheartened, my third attempt was particularly putrid.

And that was the end of my athletics career.

Nobility

2011-07-03T14:25:00.001+01:00

Chemistry, one can argue, is physics applied to electron transfer. How do compounds form? In a most basic way, this happens when one element hands over some of its electrons to another (creating what is known as a bond). Electrons, as is well known, are negatively charged particles that orbit the positively charged nucleus of every atom in an element. Opposite charges attract, and so the electrons keep revolving around the nucleus. In fact, they do so at various 'distances' from the nucleus, called 'shells'. The reason why some elements are happy to hand over electrons and others are pleased to accept them is that all elements yearn to achieve 'perfection', and this occurs when there are (usually) 8 electrons in their outermost shell.

As it happens, some elements are perfect in that they already have the full complement of electrons in their outermost shells. These elements therefore are non-reactive. They are called 'noble', and there are several of them - all gases - helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon, radon. They resolutely eschew the company of any other elements. There are no naturally occurring compounds involving the noble ones. And for much of modern chemistry, it was widely held that there was no way the noble gases would ever react.

In 1962, though, a particularly enthusiastic man called Neil Bartlett set out to create a compound that contained a noble gas.

Neil Bartlett (1932-2008) (MSU Gallery of Chemists' Mini-portraits)

Now here's an important point. Some elements have atoms that are larger than other elements' atoms. The larger the atoms, the farther away the outer shells are from the hold of the nucleus. So they are easier to dislodge and share with other elements. Bartlett realised that the technology available to him was insufficient to force the smaller noble elements into compounds, so he chose one of the larger ones - xenon (chemical symbol Xe).

He realised that the amount of energy required to remove an electron from xenon was about the same as that to ionize O₂. Oxygen, usually, was an electron borrower, but in the presence of a highly reactive substance known as platinum hexafluoride, it could be forced to release an electron. If oxygen, then why not xenon, which had roughly the same ionization energy? Bartlett managed to produce an orange crystal: xenon hexafluoroplatinate (Xe⁺[PtF₆]⁻) Interestingly, the reaction could take place at room temperature.

Encouraged by this finding, other chemists attempted to create compounds with the lighter noble gases. The next gas to succumb was krypton (Kr), and did so barely a year after Bartlett's epochal work. Krypton was so resilient, however, that it needed to be cooled down to -151°C, when its electrons slowed enough that fluorine could rip them away. Here's how the creators of krypton tetrafluoride (Kr⁺F₄⁻) reported their methodology:

The experimental setup (a reaction vessel of volume approximately 650 mm³, with copper electrodes 2.0 cm in diameter and 7 cm apart) and the experimental conditions (current of 24 to 37 ma, 700 to 2200 volts) were the same as in the earlier investigations (5). The mixtures of Kr and F₂ (1 and 2 volumes respectively, to within 0.1 percent) was admitted, at a pressure of 7 to 12 mm-Hg, into the discharge vessel, which had been cooled to 84°K to 86°K by mixtures of liquid O₂ and N₂. In a successful experiment, 500 cm³ of the mixture of Kr and F₂ (at normal temperature and pressure) was completely converted to 1.15g of KrF₄ in 4.0 hours. ²

It took another 37 years for another noble gas to form a compound. In 2000, Finnish scientists achieved the feat with argon (Ar). Here's how:

It was an experiment of Fabergé delicacy, requiring solid argon; hydrogen gas; fluorine gas; a highly reactive starter compound, cesium iodide, to get the reaction going; and well-timed bursts of ultraviolet light, all set to bake at a frigid -445°F. When things got a little warmer, the argon compound collapsed.

Nevertheless, below that temperature argon fluorohydride was a durable crystal. The Finnish scientists announced the feat in a paper with a refreshingly accessible title for a scientific work, "A Stable Argon Compound." ³

References

Mark Sampson, 'Neil Bartlett and Reactive Noble Gases', American Chemical Society.
Grosse, A.V. et al, 'Krypton Tetrafluoride: Preparation and Some Properties', Science, 15 Mar 1963.
Sam Kean, The Disappearing Spoon: and Other True Tales of Madness, Love and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements, Little, Brown, 2010.

A Sphere in Religion

2011-07-02T16:05:00.073+01:00

What are the religious consequences of a spherical Earth? They are manifold, and solutions provided have been as much driven by convenience as science.

Take the example of the Judaic Sabbath. Religious law mandates that no work be done on this day. How to determine which day is the Sabbath, however? For stationary people, there is no issue. What if one is a traveller, and circumnavigates the planet? As the Jewish encyclopedist David Gans realised and documented in the sixteenth century treatise Mogen Dovid, there would be a serious problem:

Suppose that Reuven, Shimon and Levi stand at a single point... Reuven sets out to the west and circles the world, Shimon circles to the east, and Levi remains in place... On one and the same day it will be three days after the Sabbath for Levi who remained, two days after the Sabbath for Reuven [who circled west, with the sun], and four days after the Sabbath for Shimon [who circled east, against the sun]. The difference between Reuven and Shimon will be found to be two days. ¹

Impossible, then, for travellers to know the exact day of a religious festival. They could already feel the tongues of hell-fire touching their feet.

David Gans considered the issue serious enough to request the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf to help, and the likes of Johannes Kepler got involved: "After they considered these questions for several days, and debated with me, they admitted and were not ashamed to say that they had not attained a correct and satisfactory answer."

The solution eventually was one of pragmatism and convenience: the Sabbath is what the local custom says it is.

Now, consider the problem of facing Mecca - the Qibla direction - when a Muslim wants to pray. The faithful not too far from Arabia had a pretty fair idea of the direction of the holy city. They knew that twice a year (on May 28 and July 16) the sun is directly overhead on Mecca at noon. So all they needed to do was to look at the direction of the sun at the local time corresponding to the Meccan noon, and orient their mosques thither. (I assume they knew how many hours Mecca was ahead or behind them.)

It turns out that the direction they gazed at was along a great circle, a geodesic, the shortest distance between them and Mecca.

Now imagine the situation of a Muslim in North America. A flat earth map would indicate that the Qibla is south-east. But the earth is round, and so the geodesic from North America to Mecca goes almost via the North Pole. The Muslim, in other words, has to face nearly north - quite counterintuitive.

Still, they found a solution - using the same methodology as their brethren did nearer to Mecca:

It has been observed that around noon time of Makkah, it is about 6 am in Nova Scotia, Canada and Maine, USA. The sun rises in those locations as it comes overhead Makkah at local noon time. Facing the sun on those two dates around 6 am gives the correct direction of Qibla from North America. Those who had observed this confirmed that they saw the sun in North East direction at the specified time and date. Therefore, it is correct to say that Qibla from North America is generally North-East, except from Alaska and California where it is close to North direction. ²

References

1. Paul Kriwaczek, Yiddish Civilisation: the Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005)
2. Qibla Direction.

Old Delhi and That

2011-06-28T20:59:00.000+01:00

Dr S. Y. Quraishi, Chief Election Commissioner of India and author of various scholarly works on Urdu poetry, recently was at the Nehru Centre. So was I. He was launching his latest book - Old Delhi, Living Traditions. Various dignitaries dignified the occasion, and there was some amount of 'Fancy seeing you here' and 'Mwah-mwah' and 'Monika's* done an excellent job, eh?'

The book launch itself comprised a brief bit of unwrapping a copy of the book (though copies of it were already on a table for all to see) and a sequence of speeches, followed by a question-and-answer session. There were a couple of laudations by old associates and friends of Quraishi, and then the man himself took the stage.

His audio-visual presentation had images from his book accompanied by a self-deprecating set of remarks. He mentioned that his family had been denizens of Old Delhi for close to five hundred years. He was born in 1947 and studied at the Anglo-Arabic school (itself founded in the 17th century) and then at St Stephen's college (well-known for being my alma mater), all famous institutions. He talked about the great spice bazaar of Khari Baoli, and the paper merchants of Nai Sadak, and specialist foodie alleys, and the beautiful havelis.

Speaking of havelis, he talked about one beautifully restored one. Chunnamal's haveli was named for a wealthy-as-heck merchant who, when the British, upset by the 1857 native uprising and blaming it on the Muslims, decided to blow up the Fatehpuri Mosque, bought it for Rs 20,000, saving it for his fellow citizens of Delhi. A score years later, he handed it back to the Muslims (for, said Quraishi, a nice little profit, no doubt).

Chunnamal was the wealthiest man in Delhi in the 1860s, and the first to have a telephone and a car. It is not clear who he spoke to over the phone, of course, if he was the first.

I asked Quraishi if he had some interesting stories to recount of his family's five hundred years' history in Delhi. He didn't answer the question; instead, he discussed how he knew his family had been in Delhi that long. He came, said he, of a long line of scholars, and they kept records, and they could trace their ancestry twenty-seven generations. Furthermore, 'Quraishi' meant 'of the (tribe of) Quraish', which was, of course, the Prophet Muhammed's clan. So there would have been a father-to-son linkage back from Arabia all the way to India, and his ancestors may have dwelt in various parts of the country before they settled in the imperial capital in the 16th century.

Quraishi also mentioned V. S. Naipaul. The only book by Naipaul he had read, said he, was India: A Wounded Civilization. The only reason he read it, said he, was that Naipaul had mentioned him by name, which he considered a great honour. Someone had told him once that Naipaul almost never referred to people by name in his non-fiction books. So honoured was Quraishi that, in fact, he had only read that one paragraph from all of Naipaul's books.

He also said that he was a big fan of William Dalrymple's books. The one on Delhi, said he, was excellent, beautifully written. If he had a complaint, it would be that |Dalrymple had never interviewed him.

(*) Monika, in case you are wondering, is M. K. Mohta, the director of the Nehru Centre, shortly to be the Indian ambassador to Poland. Under her aegis, the Nehru Centre was a hotbed of cultural activity. We await to see how energetic her successor turns out to be.

Calvados Cocktail

2011-06-26T12:20:00.003+01:00

That man Massimo Carlotto was falsely implicated in some crime, went on the run, returned to Italy, spent a while in prison, and came out with very little respect for either the judiciary or the politicians. He turned his mind to some noirish crime literature, and imbued his works with his disdain for the authorities and his affection for alcoholic beverages. Here's a small excerpt from his The Master of Knots.

I tasted the Alligator that Rudy had mixed for me: seven parts Calvados, three of Drambuie, plenty of ice and a slice of green apple, following the recipe invented by Danilo Argiolas, the guy who runs the Libarium bar in Cagliari. It hadn't yet reached the ideal temperature.

[...]

When I asked for an Alligator and explained its composition to the barman, he acted scandalised and sought to dissuade me, recomending other Calvados-based cocktails. After some elegant verbal sparring, I was forced to give in and try his 'Apple Cocktail': Calvados, cider, gin and cognac. I downed it and ordered another one straight away - it really was good.

The Battle for Madras (Episode 2)

2011-06-25T20:57:00.000+01:00

The Seven Years War can easily be called a World War. The British fought the French all over the planet - in Europe, in North America, in the West Indies, on German soil, and in India. By the end of 1759, the French had lost ground almost everywhere. You could say that the beginning of the end of their Indian territories was the sanguinary Battle of Madras, fought over a bitter two month period from December of the previous year to January of that year.

Fort St George was the British redoubt in the heart of the 'white town' of Madras. The 'black' town lay below and around it was where fifty thousand Indians lived. The fort was the first built by the British East India company, and served as its headquarters for the south. It became the primary target for the French assault on British dominions in India.

Fort St. George (1754) by Jan Van Ryne

Four thousand British and Indian defenders were besieged within the fortress. Attacking them were 8,000 French and Indian soldiers, who had already looted and devastated the black town. In an earlier skirmish, the British had managed to wound the French raiders. Although the French successfully chased the enemy back into the fortress, they suffered from a fall in morale. It had taken a while to bring up their siege guns, but once they were installed, they pounded Fort St George for five days continuously. The British fired back as enthusiastically, and even managed to disable the French artillery for a brief period. The statistics of the munitions expended were impressive. 'The British defenders used up 1,768 barrels of gunpowder, 26,554 cannonballs, 7,502 mortar shells, 2,000 hand grenades and fired 200,000 cartridges from their muskets.'[1] Nearly one-third of the combatants on both sides perished.

The French even set off a mine under the fort. The British were barely discomfited; in despair, 150 French troops deserted to the other side. Meanwhile, an Indian army allied under Yusuf Khan allied with the British began a rearguard action against the French. They captured two French guns - but at so great cost to themselves that they didn't have the heart to re-enter the conflict, and withdrew.

It was becoming clear that unless the French broke the resistance at Fort St George, they themselves would succumb from lack of supplies and morale. The coup-de-grace was delivered when the Royal Navy managed to break the naval blockade of Fort St George, and land 600 troops ashore. The French saw the writing on the wall, and retreated.

Their Irish commander Thomas Arthur Lally, the Comte de Lally-Tollendal, never quite recovered his reputation after his debacles in India.

[1] Frank McLynn, 1759: The Year Britain Became Master of the World, Jonathan Cape, London, 2004.

Dew

2011-06-23T12:14:00.002+01:00

Iceland is famous for being a hedge-fund rather than a country, and for its volcanoes that ruin holidays, and for one of the funniest television series I've seen in a while. Næturvaktin is set at a Shell station outside Reykjavik with three staff on the night shift (hence the title) - a simpleton, a nervous breakdown, and the boss, a left-wing nutjob.

But that's not why I'm posting this. During a recent marathon viewing session (on BBC's iPlayer, I'll have you know), I noticed an actress with the name Sara Dögg Ásgeirsdóttir. Her middle name translates as 'dew', hence the title of this post. (I'm not sure if it has any other meanings, but this one is apt. She's fresh and lovely.) It turns out that she is only a part-time actress. Her main job is as a flight attendant. At least that's what it was in 2007, when she was interviewed by Morgunbladid. Sara never went to drama school, and yet - seven years earlier - she had won a 'Best Actress' award at an international film festival in Korea. That motivated her to continue along her acting path.

Here's what she said (in a fresh and lovely accent), laughing:

"Ja, ég býst við því að þetta sé einkum til þess að fá salt í grautinn. Annars var ég einmitt að velta þessu fyrir mér um daginn, og þá komst ég að því að það er í raun flugið sem heldur mér á jörðinni."

I am not entirely sure what she's going on about, but there's something about flying keeping her grounded, and how being a flight attendant is what puts the salt in her porridge.

Salt in her porridge? As I said, fresh. And lovely.

Traumatic Brain Injury

2011-06-20T12:06:00.002+01:00

Rush out and grab this study, folks. [Via here.] Below is the abstract:

Traumatic brain injuries in illustrated literature: experience from a series of over 700 head injuries in the Asterix comic books

Acta Neurochir (Wien). 2011 Jun;153(6):1351-5.

Kamp MA, Slotty P, Sarikaya-Seiwert S, Steiger HJ, Hänggi D.

Department for Neurosurgery
Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf

Background: The goal of the present study was to analyze the epidemiology and specific risk factors of traumatic brain injury (TBI) in the Asterix illustrated comic books. Among the illustrated literature, TBI is a predominating injury pattern.

Methods: A retrospective analysis of TBI in all 34 Asterix comic books was performed by examining the initial neurological status and signs of TBI. Clinical data were correlated to information regarding the trauma mechanism, the sociocultural background of victims and offenders, and the circumstances of the traumata, to identify specific risk factors.

Results: Seven hundred and four TBIs were identified. The majority of persons involved were adult and male. The major cause of trauma was assault (98.8%). Traumata were classified to be severe in over 50% (GCS 3-8). Different neurological deficits and signs of basal skull fractures were identified. Although over half of head-injury victims had a severe initial impairment of consciousness, no case of death or permanent neurological deficit was found. The largest group of head-injured characters was constituted by Romans (63.9%), while Gauls caused nearly 90% of the TBIs. A helmet had been worn by 70.5% of victims but had been lost in the vast majority of cases (87.7%). In 83% of cases, TBIs were caused under the influence of a doping agent called “the magic potion”.

Conclusions: Although over half of patients had an initially severe impairment of consciousness after TBI, no permanent deficit could be found. Roman nationality, hypoglossal paresis, lost helmet, and ingestion of the magic potion were significantly correlated with severe initial impairment of consciousness (p ≤ 0.05).

Sassafras Loves Gumbo and Chocolate

2011-06-16T12:18:00.004+01:00

Ntozake Shange's classic of Black literature Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo, is filled with descriptions of and recipes for fine Negro food. Reminds me of a trip to New Orleans years ago, where after laying into Cajun munchies, I repaired to a soul food joint to sate my stomach, salve my spirit, and harden my arteries.

Here's a small intro, first.

"Mama, this gumbo is ridiculous." Sassafrass was eating so fast she could barely get the words out of her mouth. "Mama, you know if I told them white folks at the Callahan school that I wanted some red sauce & rice with shrimp, clams, hot sausage, corn, okra, chicken & crab meat, they'd go around campus sayin','You know that Negro girl overdoes everything. Can you imagine what she wanted for dinner?' "

But even better is this:

Sassafrass' Rice Casserole #36

1-1/2 cups medium grain brown rice     2/3 pound smoked cheddar cheese
3 ounces pimentos                      1/2 cup condensed milk
1 cup baby green peas                  Diced garlic to taste
1/2 cup fresh walnuts                  Cayenne to taste

Cook rice as usual. In an eight-inch baking dish, layer rice, cheese, pimentos, walnuts, and peas. Spread garlic and cayenne as you see fit. 
Pour milk along side of dish so it cushions rice against the edge. Bake in oven 20-30 minutes, or until all the cheese melts and the top 
layer has a nice brown tinge.

Choo Choo Food

2011-06-11T12:15:00.001+01:00

Howard Jacobson is seriously upset about train travel in Britain. I don't blame him - it is expensive and erratic. What gets his goat, however, is the fall in the quality of the food on board:

The food on trains is once again disgusting. In the last days of British Rail, catering underwent a revolution. I recall an exquisite poached salmon sandwich with rocket and dill sauce "designed" by Clement Freud. To accompany it you could buy wine "selected" by Fay Weldon. Those were the Culture Years. Then we went private and it was back to the breakfast bap designed by Fred West. That's when they have any food other than confectionery at all. Ten minutes out of Edinburgh, on the way back to London, I went to see what was in the shop. "Twix, Mars, Snickers, Kit Kat..."

"No sandwiches?" I politely enquired.

"Don't talk to me in that tone of voice", the onboard shop assistant said.

Jahangir the Cruel #2

2011-06-07T12:28:00.003+01:00

Here's another tale of the viciousness of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir. A Pathan warrior once offered his services to one of royal princes, claiming to be skilled in all manner of weaponry. He said he was so good that he would work for the prince only if he were paid a thousand rupees a day. The prince was taken aback at his audacity, but was impressed enough to present him to his father.

Jahangir was addled as usual with opium and drink, and slurred that he wanted the Pathan to fight a lion. When the man protested that it was no test of skill to fight an animal unarmed, the Emperor was in no mood to change his mind. He ordered his toughest and most aggressive lion to be brought to the arena to be pitched against the Pathan warrior.

The man fought the creature for a brief while, reported the English traveller William Hawkins. It then escaped its keepers, and despite being in chains, still rent the man limb from limb.

The Emperor was so pleased with the bloodshed that he ordered ten of his horsemen to wrestle the lion. Three of them were killed before the proceedings were brought to a halt.

And no, I'm not sure what happened to the lion.

Tita in Tears

2011-06-06T21:16:00.002+01:00

Onions make one weep, they do. Little green chillies make one's fingers burn, and nose water, and skin sweat. All this happens when one chops them. Or munches on them. For great-aunt Tita, tears, floods of tears over onions began early in life. So says Laura Esquivel in her Like Water For Chocolate.

Take care to chop the onion fine. To keep from crying when you chop it (which is so annoying!), I suggest you place a little bit on your head. The trouble with crying over an onion is that once the chopping gets you started and the tears begin to well up, the next thing you know you just can't stop. I don't know if that's ever happened to you, but I have to confess it's happened to me, many times. Mama used to say it was because I was especially sensitive to onions, like my great-aunt, Tita.

Tita was so sensitive to onions, any time they were being chopped, they say she would just cry and cry; when she was still in my great-grandmother's belly, her sobs were so loud that even Nacha, the cook, who was half-deaf, could hear them easily. Once her wailing got so violent that it brought on an early labor. And before my great-grandmother could let out a word or even a whimper, Tita made an entrance into the world, prematurely, right there on the kitchen table, amid the smells of simmering noodles soup, thyme, bay leaves, and cilantro, steamed milk, garlic, and, of course, onions. Tita had no need for the usual slap on the bottom, because she was already crying as she emerged; maybe that was because she knew then that it would be her lot in life to be denied marriage. The way Nacha told it, Tita was literally washed into this world on a great tide of tears that spilled over the edge of the table and flooded across the kitchen floor.

Cipher

2011-06-03T15:05:00.072+01:00

In 1236, Walter (Gautier) of Coincy wrote a vernacular poem for a largely non-literate audience. In it, he used the expression 'ciffres en augorisme' to mean a vacuous person. In other words, a zero. Clearly, if even an unlearned audience was meant to understand the reference, the cipher, or the Hindu-Arabic numeral, was already well-established in Europe.

Scientific, as opposed to mathematical, knowledge had already started flowing westwards in the preceding century. "After 1100, Euclid’s Elements gained increased prominence; in 1126 Adelard of Bath brought Al-Khwarizmi’s trigonometry to the West; in 1145 Robert of Chester translated Al-Khwarizmi’s Algebra; Ptolemy’s Almagest was translated from the Greek in 1160."^[1]

How did the Europeans gain access to the concept of zero? As widely documented, the good news came from the East, via the Arabs.

I have read previously that Leonardo da Pisa (or Fibonacci)'s learned work Liber Abaci of 1202 was the main mechanism of transmission. Fibonacci had travelled extensively in North Africa training to become a merchant, had come in contact with Arabs there, and learned their sciences and mathematics.

Sefer ha-Mispar of Rabbi ben Ezra

As evidenced by Fibonacci, the main impetus to arithmetic appears to have been mercantile. The widespread use of the abacus had already introduced the notion of 'place value' to the Europeans, but they persisted in using Roman numerals in their documentation. Indeed, even innovators in business such as the English Exchequer and the Medici Bank decried the use of the new-fangled numerals. The Florentine guild of bankers required its members to “write openly and at length, using letters” — the fact that the ordinance had to be repeated three more times meant that by 1299, bankers in Florence had found it faster and more convenient to use the Hindu-Arabic numerals rather than write “at length” in the old script."^[2]

I learn now, though, that an even earlier book had introduced the concept of zero to the Europeans.^[3] The Spanish rabbi Abraham ben Ezra wrote about the Hindu-Arabic numerals in his book Sefer ha-Mispar (Book of Number) while visiting Verona in 1146. He used the first 9 letters of the Hebrew alphabet to represent the numbers 1 to 9, and made a small circle that he called galgal (Hebrew for 'wheel') for zero. (The Arabs used a dot.)

The Jews, of course, already had large trade networks across the Mediterranean and the Levant and deep into the Muslim lands. Their affinity for new ideas and business acumen meant that they had a long-standing advantage over their Gentile competitors. Indeed, as we have seen, the Christians were not loath to shoot themselves in the foot with proscriptions against new (or heathen) techniques.

It was not till the 15^th century that the Church relented and allowed the use of the numerals. And they had the temerity all along to accuse of Jews of taking advantage of Christians and making money off the honest faithful. All I have to say is - pillocks.

References

1. Stephen E. Sachs, New Math: The‘Countinghouse Theory’and the Medieval Revival of Arithmetic (here)
2. Alexander Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978)
3. Paul Kriwaczek, Yiddish Civilisation: the Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005)

Nutmeg

2011-06-02T18:45:00.005+01:00

This is nutmeg.

Nutmeg (from BBC)

Not very prepossessing, is it? And yet men killed and warred and competed all over the world for it.

Medieval mendicants and medics insisted that nutmeg was a cure for all ills. They claimed it could protect against the 'blody flux' and the 'sweating syckness' in the time of the plague. They recommended it against the cough ('mulled wine with nutmeg'), and trapped gas, and ills of the 'mouthe of the stomacke and the spleen'.

Andrew Borde wrote in the Dyetary of Helth (a treatise that made him more popular than his previous one on beards): 'Nutmeges be good for them which have cold in their head and doth comforte the syght and the brain.' He said that nutmeg dampened the libido, but by his own admission, 'it is hard to get out of the flesh what is bred in the bone' and he, a celibate former monk, died in disgrace.

Others claimed nutmeg was a powerful aphrodisiac. Charles Sackville said that even a tidbit of nutmeg before bedtime resulted in troubled slumber:

Dreaming last night on Mrs Farley,
My prick was up this morning early,
And I was fain without my gown
To rise in th'cold to get him down
Hard shift, alas, but yet a sure,
Although it be no pleasing cure.

And then, said Samuel Pepys, Sackville was gaoled 'after running up and down all night almost naked through the street.'

In Chaucer's time, nutmeg was a rarity available only to the rich. In the Canterbury Tales, Sir Thopas craved it.

Ther spryngen herbes, grete and smale,
The lycorys and cetewale,
       And many a clowe-gylofre,
And notemuge to putte in ale,
Wheither it be moyste or stale,
       Or for to leye in cofre.

Even Shakespeare wrote about it in The Winter's Tale:

I must have saffron to colour the warden
pies; mace; dates?--none, that's out of my note;
nutmegs, seven; a race or two of ginger, but that I
may beg; four pound of prunes, and as many of
raisins o' the sun.

A Dutch traveller named Jan Huyghen van Linschoten weighed in with his five volume Itinerario, an encyclopedia of the East Indies: 'nutmegs fortify the brain and sharpen the memory. They warm the stomach and expel winds. They give clean breath, force the urine, stop diarrhoea, and cure upset stomachs.'

And this is what led to all that mayhem and blood, and the rise of colonialism and the fall of empires.

Check out: Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg: How One Man's Courage Changed the Course of History.

Coffee, the Right Way

2011-05-29T21:14:00.000+01:00

In 1854, John Henry Wilton published a book titled The First Crime; Or True Friendship, which, he claimed, was upon the importunations of his friends who wished to learn all about his peripatetic life. I haven't read the book, but this passage seems par for its course.

Harry stopped short the tale, and bid Bothwick and his friend partake of some refreshment. " Come," said he, "let us have a cup of mocha, friends. Mr. Wilding," added Harry, "you must be getting peckish; allow me to offer you a cup of coffee and a crust. I'll answer for both being good, for the bread is home-made, and the coffee Richard makes himself in the best style, for he has had much practice ; I taught him myself. The method I learnt in Turkey and France. The Arabs have a mode of making coffee that I don't like. They, like the Egyptians, boil it until it is quite thick, and to me unpleasant. I am very particular as to the way my coffee is made, and have, after much trouble, succeeded in hitting upon an excellent method. I carry with me my own apparatus to make it, which may be called eccentricity. Well, be it so; nevertheless, I do, for I despise nine-tenths of the coffee, or coloured water called coffee, one generally meets with in travelling; for I hold it that a cup of really good coffee is one of the greatest luxuries."

So there you go. Travel might broaden one's mind, but not if one's a Victorian gentleman, full of oneself and the supposed superiority of one's civilisation.

What Cheek!

2011-05-23T19:12:00.001+01:00

The boy got into a slanging match with a couple of little fellows at school. One of them turned around and slapped him roundly on the cheek. The mother rushed up to the aggressor to expostulate. Wherefore physical violence? etc. The fellow - all of six years old - snapped rudely at her and stomped off to class.

It is the school's practice to send an email around to the parents whenever similar episodes of violence occur. Dear Parent, goes a sample mail. We regret to inform you that one boy defenestrated another. There was minor concussion in one boy and a sudden loss of musical ability in the perpetrator, but no serious damage to school property. To prevent such occurrences in the future, we have decided to post armadilloes at every window. Yours etc., Headperson Smythe.

So we weren't surprised to receive an email from the school office today. The subject read : A Case of Slapped Cheeks. Whoa, said the wife. That was quick.

A quick perusal of the contents quickly disabused us. It turns out that Slapped Cheeks are something else entirely.

We learn something new everyday.

Accessory To Murder

2011-05-21T12:11:00.006+01:00

In an otherwise rather pedestrian book, there's a small glimmer of understanding. Check out Elaine Viets' Accessory to Murder.

Some people say it with flowers. Joanie said it with food. She believed in comfort food - if you ate, she felt better. Josie didn't think she could eat anything after Alyce's frittata, but she took a small nibble of the corned beef. Then she took a big bite. Soon she'd downed several slabs of meat.

The turkey looked as if it had been sliced off a real bird. Josie hated the processed junk that tasted like wet Kleenex. She helped herself to a small piece. Yum. Juicy. She tried a little more. Then a lot more.

How can I eat like this when a woman had been murdered? Josie thought.

Because death makes you hungry for life, she decided. She piled life-giving salami on rye.