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12 August 2015 at 11:27 #41751
@purofilion @janetteb While reminiscing on the subject of afternoon tea, I suddenly remembered that one of the staples when we had it at home was anzacs. Do you know what I mean? – the antipodean equivalent of flapjacks, and to my mind far nicer. I think my mother got the recipe from her mother-in-law, my paternal grandmother, but goodness knows where Granny acquired it.
12 August 2015 at 11:16 #41750@janetteb @purofilion Interesting that Harrods and Fortnum & Mason are now calling afternoon tea ‘High Tea’. It must be a fairly recent development, I think, and certainly contrary to the usage I am familiar with. I did once have afternoon tea at Fortnum’s but it was a long time ago, around 1968/9, and they were certainly calling it ‘afternoon tea’ then. As I recall it cost 7 shillings and sixpence per person (37.5 pence – equivalent to perhaps £5 – £6 in today’s money), but it wasn’t a particularly elaborate or lavish affair. Afternoon tea was considered rather posh. At home a relatively simple form of it was reserved for when we entertained friends, and when my mother was going shopping in the city she would sometimes arrange to meet friends for afternoon tea at one of the local tea shops.
During my early childhood and throughout my schooldays ‘dinner’ was always in the middle of the day. School dinners were served at table rather than cafeteria style, and there was no choice; you ate what you were given or went hungry. The meals at my school were cooked in kitchens on the premises and varied greatly in quality. Some things the cooks prepared were reasonably appetising, but others were culinary crimes. At my brothers’ school the dinners were prepared elsewhere and brought in in large containers (‘dustbins’, according to my brothers) and were by all accounts uniformly and utterly revolting.
At home we had high tea, or just ‘tea’ when my father got home from work. At weekends high tea was a more elaborate affair, at least after food rationing ended and foodstuffs which had been absent from the menu for over a decade started to reappear. My father used to call in at a delicatessen on his way home from work on a Friday evening, and we never quite knew what we would be getting. After the limitations of our diet during the early post-war years it was a revelation. As for the main meals, my mother was a very good, though not particularly adventurous cook (my father wasn’t bad, either) but when it came to desserts she was the pudding Queen.
Puro, I would describe Bovril as a savoury drink rather than a soup. It was also considered very sustaining on a cold day, and I believe was a staple of British Arctic and Antarctic expeditions around the turn of the last century.
11 August 2015 at 11:18 #41739@purofilion I have just realised that I meant to answer your query concerning Bovril, It is essentially a very concentrated beef extract and looks much like Marmite; even the jars in which it comes are of similar shape and size. Used sparingly it could be spread on toast or bread, but I remember it chiefly as a drink – a teaspoonful in a mug of hot water. When, as a child, I was feeling out of sorts and without much appetite, a drink of Bovril and a buttered cream cracker were very comforting. It could also be used to add flavour and oomph to an anaemic beef casserole (not that my mother’s casseroles were ever anaemic).
Marmite versus Vegemite. There is a difference, and it will be forever a subject of (mainly) good humoured contention between the British and their Antipodean cousins.
11 August 2015 at 10:54 #41738@arbutus teapot/pot/saucepan Ah yes! the pitfalls of the ‘common language’. Once, when an American to whom I had just been introduced was, for my benefit, explaining something she had just said, I made her laugh inordinately by assuring her that it was OK, I was pretty much bilingual. But not entirely so, it seems 🙂
@Rose2112 @Purofilion On the question of High Tea, I suspect that there may be some confusion here between that and afternoon tea. Afternoon tea is the light snack meal taken around 4pm and comprising tea (of course) accompanied by small, dainty sandwiches or other savoury morsels, and cakes or pastries. If it is accompanied by scones with jam and clotted cream, then it is a ‘cream tea’ . High tea is a more substantial meal, eaten around 6pm by those who have had their main meal (dinner) in the middle of the day. It may consist of cold meats and salad with bread, possibly followed by cake, or a relatively light cooked dish. Some friends of my family who had a small hill farm in West Yorkshire used, in addition, to have supper at around 10pm, consisting of a hot drink accompanied by home-made scones, biscuits (i.e.cookies) or more cake. But then working farmers need a lot of calories.
@Rose2112 @purofilion @janetteb I was told at a very tender age that my parents’ name for me prior to my birth was ‘Stinky’. It is a wonder that my psyche wasn’t scarred for life 😉
10 August 2015 at 23:31 #41729@purofilion mmmm…donuts. I don’t eat them these days, but once, for a bet, I ate 12 large cream donuts (i.e. large donuts, split and filled with whipped cream) at a sitting. The bet was for a bottle of Irish Whiskey, and I won, but for some reason I have never felt quite the same about donuts since then 😕
Maybe you could eat a whole trifle, but the ancestral cut glass bowl in which the trifle is made is quite large, containing enough for a family of five. If you are ever over here again you must look me up and I will make it for you. Then we will see 🙂
10 August 2015 at 23:19 #41728@purofilion Vegemite? Vegemite? Phooey! just a poor imitation of Marmite, the food of champions – not surprising, since it is a by-product of the brewing industry. An acquired taste, certainly, but not so much if you were introduced to it in infancy. I have an American friend who loves it., and I used to take large jars of it over when I visited, but I dread to think what would happen if I tried to do so now. I would probably find myself detained indefinitely, given the third degree by airport security, and find myself on the ‘no fly’ list from then on.
10 August 2015 at 22:53 #41725@whisht @bluesqueakpip If I made a habit of drinking builder’s tea I suspect I would be permanently insomniac and would have no stomach left. If the tea is strong enough to dissolve a spoon – and that is the definition of builder’s tea which I, also, recognize -, just what do you think it does to your innards?
@arbutus You are probably right in thinking that it is the water that makes the difference. I am the opposite to you, in that tea never tastes right to me unless it is made in a pot. Made in a cup or a mug it tends to be insufficiently infused, in which case it tastes thin and acrid, or else it is too strong- not so much builder’s tea as pure tannin.
As for cake, rich fruit cake was for birthdays, weddings and Christmas. Otherwise it was usually Victoria sponge of one sort or another, and if that went stale before it was all eaten (a very rare event), one made sherry trifle. I pride myself on my trifle, made with proper egg custard thickened with a little cornflour and flavoured with lemon zest, and with the very best raspberry conserve or raspberry puree. No jelly (or Jell-O for those you from across the pond), which is just for children’s parties. Sponge cake soaked in sherry, a generous layer of raspberry conserve, custard and whipped cream, topped with toasted almonds and glace cherries, or other garnishes to taste. My youngest brother has been known to consume half of one at a sitting.
10 August 2015 at 19:18 #41716@purofilion @janetteb Ah, cider! that takes me back to the 1960s and the summers I spent working as a supervisor on an excavation in southern England, on the borders of the cider heartland. The excavations were on a huge scale, employing around 150 volunteer workers at any one time, including people from many countries. The largest overseas contingent comprised students from universities in the USA, and it seems that many of them only knew of ‘cider’ as a non-alcoholic drink. ‘No’, we told them. ‘In this country cider is an alcoholic drink; if it isn’t alcoholic it’s just apple juice’. Many of them were persuaded to try it but, despite warnings that some ciders were stronger than beer, many glugged it as if it were, indeed, just carbonated apple juice. More than once, as a consequence, someone rendered themselves legless and had to be carried back to base.
As for tea and other beverages, I’m sorry to disagree @Rose2112 (welcome, by the way), there are many things which can affect the taste of tea – the origin and quality of the leaf, whether the water is hard or soft, the amount of leaf used, whether or not it is in a teabag, and the temperature at which it is infused, (and the water should be at or near boiling point if the tea is to infuse properly) – but I cannot imagine how the receptacle in which the water is boiled could make a difference, and certainly I have never noticed any. As @bluesqueakpip says, if you drink a lot of the stuff, an electric kettle is far more efficient – mine will boil enough to fill a teapot in two minutes, whereas a kettle or pan on the hob takes four to five times as long. But you mentioned that you now drink only herbal teas and I am talking about tea derived from camellia sinensis , so what do I know? The ‘gunk’ which @purofilion mentioned as accumulating in the kettle can be avoided if you if you use a water filter which removes the calcium carbonate in ‘hard’ water. My water goes through a water softener unit and a filter; the kettle remains free of ‘fur’, and the tea brews amber-clear, without any of the scum which can stain teapots and cups.
In fact I drink a good deal more than three cups of tea a day – anything up to two whole pots – or more than 3 litres – in fact, and I am a bit fussy about it. I have given up using tea bags and buy single estate, whole leaf Indian tea – usually Assam or Ceylon, from a specialist shop which stocks a huge range of almost every kind of tea from every tea-producing country. I also brew it relatively weak, so the flavour is delicate and it does not strip the lining from my stomach.
Coffee, for me, is for weekends, high days and holidays, and I get it from the same shop as the tea. I make it by the jug method, with Colombian beans, freshly ground as needed. It makes for a well flavoured but mellow brew, which is just as well, because when I do drink it, it is in the same quantities I drink tea, so anything stronger would result in me gibbering from the chandeliers (the chandeliers being metaphorical, in case you should get the impression I live in a palace).
Having written all that, I realise that it probably makes me sound like the kind of pretentious poser that puro described a couple of weeks ago. I must even confess to keeping spices in glass jars, although that is because I buy them loose from a stall on the market, and I do at least store them out of sight in a dark cupboard. I like Indian food, and I buy the spices whole, to be ground as needed, because ready-ground spices go stale very quickly. I used to bake quite a lot, but not any more. I do not have much of sweet tooth and, nowadays, alas, if I even look at a cake I can feel my waistline expanding.
And now it is time to go and make myself something to eat 🙂
8 August 2015 at 12:22 #41649@purofilion If it is any consolation at all, Clarke has just received a huge ovation from the Trent Bridge crowd, no doubt in honour of his past record and his graciousness in defeat. Not a dry eye in the house!
8 August 2015 at 10:21 #41642@fortheloveoftheatre @purofilion Re the expression ‘it isn’t half … ‘ you aren’t half …’ I think it probably comes within the definition of litotes i.e. a figure of speech or rhetorical device in which an affirmative is expressed by understatement or by negating its opposite – similar to ‘This isn’t bad’ meaning ‘its good’.
Pace puro, it certainly is, or at least used to be a typically British expression. I associate it particularly with London speech ‘It ain’t ‘alf ….’ , though I may be mistaken in that, but I can certainly remember it in fairly widespread use, especially among schoolchildren. A variant could also be used to emphasise agreement, as in: ‘This is fun, isn’t it?’ ‘Not half!’
It may be that this particular usage is going, or has gone out of use – perhaps younger members of the forum could say (at which point I will retire to my rocking chair and my knitting – or would if I could knit; but at least I have the rocking chair, bought by my great grandmother shortly after her marriage in 1861).
7 August 2015 at 17:59 #41627@pedant The Guardian shop is offering a T shirt printed with a summary of the innings somewhat similar to that tweet. I also enjoyed the series of tweets yesterday which showed shocked looking vegetables and fruits, plus an onion – English, obviously – the cut face of which had a positively evil grin 🙂
7 August 2015 at 13:20 #41616@pedant Was that tactful? Was it kind? 😈
At around 12 am yesterday I looked in on the Live Updates on the BBC website, just to get an idea of how things were going, and my jaw nearly hit the keyboard. Not that I am a particularly avid follower of the game or anything – I am not sufficiently knowledgeable for that – but several members of my family are/were, including one of my aunts, who was such an enthusiast that we played the theme from BBC Test Match Special (Soul Limbo) at her funeral!
@purofilion According to commentators yesterday, part of the problem is that in recent years some national teams have been experiencing difficulty adapting to conditions on pitches away from their home country, which goes some way to explaining why the Australians have tended to do poorly in England lately and, conversely England have done badly in Oz, although I hardly think that it excuses yesterday’s spectacle.
And I’m so, so sorry but 🙂
18 July 2015 at 18:37 #41269the usual reason for realising God isn’t calling you to be a monastic
As no less a person than Tom Baker could no doubt testify 😈
18 July 2015 at 09:51 #41265why the Doctor has retreated into a Silent order of Gramdillion monks
Well, at the beginning of The Bells of St John the Doctor, frustrated in his search for the impossible girl, had retreated to live with a community of medieval monks and was even dressed in a kind of monkish habit. But when he got the telephone call from Clara he promptly decided ‘Don’t be a monk; monks aren’t cool’ clapped on his fez and was away 🙂
16 July 2015 at 20:42 #41249@jimthefish @bluesqueakpip The surname also derives from the name of a perfectly respectable village in Cheshire, the county which was the home of my mother’s family since time out of mind, and thus not a subject for mockery 😉
My personal favourite of the parodies is Cummerbund Bandersnatch.
15 July 2015 at 11:06 #41211@purofilion
You were being ironic, and my tongue was firmly in my cheek 🙂
And yep, the title of the game show episode was Bad Wolf, and the concluding episode which followed was The Parting of the Ways, wherein the ninth Doctor regenerated. Truth to tell, I found even this satirical take on game shows a trifle wince-inducing.
14 July 2015 at 22:16 #41201@bluesqueakpip Oops! yes, I was forgetting the butler in Ghostlight, and I did watch it and read the forum discussions. Maybe my lapse of memory is due to the fact that I was as bemused as everyone else 🙂
On the other hand, recent research on the Neanderthals has revealed a good deal more than was known when Ghostlight first aired.
14 July 2015 at 18:36 #41194@purofilion
being Neanderthal, they don’t know what hands are for.
This is straying off topic, I know, but I think that you are being more than a little unfair to H. Neanderthalensis here, puro. Granted they weren’t particularly pretty to look at, but they were well adapted to their environment (ice age Europe) and, since they produced some pretty sophisticated, not to say elegant tools, they must have had a good deal of manual dexterity. It wasn’t their fault that the climate changed, or that H. Sap. came muscling in. Even less are they to blame for the fact that some members of H. Sap have devolved to the kind of specimen who act as judges on shows such as the X Factor 🙂
Apart from that, I entirely agree with your animadversions on such shows. I once watched The X Factor to see what the fuss was about. Since then, if I ever switch on the TV and find it tuned to a channel showing any show of that kind, I swiftly switch to something else. Tastes do vary of course and, as we know all too well, even within Whodom there are strong differences of opinion, but there are limits to what is tolerable!
Come to think of it, perhaps there should be an episode of Doctor Who set in the world of the Neanderthals, in order to address these misconceptions 😕
1 July 2015 at 22:30 #40914@lisa I have a feeling that the wording of my last post may have misled you. It is only the first, 1953 Quatermass serial for which episodes are missing. Quatermass II and Q and the Pit survive in their entirety and are available in digitally remastered form. The visual quality of QII is not all that great, and I suspect that it is mainly of historical and nostalgic interest. Quatermass and the Pit was a more ambitious production and still stands up surprisingly well IMO, with some quite impressive effects, given the limited technical resources available and a budget of about tuppence ha’penny. Not having seen the film, I do not know how the two compare.
1 July 2015 at 22:14 #40913@jimthefish Apparently I’m supposed to be Spock. I can only conclude that the whole exercise is flawed! (and I assure you that I do not have pointy ears and my eyebrows are perfectly normal).
30 June 2015 at 22:55 #40893@lisa I was referring to the original BBC television dramas – The Quatermass Experiment (1953), Quatermass II (1955) and Quatermass and the Pit, starring Andre Morell as Quatermass (1958/1959), each broadcast weekly in 6 half hour episodes – rather than the films which followed them (and which I have never seen). Quatermass and the Pit was ‘must see’ television in a way that it is almost unimaginable today. The fourth series, starring John Mills, came two decades later, and the fact that it had less impact is not necessarily a judgement on its quality; by that date it simply appeared less innovative, and reflects the way that television had developed in the interim, and audience expectations had adjusted accordingly.
The original TV series are available on DVD, although The Quatermass Experiment is represented only by the surviving first two episodes, with the scripts and stills for the remaining four.
30 June 2015 at 21:15 #40889@bluesqueakpip Re Rock Follies, seconded! I remember watching Widows and enjoying it, but it is Rock Follies which resonates in my memory, no doubt in part because of the innovative format, but also because of Julie Covington’s performance.
@lisa Verity Lambert was involved in the last Quatermass serial in 1979 but, for me, that did not have anything like the impact of the 1950’s originals. I did not see the first two, although I was kept fully informed by school friends and later read the scripts when they were published, but by the time ‘Quatermass and the Pit’ aired my family had acquired a television, and it made a huge impact. A few years ago, when the remastered DVD appeared, I found that I was still able to quote whole chunks of dialogue as I watched, even though my memory for that sort of thing is normally rubbish and I was accordingly confined to bit parts (usually comic) in school drama productions.
25 June 2015 at 00:22 #40815@purofilion @arbutus @bluesqueakpip
Celts : I seem to remember puro asking about this a while back, and I meant to respond but got distracted by something or other. The question requires quite a lengthy answer, so you are forewarned!
I think I know what Russell T Davies was getting at, but he was wrong to state that there is/was no such thing. The terms Celt and Celtic have two different usages so, for a start, the meaning depends on the context.
1. Writers of the ancient world used the term to denote a specific ethnic and culturally defined group (Greek Keltoi; Latin Celtae).
2. Since the early 18th century a group of languages have been defined as ‘Celtic’ and, by extension, applied to the people who speak these languages.
Some Greek and Roman writers used the term Celt in a general sense, meaning ‘western barbarian’, but where they are more specific it is clear that they were referring to people living in western Europe, roughly north of the Pyrenees and south of the river Seine. Herodotus rather muddied the waters, because he described the river Danube as rising in the land of the Celts – and thereby sent several general generations of archaeologists on a false trail, leading them to identify the distinctive material culture of central Europe in the Iron Age as ‘Celtic’ and assuming that the expansion westwards of stylistic elements of that culture represented an expansion of the Celtic peoples. If whoever started that hare had paid more attention to the text, he or she would have realised that Herodotus was under the impression the source of the Danube was in the Pyrenees!
Diodorus Siculus makes a distinction between the Keltoi, inhabiting an area north of the Pyrenees and south of the Massif Centrale, and the Galatoi (Gauls), to the north of this. These people or peoples expanded eastwards, invading Italy, Greece and Asia Minor, and settling in North Italy (cisalpine Gaul) and in Asia Minor (the Galatians addressed in Paul’s Epistle). Strabo is more explicit in stating that the Celts who invaded Italy, Greece and Asia Minor came originally from France south of the Seine, the Venetii came from Armorica (Brittany), and the Volcae from the Pyrenees.
Caesar, in his well known tripartite division of Gaul, is more specific still. He wrote that the people who called themselves Celts lived south of the rivers Seine and Marne and were distinct in language and customs from the Belgae, who lived to the north of the Seine, and from the Aquitanae, south of the Garonne. There are indications that the Belgae had affinities with the Germanic tribes to the north and east of the Rhine, and the homeland of the Aquitanae equates roughly with the Basque region. Nowhere does Caesar refer to the inhabitants of Britain as Celts, although a linguistic study of place names, and personal and tribal names in contemporary documents and coins, as well as material culture, provides evidence of affinities between Britain and Gaul. Parts of southern and south eastern England were, in fact, settled by Belgic immigrants from northern Gaul, and this is reflected in the metalwork and pottery in those regions, as well as in the tribal names, but there is no evidence that the language spoken in those regions differed significantly from that spoken elsewhere in Britain.
Antiquarian scholars of the early 18th century were the first to use the term ‘Celtic to identify a group of non-Germanic languages spoken in the British Isles. These languages fall into two groups: the Brythonic, which includes Welsh, Cornish and Breton, and Goidelic, comprising Irish and Scots Gaelic. These two groups are more closely related to each other than either is to English, but they are quite distinct and it is thought that they probably diverged from a common origin at an early point in prehistory.
On the evidence of contemporary inscriptions and place names, the Brythonic languages are closely related to the language or languages spoken in the regions which Caesar described as inhabited by the Celts. Welsh and Breton survive as living languages, as does Cornish to a limited extent, although the last monolingual speaker died in the 17th century. Cornish is closely related to Breton, probably because of long standing contact between the two regions and as a result of migration from Cornwall to Brittany in the post-Roman period. The Brythonic group also included Cumbric, a now extinct dialect spoken in north west England and parts of southern Scotland.
In the Goidelic group Scots Gaelic and Irish are (I am told) mutually comprehensible, and the link is generally attributed to a migration of people from Ireland to western Scotland, although it was probably founded on a far longer established inter-relationship between the two regions. Judging by surviving inscriptions, the celtiberian language spoken by peoples in the west of the Iberian peninsula also belonged to this group.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries there was a movement to define the cultural identity of the Irish, Welsh, Cornish and Highland Scots as ‘Celtic’ in the face of Anglo-Saxon dominance, overriding their individual regional, historic and prehistoric identities, and this is what I think Russell Davies was protesting, because in this context the term has little specific meaning. In any case, DNA studies of the population of Britain are starting to demonstrate that the people of Britain (excluding recent immigrants), are all a mongrel mixture, and that even in England, most of us probably have more aboriginal British (or ‘Celtic’) in our ancestry than we do Anglo-Saxon, wherever we or our immediate ancestors live(d).
18 June 2015 at 19:42 #40705@fatmaninabox Excellent! Official congratulations on the official confirmation of your Diploma and all good wishes for the future 🙂
15 June 2015 at 20:37 #40671Ceres isn’t a space dragon egg. Don’t be silly. It’s where the Clangers live.
Of course (slaps forehead), how could I have missed the obvious! And clearly it is no coincidence that, just as the probe Dawn approaches Ceres, the Clangers are back on our TV screens!
Re the Canaries: all credit due to Alex Neil; the turnaround after the dismal start to the season was spectacular 🙂
14 June 2015 at 18:54 #40650Wakes up and responds, somewhat belatedly
@bluesqueakpip re FIFA, yes! an excellent, if long overdue development. What next for an Augean cleansing? the IOC?
In this neck of the woods the delight was compounded by football euphoria of a rather more parochial nature. The Canaries are going up, back into the Premier League 🙂
Excellent news about the Philae lander, too. ET is now phoning home, with lots to report, I gather.
And what’s with the bright spots on Ceres? Please don’t tell me it’s another space dragon egg 😮
10 June 2015 at 22:52 #40588@purofilion
erratum: Nigel Hawthorne played Georgie in the 1980s adaptation; Benjy was played by Dennis Lill,
I trust that you got the joke about the Beethoven. The first movement of the ‘Moonlight’ sonata was Lucia’s party piece at the musical evenings where she entertained her social circle, but you may note that she never played the second or third movement, which she pronounced ‘inferior’. In fact any piece of music which was beyond her technical ability, or any work of art she did not understand or like, tended to be judged ‘inferior’ (which reminds me of some critics of Doctor Who).
9 June 2015 at 13:14 #40579@purofilion
Has anyone seen Susie Liggat’s production of Mapp and Lucia?
Yes, I saw it when it was shown on BBC last year, although the fact that it was produced by Susie Liggat hadn’t registered with me.
Have you read the books by E F Benson on which it is based? I enjoy them as delightful social satire, skewering a certain kind of middle-class social circle in 1920s and 30s England, albeit with a certain measure of affection for the skewered.
The BBC adaptation captured much of the essence of the novels, I think, although in heavily abridging them and conflating certain characters it perhaps loses some of the subtlety and lightness of touch of the original. On the whole I prefer the more expansive 10 episode version produced by Granada Television in 1985 and 1986, with Geraldine McEwan as Lucia, Prunella Scales as Mapp and Nigel Hawthorn as Benjie. I agree, though, that Anna Chancellor is good in the role of Lucia.
24 May 2015 at 23:22 #40329@arbutus @todeledo The Morning Glory which is most widely grown here has large, bright blue flowers which last for only one day and is an annual, so only lives for one season even if there is no frost to finish it off. There are related species, also known as Morning Glory, which are short-lived perennials, but none of them are fully hardy. Your problem plant, Arbutus, sounds much like Bindweed (calystegia sepium) which grows wild in hedges and wasteland here and is a horribly vigorous, fast growing and invasive perennial, very difficult to eradicate once it gets into a garden.
24 May 2015 at 15:15 #40311@fatmaninabox Lovely photo of the Botanical Gardens. I lived in Brum for a couple of years in the 1970s, but have no recollection of ever visiting them – which is odd, because my flat was little more than a mile away. I have clear memories of visits to the Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh and Belfast when I lived in those cities, so maybe it is just a case of blocking memories of Birmingham in general (I wasn’t very happy in my post in the museum there and abandoned it as soon as I could for a job directing an excavation, which was less well paid but much more satisfying).
I spent Friday afternoon on my hands and knees in my mini-shrubbery, grubbing out Mock Strawberry plants (Duchesnea Indica). I don’t know where they came from – I certainly did not invite them in – but they must have established themselves by stealth in the last year or two and had started to overwhelm the Brunnera Macrophyla and the alpine strawberries. It’s amazing how much work is involved in maintaining that ‘wild’ look in a garden! As for pests, my weeding was interrupted at regular intervals to dispose of lurking slugs and snails, because where those are concerned I take no prisoners. The same applies to lily beetles, but most other creepy-crawlies seem to be sorted out by the birds, beneficial insects and other wild life visitors.
@lisa Thanks for the images from the Chelsea Flower Show; I spent my evenings last week bingeing on the BBC coverage of the same. There is an element of fantasy in those gardens, in that few of them could ever be maintained at that level of perfection, but one can always gaze upon them and dream 🙂
@arbutus @janetteb. It seems strange to think of Morning Glory as a weed, although what you refer to by that name may not be the same as the cultivar which I grow (Ipomoea Tricolor) which, in Britain at least, is a showy half hardy annual and no bother at all. It dies back in late autumn and the remains are easily disposed of.
19 May 2015 at 22:01 #40227@fatmaninabox May I add my congratulations and a toast to your future career!
And when it comes to combatting things like post-election depression, there is nothing so therapeutic as gardening and the cultivation of plants – or so I find, at least!
11 May 2015 at 15:15 #40076@purofilion If you do read any of the output of the Daily Mail (aka Daily Wail, Daily Heil, Daily Hate) I hope that you fumigate your eyeballs and seek counselling afterwards. They seem to want to keep their readers in a constant state of fear and anxiety, and when it comes to things like social services, benefit claimants and the NHS any horror story, however exceptional or anomalous, will be seized on and presented as typical of the whole.
Where the NHS is concerned, of course it is not and never has been perfect; some doctors are better than others, some GP practices and hospitals are better organised and run than others. All I can say is that my experience over the past few years, which has been fairly extensive and involved several different specialists, has been uniformly excellent, and so has that of others I know. At the GP practice where I am registered (and where I live I had the choice among at least half a dozen) it is almost always possible to get a same day appointment, and if the doctor I normally see is not available and the matter is at all urgent, I can see any of the other five doctors in the practice. And when I do have an appointment I rarely have to wait more than five or ten minutes. They also do home visits for those who are too sick or infirm to get to the surgery. Referrals to specialists and clinics at the hospital have been prompt, I have rarely had to wait more than a week for an appointment, and when I arrive I am generally seen equally promptly (on one occasion when I had to wait 25 minutes, the doctor in question apologised profusely for the delay). And the nursing staff, though clearly increasingly under stress and run off their feet, have been almost uniformly cheerful, kind, efficient and helpful. So don’t believe all the propaganda. The hospital, which is a university teaching hospital, is in financial difficulties, chiefly because the building of it was paid for by PFI, but that is another story.
11 May 2015 at 12:01 #40072@janetteb Holding elections on a Saturday or Sunday might have its advantages, but I don’t think that holding them on a Thursday has ever acted as a deterrent to voting here in the UK. For a start, polling stations are open from early morning to 10PM, so unless there are people working 15 hour shifts, they should have time to vote before or after work. There are also numerous Polling stations – several in every ward, in parish halls, community centres, school halls and even rural post offices, so that in general no one has to travel far to reach one and it is rare for people to have to wait for long. Scenes such as we saw in 2010, when in a few places people turned up to vote late in the evening and found long lines, are exceptional. And for those who are housebound or for some other reason find it inconvenient to turn up on the day, it is a simple and straightforward matter to arrange a postal vote. In all the places I have lived in the UK I have never found myself more than a 15-20 minute walk from my local polling station, and have never had to wait for more than a few minutes to collect a ballot paper.
To illustrate the point: elections have always been on a Thursday and voting has never been compulsory, but the turnout figures of between 59% and 66% since 2001 are untypically low compared with those for general elections in the second half of the 20th century. In 1950 the average turnout for the UK as a whole was almost 84%, and only a little lower in the election held the following year. The lowest figure for the 1950s was 78.7%. For the general elections held during the following four decades the turnout ranged between 72% and 79%.
There seems then to have been a far greater sense of engagement with the whole process then – an engagement which has rapidly diminished in recent years, particularly, it seems, among younger potential voters. I can understand the sense of disenchantment with the establishment as it is: the politicians who are supposed to represent us seem increasingly remote and authoritarian, encased and insulated in a little Westminster bubble, all parroting the party line and hearing only what they want to hear. No more rowdy, open public meetings; hecklers and vocal dissidents who infiltrate themselves among the party faithful in the carefully orchestrated and managed events which do take place will be forcibly removed, and when high-profile candidates do venture out, they will be protected as far as possible from potentially embarrassing random encounters. And between elections, marchers in protest demonstrations, if the demonstration is too large not to be ignored completely, are depicted as cranky mobs, to be ‘kettled’ by the police.
Anecdote coming up:
The first general election in which I was eligible to vote was in 1964, and I and my contemporaries at university, though by no means politically active, took a close interest and were excited by the prospect of exercising that right. My flat mate and I solemnly witnessed each other’s postal vote and then set about organising an election night party for all our friends and acquaintances (it turned out that if we had been unscrupulous we could have voted in Edinburgh as well as in our home constituencies, as unknown to us our landlady, whose basement we occupied, had registered us as residents in her household).
We did not have a television set, but managed to scrounge the use of a flat where there was one, and what a night it was! We had prepared ample food to sustain us – mainly home-made soup, Bolognese sauce for pasta, and lots of crusty new bread and cheeses; we supplied soft drinks and a few bottles of wine, and of course most people contributed a bottle or bottles as well. As the results were announced during the night it was clear it was going to be nail-bitingly close, and to make matters even more memorable, the broadcast was interrupted by two breaking news announcements: Khruschev had been ousted, and China had tested its first nuclear bomb. Labour ended up with a majority of four seats.
11 May 2015 at 00:27 #40064@purofilion
they do have a mandate. A majority constitutes that regardless of seats.
Well, 11334726 votes were cast for the Conservatives, but 19011810 people voted otherwise, so although they have a majority in terms of seats, they certainly cannot claim the support of a majority among the voting population of the UK. Even if you top up their numbers with the votes cast for parties which might be considered broadly or partially in alignment with them, it still does not add up to a majority of votes cast. So as I see it, although the system allows them to act as if they had a full mandate to carry out all their policies, it is a mandate from considerably less than half of those who voted, let alone the electorate as a whole.
Where there are only two parties in contention, a first past the post system such as we have will generally produce a result which correlates roughly with the votes cast, at least insofar as the number of voters in each constituency is approximately equal; but where there are multiple parties, the results can become horribly skewed. So at one end of the scale we have the Conservatives, with 36.9 % of the vote gaining 51% of seats in the House of Commons, and at the other end, UKIP, with 12.6% of the vote, and the Greens with 3.8% each with only one seat. If seats were apportioned in exact proportion to the percentage of votes, the Conservatives would have 240, Labour 198, the Lib Dems 51, the SNP 31, UKIP 82, the Greens 25 and the various Northern Irish parties 13. If FTPT were replaced with a system of proportional representation it would produce a House of Commons which approximated more closely to the will of the people as a whole, even though it would never be an exact match (and more people might feel they had an incentive to vote).
I fully concur with what you say about the corrosive effect of modern conservative ideology and economic theory on the social fabric. It has fostered self interest at the expense of a wider social responsibility, and as the distribution of wealth has become ever more grossly unequal they have demonised and hounded and made scapegoats of those who, for whatever reason, have to claim assistance from the state. Life in Britain in the post war decades was often difficult and, for the majority, lacking in many of the material comforts and amenities we now take for granted, but throughout the 1950s and 60s there was, I think, an underlying and cohesive sense of progress and optimism, despite continuing problems and class divisions. And there was, for a while, also greater social mobility. Now it feels as if we are regressing to a pre-war world of increasing social inequality and estrangement.
During this election campaign the Tories played on peoples insecurities, used scare tactics and somehow managed to spin their mediocre record on the economic front as a success, aided by a press which is predominantly right wing, and in some instances rabidly so. And Labour failed to counter this robustly, seemingly afraid that if they did so they might be accused of being too left wing.
9 May 2015 at 23:53 #40029@phaseshift My reaction was rather stronger than ‘Oh bugger’ and I am still alternating between steam-coming-out-of-the-ears angry and a mood of profound despondency at the prospect of (probably) at least five more grim years of this incompetent and economically illiterate shower doing their best to finish destroying all the good that was established or begun by the post-war Attlee government – the society in which I grew up and for long (I’m afraid) took for granted. My immediate family background is middle class, although not exactly orthodoxly so. My father, a product of Cambridge University in the 1930’s was, as he put it, ‘of a pinkish persuasion’, and his father was the first of the family to get a university degree, descended ultimately from weavers and small-time clothiers in the Rochdale/Middleton area. My maternal grandparents were a pipe fitter and a dressmaker respectively, but my mother and her sister won scholarships to a local grammar school in the 1920s. My father’s family were, I think, socialists of a Fabian stripe, and my mother’s family Liberal in the 19th/early 20th century tradition. None of us ever had much time for the Tories, and since Thatcher’s day I have loathed them and all their works. .
Interesting what you say about Jarvis. The name had not registered before, but shortly after reading your account of him I came across a mention in a comment on Nick Cohen’s opinion piece in the Guardian. Clearly a name to watch. Our newly elected MP, Clive Lewis, may not prove to be a high flyer, but he has declared himself anti-Blairite, which is encouraging, especially when the immediate reaction of some of the party big-wigs seems to be to recommend a lurch even further toward the centre. What exasperated me about the Labour election campaign was how low key, timid and purely reactive it was. In particular, there was no real attempt to counter the Big Lie that profligate spending by the last Labour government was solely, or even primarily, responsible for the recession and the deficit, or that austerity was an effective solution, even when ample ammunition had been provided by the likes of Paul Krugman.
Love the photo of Osborne. He needs no makeup to qualify as a Who monster
@fatmaninabox At least you are embedded in a substantial, if compact bloc of Labour constituencies. We in Norwich South are a small speck of red in a vast ocean of hostile Tory blue.
@Purofilion As @jimthefish has said, it was not exactly a landslide. The Conservatives had just under 37% of the votes cast which, in a turnout of around 66%, amounts to just under a quarter of the total electorate. Labour have 232 MPs, with just over 30% of the votes (in many if the seats which they won their vote actually increased). With 331 MPs, the Tories have 12 more than all the other parties combined (in practice 16, since Sinn Fein members do not take their seats), but it remains a fairly slender majority. Which will not, unfortunately, stop them from acting as if they had a mandate from the entire country to do whatever they like. I just hope that the SNP MPs (all power to them) will be as noisy and obstreperous as possible, and that the MPs from the north of England and Wales will be similarly galvanised.
The conventional wisdom is that as people get older they become more conservative in their views, and the Conservatives certainly seem to have been courting the oldie vote. This pensioner ain’t falling for their blandishments and, in fact, as I get older I seem to be moving even further leftwards on the political spectrum. You may yet see me at the barricades, armed with a zimmer frame 🙂
8 May 2015 at 12:53 #39977Turkey Constituency
Christmas X
The only small spark of consolation as far as I am concerned is that the Labour candidate in the constituency where I live took the seat from a Lib Dem who got in last time by the squeakiest of narrow margins, and all I have seen and heard of him so far leads me to hope that he will make an excellent constituency MP. And since it was evident from the constituency polling that he didn’t need any help from me, I felt free to vote Green. There was a ‘What the … !’ moment when the exit poll predicted a Green victory here, but although the ward where I live always elects Greens in the local elections, and was plastered with Green posters and garden signs, I don’t think that anyone here believed it for an instant.
I stayed up for the early results, but by 2 am I was rapidly losing the will to live and too depressed to get drunk, so I sought oblivion in my bed. Not that it helped much, because I was too wound up to sleep soundly.
🙁
21 April 2015 at 23:04 #39667I am not sure that Monsieur Farage looks human
Well, according to a headline in today’s Independent, Farage wants to stop the BBC from producing programmes such as Doctor Who (UKIP frowns on all that extreme leftist propaganda, you know). So obviously he is the worst kind of alien. EXTERMINATE!
5 April 2015 at 13:26 #39441@purofilion Although, as I said, I would struggle mightily to read it now, I have still a couple of lines of the Aeneid Book II by heart
O miseri, quae tant isania cives? Creditisne avectos hostes? Aut ulla putatis dona carere dolis Danaum? Sic notus Ulixes? Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.
Laocoon to the Trojans, warning them not to be fooled by the wooden horse – ‘I fear the Greeks, especially when the bring gifts’ and all that.
(Note to self: stop showing off!)
5 April 2015 at 12:53 #39437@purofilion
How does conjugate turn into conjugal?
Both come from the Latin coniugere – meaning: to yoke together, to connect (from iugum, a yoke, and by extension, a yoked team, a pair, the marriage tie)
I studied Latin up to the age of 18 – it was one of my GCE ‘A’ level subjects. Sadly it is now very rusty indeed, and I am certainly no longer capable of reading Virgil in the original
5 April 2015 at 12:26 #39434@purofilion
it is from the latin ‘to snore’ -I think
Yup! sterto stertere stertui (you really shouldn’t feed my inner pedant 🙂
For humans, trying to act ethically has been supposed to earn a “reward”
I was thinking more about things like people paying to build cathedrals in order to offset their various murders
Building churches or endowing monasteries to offset a multitude of sins looks to me more like attempted bribery than ethical action, however you define the latter . But then, as one of my history tutors once remarked, ‘To understand the medieval world you need to think your way into a medieval fog’ 🙂
4 April 2015 at 22:22 #39420@purofilion ‘stertorious’ strikes me as possibly a rather useful addition to the English vocabulary; a conflation of stentorian (from Stentor, the Homeric herald) and ‘stertorous’ – normally used for the laboured breathing of someone suffering from respiratory disease, but could, I suppose, be applied to a husky, rasping voice 🙂
@ichabod Acting ethically is its own reward, or so I was brought up to think – the Quaker influence on my upbringing, perhaps ( I always felt that the promise of ‘pie in the sky, or else …’ was more than a little dodgy).
24 March 2015 at 18:54 #39179@bluesqueakpip Thanks for the book recommendation. That’s another one on order to be added to the tottering ‘to be read’ pile 🙂
I was a bit wary of Ehrman’s arguments, knowing his background, and it certainly looks as if he might have developed a tendency to overstate his case, to say the least! To be fair, though, in ‘Who’s Word…‘ * at least, he is at pains to make it clear that the vast majority of discrepancies between manuscripts are the result of copyists errors.
* I think the title in the US is ‘Misquoting Jesus’ which seems even more confrontational!
23 March 2015 at 11:34 #39134@ichabod @purofilion I hesitate to jump in here, since I am very much an amateur student of Biblical history and textual criticism, but as far as I know, the main debate concerning Mark’s Gospel is not new, and it relates to the account of the resurrection. The nativity doesn’t come into it, since Mark’s account begins with the appearance of John the Baptist and the baptism of Jesus. Only Matthew and Luke include narratives of the Nativity, and those narratives differ.
The problem is that the two earliest surviving manuscripts of Mark finish abruptly at 16:8, with the discovery of the empty tomb by the two Marys and Salome. It is possible that the copyist was working from a version from which the ending was missing, but differences in the style of writing suggest that the subsequent verses found in other manuscripts may have been added by a different, editorial hand.
The question of the Gospel of Thomas, the Gnostic gospels and the Nag Hammadi texts generally is a whole different can of worms.
What may have caused some confusion is a book entitled Forgery, written by Bart D Ehrman, a leading biblical scholar. I have read only the reviews of the book, so I don’t speak from authority, but from what I gathered, the gist of his controversial argument is that in the original writing of much of the N T there were deliberate attempts to deceive. It has long been known, on the basis of textual analysis, that not all the Epistles attributed to Paul were written by the same hand, and it is widely accepted that the four canonical Gospels and the Acts were not written by the Apostles to whom they are nominally attributed. It can also be demonstrated, by comparison of the early manuscripts, that editorial changes were made to some texts (in addition to copyists’ errors). Whether any of this amounts to forgery in any usual sense, as Ehrman seems to imply, is another matter, but it seems to have put the cat among the pigeons in some quarters.
As a very readable account of the history of early New Testament texts and the problems in assessing them I would nevertheless recommend Ehrman’s book ‘Whose Word is It?’ (pub 1998). And for a critical examination of Jesus as represented in the New Testament and in the historical context of first century Judaism I would also recommend the books of Geza Vermes . @bluesqueakpip can no doubt suggest other recommendations.
22 March 2015 at 11:26 #39082it struck me that the Arthur stories were taken up by the Normans to legitimise their rule over the Saxons
So it seems. As Geoffrey Ashe argued, they needed something corresponding to the Matter of France – the cycle of stories concerning Charlemagne and the heroes such as Roland who fought against the Saracens. And Geoffrey of Monmouth, who was almost certainly Welsh, or possibly Breton, handed it to them on a plate.
It is significant that the name Arthur (which is considered to be a Welsh version of the Roman name Arturius) was shortly afterwards given to Henry II’s grandson; the prince who was, according to tradition, murdered by his uncle, King John. And three centuries later, when Henry VII was seeking to establish the legitimacy of the Tudor dynasty, he also turned to the Matter of Britain for validation, naming his eldest son Arthur – though the name didn’t bring that prince much luck, either, since he died young. It should be noted that The Round Table which hangs on the wall of the Great Hall of Winchester Castle is painted with the emblem of the Tudor Rose at the centre and an image of the King enthroned above it, as well as with the names of some of Arthur’s chief knights.
21 March 2015 at 22:05 #39051“They make a desert and call it peace” . . . said of the Romans Empire I think, but by whom?).
According to Tacitus it was said by Calgacus, a leader of the Caledonian confederacy, in a speech before the battle of Mons Graupius. This reference in The Agricola is, I think, the only known mention of a leader of that name, and the speech is probably invented out of the whole cloth.
21 March 2015 at 18:30 #39040@bluesqueakpip Many thanks; I’ll add it to my ‘to read’ list.
21 March 2015 at 16:54 #39034@craig , @purofilion , @bluesqueakpip
‘We are all stories in the end’. And yes, @bluesqueakpip , I think we do shape our understanding of the world and ourselves in narrative terms, though if you can point me in the direction of arguments to the contrary I would be interested to learn more. One definition of homo sapiens could be ‘the species that creates/tells stories’, although it does depend on how broadly you define the term ‘story’.
We shape our own lives in story, sometimes confabulating to create a more satisfactory narrative, and we make sense of our world in stories. Some people constantly rework the stories to incorporate new information; others seem to cling doggedly to the story formed early in their lives and are resistant to any information which challenges it.
History and story have the same root, and history as a narrative may be coloured and distorted in many ways as people shape the verifiable facts to their own ends, good or bad. And sometimes history can become legend. So Arthur who, if he existed, was probably the exceptionally successful leader of a war band fighting the Saxons in the late fifth or early sixth century, became eventually the hero at the centre of ‘The Matter of Britain’ featuring in stories endlessly reworked for the needs of successive generations down to the present day.
On a more universal level, myths and archetypes have always been the vehicles of one kind of truth, as people have perceived it throughout the ages. And in the field of the sciences, the way in which observed phenomena are ordered and classified seems to me to be a form of story telling, and even our understanding of the physical universe can be seen as a narrative told in the language of mathematics.
Or maybe this is all just the story I am telling myself 🙂
21 March 2015 at 13:28 #39029@ichabod @janetteb @purofilion
The way to deal with monsters under the bed, or in the closet, or anywhere else for that matter is, as Susan StoHelit would tell you, and everyone who has read Hogfather knows, to confront them armed with the weapon that slays all monsters: the fireside poker. There is just one problem with this remedy: nowadays, when relatively few houses have open fires, how many people still possess a poker?
As for the thing under the blanket and whatever was hammering on Orson’s capsule, I think the question was deliberately left open, for the viewers to supply their own answers. I don’t think the Floof described in Corner of the Eye were involved, despite the ‘corner of the eye’ reference. They are, we are told, above all adept at concealing themselves: never seen or suspected except as a flicker in the corner of the eye or a prickle on the back of the neck, and would never advertise their presence or manifest themselves unless forced into the open.
The thing under the blanket had substance and weight (the bedsprings sagged), and the rational explanation is that it was another child playing a practical joke. The Doctor told everyone not to look, which goes against the usual counsel (not to mention the Susan StoHelit solution), which is to confront one’s fears and phobias and face them down. But perhaps it was to allow the joker to leave without embarrassment to or retribution from anyone.
The banging on the hull of Orson’s capsule might have had an equally mundane explanation, as sounds generated by the warming and cooling of the metal. Or perhaps there really was something out there; but if so, what could there be at the end of the universe?
My preferred explanation, expounded way up thread, was that the uncanny phenomena, which all occurred in the vicinity of the Doctor, were manifestations of his unconscious mind, rather like the invisible id-monster in the film Forbidden Planet. In his soliloquy in the opening scenes of Listen, he is trying to construct a hypothesis to explain his sense of being ‘haunted’ by something or things unseen – which we later see might or might not be fully explained by his childhood experience in the barn. But at this stage of his post-regeneration life he is still probably in a slightly unstable and hypersensitive state, with his subconscious working overtime to sort out his residual identity problems, and this, amplified by the telepathic link which we know he has with the Tardis, could perhaps have physical manifestations.
20 March 2015 at 21:15 #39005@ichabod I, too, tend to keep my extremities safely tucked under the duvet, but that is because I prefer to sleep in an unheated room, and in winter it gets chilly out there 🙂
As far as I can recall, I don’t think that I was ever worried by things under the bed (other than dust bunnies, or perhaps the family cat). What haunted my nightmares at three/four years old bore a marked likeness to the thing under the blanket on Rupert’s bed, which lay in wait for me on the stairs or in the middle of the path ahead of me, and the sight of it here still had the power to send a shiver down my decrepit spine!
20 March 2015 at 14:19 #39001when The Moment lifted the Time Lock, it stayed lifted. The Time Lock is gone;
I hadn’t seen Moffat’s clarification of this question, but it was certainly the understanding that I was left with at the end of Day of the Doctor. So Gallifrey is once again accessible at any time before the ending of the time war, and the events of Listen show that Tardis knows this, even if the Doctor doesn’t (yet).
The question remains, whether the Tardis also knows the current whereabouts of Gallifrey, or whether her awareness of spacetime is limited to the ‘normal’ universe. The events of The Doctor’s Wife show that she is capable of entering a bubble universe, but perhaps the alternate or pocket universe where Gallifrey is presumably now situated is different in nature.
My guess is that she knows but just ain’t telling (well, as far as we know, the Doctor hasn’t yet thought to ask her).
@bluesqueakpip It goes without saying that we all bring our individual understanding of the Doctor to Who, and the longer we have been watching, the more varied and complex our ideas are likely to be.; which is all to the good. For me Capaldi nailed it in the ‘see me’ moment at the end of Deep Breath, and he has been quintessentially the Doctor from then on. Of the four since the reboot, it was Tennant’s interpretation that I had the most difficulty coming to terms with, although I certainly didn’t reject his version.
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