Cucumis melo

It’s not too difficult to grow melons in England, though only, I imagine, under glass. But a travel book of 1607 described them as growing here freely, and Andrew Marvell, in a well-known poem written about fifty years later also refers to melons. These must have been in the open, for the hot-bed was a recent invention in 1600, and glass-houses must have been a great rarity. Is it possible that our climate was warmer four hundred years ago, or were those so-called melons actually pumpkins?

The history, varieties and nomenclature or the fruit are perplexing. All forms of the species hybridise readily with each other, or indeed with other family members; the puritanical French have traditionally taken care to avoid ‘incestuous intercourse’ by keeping melons and cucumbers well apart.

To us, giving a melon as an expensive gift would be considered a little eccentric. Not so in Japan; the price shown here is equivalent to about $50.

Anything goes

This and Porgy and Bess are the only 1930s musicals which are regularly revived.
In olden days a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking,
Now, Heaven knows,
Anything Goes.

I went to see it at the De La Warr Pavilion, designed by Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff in 1935 and restored in 2005.
It was built by Earl De La Warr, the socialist mayor of Bexhill-on-Sea,when the modern was only just beginning to be the accepted architectural style of social progress. and was the first large scale welded steel-framed building in the UK.

It was a good production, but even if it hadn’t been there would still have been huge pleasure in marvelling at the lyrics:

You're the top! You're the Colosseum.
You're the top! You're the Louvre Museum.
You're a melody from a symphony by Strauss
You're a Bendel bonnet, a Shakespeare's sonnet,
You're Mickey Mouse.

You're the Nile, you're the Tower of Pisa,
You're the smile on the Mona Lisa
I'm a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop,
But if, baby, I'm the bottom you're the top!

You're the top! You're Mahatma Gandhi.
You're the top! You're Napoleon Brandy.
You're the purple light of a summer night in Spain,
You're the National Gallery, you're Garbo's salary,
You're cellophane.

You're sublime, you're a turkey dinner,
You're the time of a Derby winner
I'm a toy balloon that is fated soon to pop
But if, baby, I'm the bottom, you're the top!

You're the top! You're an Arrow Collar
You're the top! You're a Coolidge dollar,
You're the nimble tread of the feet of Fred Astaire,
You're an O'Neill drama, you're Whistler's mama,
You're camembert.

You're a rose, you're Inferno's Dante,
You're the nose on the great Durante.
I'm just in a way, as the French would say, "de trop".
But if, baby, I'm the bottom,
You're the top!

You're the top! You're a dance in Bali.
You're the top! You're a hot tamale.
You're an angel, you,
Simply too, too, too diveen,
You're a Botticelli, you're Keats, you're Shelley,
You're Ovaltine.

You're the top! You're a Waldorf salad.
You're the top! You're a Berlin ballad.
You're the boats that glide on the sleepy Zuider Zee,
You're an old Dutch master, you're Lady Astor,
You're broccoli.

You're romance, you're the steppes of Russia,
You're the pants on a Roxy usher,
I'm a broken doll, a fol-de-rol, a flop,
But if, baby, I'm the bottom,
You're the top!

Fancying myself as a fast man with a pastiche, I spent a very long time trying to write some new verses to this with contemporary references. This was a hopeless task, partly because few of today’s icons, apart from the obvious ones like Blair, can be wittily rhymed, but mainly because I am not Cole Porter.

Many others have written parodies, not least Porter himself, who used to perform them at private parties; his have not survived except for this one, though some say it was actually written by Irving Berlin. It is not suitable for quoting here; this is a respectable blog.

Happy times in Paris

Between the two world wars many English-speaking expatriates lived in Paris; Samuel Beckett, John Dos Passos, Lawrence Durrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein were among them. Most of them enjoyed themselves in various discreditable ways, or were interestingly miserable.

George Orwell was also one of those, though in his case the misery was not particularly interesting, except to us reading about it now. In 1933 he published Down and Out in Paris and London in which he describes his routine life as one of the working poor in Paris: slaving and sleeping, then drinking on Saturday night until the early hours of Sunday morning—the "one thing that made life worth living" for some of the unmarried men of the quarter. Penniless after leaving a hotel job, he takes another at a new restaurant, the Auberge de Jehan Cottard, where he falls into a daily routine of fighting for a place on the Metro to reach the "cold, filthy kitchen" of the restaurant by seven:

The patron had engaged me as kitchen plongeur; that is, my job was to wash up, keep the kitchen clean, prepare vegetables, make tea, coffee and sandwiches, do the simpler cooking, and run errands. The terms were, as usual, five hundred francs a month and food, but I had no free day and no fixed working hours.

At the Auberge, I learned how things are done in a thoroughly bad restaurant. It is worth describing, for there are hundreds of similar restaurants in Paris, and every visitor feeds in one of them occasionally. I should add, by the way, that the Auberge was not the ordinary cheap eating-house frequented by students and workmen. We did not provide an adequate meal at less than twenty-five francs, and we were picturesque and artistic, which sent up our social standing. There were the indecent pictures in the bar, and the Norman decorations—sham beams on the walls, electric lights done up as candlesticks, 'peasant' pottery, even a mounting-block at the door. The patron and the head waiter were Russian officers, and many of the customers titled Russian refugees. In short, we were decidedly chic.

Nevertheless, the conditions behind the kitchen door were suitable for a pigsty, for this is what our service arrangements were like: The kitchen measured fifteen feet long by eight broad, and half this space was taken up by the stoves and tables. All the pots had to be kept on shelves out of reach, and there was only room for one dustbin. This dustbin used to be crammed full by midday, and the floor was normally an inch deep in a compost of trampled food.

For firing we had nothing but three gas-stoves, without ovens, and all joints had to be sent out to the bakery. There was no larder. Our substitute for one was a half-roofed shed in the yard, with a tree growing in the middle of it. The meat, vegetables and so forth lay there on the bare earth, raided by rats and cats. There was no hot water laid on. Water for washing up had to be heated in pans, and, as there was no room for these on the stoves when meals were cooking, most of the plates had to be washed in cold water. This, with soft soap and the hard Paris water, meant scraping the grease off with bits of newspaper.

We were so short of saucepans that I had to wash each one as soon as it was done with, instead of leaving them till the evening. This alone wasted probably an hour a day. Owing to some scamping of expense in the installation, the electric light usually fused at eight in the evening. The patron would only allow us three candles in the kitchen, and the cook said three were unlucky, so we had only two.

In these conditions the cook and I were expected to serve thirty or forty meals a day, and would later on be serving a hundred. From the first day it was too much for us. The cook's working hours were from eight in the morning till midnight, and mine from seven in the morning till half past twelve the next morning—seventeen and a half hours, almost without a break. We never had time to sit down till five in the afternoon, and even then there was no seat except the top of the dustbin.

Two invitations

The great Nellie Lutcher, singer and pianist, has died aged 94. I had what we quaintly used to call a “record” (black disk, with a hole in the centre) of Fine Brown Frame, and on the flip side was her very best, Hurry On Down:
I love you, you love me.
A-hurry through the alley
So the neighbours don't see
..you.
Hurry on down to my house, honey,
Ain't nobody home but me. Oooh.

That was made in 1947, then four years later Rosemary Clooney had a big hit with a song on a very similar theme, Come on-a My House:

Come on-a my house, my house, I'm-a gonna give-a you candy
Come on-a my house, my house, I'm-a gonna give-a you
Apple, anna plum, anna pomegranate too, eh
Come on-a my house, my house a come on
Come on-a my house, my house a come on
Come on-a my house, my house, I'm-a gonna give you EVERYTHING.

This was from an off-Broadway musical called The Son, by the prolific writer William Saroyan, who was of Armenian descent, and his cousin Ross Bagdasarian, (who later, as "David Seville", created The Chipmunks). Saroyan married the seventeen-years-old Carol Marcus; they had two children, Aram and Lucy; when Carol revealed that she was Jewish and illegitimate, Saroyan divorced. They remarried and divorced again. Aram became a poet, who published a book about his father, and Lucy became an actress. Carol Marcus later married the actor Walter Matthau.

So there.

Feeble Endeavour

A TV or film adaptation of an admired novel is often judged not on its merits but by the extent to which it is faithful to the original. It rarely happens that reading the novel after first seeing the adaptation is a disappointment: more often, you discover that the original has riches which the adaptation lacked.

But the reverse can sometimes happen. In the eighties and nineties I watched an occasional episode of Morse and found the character of the detective unattractive: he was pretentious, arrogant and patronising and his love of crosswords, beer and classical music struck me as attributes tacked on in a feeble attempt to make him interesting. The esteem in which he was held by his sidekick Lewis—and the viewing public—was inexplicable.
Of course it was John Thaw's brilliant characterisation that did the trick; that, coupled with good writing, enjoyably preposterous stories and high production values, made the series watchable and even memorable.

The other day I came across a copy of Last Bus to Woodstock, the first in the long series of Morse novels by Colin Dexter, and read it. It was not easy to finish, for it tells a dull and confused story in flat, turgid, cliché-ridden prose, and Dexter's Morse is desperately uninteresting. In the adaptations he may be unlovable but at least he is a character. Here he is quite unlike the TV Morse: the original is an unconvincing, boring, cigarette-smoking cipher, given to vulgar chat-up lines and younger than Lewis.

There must have been something in the novel—or perhaps in its successors , which I don't want to read—to inspire the creation of a TV series, but it is difficult to imagine what it was. Their undistinguished author was lucky to have been made extremely rich by the work of the talented scriptwriters, directors and actors who contrived to give his oeuvre what it so conspicuously lacked: style.

Keeping the mud off their balls

Pétanque is reputed to have been invented in 1907 in the village of La Ciotat near Marseille. The name is derived from the term pés tanqués, which in the Franco-Provençal dialect means "stuck feet", because in Pétanque the feet have to remain fixed together within a (small) circle. Pétanque has become so popular that the term Jeu de Boules (game of balls) is often used to refer to it, even though Pétanque is only one of several variants of boules. Many French villages have a special stadium for the game called a Boulodrome.

In recent years we too have taken to the Jeu de Boules in a big way, and a crack team of retired accountants from Much Wenlock is said to be hot favourite for the next World Championships.

I am indebted to an anonymous correspondent who has informed me that the French, always eager to express their affection for Anglo-Saxons and their admiration for our sporting prowess, have paid us a pretty compliment by adopting an English name for one of the accessories used for the game, the thin mat which often needs to be laid down at Boulodromes when the heavy rain so common in the south of France causes the pitch to become too wet for play and may cause pés tanqués. This useful piece of kit comes in sections which are zipped together to cover the entire area, and they call the whole thing a complete Boul’-sheet.

The hidden rules of English behaviour

This is the sub-title of Watching the English, a survey by the social anthropologist Kate Fox which dissects and explains the quirks and habits of the English people.

The hidden rules that govern our behaviour—rules we obey without thinking—are revealed in all their Byzantine complexity by minute observation of the way we talk, dress, eat, drink, work, play, shop, drive, flirt, fight—and moan about it all. As the blurb says, …If you are English, it will make you stand back and re-examine everything you normally take for granted, discover just how English you really are, and laugh ruefully at yourself. If you aren’t English, you can laugh without squirming: you will finally understand all our peculiar little ways. If you wish, you can become as English as we are—Englishness is not a matter of birth, race, colour or creed: it is a mindset, based on a set of behaviour codes that anyone can decipher and apply….now that Kate Fox has provided the key.

No more now: I must finish reading about: the reflex-apology rule; the ironic-gnome rule; the money-talk taboo; the eccentric-sheep rule; the paranoid-pantomime rule; the dangers of excessive moderation; the rules of bogside reading…..and the rest of the 420 pages. Then in future posts I can quote chunks of this witty and fascinating treatise.

For a start, the ten pages explaining in detail the rules of English weather-speak are introduced with the observation that:
…Our conversations about the weather are not really about the weather at all: English weather-speak is a form of code, evolved to help us overcome our natural reserve and actually talk to each other. Everyone knows, for example, that ‘Nice day, isn’t it?’, ‘Ooh, isn’t it cold?, ‘Still raining, eh?’ and other variations on the theme are not requests for meteorological data: they are ritual greetings, conversation-starters or default ‘fillers’. In other words, English weather-speak is a form of ‘grooming-talk’—the human equivalent of what is known as ‘social grooming’ among our primate cousins, where they spend hours grooming each other’s fur, even when they are perfectly clean, as a means of social bonding.

I would like to copy the whole of the book into Other Men's Flowers page by page, but it wouldn’t be proper. Besides, English readers don’t need it and foreigners who want to understand us can buy it from Amazon (paperback) for $16.

[Watching the English was published in 2004 but we haven’t changed much since then. The whimsical How to be a Brit by the Hungarian George Mikes is funny but dates from 1986, and we have modified a few of our little ways the last twenty years.]

How about a Beefeater newt?

It is easy, but pointless, to say rude things about the London (or rather london) 2012 logo: everybody knows that if you give world-famous brand consultants Wolff Olins a year and £400,000 to design it then you are likely to get a piece of laughable rubbish. So no surprise there, though the animation of it which causes epileptic seizures, the unrecognisable 2012 and the fact that it suggests a swastika were unpredictable bonuses. It was apparently designed to "attract the internet generation", an objective both deeply sad and clearly not achieved: an online petition to get the whole thing ditched attracted nearly 50,000 signatures within a couple of days, while a "Support the 2012 Logo" list was struggling to make it into double figures.

There will also be a London 2012 mascot and we can be fairly sure that its unveiling after the Beijing Olympics will evoke similar contempt and ribaldry. In recent years many Olympic venues have settled for awful sub-Disney cuteness as in Moscow’s Misha and Seoul’s Hodori.

An honourable exception was Barcelona’s Cobi, but then they had taken the extraordinary step of giving the task of creating it to a real artist-designer (Javier Mariscal), who was responsible for the corporate identity for the Games; their logo was one of the best ever.

Few will be much impressed by the charm and originality of Huanhuan, the mascot for Beijing 2008 now being promoted to the world.

[Note that it is a microphone that the gentleman on the right is holding.]

Recipe for a Salad

Recipes expressed in verse are rarely any good. Here’s one by Sydney Smith (1771-1845), clergyman, writer, lecturer and society figure. He was also, on the evidence of the following, a rotten poet and not much of a gastronome:

To make this condiment, your poet begs
The pounded yellow of two hard-boiled eggs;
Two boiled potatoes, passed through kitchen sieve,
Smoothness and softness to the salad give;
Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl,
And, half-suspected, animate the whole.
Of mordant mustard add a single spoon,
Distrust a condiment that bites so soon;
But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault,
To add a double quantity of salt.
And lastly, o’er the flavoured compound toss
A magic soup-spoon of anchovy sauce.
Oh, green and glorious! Oh, herbaceous treat!
‘T would tempt the dying anchorite to eat;
Back to the world he’d turn his fleeting soul,
And plunge his fingers in the salad bowl!
Serenely full, the epicure would say,
Fate can not harm me, I have dined today.

It is said that because of this recipe Smith’s memory was to live on among homemakers in the United States (and presumably among dying anchorites) long after his death. It is hard to see why; anchovy sauce and double salt, anyone?

He rather fancied himself as a fast man with an epigram, and his sayings infest the quotation dictionaries. Most of them are pretty unremarkable:
“A comfortable house is a great source of happiness. It ranks immediately after health and a good conscience.”
“A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage. Every day sends to their graves obscure men whose timidity prevented them from making a first effort.”
“Among the smaller duties of life I hardly know any one more important than that of not praising where praise is not due.”
“As the French say, there are three sexes - men, women, and clergymen.”

But this one I like:
“Correspondences are like small clothes before the invention of suspenders; it is impossible to keep them up.”

Phew!

The days when a hot summer was a pleasing prospect are long gone; we all know now that summers are going to get hotter and hotter, i.e. worse and worse. But even before we were told that we must get used to the idea of being burnt to a crisp, we had begun to find out that sunny weather is not always fun. In 1995 we had one of the hottest, driest summers for 200 years, and August was the hottest ever recorded.

An article in the Evening Standard at the time noted some of the effects, good and bad, which were considered newsworthy then but would be unremarkable now:

300 sheep and 80 cattle had to be shipped off the Isle of Lundy because of a shortage of water on the island.
Free bottles of water were delivered to thousands of homes by Welsh Water after tapwater from the reservoir at Llandegfed turned green.
More that 17 million people were hit by hosepipe bans.
Swarms of ladybirds drove sunbathers of beaches in the west country. They even bit people in their search for moisture.
At London Zoo, rhinos Jos and Rosie had to have sun cream rubbed into their hides to stop them from burning.
Fire burned slowly beneath the surface of peat moors near Wensleydale, and five fire engines had to soak the ground to stop it spreading.
Radio weather forecasters got tired of saying the same thing every morning and wondered how they would fill the bulletin when the whole country was sun, sun, sun. Not so a TV forecaster, however, who said, “It’s not a bit boring for us, because records are tumbling right and left. This is sheer naked excitement for weathermen!”

Even this excitement will pall after a few decades of boring, boring summer sunshine.

Mother Courage

I have been asked why I wrote about Yiddishe Mommas the other day when I never had one. But all is grist to the mill of Other Men's Flowers, and I liked the essay about them from which I quoted.

But I did have a mother whose quiet calm and gentleness gave no hint of the extraordinary strength with which she faced the appalling adversities of her life and which enabled her, against all the odds, to provide her five children with childhoods which they would later remember as happy ones.

Here is a picture of her, aged 18, in 1907. At that time she was a children's nurse, a "nanny".

Lilian

Jewish Mother, RIP

Q: Why do Jewish Mothers make great parole officers?
A: They never let anyone finish a sentence.

Why aren’t Jewish Mother jokes funny any more? A book by Professor Joyce Antler, You Never Call! You Never Write! A History of the Jewish Mother, attempts to explain why one of the most dominating icons of 20th-century American popular culture has died.

In the current issue of the Jewish daily The Forward its arts and culture editor Alana Newhouse reviews this well-researched and insightful analysis of the stereotype in popular culture and others among a new crop of books about the Jewish Mother:

Known in some circles as a figure of generosity and deep warmth, in others as the skilled practitioner of toxic enmeshment, the Jewish Mother was acknowledged, here and abroad, as the symbol of over-involvement in children’s lives. She was also known for her chicken soup.

The Jewish Mother is survived by her neurotic yet high-achieving, dependent though viciously ungrateful, sexually repressed yet rapacious, impossible-to-satisfy son and her primped and posed, nose-jobbed and outfitted, long-suffering-yet-somehow-exactly-like-her daughter (both well-fed); innumerable books, radio serials, television shows, movies, songs, articles, nightmares not to mention more jokes than Egypt had locusts; the field of American stand-up comedy, born of those locusts; Guilt, her lifelong companion; the word “Feh”; thousands of appreciative psychoanalysts; and several acquaintances from her stint at The Dayenu Home for Aging Stereotypes, including Sassy, Overweight Black Mom and Finger-Snapping Gay Best Friend.

…The Jewish American Mother, like all caricatures, derived from certain real-life phenomena. She emerged at the beginning of the last century, when millions of Jews uprooted themselves from Eastern Europe and set out to create new lives, and lifestyles, in America. Most had spent decades living under the constant threat of pogroms, terrifying attacks in which rioters set upon homes, synagogues, even whole towns with murderous rage. (That Fiddler? He was on the roof for a reason.) They were traumatized, and many — women in particular—brought with them to this country a deep-seated protectiveness for the well-being of their family members.

…But the Jewish Mother’s career recently hit a rough patch from which she seemed unable to recover… Many real-life American women today are actually parenting like the stereotype, earning denigration as hover mothers, helicopters, smother mothers and more. The stereotype isn’t a stereotype any more: We’re all Jewish mothers now.

So that’s one reason why jokes about them are no longer funny. For more explanation, you should read the rest of this warm and witty essay. The paragraph about Philip Roth’s Portnoy is a particular joy.

How Long, O Lord......?

Several of my more devout friends have complained that Other Men's Flowers, while purporting to be a veritable compendium of literary reference, is curiously deficient in biblical quotations. As a first step towards putting this right, I print here the last of all the antediluvian stories, which appears in many places on the internet, usually uncredited. The original version was written by Keith Waterhouse:

And God said unto Noah, Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and the length of the ark shall be 300 cubits. And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee.

And Noah said, Sign here, and leavest Thou a deposit.

And the Lord signed there, and left He a deposit.

And Noah was 600 years old when the flood of waters was upon the earth.

And the Lord said unto Noah, Where is the ark, which I commanded thee to build?

And Noah said unto the Lord, Verily, I have had three carpenters off ill. The gopher wood supplier hath let me down - yea, even though the gopher wood hath been on order for nigh upon 12 months. The damp-course specialist hath not turned up. What can I do, O Lord ?

And God said unto Noah, I want that ark finished even after seven days and seven nights.

And Noah said, It will be so.

And it was not so.

And the Lord said unto Noah, What seemeth to be the trouble this time?

And Noah said unto the Lord, Mine sub-contractor hath gone bankrupt. The pitch which Thou commandest me to put on the outside and on the inside of the ark hath not arrived, and the plumber hath gone on strike.

Noah rent his garments and said, The glazier departeth on holiday to Majorca - yea, even though I offerest him double time. Shem, my son, who helpeth me on the ark side of the business hath formed a pop group with his brothers Ham and Japheth. Lord, I am undone.

And God said in his wrath, Noah, do not thou mucketh Me about. The end of all flesh is come before me; for the Earth is filled with violence through them; and behold, I will destroy them with the Earth. How can I destroy them with the earth if thou art incapable of completing the job that thou was contracted to do?

And Noah said, Lo, the contract will be fulfilled.

And Lo, it was not fulfilled.

And Noah said unto the Lord, The gopher wood is definitely in the warehouse. Verily, and the gopher wood supplier waiteth only upon his servant to find the invoices before he delivereth the gopher wood unto me.

And the Lord grew angry and said, Scrubbeth thou round the gopher wood. What about the animals? Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the Earth after his kind two of every sort have I ordered to come unto thee, to keep them alive. Where for example, are the giraffes?

And Noah said unto the Lord, They are expected today.

And the Lord said unto Noah, How about the unicorns?

And Noah wrung his hands and wept, saying, Lord, Lord, they are a discontinued line. Thou canst not get unicorns for love nor money.

And God said, Come thou, Noah, I have left with thee a deposit, and thou hast signed a contract. Where are the monkeys, and the bears, and the hippopotami, and the elephants, and the zebras and the hartebeests, two of each kind; and of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female?

And Noah said unto the Lord, They have been delivered unto the wrong address, but should arriveth on Friday; all save the fowls of the air by sevens, for it hath just been told unto me that fowls of the air are sold only in half-dozens.

And God said unto Noah, Thou hast not made an ark of gopher wood, nor hast thou lined it with pitch within and with-out; and of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort hast thou failed to bring into the ark. What sayest thou, Noah?

And Noah kissed the Earth and said, Lord, Lord, thou knowest in thy wisdom what it is like with delivery dates.

And the Lord in his wisdom said, Noah, my son, I knowest. Why else dost thou think I have caused a flood to descend upon the Earth?

[ But it must have been all right in the end, because otherwise they could never have made this film]

O lambent flame

In 1951 the 28-year-old Peter Ustinov got the part of Nero in Quo Vadis. He was required to sing a lament to the burning Rome and, as it was a big-scale production and the director Mervyn Leroy was, with reason, unsure of Ustinov’s vocal talents, they sent him to a distinguished professor at the Rome Opera House who had been offered a substantial financial inducement to give him three singing lessons. The account of how they went has been told many times, often by Ustinov…….

He delivered to me the pith of his first year’s singing course in a single lesson:
“Always, as I tell Gobbi, always breathe with the forehead.”

I wrinkled my brow as though it contained a small pulse. He was enchanted. Never, he informed me, had any pupil been quicker on the uptake.

At the start of the second lesson, he asked me what I remembered of the first lesson.
“Breathe with the..?” he asked
“Forehead” I replied.
“Bravo!” he cried, “What a memory! Really fantastic”.

Now followed the second lesson, containing all I would learn in the second year, in concentrated form. “As I tell Gobbi, think with the diaphragm,” he said.

I adopted a constipated look, which seemed to me the outward proof that my diaphragm was wrapped in thought. I set the pulse going in my forehead at the same time.

“My God, it’s fantastic, fantastic! One at a time, yes, perhaps, but both together, so soon! Fantastic! What a talent!”

Before the third and final lesson he decided on the usual refresher.
“Da capo,” he said “Breathe with the…?
“Forehead”
“Bravo! Think with the…?”
“Diaphragm.”
“Bravissimo!”

And here followed the third and most difficult lesson.
“As I say to Gobbi, always, in all circumstances, sing…with the eye!”

I came away as enriched musically as the professor had been enriched financially, and whereas those who saw the film might not have guessed that I was thinking with my diaphragm or indeed breathing with my forehead, I fear it was painfully obvious that I was singing with my eye.

[In later years, of course, Ustinov was able to display his talent as composer, tenor, soprano, bass and as a variety of instruments, notably in the one-act opera Die Zauberposaune and in Three Depressing Love Songs: from Spain, The Story of the Girl Who Always Fell for the Wrong Bull; from Russia, The Song of the Peasant Whose Tractor Has Betrayed Him, and from Norway, The Story of the Gnome Slighted by a Dilatory Troll.]

Voices over

A dozen tactful phrases used to intimidate voice-over artistes:

Mmm, very good. Can you do it like Michael Palin?

Well, we did want Felicity Kendal, but she was too expensive.

That was great. Do you have any other voices?

Can we lose the Pakistani accent? Oh you’re Welsh. I am sorry.

Didn’t you used to be an actor?

Can you make it sound more real?

Over by a second, I’m afraid, and it’s rather rushed, so could you go quicker but sound slower?

Do you think you could breathe a bit less?

We’ve still got point three of a second to play with, actually. You can spread it over the whole read if you like.

Do you always sound like that?. Oh, I see. I thought you had a cold.

We thought it might be fun if you all just absorbed the concept and then improvised.

It’s quite simple, just try to imagine you’re a beefburger.

The Father of the Bride

As the father of the bride I would now like to reply to the best man’s toast and propose the health of the happy couple

This indeed is a proud day for me. I have often dreamed of the moment when Marlene would come to me and say ‘Daddy, I’m in love with George Witherspoon. He’s been promoted to manager of the bank and now he wants my hand in marriage’. As things turned out George Witherspoon married the chief bridesmaid but then you can’t have everything. What we do have is Rodney, and it is with humble pleasure that I welcome him to our family circle. We represent a number of honourable professions in my family. My father is a respected retail tobacconist, my brother is a distinguished solicitor and as you know I have the honour of being the manager of a well-known grocery shop. We have not had a window cleaner in the family before and I sincerely welcome this new blood.

It’s true that Rodney has had some bad luck lately and is temporarily out of employment owing to that unfortunate misunderstanding over Mrs Parkinson’s jewellery. I myself entirely accept his explanation that the brooch and necklace must have fallen into his pocket when he knocked them with his chamois leather. In any event my brother assures me that Rodney has a good chance and that he is likely to get off with a heavy fine, which will be my small wedding present to the happy couple.

They have a fine start in life—a fine home and fine prospects. My Marlene should learn a great deal from living in one room over a plumber’s shop, and of course it will be very handy if they ever think of getting hot water installed. Both Marlene and Rodney know that my house is at their disposal whenever they want a bath, and the sooner Rodney avails himself of the invitation the better.

Now I want to recall a conversation I was having with Rodney’s father in the vestry before the vicar separated us. Rodney’s father reckons that in the heat of the moment I referred to his son as a half-baked twit. Let me assure Rodney’s father that I never speak in the heat of the moment, particularly on such an auspicious day as this. The way I look upon it I am not losing a daughter but gaining a son. In fact I am also gaining a grandson. The credit for that is entirely Rodney’s. He admits it and she admits it and we won’t go into all that again thank you very much Rodney’s mother. I admire Rodney for the way he has stood by my Marlene. When the paternity case came up a lesser man would have skipped his bail. Not Rodney. He came all the way back from holiday in Dublin to face his responsibilities like a man, and also gave myself, my brother and my three sons an opportunity of visiting the great Irish capital.

Finally, before proposing the toast, I have a message from the catering manager about twelve fish-knives and a silver-plated cruet. He says that Rodney’s family will know what he means and that he is prepared to accept it as a joke if the missing items are on the table when we leave. Now I ask you all to charge your glasses, and be upstanding for the happy couple. Marlene—could you help Rodney’s father to his feet, there’s a love. The happy couple.

[Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall]

Next lines of poems

I’ve never liked poetry much. I find that anything which is not prose and doesn’t have a rhyme here and there, or go umty-tumpty-diddley-dum, somehow fails to grip, except for those poems which have some special significance for me, and most of these are not highly esteemed ones; as Amanda Prynne very nearly said, Extraordinary how potent cheap poetry is.

Many of the extracts below are from bagatelles: recitations, doggerel, mawkish ballads, trifling verse or just enjoyable tosh; the serious poems that are included are nearly all standard, over-familiar stuff. There is nothing here that is new or exciting, or which will hold the attention of lovers of poetry; most people will be able to guess where the words are taken from, even if they can’t remember the next line.

Everything quoted below has given me pleasure (if it had all been about real poetry I wouldn’t have bothered with typing it), so I make no apologies for the trivial nature of this exercise: you might, if you can put up with this sort of thing, try to recall the next line (the number of words required is in brackets), the name of the poem, and the name of the poet or poetaster (two are by Anon), and give yourself one point for each.

1 A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon (11)

2 Weave a circle round him thrice, and close your eyes with holy dread, (12)

3 Was none who would be foremost to lead such dire attack? (10)

4 All this the world well knows; yet none knows well (10)

5 But as it is . . . My language fails! (7)

6 "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all (10)

7 Full many a flower is born to blush unseen (8)

8 And thou, what needest with thy tribe’s black tents (8)

9 There was a young girl from Aberystwyth (9)

10 One short sleep past, we wake eternally (10)

11 They fill you with the faults they had (7)

12 I've a lover in the prison, doomed this very night to die (12)

13 Not a word to each other; we kept the great pace (10)

14 And the sweat is on thy brow, for he passes even now (9)

15 For the stronger we our houses do build (8)

16 We sat in the car park till twenty to one (9)

17 In the blithe and pleasant Spring-time (8)

18 Il n'y a beste ne oyseau, qu'en son jargon ne chante ou crie (13)

19 Did He smile His work to see? (8)

20 I sometimes think that never blows so red (8)

21 He took castles and towns; he cut short limbs and lives (9)

22 There are maidens in Scotland more lovely by far (9)

23 ‘Tis paid with sighs a plenty and sold for endless rue

24 For Witherington needs must I wail, as one in doleful dumps (12)

25 But for all his foolish pranks, he was worshipped in the ranks (9)

ANSWERS ARE HERE

Bad words

When I was in the army I encountered a sergeant called Foulmouth O'Houlihan; for a soldier to to acquire such a soubriquet was exceptional, for among us there were many whose normal speech pattern was based on sentences in which obscenities provided adjectives, nouns, adverbs and verbs.

He was a kindly man, and he had a little dog which he adored, though he never addressed it except in terms of the vilest abuse: C'm 'ere, ye * *, or I'll tear yer * balls off, he would say, affectionately. Then one day the dog was run over, and he was a broken man; he still swore, of course, but his heart wasn't in it.

I thought of him the other day when I was reading a compilation of supposedly outstanding blog posts. Several of them contained swearwords used in a way which suggested that the writer knew of no other way of emphasising a point or expressing contempt, or had never realised that they are best used sparingly rather than as mere garnish.

What a terrible waste of a powerful weapon that is! If swearwords are part of your normal vocabulary, sprinkled throughout your prose, what can you say when you are really angry or appalled or want to shock?

I like swearing but recognise that the effectiveness of the top three or four swearwords soon disappears if you use them often. So I do not say them to strangers, rarely in print, and only occasionally to (never at) my nearest and dearest. On these occasions it becomes apparent, because they know me, that I feel strongly about the matter under discussion, or else that it is for comic effect. Happily, most of them have a similar approach to the use of such words.

Drastic action by Xenu

When one imagines the sort of dangers that journalists in war zones face daily, it seems rather feeble of John Sweeney—who had at one time reported from Bosnia—to have a screaming fit merely because he was being shouted down by a nasty-looking Scientology spokesman and had been harassed and spied on by the organisation. However much contact with Scientologists may make your flesh creep, it’s not quite like having people with guns trying to kill you.

Of course we should all have some respect for the sincerely held beliefs of Tom Cruise, John Travolta and, according to the Church of Scientology, 120,000 people in this country, or at least make an effort to understand them before writing them off as inane drivel. So here is exactly what they believe; these are the astonishing facts revealed to the world by a science fiction writer called L Ron Hubbard in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1952:

75 million years ago an evil galactic war-lord called Xenu rounded up 13.5 trillion beings from an overpopulated corner of the galaxy, dumped them on volcanoes on Earth, then vaporised them with nuclear bombs. Their radioactive souls, or thetans, later attached themselves to human beings and are at the root of our personal and global problems today.

By whom these truths were revealed to Ron is not clear; I find it hard to see why Xenu himself would have confessed all in Phoenix, AZ, after waiting 75 million years, but then what do I know about the motivations of evil galactic warlords?

Anyway, there it is. If you want to know more about all this, further information is freely available from Scientology HQ. Well, perhaps not quite freely; I gather that fees may be payable if you are really curious.

Sooty of the Yard and Sir Stafford Crisp

It seems a pity to quote hoax entries in Conservapedia, the leading source of misinformation for the not very bright, because this increases the chances that they will be exposed before we have all had a chance to enjoy them. My own contributions, providing fascinating and totally fallacious details about the careers of such characters as Melzach the Jebusite and the modern artist Goswell Frand, were spotted and disappeared within a couple of weeks, and I am now banned from the site; quite right too.

However, the editors of this fatuous website are, typically, Baptist creationist sophomores; they are not the sharpest of reviewers and very unlikely to be readers of Other Men's Flowers, so I will recommend this entry which I came across today; it may have vanished even before I post this piece; in case it has, I reprint it here in full:

Detective Superintendent Sooty
Sooty was a notorious figure in Scotland Yard in the mid sixties, his colleague Sweep made a pun of his name referring to himself as "the new broom of the yard". Brought in to fight corruption within Scotland Yard, they were in fact nothing more than puppets of crime figure Harry Corbett. Their campaign in London sloganed "Let's get busy" was not successful, even for a spell. This was eventually brought to light after the infamous incident concerning Basil Brush, which subsequently led to their downfall.
In 1983, Sooty was charged with the murder of three left-wing agitators belonging to an organisation called the Rainbow Programme—Rod Burton, Jane Tucker and Freddie Marks. It is believed by some that they had become aware of his role in MI5's covert project to oust Harold Wilson from office. However, because no reliable witness could be found willing to testify, Sooty was acquitted. He retired to Bordeaux, where he had family, and died of a coronary thrombosis in 1987.




Sooty and Sweep were indeed the puppets of the much-loved Harry Corbett, who created them for TV in the fifties.



Basil Brush is an 18-inch fox who has been a part of British television culture for nearly 40 years. He was created by illustrator and animator Peter Firmin and actor Ivan Owen in 1963; the latter spent most of his life in a cramped box providing Basil’s voice and actions.

Rainbow was a highly successful children's TV puppet series which ran from 1972 t0 1992. The "left-wing agitators" were actually a popular singing/songwriting trio.

And here’s another, still there the last time I looked:

Milton Keynes
Milton Keynes (1883-1961) was a British economist who worked with Lord Beveridge on his landmark report on social service and also advised Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Stafford Crisp, modifying the latter's extreme socialist views, in the 1945-51 Atlee government. In the 1951 dissolution honours he became Lord Keynes of Wolverton.
The 1960s new town in Buckinghamshire is named after him. The town is famous for its use of concrete, (especially its concrete cows), its confusing road system, and its apparent abandonment of all aesthetic considerations in its planning.

Many of the spoof entries in Conservapedia seem to have been inserted by mischievous Englishmen, perhaps because they assume, quite rightly, that the editors are even more profoundly ignorant about England than they are about most of the other topics their website covers. After all, why should a Midwestern fundamentalist know or care that the economist Maynard Keynes died a year before Stafford Cripps became Chancellor, or that the new town was named after the existing village of Milton Keynes, which was in the Domesday book?

The reference to concrete cows might have raised doubts, but in fact this is almost the only accurate statement in the whole article.