Warm Heart

Winter is not yet upon us, so why am I making use of a piece of equipment designed to help Antarctic explorers type up their diaries when it's -20°?

At the moment I am totally deprived of fingerspitzengefühl (in the literal sense, not the figurative—there's nothing wrong with my strategic intuition). This is caused by peripheral neuropathy; it may not be permanent but means that at present my hands are cold and my fingers are numb. My friend Grumio (the Bruton Boulevardier) has very kindly sent me a pair of Heating Gloves; plugged into a USB port, these suffuse my hands with a pleasant warmth. This is not only comforting but enables me to achieve my normal level of clumsiness in bashing the keys.

This post must be a short one. Like Captain Oates, I have to go outside and may be some time.

The happiest days

When I was at school, during the Second World War, our teachers were men who had been drafted in because they were not in the forces. Some had been dragged back from retirement and the younger ones were there because the forces wouldn't have them. Most of them were senile, exhausted, ill, drunk or just sunk so deep in Weltschmerz that nothing much, not even sadism, held any pleasure for them. Some of them had been had up for indecent exposure before the First World War.

But, my word, they were a splendid bunch of characters who enriched our lives beyond measure. Even now, the names we gave them them still conjure up affectionate remembrance:  Little Man, Gloom, Daddy Parr, Uncle Tom, Golly, Hack, Stodge... Only those we really despised were not given nicknames; Holy Joe was an exception; he was despicable but we felt a bit sorry for him as he was a lone pious voice in a singularly godless establishment; as I recall, the Christian Union there had only three members, and one of these was deaf.

A few of them had been brilliant, with honorary degrees from several European universities, but they had forgotten much; one man had been fluent in a dozen languages but by the time he came to us had difficulty with expressing himself in English. But somehow they managed to impress us with the remnants of their erudition, for we knew no better. 

There was only one man who really couldn't cope, and that was our PE (we called it Gym) instructor. His problem was that he could no longer do many of the things he was supposed to demonstrate to us: "Now just pull yourselves up onto the beam with a nice easy movement, in this way.... EURARGGH!!! The sweat would pour off him and the veins would bulge out on his poor old forehead. We all spent every lesson praying that he wouldn't die before it ended. But he survived until we spent a whole term in arduous rehearsal of an intricate display we were to put on at the end-of-term concert; the morning before the great occasion, he was taken very ill, and we never saw him again. The item was replaced by a sixth-form barbershop quartet harmonising "Home on the Range". Ah, they were good times; funny how trivial events like these stick in the memory, as does the occasion when a tree blew down, a large branch of it fell on the headmaster and he was away for two months.   

The fact that no-one actually taught us anything much was unimportant, for wartime standards in public examinations were very low and you could pass them with little more than your name written neatly at the top of the paper and then some cheerful and confident-sounding ramblings with a vague relevance to the questions. This was one of the reasons why I later found myself trying half-heartedly to get a degree in a subject for which I had no talent and in which I had no interest.

Shattered Nerve du Pape

Now that Ian Paisley in his dotage has stopped masquerading as a ranting bigot and taken on the role of cuddly national treasure it is apparent that all the time he had been concealing a quiet and delicate sense of humour, typified by the friendly if disrespectful sobriquet  he gave to Joseph Ratzinger: Old Redsocks.

However, he may not be at all pleased to find that his friend was received in Scotland and England with some warmth, though clearly not by everyone. Whether the protesters in London numbered 2,000 or 12,000 depends on which newspaper you read.

Although many did not feel that we got much value from the pontiff's visit,  the police certainly pulled out all the stops to earn the £1 million we are paying them to look after the old rascal; within a few minutes of an allegedly sinister conversation being overheard, they had arrested six Algerian street cleaners, and only a couple of days later had found out who they were and established that it was all a misunderstanding and that these miscreants were not planning a terrorist attack, just having a giggle.

But it was a near thing, and JR must have been shaken by the non-incident. He can't say he wasn't warned before his arrival in Edinburgh that a majority of UK residents did not particularly want him here. The Scotsman suggested that rather than kissing the earth on arrival he ought to take a shovel and dig himself an escape tunnel.

Anyway, the small discomfitures he must have suffered at various points in his visit justify me in using for the title of this post a phrase which I have treasured for years. Sadly, it did not originate with me, and I cannot remember where I first saw it.

Selection 33

More recycled posts from 2005:

sex
A 28,000 years old toy

words
Supermarket gives away drugs

computers
WWW, phooey!

Six things to do in Andalusia...

...if you are seven years old:

• Pay an official visit to the local Comisaria de Policias
• Lead an underwater expedition
• Try out the local delicacies
• Learn dressage
• Get a degree in Spanish literature
• Make your first parachute jump

For further guidance, look HERE

One down, three to go

Andy Lewis (Le Canard Noir of The Quackometer) is bearing up very well after the recent demise of the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, and has written its obituary. For the benefit of those who are pressed for time, I print below a slightly abridged version.

The Royal London Homeopathic Hospital of Great Ormond Street, London, has passed away after a long battle with science. It can trace its origins back to The London Homeopathic Hospital founded by Dr. Frederick Foster Quin, the first homeopath in England. Quinn was a pupil of the founder of homeopathy, Dr Samuel Hahnemann, and his entry to London saw him mixing with the aristocratic and wealthy, establishing royal connections for homeopathy that would last until today.

In its life, the RLHH has moved through several London addresses and became the Royal Hospital when King George VI granted the honour in 1948. In the same year it was subsumed into the NHS as part of the widespread post-war nationalisation of the health system.

In becoming a public institution, and no longer relying on wealthy benefactors, the hospital began its long and slow battle against the cancer of reality. Despite its long history, the homeopaths could not demonstrate that anything that was going on inside showed any sign of objective success. Instead of embracing the new world of trials and evidence, the hospital clung to its tried and trusted approach of relying on anecdotal stories of its success, a diet that would ensure its eventual demise. Despite other doctors’ warning that it had to kick the 60-a-day habit of anecdote after anecdote, the rot of pseudoscience was setting in.

After the Staines air disaster in 1972, which tragically killed 16 of its doctors on the way to a conference, the hospital started to become more and more diluted as it lost its ability to survive alone and subsumed its independence to its retirement home of University College London Hospitals. At the time of its demise today, only one small ward was still breathing and having to share its small room with unwelcome acupuncture quacks and reiki healers

Hope for a longer life flourished under the directorship of Dr Anthony Campbell, a homeopath who recognised that homeopathy was a form of counselling and was thoroughly skeptical of its more deluded claims. Unfortunately, this progressive form of homeopathy never took root and the current incumbents maintained the wilder fantasies of homeopathic healing, ensuring the spreading disease of reality would soon ensure the lights would be going out.

The Royal London Homeopathic Hospital has many admirers from abroad. Homeopaths in India, Africa and Cuba used the presence of a Royal Hospital, funded by tax payers within the NHS, to push quackery on some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world, replacing cheap and effective malaria treatments with sugar pills and water drops, pretending homeopathy can treat AIDS, cancer and TB and using it as justification to replace effective infectious disease control with superstitious nonsense. It is survived by similar institutions in Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow. We understand that they too are desperately ill and will not be able to attend the funeral

It is understood that the body of the hospital will not be donated to science, but instead will be occupied by a few remaining stragglers who will stick pins in patients, wave their arms around them and dish out vitamin pills. Known as the Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine, it will survive for a few more months until it is realised that ‘Integrated’ is a misnomer and it is still practising superstitious nonsense.

No flowers.

The Flavour Thesaurus

This is the title of a wonderful book by Niki Segnit subtitled Pairings, recipes and ideas for the creative cook. Published in June last year, it is original, witty and demonstrates a magisterial knowledge of food.

She chose 99 flavours, sorted them into groups (spicy, cheesy, sulphurous and fifteen others) and then wrote this manual to explain how and why one flavour might go with another, their points in common and their differences.

Some of the pairings listed are familiar: Bacon & Egg, Lemon & Chicken..., others less so: Apple & Horseradish, Coriander Leaf & Peanut (ugh!), Sage & Anchovy...  (One of my own favourites, Ice Cream & Sauerkraut, is unaccountably omitted.)

The recipes crop up in the book almost casually:
"To serve two [fried trout]...make a watercress sauce by blending a bunch with 150 ml soured cream, a squeeze of lemon and a pinch of salt and sugar".

I've tried this, and it works. Having bought the book as a gift for someone I knew would love it, I just had to read it, and there is now a nasty food-related stain on page 199, so I had to buy another copy to see if  Butternut Squash & Chestnut  ("sounds like a couple of fat Shetland ponies") is any good. But I shall not bother to find out whether Celery & Truffle make a good pair, as Segnit quotes food writer Elizabeth Luard reminding us that "truffles are an acquired tase, redolent of old socks, the locker-room after a rugby match, unwashed underpants, methylated spirits and a gas-pump on a wet Saturday".

Out of sheer curiosity, though, I might try Grapefruit ("lumbering old uncle of the citrus family") & Shellfish, or Rhubarb & Black Pudding.


Niki Segnit joins the tiny band of food writers (headed by Elizabeth David and Alan Davidson) who can  be read with enjoyment even by those who have no particular desire to try out their recipes.

A cheese too far

Cheese seems to attract poetasters, for there are hundreds of odes to it. Here is one written by Deric Guest, and published in Wine and Food, André Simon's Gastronomic Wine Quarterly, in 1950:

How shall my palate aught but fickle be
Confronted with such wealth of choice choice—in Brie,
Blue-veiny Dorset, Wensleydale and Dutch,
Stilton and Gruyère, Shabzieger and such
Exotic brands—for Nature sets no term
To the emulgent products of the lactic germ!
To wash down hunks of cheese from Lancashire;
Broaden my vowels, don corduroys and foster
The yeoman spirit bred on Double Gloucester?
Or, with abandoned braggadocio, dare
The cloying decadence of Camembert?

Passing over the pleasure of finding aught, emulgent and braggadocio cropping up in a bit of facetious doggerel about cheese, it is interesting to note that while most of the named cheeses are not exotic to us now (this was written in the grey postwar days when we still thought olive oil was only for pouring into your ear), one of them is no longer widely known.

Shabzieger? Haven't seen that in Tesco's. Surprising, when Wikipedia, spelling it slightly differently, tells us that it was first made by Swiss monks in the 8th century, that it is produced exclusively by Gesellschaft Schweizer Kräuterkäse-Fabrikanten (well, it would be, wouldn't it?), contains blue fenugreek, and is sold abroad under the name Swiss Green Cheese. It was introduced into New York pharmacies in the 1800s under the brand Sap Sago: perhaps they tried to sell it under that name over here too, which would account for its lack of appeal nowadays.

Great inventions of the last hundred years

Much of my long life has been devoted to the preparation and execution of deeds of unsolicited benevolence, with occasionally, for a change, some completely justified malicious actions causing great distress to the ungodly. In between these tasks I have had many utterly brilliant ideas come to me, often when I am having an attack of OAB. Any of them would make the world a better place. Sadly, it was never possible for me to take any of them forward to a patentable or even marketable stage for various reasons, the most usual one being that to achieve this would call for great energy, hard work, drive, some relevant skill or knowledge, and iron determination. None of these things are within my range and that prevented me from getting any further.

Here are four of them; skip the first if you are easily disgusted:

1  Pukejoy
Everyone knows how awful it is when you think you are about to be sick; you dread the pain and humiliation and the horrid taste you are left with. If you sip a glass of Pukejoy it will neither bring on nor delay the event, but it will ease the expulsion and leave in your mouth une sensation de fraicheur agréable with an overtone of  lemon, spearmint or kiwi fruit.

2  Tyresave
When an aircraft's landing wheels hit the tarmac there is a puff of smoke; this is the tyres burning rubber as they have to accelerate from zero to the landing speed in fraction of a second, and is why the hugely expensive tyres have to be replaced frequently.
It would be quite simple to fit vanes to the wheels, so designed that they will start to revolve in the slipstream as soon as they are lowered. The speed at which they revolve will depend on the speed of the aircraft, so with careful design they will hit the tarmac at exactly the speed needed to ensure that there is no puff of smoke.

3  Styenka Razin
This is the name of an old Russian song to which I intended to write some English lyrics and HERE I explain how Dusty Springfield's brother stopped me from doing so

4  Patients' Symptom Reporting System
This is based on three undeniable facts: that doctors' time is precious, that the waiting room reading matter is always depressing, and that an increasing number of patients would like to tell  tell a computer what is wrong with them rather than a doctor.
In the waiting room there would be a couple of old PCs donated by local firms and a notice would ask patients if they would like to record their symptoms. Those that do can sit down at a screen and switch on: there is no logging on and they are not asked to type in their name: instead, a question appears: What seems to be the trouble? There are a dozen answers offered and the patient chooses one, perhaps my elbow hurts. More questions come up: what they are depends on  the answer given to the first; these might be all the time?, or just when you bend it?, etc. Then so on until the questions have been answered, or the patient is called by the doctor, or just gets fed up. The last button is pressed and the program prints a report and deletes all the information that has been put in. The patient trots into the doctor with it; reading it takes him 30 seconds and he can then carry on the consultation, having saved himself the first  three minutes.

As I explained, none of these brilliant ideas will ever be exploited by me. Of course, someone else might take them up and try, and unless he can produce a document dated prior to this post proving that he thought of them himself then I shall call in m'learned friends; I might well be open to offers over 40%.

Soldiers of the King, Part Two

Warning:  Here are more maudlin reminiscences, continued from  HERE; two clicks on Page Down will move you on to something that may be more interesting.

...After a while it occurred to me that I could have another go at getting a commission, and so I asked to be put in front of a Unit Selection Board. This consisted of the CO and the adjutant, and much to my surprise they agreed that I should be sent back to England for a War Office Selection Board; this was probably because they couldn't find much use for me in the Middle East. While I was waiting they made me a corporal ("umbasha" in Arabic, I rather liked the sound of that) with the idea of giving me some experience in leadership. This was well-meant but very silly: anyone can be a subaltern, but NCOs need to be made of sterner stuff, which I wasn't.

They also posted me to the GHQ Car Company in Fayid, which was a rather up-market affair which had the task of driving senior officers up and down the Suez Canal Road in Humber Super Snipes. It was a nice change, and it was there that I picked up a remark that gave me more pleasure than anything else I ever heard said during my two years service.

We were taking down to Alexandria a brigadier who had just flown in to Suez with his family. I was sitting in front with the driver and the brigadier, his wife and his two small children sat in the back. A few hundred yards ahead we  saw some sort of disturbance going on: no shooting, but a crowd of fellahin throwing stones and generally getting stroppy. We stopped, I cocked my (empty) sten and we sat there and thought for a bit; the children started to chatter with excitement, but the brigadier remained utterly calm and took control:
"Quiet, dears," he said "Daddy's trying to make an appreciation of the situation".

And so the days dragged on, the only event worth recording being a bad attack of Gyppo Tummy which kept me busy during the whole of my twenty-first birthday and the night that f0llowed.  I began to realise that if I was to get home in time to go to Officer Cadet School,  something had to happen soon. My CO, a pompous double-barrelled ass, gave me a cheery greeting from time to time but clearly wasn't interested in furthering my military career. So I did what any ambitious aspiring officer would have done and wrote to my mother; with the help of my brother-in-law she concocted a letter to our MP pointing out that if they didn't get a move it would soon be too late for me to fulfil my destiny. He replied that he was putting my case to the Secretary of State for War, who in turn promised to send a "hastener" to my unit.

To my huge surprise, my mother then received another letter saying that I was to be sent  to England within three weeks. The CO sent for me a couple of weeks later: "Good news, corporal, you're going home!".

"Oh, yes, sir", I replied, "I know, my mother told me last week". He never spoke to me again.

By the end of that month I was on a flight to England.

[Continued HERE]  

A list of gullible idiots

After the Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology, and later the BMA, have clearly and unambiguously recommended that homeopathy should not be financed or supported in any way by the NHS since it is of no value other than as a placebo, it is surprising that the coalition government appears to be evading the issue.

Or perhaps it is not so surprising, since this two hundred year old quackery still has many adherents, most of whom have no idea of its principles, which are clearly nonsensical. For a list of people who believe that magic water with no active ingredients remembers what it once contained and can cure almost anything, look at this petition, now closed after gathering 3,907 signatures.

And there is also an Early Day Motion submitted  by the absurd David Tredinnick and signed by 27 MPs calling on the government to ignore the BMA's recommendation and let homeopathy flourish.  Sadly, among the deluded signatories is Caroline Lucas, the Green Party's sole MP; this may discourage some from voting for her party, which presumably shares her superstitious beliefs.

Somewhat diffidently, I must note that a glance at the list of petitioners suggests that the great majority of them (twenty out of the first twenty-five) are women. There is absolutely no conclusion to be drawn from this, except that in my frivolous little poll a few years ago I was wrong about homeopathy being equally appealing to both sexes, but spot on in my conclusion: that women are more superstitious than men.

Vulnerable men in danger

I have been closely following a worrying case which is currently being investigated by the state police in Massachusetts. A fifth grade student named Betty (to protect her family, her surname has not been published) has been accused of grooming a middle-aged man on the internet. His name is given as "Fatso" Schlegel, and he is an unemployed steel worker aged 54. For months, Betty had been carrying on an email correspondence with him, masquerading as an imaginary steel worker called "Plug" McCory, a man with an unpleasant skin disease and a criminal record.

She gained Schlegel's's confidence by pretending that her (Plug's) interests—shooting craps, pool and possum-hunting—are just the same as his, while concealing her real obsessions, which are Barbie, Sweetie Belle's Gumball House and Snickers.

Her object, of course, was to lure him into a meeting, and she even sent him a photograph of some of the men she tells him that she hangs out with, promising that she would bring them along so that they could all play seven-card stud together. She did not intend to molest him, but was intent on enjoying his disappointment when he came face to face with an adorable golden-haired poppet rather than the bunch of smelly overweight thugs with whom he had been hoping to bond.

Fortunately the police stepped in before the meeting could take place, and we may hope that a stiff custodial sentence for Betty will be a warning to others who might attempt such cruel impostures.

Let me have men about me....

No, on second thoughts let me not. Samuel Johnson noted a useful word for the one in four men and one in three women in the UK who are overweight:

gorbelly [from gor, dung, and belly, according to Skinner and Julius. It may perhaps come from gor, Welsh, beyond, too much; or, as seems to me more likely, may be contracted from gourmand, or gourmand's belly, the belly of a glutton.] A big paunch, a swelling belly. A term of reproach for a fat man.

(According to the OED, Skinner and Julius were right.)

My drug habit

I came very late to drug addiction: in my teens and twenties I was too innocent to notice what was going on. Once at a party a girl passed me a lighted cigarette, which I obligingly stubbed out for her; she told me irritably that it was her last joint and I felt an awful fool.

Later, when travelling overseas, I found out what kif, ganja, blow, toot, christina, dagga, Miss Emma and all the rest were, by being offered them or by being told about them by knowing friends, or learning that the rather pleasant smell I had noticed was caused by the airheads puffing away around us.

But in the last few years, and particularly in the last few months, I have become a major player on the drugs scene, not as a burnout or a paper boy or a pusher, but certainly as a user. When people notice my erratic behaviour and ask me what I'm on I usually reply "Oh, just a bit of pot at weekends", because to give the whole list would take too long. Here it is:


Swallowed daily: Metformin, Ibuprofen, Simvastatin, Ramipril, Finasteride, Lansoprazole (Omeprazole), Tamsulosin (Stronazon), Nembeterin (Cholisterin)
Swallowed three days in every fortnight: Odansetron, Dexamethason
Swallowed when required: Metoclopamide, Loperamide
Dripped in for two hours once a fortnight: Oxaliplatin and calcium folinate (folinic acid)
Pumped in for two days in every fortnight: Fluorourcil

(Curiously, there is very little main-lining involved and no sniffing up the nose, so I suppose I'm not considered a serious user.)

I shall be finished with some of these substances in August (I dread the cold turkey), but the rest I must continue with until I go to that great pharmacy in the sky. The cost of all this to the NHS must be enormous, perhaps equivalent to the maintenance of a medium-sized primary school or a battalion of the Coldstream Guards. But still, if I had become addicted to, say, crack cocaine, I might have taken up mugging or burglary which would have cost the taxpayer much more in the long run, so I don't feel too bad about it.

(I do not want OMF to lose its hard-won reputation for frivolous and trivial writing; it s widely respected as The Blog That Cannot be Trusted. The above list is perfectly accurate except for one drug I have included which does not yet exist. It will be used for the treatment of obstreosis of the ductal tract (tertiary), if someone invents it.)

Soldiers of the King, Part One

Warning: This post consists of personal reminiscences, and is therefore of no interest whatsoever to anyone except my family and close friends, and very little to them. Some names have been changed to protect the guilty, though the chances are that these are all dead.

Two years into a degree course I was asked to leave University College London, mainly because I was no good with Meccano. This meant that my deferment from National Service expired and I was invited to carry out two years of it. I didn't mind much because I hadn't been enjoying myself learning to be a Mechanical Engineer.

During basic training I applied to be sent on a WOSB (War Office Selection Board for Officer Cadet School). I wanted to be an officer, not from any inflated ideas about my leadership qualities but because I rather fancied myself in the hat, with, under my arm, the little stick they give you, presumably for striking recalcitrant private soldiers lightly on the face to enforce discipline. And anyway, I suspected that many junior officers are asses and that I would not have much difficulty in keeping up with them. I must have explained this rather badly, because the members of the board smiled gently and suggested that it might be better for everyone if I finished my training and then became a driver, or something.

In a fit of pique I volunteered to be sent abroad as soon as they had taught me to drive; I was not seeking adventure but merely thought that spending the rest of my two years military duties in some exotic spot might be more enjoyable than languishing in Aldershot. The choices were limited to Korea, where there was a war going on, and Egypt, where a General Neguib (Nasser's predecessor) was being disrespectful to us.

I chose Egypt and was quickly despatched to a Field Bakery unit at Ismailia on the Suez canal. There I shared a tent with five other conscripts. I had little in common with them but after initial suspicion they decided that I was harmless and they treated me with an amused contempt. Actually, we became good friends; I helped them with writing letters to their wives and girl friends and they treated me as a sort of mascot, calling me 'Perfessor'.

They were a colourful bunch of characters but only two stay in my memory: Paddy Reilly, who thought 'the murtherin' British' ought to leave Ireland forthwith, and Filthy MacDonald, whose speciality when dealing with men who did not share his opinions was 'gi'ing 'em the heid'. I taught him a bit about writing and he taught me a bit about how to use a shiv.

The unit was equipped with AEC Matadors, 10-ton diesel trucks used for pulling mobile ovens when we drove out into the desert and baked 50,000 loaves for practice, or at other times for carrying loads of dough-encrusted 'whites' down the canal road to the laundry. They rather optimistically let me drive one, but not for long; to change gear you had to put both hands on the gearstick, brace your foot against the dashboard and heave. I was no good at all at this sort of thing and was soon transferred to the company office as a clerk.

There I had nothing much to do; I practised calligraphy with my letters home and filled in the time with little jobs like making out a Certificate of Competence to Drive for myself and getting it signed; of course I had had a test after my driver training, but this was given by the man who had taught me, and he wasn't going to fail anybody, was he? So, quite reasonably, you had to get the army to confirm that you could drive in order to obtain a civilian driving license, and this I was happy to do for myself.

And so the days wore on. It wasn't a bad life really, though some found it so: some sad boy in a neighbouring unit couldn't stand it and one day ran amok with a sten gun, killing several of his fellow-conscripts. I heard that Albert Pierrepoint, then nearing retirement, was flown out to hang him, but I couldn't confirm that this was true.

I learned a few words of Arabic, none of which were of the slightest use to me in later years when I had to visit the Middle East frequently. There were also songs which we sang in raucous chorus: some of these were slanders on the private life of the Egyptian royals at the time, King Farouk and Queen Farida, while others were sentimental ballads with such refrains as You're My Little Gyppo Bint, You're Kuwayyis Ketir. These were mere fantasies, for penned up in our camps we never encountered any local beauties, and for most of us romance of any kind was just a dream: at that time there were 30,000 British troops in the Suez Canal Zone, so the few dozen NAAFI girls also serving there were not short of offers of one kind or another.

[Continued HERE. The next instalment will include what the brigadier said to his children and how my mother made the CO look a complete prat, which he was.]

 

Cheerio everybody!

No 31 in an occasional series of extracts from The Postcard Century

July 1927:  Dear Nellie, writes Ada to her friend, also in Tunbridge Wells. Congratulations on you reaching the age of discretion. Now you are able to think for yourself. 
The good-time Prince of Wales has a smoke, or perhaps (for once) not, since the cigarette looks to be added. What then was airbrushed in would now be airbrushed out.

Angel hair football coach?

Much has been written recently about one Fabio Capello, and some confusion has arisen about him, many people arguing that he is a kind of pasta and others saying that he is connected in some way with football or some such game.

For an authoritative answer to this question we can turn to that veritable vade mecum of sporting lore, Alan Davidson's Companion to Food, where Capello appears in the plural as:

Capelli d'angelo ('angel hair), capellini ('little hairs'), the thinnest form of the spaghetti family.

So that clears that up. While we are on the subject, let us note the names of a few other kinds of pasta which also have no connection with sport. Skipping those we all know like LASAGNE, MACARONI, VERMICELLI and so on, here are some of the less familiar (in England at any rate) ones:

BIGOLI, a thick spaghetti from Venice; BOMBOLETTI, a short cylindrical form with a smooth exterior; ELBO MACARONI, an American term for short, curved macaroni; LUMACHE, like snail shells; ORECCHIETTI, 'little ears'; SIDANI, a S. Italian sort of macaroni ridged like celery; ZITE/ZITI, a tubular pasta from Naples.

Davidson describes thirty-eight types of pasta. It is easy to see why it is said that 'Surface-to-volume ratio is important; marrying a particular form of pasta to a particular kind of sauce is an art instinctively acquired by Italians from an early age but needing to be learned by others'.

A cooler London

Londoners cursing the heat may like to be reminded what London has been like from time to time in earlier years: "In its long history the river Thames has been frozen solid forty times", wrote Helen Humphreys as introduction to her book containing forty vignettes based on events that actually took place each time the river froze between 1492 and 1895. Here is part of one of them:

1684
An entire village has been built upon the ice. Booths have been made from blankets and the oars of the watermen. The main thoroughfare between the booths has been named Freezland Street. There are coffee houses and taverns, booths that sell slices of roast beef. An ox has been roasted whole and a printing press has been set up so that one can have one's name printed in this place where men so oft were drowned. The Frost Fair is visited by a royal party that includes Charles II in what will be the last week of his life.

The watermen trade their boats for sledges and pull people across the river for the same price as when they had rowed them over. A whirly sledge twirls passengers around a stake set in the ice, Coaches are pulled by both horses and men. There are games of football and bowls, horse and donkey races. There is music and a large bear garden. A fox is hunted on the ice and a bull is staked out in a ring by the Temple Stairs. Dogs are tossed in to bait the bull and many are gored to death before the beast is brought down. Men have skates to slide over the river, and horses have have their hooves wrapped in linen to prevent this very same thing. Three cannons are brought out upon the ice to commemorate the royal visit, and boats are sent over the frozen Thames with their sails set and wheels fastened to their hulls to keep them upright.

What is remarkable about about the Frost Fair is that it does not operate by the same rules that govern life on land. It is a phenomenon and therefore free of the laws and practices of history. The poor and rich alike inhabit the same space, participate in the same sports and diversions, and are, for a very brief moment in time, equal citizens of a new and magical world.


Bull and bear baiting aside, all that sounds like a lot of fun, certainly better than sweaty old London as it is this week,

Hi-de-hi-de-hi! Ho-de-ho-de-ho!

The other day I watched The Blues Brothers, the best musical comedy of all time; among the cast were Ray Charles, John Belushi, Aretha Franklin, Twiggy and Cab Calloway. Although I had seen the film before, I had forgotten that Calloway was in it and when I wrote an autobiographical note which mentioned him I had recorded my connection with the great man but not referred to the film. The connection was a tenuous one, being simply that I was born on the day he published Minnie the Moocher.

Forty-nine years later there he was in The Blues Brothers, still singing it with undiminished verve. He died in 1994 at the age of 86.

Meredith!

Is Cameroon a mightier nation than Denmark? Can a graceless Scotsman beat a Frenchman called Jo-Wilfried Tsonga?

All those of us with little interest in such matters have had a hard time over the last few weeks; television has been pandering to the national addiction to a couple of sports so that these and many other similar questions have been exercising the minds, if that is the right word, of the addicted.

But there has been one consolation: it has been worthwhile to switch the TV on from time to time if only to catch one or two of a series of commercials currently appearing on TV3 which are impeccably written, casted, acted and directed. The fact that it is doubtful if I shall ever be seduced by them and buy the product is irrelevant: they have given me enormous pleasure.

They are for Birds Eye frozen meals, products of a company founded by Clarence Birdseye; the first retail sale of his frozen foods occurred on March 6, 1930, in Springfield, Massachusetts.

The principle of these little gems is quite simple: you are shown a scene of violence or romance and it is then revealed that one of the participants is uninterested in the action and is giving total attention to a frozen dinner, presumably thawed and cooked . For example, a line of riot police rattle their shields while the rioters attack them; then the camera pans to show that one of them, absolutely calm, is enjoying his meal. In another, two men crouch behind a car which is being struck by a hail of bullets; one of them is ducking and flinching but tucking in with gusto.

My favourite has a man in period costume entering through French windows with a girl over his shoulder; he looks behind him and gives an anguished cry of "Meredith!". Then he exits right and as he turns we see that the girl clasping him round the neck has a plate of food in one hand and, quite expressionless, is wielding a fork with the other.

What is going on? Who is this Meredith person and why is he or she so urgently required? Now those are questions which really do exercise the mind.

Brilliant!