We don’t do symptoms

I had this itch in my ear, you see. Not really life-threatening but annoying and perhaps a bit worrying. Had an ear-wig burrowed inside, as earwigs are alleged to do, and laid eggs which, when hatched, would come marching out in serried ranks in the middle of the night as fully-grown forficula auricularia*? Even learning, on looking up the things in Wikipedia, that “Interestingly, the male of the species has two identical, fully-functional and independently-operable penises” did not reconcile me to the prospect, and anyway I didn’t think the information was all that interesting, except perhaps to female earwigs.

So I resolved to get help. Some internet sources identified the problem as swimmer’s ear, and the American Academy of Family Physicians went into much detail, recommending a 2% solution of acetic acid; as I had never done any swimming, and didn’t much like the idea of filling my ear up with vinegar, I felt I should look elsewhere for advice, and sent an email to NHS Direct.

I suppose this service seemed like a good idea at the time it was set up, saving busy doctors from having to listen to trivial complaints by providing medical advice on the telephone or through a website, but it seems unlikely to be serving much purpose. I have never heard of anyone who has found it useful, and my own experience of it was not gratifying: I simply said that my hearing was OK and that I had no earache and asked “..so why does my ear itch?”, and got back a standard letter saying, in effect, “This is not the sort of question we can deal with”.

This seemed remarkably feeble of them, as in their blurb they invite you to “…Get an assessment of what your current symptoms may be the cause of..**”. I suppose, with over two million enquiries a month, they simply cannot give specific advice to many; one imagines a call centre where hundreds of teenagers sit at consoles with a array of buttons to press from which they can choose a standard pre-recorded message or an email (in any one of the twelve languages they say they use), like the one I had, or others saying Don’t worry, it’ll get better on its own, or Call an ambulance NOW, or Don’t scratch it, leave it ALONE, or even just Dear Sir, You have the pox, Yours faithfully.

In my case they could have said Sounds like a minor infection, see your GP and he will prescribe something which will cure it in a trice. Anyway, I did, he did, and it did.

But of course this would have meant a bit of typing; easier to press the button to send the We don’t want to know email.

All this has reminded me of a very old Jewish joke, but I’ll keep that for another time.


* forficulae auriculariae?
** “Get an assessment of what your current symptoms may be the cause of...” This is disgracefully careless writing: symptoms don’t cause anything: they meant to say “..may be caused by”.

Celebrity Cool

It takes a really big star to stay completely calm when they photograph you just after you’ve vomited.

Splendour in Uganda

Thousands lined the road from Entebbe airport last Wednesday to welcome this hat to Kampala.

Opinion was divided as to whether it was more impressive than its sister, a lime-green job which made a big hit when it visited the Ugandan parliament later the same day.

However, according to the official parliament website, this was the one which had arrived outside the parliament building. If this was so, there must have been a lightning change in the lobby, but my guess is that this an attempt to cover up the fact that they couldn’t get a good close-up of the green one.

It has been said that the first two above were inspired, as were many of the Queen’s hats, by the pièces montées of the great chef pâtissier Antonin Carême (1783-1833). These were monumental confections, several feet high, made from sugar, nougat, marzipan and pastry for the crowned heads of Europe. They were rarely eaten and never worn; you can see why, if you believe Wikipedia's note on Carême: Utilizing his previous architectural knowledge coupled with culinary genius, some of his sugar works were so elaborate that court jesters would dance upon them while entertaining the king.

Lovely with buttered toast

Here are twelve things, ten of which are considered edible, though obviously not by everyone:

Fried cockchafers
Sonofabitch stew
Icelandic moss porridge
Cajun wild toad
Prairie dog
Crunchy sand-bugs with honey
Pandowdy
Stuffed baboon’s nostril
Apple slump
Yuk-sik
Rendang
Wart-necked piddock

Ten of them are in the Oxford Companion to Food (you'll have to buy it: it's not online). The other two are merely creations of a diseased mind; see if you can decide which before you look at further details.

Two Trinities, and a note on Jesus

Carmarthen, Dublin, Hartford, London, Melbourne, Toronto and many other towns and cities have a Trinity College, with varying degrees of distinction. Most people would agree on which are the two most highly distinguished and prestigious, but there is no such consensus about which of the two has the edge. Cambridge’s (Henry VIII, 1546) is larger and older than Oxford’s (Thomas Pope, 1555), though neither of these attributes necessarily confers distinction or prestige; antiquity certainly doesn’t—think of professions.

Since neither I nor any member of my family went to either, there is no reason why anyone would ask for my view, but if someone did I think I would choose Trinity College Cambridge, if only because of Crème Brûlée.

This is the French term for a rich baked custard made with cream (their language is utterly useless for naming food—there is no French word for custard, imagine!). In English, the dish is called Burnt Cream.

It is also sometimes known as Trinity Cream because at Trinity Cambridge they used to impress the college crest on top of the cream with a branding iron. I call that stylish.

In the case of the two top Jesuses it also looks as if Cambridge has it. Their Jesus is not only the older (the Bishop of Ely, 1496; Oxford, Elizabeth, 1571), but has a splendidly resounding full name: "The College of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Saint John the Evangelist and the glorious Virgin Saint Radegund, near Cambridge".

However, your typical Oxford Jesusman is totally unimpressed by this. Asked whether he went to Jesus, Oxford or Jesus, Cambridge, he would almost certainly reply: “Jesus”.

Good letters bring success

Most people are aware that if your surname begins with a letter in the first half of the alphabet then you have a better chance in life, simply because having your name crop up near the top of written lists, or having it called out before others, must in some circumstances confer an advantage.

I had not realised before that there is something called the Name Letter Effect (NLE) which is said to work in other, subtler, ways, and involves not merely your surname but your monogram—all your initials. Martin Gardiner in Really Magazine quotes from and gives links to several pieces of research on this phenomenon.

The most recent of them resulted in a paper published in this month’s edition of the journal Psychological Science by Leif D. Nelson of the University of California and Joseph P. Simmons of the Yale School of Management , which they childishly titled Moniker Maladies: When Names Sabotage Success. It found that “law students with initials which represented poor grades in exam results did less well than their colleagues whose initials included As and Bs” and generally “people perform worse when their initials match objectively undesirable performance outcomes”.

I was tempted to download a copy of the research but a glance at the Abstract warned me that it is unlikely be a thumping good read:
People like their names enough to unconsciously approach consciously-avoided name-resembling outcomes. Baseball players avoid strikeouts, but players with strikeout-signifying K-initials strike out more than others. All students want A's, but C- and D-initialed students find initial-resembling outcomes less aversive and achieve lower GPAs, particularly if they like their initials. Because lower GPAs lead to lesser graduate schools, C- and D-initialed students go to lower ranked law schools than their A- and B-initialed counterparts .… These findings provide striking evidence that unconscious wants can insidiously undermine conscious pursuits.

Back in 2005, the Journal of Psychosomatic Medicine had a paper entitled Monogrammic Determinism? describing research in which students had to categorise some initials according to unpleasantness. Unsurprisingly, they rated initials such as P.I.G. and Z.I.T. as severely negative. Next, the researchers correlated the unfortunate initials with death records from the California Department of Health Services mortality database stretching back to 1905.
So did having an undesirable set of initials mean that you might D.I.E. earlier? No, it didn’t, so let’s move on.

The concept goes back much further. In 1984 Joszf M Nuttin, the founder of the Laboratorium voor Experimentele Sociale Psychologie, in Belgium, reported on NLE to the General Meeting of the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology. Here again, I cannot comment, because a glance at the Abstract made me decide that Narcissism beyond Gestalt and awareness: The name letter effect was not something I wanted to spend a long weekend with:
Mere belongingness to self is tested as a sufficient condition for the enhancement of the attractiveness of visual letter stimuli….The effect is obtained in the absence of awareness of the Gestalt of any name, thus challenging current understanding of fundamental affective processes.

So there you have it, or possibly don’t. Why was I interested in these enquiries into trivial and probably rather pointless matters, you may ask? Well, because they illustrate the point that sociological research, whatever degree of correlation is found in two sets of data, is never more than generalisation, and tells you nothing about a specific case. My initials, you see, are AAB: I have yet to make my first million, my academic achievement consisted of failing the same degree twice, and my sporting career began when I was ten with the discovery that rugger is a very rough game indeed and that cricket is played with a very hard ball, and went downhill from there.

Here it is again

If you put "Origami Bank" into Google, you will be offered 2,200 versions of the piece below, some of them dating back many months. I couldn’t be bothered to look through them all to see where it originated; it was passed to me by a renegade Englishman currently hiding in Spain.

After all the stress of being tricked about those green Belgian marchers earlier this week I was not inclined to overtire myself today by trying to think of something original to post, and anyway true originality is out of place in Other Men's Flowers, so here is the 2,201st appearance of the joke on the internet. Maybe there is someone out there who hasn’t seen it.

We all know that the knock-on effect of the US sub prime banking problems has stretched far afield; it is now devastating the banking industry in Japan.
In the last seven days the Origami Bank has folded, Sumo Bank has gone belly-up and Bonsai Bank is planning to cut many of its branches. Only yesterday Karaoke Bank was put up for sale and will probably go for a song.
Today shares in the Kamikaze Bank were suspended after they nose-dived, while investors at the Anime Bank were left wide-eyed. Analysts report that there is something fishy going on at the Sushi Bank and staff there fear that they may be in for a raw deal, after hearing that 500 clerks at the Karate Bank got the chop.

At the pictures

The modern multiplex adds nothing to the experience of going to see a film. A whiff of popcorn and the sight of a garish display of nasty snacks and sweets is followed by what seems like hours of ads and trailers until finally, in an uncomfortable seat, we get to the object of the visit.

So it was a huge joy to find something quite different. In a very small town called Hawkhurst, twenty miles from where I live, there is a building that looks from outside like an old school, and only some very discreet signs tell you that inside is Kino, the UK’s first entirely digital cinema. To be told that “its state-of-the art technology features a Christie 2K projector and a Dynaudio sound system” and that its “digital content is supplied by the world's first digital networks, the UKFC's DSN [digital screen network] and Brazil's Rain Network” means nothing to me. Brazil?

Digital-shmigital; but what did mean a great deal to me is that after a glass of red wine in the cinema café we watched the film, and nothing but the film, in extraordinarily comfortable seats. And digital programming means that they can have a sort of repertory, showing up to six different films every day, which include the latest movie releases, Hollywood classics and art-house classics. This means that virtually every week something I want to see will be showing several times, on different days at different hours.

There is a second Kino in another small town, Sevenoaks, not far away. Digital cinemas are rapidly spreading in the US, and the UK is home to Europe's first fully digital multiplex cinemas: a couple of digital Odeons opened last February with a total of 18 digital screens. But I bet they’re not nearly as nice as the two little single-screen ones we’ve got in rural Kent.

Suspicion and deceit

A couple of days ago I posted a picture of part of a parade in Brussels featuring some marchers wearing splendid green furry costumes. As I had found this, uncaptioned, on the cover of a tourist brochure, I had no idea who they were or what they were representing: The Gnomes of Flanders, perhaps? Die Grünen? The Brussels Lettuce Growers Association? I was certain that someone living in Brussels would write in and tell me.

Sure enough, within a few hours several comments had appeared on the blog, including one in French and one in Dutch. Both of these informed me that the parade was in fact part of the 2007 21ème Festival Gay et Lesbien de Belgique. The Frenchman not only gave me the website but said that his sister Éloise was on the left in the photo.

Well, fine. And yet…

I am ever mindful of Thomas Paine’s dictum: Suspicion is the companion of mean souls, and the bane of all good society. So I stifled my doubts and engaged this helpful pair in an exchange of comments. Finally, though, the doubts increased and I emailed a polyglot friend who writes under the name of Grumio. He is an unashamed blackguard and, on being pressed, freely admitted that he had written the comments, and that the G&L people of Brussels, had never, as far as he knew, marched in green fur.

By then I really wanted to know what it was all about, and asked a friend in Brussels for her help. She didn’t know the answer but referred me to a website which posts answers to questions about Belgium.

Bingo! Two anonymous people replied to my query with the totally convincing suggestion that "this could well be a group taking part in the Zinneke Parade (which takes place every two years). The theme changes on each occasion, and this sounds like the ecological theme from a couple of years ago".

That seems extremely likely. Anyway, I am going to accept it as the truth and make no more enquiries, suppressing the thoughts that anyone can send in answers to that website, the comments on it were anonymous, and Grumio is a persistent spoofer with time on his hands…

Is that water-cannon trained on us?

I find all spectacular hats fascinating, but en masse they can be terrifying. I have no idea where these ladies were off to, or what they were advertising, or demanding; all I know is that they were in Brussels.

Perhaps they were just out to enjoy themselves, though it doesn't look much like it. Anyway, they were tremendously green, which must be a good thing, so let us hope they had a fun day, or a successful outcome, or whatever it was they were after.

Or take precautions while you're waiting

This notice in my local hospital might have been less likely to be misunderstood if the last three words had come immediately after "radiographer".

More hat fetishism

This post, the twenty-sixth in the series, features the Seppelhut, traditionally worn at the Oktoberfest, the Bavarian beer festival; this is claimed to be the largest fair in the world, attended by six million people each year. Some years ago I was one of them (by mischance, having gone to Munich for quite another reason) and can confirm that wearing this hat makes the most handsome and distinguished Münchner (or, indeed, anyone else), look a complete idiot.

I can also state authoritatively that the festival is not a fun event for those who don’t much care for beer and dislike crowds. I do not know why nobody in this picture is wearing a silly hat.
(Click on it to appreciate the full beauty of the scene)

[My thanks to Crowbark for bringing the Seppelhut to my attention.]

The shape of evil

In my last post I wrote that I could not really see the connection between the Whore of Babylon and Hudson Bay (which the French, in that sly way they have, call baie d'Hudson). Several readers emailed me with comments on this, none of them, sadly, on behalf of the Cree and Inuit people who make up most of the population of the coastal villages of this 1.23 million square kilometres of very cold water. Most of these correspondents told me that a quick glance at the map should have made it perfectly clear to me that the shape of this closely resembles that of the allegorical figure of pure evil, though one pointed out that the issue is clouded somewhat by the assertion made by some that the Whore of Babylon is in fact the Roman Catholic Church, which by no stretch of the imagination could be called Hudson-Bay-shaped.

Well, maybe. Anyway, there seems to be no agreement as to what shape the W of B actually was. Put Whore of Babylon into Google Images and you are offered over fifty thousand pictures, many of them, frankly, of an indelicate nature, and none looking remotely like any part of Canada. So over to Wikipedia, which has this one; it is a charming German woodcut showing her doing a bit of juggling before an appreciative audience, but it doesn't really get us any further forward:

(Great Britain undoubtedly has the shape of an old woman riding on a pig, but that is quite another matter and has nothing whatsoever to do with the Book of Revelation. Don't know why I mentioned it, really.)

Forty-one shopping days to go

On Christmas Day this year the volcanic island of La Palma will erupt and the unstable part will fall into the sea, resulting in a mega-tsunami that will devastate the east coast of America, if the word of God is anything to go by. Or, rather, the word of Alasdair T R Laurie, who is, or was, a promising second-year PhD student at the University of Leeds in the UK. He did not finish the course after becoming a fundamentalist Christian.

All this is set out in his website, called unequivocally WorldEnds. Many will find some of his evidence difficult to follow; it is not easy, for example to see just how the date was first predicted by showing that the 666th name in the Bible is Solomon, the number of the beast, and I myself am totally confused by Laurie’s reference to the whore of Babylon being outlined by Hudson Bay (Canada), riding on the scarlet beast (Labrador). He does provide a map but this doesn’t really help much.

But while one may be unable to comprehend the main thrust of his argument, one must admire the way in which he presents it. Unlike many American fundamentalists, he has an excellent command of English: the syntax and grammar of his prose is quite sound, and his spelling is impeccable. If his reasoning is difficult to grasp, this is only because these are complex matters which would tax the exegetical skill of the keenest mind, even that of a bioinformatics PhD student who had actually completed the course.

Another point in Mr Laurie’s favour is that he has taken the trouble to pass on this particular warning to residents of the east coast of America, although the catastrophe lined up for December 25th will presumably affect the whole world, including Leeds. It seems that the tsunami which hit the Solomon Islands on April 1st this year did actually ‘herald an end to the capitalist ideology that is in opposition to following Jesus’, and ‘God is in support of this line of argument, but is giving extra warning to the Americans’. This is a clear rebuke to those who have ever doubted that the USA has a very special place in the affections of the Almighty.

Christmas in Maine, 2007
(actually, a microphotograph of organic crystals
by John Cheslik, entitled "Apocalypse")

When galaxies collide...

…this is the sort of thing you see through the Hubble telescope. At least, it would be if you were orbiting the earth and the Hubble telescope was for looking through and not for taking pictures.

This beautiful colliding pair is called Arp 87 and is 300 million light years away in the constellation of Leo. Phil Plait tells you about it in Bad Astronomy, which in this instance is an inappropriately named website.

The maligned Sir Granville Bantock

Here is an extract from a splendidly tumid piece of writing:

Sir Granville Bantock probably has the unenviable distinction—with less than a handful of other arguable challengers—of being the most unreasonably neglected composer in the whole pitiable chronicle of neglected 20th century British music. He is truly the supreme musical Ichabod of our Isles and the almost complete disappearance of his works from the repertoire of his country is one of the strangest and perhaps saddest musical biographies of recent times. The winds of cultural opinatry and the gravities of critical mythologising have condemned him to a limbo of fabled ingloriousness and he is left as nothing much more than a fleeting footnote in the histories of British music: his foibles and idiosyncrasies have been exaggerated and his gifts minimised, misjudged, and precondemned; characteristic idioms glibly recast into mannerisms, influences reduced to imitation, and critical marginalisation all too easily transfigured into musical fault in the shallow doctrines of accepted musical historiography.

Supreme musical Ichabod in a limbo of fabled ingloriousness, eh? This is fighting talk from a brief introduction to the neglected composer’s life and works (actually a ten thousand word essay) by Vincent Budd, a noble attempt, almost certainly doomed, to rescue the reputation of Bantock from the ‘unfounded, beggarly, and ignominious inscriptions cast upon his name down the years’.

One cannot but admire the author’s conviction and the vigour with which he expresses it, but ‘the winds of cultural opinatry and the gravities of critical mythologizing’ have clearly had a strongly deleterious influence upon me, for although I am deeply impressed by the flow of his prose I am not convinced by his argument. To be fair, I suppose I might be more open to the view that Bantock’s music has ‘enduring and commanding glory’ and that it ‘stands by itself majestic, mighty, and magnificent for all to hear’ if I had actually heard any of it.

However, he was clearly a remarkable man, and one cannot read about his life without feeling some affection for him. Here is a photo of the dear old fellow just about to audition as an extra for Lawrence of Arabia (presumably not the David Lean film, as Bantock died in 1946); whether he got the job is not recorded).

Although ‘there were palpable streaks of malevolence and moral ambivalence in his character… some of his behaviour had deeply unhappy consequences for those closest to him… and he had one known extra-marital liaison… which had a profound effect on his wife and children, all of whom obviously loved and cherished him deeply’, perhaps we should not judge him too harshly, and his biographer may be right in saying resoundingly that ‘his neglect owes little to the intrinsic quality of his work, and much more to do with the unluck or misjudgements associated with the blinding mythic tyrannies of taste and fashion… his music should be freed from the stale blinkeredness of our cultural treadmills; his weathered laurels discarded and replaced with a new sweeter smelling wreath’.

True or not, that’s a nice bit of purple prose.

Homeopathy and other snake oil

Every sensible person keeps paracetamol tablets in the house to relieve pain, and adhesive plasters in case of injury. It is also a good plan to have always to hand something to counteract the effects of finding material on the internet which offends one’s regard for the truth, feeling for justice or merely one’s common sense.

Happily, many such antidotes are freely available and take the form of websites expressing sane and considered points of view based on evidence and not superstition or bigotry. There is, for example, RationalWiki, which discusses crackpot ideas in general and the beliefs of the American religious right in particular; an example of its style is its note on Faith Healers. For a corrective to anti-science, there is Sense About Science, which is an independent charitable trust responding to the misrepresentation of science and scientific evidence on issues that matter to society, and Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science with a similar aim.

There is also Bad Astronomy, which is currently dealing briskly with:
"Asteroid 1999 AN10 is predicted to come close to Earth in 2027 and 2039. NASA doesn’t think that it will hit. However there is evidence that it will—from the Bible."

Naturally there are many sites devoted to medicine and health, for this is the field in which more greedy charlatans flourish than any other. To cure the depression engendered by encountering pernicious rubbish about miracle cures, you can turn to Quackwatch or Quackometer which are an assurance that the snake-oil salesmen do not have it all their own way.

Then there is Homeowatch, which notes that
“Homeopathic 'remedies' are usually harmless, but their associated misbeliefs are not. When people are healthy, it may not matter what they believe. But when serious illness strikes, false beliefs can lead to disaster. This website provides information about homeopathy that is difficult or impossible to find elsewhere. The bottom line is that it is senseless and does not work.”

An illustration of the value of such sites in counteracting the outpouring of quackery was provided when Dr Andy Lewis put on his Quackometer website an article criticising the Society of Homeopaths (Europe ’s largest professional organisation of homeopaths) in no uncertain terms. The SoH did not attempt to challenge his assertions, but sent a threatening legal letter to his hosting company Netcetera, demanding they take his page down. Dr Lewis emailed the SoH politely asking which of his comments they wished to counter. There was no response but instead their lawyers sent another angry letter to his hosting company, who finally took the page down.

Of course, it has now been replicated a hundred times across the internet, on blogs or websites which have a total readership many times greater than that of the original article. You can read it here and Dr Lewis’s polite email is here.

[News items beginning ‘Scientists have discovered that…’ or an assertion that the efficacy of a product has been ‘scientifically proven’ should be regarded with scepticism (or by Americans with skepticism) until the relevant research has been published and peer-reviewed as described here.]

It’s the oil, stupid

The received opinion is that, for America, Iraq is ‘unwinnable’, a ‘quagmire’, a ‘fiasco’. An article in the London Review of Books by Jim Holt (the New York Times writer, not the Arkansas politician) suggests that, on the contrary, it is none of these things, and that the US may be ‘stuck’ precisely where Bush and Cheney want it to be.

Holt argues this convincingly, though he tacitly admits that this is in a sense a conspiracy theory which, like all such theories, calls for a level of foresight, cunning and general brilliance which the conspirators are unlikely to possess. You can judge the validity of his theory by reading the article, but he does quote a number of incontrovertible facts which tend to support him. Among these are:

• Iraq’s known oil reserves are five times the total in the United States.
  
• If current estimates are correct, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources, with a value of $30 trillion at today’s prices.
  
• The projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.
  
• The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi Congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western countries.
  
• The US can maintain hegemony over Iraqi oil by establishing permanent military bases in Iraq; five self-sufficient ‘super-bases’ are in various stages of completion; their main day-to-day function will be to protect the oil infrastructure.
  
• The beneficiaries of the continued occupation of Iraq and the exploitation of its oil will be: oil-services companies like Halliburton; US voters, who will be guaranteed price stability at the gas pump; and Europe and Japan, which will both benefit from Western control of such a large part of the world’s oil reserves.

Holt ends: “The occupation may seem horribly botched on the face of it, but the Bush administration’s cavalier attitude towards ‘nation-building’ has all but ensured that Iraq will end up as an American protectorate for the next few decades – a necessary condition for the extraction of its oil wealth. If the US had managed to create a strong, democratic government in an Iraq effectively secured by its own army and police force, and had then departed, what would have stopped that government from taking control of its own oil, like every other regime in the Middle East? On the assumption that the Bush-Cheney strategy is oil-centred, the tactics – dissolving the army, de-Baathification, a final ‘surge’ that has hastened internal migration – could scarcely have been more effective. The costs – a few billion dollars a month plus a few dozen American fatalities (a figure which will probably diminish, and which is in any case comparable to the number of US motorcyclists killed because of repealed helmet laws) – are negligible compared to $30 trillion in oil wealth, assured American geopolitical supremacy and cheap gas for voters. In terms of realpolitik, the invasion of Iraq is not a fiasco; it is a resounding success.”

[These are depressing facts, but Bird and Fortune had a lot of fun with them in a sketch they did in Rory Bremner's programme on Channel 4 just after after I posted the above.]

In the bleak midwinter

So farewell then, Alan Coren, the funniest and most stylish of columnists. It was a surprise to learn that he was so prudish that he would not have as dinner guests any couple who were living together but not married, but this was reported some years ago and he may have mellowed later.

We shall miss him, but happily his short pieces have been comprehensively anthologised; they do not date and the collections will be readable for years to come.

Here he is in Bethlehem, in the year BC (and AD) 0. The star has arrived overhead and the ox and the ass have been arguing about which of them is to be the Messiah, when a ram turns up:

‘Anyone seen three wise sheep?’
“What?” snapped the ass.
‘Three wise sheep,’ repeated the ram, ‘They’re due here any minute now, bearing gifts.’
‘Gifts?’ lowed the ox.
‘Yes,' said the ram, confidently. ‘It is traditional, I gather. Three wise sheep come from the East, bearing gifts for the Messiah. Grass, grass and grass, as I understand it.’
‘Messiah?’ croaked the ass, ‘What Messiah?.’
‘You’re looking at him’, said the ram. ‘Or rather, Him. It is customary at this point to fall down and praise my name, but as my three wise sheep are still en route we might as well hang on till they get here and I can do you all at the same time. Makes sense.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said the ass, ‘The star is hanging bang over the stable, the Messiah is either me or the ox, there are no sheep on these premises, you are well out of order!’
The ram tutted, as only rams can.
‘Never mind hanging over the stable’, it said sharply, ‘we have had an angel up our field, sunshine, there is no question but that I have been singled out, it is all over bar the paperwork’.
‘Hail the King of the Ewes!’ cried an invisible chorus.
‘See?’ said the ram.
The ass and the ox peered out into the night.
‘Stone me!’ cried the ox. ‘Who are they?’
‘Ewes,’ replied the ram. ‘My followers. You got to have followers, if you’re a Messiah. It is doubtless why He chose a sheep. It is one of the main things sheep do, follow’.
There was a long uneasy silence. Finally, the ass said:
‘What did this angel say, exactly?’
‘Hard to tell, replied the ram. ‘There’s the hell of a wind up there and I got all this wool in my ears, but the gist was unto us a something something and follow the star, and then He give me this Look’.
The ox shrugged.
‘Well, that’s it, then,’ it said, ‘Can’t say I’m sorry, it’s a big responsibility redeeming mankind, never mind not liking ‘em much to start with, if they’re not eating you they’re turning you into bloody suitcases.’
‘Good point,’ said the ram, nodding. ‘One of the first things on my agenda will be the commandment Love Thy Sheep. You’ve no idea what it’s like, having them shears running over you, I go all funny just thinking about it. My millennium will spell the end of the pullover, as we know it, and not before time. Also collies. I am not having the disciples rounded up and put in pens just so’s some nerd in moleskin trousers can go home with a silver cup.’
The ass cleared its throat.
‘That could explain it,’ it said.
‘What could explain what?’ enquired the ram.
‘The non-arrival of your three wise sheep. You got to go through Turkey, if you’re coming from the East. They are probably a gross of shish kebabs by now’.
‘Careful, son,’ said the ram. ‘When they get here with the documents, I shall be able to do miracles, e.g. turning donkeys into frogs.’
‘Possibly, possibly’, said the ass. ‘However, I remain to be convinced that the Almighty would entrust the salvation of mankind to something on which mankind has been putting mint sauce all these years.’
The ram narrowed its eyes.
‘Listen,’ it said. ‘it may interest….’

But at this point there is another arrival at the inn, and of course in the end all three creatures are disappointed.

The most beautiful spring of the love

[Skip this post if lieder are of no interest to you.]
The lovely Holywell Music Hall in Oxford, built in 1742, is said to be the oldest purpose-built music room in Europe, and hence England's first concert hall.

Grumio and I went there last week for a lunchtime lieder recital given by students from the Guildhall School of Music. The singing seemed to our untutored tastes to be rather good, and anyway just sitting in such a room for an hour is a pleasure not to be missed.

I know exactly what a leichenbegleiter* does, though I have no idea how I came by this piece of information and have never found it in any way useful. Nevertheless the knowledge probably does give me a slight edge over many lieder singers, but my understanding of German does not go much further than this and I depend on my Penguin Book of Lieder to tell me what Goethe or Heine is going on about. On this occasion, however, the crib let me down, for it did not include a song which was to be in the recital at Oxford and which I had heard before and rather liked without knowing what the words meant.

So before I went to Oxford I looked up the words (by Friedrich Rückert) on the net. Here they are:

O du Entrissne mir und meinem Kusse,
Sei mir gegrüsst, sei mir geküsst!
Erreichbar nur meinem Sehnsuchtgrusse,
Sei mir gegrüsst, sei mir geküsst!

Du von der Hand der Liebe diesem Herzen
Gegebne, Du von dieser Brust
Genommne mir! Mit diesem Tränengusse
Sei mir gegrüsst, sei mir geküsst.

Zum Trotz der Ferne, die sich feindlich trennend
Hat zwischen mich und dich gestellt;
Dem Neid der Schicksalmächte zum Verdrusse
Sei mir gegrüsst, sei mir geküsst!

Wie du mir je im schönsten Lenz der Liebe
Mit Gruss und Kuss entgegenkamst,
Mit meiner Seele glühendstem Ergusse,
Sei mir gegrüsst, sei mir geküsst!

Ein Hauch der Liebe tilget Raum und Zeiten,
Ich bin bei dir, du bist bei mir,
Ich halte dich in dieses Arms Umschlusse,
Sei mir gegrüsst, sei mir geküsst!

I could not find a translation anywhere except one in a website about a recital in Rio de Janeiro sponsored by the Gulbenkian Foundation, but this was into Portuguese so it didn’t really help me all that much.

Then a friend lent me The Book of Lieder, which has the original texts, an English singing version, and a translation of over a thousand lieder including the one I wanted. Finally, I realised that—as usual at recitals— translations of the text of the words were provided in the programme notes, so I needn’t have gone to all that bother.

But I’m glad that during my search I had asked Babel Fish to have a go at the poem, for the result was quite pleasing:

O you is greeted Entrissne me and my kiss
Is greeted me, is kissed me!
Attainable only my longing greeting
Is greeted me, is kissed me!

You of the hand of the love this heart
Gegebne, you of this chest
Genommne me! With this tear casting
Is greeted me, is kissed me.

To the defiance of the distance, hostilely separating
Between me and you placed;
The envy of fate powers to the annoyance
Is greeted me, is kissed me!

How you came to meet me ever in the most beautiful spring of the love
With greeting and kiss,
With my soul most glowing Ergusse
Was greeted me, was kissed me!

A breath of the love erase space and times,
I are with you, you are with me
I hold you in this arm Umschlusse
Is greeted me, is kissed me!

[*He is a funeral attendant, or what Babel Fish calls a corpse companion.]