Buy one immediately

This sounds ingenious. But what's it for, and how does it work?

Two pairs of first and second legs compromised of angular members having top portions and lower ends, said first and second legs connected at top portions of first and second legs at joints, wherein the joints further comprise pivots, and further comprising spacers located at the pivots, said spacers spacing the first and second legs a predetermined distance apart from one another…

For a fuller description and an illustration, you will have to go here.

[Thanks to Martin G]

Erethizon dorsatum

Good recipes for cooking and serving the Canadian porcupine are very hard to find, as of course are the creatures themselves if you live in south-east England, as I do.

If you can find one, they are in no way difficult to deal with: a website for (North American) hunters tells us that they “…can be easily killed with a club...” (just like baby seals!), and then you just “slit the belly area, thus avoiding the quills, and, naturally, remove the stomach”. Then you can make Marinated Porcupine Chops (6 chops, a quart of maple sap and 3 fingers of coltsfoot salt), or New England Broiled Porcupine Liver.

Enjoy! as they say over there.

But apparently the really good bit of a Canadian porcupine is the crackling which, according to an early manuscript reproduced by Leopoldt (1976), has a “sapid crispness far exceeding that of pork crackling”. The manuscript gives no recipe, but merely suggests sending it to table with plenty of rice and lemons cut in halves.

Best of all, you can wear the left-over bits.

Irregular Turkish cavalry commits atrocity

Last January I asked if anyone could tell me the source of a delightful poem which somehow has stuck in my mind for years. A kind reader posted a comment giving me a clue that it was contained in a book by Osbert Lancaster called Drayneflete Revealed. I suppose I must have read it in the fifties but anyway I got hold of a copy today and there was the poem.

The book is a parody of an antiquarian study of an imaginary English town and includes notes on some of its eminent residents over the centuries. One of these is a Miss Amelia de Vere, niece of famous (fictitious) poet Jeremy Tipple, and it is she who is supposed to have written the poem. I quote here all that is known of it, which is entitled Lines on the Late Massacre at Chios:

O hark to the groans of the wounded and dying,
A mother who takes a last lingering look
At her infant aloft, understandably crying,
Impaled on the spear of a Bashi Bazook

O see where the vultures are patiently wheeling
As the Scimitars flash and the yataghans thud
O innocent victims, vainly appealing
To dreaded Janissaries lusting for blood.

As Osbert Lancaster comments: “The two opening verses will serve to demonstrate both the fearless realism of the gentle poetess and her exceptional command of local colour, a command the more extraordinary in that she never, save for a brief visit to Tunbridge Wells, travelled more than ten miles from Draynefleet in all her life”.

I wonder if any modern poet leading a similarly quiet life could conjure up with such verve an evocative picture of a bloody 19th-century battle in the Levant.

[More about Drayneflete HERE]

Two Canadians

As Runyon might have put it, Conrad Black is not such a guy as I am wishing to give the large hallo to. However, it is difficult to ascribe to him the same level of infamy as, say Robert Maxwell, partly because our feelings for investors on the New York Stock Exchange cannot compare with those which we had for the Daily Mirror pensioners. And that ridiculous cardinal's get-up was a splendid effort: one cannot imagine Maxwell ever making himself look quite so silly for our amusement.

But anyone who doubts that Black richly deserves his sentence—or possibly a stiffer one—has only to assess his character by looking at the unsavoury bunch he used to hang out with, which apparently included Princess Pushy, Henry “Peace Prize” Kissinger and The Iron Lady. With friends like that, he must surely be the kind of man who should get at least twenty years in the slammer.

It is refreshing to turn our thoughts to another flamboyant Canadian magnate, though sad to learn that ‘Honest Ed’ Mirvish has died this week. He was 92, suggesting that his recipe for a long life—Keep breathing—worked better for him than it does for most people. The store in Toronto which made him a multimillionaire followed the policy expressed in the title of Jack Cohen’s autobiography: Pile it high and sell it cheap. Tesco later changed their approach, but Mirvish never did. He opened Honest Ed’s Famous Bargain House with the slogan: Our building is a dump! Our service is rotten! Our fixtures are orange crates! But!! Our prices are the lowest in town! Serve yourself and save a lot of money! and the store carried on that way.

Ed is one of the few Canadians ever involved in English public life who is remembered here with admiring affection. He saved the Old Vic from an uncertain future when, in 1982, to the delight of many, he outbid the unattractive Andrew Lloyd Webber for it; he then poured huge sums of his own money into it for fifteen years until he could no longer support the theatre’s losses, and sold it to a trust.

His death had already featured in an advertisement for the Toronto store: “When Ed dies, he would like a catered funeral with accordion players and a buffet table, with a replica of ‘Honest Ed’ on it made of potato salad”.

Let us hope his wishes will be carried out to the letter and that everyone has a good time. Such an occasion would put to shame all the lavish parties on which Conrad Black spent millions of other people’s money.

Ed got a CBE, but Conrad got a peerage.

How does it go, now?

It's profoundly irritating when you have a tune on the brain and can’t get rid of it, or when you know a tune well but don’t know what it is.

Even worse when you like a tune but can’t call it to mind when you want to. I have an excellent memory for tunes, a singularly useless attribute since I can’t sing much though I enjoy a good hum, but there is one which somehow won’t stick; sometimes it comes to me and I retain it for a while, and then it’s gone again and I have to ask people to remind me of it. Few can.

The tune is nice, though if you see Les Parapluies de Cherbourg it gets a bit wearing when it goes on and on. Now, God bless YouTube, I have realised that whenever I forget it I have only to click here and I can not only hear it but see a clip of the 21-year-old Catherine Deneuve as the 16-year-old Geneviève lip-synching ably to the voice of Danielle Licari, and there’s another here showing the poignant ending of this lovely sentimental operetta, with the umpteenth reprise of Michel Legrand’s tune.

A literary partnership, almost

I had not known, until I read it in a book review the other day, that Prosper Merimée once proposed marriage to Mary Shelley; she was presumably a Miss Wolstencroft at the time. Odd, because she eloped with Percy Bysshe in 1814, when she would have been 17 and Prosper only 11. Perhaps this was just a giggle between a couple of teenagers.

Anyway, it is interesting to speculate how, if the proposal had been accepted, it would have affected 19th century literature. Would they have discussed their work together and influenced each other so that Frankenstein would have made his experiments in Seville and Carmen would have worked in the Ingolstadt cigar factory?

Or would the marriage have been such a jolly one that neither of them would ever write anything? That would have been a pity.

Shakespeare knew grammar

I have been reading—or rather leafing through, for it has 850 pages and I am already behind with the week’s newspapers—a book by Clive James called Cultural Amnesia. It is a lament for the loss of learning and reason in the form of over a hundred essays arranged around celebrities, intellectuals, tyrants and writers. I had never heard of about two-thirds of these, which shows that even if I had actually read the book I would be quite unqualified to review it.

I used to enjoy James’s TV reviews but nowadays find him unlikeable, too clever by half and faux modest about his undeniable erudition (it seems he can no longer read Russian fairly fluently or get through a simple article in Japanese: lamentable!). While setting out to write something which the blurb asserts is ‘poetic in its language, magisterial in its scope and courageous in its defence of the human spirit’ he indulgently allows himself lengthy diversions on subjects that amuse him; there is a long piece about Richard Burton’s haircut in Where Eagles Dare, a page about how Joan Crawford replied to fan letters and why Greta Garbo never did. and a lot of stuff about Coco Chanel. In all these ramblings he clearly intends to make serious sociological points but that could have been done less obscurely without the gossip. No wonder the book took him nearly forty years to write.

And his literary judgement is often at fault; he believes that Evelyn Waugh was funnier than P. G. Wodehouse, an aberrant view surprising in a competent humorist such as James used to be.

Nevertheless there are nuggets to be relished. Here James kills the myth that ‘genius operates beyond donkey work’—that Einstein was no better at arithmetic than we are, that Mozart didn’t bother with the rules of composition, that Shakespeare didn’t care about grammar and that just because Picasso sailed through art school doesn’t mean that anybody can sail past it. On the contrary, he points out, Einstein could add up, Mozart would not have been able to break the rules in an interesting way unless he was able to keep them if required, and:

..Shakespeare, far from being careless about grammar, could depart from it in any direction only because he had first mastered it as a structure. Moreover, unless we ourselves know quite a lot about how grammar works, there will be severe limits on our ability to understand what he wrote, especially when he seems to be at his most untrammelled. Take a single line from Henry V:
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester.
Here is a whole story in eleven syllables, but unless we grasp how an extremely compressed sentence can be put together, we won’t get the story out; and if Shakespeare had not grasped it, he would not have been able to put the story in. Though they might look like it at first glance, “ill” and “white” are not a pair of adjectives. “Ill” is an adverb, modifying the verb “become”. If this is not realised, the meaning is reversed. If Shakespeare hadn’t realised the fundamental difference between an adjective and an adverb, he couldn’t have written the sentence. A good actor will help him make the point, by emphasizing “ill” so that its effect carries over to “become”. But it is quite easy to imagine a bad actor missing the point, and conveying the impression that ill white hairs make a fool and jester look good, or, even worse—two errors for one—allowing it to be thought that ill white hairs have turned into a fool and jester. This latter kind of misapprehension has become especially likely in recent times. There are now a whole generation who have never become required to understand the verb “become” in any other sense than the one for which I employed it in the preceding sentence: in a previous generation they might have heard a fragment of popular song (“Moonlight Becomes You”) and realised that there is another sense.

All that is a bit wordy but the observation is a salutary one. James hangs it on a peg provided by a quotation from the philologist and essayist Pedro Henriquez Ureña: Great art begins where grammar ends.

We need some new clichés

In most episodes of any UK soap, one line of dialogue will crop up whenever some dramatic event is unfolding and its purport is unclear: “Woss goin’ on?”, someone will certainly say.

And it's expected that people in British cop series will take the trouble to address the investigating officer by his rank: “Please sit down, Chief Superintendent”, or “Am I a suspect, Detective Inspector?”

Movie and TV clichés are a rich field, and Mark Gamon has a comprehensive list of them, including such favourites as:

All beds have special L-shaped cover sheets which reach up to the armpit level on a woman but only to waist level on the man lying beside her.

When paying for a taxi, don't look at your wallet as you take out a bill—just grab one at random and hand it over. It will always be the exact fare.

Television news bulletins usually contain a story that affects you personally at that precise moment.

Mark invites contributions to the list, particularly in such categories as British Movie Cliches, Auteur Movie Cliches, Broadway Movie Musical Cliches and Television Drama Cliches' (including the hitherto-unexplored category 'UK Soap Cliches').

Foaming pud

The first edition of the late Alan Davidson’s wonderful Oxford Encyclopaedia of Food (1999) is still available at a reduced price from Amazon and elsewhere so there is no real need yet to go for the second edition, though this has been scrupulously expanded by Tom Jaine. The first edition has this about syllabub (or sillabub):

… a sweet, frothy confection which was popular in Britain from the 16th to the 19th centuries, and has since been revived in a small way as a dessert.
The origin of the word ‘syllabub’ is a mystery. Lexicographers find no compelling reason to accept any of the explanations offered so far.

Originally syllabub was a drink with a foamy head, but the foamy part was the object of chief interest and later became the main element. It has often been said that the primitive method of making syllabub, ensuring a good foam, was to partly fill a jug with sweetened, spiced white wine or cider and to milk a cow directly into it. When this technique was critically examined and subjected to experiments by Vicky Williams in 1996, it was found to be unsatisfactory, and it began to seem doubtful whether it had ever been a common practice.

Ivan Day crowned the debate on this particular question by a technical and historical survey of the whole subject of syllabubs, now the locus classicus. He acknowledges at the end of his essay help received (presumably on the particular question of direct milking) from cow 53 at Thrimby Manor Farm, Cumbria, as well as the illumination provided by the numerous 17th- and 18th-century authors whose recipes he cites.

I am keeping for a later post some notes from the Oxford Encyclopaedia of Food on the cooking of Canadian porcupine crackling, a subject dealt with sketchily, if at all, in modern cookbooks.

My talks with the famous

There can be very few people who ever had, within a week, a meaningful conversation with the late Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington and another with the late Arthur Michael Ramsey, the one hundredth Archbishop of Canterbury.

l. to r.: Ellington, Ramsey

I am not among this fortunate band but while travelling in the Far East back in the sixties I very nearly was. This is how it happened, or rather how it didn’t happen:

Spotting Duke Ellington in the departure hall of Bangkok airport, I felt impelled to accost him and tell him how much I had always admired Mood Indigo. Then I realised that this would hardly be an adequate basis for a stimulating discussion, that in the middle of an exhausting tour he would not enjoy a chat with a total stranger who would have nothing of much interest to say to him, and that he was accompanied by some grumpy-looking heavies who looked unlikely to welcome me to the group. So, probably wisely, I resisted the impulse and we went our separate ways; I shall never know whether an exchange of views with the great man would have been fun or not

Then, a few days later, I was walking down a corridor in the Okura hotel in Tokyo when I saw coming towards me the Primate of All England, a genial-looking fellow, impressively be-gaitered and with a relaxed air, possibly having just completed a productive day at some ecumenical conference. We would pass each other just by the entrance to the bar; I was on my way there, but he was probably not (though you never know with archbishops), and it struck me that it would be a friendly and perhaps welcome gesture to say to my compatriot, “Would Your Grace care to join me for a quick one?”.

I suppose I imagined that over a gin-and-tonic for me and some suitably prelatic tipple for him I might recount an amusing incident I had witnessed in the Ginza the previous night and tell him what I was doing in Japan (selling dyestuffs, actually), while he would be happy to bring me up to date with all the latest gossip from Lambeth and maybe put my mind at rest about a few doctrinal issues which had long been bothering me.

But it was not to be; by the time all this had gone through my mind we were already passing each other; he gave me an affable nod and was gone. Running after him and grabbing him by the arm might have led to an unseemly scuffle, so I abandoned the idea, went into the bar and ate a whole dish of nuts with my lonely drink.

I did not realise until years later just what I had missed through my slow reaction. Ramsey was the last of the stylish As of C, though perhaps not quite in the same league as John Whitgift, who had the job from 1583 to 1604 and used to travel to Canterbury with a retinue of 800 horsemen; he was a real class act, unlike his modern-day successors. Ramsey clearly had a bit of charisma, but after him there was Coggan, said to be orderly and punctual but otherwise unremarkable, Runcie, who officiated at the marriage of Charles and Diana (despite suspecting privately that they were ill-suited and that their marriage would not last but not having the nerve to say so), then the fatuous Carey, who smarmed over Charles and Camilla and secretly demanded the release of Pinochet, and now under the mitre there is a little bearded Welsh fellow called Rowan Atkinson or something like that.

P.S. No wonder the Church of England is in terminal decline; the omens are not good. Future Archbishops of Canterbury will be selected from among its top bishops; the Daily Telegraph always finds space for their loopier pronouncements, and reported yesterday:

The floods that have devastated swathes of the country are God's judgment on the immorality and greed of modern society, according to senior Church of England bishops. One diocesan bishop has even claimed that laws that have undermined marriage, including the introduction of pro-gay legislation, have provoked God to act by sending the storms that have left thousands of people homeless.
The Rt Rev Graham Dow, Bishop of Carlisle, argued that "…We are reaping the consequences of our moral degradation… The sexual orientation regulations are part of a general scene of permissiveness. We are in a situation where we are liable for God's judgment, which is intended to call us to repentance."

[It is not known whether these views are also held by Carlisle City Council's Chaplain, but it seems likely that they are: he is called Canon Pratt.]

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Ten easy steps to dictatorship

Naomi Wolf identifies the steps any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms, and argues that George Bush and what is left of his administration seem to be taking them all, using time-tested tactics to close down an open society:

1 Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
2 Create a gulag
3 Develop a thug caste
4 Set up an internal surveillance system
5 Harass citizens’ groups
6 Engage in arbitrary detention and release
7 Target key individuals
8 Control the press
9 Dissent equals treason
10 Suspend the rule of law

No reason for us to feel smug about the unlikelihood of such measures ever being introduced into the UK. Most of them are for the moment unthinkable to us, but there are already indications that we are starting to edge in that direction.

Don’t mention the class war

More from Watching the English...

Class denial rules
We are clearly as class-conscious as we have ever been, but many of us are increasingly embarrassed by our class-consciousness, and do our best to deny or disguise it. The middle classes are particularly uncomfortable about class, and well-meaning upper-middles are the most squeamish of all. They will go to great lengths to avoid calling anyone ‘working class’—resorting to polite euphemisms such as ‘low-income groups’, ‘less privileged’, ‘ordinary people’, ‘less educated’, ‘the man in the street’, ‘tabloid readers’, ‘council estate’ (or sometimes, among themselves, less polite euphemisms such as ‘Tracey and Kevin’, ‘Essex Man’ and ‘Mondeo Man’.)

These over-tactful upper-middles may even try to avoid using the word ‘class’ at all, carefully talking about someone’s ‘background’ instead—which always makes me imagine the person emerging from either a Lowry street scene or a Gainsborough or Reynolds country-manor portrait, depending on the ‘class’ to which ‘background’ is intended to refer. (This is always obvious from the context: ‘Well, with that sort of background, you have to make allowances…’ is Lowry; ‘We prefer Saskia and Fiona to mix with girls from the same background…’ is Gainsborough/Reynolds.)

Hole in the wall

The idea of global electronic money was invented in 1968 by a junior bank manager called Mr Hock. Wisely, he didn’t give his name to the idea, but called it Visa International and sold it to the world.

The year before that, forty years ago this week, the world's first ATM had been installed in a branch of Barclays in Enfield, north London. Here is Mr Shepherd-Barron, now 82, who, while he was in the bath, had the idea of adapting a chocolate bar dispenser, but replacing chocolate with cash.

From BBC News:
Barclays was convinced immediately. Over a pink gin, the then chief executive signed a hurried contract with Mr Shepherd-Barron, who at the time worked for the printing firm De La Rue. Plastic cards had not been invented, so Mr Shepherd-Barron's machine used cheques that were impregnated with carbon 14, a mildly radioactive substance. The machine detected it, then matched the cheque against a Pin number. However, Mr Shepherd-Barron denies there were any health concerns: "I later worked out you would have to eat 136,000 such cheques for it to have any effect on you."

The machine paid out a maximum of £10 a time. "But that was regarded then as quite enough for a wild weekend," he says.

Mr Shepherd-Barron had come up with the idea of the PIN when he realised that he could remember his six-figure army number. But he decided to check that with his wife, Caroline. "Over the kitchen table, she said she could only remember four figures, so because of her, four figures became the world standard," he laughs.

A small plaque was placed on the site of the first machine on the 25th anniversary of its installation, but few people notice it. Given that there are now more than 1.6 million cash machines worldwide, it is a classic case of British modesty.

The saviour of the human race

Those readers who are of a prurient disposition (I’ll mention no names, you know who you are) and who therefore followed a link I gave recently to an improper extra verse to You’re the Top may have been puzzled by the reference to Miss Pinkham’s Tonic.

Here is the lady herself.
A resident of Lynn, Massachusetts, Lydia Pinkham first began developing home remedies after the near bankruptcy of her husband. Mass marketed from 1875 on, Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound was one of the best known patent medicines of the 19th century.
Lydia and her "medicinal compound" are memorialized in the folk songs "The Ballad of Lydia Pinkham," and "Lily the Pink". A sanitized version of Lily the Pink was a number one hit for The Scaffold in the United Kingdom in 1968/69.
The reason a humble women's tonic was the subject of this and other ribald drinking ballads and an increasing success in the twenties and early thirties was its availability as a 40-proof patent eye-opener during Prohibition.

So we'll drink a drink a drink
To Lily the pink the pink the pink
The saviour of the human race.
She invented a medicinal compound
Most efficacious in every case.

All this information is from Wikipedia, which also gives the full lyrics of this and other versions and describes in great detail the ingredients of the compound and its indications; it is still being manufactured.

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.