A Website by Frank Key
Another magnificent snippet from Fish, Flesh And Good Red Herring : A Gallimaufry by Alice Thomas Ellis (2004):
[The vicar's wife] has had bad luck with hens: she lived for a time on Tristan da Cunha and says there are few things more dispiriting than seeing your poultry being blown by the wind out over the Atlantic.
A certain Mr Beale, in the nineteenth century, was collecting shells on the shores of the Bonin Islands when he encountered “a most extraordinary animal” creeping on its eight legs towards the water. “It seemed alarmed and made great efforts to escape, but the naturalist had no idea of consenting to the termination of so unexpected an interview with the odd-looking stranger,” so he trod on one of its legs and then grabbed hold of another one and then “gave it a sudden jerk to disengage it” (the poor thing was clinging to the rock). “This seemed to excite it into fury” which by now was hardly to be wondered at and, “it suddenly let go its hold of the rock and sprang on its assailant’s arm, which was bare, and fixing itself by its suckers endeavoured to attack him with its powerful beak. The sensation of horror caused by this unexpected assault may be readily imagined. Mr Beale states that the cold and slimy grasp of the ferocious animal induced a sensation extremely sickening, and he found it requisite to call to the captain, who was occupied in gathering shells at a little distance.”
I don’t know what Mr Beale had expected, but they proceeded to jump on the wretched creature and hack it with the boat knife: “It did not surrender, till the limbs by which it so tenaciously adhered were successively cut off.” The Victorians were notoriously wasteful of wildlife and we may be sure that Mr Beale and the captain did not cook and eat this octopus. We are told that cephalopods are unusually intelligent, which strikes us, prejudiced as we are against things with tiny heads and eight legs, as strange but caused me to feel some sympathy with Mr Beale’s antagonist. It must have experienced its own sensation of horror on being confronted with a heavily bewhiskered Victorian naturalist.
from Fish, Flesh And Good Red Herring : A Gallimaufry by Alice Thomas Ellis (2004)
Victorian ladies who, one gets the impression, spent most of their lives in what is now known as ’socialising’, rarely set foot in the kitchen except to have words with Cook, but were frequently found in hysterics, or high strikes as the condition was vulgarly known. When visitors came to call, a young woman had to know when to stay in the room or when to make herself scarce and while the writers on etiquette tried to be reassuring – ‘A young girl with all the freshness of youth and the sweet dignity of woman-hood has a sure passport into society which assures her a warmth of welcome’ (the proviso, as long as her papa has pots of money, was considered at once too obvious and too coarse to be stated) – it is no surprise that so many of them were reduced to lying on the floor drumming their heels and screaming. Hysteria, which was, according to The Dictionary Of Daily Wants, ‘more common in females than men’, was characterised by ‘low spirits, a feeling of depression and anxiety, sudden involuntary grief and tears, palpitation, sickness, a sense of suffocation and the apparent presence of a ball in the throat; theses symptoms are or are not attended with sobs and sudden fits of laughter, convulsive twitches and contractions of the hands and arms, finally terminating, after more or less muscular contractions, in insensibility and coma’. If the patient was young and robust, she was bled, but in general it was thought sufficient to throw cold water on her.
from Alice Thomas Ellis, Fish, Flesh And Good Red Herring : A Gallimaufry (2004)
“To begin from the top: I have five sabre cuts on the crown of the head and three on the left temple, all fractures from which much bone has come away; one on my left cheek which fractured the jaw bone and has divided the ear, forming a very unsightly wound; one over the right temple and a dreadful gash on the back of the neck, which slightly grazed the windpipe; a musket ball in the hip, which made its way through my back, slightly grazing the backbone; five sabre cuts on my right arm and hand, three of the fingers broken, the hand cut three-fourths across, and the wrist bones cut through; three cuts on the left arm, the bone of which has been broken but is again uniting; one slight wound on the right leg and two with one dreadful gash on the left, to say nothing of a cut across the fingers of my left hand, now healed up.”
Almost as an afterthought he added that on arrival at Sidi el Muktar he had caught the plague – “a dreadful malady somewhat similar to yellow fever in its symptoms” – and had spent nine days “so ill with fever that it was presumed, expected and hoped that I should die”. While he was sick most of his possessions, including his gun, had been stolen and sent to be sold in the Timbuctoo market. “I am nevertheless doing well,” he concluded, writing with only the thumb and middle finger of his left hand, “and hope yet to return to England with much important geographical information.”
… “My father used often to accuse me of a want of common sense,” he once confided to his sister, “‘Tis true, I never possessed any, nor ever shall.”
Gordon Laing in Africa in 1825, from Barrow’s Boys by Fergus Fleming (1998)
It is almost a year ago that I (inadvertently) set out to learn to speak Danish. My beginner’s vocabulary list is here. I am now watching Borgen, and have progressed by leaps and bounds. Here are the latest additions to my phrasebook:
English : briefing. Danish : briefing.
English : spin doctor. Danish : spin doctor.
English : girl power. Danish : girl power.
English : wet tee-shirt competition. Danish : wet tee-shirt competition.
English : famous for fifteen minutes. Danish : famous for fifteen minutes.
Of all the miserable places on earth, a snow village recently deserted is the most gloomy.
George Francis Lyon, Private Journal During The Recent Voyage Of Discovery Under Captain Parry (1824)
On Commander John Ross’s 1818 voyage to search for the North-West Passage,
To justify the expedition’s scientific aims the Admiralty and the Royal Society donated chronometers and compasses – the Isabella carried seven different models of each – plus a number of other instruments, among them Henry Kater’s Pendulum for measuring the ellipticity of the globe, Mr Plentty’s Cork Life Boat, Englefield’s Mountain Barometer and Companion, Burt’s Buoy and Knipper, Trengrouse’s Apparatus for Saving Lives, and Troughton’s Whirling Horizon. John Ross would later contribute to the array with a dredging device of his own invention which he whimsically christened ‘the Deep Sea Clamm’.
Fergus Fleming, Barrow’s Boys (1998)
I always thought that ‘FBI’ referred to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, but today I learned that the letters actually stand for the Farmland Bird Index.
Now I will be able to make sense of even the most convoluted plot in an American crime drama. All those agents are in fact engaged in the counting and classification of birds. The veil has been lifted from mine eyes!
FBI Agent
Bird
From today’s Grauniad. Well worth memorising (and adding to).
England’s drought draws attention to the condition of England’s rivers. And England’s rivers – with those in Scotland and Wales – have ancient names, often conferred before the Roman legions came, and passed down almost unchanged to the present. Daily Mail spread on the misery that will last all summer featured the Bewl, the Chess and the Pang. But these are just the start. What about the Mease, the Tees, the Dee, the Cree, the Nar, the Ter and the Ver? Or the Box, the Yox and the Axe? Or the Neet, the Fleet and the Smite? Do not forget, either, the Ebble, the Piddle, the Polly, the Nadder or the Wandle. Or the Feshie, the Mashie and the Wissey. Then there are the Lugg, the Ugie, the Meggat, the Tud, the Lud and the Irt. Like these other rivers, the Wampool, the Snizort, the Skirfare, the Deveron, the Cocker and the Stinchar speak of a deep Britain, to which we are more connected than we realise. Or would be if it rained.
I like words. I like fat buttery words, such as ooze, turpitude, glutinous, toady. I like solemn, angular, creaky words, such as straitlaced, cantankerous, pecunious, valedictory. I like spurious, black-is-white words, such as mortician, liquidate, tonsorial, demi-monde. I like suave “V” words, such as Svengali, svelte, bravura, verve. I like crunchy, brittle, crackly words, such as splinter, grapple, jostle, crusty. I like sullen, crabbed, scowling words, such as skulk, glower, scabby, churl. I like Oh-Heavens, my-gracious, land’s-sake words, such as tricksy, tucker, genteel, horrid. I like elegant, flowery words, such as estivate, peregrinate, elysium, halcyon. I like wormy, squirmy, mealy words, such as crawl, blubber, squeal, drip. I like sniggly, chuckling words, such as cowlick, gurgle, bubble and burp.
Robert Pirosh, in a 1934 letter reproduced at Letters Of Note
Not just any dining room… but the dining room on the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin 129 Hindenburg!
More pictures at airships.net
An amusing letter in today’s Grauniad:
Having written a piece of music based on the sinking of the Titanic, I might perhaps be lumped with the Titanoraks (Pass notes, G2, 5 March). Inevitably this 1969 piece is being performed several times this year. Recently a young Belgian composer contacted me to ask if his composition on the subject might be performed alongside mine in his country. His piece is written from the point of view of the iceberg.
Gavin Bryars
Billesdon, Leicestershire
In those dark times, astrologer, mathematician and conjuror were accounted the same things, and the vulgar did verily believe [Thomas Allen] to be a conjuror. He had a great many mathematical instruments and glasses in his chamber, which did also confirm the ignorant in their opinion, and his servitor (to impose on freshmen and simple people) would tell them that sometimes he should meet the spirits, coming up his stairs like bees.
from John Aubrey, Brief Lives (1972 edition edited by Oliver Lawson Dick)
Today is Collop Monday, so here is what you ought to be eating (and a tip on what to do with the servants):
PIG-FRY – This is a Collop Monday dish, and is a necessary appendage to “cracklings”. It consists of the fattest parts of the entrails of the pig, broiled in an oven. Numerous herbs, spices, &c. are added to it ; and upon the whole, it is a more sightly “course” at table than fat cracklings. Sometimes the good wife indulges her house with a pancake, as an assurance that she has not forgotten to provide for Shrove Tuesday. The servants are also treated with “a drop of something good” on this occasion; and are allowed (if they have nothing of importance to require their immediate attention) to spend the afternoon in conviviality.
from The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction: Containing Original Essays; Historical Narratives; Biographical Memoirs; Sketches Of Society; Topographical Descriptions; Novels And Tales; Anecdotes; Select Extracts From New And Expensive Works; Poetry, Original And Selected; The Spirit Of The Public Journals; Discoveries In The Arts And Sciences; Useful Domestic Hints; &c. &c. &c., Vol. XIII (1829)
Thanks to Ian Visits for reminding us all.
