What, when there are places on the map called Upper Dicker, Lower Dicker, or Wyre Piddle, was the particular appeal of Deal (pop. 28,504), one wonders, for the nation’s reprobates and misanthropes? The drunken polymorphously perverse bankrupt novelist and cashiered King’s Own Shropshire Light Infantryman Simon Raven (1927-2001), for example, was banished to a nursing home for handicapped old ladies in the town for thirty-four years, sallying forth every now and again to a massage parlour opposite the Reform Club, Pall Mall, for ‘a good housemaid’s wank’. One is compelled to picture the streets of Deal as a world in decay thronged with George Grosz characters got up in askew velvet hats and musquash coats seeking eyeglass-fogging diversions. ‘I always used to see [Charles] Hawtrey being pulled out of pubs,’ Raven recalled the week before he died, ‘But what’s wrong with that? We all like a drink, don’t we dear?’ Deal is the capital of non-conformity.

A footnote by Roger Lewis in his biography Charles Hawtrey : The Man Who Was Private Widdle (2001). Another Deal resident, in his final years, was Rayner Heppenstall (1911-1981), whose posthumously published novel The Pier is a murderous fantasy in which the Heppenstall-like narrator systematically plans and commits the slaughter of his (working class) next door neighbours.

When they were apart, they questioned and instructed each other minutely on the state of their health. “How is it my darling,” Mill inquired, “that you say you have broken the habit of expectoration? When you cough are you not obliged to swallow something if you do not spit it up?” “I cannot but think,” replied Harriet with her characteristic note of self-righteousness, “that if you tried as earnestly as I have done since October to avoid any expectoration that you would lose the habit altogether as I have done.” It was her idea that Mill was bothered by phlegm because he was in the habit of spitting, not that he was forced to spit because he was bothered by phlegm. Perhaps she was right.

John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor recalled in Parallel Lives : Five Victorian Marriages by Phyllis Rose (1984)

There is a piece in The Public Domain Review about Gerard Manley Hopkins’ reportage on the remarkable “Krakatoa sunsets” of 1883.

according to my observation, the ground of the sky in the east was green or else tawny, and the crimson only in the clouds. A great sheet of heavy dark cloud, with a reefed or puckered make, drew off the west in the course of the pageant: the edge of this and the smaller pellets of cloud that filed across the bright field of the sundown caught a livid green.

[F. J. Furnivall (1825-1910)] was… besides being a redoubtable scholar himself, one of the great rock-blasting entrepreneurs of Victorian scholarship, the kind of man who if his energies had taken another turn might have covered a continent with railways. As secretary of the Philological Society, he spent twenty years amassing materials for the New (Oxford) English Dictionary, of which he was one of the first editors; as founder of the Early English Texts Society, he performed an indispensable service for medievalists. Societies were his natural element. Apart from the E.E.T.S., he also founded the New Shakespere Society [he insisted on spelling it that way], the Ballad Society, the Chaucer Society, the Wycliffe Society, the Shelley Society, the Browning Society. It is a measure of his optimism that he even tried to start a Lydgate Society, though it failed to get off the ground…

There are times when it is impossible not to applaud his fighting spirit, or marvel at his vitality. Like the young Shakespeare, he was a lithe and active fellow; at the age of seventy he had enough surplus energy left to found the Hammersmith Sculling Club for Girls and Men, and he was still turning out with them on the river every Sunday at the age of eighty-five. He was also an ardent old-fashioned socialist, who refused to be bound by snobbish convention. It is characteristic that the memorial volume published after his death should have contained, along with contributions by scholars from all over the world, a simple tribute from a waitress in the ABC tea-shop in Oxford Street where he used to hold court.

from The Rise And Fall Of The Man Of Letters by John Gross (1969)

His students realised that they had a legend on their hands, and made the most of it. Dozens of stories circulated about his rumbustious asides, his impossible handwriting, the convolutions of his syntax.*

* In the Saintsbury Memorial Volume a former student recalls learning a specimen sentence by heart: ‘But while none, save these, of men living, had done, or could have done, such things, there was much here which – whether either could have done it or not – neither had done.’

George Saintsbury (1845-1933) recalled in The Rise And Fall Of The Man Of Letters by John Gross (1969)

Imagine for a moment that you have a pet swan. What would you call it? Alan? Belinda? Clive? Dot? I could continue through the alphabet, but I won’t, not for the time being. If I did, we would soon enough get to J. I like to think that I would not, at that juncture, pick the name Jack. Not for a swan. It doesn’t seem right. Yet that is the name Anna Pavlova gave to her swan, as can be seen in this tremendous photograph, kindly sent to me by David Cranmer. Click for gigantic version.

I mentioned yesterday Jack Warner’s fantastic cheese-and-biscuits recipe, included in The Curious Cookbook by Peter Ross. The original source is a wartime collection entitled A Kitchen Goes To War : Famous People Contribute 150 Recipes To A Ration-Time Cookery Book (1940). Among the other dishes is the splendidly-named Agatha Christie’s Mystery Potatoes. I was intending to transcribe the recipe here, then realised that in so doing I would shatter the mystery, so instead I will urge – or indeed egg you on – to buy the book.

Meanwhile, you might be interested in making imitation bacon out of marzipan. Who wouldn’t be?

Take some of your marchpane [marzipan] Paste, and work it in red saunders [sandalwood – a red dye] till it be red; then rowl a broad sheet of white paste, and a sheet of red paste; three of the white and four of the red, and so one upon the other in mingled sorts, every red between, then cut it overthwart, till it look like collops [slices] of bacon, then dry it.

That is from A Queen’s Delight of 1671, and given the title I suggest you make some to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee.

The Queen Of Crime, contemplating her mysterious potatoes

To keep flies off your paintings and hangings. An Italian conceipte both for the rareness and use thereof doth please me above all other: viz: pricke a cowcumber full of barley corns with the small spring ends outwards, make little holes in the cowcumber first with a wooden or bone bodkin, and after put in the grain, these being thicke placed will in time cover all the cowcumber, so as no man can discerne what strange plant the same should be. Such cowcumbers to be hung up in the middest of summer rooms to drawe all the flies unto them, which otherwise would flie upon the pictures or hangings.

Hugh Plat, Delightes For Ladies, c.1602

Hugh Plat… does not quite make it clear that the wheat stuck into the cucumber would quickly sprout and cover the fruit in a coat of young shoots. This must have looked like some exotic sea creature hanging from a chandelier at the centre of a room. It would, no doubt, have grown increasingly strange as the cucumber gradually dried and rotted, and the barley shoots withered.

from The Curious Cookbook : Viper Soup, Badger Ham, Stewed Sparrows & 100 More Historic Recipes by Peter Ross (2012). I thoroughly recommend this splendid new book, published by the British Library, not least because Dr Ross is my oldest friend – we met when we were eleven years old. Obtain a copy, and you too will be able to make what is possibly the world’s most complicated recipe – cheese and biscuits (with chutney) à  la Jack Warner. Yes, that Jack Warner, beloved by all as Dixon of Dock Green.

Forty years have passed, I think, since I last looked at a duck with any degree of care or interest.

Roger Lewis, What Am I Still Doing Here? (2011)

If instead of one apple falling on the head of Sir Isaac Newton a heavenly orchard had let tumble a rain of fruit, one of the greatest of men would have been overwhelmed and then buried. Anyone examining the situation afterwards in a properly scientific spirit, clearing the apples layer by layer, would be able to deduce certain facts. He would be able to prove that the man was there before the apples. Furthermore, that the blushing Beauty of Bath found immediately over and round Sir Isaac fell longer ago than the small swarthy russets that lay above them. If, on top of all this, snow had fallen, then the observer, even if he came from Mars where they are not familiar with these things, would know that apple time came before snow time.

Relative ages are not enough, the observer would want an absolute date, and that is where Sir Isaac comes in again. An examination of his clothes, the long-skirted coat, the loose breeches and the negligent cut of his linen, the long, square-toed shoes pointing so forlornly up to the sky, would date the man to the seventeenth century. Here would be a clue to the age of the apples and the snow.

Jacquetta Hawkes, A Land (1951). There is an interesting piece about the book here.

A letter arrives in the post:

Dear Mr Key

I was interested to read your comments about The Readers’ Digest, which was a formative influence when I was growing up also. An ancient companion of my late grandmother lived with us, and was a subscriber: she would leave copies outside her door when she’d finished with them and we all pounced on them with glee. As well as the magazines, she received a 78 rpm record every month from some sort of listening-club associated with the publisher, and my brother and I were intrigued by these, as she never allowed us to hear them (though we endured endless Caruso, Bing Crosby and The Spooncat 5 on her wind-up gramophone). She explained that the Readers’ Digest records always got broken in the post, and we never wondered why she didn’t simply cancel the subscription.

She’s been gone for decades; but her wind-up gramophone remained, and when we were cleaning it up recently to send it to auction we found just one of those white-label Readers’ Digest 78s, still extant in a thin drawer in the base of the machine. It’s lo-fi stuff – and pretty tame these days – but I’ve recorded the ‘with vocal refrain’ section in hopes that it will be of interest to your readers. I used ‘declicking’ software to remove most of the surface hiss but there’s no curing the damage at the end. Doubtless we have the Royal Mail to thank for that.

Best wishes
Roland Clare

♫♫♫ aunt-maud-78rpm ♫♫♫

I am sending you a bird’s head in a steel box filled with alcohol.

Pierre Bardey to Alfred Bardey, 30 November 1882, quoted in Somebody Else : Arthur Rimbaud In Africa 1880-91 by Charles Nicholl (1997)

Here you are, not a shadow above or below or around you, even though surrounded by enormous objects; there is no more trail, no more precipices and gorges, no more sky; there is nothing but whiteness to think of, to touch, to see or not to see, it being impossible to raise your eyes from the white pointlessness [l’embêtement blanc] which you take to be the middle of the trail; impossible to raise your nose into the raging of the north wind; your eyelashes and moustache forming stalactites, your ears nearly torn off, your neck swollen. Without your own shadow, and the telegraph poles which follow the supposed trail, you’d be as hopeless as a sparrow in the oven.

Arthur Rimbaud, in his account of crossing the Alps in 1878, quoted in Somebody Else : Arthur Rimbaud In Africa 1880-91 by Charles Nicholl (1997)

I’m surprised to hear that you communists overseas are using your own individual sharpeners in classrooms. It’s a very Ayn-Randian position to take. “I’ve got my pencil sharpener, fuck you if you can’t afford a pencil sharpener! Sharpen your pencil with your bootstrap!”

Pencil-sharpening enlightenment here.