Today’s entry is going to be rather bitty – though with a long ornithological excursus towards the end that non-bird-nerds should feel free to skip – but I do have what I hope are some interesting word- and phrase-related snippets to share. Some are new discoveries, others welcome jogs to the memory I’ve come across over the last few days.
On stereotype and cliché
I knew that the term stereotype came from printing, but professional cornucopia of knowledge Stephen Fry added some further insight into the matter on this week’s QI (a BBC quiz programme, in case you didn’t know). The term was first used by the French printer Firmin Didot in 1798 and it applied to a process whereby once a page of print had been (manually) typeset in its final format, a mould was made and a single metal printing plate cast from this mould. It was easier and quicker to print multiple copies of any page from this plate than from the original made up of all those small pieces of metal lined up in a frame.
Given that manually setting movable type was a laborious and time-consuming business, printers had discovered that if they had phrases that were frequently reused, it made sense to make a cast of the whole phrase so that it could be quickly inserted in one fell swoop. And these mini-stereotypes, metal strips of interconnected print “characters” representing well-worn phrases, were known as clichés. Some say that the etymological origin of the name is the verb cliquer, meaning “to click”, on account of the clicking sound the metal made as it was poured into the mould.
On jacquard and sabotage
Also on QI, there came a discussion of technical developments including prototypes of the computer and other “programming” systems. The broadcast of the episode almost coinciding with the birthday of Ada Lovelace (born 10 December 1815), mention was made of her work with Charles Babbage, and the discussion turned to developments preceding their work on the Analytical Engine. The machine made use of punch cards of a kind developed in 1801 by French merchant Joseph Marie Jacquard for insertion in a special patented loom to add a degree of automation to the weaving process by “pre-programming” a pattern into the cloth. To this day we associate the term jacquard with certain ornate types of woven fabric, damask being one example, and it was thanks to the punch-card system that the process of producing these complicated patterns was made very much quicker and more efficient. I remember becoming fascinated by the idea of the Jacquard loom during a visit to the National Wool Museum in Dre-fach Felindre (South West Wales) some years ago, but at the time I hadn’t completely cottoned on (geddit?!) to the extent to which the reach of this invention went so much further than producing cloth.
Not everyone, though, was as inspired by Jacquard’s invention as the likes of Babbage and Lovelace. Just as the Luddites in England revolted against the introduction of machine looms a few years later, fearing that their status as skilled handloom weavers would become worthless, their French counterparts were similarly aghast at Jacquard’s innovations and set out to destroy these new-fangled machines. Their weapons of choice? Their wooden clogs – sabots – and thus the word sabotage came into being. Or at least, that was Stephen Fry’s line – Wikipedia suggests that the term might actually go back to Dutch weavers in the fifteenth century, though in a similar scenario.
On throwing people curveballs and knocking them for six
This morning on Twitter, Kellie (@belouise) was asking what a “curveball” was, not in the original baseball sense but in the figurative expression “to throw someone a curve[ball]“. I didn’t know what it meant either – we Brits don’t do baseball or baseball idioms, on the whole – but I did a bit of poking about on t’internet and found out that it basically means to confuse someone or throw them off track by doing something surprising or unexpected. It struck me that in British English we tend to use the expression “to knock someone for six” with much the same meaning, though interestingly the expression is based on the (unexpected) behaviour of the batsman in our case, not of the bowler, and – not so surprisingly – it is derived from cricket rather than baseball.
It is also no real surprise that there are many sport-derived idioms that have developed differently in American English and British English (as well as a lot more that share meaning and form). While translating a text with colleagues recently, I found that while I had written “the ball is in the politicians’ court” (= tennis), an American colleague had written “the ball is in the politicians’ corner” (= baseball again). In the wider context, it is certainly the baseball terms that have come to the fore in the international boardroom, though interesting that phrases such as “to touch base” and “a ballpark estimate” frequently make it onto British-based lists of most hated “management speak” or jargon. Is this due to a knee-jerk anti-Americanization drive, because they sound alien or false when used by a non-American, or simply because a few people use them too frequently in an offhand, cliched manner? I really don’t know and am not going to be the judge of that here.
On eagles, hawks and kites
Moving away from contentious issues, it seems to be a fact internationally acknowledged that birds of prey have good eyesight, and this fact has given rise to its fair share of idiomatic expressions, some dating back to ancient lore. An observant or scrutinising person can be described as having eyes like a hawk or keeping an eagle eye onsomething, and in German you can use either Falkenauge (= hawk, falcon) or Adlerauge (= eagle), or related phrases, to get the same idea across; I’m sure many of you reading this could provide further parallel examples from other languages, too.
My heart did a little skip the other day, though, when I discovered that a Welsh expression for this seems to be llygad barcud, i.e. “eye of the kite”. Now, eagles are extremely rare in Wales – the golden eagle, once a native species, has not been resident for over 400 years and sightings are thus extremely rare, and the white-tailed eagle seems also to be only a rare visitor. It may in fact be that neither was ever really prevalent in the area, so that the absence of these species from everyday expressions would not be that surprising. Kites are a rather different case in point, having been present in Wales for longer than anyone knows, though not without their challenges, as I’ll explain in a moment.
To backtrack a bit first: in English folklore and literature the kite traditionally suffered pretty bad press, being considered nothing more than a trouble-making scavenger: Shakespeare, for example, has King Lear refer to his daughter Goneril as a “detested kite”. In Scotland the situation was no better as they were legally labelled as vermin in the 15th century. Not the stuff of noble idioms, then. Nor any surprise that the red kite was extinct in England and Scotland well before the end of the 19th century (with reintroduction only from 1989: see here).
I really don’t know how the red kite was viewed historically by the people of Wales – maybe someone else can enlighten me on this – but it is certainly the case that various individuals made efforts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to prevent its extinction. They managed that, though only just – by the 1930s the population had continued to decline to an estimated <20 birds. What did happen, though, was that the local population became fiercely protective of these birds – not least against the efforts of egg thieves – and the red kite took on an almost mythical status that I can still remember from my childhood. Mid Wales was a place of hallowed pilgrimage for those seeking the last habitat of the UK red kite.
The situation has much improved since then and has been mirrored elsewhere in the UK through reintroduction programmes. In Wales, though, the red kite remains a symbol of triumph over adversity and has widely been used as an icon representing wildlife in the region. In a poll run by the RSPB and the BBC in Wales in 2007, the red kite was the clear winner: “an astonishing 36% of voters picked the red kite as their favourite bird, putting it way ahead of the robin – which came second with 15% of votes – and the barn owl in third place with 11%.”
I still feel a sense of exhilaration when I see a red kite – or even a pair of them – circling overhead, and all of this is why I was so pleased to find an expression that ennobled this lovely bird.
Thank you if you’ve taken the time to read this far – that’s all for this week.
Another post, another meme, but this time the topic caught my eye because I thought it was a good opportunity to dust off and expand on my knowledge of history.
The aim is to focus on the day of the year on which you were born and to talk about various events and personalities associated with that day. Click on the picture to the left to view the original post that has, in the meantime, inspired a lot of other people to write about their birthdays (links to these can be found at the bottom of the original article – is your birthday there yet?).
Note: all bullet points in this post are copied, including hyperlinks, from the Wikipedia entry for May 19, though I’ve looked at a wider range of sources for my own input.
When is your birthday?
On 19th May.
Pick three people who share your birthday and share what you know about them.
Nancy Astor is best known as the first female MP to set foot in the House of Commons, in 1919. I say “set foot” deliberately as she wasn’t the first female MP to be elected: the previous year saw the election of Constance Markievicz, but as a Sinn Fein member who refused to take the obligatory oath of allegiance to the UK monarch she was not allowed to take her seat in the Commons – not much has changed there.
Astor was active in the temperance movement and championed causes relating to (women’s) suffrage and education. Like most politicians, she was not without controversy – she was accused of jumping on the suffrage bandwaggon only after she had been elected, while her American birth and upper class credentials led to criticism that she was out of touch with ordinary people. Having said that, I suspect it would have been well-nigh impossible within the social structures of that time for an “ordinary” woman to have the wherewithal to enter high-level politics, though I am very happy to be corrected if this is an inaccurate view.
Astor was well known for her acerbic wit and sharp tongue. Her election slogan was “Vote for Lady Astor and your children will weigh more”. She is also quoted as saying, “I married beneath me – all women do”. My favourite Astor soundbyte, though, and one I’ve known since I was quite young, comes from an exchange with Winston Churchill:
Astor: If you were my husband, I’d poison your tea.
Churchill: If I were your husband, I’d drink it.
1925 – Malcolm X, American civil rights activist (d. 1965)
I don’t know as much about Malcolm X as I should, so it would be pretentious to try to give the impression of writing knowledgeably about him here, when probably most people reading this know a great deal more. What strikes me, though, after writing about Nancy Astor above is that here we have a political activist who also grew up in America, though half a century later than Lady Astor and in circumstances dictated by the cards having fallen very diferently. He was not cushioned by affluence in his political aspirations, but spurred into action by hardship and suffering experienced firsthand.
I can’t think of many comedians I’ve laughed at so much and for so long as Victoria Wood. Her TV shows and other projects were very present in my life throughout my teens and most of my twenties (after which I moved to Germany), and she specialises in the kind of razor-sharp observation applied to satirizing the mundane that has always made me laugh (and probably always will).
A 2005 Channel Four poll among those working in the comedy industry ranked her 27th among the top 50 comedy acts ever – she was the highest-ranked female comedian of all, beating some stiff competition from other favourites of mine, French & Saunders and Joyce Grenfell (though I have to say I’m disappointed – though not surprised – that there were no women in the higher echelons of the poll rankings). In the meantime she has won BAFTAs and other awards for her acting and comedy shows, and has been awarded both an OBE and a CBE by the Queen.
Here is one of my favourite Victoria Wood sketches. The show is completely stolen by the fabulous Julie Walters, but it’s an unforgettable exchange.
Is anyone listed as being born on the same day as you (ie the same year)? If so, what do you know about them?
Without looking these guys up, I have to confess I couldn’t tell you a thing about them – I feel I should know more about the first guy as the name rings a vague bell somewhere, but as I’m dreadful with names of producers and directors I have to draw a complete blank. The second guy no doubt thought he was giving himself a scary name of the “psychosis” variety, but I find myself wanting to read it as “psittacosis” – exactly why I have a better memory for obscure avian diseases than for (probably) mainstream movie producers is a mystery to me.
– Interlude while I do a bit of googling… –
Ah, it seems that Ross Katz’ main claim to fame is that he co-produced Lost in Translation, so that provides a link of sorts to stuff that I do (translation, rather than getting lost in it). Of course, the film is not ostensibly about translation in the classical sense – something that I can remember slightly disappointed me at the time I saw it – but it does deal with quite important issues of interlinguistic and intercultural problems in a much subtler way than the usual crashing slapstick such moments tend to give rise to in mainstream cinema. So hats off to Mr Katz for his role in that.
As regards the wrestler, I now know that his actual name is the much more mellifluous (and to me, less sick-parrot-sounding) Dionicio Castellanos Torres. I have to say, though, that I can’t really bring myself to work up a knowledge of wrestling, prodigious though Señor Torres’ career seems to have been, so I will refrain from saying any more about him. What did catch my eye, though, was a brief sentence towards the end of the Wikipedia article on him: “Torres appeared in the independent documentary, 101 Reasons Not To Become A Professional Wrestler.” Oh.
List three people who died on your birthday and tell us what you know about them.
I studied Medieval Studies in Leeds many moons ago (though not so long ago that it was modern history at that time), and there was no escaping local lad Alcuin of York. In fact, however, though he started his illustrious career at the cathedral school in York, Alcuin spent much of his life rather further afield in continental Europe, where he was appointed as a scholar and teacher at Charlemagne’s court in Aachen. He is acknowledged as one of the key figures in the Carolingian Renaissance and led efforts to set up a standard curriculum to be followed at the Carolingian schools. The basis of this curriculum was the artes liberales divided into the trivium (grammar, logic and rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy); these subject areas remained an important educational basis well into the Renaissance period (and indeed the term “liberal arts” still exists today, albeit in a somewhat different form).
OK, this is going to be much more about reactions than historical facts. My first real encounter with Charles Ives was incredibly nerve-wracking. I was twenty, in my last year with the National Youth Orchestra of Wales, and had finally reached the coveted – and veeeery exposed – position of principal flute. One of the pieces on our ambitious programme for our two-week stint of rehearsals and concerts was Ives’ Three Places in New England. It’s a comforting, tidy, unpretentious, homely (in the American sense) title that made me think of picturesque wooden houses and the placid autumnal glow of the New England fall. However, the first rehearsal was dominated by chaotic cacophony, me (and others) missing important solos due to miscounting, and an overall feel that was more akin to not knowing where one was in Old England on a Saturday night at throwing-out time.
For people like me who were far more used to the regular time signatures and broad melodic expanses that characterize the mainstream of Classical and Romantic music in a broad sense, Ives was a nightmare of cross-rhythms, syncopation, apparently random entries cued by silence, and some of the most controlled, exposed technique I’ve ever had to use. I don’t think I slept much the first week.
In any case, it was a steep learning curve, but so very worth it in the end. Out of the initial cacophony rose an intricately woven tapestry of the most amazing combination of snatches of sound – two competing marching bands playing at once, passages that you just had to associate with water, or fog, hard textures, soft textures, layer upon layer of sound, folksong against avant-garde atonal clustering, sudden caesura alongside gently metamorphosing motifs.
I think it’s one of the most amazing pieces I’ve ever heard, let alone had the privilege of playing. Do, do, please give it a listen if you have never come across it.
I was rather sad to discover that in fact two of my favourite poets died on my birthday. John Betjeman , English poet and Poet Laureate died on this day in 1984, and I could easily have written a few lines about him. However, Ogden Nash has the slight edge as he died on the very day I was born (why does that send an odd shiver down my spine?), and I came to his poetry earlier, at about the age of six. I can remember being fascinated by a poem of his that we had up on the wall at school. I know I’d recognize it if I saw it again, but unfortunately my attempts to find it have proved unsuccessful so far.
However, there is much more of value to be discovered in the anthologies of this master of humorous rhyme and wordplay, so I’ve just picked out a few lines and stanzes from here and there that particularly caught my eye and made me smile.
Nash has a refreshingly irreverent take on love poetry, for example:
A girl whose cheeks are covered with paint Has an advantage with me over one whose ain’t.
- “Biological Reflection”
Some of what he says sounds silly but makes a very serious point:
Consider the auk; Becoming extinct because he forgot how to fly, and could only walk. Consider man, who may well become extinct Because he forgot how to walk and learned how to fly before he thinked.
- “A Caution To Everybody”
Beneath this slab John Brown is stowed. He watched the ads And not the road.
- “Lather As You Go”
Nash was also a master of the ultra-short poem. I particularly like “Further Reflections on Parsley”, where the poem text is shorter than the title:
Parsley Is gharsley.
I wanted to pick just one longer poem to include in its entirety, and I think it has to be “Peekabo, I Almost See You”. It combines the best of Nash’s quirks with some pretty universal sentiments that I hear from my glasses-wearing friends and relatives on a regular basis:
Middle-aged life is merry, and I love to lead it, But there comes a day when your eyes are all right but your arm isn’t long enough to hold the telephone book where you can read it, And your friends get jocular, so you go to the oculist, And of all your friends he is the joculist, So over his facetiousness let us skim, Only noting that he has been waiting for you ever since you said Good evening to his grandfather clock under the impression that it was him, And you look at his chart and it says SHRDLU QWERTYOP, and you say Well, why SHRDNTLU QWERTYOP? and he says one set of glasses won’t do. You need two. One for reading Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason and Keats’s “Endymion” with, And the other for walking around without saying Hello to strange wymion with. So you spend your time taking off your seeing glasses to put on your reading glasses, and then remembering that your reading glasses are upstairs or in the car, And then you can’t find your seeing glasses again because without them on you can’t see where they are. Enough of such mishaps, they would try the patience of an ox, I prefer to forget both pairs of glasses and pass my declining years saluting strange women and grandfather clocks.
List three notable events that took place on your birthday.
A tapestry in the Flemish style of Catherine of Aragon and her husband Arthur Tudor, Prince of Wales (source: Wikimedia)
It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the royal family and the nobility always had an easier time of things in long past ages, while the poor struggled and starved. Occasionally you get a stark reminder, though, of the particular pressures the high-born were placed under. Catherine and Arthur were betrothed as small children, so there would not have been much scope for imagining a different existence in either of their lives; their being “married by proxy” at a young age was on the surface of it designed to strengthen the Tudor claim to the English throne, but it also ensured that the parties were under a stronger contractual obligation to one another.
It is interesting to note that Catherine and Arthur managed to correspond with each other by letter, in Latin, until late in 1501, when they were deemed old enough to actually meet and marry “in person”. When they did come face to face, however, they found communication quite difficult as they had very different pronunciations of Latin. Nor was there much of a happy ending in any other sense – just a few months after their marriage both fell seriously ill, and Catherine recovered only to find herself a widow.
At this point, Arthur’s father, Henry VII, could have been obliged to return Catherine’s dowry to her father. In the end, though, it was agreed that she would marry Arthur’s younger brother, Henry, Duke of York. There followed an interim of several years – Henry was too young to marry, and the idea of a union with Spain through marriage became less attractive to the King. Catherine’s future was uncertain and she was virtually kept prisoner during this time. However, when Henry senior died and his son ascended the throne, one of the first things Henry VIII did was to finally marry Catherine. The rest of this ultimately ill-fated union is well documented elsewhere.
Anne Boleyn was Catherine’s maid of honour and ultimately her “successor” as Queen, though it is certainly well known that there was an overlap between the two relationships. While Henry managed to have his marriage to Catherine annulled, this did not actually come through until a few months after he had married Anne. It was the refusal of the Pope to annul this marriage that triggered Henry’s desire to break with Rome and foreshadowed the beginnings of the Church of England. Both Catherine and Anne were important figures in English history, not least because they bore female heirs who went on to rule the country in their own right. However, both failed to produce a (surviving) male heir, and this was their ultimate downfall.
Annulment was not Henry’s weapon of choice for getting rid of his second wife after her presence came to be an obstruction to his further plans; instead, he had Anne and a group of others investigated on charges amounting to adultery, high treason and incest. She was found guilty – on unconvincing evidence, from the viewpoint of modern scholars – and was beheaded just one day after Henry announced his betrothal to his third wife, Jane Seymour. All the evidence indicates that Henry sent for her executioner, a swordsman from France, before she even went on trial.
I’m neither a republican nor a passionate royalist/monarchist, but the Commonwealth period was certainly an important caesura in English and British history. Following on from a period during which the monarch had become simply too powerful and too easily able to interfere in political life, the eventual execution of King Charles I paved the way for a period of radical political change that saw the (temporary) abolition of the monarchy, the House of Lords and the Church of England. The country was controlled by the House of Commons and the army.
Oliver Cromwell became the new “ruler” (Lord Protector of the Commonwealth) in 1653, and he imposed military rule and ran the country with as much power as the monarch had previously held. Puritan values were imposed by law, and while most of us might applaud the abolition of “cruel” sports such as bear-baiting and cock-fighting, restrictions also affected ale-houses, theatres, and the celebration of Christmas and Easter was also suppressed. There was much political experimentation without any stable form of government or institutions emerging.
Cromwell died in 1658, and after that there was no one obvious to carry on as a convincing ruler. Few of those active in politics had real parliamentary or legal experience, and things began to crumble. Ultimately royalists were re-admitted to Parliament, and slowly the tide turned once more in favour of the monarchy. Charles II, as he would become, was summoned back to England from Holland and the monarchy was restored in 1660. Importantly, Charles agreed to continue the policy of religious toleration introduced during the Commonwealth as well as to share power with Parliament and not attempt to be an absolutist ruler as his father had done. And while the path might not always have been smooth, all of these points have continued to define the reigns of those who have followed him.
Tell us about a holiday that falls on your birthday.
St Dunstan (909 – 19 May 988) had an illustrious scholastic and ecclesiastical career, serving as the Abbot of Glastonbury Abbey, the Bishop of both Worcester and London, and ultimately as the Archbishop of Canterbury. He was canonised in 1029 and his feast day has been celebrated ever since. I could go into the reasons for his canonisation, but there are a number of miscellaneous aspects of his life and legacy that I’m going to pick out here, just because I happened to find them rather (more) interesting.
Dunstan seems to have had a range of talents and is known to have been a scribe, an illustrator / illuminator, silversmith and musician. He is the patron saint of both silversmiths and goldsmiths, and one fascinating fact that I discovered in this connection is that hallmark years for silver and gold run not from 1 January to 31 December, but from 19 May to 18 May the next (calendar) year.
Dunstan and the Devil, by George Cruikshank (source: Wikimedia)
As is the case with many saints, there are tales of encounters between Dunstan and the Devil. In one of these he is said to have nailed a horseshoe to the Devil’s hoof, causing him – unsurprisingly – much pain. The Devil protested but Dunstan stood his ground, only agreeing to remove the offending item once the Devil had promised never to enter a place that had a horseshoe attached to its lintel. It is widely believed that this is the origin of the lucky horseshoe superstition.
Finally, please tag some lovely people to carry on this meme, then link back to this post so they can find the badge and link up their post once published.
A couple of people have already asked to be tagged: they are my lovely photography friend Chis (better known online as Squonk) and my school friend Nicola, who has a fairly new blog. I’d also love to read my brother Matt‘s take on his birthday (which is coming up soon, plus maybe he’d like to be nudged into blogging again!). No obligation on any of you to continue the meme, but for anyone who feels browbeaten into inspired to do so, it would be great if you’d leave a comment with a link here so that I and other interested readers can follow it up.
I haven’t had a lot of spare time over the last week – mainly due to having guests and a party to organize over the weekend – but what time I have had has been spent poring avidly over the latest records the folks at www.findmypast.co.uk have added to their resources, and it’s been an exciting time indeed. No wonder my poor little laptop has been groaning and creaking of late!
Appropriately enough on St David’s Day (1 March), FMP published nearly four million new Welsh records reproduced from parish registers, the results of an ongoing collaborative project they have going with the National Library of Wales and the Welsh County Archivists Group. Though there is still a lot more to come, I was particularly excited that this update contained huge numbers of records for Glamorgan, where a great many of Mum’s ancestors hail from, and also for Denbighshire and Flintshire, the coverage for which had been very poor previously (and where significant portions of Dad’s family were / are based).
What I find particularly valuable about these latest additions is that in many cases, alongside indexed (and thus easily searchable) transcripts of the records, they have provided high-quality digital images of the original records that often yield further information not included in the standardized, reduced format of the transcripts. To give them their due, the transcripts do generally indicate whether there is further personal information included in the original register, but this can be a source of slight frustration if you have no access to the original.
Marriage records are the case in point here: while the transcripts contain what is admittedly the most important information such as the names of the bride and groom, the date and location of the marriage and (if the information is contained in the original manuscript) ages of the parties and their parishes of origin, plus – from 1837 on in most cases – the names and professions of the fathers of the groom and bride respectively, what is generally not included in the transcripts is the more precise abode(s) of the bridal couple, names of the witnesses (these were often family members so are worth researching in their own right), and information as to whether the various parties signed their names or – if they didn’t know how to write their name – made a cross or other mark in the register. The latter point can be interesting in terms of giving insight into levels of education in the age before schooling was compulsory, and on the more emotional level there is a certain thrill associated with actually seeing the handwriting of your ancestors – sometimes beautifully formed, more often a spidery scrawl or a scratchy, blotted mark on the page.
Here are the signatures (or mark) of my great-great grandparents Thomas John and Ann Thomas, who married in Llansamlet in 1866, plus their two witnesses (who from their surnames look as though they might have been relatives of Ann, though I have the impression that every second person in Llansamlet had the surname Thomas at this date):
(This is just the couple of lines at the bottom of the full register entry. I hope it gives an idea of what I mean without infringing copyright.)
I won’t bore you here with all sorts of individual details about the new connections I’ve found out over the last week; suffice it to say that I have…
found a number of “new” ancestors by being able to move back a generation or two in several cases
filled out a few branches of my family through discovering siblings, cousins and in-laws turning up as marriage witnesses
removed a few question marks about whether individuals of the same name turning up in different parishes /areas were the same person or not
solved some mysteries and dispelled a couple of myths about various people’s provenance
AND
opened up numerous new cans of worms to be dealt with in the future
Anyone who has been down to the harbour in Aberystwyth will have spotted the lime kiln that stands out as one of the oldest – and oddest looking – things you can see in the immediate area. As a child I always thought it looked like a giant sandcastle, which seemed to provide a satisfying enough raison d’être for this oddity, given that Aberystwyth is known for its beach and a castle as well. Even the cracks in the brickwork resemble the worrying structural faults that sandcastles tend to develop as a result of overzealous reshaping or gravity-defying planning.
To continue my recent(ish) attempts to look more carefully at things I photograph, not just through the viewfinder, I decided it was time to find out a bit more about this landmark…
In fact it is the last survivor of a number of such kilns in the Trefechan area around the harbour, dating back to the eighteenth century. In those days Aberystwyth was a busy sea port, something that is hard to appreciate today given that the harbour is home to just a few small fishing boats, modest sailing yachts and the like. Back then, limestone was shipped in from places further down the coast, together with culm (a mixture of coal dust and clay), the fuel needed to convert it into (quick)lime.
Burning limestone (calcium carbonate, CaCO3) at temperatures of 800-900°C causes it to break down into carbon dioxide (CO2) and calcium oxide (CaO) in a process that was said to result in blue flames and lots of thick yellow smoke coming out of the kiln. Calcium oxide is a very reactive compound traditionally known as quicklime because of its lively behaviour on contact with water. Adding water produces so-called slaked lime (calcium hydroxide, Ca(OH)2).
Are you still with me? Nowadays I suspect most of us could come up with a good few ideas for how you might use lime of the green, citrus variety (mmmm, caipirinha!), but this other sort of lime has most likely slipped into obscurity for us “younger” generations and/or anyone not interested in the chemical side of it. However, this stuff was hugely important in the heyday of these kilns, and had been for a long, long time before that.
The Romans used lime in mortar and concrete, and for centuries it was also used for making whitewash, a kind of paint that was popular not just because it was cheap and gave a fresh, clean look to the walls of houses but also for its added durability and anti-bacterial properties. In this part of Wales lime was used rather more extensively in agriculture – farmers purchased calcium oxide to slake and spread on their fields to neutralize the acidity of the soil, improve drainage and provide access to nutrients for their crops, the beneficial properties of lime having been noted as early as the sixteenth century. Without this fertilizer arable farming would have been well-nigh impossible, and concentrating on sheep or dairy farming was simply not an option for the subsistence farmers of pre-modern times.
The decline of the lime burning industry in West Wales in the nineteenth century can be mainly attibuted to two factors. Firstly, agriculture had changed almost beyond recognition even within the space of a century, and fertilizers had moved on, too. Those farmers who were still growing cereal crops in this area could choose between potent, if pricy, imported guano (anyone who has experienced the seagull problem in Aberystwyth might wonder why it needed to be imported…*), more readily available and economically produced bone meal, or superphosphate of the sort manufactured in England since 1842.
Secondly, the coming of the railways might have turned Aberystwyth into a tourist resort, but in industrial terms the area became marginalized as the local shipping trade was gradually wound down and inland, more central areas were more economically integrated into the industrial transport network. Even today, when you travel by train to Aberystwyth you can feel as if you are travelling to the end of the world…
* I do know why, but I don’t want to expose myself as a faeces nerd
Well, I don’t think I’ll be winning any prizes for food photography with this shot, but this is last night’s dessert, crème caramel. It was ever so good.
No one made any snide comments about the choice of a French dessert to follow my very British main course (which went down extremely well, by the way) – maybe people don’t think of it as being French but rather a fairly international dessert.
It’s a type of baked custard.
When I hear the word custard, I certainly think of hot vanilla-flavoured sauce poured over some very British dessert: apple crumble, spotted dick, treacle pudding… The French serve it cold and call it crème anglaise (which the Germans took over as Englische Creme, so they must have thought of it as typically British/English at some point, though I can’t find any more comment on the etymology of this.
The term custard has a wider meaning of course, ranging through various kinds of egg-thickened milk or cream concoctions, whether used for filling eclairs (as confectioner’s custard) or quiches (a savoury form). Many of these forms date back to the Middle Ages, when egg and milk mixtures were popular for filling flans and tarts – in fact the word “custard” is a corruption of crustade, an old word for a pie or pie crust (cf. French croustade). Classic French cuisine, meanwhile, has no specific word for custard, using the more general term crème instead. Maybe it was conceptually more important to the British, since they at least had a word for it.
Europeans took a wealth of custard recipes with them to the New World, though sometime in the nineteenth century the terms “custard” and “pudding” became confused in the United States, so that to this day “pudding” in American English denotes a set milk pudding. This new meaning of the word came back over the Atlantic and settled in German as Pudding. Cue confusion and strange looks when, as a Brit, you start talking to people in this country about Christmas pudding, steak and kidney pudding or black pudding, or even if you simply ask “What’s for pudding?”…
Tomorrow I will be making another step in my so far successful quest to convince German friends that British food goes beyond fish and chips, haggis, baked beans and spongy square white sliced bread (“untoasted toast” as one student once put it – I guess you have to have lived in Germany to get that one) and is actually rather good.
The main attraction is going to be beef and Guinness casserole with herb dumplings. Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme – a very quaint English-sounding mixture to those of us who grew up with the song “Scarborough Fair” and were aware that it was not written by a couple of folk-rock dudes from New York.
The line is a recurring refrain throughout the song, which in its simplest form is the lament of someone who has been left by his lover and imagines a string of impossible-sounding feats that will win her back. The herbs mantra seems at first sight (or hearing) not to make much sense, but centuries-old knowledge about the medicinal properties of these four herbs can be tied in to give a somewhat clearer allegorical meaning.
Parsley is well known as an aid to digestion (remember Peter Rabbit?) and as a herb to counteract bitterness or acrid tastes (garlic might fall into the latter category). The jilted lover in the song presumably hopes to overcome his own feelings of bitterness.
Sage, whose Latin name salvia comes from the verb meaning “to heal” or “to be / feel well”, is symbolic of strength – it is no coincidence that even today it is used as a herbal remedy for excessive sweating, as a means to “strengthen” the stomach following e.g. a course of antibiotics, and as a more general boost to the immune system thanks to its antioxidant properties. An old rhyming aphorism tells us “He that would live for aye / Must eat sage in May”. The “I” of the song thus wishes for strength to overcome his adversity and recover. In German folk tradition, sage was also used to prepare love potions.
The herb rosemary represents loyalty and constancy (maybe partly because it is evergreen), love and remembrance (Nicholas Culpeper noted that “It helps a weak memory” and that it is good for “all the diseases of the head and brain”), qualities the singer of the song has not been receiving too much of recently, but precisely those qualities and feelings he hopes to rekindle in his beloved lady.
Thyme also contains potent essential oils (the name derives from the Greek verb thyo, “to perfume”) and symbolizes courage. Culpeper said that wild thyme was “excellent for nervous disorders” and that it was “a certain remedy for that troublesome complaint, the night-mare”. The Ancient Greeks believed it strengthened certain masculine characteristics (it does have proven aphrodisiac qualities, apparently), and in the Middle Ages knights often had thyme painted on their shields as proof of their mettle. Today, apart from its continued use in cooking, it has largely been relegated to a remedy for coughs, sadly distant from its rather grander reputation in older thymes …. err, times. However, the protagonist in the song was probably not thinking about his bronchial health.
Plan of Neuf-Brisach (c. 1697) (image via Wikimedia, out of copyright)
I’d whizzed past the fortified town of Neuf-Brisach (New Breisach) in the car on numerous occasions many moons ago, on the way to Colmar, but I’d never managed to actually stop and take a look at it. This changed on Tuesday when it became the destination for a cycle tour.
The name, Neuf-Brisach, might seem misleading to some as the town in fact dates back to the years around 1700, but it distinguishes the location from the ancient city of Breisach over on the other – German – side of the Rhine. Neuf-Brisach is, today, in Alsace (France), but it owes its existence partly to Austria.
In the 17th century all of this area, also including Breisach and Freiburg to the east of the Rhine, was under French rule, but according to the terms of the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697, the now German areas were to be surrendered to Austria, which was under Habsburg rule back then. The French king, Louis XIV, felt the need for a new fortification close to the Rhine border and commissioned his military engineer, the Marquis de Vauban, to build Neuf-Brisach. The plan shown above dates from this period.
Vauban upgraded and built a great many fortifications and military harbours during his lifetime, including Freiburg, Besançon, Maastricht and Dunkirk. A cluster of these were awarded UNESCO World Heritage Site status in 2008. He favoured the star fort design, not because it looked baroque and pretty, but for the military strength it offered. Unlike most older round or rectangular types of fortress, the walls of the star fort did not present easy perpendicular targets for attackers. From older designs it was hard to open cannon fire on potential infiltrators who had come close to the fortress walls, whereas the star fort offered defensive firing options from a range of different and overlapping angles, again not just perpendicular to a main wall. In other words, there were no dead zones. The diamond-shaped points allowed no hiding places for attackers, while an elaborate system of walls and ditches lured them into so-called “killing grounds”.
It’s odd thinking about all this today when you walk around the outside of Neuf-Brisach. There was a herd of sheep fenced in and sheltering from the sun next to one section of the walls, some sort of playground-cum-modern-art thingy on another side, and the only noise came when one approached one of the four city gates, which provide the only road access to the town.
Inside the walls, the chessboard layout of the original street plan has largely been preserved, and the central square, once a parade ground, is now a spacious market place in the centre of this now sleepy, quaint little town. The square’s vastness and the plain gritty surface do serve as a strong reminder of its original purpose, though.
Neuf-Brisach may not be the most monumentally impressive or best known of Vauban’s works, but it’s a wonderful destination for a day out and it’s given me a great excuse to delve a bit further into the history of this area.
Outer wall detail, with pigeon flypast
Epilogue: One interesting thing I found out while researching this entry was that Michaelangelo engineered the building of a star fortification for Florence in the sixteenth century. Who knew?
“So what were you doing when the Wall came down?” This is the question on everyone’s lips today, the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Sad to say, I’m not quite sure. Embarrassed and sad, I should say, as I was only a month into my German degree and should really have been showing a lot more interest…
What I do remember best, oddly enough, relates to someone on my university course who had just had a gap year in Berlin. As soon as he heard the news he was in mental agony that he wasn’t there and felt he couldn’t even go there. Like any semi- conscientious fresher, he knew that we were absolutely Not Permitted to take time off to go places during the week in termtime, and yet… His frustration was tangible. Which is just as well, since as soon as our lecturers got wind of it they basically implored him to go, he must go and bring back his impressions for all of us to share, along with a bag full of fragments of Wall. So off he went and became our foreign correspondent. Incidentally, he’s now Professor of German at my later alma mater and has specialized in East-West German relations.
***
Anyway, I decided to visit Berlin myself a few weeks ago. I’d never been before – it’s a long way from here – but it had felt overdue for some time. As it happened, I had to go all the way up to Usedom for a conference and would be passing through Berlin in any case, so I decided I to make a brief but action-packed overnight stop there. I’d be arriving Friday at 2pm and leaving on Saturday at 12.30pm to get to the conference on time.
After getting slightly lost while trying to find the left luggage section in the overwhelmingly huge, multi-level Hauptbahnhof, I bought a 24-hour ticket for the public transport system and headed towards the Jewish Museum (architectural highlight) and afterwards to Checkpoint Charlie (underwhelming and overpopulated by tourists, but you can’t not go there).
Jewish Museum
Checkpoint Charlie
The Reichstag and Brandenburg Gate were much as expected, but I was a bit disappointed by the memorial to Holocaust victims. I found the line of pavement cafés set out next to it suggested an unnecessarily mercenary, leisurely, voyeuristic touch, plus there were quite a few children running around and jumping from one stone to the next, which rather killed the solemn, introspective atmosphere I’d anticipated. Someone else might have seen the children’s games as a positive sign of life and hope, I guess, but it spoiled the moment for me.
Fernsehturm, Alexanderplatz
Towards sunset – the light was magical that day – I headed east to Alexanderplatz, to marvel at the ostentatious wonders of GDR architecture still displayed there, not least the impressive TV tower. This did feel like a different country: the use of expansive space was alien, as was the feel of the architecture – starker, quite obviously totalitarian, even if you hadn’t known where it was. Seeing the familiar logos and chain stores at street level, though, brought me down to earth. I found myself wishing I’d seen it ten, twenty years ago to compare. I’ve been scouring the internet for pictures ever since.
It was beginning to get dark and I decided I should slowly head for my hotel, which was located towards the north edge of Kreuzberg, the vibrant and multicultural heart of Berlin, many would say. Again I felt as though I was in a different country, this time somewhere in the Near East, with exotic fruit on sale outside small greengrocers’ shops and a heavy smell of spices and cooking in the warm evening air. It was in Kreuzberg that doner kebabs were invented, so it was not difficult to decide what to have to eat that evening. I went to a place that had been recommended by a friend and where there were diverse groups of people having an elaborate sit-down meal in the cosmopolitan restaurant area alongside the takeaway counter.
The following morning, my primary destination was the East Side Gallery, a stretch of original Berlin Wall of some several hundred metres in length and decorated panel-wise with paintings and graffitti in all kinds of styles, each very good in its own way. Again, the low sun was generous in promoting vivid colours and long shadows, and this was definitely the part of the trip I enjoyed photographing most. I met some funny characters along the way – clearly this was just about chucking-out time in some of the area’s many clubs, and a few individuals were quite inquisitive as to exactly why I was photographing this lamp post or that piece of paper. I fell into conversation with two young guys who were very amenable to having their photo taken against an appropriate backdrop. Unfortunately none of us had anything to write with, so I couldn’t take down an e-mail address to send them the picture. If anyone happens to recognize them, please let me know!
Lads by the Wall
And that was it, then – after a leisurely breakfast back at my hotel it was time to head back to the Hauptbahnhof to meet my colleagues so that we could continue our journey to Usedom. Which was quite a different experience that I might write about another time. I’ll definitely be going back to Berlin as soon as I can, though, to spend a bit more time to explore this fantastic, schizophrenic, bittersweet city of many cultures.
A set of Berlin pictures including these and others can be viewedhere.
Today’s entry is going to be rather bitty – though with a long ornithological excursus towards the end that non-bird-nerds should feel free to skip – but I do have what I hope are some interesting word- and phrase-related snippets to share. Some are new discoveries, others welcome jogs to the memory I’ve come across over the last few days.
