Stuffed rolled turkey joint with vegetables

Ingredients

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 175°C or equivalent. Roll out the turkey on a chopping board. Make small incisions in it and push the garlic slivers into these. Then lay the ham slices over the turkey, followed by the spinach leaves (removing any thick stalks beforehand), chopped onion and mozzarella. Season with salt and pepper, and you could also sprinkle over some thyme. Then roll up the turkey as tightly as you can and tie it up securely with kitchen string. Place in the centre of a generously sized roasting tin (any stuffing that fell out during the rolling process can be placed under the joint) and brush with olive oil  – you might not need the whole 2tbsp if the turkey still has skin on it. Mix the chicken stock and wine in a jug and ladle some of this over the meat before putting it into the oven for 45 minutes. You will probably need to ladle over some more of the liquid once or twice during this time so that the bottom of the pan doesn’t dry out and burn.

2. When the 45 minutes have elapsed, add the vegetables to the tin, along with some fresh thyme and the rest of the reserved liquid. Give the veg a good stir in the juices, then return the pan to the oven for another 45 minutes.

3. Leave the meat to rest briefly when it is done, then cut into thick slices and serve with the vegetables and gravy.

While nothing can beat working with original census returns, parish registers and the like for providing as much historical, social, geographical, chronological and cultural contextualization as one can hope to reconstruct – carefully! – from these records of a byegone age or community, the limitations imposed by ONLY having access to these should be obvious: travelling to see an original isn’t always possible, and trawling through heavy tomes, delicate parchment fragments or motion-sickness-inducing microfilms is certainly time-consuming and tiring, plus it can be all the more frustrating if information is illegible, elusive or absent. Online availability and search functions can  and do save a lot of time and effort IF you know how to search and, equally importantly, if the resource allows you to search in ways that are most likely to turn up what you are looking for – if it exists – without being either too narrow or too broad in focus. More about this later, but the basic point I wanted to make here is that for all the time and effort you can save through effective online searching, you are of necessity narrowing your focus each time you search and possibly missing out on important context and tangential discoveries that can ultimately provide a crucial missing link.

So what about the published indexes I mentioned earlier – what makes them so good, if they are neither the original source nor equipped with a high-tech search function? What I ordered was indexes to the (approx. 17th-19th century) baptism, marriage and burial registers for two parishes in South Wales, Llantwit Fardre and Pentyrch, produced and distributed in booklet format by the Glamorgan Family History Society and orderable online via e.g. Genfair. They arrived in the post remarkably quickly and I started flicking through them immediately, and with almost instant success. So who’d have thought a booklet could be so user-friendly? It was neither heavy nor unwieldy, very easy on the eye, there was no scrolling, clicking on links, waiting for pages to load, no mechanical typing of names and dates into boxes, and all sorts of details that caught my eye here and there without me having to make a deliberate decision to search for them. (Of course I’m not seriously surprised by any of this, though I’m not sure whether I should be amused or rather appalled that someone else might be…)

But the advantages of this format go much further, and here I can make direct comparisons with online resources, starting with findmypast.co.uk. Much of the information contained in these same booklets has been digitized and made available to search online at that site (I wrote about this a year ago, when that service launched its main Welsh collection), and I must say that the search parameters are pretty flexible: variants in spelling can be taken on board (and are handled sensitively and intelligently, on the whole) or ignored as you choose, and you can search by fore- and/or surname as you like, plus restrict by date and/or parish if relevant; for some of the records, a digital reproduction of the original pages of the registers can be accessed and browsed, so the online site does win in terms of access to something approaching an original (for those records where they have been made available, at least – coverage does seem patchy). However, the booklet index offers two further approaches that are not available as search options on findmypast; and these approaches prove absolutely invaluable (one could almost say, indispensible) in the context of these rural Welsh communities:

1. Patronymic indexes for baptisms

In the original registers, a 17th- or 18th-century baptism might be recorded as something like “David son of Evan Richard”, preceded or followed by the date of baptism (the mother’s name is not always given). The modern way of doing things would be to assume that little David was identified as David Richard, but depending on date, area and specific family tradition, back then he might in fact have been known henceforth as David Richards, David Evan, David Evans, David Bevan, or even David Evan Richard (with David Pri(t)chard and David ap Evan being further, albeit less likely choices).

GFHS approach to patronymic patterns and spelling variants

The booklets take this “systemic inconsistency” (my term: I know it sounds a bit flippant) into account, offering one index following the modern practice for all baptismal entries but for pre-Victorian entries also providing a further index alphabetized according to the father’s (or in e.g. some cases of illegitimacy, the mother’s) first name. All names are transcribed as they appear in the registers, so one does need to take care to look under e.g. Howel AND Howell AND Howells, but you can see immediately whether there are entries for these (or further) variants and it really doesn’t take long to flick through the entire index if you’re on the lookout for more unusual variants (especially those that might not be alphabetically adjacent).

Online search facilities’ approaches to the same issues

The online resources largely ignore (or are unaware of) the existence of the older naming system. On findmypast, if you suspect the individual you are looking for may have been given an older patronymic-style name, you have to leave the surname blank and hope for a manageable number of results, then click your way through to every individual record to see whether the father’s first name is what you might have expected – which can be pretty time-consuming. In addition to this, some records have been attached to the wrong parish name, or the parish name is missing, so even if you restrict by parish (which is perfectly possible), you might not get an entirely reliable set of results (this is a known issue and they are working on it, by the way).

To the best of my knowledge, only familysearch.com gives you the option of searching using a combination of child’s first name and father’s first name only (other combinations are also possible), and this LDS site also has a powerful, apparently pretty reliable function for taking on board variant spellings. A further resource, freereg.org.uk, which in general I find absolutely laudable in its efforts to make church and chapel register entries freely available online, some of which are just not available on the “bigger” or more commercial sites, really falls by the wayside here and becomes extremely hard to use for older Welsh records: not only are you obliged to enter a (modern-style) surname, but e.g. Evan and Evans are considered two separate names, even if you check the “include variants” option, and so there is a lot of doubling-up on searches and making a mental note of your various “+s” and “-s” search history, assuming you even have a semi-workable surname to search for in the first place. Likewise, ancestry.com is not terribly reliable when it comes to soundex other ways of searching for variants. Ultimately, none of these technologies replaces the watchful human eye in that respect (or, indeed, various others).

A practical example of how some of these features play out: I had an elusive ancestor called Mallt Thomas (according to her marriage record) who was born in around 1735 (calculated from the age given on her burial record). I had hoped to find her baptism in Llantwit Fardre (where she married and was buried) but I drew a blank in both of the baptism indexes for that parish. I decided to take a look in the Pentyrch records while I had them immediately to hand, and hey presto, I found her in the patronymic index: she was the daughter of a Thomas William. The Pentyrch baptism records for this date seem not to be available on findmypast or familysearch, so I wouldn’t have found her there even on the basis of a forename-only search. And on freereg, which does have the records for that date, I’d potentially have had to try out all sorts of guesses for the surname box – admittedly, William(s) would have been one of my first choices, but still, the booklets were much quicker in providing the information I was looking for.

2. Details of abode / address

William(s) turns out to be just about one of the most common surnames (by any of the systems used) in this part of South Wales over the entire period covered by the registers, and another headache I’ve had to deal with on a regular basis is the sheer number of individuals with identical names and similar dates of birth. Not surprisingly, back in the day people were often referred to by attributes other than their name – their profession (think “Jones the Voice” or one or two of the characters from Under Milk Wood) or their abode. My ancestor David Morgan (Mallt Thomas’s son, incidentally) had brothers called Thomas and Evan, but then again so did a great many David Morgans in South Wales at the time. I know from passed-down snippets of information, though, that Thomas was better known as “Twmi’r Gedrys” and Evan as “Ifan o’r Waran”, Gedrys and Waran (or Warren) being the names of the farms they managed. Flicking through the Morgan entries in the Llantwit Fardre registers can be a daunting task – based on the names alone, you can’t see the wood for the trees – but the presence of an additional column on each page for any abode noted in the original PRs can REALLY help to pick out a possible spouse, children etc. Again, spelling variants are part and parcel of this – and place names do genuinely evolve over time – but it really is very quick to scan the “abode” column for any forms of names that might look familiar or resemble others.

How do the online resources compare here? Rather poorly. In most cases you can’t search by abode on any finer level than the name of the parish itself, and even if an address, farm or township is specified in the original records, it is not necessarily transcribed in the indexes that have been made searchable. Findmypast has in some cases double, even triple sets of data derived from different “levels” of indexing, one with the residence included and the other not – so you do need to learn which results to look at first to get hold of this information; better still, look at the original image if it is available (and if your mouse-clicking finger isn’t tired by this point).

Who provides the transcriptions in each case is also of relevance. The family history society transcripts and indexes are put together by genealogists  (largely unpaid volunteers!) with knowledge of the locality concerned, manuscript and handwriting conventions (including a range of abbreviations), and the language(s) of the region. Even the best transcriber of historical records will have to scratch their head and make a “best guess” from time to time, but the results are plausible and variance is only slight. In contrast, the census transcriptions available on the biggest international genealogy site, ancestry.com, are in some cases WILDLY inaccurate and can only have been done by people without the specific range of knowledge mentioned above. People’s names, addresses, ages, family status and occupations can all be mistranscribed, rendering them unfindable in searches, and Welsh placenames understandably present a further level of challenge. Even the National Library of Wales’ (largely excellent, extremely valuable) probate records search is hard to use from the aspect of place names: it’s great that you can search by parish, but in each case only one spelling – sometimes idiosyncratic or obscure – will turn up any results (e.g. “Pen-tyrch” will work, but the normal spelling “Pentyrch” will draw a blank). Sometimes only the Welsh name / spelling is accepted, sometimes only the English: it seems rather random. This must be quite daunting for someone with little or no knowledge of Wales or the Welsh language looking for their Welsh ancestors. The search function also offers the option of searching by “township” – this might be the name of the hamlet or farm where the testator lived, if such specific detail is included in the will or bond – and this functionality is absolutely brilliant IF said township has a stable spelling OR you are good at guessing variants, but there is no soundex function on any of the search parameters. In some cases I have ended up calling up all the wills for a particular parish in order to be certain not to have missed anything due to a rogue spelling used in the will (in fairness to NLW, it is rarely a case of transcriber error in these cases).

At the risk of repeating myself, I’m certainly not out to diss any of the online resources available – each one has its strengths, as I’ve tried to make a point of showing here, and together they are continuing to revolutionize people’s access to family, local and social history, some of them at no cost to the end user. However, this recent experience of the sheer uncomplicated joy of dealing with more low-tech resources that are so reliable and effective has just reminded me that in so many areas, human skills and knowledge remain the key to handling all the “data” available out there, in whatever form it might exist.

Ultimately the frustration of not having a wearable pair of Docs won out, and I set to work to find a pair that were most similar to what I’d had. And voila! I love the round toe, the slightly sleeker silhouette and the absence of such bright yellow stitching on these, compared to the absolutely classic model, and I really do think that the milled leather was the secret to the long life of my previous pair – the uppers never cracked, unlike almost ALL the Docs I’d had for any longer period previously.

And now to make them my own. In the past I had a striking pair of cherry-red square-toed DM shoes, which I loved, and a quite bizarre limited-edition pair of boots in beige(!) hessian(!!), which I dyed purple and loved almost as much, even though they spent most of their lifetime looking rather scruffy and being decidedly non-waterproof. I’ve seen people with beads or trinkets threaded onto the laces of their boots, and I decided to try something similar. On my way to the rather funky bead shop, I happened to go into a cheap accessory store that was having a sale on. I bought two cheap Christmas bracelets and decided to plunder them for sparkly stuff to thread onto the laces of my new boots, magpie that I am. You can see my “plunder stash” and the final result below (you can click on the picture of the boots to see a larger version). It may end up feeling a bit OTT – I’ll have to see, but for now I’m happy.

But hah! At some point I remembered that this coffee machine arrived bright and early one morning while I was in the shower (typical!) – it’s virtually new but was surplus to the requirements of the people who bought it, and generously they asked if it might find a new home here.

I was sceptical at first as I’m not a big coffee drinker, and M is devoted to his “holy ritual” (as it appears to an onlooker) of grinding the beans and going through the whole (messy) rigmarole with his espresso pot. It’s no great secret that I find the coffee it produces too strong and bitter – and yes, lots of different beans have been tried, but no, I will not adulterate my coffee with milk or sugar – and I’d ended up more or less giving up drinking any as a result. On top of that, we were both rather doubtful that the capsule technology this new machine uses could be a match for actual coffee beans.

The long and the short of it, though, is that it’s been a welcome addition to the household. I’ve started drinking coffee in the mornings again, and the volume, strength and flavour of the cupful it produces suits me just fine – I enjoy drinking it. And even M has taken to using it of an evening for the odd espresso after dinner – it’s less labour-intensive and quicker than the empty-grind-fill-wait routine with his “proper” coffee pot.

The pictures on the wall were all cut out of calendars of medieval and pre-Raphaelite art, and they’ve been hanging there for as long as I can remember. They’re beginning to look a bit dog-eared in places by now, but I’m pretty loth to replace them until and unless I can find something I like as much.

Recently I’ve been relying on a small selection of clothes – regularly exchanged and washed, might I add! – and it’s partly because I’d either forgotten what else I had or it was buried at the bottom of a full drawer or cupboard. I’ve now rediscovered some “fresh” things but have taken a critical look at the rest. There are only so many odd old bits of clothes that you can reasonably keep for cleaning / painting / in case of weight loss or weight gain / in the hope that you might actually like them some day…

Any writing project brings with it serious considerations about use of space. In the academic writing I did in the distant past, word counts and style sheets were the all-important units of measurement. Writing for the commercial educational sector brings further constraints, most significantly the need to plan content for each page of each chapter in detail before you’ve even started, and the need for your units to fit onto the page format of the final product. For the first publication of this kind I did, I didn’t really know in advance what kind of space per page was going to be available and this led to much agonizing cutting of material in the latter editing stages (and given that this then had a knock-on effect for the solutions section and the glossary, it was all the more of a headache as a result). For another project, where limited space was a major and deliberate feature, the template I was given to insert content into was so detailed that it more or less automatically generated a WYSIWYG final format and I could see immediately where I needed to economize. This latest project has been somewhere in between these two extremes. While the document template took into account page size/layout and roughly managed things like font size and spacing for the different types and functions of text on any given page, there was still a lot of guesswork regarding how much space various other essential non-textual elements might take up.

Most significantly, this publication was to have lots of full-colour pictures, ranging from thumbnails to double-page spreads, and these in fact accounted for many of these unknown quantities regarding space. The necessity for me to think of the illustration aspect at all times really added a further major layer of planning to the whole project and one that proved at least as complex as the generation of text “content” – and this, I think, was the biggest eye-opener of the whole experience. In many instances I could just indicate where I wanted a photo of what, and someone else would later have the task of sourcing suitable images, but I was also given a list of stock photo sites I could use to source particular images if I wished to do so. I think this combination of perceived freedoms gave me a bit too much ill-founded confidence at first: it was tempting to think the world was my oyster and that I would find a photo of anything I damn well wanted via the powerful search engines each stock photo provider offered, or that writing “please insert photo of x here” would be the end of the matter. Wrong. Big fat wrong.

It was only when I was part of the way through the project that I started actively trying to select my own choice of images for inclusion, having decided that since I do have ideas about what sorts of photos I like and what I don’t, I might as well exercise this choice. And it was at this point that my naivety became blatantly obvious – no, you cannot simply find a picture of this or that brand, this or that paid tourist attraction, or this or that celebrity on stock photo sites, or at least not for any kind of commercial use. This set me into a spiral of despair at first as it necessitated rethinking a number of activities I had planned to base around just these kinds of pictures. Ultimately, though, it led to me having simply to think rather more creatively about how to adapt to the constraints I’d discovered, and although the frustration at not finding a picture of this or that did continue to the end, I think it’s true to say that rather more good ideas were born of this restriction than were nipped in the bud by it. [Insert pithy quote about adversity and creativity here ]

Needless to say, it was quite something to receive the “semi-final” PDF version of the final document, all typeset, in full colour and with all the photos, for detailed proofreading and final tweaks. What needed to be changed at this stage wasn’t generated so much by mistakes – almost all of these had been nit-pickingly spotted and eradicated earlier – or by the desire to reformulate something more impressively / simply / effectively, but rather by aesthetics and more immediate, measurable considerations of space and spacing. This sentence needed to be shortened so that it didn’t run on to a second line or have such an awkward line break, or that item should be deleted or moved so that there was enough space for the picture / map / diagram; here something needed to be moved up or across a bit, while there some colour-coded items needed to be swapped around so that the overall impression was better balanced visually. It was quite a different kind of scrutiny and editing dictated by often very different considerations from what would govern a purely text-based entity, but I have to say that I enjoyed this challenge a great deal.

So now my work is done, and I can breathe a big sigh of relief. Thanks to all those who suffered and stoically put up with my periodic moaning, groaning and gnashing of teeth during this whole project. You know who you are.

First things first, though: It had been bothering me for ages that a cupboard above the fridge that had been transformed from a junk hoarding place into a – in theory at least – practical storecupboard for spare tins, jars and packets of food had ended up really not very practical at all, given that I wasn’t actually tall enough to either see or reach the things right at the back. Fetching a stool to stand on every time I just wanted to check whether I had something seemed a waste of effort. To cut a long story short, I took all the stuff out, put my baking tins (which are rarely used) into the cupboard instead, where they have a LOT more room and now don’t fall out when I open the door (note to self: maybe this will make me more favourably disposed towards baking in future!), and in turn put the food storecupboard contents into the much more accessible cupboard that the baking tins came out of. Result!

This was also the week that saw me missing the Christmas tree, so what better to do than to go and plunder the post-Christmas sales (up to 70% off!) to buy more (yes, MORE!!) decorations for next year’s tree. I got a pack of eight medium-sized gorgeous orange baubles for about €1.80 plus various other bits of bling – nothing tacky, mind – that will also look rather nice in situ.

The achievement of the week – and now we get to the thing that I can’t really take any credit for – was getting the bathroom into rather better shape than it’s been in for some time, and hopefully sustainable shape, too. The mild, damp winter had led to some mould patches on the ceiling – especially above the shower and by the window – becoming more and more apparent and ominous. So, one day in this second week of the year, M donned his oldest clothes and set to work – carefully! – with rubber gloves, safety glasses, a spray canister of strongish bleach solution, and a scrubby sponge. An hour or two later, the ceiling was spotlessly white (and his clothes, in places, decorated with white spots).

Having removed the surface evidence, we needed to tackle the source of the problem: a bad combination of moisture and poor ventilation. Now here I have a confession to make. In all the 13 years I’ve lived here, there’s been a suction ventilator (is there a technical term for these things?) built into the wall that has never worked, and no one had really thought to investigate its innards as its absence of function wasn’t really an issue until this winter. I’d taken the front cover off a couple of times, thinking there might be a switch inside, but there wasn’t and so I’d simply shrugged, closed it back up and forgotten it again. On this occasion, though, M decided that investigative open-heart surgery was probably needed, so he took off not just the front cover but also unscrewed the outer panel of its inner workings. And guess what: it wasn’t even wired up to the mains, hence the lack of functionality. So we deactivated the mains circuit in the bathroom temporarily while the loose wires were screwed into the right connectors, and now we have a very powerful ventilator that kicks in immediately when you switch the bathroom light on, and switches off with a time delay of 5-10 minutes after you turn the light off again. And it sucks. Which is what it’s supposed to do – you really notice that the steam disappears much more quickly after a shower. It isn’t exactly silent – which is why the people who were in the flat before me might have disconnected it – but compared to mould, I know what I’d rather put up with.

Big thanks to M for his sterling work. xx

Part of the first weekend of 2013 was spent assembling this handsome chest of drawers, courtesy of IKEA (as if you hadn’t guessed). I’d had my eye on it for a while and decided it would make a good Christmas present for the flat, though it was only in the lull after Christmas and the New Year that it seemed a good point to actually get it. You hear endless jokes and horror stories about self-assembly furniture experiences, but I have to say I find putting this kind of thing together surprisingly therapeutic. OK, maybe not in the moment when you open the box and discover the three (!) numbered bags containing a total of what seem like hundreds of screws, rivets, nails and dowelling plugs; but if I’m left in peace to work away, I can usually get the thing assembled without a single hammered thumb, forgotten screw or disgruntled curse (M in fact commented on the latter in particular – I’m a terrible one for turning the air blue when a project doesn’t go to plan).

The new bit of furniture has replaced the bookcase containing the cookery books, which has been a great deal less tidy of late than it looks in this picture, so it was rather good to get it out into the hall, where it’s next to the kitchen and not actually in anyone’s way. It in turn has replaced a rather tatty little pine chest of drawers that someone who shall remain nameless spilled a glass of red wine over a while back – the wood is untreated so of course a lovely dark red stain ensued, and it had looked pretty manky ever since – a bit of a disgrace, if truth be told… It has been demoted to the cellar, where it has already been earmarked for storing bits of bike.

The new chest of drawers doesn’t actually have a great deal in it yet – what happened when I cleared the old one was that a lot of the contents were either ready for the bin (including a broken umbrella, some insoles that had gone a bit horrible, a defunct torch and three partnerless gloves), could be stowed away in the cellar or was better stored in the kitchen or bathroom mainly cleaning stuff). Still, it’s nice to have that breathing space for storage, and I bet it’ll be full within a matter of months.

The cupboard from the same range I bought a couple of years ago has become a real feature of the room, so it’s lovely to have something to balance it over on the other side. This earthy red seems to have become one of the dominant colours in the room, and the way it works with the white walls, parquet floor and the other furnishings is just lovely. Well, we think so, anyway!

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 on something, 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.