Poetry – the heart thrills

THREE WISE MEN

Milan, 6 January 2025

Today is 6 January, the day of the Epiphany! The day when the Three Wise Men arrive in Bethlehem to find the Child Jesus. Momentous event! In the words of St. Matthew’s Gospel (I cite the King James version)

And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense and myrrh.

Or, as the Christmas carol puts it

Three Wise Men
We Three Kings of Orient are,
Bearing gifts we traverse afar,
Field and fountain,
Moor and mountain,
Following yonder Star.
Refrain
O Star of Wonder, Star of Night,
Star with Royal Beauty bright,
Westward leading,
Still proceeding,
Guide us to Thy perfect Light.

Gaspard
Born a King on Bethlehem plain,
Gold I bring to crown Him again,
King for ever,
Ceasing never
Over us all to reign.
Refrain

Melchior
Frankincense to offer have I,
Incense owns a Deity nigh:
Prayer and praising
All men raising,
Worship Him God on High.
Refrain

Balthazar
Myrrh is mine; its bitter perfume
Breathes a life of gathering gloom;—
Sorrowing, sighing,
Bleeding, dying,
Sealed in the stone-cold tomb.
Refrain

Three Wise Men
Glorious now behold Him arise,
King, and God, and Sacrifice;
Heav’n sings Hallelujah:
Hallelujah the earth replies.
Refrain

The Three Wise Men are, of course, important characters in our annual crèche. Ever since Christmas Day, they have been travelling across the furniture of our living room, on their way to Bethlehem. This year, I have had them accompanied by a retinue worthy of their rank.

I found the figurines of the retinue in a box where they had been carefully stored away by my mother-in-law many years ago. It seemed a pity not to bring them out into the light of day. I think it all looks pretty impressive! (But we have to do something about the camels; I’ve been telling my wife for years that we need to find some more camels, one camel simply isn’t enough. And we have to get a statue to replace the kneeling Wise Man; kneeling before the Baby Jesus is OK, but he can’t be on his knees the whole trip to Bethlehem …).

Here, we can see the tail-end of the cortege.

I added the birds because they were also in the box. A bit odd, but why not? Maybe the Wise Men were like St. Francis, they were listened to by the birds (boy, are we going to have fun when we set up the crèche with our grandson, possibly grandchildren, in a few years’ time! Who knows what interesting additions we could come up with!).

And now the Three Wise Men have arrived at the manger and are adoring the Baby Jesus!

This scene of the Adoration of the Magi has been painted over and over again by European artists. I pick here just one of the many offerings. It is by the Flemish painter Hugo van der Goes, who painted it in about 1470.

In truth, though, I prefer the rendering of the Three Wise Men in the mosaics of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna.

Dressed as they are as Persians, wearing the Phrygian cap which Romans seemed to think all Persians wore, they fit better with what the Gospel of St. Matthew had to say: “behold, there came wise men from the east”. Now Matthew didn’t actually say how many Wise Men there were, but pretty quickly most Christian sects settled for three, one for each gift. Matthew also didn’t say how old they were, but clearly by the time these mosaics were laid down it was generally agreed that they represented the three ages of Man, so we have one old one, one middle-aged one, and one young one. It was only later that it was decided that they also represented the three races known to Europeans: the Europeans themselves, the peoples of the Middle-East, and the peoples of Africa. Paintings of the Magi are some of the earliest representations of Black people in European art. Here is a lovely example from an Adoration of the Magi by Hieronymus Bosch.

Painters don’t seem to have been much interested in what was happening to the Three Wise Men on their way to Bethlehem. But T.S. Eliot, in his poem Journey of the Magi, did try to imagine what the trip was like. I cite here the first twenty lines of the poem.

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Compared to this description, our Three Wise Men have had it pretty easy: nice, warm living room, easy travel across the furniture, respectful entourage …

As told in St. Matthew’s Gospel, the arrival of the Three Wise Men was like a poke in a hornet’s nest. In Jerusalem, they asked, “Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him.” Matthew goes on, “When Herod the king had heard these things, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him. And … he demanded of them where Christ should be born. And they said unto him, In Bethlehem … Then Herod … said, Go and search diligently for the young child; and when ye have found him, bring me word again, that I may come and worship him also.” But, Matthew tells us, after giving Jesus his gifts, “being warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed into their own country another way.” He goes on, “behold, the angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word: for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him. When he arose, he took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt.” The Flight to Egypt was also a popular theme for European painters. I show one example, by my favourite painter, Caravaggio, Rest on the Flight to Egypt, where one of the painter’s luminous angels is playing music on a viol to soothe Mary and Jesus in their slumber (the music held by Joseph is readable; it is a motet by the Flemish composer Noel Bauldeweyn dedicated to the Madonna, with a text from the Song of Songs, Quam pulchra es, “How beautiful you are”; nice touch).

Alas, Herod was not a man to be crossed. Matthew tells us, “Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under.” This Massacre of the Innocents was, too, a popular theme for European artists. I show here an example of the genre by Peter Breughel the Elder.

I’m actually being a little economical with the truth. This is really a copy of Breughel’s painting, by his son Peter Breughel the Younger. The original was once owned by the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II. For some reason – queasiness? – he had the dead children painted over. This copy retains the dead children.

Quite by chance, just before Christmas, we stumbled across a very sophisticated crèche, in a place called Baggio, which once was a village but then got swallowed up by Milan some 150 years ago. There, in the crypt of a church, over the last forty years or so, dedicated local volunteers have created 58 scenes from the Bible, with the Nativity being the central scene. Some of the scenes have running water, others have moving figurines, … it’s very impressive. Here is a shot of the first scene, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (with a delightfully slithery snake in the tree).

Here is one of Moses and the parting of the waters of the Red Sea.

And here is a shot of the central scene of the Nativity.

As I say, very impressive … although I will admit to having been just a teeny-weeny bit jealous. We’ll soon be packing away the crèche and its figurines for another year, but I’m already thinking how we could expand the offerings next year. Running water and moving figurines is a bit beyond me. But maybe Herod in a palace in Jerusalem? The Massacre of the Innocents? Some “snow” for the Wise Men to trudge wearily through? At least let’s fix the camel problem!

GIN

Vienna, 26 January 2024

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while. But for reasons that I cannot explain, I have procrastinated. Nevertheless, I have finally got myself to put pen to paper and get to work.

The germ for the post was planted several years ago during a hike my wife and I were taking along the edges of Lake Como. We dropped into a café to have ourselves a cappuccino. There, on a shelf, the café owner had lovingly placed a long row of bottles of gin, all of them some strange colour: pastel yellow, blue, or even – I think – pink. I say “I think”, because the memory of it all is somewhat fuzzy now. At the time, I took a photo of that row of bottles to show to my readers – as I say, I thought immediately of writing a post about gin – but somewhere along the line I decided to delete it, convincing myself I would never get around to writing the post. This photo, which I created with a bit of photoshopping, will have to stand in for that initial vision of mine.

All those coloured gins startled me. I have since read on the internet that this is the latest fad in gin making – or perhaps, to put it a little more cynically, the latest way for gin makers to differentiate themselves from their competitors. As one internet entry puts it, “coloured gins are having a moment, the latest phase in the great craft gin revival. You can now choose from a whole spectrum, including pink grapefruit gin, Amalfi lemon gin the colour of a pale sunrise, bitter orange gin like alcoholic marmalade and lavender gins that change colour on contact with tonic. But the most popular is violet.”

I dislike to think of myself as a traditionalist, I’ve always been suspicious of tradition, but hello! coloured gin! what is the world coming to?! I am firmly of the opinion that gin should be a colourless liquid to which you add things to enhance its basic taste and possibly – just possibly – add colour.

Talking of gin’s basic taste, I think we all know that this primarily comes from the addition of juniper berries, from juniper trees like this beautiful example.

Juniper is after all in the drink’s name. The ancestor of British gin is Flemish/Dutch jenever. Jenever making was brought to England by traders or by English soldiers returning from fighting in the Low Countries. Linguistic laziness eventually shortened jenever to gin. But my surfing has shown me that today’s gin makers add other “botanicals” to their gin, to distinguish it from everyone else’s. Citrus “notes” seem to be important, imparted by the addition of the peels of lemon, or bitter orange, or lime, or grapefruit. Then small amounts of all manner of spices can be added: anise, fennel, caraway, coriander, licorice, orris, longan, baobab, savory, angelica, cardamom, grains of paradise, cubeb, cinnamon, cassia, nutmeg, almond, saffron … the mind whirls in front of this veritable cornucopia of spices.

And it doesn’t finish there. Even pine needles and cones can be added, or frankincense! Of course, which extra “botanicals” are added are closely guarded secrets.

I wouldn’t want readers to think I am a frequent drinker of gin – unlike the late Queen Elizabeth, who was, I was somewhat astonished to learn, still knocking back two gin-based drinks daily in her nineties: a gin and Dubonnet with lots of ice before lunch, and a dry martini after it.

I will just have a gin and tonic from time to time, when the fancy takes me – and when the ingredients are available. Harking back to my earlier harrumphing, readers will see that a G&T is satisfactorily colourless.

I am glad to see that I am in good company in my fondness for G&T. Philip Larkin, a poet whom I greatly admire, was an aficionado. We have him here nursing a G&T.

He once wrote to his lover: “life is very narrow without glasses OF GIN AND TONIC”. Note the capital letters and the plural “glasses” – he imbibed considerably more gin and tonic than I do. He even devoted several lines of one of his poems, Sympathy in White Major, to the making of a gin and tonic:

When I drop four cubes of ice
Chimingly in a glass, and add
Three goes of gin, a lemon slice,
And let a ten-ounce tonic void
In foaming gulps until it smothers
Everything else up to the edge,
I lift the lot in private pledge:
He devoted his life to others.

But in my mind the G&T is also firmly anchored to the colonial period of India, where it was particularly popular among the British colonialists. I’ve read that their excuse for quaffing large amounts of G&T was to ingest quinine as a prophylactic against malaria – tonic water contains quinine. Malaria was certainly a problem in India – my father contracted it while a colonialist in India – but I’ve also read that actually this can only have been an excuse, because there isn’t enough quinine in tonic water to work as a prophylactic. In any event, I throw in a photo of two British colonialists languidly seated and being fanned by an Indian servant. On the table, one can make out what seems to be a glass of G&T.

Although I am now firmly in the G&T camp, my gin drinking habit didn’t start there. I began knocking back gin when I was 17, maybe even 16 – yes, it was easier to get served in pubs when I was young – and my gin drink of choice was what I remember being called a gin and lime, although the proper name for this drink seems to be a gimlet. Again, I am pleased to know that I was in good company. Gimlets play a not insignificant role in Raymond Chandler’s book “The Long Goodbye”.

Early on in the story, the hero, or maybe we should call him the anti-hero, the “hard-boiled” detective Philip Marlowe, meets a friend, who happens to be British, in a bar:

We sat in a corner of the bar at Victor’s and drank gimlets. “They don’t know how to make them here,” he said. “What they call a gimlet is just some lime or lemon juice with a dash of sugar and bitters. A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose’s Lime Juice and nothing else. It beats martinis hollow.”

Rose’s Lime Juice cordial … an icon of my youth:

My British grandmother often had a bottle, but not for making gimlets; I don’t remember her ever drinking anything stronger than a dry sherry. She would make lime drinks for us grandchildren, adding water to a generous portion of Rose’s Lime Juice. Yes, I have very fond memories of that cordial. My reading tells me, though, that today’s mixologists (strange word …) pooh-pooh on Rose’s Lime Juice in its modern form, considering it far sweeter than the Lime Cordial made by the original Mr. Rose. As a result, there is a cottage industry in the production of lime cordials considered to be closer to the Real Thing, and the gimlets made with these revisited cordials are claimed to taste much better. If ever I end up in some bar offering one of these alternative lime cordials, I might try a gimlet. Otherwise, I’ll stick with my G&T, thank you.

Chandler’s tales of Marlowe are great, by the way. If any of my readers have never dipped into them, I highly recommend they pick up a copy. And of course, a good number of his books have been turned into films over the decades. Liam Neeson is the latest well-known actor to play Marlowe, but there have been a number of others before him: Elliott Gould, Robert Mitchum, James Garner, Robert Montgomery. But to my mind by far the best Marlowe was Humphrey Bogart, who back in 1946 played him in “The Big Sleep”.

It was also Bogart who, in “Casablanca”, after Ingrid Bergman has entered his nightclub, talked to him, and left, utters the anguished phrase: “of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”

Which brings us back to gin.

Marlowe’s friend in “The Long Goodbye” says gimlets beat martinis hollow. I wouldn’t know, I don’t think I’ve ever had a martini. But I’m sure James Bond – who must be the best known martini drinker in the world – would have disagreed. Here, turning to films again, we have Sean Connery, the greatest of all the James Bonds (at least that’s what I think), preparing himself a martini.

Mind you, I don’t think Bond’s martini is quite the Real Thing, which I read should be a mix of gin and dry vermouth – the precise ratio is of course a source of heated debate in certain mixological circles but the current consensus seems to be around 5 parts gin to one part vermouth. The two should be poured onto ice cubes, stirred not shaken, strained into a chilled cocktail glass, and served with a green olive or twist of lemon peel as garnish.

In his book “Casino Royale”, however, Ian Fleming has Bond ordering another kind of dry martini at the bar in the casino:

‘A dry martini,’ he said. ‘One. In a deep champagne goblet.’
‘Oui, monsieur.’
‘Just a moment. Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?’

Sounds like a bit of a Frankenstein martini, if you ask me. And Bond’s well known comment “shaken, not stirred” has mixologists shaking their head in disapproval; it should be the other way around. I’m sure that other famous martini drinker, the late Queen, would have pursed her lips in disapproval, even though, as we know since the 2012 London Olympics, she and Bond were BFFs.

This mention of the House of Windsor lets me segue smoothly to another gin-based drink which I have also never tried, a fruit-based punch using Pimm’s No. 1 Cup as the base. To make it, get a bottle of Pimm’s No. 1 Cup.

This is basically gin in which a whole lot of herbs and some citrus have been macerated; quite what herbs and citrus we are talking about is – of course, as usual – a closely guarded secret. Pour a slug of this potion into a jug, add a generous portion of lemonade, and then bung in sliced and diced vegetables and fruit; which vegetables and fruit exactly is up to you, but I’ve seen mention of cucumbers and celery on the vegetable side and orange and strawberries on the fruit side. The end result will look something like this.

This seems to be quite a posh drink. For instance, we see here King Charles, at a time when he was still a young Prince Charles, gulping down a Pimm’s at a polo game – note polo game, not a football game or rugby game or some other game which we normal mortals take part in or watch.

Here he is again, “a little bit older, a little more bent” as the song goes, pensively clutching his glass of Pimm’s.

It’s very popular at Royal Ascot, which – obviously, given its name – the Royals attend.

Following suit from the Royals, the other race goers deck themselves out in their finest, the ladies with those ridiculous hats English women love to wear, the gents in morning suits, which are equally ridiculous.

Everyone has a flutter on the horses.

And the Pimm’s flows freely all day.

These two drinkers of Pimm’s seem to have backed the wrong horse, though.

It’s also very popular at the Henley Royal Regatta, where anyone who is anyone wears a blazer (I think to signal that they belong to a boat club somewhere).

And of course Pimm’s flows freely.

Although not quite in the same posh league these days, Pimm’s is also quaffed in large quantities at Wimbledon. Just because I find him very simpatico, I throw in a photo of Stanley Tucci at Wimbledon clutching his Pimm’s.

I think readers will get the general idea from what I have written above that gin is a very respectable drink these days. Which was certainly not the case a mere three hundred years ago. In the early 1700s, the British government decided – as an anti-French move (so what’s new…) – to greatly increase import duties on French brandy. At the same time, it made it much, much easier for people to get into the business of making gin: it broke the monopoly of the London Guild of Distillers on the making of spirits, it reduced taxes on the distillation of spirits, and it revoked the need for a license to make spirits. Add to this the fact that this was a period which saw a drop in the prices of barley – used to make the mash, which was then distilled to obtain the spirits – which very much helped to make the final product cheap. Add also to this the fact that there was a general rise in salaries (from absolutely wretched to slightly less so) and a concomitant general drop in food prices, which meant that the poor had somewhat more disposable income to spend on liquor. Add all of that up and you have the makings of a perfect storm. Thousands of people all over the country got themselves a pot still and started making gin. This is a pretty simple type of pot still.

This pot still is a little more sophisticated.

Many of these new gin makers opened gin-shops to sell their rot-gut. Here, we have a print of a gin shop made towards the end of the 1700s (note that it’s all women and one child; commentators of the time were particularly exercised that this was not just a problem with men).

Many others simply made it at home in their kitchen for their personal consumption.

And rot-gut it was! Pot stills produced a very coarse product, and some pretty awful things were added to make it more palatable. Turpentine was one, to give the stuff “woody notes”. Sulphuric acid was another, although luckily the acid didn’t distill over with the ethanol; it merely reacted with it to form diethyl ether, which added a sweetish taste to the product.

The awful taste didn’t seem to matter very much. People, especially the poor, began drinking huge amounts of gin. What came to be known as the Gin Craze had started. Quite soon, the authorities realised they had a serious social problem on their hands as drunkenness and disorderly behaviour – especially among the poor and involving women as much as men – became endemic. William Hogarth’s print, “Gin Lane”, gives an idea of how the governing classes saw the problem.

By 1736, the Middlesex Magistrates had this to say: “It is with the deepest concern your committee observe the strong Inclination of the inferior Sort of People to these destructive Liquors, and how surprisingly this Infection has spread within these few Years … it is scarce possible for Persons in low Life to go anywhere or to be anywhere, without being drawn in to taste, and, by Degrees, to like and approve of this pernicious Liquor.”

Already in 1734, the story of one Judith Defour had shocked the nation – or at least the superior Sort of People. Judith had taken her two year old daughter out of the workhouse, where she had placed her earlier, for a visit of a few hours, and had met up with her friend Sukey. The court records document what followed:

“On Sunday night we took the child into the fields, and stripp’d it, and ty’d a linen handkerchief hard about its neck to keep it from crying, and then laid it in a Ditch. And after that, we went together and sold the coat and stay for a shilling, and the petticoat and stockings for a groat. We parted the money, and join’d for a quartern of gin.”

The little girl died in the ditch. Defour was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death, and hanged at Tyburn (note the grandstands; this was spectacle indeed).

The public outrage over this story forced Parliament to act. Over the next fifteen years, various laws were passed which eventually brought gin drinking under control.

It’s hard not to read about the Gin Craze and think about today’s opioid crisis, or the crack epidemic of the 1980s, or the many previous epidemics of heroin, amphetamines, morphine, and on and on. Different chemicals, same problem: the desire – the need – to dull the pain of living, and a ready supply of cheap chemicals to do it.

And on that sombre note, I will finally crack open a bottle of – colourless – craft gin someone gave us, aromatised – so the label informs me – with juniper of course, but also orange peel, cardamom, angelica root, coriander, ginger, cinnamon, and maybe a few other things, and, more or less in Larkin’s words:
I’ll drop four cubes of ice / Chimingly in a glass, and add / Three goes of gin, a lemon slice, / And let a ten-ounce tonic void / In foaming gulps until it smothers / Everything else up to the edge. / And then I’ll lift the lot and ask myself:
“Am I a superior Sort of Person or an inferior Sort of Person?”

MY FATHER AND POETRY

Milan, 26 March 2023

A few days ago, I realised with a start that it was my father’s birthday. He would have been 106 years old had he made it this far – a venerable age indeed. But he shuffled off this mortal coil some twenty years ago already, and hopefully is singing with the choirs invisible (although he was terribly tone deaf; hearing him sing was a sufferance).

I am now at an age when I can reflect on my father more as an equal than as a Father Figure. We were never really that close: a generational thing, I think – he was a child of the severe, repressed, melancholic post-War 1930s, I was a child of the optimistic 1960s. But the gap between us was intensified by our different characters – he was a brooder, I never brood. I don’t suppose it helped that I hardly grew up with him. From the ages of 8 to 18 I spent three-quarters of the year away from the family. Most of that was in boarding school, but one school holiday a year was also spent with relations; for all of my life my father worked outside the UK.

But in one thing, I recognise a deep similarity; he was, and I am, a romantic. In my case, I feel it is of a piece with my cheerful character. But in his case, it was quite surprising. Normally, he was a measured man, carefully balancing all things, and pronouncing well argued verdicts; not surprisingly, he had spent much of the first half his working life as a judge and spent the second half ensconced in a law school as a professor. But when it came to poetry, my father’s romantic side emerged into the light and he was floridly, lushly, ridiculously romantic. It seems to me that his 106th birthday is a good excuse to pay tribute to his poetic inclinations (very different from mine, I have to say), through flashbacks of moments when he bared his romantic soul to me through poetry.

Omar Kahyam’s Rubaiyat, or rather Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of it, was a favourite of his. I still have memories, fond ones now, pleasantly blurred by the passage of time, of my father declaiming quatrains from Edward Fitzgerald’s – very loose – translation of the Rubaiyat. This was one of his favourite quotes – I still see him in my mind’s eye declaiming it at lunch one day.

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, A Loaf of Bread—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

He once asked me what I thought of Fitzgerald’s poetry. In the callowness of my youth, I found it precious and somewhat ridiculous, but I smiled diplomatically and I think – at least, I hope – I managed not to sound too, too negative (although I have to say that even with the wisdom of old age I find Fitzgerald’s poetry too precious for my tastes). After his death, when my mother invited me to go through his books and take those I wanted, I took his copy of the Rubaiyat. It still graces my shelves.

Once my father retired, he gave freer rein to his poetic inclinations. On one of my infrequent trips to visit my parents, he confessed to me an adoration of Dante’s Inferno and Paradiso. He declared that when he read Dante – in the original, old Italian; he was a gifted linguist – the verse would grip him in his vitals. I was rather startled by this turn of phrase from such a measured man. One of my sisters bought him a large, expensive, limited edition, book of Dante’s Inferno and Paradiso, complete with pictures. But that I didn’t take. In the first place, it weighed a ton. But in addition I was also mindful of what my father said to my mother-in-law when my parents came down to Milan to meet her for the first time. She had proudly shown him one of her treasured possessions, an exact replica of the Bible of Borso d’Este. It’s a beautiful book, enlivened throughout with lovely miniatures.

But my father told her that he was interested in reading books rather than admiring them. The poor woman was quite deflated.

I join him in loving Dante – although in my case, in modern Italian “translation” – but our differing characters brought us to diverge on which parts we liked most. Thoroughly romantic as he was, it was the parts where Dante dwells on his impossible love for Beatrice in Paradise which he delighted in most.

I, instead, found Dante’s Paradise really boring. But his Hell was wonderful, full of fantastic and fun characters.

There was also a time when the opening lines of Inferno resonated with me:

When half way through the journey of our life
I found that I was in a gloomy wood,
because the path which led aright was lost.

Have we not all asked ourselves at some point in the later years of our lives if we have strayed from the path we should have taken? What if I had taken that other job, gone to that other university? … What if … what if …?

Another set of books – notebooks, actually – that I took after my father’s death was the diary he wrote from the ages of 16 to 22. This is the first volume.

The diaries start abruptly at the beginning of 1934 – perhaps the result of a New Year’s resolution – and finish equally abruptly in 1939, a piece of blotting paper still sitting between the pages waiting to dry the next entry. Reading them was wonderful. Suddenly, the older man with such gravitas that I had known became a young lad doing silly things with his friends. It is really quite endearing. In the later diaries, when he’s at University, he tells of how he meets my mother, the French friend of his sister’s who is in the UK to brush up her English. Knowing how the story ends (and personally very thankful that it ends that way, allowing me as it does to be born!), it’s a treat to read “hot off the press” how their relationship unfolded. The first thing my father did was to take my mother up to his rooms for tea and cake (I was quite surprised he was allowed to do this, perhaps he smuggled her in) and they read poetry out loud. He chose to read “The Isles of Greece” by Byron.

The isles of Greece! the isles of Greece
Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace,
Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung!
Eternal summer gilds them yet,
But all, except their sun, is set.

The Scian and the Teian muse,
The hero’s harp, the lover’s lute,
Have found the fame your shores refuse:
Their place of birth alone is mute
To sounds which echo further west
Than your sires’ ‘Islands of the Blest’.

The mountains look on Marathon—
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dream’d that Greece might still be free;
For standing on the Persians’ grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.

It goes on a good deal longer but I think my readers get the picture. Definitely not a poem I would have chosen, but my father was overwhelmed with emotion, confiding to his diary that “there were tears in my eyes most of the time and I was quivering all over when I had finished.”

My father writes that my mother read a French poem, although he doesn’t report which one she chose. I’m sure it was in a romantic vein; my mother also had a wide romantic streak running through her soul.

My father’s diaries show that the Young Him imagined himself as quite the man about town. Even while building the relationship with my mother, he continued flirting outrageously with other women. In some cases, he was even moved to turn his hand to writing poems about them. As I went through his papers after his death, I came across a cache of these poems, typed up; my father was an intensive user of the typewriter, the rapid click of its keys being a constant soundtrack to my youth. In truth, the poems are not very good, but I treasure them. And at least he tried to write poetry. I have never dared, except for one light-hearted “poem” (rhyming doggerel, really) which I wrote many years ago in response to a poem my son had written at primary school – both poems hang on the wall, side by side, in our apartment.

In his fifties, my father turned back to an earlier love, that of Latin poetry; he had studied Latin and Greek at school and did Classics at University, and he had never lost his deep admiration of the Classics (an admiration he tried to instil in me with embarrassing results; I barely scraped a pass in Latin and Greek at O-levels and then escaped from these hated subjects forever). He was particularly fond of the love poems of Catullus and dedicated his spare moments in his later years to translating them. I remember him trying out one of his translations on me. I think it was of this poem, which is one of Catullus’s better known love poems (I give it in translation, although not translated by my father).

Let us live, my Lesbia, let us love,
and all the words of the old, and so moral,
may they be worth less than nothing to us!
Suns may set, and suns may rise again:
but when our brief light has set,
night is one long everlasting sleep.
Give me a thousand kisses, a hundred more,
another thousand, and another hundred,
and, when we’ve counted up the many thousands,
confuse them so as not to know them all,
so that no enemy may cast an evil eye,
by knowing that there were so many kisses.

I remember that his version had the line “Kiss me, Kate” in it somewhere. I suppose he was trying to modernise the poem, Lesbia not being a name one hears nowadays. Why Kate? Maybe it gave him a rhyme, maybe he found the double K pleasing. In any event, I smiled and murmured something noncommittal before escaping. Quite recently, I laughed out loud when on a family WhatsApp group my younger sister confessed to doing the same when my father buttonholed her to try out one of his translations on her. Where did those translations go, I wonder? I found no trace of them among his papers. Perhaps he despaired and threw them away.

I wanted to finish this post with a poem written by a son to his father, but the only one I could find which was half-way satisfying was the poem by Dylan Thomas where he is talking to his dying father. It starts:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Alas, the poem is too late for my father, the dying of the light happened twenty years ago for him. And anyway I’m not sure he would have burned and raved at the close of his day. He believed in God and an afterlife (another difference between him and me) and I’m sure he saw Death as merely a doorway to be passed through to another life.

So let me finish instead with a poem which I dedicate to my wife – my Lesbia, my Kate, my Beatrice. It is a sonnet written by Shakespeare, and it speaks of the love one has in the late autumn of our lives. More satisfying, I think, than the lush romance my father delighted in.

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

THE ONE THAT NEARLY GOT AWAY

Vienna, 20 February 2023

I’m normally quite good at writing posts about the wonderful experiences which my wife and I have enjoyed as we pass through this Autumn of our lives. Sometimes, though, they escape me. We get carried along by the River of Life as it rolls remorselessly on and soon something else has happened which becomes the topic of my next post. That experience disappears from the rear-view mirror and is gone for ever.

This post is about one such experience, which I am determined will not wriggle free of my electronic pen, because it was simply too wonderful not to document. It’s been eight years since it occurred but it has never quite disappeared from my mind’s eye. Every time the memories resurface, I castigate myself for my laziness and vow to write That Post. I am finally making good on that vow.

As I said, I have to take my readers back eight years, when we went to spend the Christmas break in Mexico with our son and daughter – he was working there, and she flew down from New York where she was working. As a last trip before we went back to Bangkok, where I was stationed at the time, the two of us along with our son (our daughter had had to go back) flew down to the state of Chiapas, which borders with Guatemala. We had arranged for a car and driver to pick us up in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, from which we were to take a one-week tour. The itinerary was put together by an agency, with limited input from our side; we were happy to go along with their recommendations. And so we found ourselves going to the Sumidero Canyon, San Cristobal de las Casas, Palenque, a couple of Mayan ruins in the Reserva de la Biósfera Monte Azules down by the Guatemalan border, and finishing off in Villahermosa in the neighbouring state of Tabasco (I had to check our photos floating around in the i-cloud to remember where we’d been).

Ever since my wife and I, together with my mother-in-law, had toured central and southern Mexico back in the early 1980s, I have had an enduring fascination for the ruins of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican civilisations. On that earlier trip, we had visited Palenque, so I looked forward to revisiting the site. Alas, the intervening years have not been kind. The site was in good shape, I hasten to say; that wasn’t the problem. Actually, the site was in too good a shape, very much tamed, with the surrounding semi-tropical vegetation cut back and kept under control, a far cry from my memory of Palenque as a place where the ruins poked out of the jungle. And it was terribly crowded! The curse of having been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, I’m sure. So I’m afraid to say I felt slightly deflated after the visit.

The next day, the driver announced that we would be visiting two other Mayan sites today. They were quite remote, requiring us to drive a good long way down to the Guatemalan border. It all sounded very intriguing, but after Palenque I, for one, was game for a little adventure. So off we went, down this rather minor road, with our driver doing some alarming overtaking along the way. After a while, we reached the first site, Bonampak, which lay just off the road.

Its main claim to fame are its murals, which are indeed quite remarkable. I thought of inserting here some of our photos of these murals which are adrift in my i-cloud, but I find that other photos available on the internet are much better, so as is my habit I have instead shamelessly lifted these two photos, showing some of the murals.

On we drove, until finally we reached a river (I later learned that Guatemala started on the other side). Our driver parked the car and we got out. Where was the site, we asked, looking around. Oh no, he said, you could only get to the site by boat. We would be taking one of the boats (rather frail-looking, I found) pulled up on the bank, and it would take us about 40 minutes to get there.

And with that, he handed us over to the skipper of one of the boats and brightly informed us that he’d be waiting for us. Right, we said, and took our seats somewhat gingerly in the boat. As the skipper roared off upstream, I was feeling quite like Indiana Jones setting off into the jungle to discover a long-lost temple stuffed with gold.

A sudden squall of rain dampened the thrill, especially as our trousers and shoes began to get seriously wet. But the rain left mist trailing romantically through the increasingly thick jungle on the Mexican side of the river.

Finally, our skipper pulled up to a jetty and motioned us to take a path which disappeared off into the jungle. And so we climbed up through thick vegetation until we finally entered some moss-covered ruins jutting out of the jungle.

The path led us to a dark, creepy corridor, which we felt our way along

until we finally exited back into the light.

We walked into a clearing, where we could see other ruins peaking out of the surrounding jungle.

We had entered the ancient Mayan city of Yaxchilán.

I find any ancient ruin fascinating – the pull of a place once the centre of a vibrant life but now just a tumbled pile of mouldering stones. Others before me have captured this melancholy fascination of ruins in words much better than mine. Sultan Mehmet II, the Ottoman conqueror of Constantinople, is said to have murmured a distich by the Persian poet Ferdowsi as he surveyed the ruins of what had been the Sacred Palace of the emperors of Byzantium:

The Spider has wove her web in the imperial palace,
The Owl has sung her watch song upon the towers of Samarkand.

While an anonymous Anglo-Saxon penned these lines about Roman ruins he encountered somewhere in Britain:

Wondrous is this wall-stead, wasted by fate.
Battlements broken, giant’s work shattered.
Roofs are in ruin, towers destroyed,
Broken the barred gate, rime on the plaster,

Walls gape, torn up, destroyed, consumed by age.
A hundred generations have passed.
Earth-grip holds the proud builders, departed, long lost,
In the hard grasp of the grave. How often has this wall,

Hoary with lichen, red-stained, outlasted the passing reigns,
Withstanding the storms; the high arch now has fallen …

(At this point, there is a gap, for the parchment on which the poem was written has itself suffered badly from the passage of time).

But there is something very special about ruins like Yaxchilàn immersed in jungle. It has to do, I think, with Nature much more obviously reclaiming what is hers, a powerful reminder of the warning uttered endlessly by the catholic priests of my boyhood on Ash Wednesday as they crossed your forehead with ash, “Remember, man, that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.” That sense of Nature slowly growing back and smothering men’s foolish dreams in stone is overpowering in Angkor Wat, of which this one photo, endlessly reproduced, is a potent example.

But it was also there in Yaxchilàn, all the more so since the overcast weather gave the site a brooding feel.

And so, with the site more or less to ourselves, we wandered from ruin to ruin.

Finally, we climbed a long flight of stairs that disappeared up into the surrounding vegetation.

At the top of which there was this structure.

And beyond which rolled away to the horizon the thick jungle of the Reserva de la Biósfera Monte Azules.

As we walked around we came across carved stone steles showing the proud rulers of this once thriving city state.

Looking at them, it was hard not to murmur Shelley’s Ozymandias:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away

And so we travellers walked back down to the river, got into our boat, and skimmed along the river to our waiting driver.

SPRING IS HERE!

Sori, 8 March 2021

“Spring his here” crooned Frank Sinatra. And indeed – at least in the little corner of the Northern Hemisphere on which my wife and I are currently perched – Spring is here! Frank then goes on to lament the lack of love in his life, but that is not our problem. My wife and I can just focus on the flowers exploding into life all around us, humming soulfully a tune or two as we do so.

As usual in Liguria, mimosa was the first to burst onto the scene, with joyous sprays of canary yellow.

Those are fading now, their place being taken by crocuses (high up in the hills)

various fruit trees

and of course daffodils! Gardens and public parks have a sprinkling, but my eye was really caught by this bevy of them planted in a corner of an olive-tree terrace.

It’s been decades now since I’ve lived in the UK, but first impressions on the young mind are indelible (as opposed to impressions on the old mind which I find to be distressingly delible). My spending the Springs of my youth in rural Somerset, in that prep school which I mentioned in a recent post, has meant that in my mind’s eye Spring will always be that triumvirate of flowers: the snowdrop, the crocus, and the daffodil, which someone at the school had planted in various corners of the school grounds.
Later, when I moved on to my public school (in Brito-speak, a private boarding school for boys (in my time) aged between 13 and 18), my soul was stirred during my first Spring there by bunches of daffodils which sprang out of the lawn in front of my House.

That same Spring, just off the path which led down from the House to the main school buildings, I discovered a group of narcissi, those cousins of the daffodil, scattered down a slope.

I was enchanted.

Alas, I quickly learned that showing a delight in flowers would definitely put me in the uncool category at school. I risked being compared to Fotherington-Thomas in the book “Down with Skool”. Molesworth, the purported author of the book, has this to say about Fotherington-Thomas: “you kno he say Hullo clouds hullo sky he is a girlie and love the scents and sounds of nature … he is uterly wet and a sissy” (Molesworth’s spelling is also quite erratic). This gallery of drawings in the book of Fotherington-Thomas, by the great Ronald Searle, says it all.
At the age of 13-14, that was definitely not where I wanted to be! And so I buried my uncool delight in daffodils and other flowers of Spring under deep layers of teenager cynicism and world-weariness. A few years later, when I got to know it, I could only secretly thrill to Wordsworth’s poem “Daffodils”.

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

But now that I am old and venerable, and my foibles and oddities are tolerated (“don’t worry about him, he’s just an old fart”), I can openly advertise my delight in the flowers of Spring. I can, like the Great Poet, lie on my couch and let my heart with pleasure fill and dance with the daffodils and all the flowers that Spring brings us.

MARTIN’S GOOSE

Vienna, 11 November 2020

Often in past years, on this day – 11 November, the day on which the First World War ended on the Western Front – I have published a post in memory of those who died in that war or who were permanently scarred by it. But this year, since my wife and I are spending November in Vienna, I published this year’s memorial post a few days ago, in recognition of the fact that the war ended about a week earlier for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. So instead, I shall use this post to celebrate rather than grieve. I shall write about a food dish, the Martinsgans (which for some strange reason becomes Martinsgansl in Austria).

Martinsgans is a dish from the German lands and is traditionally eaten today, 11 November (but of course nowadays, as a way of increasing sales, it gets offered in restaurants for a couple of weeks around that date – although this year, because of Covid, all the restaurants are now closed in Vienna). It is a dish based on goose – Martinsgans translates into English as Martin’s goose. Why Martin’s goose rather than anyone else’s goose? Well, that’s because 11 November happens to be feast day of St. Martin in the Christian calendar.

A Martinsgans made according to tradition consists of roast goose served with cooked red cabbage and potato dumplings. This is what it will look like when it is placed on the table to the oohs and aahs of the assembled family and guests.

For those of my readers who feel the need for an adventure in the kitchen, here is a recipe for making Martinsgans.

The goose:

Wash the goose thoroughly inside and out and dry. Cut a couple of apples and an orange into eights, mix well with some thyme and marjoram, and stuff the goose with the mix. Tie the goose up and seal with wooden skewers. Rub the goose well on the outside with salt, pepper, marjoram and thyme, and then place the bird, breast side down, in a large greased roasting pan or baking dish. Roast the goose in the oven, preheated to 220°C, for about half an hour. Brush the goose with honey several times and pour a bottle of beer over it. Turn the oven down to 180°C, deglaze with a little water, and roast the goose in the oven for about 2 hours. Pour its own juice over the goose while it is roasting. Take the roasted goose out of the oven, and let it rest for a while before serving.

While the goose is roasting, you can prepare the red cabbage and the potato dumplings.

Red cabbage:

Clean, wash and finely chop the red cabbage. Mix with some orange juice and red wine, a dash of lemon juice, salt and caraway seeds, and let it all steep for a while. Then cook in a saucepan over medium heat until soft (30 minutes or so).

Potato dumplings:

Peel some potatoes, cook them until soft, then squash them. Mix in some potato starch, semolina, salt and nutmeg. Let the dough rest for half an hour. Then form the dumplings, and let them simmer in a saucepan with salted water for 15 minutes.

I could leave it there and invite my readers to go celebrate life with a Martinsgans night out, as these folk are.

But I’m afraid I can’t. Too many questions were buzzing through my mind when I was reading up on Martinsgans. Why is the goose eaten on 11 November and not 11 October or 11 December, or indeed the 11th of any other month? And why goose rather than duck or swan – or chicken or turkey or any other fowl? I had to investigate further, and as is my habit I feel a bursting desire to share what I have learned with my readers (and I fervently hope that they have a bursting desire to listen).

On the question of why November 11. As usual, there are several reasons given on the net. The one which I think makes most sense is that it is the result of the Catholic Church’s liturgical calendar. There was a time, long, long ago (from the 7th to 12th centuries CE, to be precise), when the Church required all good Christians to do three days of fasting a week from St. Martin’s day (i.e., 11 November) to Christmas, to prepare themselves for that great feast. Very sensibly in my opinion, people decided that they would have one last good meal before starting to fast. Thus was born the tradition of having a slap-up meal on St. Martin’s day.

What’s odd, though, is that the Church authorities eventually decided to cut this period of preparation before Christmas – which is now called Advent – to four weeks, with the start date being in the very last days of November. So why didn’t the slap-up meal migrate to the end of November?

It could be because, together with the decision to shorten the Advent period, the Church authorities dropped the requirement to fast (a very sensible decision in my opinion; I never could understand why fasting would make you more religious). So perhaps there was no longer any need (or excuse) to have a slap-up meal just before Advent started.

But then why continue with the slap-up meal on St. Martin’s day? And here I think we have to look to some of the other reasons proposed on the net. In the old agricultural calendar, the beginning of November was when in many European countries excess livestock was slaughtered and the meat salted or otherwise preserved (I wrote about one such product, the Italian cotechino, in an earlier post). As a result, it was also a period when many peasants (I dare hardly call them farmers) paid some of the rents which they owed to their lords, payments nearly always made in kind rather than in cash.

St. Martin’s day was traditionally the day when these payments were made. Early November also happens to be the time when domesticated geese are at their fattest. Hence, payments were often made in live geese (in the picture above, one of the peasants is making his payment with what looks suspiciously like a swan).

It’s a little off the point, but I remember well a story which my mother used to tell us when we were young. My maternal grandparents owned some lands, which they rented out to local farmers. The day when the farmers paid their rents was St. Martin’s day. One such farmer was a farmer with red hair (this point was stressed in the story, because – quite unfairly, I think – my mother considered red-haired people to be excitable). In my imagination, I see him something like this.

Like many rural folk of the time (we’re talking the late 1920s, early 1930s), this farmer had received little formal education – probably primary school, if that – before starting to work the land. The discussion would always start pleasantly enough. My grandfather would work his way through the accounts, showing the farmer, let’s call him Mr. Dupont, how he had arrived at the amounts due. As long as my grandfather kept to addition Mr. Dupont could follow. But whenever my grandfather strayed into multiplication, Mr. Dupont got nervous, he would go red in the face, raise his voice, and start objecting vociferously, with my grandfather vainly trying to placate him: “but no, Mr. Dupont, really, if you multiply 20 by 5 you get 100” – all to no avail. My grandfather had to keep to addition with Mr. Dupont.

But back to the subject at hand. Since the lords now had live geese on their hands, and since lords were always eager to eat fresh meat, we can understand that at least a few of the geese would have been sent to the lord’s kitchen for neck-wringing (or throat-cutting?), plucking and roasting, with a fine feast to follow.

Luckily for us (because most of us had peasants as ancestors, no?), the industrial revolution came along and wealth got much better distributed. So it’s not only lords now who can afford to eat goose on 11 November, it’s most of us. Which is a Good Thing – except, of course, for the poor geese which end up roasted on our dining room tables.

As I look these geese waddling to their roasted fate, I am reminded of a song in Carmina Burana (admittedly about a swan, but the principle is the same). The original is in Latin, but I will spare the readers the trauma of reading the original and give them an English translation:

Verse 1:
Once I lived on lakes,
Once I looked beautiful
When I was a swan.

Chorus:
Misery me!
Now black
And roasting fiercely!

Verse 2:
The servant is turning me on the spit;
I am burning fiercely on the pyre:
The steward now serves me up.

Chorus

Verse 3:
Now I lie on the platter,
And can fly no longer,
I see bared teeth.

Chorus

Spare a thought for the goose as you bare your teeth to tuck into your Martinsgans.

PARAPHRASING WORDSWORTH

Milan, 26 February 2020

updated 29 February 2020

“I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.”

Except that, contrary to William Wordsworth, I wasn’t lonely as a cloud, I was with my wife, and it wasn’t daffodils that I saw crowded on the hillside but primroses. My wife and I were finishing the last stage of the Traveler’s Trail along Lake Como when we turned a corner and found before us this star-burst of yellow.

True to their name — prim-rose; first “rose”, or flower — the primroses have been one of the first flowers to burst out of their winter hibernation into this Year of Our Lord 2020. They have been a constant companion along the paths we have travelled these last days of February, coming up through the forest floor litter of last year.

But it is not only them which have been keeping us company. For every primrose we have seen, it seems there has been a small purple flower close by. A few minutes after seeing that crowd of primroses, we saw a heavy sprinkling of these purple flowers along the side of the path.

Some investigation on my part has revealed that they are liverworts. They are so small that I had to crouch down low to get this picture, with my old bones protesting all the while.

We have seen them showing off hues ranging from this violet to washed-out jeans-blue.

Nature, slowly coming alive again, has continued to give. Today, as we travelled a trail from Como which wends its way through the woods north of the town, we came across a few bunches of this flower.

My internet searches failed to come up with a name for this lovely green flower with yellow pistils. Luckily, however, my initial plea for help led one helpful reader to point out that I had another hellebore on my hands, the helleborus viridis, or green hellebore (I happen to have written about the black hellebore in my previous post). This flower hangs its head modestly on its stalk, so to get this picture I had to lie down on the path – I must confess to having had difficulties getting back up; luckily, my wife was at hand …

A little further, we came across another tiny purple flower. For a moment, I thought it was a liverwort, but on closer inspection I concluded that it was a violet.

And a little further on, we came across a white version of this same flower.

And now, riding back on the train to Milan, writing this up, I think I can say about all these flowers, paraphrasing Wordsworth (and severely harming his rhythm in the process), that

“… when on my couch I will lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They will flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure will fill,
And dance with the primroses, liverworts, violets, and green hellebores” .

QUAFFING MEAD

Vienna, 18 August 2019

Back in April, I was up in Vienna to make a presentation at a workshop on ecodesign and its role in promoting circular economies. Fascinating topic, but what I actually want to write about is the fact that at this meeting I met an old contact of mine, Wolfgang, who many years ago had run a training programme for me on ecodesign in Sri Lanka. After the workshop, we repaired to a bar to catch up on the past 15 years or so over a beer. Wolfgang first told me all about what he’s been up to in the ecodesign world, but then added, “What’s really exciting me at the moment is my production of mead.”

Mead … I don’t know what visions this conjures up in my readers, but for me I immediately see Vikings wassailing the dark Nordic nights away, drinking mead out of horns or possibly the skulls of their enemies, and preparing for the battle of tomorrow where they will die heroically and go to Valhalla. These fine fellows will stand in nicely for such a scene.

I had certainly never drunk the stuff myself; I didn’t know anyone made it anymore.

Thoroughly intrigued, I pressed Wolfgang for more information. As is the case with all enthusiasts, I didn’t have to press very hard. With a pint of beer inside him, he waxed lyrical on the subject. He had to start at the very beginning, with what mead is made from – I didn’t even know that. It’s a mixture of honey and water to which yeast is added to turn the sugars in the honey into alcohol. The relative ratios of honey to water will determine the level of sweetness of the final product. Sweetness can be further increased by the addition of fruits. On the other hand, the mix can be made dryer by adding astringent berries or herbs. Wolfgang was very dismissive about the modern trend of making sweet meads. In fact, he said, he started making mead because he was appalled at how horribly sweet most modern meads are, which in his opinion obliterates the wonderful underlying tastes of the honey. He decided he was going to swim against the current and make a dry mead. He had been at it for a couple of years, and was beginning to sell his product to other enthusiasts.

Well, this all sounded very interesting! I was definitely going to have to try this stuff. Unfortunately, I was going back down to Milan the next day. But we agreed that when my wife and I came up to Vienna for the summer, I would contact him and we would arrange a mead-tasting event.

In the meantime, down in Milan, I did some research. Mead, it turns out, is very ancient, probably the first alcoholic drink that human beings ever quaffed. It’s also a pretty universal drink. The tribes that settled Europe certainly all drank mead. I’ve already mentioned the Vikings. They loved mead so much, they wrote a whole saga about it – Kvasir and the Mead of Poetry. It’s a story that has dwarves, giants, the god Odin, thievery, murder, and various other bits and bobs. A shaggy dog story if ever I heard one, good to while away those long Nordic nights while quaffing mead. The bottom line of the saga is that mead can turn you into a poet or a scholar: a feeling that I’m sure all of us have had when we have drunk too much alcohol; a feeling we normally have just before we are sick or pass out, or both. And much of Beowulf, that Anglo-Saxon poem greatly revered by lovers of the English language, takes place in a mead hall; it was in these specially-built halls that Viking chieftains and their retinue of warriors drank mead, listened to long, long – long – sagas, and generally wassailed the nights away, before collapsing onto the benches or even onto the floor in a drunken stupor. Here is an artist’s representation of a mead hall.

And here is an excellent summary of the first part of Beowulf: “The fantastical mead hall of Heorot forms an integral part of the epic Old English poem Beowulf, serving as both the setting and instigation of the action. It is the carousing of Heorot’s denizens as they slug back mead in the hall which awakens the terrible ire of the monster Grendel – with predictably gruesome results. The solution to the problem – in typical Old English style – was not to put down the mead horns and cease partying, but to slay the monster (and his mother) before throwing an even bigger and more mead-soaked party to celebrate.”

The Vikings may be the best known quaffers of mead, but the Celts were no slouches, and nor were the Germanic tribes. There is riddle-poem in the Exeter Book, a 10th-century anthology of Anglo-Saxon poetry, about honey and mead. I quote the first couple of lines:

Ic eom weorð werum, wide funden,
brungen of bearwum ond of burghleoþum,
of denum ond of dunum. Dæges mec wægun
feþre on lifte, feredon mid liste …

But since I’m sure that 99.99% of my readers are like me not able to read Anglo-Saxon, I insert here a translation of the poem into modern English:

I am valuable to men, found widely,
brought from groves and from mountain slopes,
from valleys and from hills. By day, was I carried
by feathers up high, taken skillfully
under a sheltering roof. A man then washed me
in a container. Now I am a binder and a striker;
I bring a slave to the ground, sometimes an old churl.
Immediately he discovers, he who goes against me
and contends against my strength,
that he shall meet the ground with his back,
unless he ceases from his folly early;
deprived of his strength, loud of speech, his power bound,
he has no control over his mind, his feet, or his hands.
Ask what I am called, who thus binds slaves
to the earth with blows, by the light of day.

The Anglo-Saxons clearly recognized the power of mead to bring you crashing to the floor of the mead hall or any other establishment where you drank the stuff in excess.

The Slavs also drank the stuff – they still do, with Poland having an especially developed culture of mead drinking. We have here a painting of a couple of early 19th Century Polish noblemen enjoying a flagon of mead, a scene inspired by that great nationalist Polish poem, Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz. I don’t even bother with the Polish here, I just launch straight into an English translation, and cut out much of the saga-like talk between the two old men who are our subject:

Two old men sat outside the house, tankards
of strong mead resting on their knees; …
The old men drink their mead and dip their snuff
from a bark case, continuing their chat.
“Yes, yes, Protazy, it is true enough,”
said the Warden. “I can agree with that,”
replied Protazy the Apparitor.
“Yes,” they repeated in unison, “Yes,”
nodding their heads. …
…. The turf bench in the yard
on which they sat adjoined the kitchen wall;
from an open window, steam filled the air,
billowing like a conflagration. When all
the smoke was gone, a white chef‟s hat was there,
flitting like a dove. It was the Seneschal,
who stuck his head out through the kitchen window,
eavesdropping on this private conversation.
Finally, he handed them a plate with two
biscuits. “Have this cake with your libation,”
He said …

It wasn’t just tribes in Europe’s north who drank mead. The Ancient Greeks drank it – I read that Dionysios was the God of mead before becoming the God of wine. Greek followers of Dionysios, and Roman followers of Bacchus (same God, different name), used to hold festivals – the Dionysia or Bacchanalia – where much drinking and dancing and cavorting about (nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more) was the key. Here is a take on a Bacchanalia by Hendrik Balen (he did the figures) and Jan Breughel the Elder (he did the landscape), painted in about 1620.

As I say, the Romans partook enthusiastically in Bacchanalia, but there were more sober Roman citizens who left us some serious commentary on mead. Here is my favourite, by the Roman naturalist Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella, who included a recipe for making mead in his tome on agriculture, De re rustica, which he wrote in about 60 CE (again, I skip the Latin and go straight into an English translation).

Take rainwater kept for several years, and mix a sextarius [ca. ½ litre] of this water with a [Roman] pound [ca. ⅓ kg] of honey. For a weaker mead, mix a sextarius of water with nine ounces [ca. ¼ kg] of honey. The whole is exposed to the sun for 40 days, and then left on a shelf near the fire. If you have no rain water, then boil spring water.

I am appalled and fascinated in equal measure by this idea that one could take several-year old rainwater and use it to make something to drink; I suppose this was a way of inoculating the honey-water mix with natural yeasts which somehow found their way into the rainwater. I presume Columella drank his own mead and survived, so it cannot have been as deadly as it sounds.

And it wasn’t just the Europeans who drank it. The Chinese did – in fact, the oldest archaeological evidence tentatively pointing to mead drinking has been found in China: some honey, rice, and fermentation residues found on the inside of a pot 9,000 years old. The Mandaya and Manobo people in the island of Mindanao in the Philippines still drink mead, which they call bais.

In Africa, the Xhosa in South Africa have an ancient tradition of drinking mead, or iQhilika in Xhosa, and the Ethiopians have been, and continue to be, enthusiastic drinkers of mead (or tej as it’s called locally). Here we have Ethiopians enjoying a wee dram of the stuff.

And I love this picture, done in the traditional Ethiopian style, of what appears to be a priest and his acolytes getting ready to down some tej.

What I find particularly delicious in this painting is that normally the figures in Ethiopian paintings are very solemn; no-one breaks into a smile. Yet here, at the thought of the pleasures to come, we see a hint of a smile on the acolytes’ faces (while the priest looks troubled, which is perhaps how it should be: “Guys, should we be doing this? What if someone sees me drinking this stuff? I have an important position in the community.”).

Even in the Americas mead was, and still is consumed. Prior to the Spanish conquest, the Maya made a drink called balché made by soaking the bark of a special tree in a honey-water mix and allowing it to ferment. Apparently, the Maya consumed balché in enema form to maximize its inebriating effect (just think if the Vikings had cottoned on to that …). For some reason, the Conquistadores banned the drink, but it never went away completely. Here is an Amerindian from the Chiapas region of Mexico making balché the old way: in a hollowed log, place the bark of the tree, add water and honey, cover and wait.
Balché may be making a comeback, although one of the reasons the Spaniards didn’t like it is that it smelled foul to them. They popularized a variant, xtabentún, which replaced the tree bark with anise (they also added rum, which makes the drink more of a liqueur).

In a way, it’s not surprising that mead is drunk in so many parts of the world. Honey, its basic ingredient, is to be found pretty much everywhere on this planet, as this map of the global distribution of the honeybee attests (the different colours refer to sub-species of the honeybee; the pinkish colour, the most dominant, gives the range for apis mellifera).

For reasons that are not completely clear to me, the drinking of mead went into steep decline in Europe some time after the Middle Ages. Somehow, it got squeezed out by wine on one side and beer on the other. So now there are a few traditional hold-outs where mead never completely died out and enthusiasts like Wolfgang who are trying to bring mead back.

Coming back to Wolfgang, when June came around and my wife and I came up to Vienna for the summer, I contacted him. But one thing and another – he was away, then I was away; he was busy, then I was busy – meant that we weren’t able to arrange the mead tasting until last week. But it was finally arranged! Wolfgang keeps his mead in an old wine cellar in a small village outside Vienna, so we took a bus with him one evening and sallied forth. It was a lovely cellar, very deep, at the end of which he had a table with chairs where we sat down to do our mead tasting.
He got us some glasses and a bottle of his best mead.
He uncorked it, poured us a generous portion, and invited us to taste. We ceremonially picked up the glass, sniffed it, swirled it around, and took a sip.

It was … interesting. I think that’s the best I can say. I don’t know if readers can imagine this, but it tasted like honey without the sweet taste. What gets left behind if you take out the honey’s sweetness is a slightly acrid, slightly “waxy” taste. If any of my readers have ever nibbled at wax, that was the predominant taste of the mead.

The first mead we tried was made with honey where the bees had been feeding on the nectar from lime-tree (linden) flowers (I have waxed lyrical about the flower of the linden tree in a past post). We then tried a mead made with honey where the bees had feasted on rhododendron nectar up in the Alps. It was much clearer in colour, but the taste did not change much. As a finale, we tried a mead to which chokeberries had been added. These turned the mead’s colour redder and made the taste smokier – but it did not change the basic facts.
Well, we bought two bottles from Wolfgang. We felt we owed him that for the trouble he had gone to. We plan to take the bottles down to Milan, where we’ll try them on our son and see what he thinks.

In the meantime – but I have to hide this from Wolfgang – I think we should find some sweet mead to try. I feel that despite Wolfgang’s tut-tutting, people are not so wrong to drink their mead sweet. And that Ethiopian mead looks really interesting! I wonder if the Ethiopian restaurant we go to in Milan has any?

BUTTERFLIES

Milan, 8 February 2019

If your mother tongue happens to be a European language, one of the things which always happens when you learn another European language is that you begin to see words very similar to those in your mother tongue used to describe the same object: “well how about that, the German word for cow is kuh” or “whaddaya know, the French word for quay is quai”. In some cases, like for the word quay, the similarity is caused by straight borrowing: “the French call this new thing they build these days a quai, so let’s call it the same”. But in other cases, experts believe the similarities point to deeper connections between European languages, as in the case of cow and kuh. And these connections span languages from Ireland in the west to northern India in the east, the family of so-called Indo-European languages.

I won’t go into the details of how experts believe the Indo-European languages developed and spread, fascinating as they are. Suffice to say that in Europe we now have three major families of languages – the Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages – one minor family of languages – the Celtic languages – and a number of loners – Albanian and Armenian (there are also a few non-Indo-European languages, like Hungarian and Finnish).
A lot of basic words – words that our ancestors would have used thousands of years ago – have remained quite constant across different European languages. Look at “cat” in this table, for instance.
Pretty much every European language has got the same word. The two languages out of step here are Serbo-Croat and Romanian, which seem to have gone off together in another direction.

And how about that other friend of us human beings, the dog? (or hound, using the somewhat old-fashioned English name for it – Elvis Presley reminds us of their connection in his inimitable song “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound-dog”)
We see in this case how the words fall very clearly into their Romance, Germanic, Slavic, and Celtic clusters. I think, though, that linguists would tell us that there is actually an underlying connection between the Germanic cluster and the Romance and Celtic clusters, in that the “k” sound being used in the Romance and Celtic languages can slide into the “h” sound used in the Germanic languages. They might even tell us that by some strange alchemy of linguistics the Slavic root word was also connected long ago with their Germanic, Romance and Celtic colleagues.

The same clustering holds for the word “cow” I mentioned at the beginning.
In this case, the Celtic languages seem the odd ones out, although I suspect their root is another term for cow, the one we have in the English word “bovine”. The Romance languages, which superficially also look different, probably connect with the others – I would say that somewhere along the line, someone added a “va” to the “ca” sound.

I could go on at great length, giving other examples, but I don’t want to bore my readers and, anyway, these examples are enough to discuss the real subject of this post: butterflies.

All my meditating on the similarities which one finds across European languages was set off when my wife and I walked by the Butterfly House in Vienna a week or so ago – beautiful place, by the way; an old greenhouse from Vienna’s Art Nouveau days
whose space has been transformed into a home for butterflies.
On the door, in large lettering, was written Schmetterling Haus, Butterfly House in German. Readers will immediately see the house-haus connection. But butterfly-schmetterling? And then I thought of the equivalent words in French and Italian: papillon and farfalla. No noticeable connection between any of the four. This table shows the larger picture, with other languages thrown in.
Hardly any connections anywhere!

How was that possible, I wondered? It’s not as if we humans have just recently discovered butterflies. They fluttered around our ancestors living on the Pontic-Caspian steppes, where the experts believe the original Indo-European language was created some 5,000 years ago. Here is one such butterfly whose range covers that part of the world, the Parnassius apollo.
Surely they gave these creatures a name?

Butterflies such as this Orange Oak Leaf were also there to welcome the arrival of Indo-Europeans in India
as was this Peacock when they arrived in in Ireland
and indeed in every place in between. Surely, when our Indo-European ancestors saw new butterflies, they didn’t say “Oh look, it’s those thingies again!”

Pondering about this, I have arrived at a theory. It is based on the assumption that in those far-off days (actually not so far-off for many of our ancestors) we humans were supremely utilitarian, viewing the world around us primarily in terms of what material value it brought to us. Under these conditions, my theory says that words stayed the same – they were conserved – if they were for things which we humans felt were really important, which added value to our lives. And the animals I’ve given above as examples did indeed add great value to our lives: cats, to fight off rodents which otherwise invaded our food stores; dogs, as useful adjuncts to the hunt and to corralling those pesky cows, and for our defence; cows, as givers of milk, as givers of meat, as signals of wealth.

In this optic, butterflies brought us nothing, so our ancestors did not feel it was important to conserve their name. And so their name just drifted. At some point, though (my increasingly fanciful theorizing continues), butterflies began to be appreciated aesthetically, for their beauty alone. So butterflies began to be given fancy names:
– butterfly: “from butter + fly; perhaps from the cream or yellow colour of common species, or from an old belief that the insects stole butter”
– schmetterling: “from schmetten (cream) due to an old belief that witches transformed themselves into butterflies to steal cream and other milk products”
– mariposa: “the union of Maria and posate, perhaps from a children’s song”
– babochka: “seems to be a diminutive of baba ‘(old) woman,’ a doublet of babushka ‘grandmother’—a fact that seems to strengthen the alleged connection between witches and butterflies”
– glöyn byw: “literally ‘living coal’”
And on and on … I think readers get the picture.

At some point, the artists weighed in, especially the still life painters who liked to decorate their fruit and vegetable compositions with beautiful butterflies.

Van Gogh later put butterflies in their more natural habitat, as in this Long Grass with Butterflies:
The poets also weighed in. For instance, we have William Wordsworth’s poem To a Butterfly:

I’ve watched you now a full half-hour;
Self-poised upon that yellow flower
And, little Butterfly! indeed
I know not if you sleep or feed.
How motionless!–not frozen seas
More motionless! and then
What joy awaits you, when the breeze
Hath found you out among the trees,
And calls you forth again!

This plot of orchard-ground is ours;
My trees they are, my Sister’s flowers;
Here rest your wings when they are weary;
Here lodge as in a sanctuary!
Come often to us, fear no wrong;
Sit near us on the bough!
We’ll talk of sunshine and of song,
And summer days, when we were young;
Sweet childish days, that were as long
As twenty days are now.

Or Emily Dickinson’s From Cocoon forth a Butterfly, one of many poems she wrote about butterflies:

From Cocoon forth a Butterfly
As Lady from her Door
Emerged — a Summer Afternoon —
Repairing Everywhere —

Without Design — that I could trace
Except to stray abroad
On Miscellaneous Enterprise
The Clovers — understood —

Her pretty Parasol be seen
Contracting in a Field
Where Men made Hay —
Then struggling hard
With an opposing Cloud —

Where Parties — Phantom as Herself —
To Nowhere — seemed to go
In purposeless Circumference —
As ’twere a Tropic Show —

And notwithstanding Bee — that worked —
And Flower — that zealous blew —
This Audience of Idleness
Disdained them, from the Sky —

Till Sundown crept — a steady Tide —
And Men that made the Hay —
And Afternoon — and Butterfly —
Extinguished — in the Sea —

Or Robert Frost’s Blue-Butterfly Day:

It is blue-butterfly day here in spring,
And with these sky-flakes down in flurry on flurry
There is more unmixed color on the wing
Than flowers will show for days unless they hurry.

But these are flowers that fly and all but sing:
And now from having ridden out desire
They lie closed over in the wind and cling
Where wheels have freshly sliced the April mire.

Yes, all very beautiful …

But of course our ancestors didn’t know everything. Beautiful they may be, but butterflies add value to our planet. A number of plants need butterflies for their pollination (a process we humans didn’t understand until the early 19th Century). They are prey to some insects and in turn are predators for other insects, helping to keep everything in its natural balance. So its name should never have drifted, we Europeans should always have had one common name.

I guess this is yet another example of how our half-knowledge of the world around us is leading us to destroy it. I write this as butterfly numbers continue to drop precipitously, with pesticide use, changes in land use, climate change, and who knows what else decimating them. Just as an example, take the monarch, a lovely butterfly native to North America.
Its populations have plummeted by 90+% over just the last few years. It is facing extinction.

Will we ever learn, I wonder?

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Map of Indo-European languages: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages
Schmetterling Haus – exterior: http://farewell-owl.blogspot.com/2010/08/imperial-butterfly-house-vienna.html
Schmetterling Haus – interior: https://www.tripadvisor.it/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g190454-d591133-i80628931-Schmetterlinghaus-Vienna.html
Butterflies in Schmetterling Haus: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dainsk/5726792178
Parnassius apollo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_(butterfly)#Distribution_and_habitat
Orange oak leaf: http://indiasendangered.com/7-spectacular-butterflies-of-india-photos/
Peacock: http://butterflyconservation.ie/wp/
Jean Mortel, Still Life with Apricots, Grapes, Fig and Butterfly: https://www.pinterest.it/pin/291045194650938994/?lp=true
Laurens Craen, Still Life with a Lobster on a Pewter Plate, Lemons, Grapes, Apricots, Oysters and a Gold-Mounted Blue and White Porcelain Ewer, all on a Wooden Table Top with a Swallowtail Butterfly: http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2011/important-old-master-paintings-sculpture-n08712/lot.173.html
Vincent Van Gogh, Long Grass with Butterflies: https://theartstack.com/artist/vincent-van-gogh/long-grass-butterflies
Monarch butterfly: https://sovasgottalent.com/10931-pic-of-butterfly/now-pic-of-butterfly-new-jersey-s-key-role-in-the-monarch-migration-conserve-wildlife/

WILD GEESE AND GREAT POET

Milan, 7 December 2018

I wrote in the previous post about my wife and I visiting a museum dedicated to the Japanese woodblock artist Utagawa Hiroshige, in preparation for our walk along the Nakasendo Way. That same museum also happened to be holding an exhibition dedicated to Katushika Hokusai. Many of Hokusai’s woodblock prints were of course on show, and it was certainly a pleasure to be given the opportunity to study and admire them up close.

But actually it’s a painting of Hokusai’s that has remained with me in the intervening weeks. I sneak in here a photo that I took of it – I’m not sure I was allowed to take photos and I looked around stealthily before whipping out my phone and snapping this shot. I have cropped the photo to eliminate the silk wall hanging in which it is incorporated; I want the reader to focus on the painting, and I find its silken frame a distraction to the eye.

Its title is Wild Geese and Great Poet, and indeed we see a man of certain means sitting on the ground, his elbow resting on that typical Japanese arm rest, the kyousoku. His head rests on his hand, and he is watching with a look of wistful melancholy at a flock of geese flying away into the distance.

I immediately felt that there was a story being told here. I saw the drawing in of winter, with the geese flying south from Siberia to overwinter in Japan, and of the poet meditating on the drawing in of his own life as old age beckons: the kind of pessimistic thinking which I enjoy, especially now that I am a pensioner, and which makes my wife roll her eyes and sigh loudly. I felt that Hokusai was surely taking his cue from a Japanese or possibly Chinese poem on the subject, and I resolved to track the poem down.

Well, five weeks have passed, and I can’t say that I have yet found the poem in question. Everyone agrees that flying geese were often used as symbols of the passage of the seasons and of time in Japanese and Chinese poetry, but one particular poem where the writer uses this imagery to meditate on his approaching old age I have not found. Fearing that the task I have set myself will meander on inconclusively before petering out ignominiously, I have resolved to stop here, draw a line under my research, and report back on the results of my increasingly dispirited internet surfing.

The best fit I have found is a poem from the Songs of Chu, an anthology of Chinese poems which tradition says were written in the late 200s BCE, during the Warring States period. This particular poem is attributed to the poet Song Yu. I read into this poem a story, so typical of Imperial China, of the bureaucrat who has somehow fallen foul of his master, has lost his position, and is now wandering the land, an exile, wondering if he will ever get his old life back.

Alas for the breath of autumn!
Wan and drear: flower and leaf fluttering fall and turn to decay;
Sad, forlorn: as when on journey far one climbs a hill and looks down on water to speed a returning friend;
Empty and vast: the skies are high and the air is cold;
Still and deep: the streams have drunk full and the waters are clear.

Heartsick and sighing sore: for the cold draws on and strikes into a man;
Distraught and disappointed: leaving the old and to new places turning;
Afflicted; the Emperor’s servant has lost his office and his heart rebels;
Desolate: on his long journey he rests with never a friend;
Melancholy: he nurses a private sorrow.

The fluttering swallows leave on their homeward journey;
The forlorn cicada makes no sound;
The wild geese call as they travel southwards;
The partridge chatters with a mournful cry.

Alone he waits for the dawn to come, unsleeping;
Mourning with the cricket, the midnight traveler.
His time draws on apace: already half is gone
Yet still he languishes, nothing accomplished.

As for the Japanese side, the best I’ve managed to find is a number of haiku. Here is one from the Manyōshū, a collection of Japanese poems compiled sometime after 759 AD.

The inlet of Okura is echoing;
To the fields of Fushimi
The wild geese are passing.

This one instead is by Matsuo Bashō, master haiku composer whom I mentioned in my previous post and who lived in the second half of the 1600s.

The sea darkening –
The voices of the wild geese
Crying, whirling, white.

And finally, there is this haiku, written in 1953 by Takaha Shugyo

Wild geese pass
Revealing
The whole of heaven

A certain continuity is revealed, I think, over this nearly 1,000 year period.

Well, since it was a visit to a museum dedicated to Hiroshige that led me to the painting by Hokusai, I feel it is only fair that I should finish with a woodblock print by Hiroshige, Full Moon at Takanawa, where geese are the star players.
_____________

Hokusai, Wild Geese and Great Poet: my photo
Hiroshige, Full Moon at Takanawa: https://www.musubi.it/en/biblioteca/haiku/477-mp-haiku?showall=1