A SUMMERTIME ODE

A SUMMERTIME ODE

At this time of year, I yearn to forage

For mint and thyme and a sprig of borage,

The latter required if your summertime whims

Includes a few glasses of over-priced Pimms.

 

 

BS, August 2025

NO THANQUERAY!

Browsing through an old diary from 1971, I came across a piece of doggerel I wrote in the style of Ogden Nash...

The Second Mrs Tanqueray

or

Once Bitten, Bite Back

The second Mrs Tanqueray

Indulged in hanky-panqueray;

Without so much as thanqueray,

She took from Mr Tanqueray

The money in his banqueray,

Then turned to drink and dranqueray,

While Mr T's hopes sanqueray.

His form grown lean and lanqueray

(Within his breast a canqueray),

He bought a knife and sanqueray

The blade in Mrs Tanqueray,

Which – to speak quite franqueray –

Stopped her hanky-panqueray

But hanged poor Mr Tanqueray. 

HOLIDAY TREATS

As a kid I was notoriously picky about breakfast cereals (an odd hang-up I admit) and my Mum despaired of finding one that I liked. Then, on a holiday trip to an aunt and uncle in Somerset, I fell in love with Weetabix (a previously rejected brand) and not only ate what I was given but, Oliver Twist-like, asked for more!

Back home, my delighted mother immediately invested in a bargain-bumper-mega-giant-economy-size box of Weetablix and, as might have been predicted, never touched them again –– at least, not for many years!

I have a theory that there's a whole category of food and drink that we enjoy – indeed, relish – while being on holiday but which has little or no appeal if once transported to, or encountered in, the normal mundane surroundings of our home environment: hence the number of unopened bottles of Ouzo currently stashed under our stairs!

Among such exclusive vacation treats I'd list waffles with maple syrup and crispy bacon in an American diner, soft ice cream with a Cadbury's flake on a British seaside pier –– and a ice-cool, foamy freddo cappuccino in a shady Greek taverna...

Still, like all the very best treats, it was fun while it lasted!

WINE WHINE

WIne lables these days increasingly seem to suggest that the bottle contains a miscellany of ingredients – ranging from flint to cut grass – as opposed to the more conventional grapes!

For example, a Domaine de Majas 2010 is described as having 'pronounced fennel and camomile aromas' leading 'onto a fresh palate with hints of stone fruits and mineral acidity.'

However, I noticed it on a restaurant wine-list recently with an even more flowery description:

Walk through a soft meadow filled with herbs, into an orchard with a red apple tree, delicious and intriguing.

Frankly, that ought to win a fantasy literature award1

THE REAL THING?

There's just one more sleep until the night when that fat, jolly, old, bearded gent in the red suit will (hopefully) be squeezing himself down our chimneys and distributing his annual largesse!

But, as few of us have ever seen him on his 24 December rounds (unless we caught him kissing mummy under the mistletoe) how come we recognise him so easily?

Well, much of what we know about Santa's appearance was established by the American cartoonist Thomas Nast, responsible for the iconic image on the right and others which you will find here.

But, certainly as far as American sensibilities are concerned, the image of Christmas' Patron Saint (aka St Nicholas, Father Christmas and many other names in different lands) was reinforced by the work of the great illustrator, Norman Rockwell (you can view some oif his Santas here), as well as through a series of annual advertising campaigns for Coca Cola that began 80 years ago, this December!


For a considerable time, Coke was thought of as a being warm weather drink – a thirst-quencher – but from 1922, the Coca-Cola Company began advertising their drink as one to be consumed the whole year round with the slogan: "Thirst Knows No Season".

Then, in 1931, came the first of a long line of seasonal promotions featuring Santa as an enthusiastic drinker of Coke.

The work of Michigan-born illustrator, Haddon Sundblom (left), who used himself as a model for his portrayals of Santa, provided much loved advertisements in the pages of The Saturday Evening Post, The National Geographic, The New Yorker and The Ladies Home Journal.

These ads (in addition to selling Coca Cola) helped shape our perceptions of our late-night Christmas Eve visitor.

Here is that Santas on a few of his annual outings...


And, 80 years on, Santa is still raising a bottle of Coke to the Season on bill-boards the world over and in TV commercials...

I HOPE SANTA BRINGS YOU
YOUR CHRISTMAS HEART'S DESIRE...

AND...

If you haven't heard it, my dramatisation of P L (Mary Poppins) Travers' mystical Christmas fable, The Fox at the Manger, is being re-broadcast today on BBC Radio 4 Extra at 11:15 and 21:15 and repeated tomorrow, Christmas Eve, at 04:15 and for the next seven days on BBC iPlayer.

The play tells the story of what gift the wild and wayward fox took to stable in Bethlehem and gave to the new-born Christ Child.

Starring Wendy Hiller as the Storyteller and Alec McCowan as the Fox, it features the ancient Carol, 'The Friendly Beasts', and a memorably evocative music score by Dave Hewson.

Image: Fox woodcut by Thomas Bewick

AN EGGCEPTIONAL WINE

"I think you will be amused by the punning jocularity of its label!"

Photo: David Weeks

PIP PIP!

Just heard on The Food Programme (BBC Radio 4) that Brogdale Farm in Faversham, Kent, home of the National Fruit Collection, sells a variety of ciders in its shop, which is called --- Tiddly Pomme!

ALTERNATIVE SOLUTIONS

Of course, if you don't like tea...


That's if you'd drink anything offered to you by this party host!

Anyway, today, I'd like to introduce you to a more benign - but no less strange - account of that famous mad tea party from Jonathan Millers' 1966 TV film, Alice in Wonderland...


This avant-garde production was shot in crisp monotone of a nineteenth-century Daguerreotype and was informed by the satirical sensibility of Miller's co-written cult 'sixties revue, Beyond the Fringe. Indeed, the film featured two of Miller's BTF co-stars, Peter Cook and Alan Bennett along with such starry names as Peter Sellers, Michael Redgrave, Finlay Currie, Alison Leggatt and John Gielgud playing Lewis Carroll's Wonderlanders without the aid of fur and whiskers as if they were merely Alice's eccentric Victorian relations.

I still vividly remember the controversy that raged in the press about the production ("Alice strictly for grown-ups...") and the huge excitement that I felt at seeing something that was so radically revisionist.

Wilfred Brambell (the father in Steptoe and Son) was a fiercely intimidating White Rabbit...


Leo McKern (later the eponymous Rumpole of the Bailey) was a boozy Duchess-cum-Nanny...


...and Gielgud as the Mock Turtle, accompanied by an unlikely Gryphon in the person of media pundit, Malcolm Muggeridge, danced a version of 'The Lobster Quadrille' that provided one of the decade's oddest and yet most hauntingly poignant television moments...


Anyway, back to that mad tea-party: here Alice (played by the hitherto unknown Anne-Marie Mallik) spends a bemusing afternoon in the company of the Hatter (Peter Cook), the March Hare (Michael Gough) and the Dormouse (Wilfred Lawson). The music - as is fitting for such a totally 'sixties offering - was by Ravi Shankar...

If you've never seen this extraordinary interpretation of Alice, it's currently available on a DVD issued by the British Film Institute as is Jonathan Miller's other brilliantly directed TV play, Whistle and I'll Come to You, based on the ghost story by M R James and featuring an unforgettable performance by Michael Hordern: two period masterpieces that shouldn't be missed...

MAD ABOUT TEA

I'm really fond of a nice cuppa and on a recent visit to Oxford - sometime home of Lewis Carroll and birthplace of 'Alice' - I picked up a rather particular tea-bag...


An odd souvenir, I know, but that's me...

Now, some of you may recall my boring you about this before but there's actually no such character as the MAD HATTER.

Yes, yes, I agree that's what people call him - and the film magazines have recently been carrying photos of Johnny Depp (right) who will be playing the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton's forthcoming film of the book - but Lewis Carroll never calls him the Mad Hatter - not once!

The author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland only ever speaks about him as "the Hatter".

What's more, Carroll never refers to that curious afternoon's entertainment that the Hatter presides over as 'The Mad Hatter's Tea-Party'.

Don't believe me? Check out Chapter Seven and you'll find it's entitled 'A Mad Tea-Party' - no Hatter's.

You'll also find that it was held in the garden of the March Hare's house, so it really, absolutely wasn't the Hatter's tea-party!


Where then does the Hatter's damaging reputation for madness come from? Well, it seems that it's all down to the word of a CAT... What's more, a Cheshire Cat...

'In that direction,' the Cat said, waving its right paw round, 'lives a Hatter: and in that direction,' waving the other paw, 'lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they're both mad.'


'But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.

'Oh, you ca'n't help that,' said the Cat: 'we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'

'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.

'You must be,' said the Cat, 'or you wouldn't have come here.'

So, there you are: the only reason we have for calling the Hatter 'Mad' is because we're told he's mad --- and by a character, please note, who not only believes that he's mad himself but that everyone else is mad as well.

There is, of course, a saying (coined long before Lewis Carroll's time): 'As mad as a hatter', the origin of which is somewhat vague...

The felt used in hat-making was 'cured' with the use of mercury and prolonged inhalation of the fumes frequently led to mercury poisoning, resulting in such neurological damage as confused speech and distorted vision. It was a regrettable side-effect of the millinery trade and often brought about an early death.

However, the symptoms of mercury poisoning are 'excessive timidity, diffidence, increasing shyness, loss of self-confidence, anxiety, and a desire to remain unobserved and unobtrusive,' which doesn't sound even remotely like the bombastic bully encountered by Alice.

There is a further theory that Lewis Carroll based the Hatter on Theophilus Carter, a former servitor at Lewis Carroll's college, Christ Church, who invented an alarm clock bed, exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851, that tipped out the sleeper at waking-up time!

That certainly sounds pretty mad but his alleged reputation for being referred to in Oxford as 'The Mad Hatter' derives from the fact that he later owned a furniture shop and is said to have been in the habit of standing in the door of his shop wearing a top hat.

Not the maddest behaviour you've ever come across, I'll bet. Nevertheless, legend has it that the illustrator of Alice's Adventures, Sir John Tenniel (right), travelled to Oxford especially to sketch him for his pictures of the Hatter.

This, however, seems amazingly unlikely since when Lewis Carroll's alter-ego - mathematics don Charles Dodgson - suggested a child who might serve as an artist's model for Alice, Tenniel retorted that he no more needed a model to draw a child that Mr Dodgson needed a set of mathematical tables to work out his sums!

So, is it really feasible that Tenniel would have bothered to take the train from London to Oxford simply in order to sketch the local furniture-shop-man? I think not!

Finally, an observation on that price tag of 10/6 (ten-shillings-and-six-pence in British pre-decimal currency) that Carroll never mentioned but which Tenniel added to the Hatter's topper and which virtually all subsequent illustrators (and most filmmakers) have felt obliged to copy...


This sum - half-a guinea - suggests that it was quite an expensive titfer and it has been calculated that if one were able to purchase it today it would cost £72 or $105!

Anyway, Hatters are popping up all over the place just now, blog-friend, Good Dog sent me this cover art by Dustin Nguyen for the DC comic, Batman Detective Comics issue #841, showing the Masked Crusader attending a wacky Wonderland tea-party where the Hatter (inspired by an illustration by Arthur Rackham) sports a topper that, at only 8/11, is a tad cheaper than Tenniel's headgear!

Click image to enlarge

For more information on those tea-bags that got me started on all this, visit The Mad Hatter Tea Company.

TOP O' THE MORNIN' AFTER

I realise it's unlikely (knowing the type of reader who visits this blog) but just in case you happened to have celebrated St Patrick's Day a tad too enthusiastically, here are few hangover cures...

As recommended by the Ancient Assyrians...

A mixture of ground birds' beaks and myrrh

From the prescription pad of a Medieval European doctor...

Raw eel and bitter almonds

Or there's the Mongolian pick-you-up...

Pickled sheep's eyes

One cure that comes highly recommended - at least by one Bertram Wooster - is the restorative administered by the incomparable Jeeves in P G Wodehouse's first story about him, 'Jeeves Takes Charge'...

Raw egg, Worcester sauce, and red pepper

As Jeeves explains...

"It is the Worcester sauce that gives it its colour. The raw egg makes it nutritious. The red pepper gives it its bite. Gentlemen have told me they have found it extremely invigorating after a late evening."


Or you could stick with the hair of the dog and pour yourself another Guinness with a Jameson chaser...

COFFEE OR TEA?

While in Brighton on our recent anniversary jaunt, we repeatedly sought refuge from the wind and the rain in our favourite coffee shop, Redroaster, where we consumed probably rather too many cappuccinos than were good for us...

But, look! How could anyone resist?


Of course, most of the time (i.e. when I'm not in Brighton) I'm more a tea than a coffee man, except that I think I'd soon go off my English Breakfast if I had to use this depressing teapot spotted in the Brighton museum...


Tea and sympathy? I don't think so... Just drink up and die!

Images: Brian Sibley © 2008

SMELLOVISION

More or less every day, when we are at home, I make David an early morning cup of coffee. I open the container of ground coffee and am immediately transported back to my childhood: shopping with my Mum in Bromley High Street and lingering outside the bakery and coffee shop (the name of which I have forgotten) caught in a state of olfactory inebriation by the smell of the roasting coffee beans...

I read that "the aroma of roasted coffee contains as many as 1,000 volatile compounds".

Curious!

To my mind, it is without question one of the most potent fragrances in the world and yet, for some reason, coffee never tastes -- to me, at least -- quite a fantastic as something that gloriously perfumed ought to taste!

I've recently (and belatedly) been reading Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies and came across a similar thought being expressed by the hero, Adam Fenwick-Symes, triggered by the scent of -- a kipper...

No kipper, he reflected, is ever as good as it smells; how this too earthly contact with flesh and bone spoiled the first happy exhilaration; if only one could live, as Jehovah was said to have done, on the savour of burnt offerings.

He lay back for a little in his bed thinking about the smells of food, of the greasy horror of fried fish and the deeply moving smell that came from it; of the intoxicating breath of bakeries and the dullness of buns...

For some fascinating insights into the aromatic powers of the coffee bean, read 'Simulating the Coffee Drinker’s Nose' on Neuromarketing: Where Brain Science and Marketing Meet.

And after all that talk of coffee, I think it's probably time for an iced frappuccino which, for the uninitiated is a blend of frappé - the Greek term for milkshake - and cappuccino.

And I think I'll drink it on the beach...


For those not able to sample the delights of a Kalymnian frappucino, here's Mr Waugh's book and an appropriate, accompanying coffee mug...

SAME OLD SAME OLD

It's probably a gross simplification, but I think there are basically two kinds of holiday: the kind where You Have to Do Things and the kind where You Don't!

Every time we visit Venice we know that there are churches we've never got around to visiting (featuring Tiepolos we've never looked at it) or Palazzi where exhibitions are being held that one really ought to see or This or That or Whatever.

On Kalymnos, however, there is nothing that has to be seen or done that we haven't seen or done at least once before. There is the monastery - well, there are several, naturally, but most are inaccessibly perched on precipitous mountain tops beyond the reach of anything other than goats or, presumably, monks...


There is the ruined castle...


A batch of abandoned, sail-less windmills...


And the scant remains of the Early Christian Baths (seen here being visited by a tourist)...


There is, of course, the hustling-bustling port of Pothia with its Cathedral, Diving Museum and Sponge Factory (the kind you wash with not the Victoria Jam variety)...


But any later than 10.00 am and the place is hotter than Tophet so, after a coffee in the Kafennia (watching senior Kalymnians playing chess) and a quick visit to the local bakers for some home made bread and biscuits, it is time to escape from rather than explore...

One is left, therefore, with the other strenuous option of passing the time here in Emporios...


You wake leisurely to the gentle sound of the sea lapping on the shore beneath the bedroom window; enjoy a leisurely coffee and a slice of fresh watermelon for breakfast; take a leisurely stroll the exhausting ten yards (!) to the beach and make the tiring decision about which tamarisk tree to sit under; read a page or two of a book; doze; have another coffee; listen to the ever-busy cicadas; doze again; read half a page; doze once more; maybe take a short stroll (it's really not obligatory) to the bougainvillea-surrounded church...


...then have a Greek salad for lunch, followed by the requiste siesta; wake up in time for a nice leisurely cup of tea and a Kalymnian biscuit (or three); toying - possibly, but only if one really feels like it - with thinking about writing something; have an early evening drink; leisurely contemplate what maight be nice for dinner; read a paragraph or two; have a chat; have another drink; have supper; listen to George Glinati playing the guitar; watch David doing magic for the patrons of the Artistico; have a final drink and - somewhere about 1.00 am or, maybe, 2.30 it really doesn't matter - toddle up to bed and fall asleep to the gentle sound of the sea lapping on the shore...

So, you seen, absolutely no pressure!

GETTING THE KANE

One of the many criticism leveled against David Michaelis'recent biography of Charles Schulz is the author's selectivity in choosing facts, quotes and images to serve the analytical thrust of his arguments.

So, for example, he makes repeated reference to Schulz' supposed obsession with Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, a film that the artist saw, we are told, "as many as forty times" and which he referenced in several of the famous Peanuts strips. Small wonder, argues Michaelis, since the movie had highly significant resonances within Schulz' own life.


According to Michaelis: "Like Welles's hero, Charles Foster Kane, who 'got everything he wanted, and then lost it', Charles Monroe Schulz would succeed on a scale beyond the grandest of his childhood dreams, and yet he would struggle to love and be loved..."

Without subscribing to this theory (and feeling obliged to point out that Schulz repeatedly referenced many other films in his strips that are never mentioned by Michaelis) it does provide an excuse - as a fellow Kane fan - to reproduced one of my all-time favourite Peanuts strips that neatly sums up the utter frustration of having one's anticipated delight in seeing a film for the first time ruined by a mean Plot-Spoiler!

Click to enlarge

And, on the subject of that famous sled, here's Absolut Vodka's take on the Kane-connection.

*********************************************************************

And...
A VERY HAPPY BIRTHDAY
to
DAVID

*********************************************************************

Images: 'Peanuts', © The Estate of Charles Schulz; Photo of David Weeks © Mandy Davis, 2007

INN THE WILD

I've heard of pubs being called The Bear, The Cock and The Bull, The Tiger's Head, The Red Lion and The White Hart - even (disgustingly uninviting though it sounds) The Slug and Lettuce, but---

The ELEPHANT and HIPPO...?

Still, it's doubtless a handy hostelry for any big-game hunters who happen to be on safari in South West London...