Tuesday 24 February 2009

Pancakes: Flip, flip, hooray!

I’ve just been to buy a packet of batter mix and a bottle of squeezy lemon, a tradition started by our forbears many hundreds of years ago.

Shrove Tuesday became synonymous with pancakes pretty much as soon as it was invented, because it heralds the start of Lent. Lent was a bit stricter in those days – none of this ‘giving up Brussels sprouts’ malarkey – and Christian types weren’t allowed pleasant things such as sugar, milk, eggs or smiling. In a crazed attempt to rid themselves of these sinful commodities on the last day of freedom, they tossed them all into a hot pan, and the rest is history.

But what, you may ask, is a shrove? Turns out it is nothing more than a common verb, the past tense of shrive, which – if I know you, and I think I do – you will appreciate means ‘to confess, repent and seek absolution for one’s sins’. Presumably the modern translation of Shrove Tuesday – Pancake Day – came about when people realised they weren’t doing a whole lot of shriving but were enjoying an inordinate number of pancakes.

When I were a lass I went to this boy’s house for Pancake Day one year, and we took it in turns trying to flip pancakes. Some of them got stuck to the ceiling, most of them landed on the floor, and all of them tasted foul. So, call me dull, I use a utensil to flip pancakes now that I am old. But by all accounts, flipping pancakes straight out of the pan is what Jesus used to do, and experienced pancake-flippers continue to operate to this day, often racing against other people of equal talent in what is known as a pancake race.

This bizarre tradition began on this very day in 1445 in the small town of Olney, Buckinghamshire, when a pancake-cooking housewife heard the church bells calling her to her shriving duties and dashed out of the house, forgetting – forgetting – to cease flipping pancakes as she ran. As I write, dozens of proud Olney women are emulating this woman’s absent-mindedness, and indeed pitting their so-called wits against the women of Liberal, Kansas, in what I imagine is the only international pancake race in existence, now in its 59th year. Judging by the town sign, all participants must be disguised as portly nuns.

It’s what Jesus would have wanted.

Friday 20 February 2009

Superheroes (tm): Men in pants

Apologies. I have been remiss. During my blogging absence I’ve thought quite a few times of posting a very short entry – ‘Foxtons are a bunch of mimsies. Fact.’ – but couldn’t find the time in between increasingly irate phone calls to said estate agent.

So superheroes, right? Somehow or another I got to thinking about the fact that superheroes all wear tights and masks, and I wondered: What’s that all about, then?

The first superhero to wear the skintight ‘unitard’, as it is known, was Lee Falk’s 1936 creation The Phantom, the ‘Gray Ghost’ who became purple when colour was invent
ed in 1939. Since that time, pretty much every single superhero has copied The Phantom’s enviable style. The Phantom was also ‘on-trend’ where pants on the outside and a mask through which no eyeballs are visible were concerned. He truly was the Coco Chanel of the superhero world.

But he was not the first superhero. No. Indeed, the word ‘superhero’ was coined in 1917 and subsequently trademarked jointly by DC Comics and Marvel Comics. Who knew? He was also not the first masked crime-fighter: that honour is bestowed upon a dinner-jacket-wearing character named The Clock – a nonsensical name until you learn that he left calling cards that said: The Clock Has Struck. (Really, that’s as tenuous a joke as Bond girl Dr Christmas Jones, so named for the sole reason that Pierce Brosnan can shag her and quip ‘And I thought Christmas only comes once a year…’)

In the course of my research, I’ve seen the Scarlet Pimpernel (1905), Zorro (1919), Greek and Roman gods (Olden Days) and Robin Hood (1400s) described as early superheroes, which makes sense. Robin did also wear tights… but I suspect it was simply the fashion of the day. I also discovered that Batwoman is officially a Jewish lesbian, which was quite a revelation.



Also: Foxtons are a bunch of mimsies. Fact.

Thursday 12 February 2009

Gaybraham Lincoln

It came to my attention today that it was the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth – which is handy because a) I seem to be in the middle of a series on February birthdays, and b) I know a fact about Abraham Lincoln. (ALSO, and this is a very exciting fact, it’s the 200th anniversary of the birth of the much-ballyhooed Charles Darwin, too – fancy that.)

As well as being one of America’s greatest presidents, having the world’s strangest beard and history’s tallest hat, there are mutterings and whispers that Abraham Lincoln was, well, y’know. ‘One of them’. A bit of a whoopsie, as Stephen Fry might say.

Here is the damning evidence against family man Honest (ha!) Abe:

  1. In an episode of The Simpsons, he pinches Homer’s bottom. Fact.

  2. He slept with men.

  3. ‘Abraham’ sounds like ‘Gaybraham’.
Wait, what? Slept with men? Well, yes and don’t-know. At various stages of his life, he slept (shared his bed) with men, but as to whether he slept (‘accidentally’ snuggled up) with men is entirely open to interpretation. I like to think that he did.

When Lincoln was 28, he moved to Springfield, Illinois and shacked up with th
ree men, one of whom, Joshua Fry Speed, shared Lincoln’s bed. But given that it literally was a shack and had only one bedroom, this was perhaps more of a practicality than a lifestyle choice. BUT, when Joshua announced he was moving away four years later, Lincoln dumped his fiancée and suffered a bout of clinical depression, which was only cured when he went to stay with Joshua. Joshua then got married to some woman so Abraham convinced the jilted fiancée to marry him after all. It’s a lovely story, really.

And THEN, once he was president, Lincoln and his bodyguard David Derrickson shared a bed whenever Mrs L was out of town. (Or so the story goes – perhaps she fled town having discovered her husband and bodyguard in bed together.)

I’ve also heard that the show at Ford’s Theater on the fateful evening of 12 April 1865 was ‘An Audience with Liza Minelli’, but have yet to verify that claim.

Tuesday 10 February 2009

Happy Birthday, Town v. Gown Rioting

Like most people, I take a pointless interest in historical things that occurred on my birthday, 10 February. Queen Victoria married Prince Albert in 1840, New Delhi became the capital of India in 1931 and the ‘Deep Blue’ computer beat Garry Kasparov at chess in 1996. It is also the birthday of Boris Pasternak, Harold Macmillan, Bertolt Brecht, Robert Wagner, Roberta Flack, Laura Dern, Keeley Hawes and newsreader Nicholas ‘Silver Fox’ Owen. Aleksandr Pushkin, Joseph Lister, Arthur Miller and Roy Scheider died on this day.

It is also, as you are doubtless aware, the feast day of Saint Scholastica, the patron saint of convulsive children and nuns (Christ, they were scraping the barrel with that one). On 10 February 1355, a terrible riot broke out in the (aptly scholastic) city of Oxford, at the Swindlestock Tavern. A group of boozy students complained to the pub landlord about their wine; he, responding in a manner described by witnesses as ‘saucy’, was smashed over the head with a wine flagon. This was enough to stir up pre-existing ‘town v. gown’ rivalries, and the two factions raced off to ring the bells of the City Church and the University Church, apparently the done thing in those days if one wanted to raise an angry mob.

The ensuing three days of what became known as the Saint Scholastica Day Riot saw sixty students and thirty townspeople slain in the streets of Oxford. Somehow, this whole debacle was deemed by the king to have been the fault of the townspeople, and for the next 470 years, the mayor and city officials had to attend an annual service of penitence at the University Church. It wasn’t until an incoming mayor said he’d have nothing to do with this nonsense that the tradition came to an end.

Bloody students.

Saturday 7 February 2009

Dickensian London: You simply must go

February, Month of Glory, is all about birthdays. I know people with birthdays on eighteen of February’s twenty-eight days, including a cousin, three grandparents, my two favourite childhood dolls, my very good self, and a boy from my primary school class who always used to wet himself and then cry.

Today is – or would have been – Charles Dickens’s birthday. (He’s not the ‘person I know’ for 7 Feb, by the way – there was also a girl at my secondary school with luminous yellow hair.) Charles Dickens is one of the most marvellous people who ever lived, and No.1 on my list of Historical People I’d Like to Have a Pint With. He was born in Portsmouth on this day in 1812, the second of eight children of the financially useless John Dickens, who ended up in Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison, taking the whole family with him. Twelve-year-old Charles had to leave school and support the family, and ended up working at a blacking factory underneath what is now Charing Cross Station, essentially sticking labels onto jars of boot polish.

‘A crazy, tumbledown old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats… The sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise visibly up before me, as if I were there again.’

We went for a walk around Dickensian London last week – it was like going back in time, fucking brilliant – and saw the steps down to the river where young Dickens might have, I don’t know, washed his glue brushes or drowned some rats. The river was higher in those days, and came up to the grim side passage of Gordon’s Wine Bar that is, I can attest, ‘literally overrun with rats’. Just off the Strand, we peered through the gates of a Roman Bath I never knew existed, and where Dickens suffered ‘many a cold plunge’.

Just off Lincoln’s Inn Fields, you can see yer actual Old Curiosity Shop, which – needless to remark – was not thus named in Dickens’s day, but it was a bookbinder’s shop that the good man himself used to frequent. We didn’t go there, however – we made a beeline for one of Dickens’s favourite pubs, Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street. The pub was built in 1538 and rebuilt after the Great Fire of London, and Dickens used to sit by the fire in the gloomy, smoky little room to the right of the front door. I don’t think he would have drunk pints of Sam Smith’s Pure Brewed Lager, but that is what we did, imagining all the while that the large blonde tourist at his favourite table was a bearded Victorian man saying terribly witty things.


Wednesday 4 February 2009

Turning 30: Get over it

My paternal grandfather, shown here in a portrait of himself he absolutely hated, would have been 129 years old if he were still alive today. Needless to remark, he is very much not alive today. He died in 1952 at the age of 72, unaware that King George VI had passed away and been replaced by Her Maj. The servants (yes) were forbidden from telling him, lest it hasten The End. But I digress. He was 34 years old – and thus beyond fighting age – when World War I began, and 59 years old at the outbreak of World War II. That’s pretty old.

So I’ve done a spot of research into the world’s oldest people ever. (Interestingly, the third website that came up when I searched under ‘world’s oldest’ was about prostitution. ‘Redirect: World’s Oldest Profession’.) It would seem there is quite some caché in being the crustiest person that ever did live, and numerous people have been discounted on suspicion of fiddling (or indeed forgetting – you know what old people are like) their dates of birth.

The current oldest living person is American Gertrude Baines, whose parents were actual slaves, and who will be 115 in April. Gertrude’s still a few years off the world record, held by Jeanne Calment of France, who made it to 122 years and 164 days before her death in 1997. She never did a day’s work in her life, took up fencing at 85 and gave up smoking at 117. The second oldest person ever is a Japanese chap (120 years, 237 days), who worked for 98 years and lived through 71 Japanese Prime Ministers, but he stands accused of secretly having been a sprightly 105 years old at the time of his death.

The rest of the top ten are women – and indeed, 90 of the top 100 oldest people ever are women. Presumably the times in which they all lived have something to do with that: most of these women were born in about 1890, making them only 20-something when World War I broke out and their brothers and boyfriends marched off to their deaths, leaving my aged 30-something grandfather behind to do whatever middle-aged non-soldiers did in those days. Pose for portraits and holiday on the Isle of Wight, by the looks of family photo albums.

Well, happy birthday, aged grandfather.

Sunday 1 February 2009

Father Christmas: Not topical in February

It’s the 1st of February, so what better subject for today’s facts than Father Christmas? For reasons best known to myself, I know lots of Santa facts, and intend to trundle them out whenever I’m stumped for a topical subject.

So, ’twas the night before Christmas (in 1823) when Clement Clarke Moore’s poem ‘A Visit from Saint Nicholas’ appeared in New York’s Sentinel newspaper.

’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St Nicholas soon would be there…

The poem described Saint Nicholas’s attire and general jollity for the first time: ‘Dressed all in fur… his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot… a bundle of toys he had flung on his back… His eyes how they twinkled! his dimples how merry! His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry! … And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow… He had a broad face and a little round belly, That shook when he laughed, like a bowlful of jelly!’

Later that century (3 January 1863, to be precise), German-American caricaturist and political cartoonist Thomas Nast drew Santa as a portly, bearded, fur-clad, sleigh-driving fellow who visited Civil War camps in order to demonstrate his loyalty to the Unionist cause. If this image from Harper’s Weekly were available in higher res, you’d see that he is apparently lynching a puppet of Confederate leader Jefferson Davis. Who knew he cared?

Santa’s glorious victory in the Civil War served only to strengthen Nast’s obsession with the character, and he continued to sketch him for thirty years. Gradually, Santa’s jacket changed from tan to red, and the image of a jolly – but borderline morbidly obese – little chap was born. This is him in 1881.

It is a common misconception that Father Christmas was dressed in red by the Coca-Cola Company – but that’s another story.