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.

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.

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.

Creationism: Words fail me

I visited the Darwin ‘Big Idea’ exhibition at the Natural History Museum at the weekend. The tagline – ‘If you had an idea that was going to outrage society, would you keep it to yourself?’ – refers to the fact that Darwin held off publishing On the Origin of Species for twenty years for fear that Christians (his wife/cousin included) would not be best pleased.

Fortunately, sane people don’t worry about such things in this day and age. But ‘I couldn’t help but wonder’ how on earth Creationist types – Sarah Palin and the like – actually explain the evolutionary stuff around us in a way that is so compelling as to discount Darwin entirely. Here is what I discovered.

So there’s something called ‘flood geology’, which tries to prove that the Genesis flood, of Noah and the Ark fame, occurred approximately 4500 years ago and was the cause of all the geological features and fossils we see around us today. Some Creationists argue that ancient dead things are buried at different levels in the earth’s rock because they sank more quickly during said flood. On account of being heavier, you see. So a dinosaur is heavier, and therefore lower – but not necessarily older – than Noah’s third-favourite cat.

Young Earth Creationists believe that the earth is about 6000 years old. Indeed, a seventeenth-century archbishop called James Ussher did some sums based on a literal reading of the Bible and deduced that the world was created ‘upon the entrance of the night preceding the twenty-third day of October’ in 4004 BC.

Old Earth Creationists, on the other hand, can explain how our world came into existence one autumnal Saturday evening in 4004 BC, and yet clearly hosted dinosaurs and whatnot long before that date. The Bible doesn’t specifically state that ‘the first day’ (God switches the lights on) was the same day as ‘in the beginning’ (lights on the blink). So he could well have created the earth, spent veritable eras creating and destroying dinosaurs in the darkness, and then settled on a new plan – the one with which the Good Book is actually concerned.

There is so much more of this stuff that will have to be left for another time. ‘Irreducible complexity’, for example – the theory that things are just so damn clever and fiddly that it’s simply not possible they weren’t created by a big invisible beardy man in the sky. There was a great quote from David Attenborough in today’s Guardian:

‘They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator.’

I love David.

The Royal Family: Icky

I’m no doubt preaching to the choir when I point out that there’s something kinda funny-looking about the royal family. ‘Buck-toothed, big-eared, horsey and inbred’ is probably nearer the mark. The shocking truth is that they are in fact all of the above.

The Queen and Prince Philip are both great-great-grandchildren of Queen Victoria – making them third cousins – as well as being second cousins once removed through King Christian IX of Denmark. Christian IX was himself Queen Victoria’s third cousin and had asked her to marry him before she chose Albert instead. Albert being her first cousin. Somehow, the fact that Victoria and Albert were both delivered by the same midwife makes it even ickier.

If you look at the (tiny) family tree below, you’ll see that the Queen and Prince Philip are also third cousins of King Juan Carlos of Spain – who is married to yet another third cousin’s daughter.

What is wrong with these people? Surely there are plenty of perfectly horsey fish in the sea?

Charles Darwin did a spot of research into inbreeding, spurred on by anxiety after marrying his cousin Emma Wedgwood, of the credit-crunched white-motif-on-blue-background pottery family. Back in the day – Victorian times, shockingly – this was quite the thing to do in order to prevent unsavoury sexual mingling with the inferior classes. Charles and Emma Darwin had a nice life and ten children, but somehow Charles couldn’t shake off the suspicion that there was something inherently… inbred and icky about his family. He spent years recording his children’s defects – ‘backward in walking & talking… attacks of shuddering & gasping & hysterical sobbing… makes many extraordinary grimaces’ etc etc – and eventually concluded: ‘We are a wretched family and ought to be exterminated.’

I’m saying nothing, but republicans may want to take note.

Mentos: Frothy

Today’s fact is less original than some of the others, but I’m doing it anyway for the simple fact that you must see the video below if you haven’t already. It’s absolute genius.

So the fact is: Mentos + Diet Coke = crazy explosion of fizz.

For once, I have done some research into the science behind this physics-class phenomenon. For some reason (oh dear, there goes the scientific gravitas), Mentos have greater surface tension than other ‘small oblate spheroids’ – round things – as well as a number of little pot-holes on said tense surface. Something called ‘nucleation’ occurs in the pot-holes, and carbon dioxide is released so rapidly that the whole thing turns into ‘a raging foam’.

Phew. Here’s the video:



While engrossed in the scientific volumes necessary to write the technical paragraph above, I discovered some very pointless things about Mentos, including the fact that ‘the typical Mentos roll is approximately 3/4-inch in diameter, 6/16-inches tall and 1.3 ounces.’ That’s right: approximately 6/16 of an inch*.

Most interestingly, however, you can recreate the experiment within your very stomach by eating a handful of Mentos and downing some Diet Coke! It ‘can result in people regurgitating the foamy result (as evidenced by numerous online videos)’, although ‘no actual news accounts exist of anyone dying from it.’

I must source these regurgitatory videos at once.

***

* And hello, surely that’s 3/8? Take that, boffins!

Can’t Get Enough of that Wonderful Duff

My brother’s boss sent him a helpful link to a website all about the dangers of alcohol this morning, and he helpfully passed it on to me, reminding me in the process of the time I registered with a new doctor and, after making something of a wild misstatement regarding my alcohol intake, was met with a raised eyebrow and sent to the waiting room clutching a leaflet entitled ‘Thinking About Drink’. Them’s were strange days.

So today I have mostly been learning facts about alcohol.

While alcohol has the effect of stimulating the drinker, it is not in fact a stimulant. On the contrary, the garrulousness, wild dancing, hilarious-anecdote-telling, sing-song-instigating, ill-advised-text-messaging and tearful revelations that accompany a night down the local occur because alcohol anaesthetises the part of your brain that governs self-control. The different areas of your brain get pissed at varying rates, which explains why you can go from ‘I bloody love you, mate’ to ‘LET’S JUMP IN THE RIVER!’ – and back. On the positive side – depending on what you’re up to – your pain threshold goes through the roof.

I also learnt that alcohol is technically a food, since it contains calories. Who knew? Indeed, a glass of wonderful booze contains as many calories as ‘a large potato’, the website told me. Unlike a large potato, however, alcohol has no nutritional value and doesn’t sit around waiting to be digested. It goes into your blood stream in a diluted form, depending on how much water you have in your body. Since muscle contains more water than fat, and women generally have more fat in their bodies than men, women are traditionally a bunch of hysterical lightweights and most likely to suffer from ‘behavioural instability’ and ‘emotional distress’. (I’m thinking Jean off EastEnders.)

There were all manner of other hideous facts – ‘blood-sludging’, ‘cell death’ and ‘decreasing penile size’ came up an awful lot – but they were rather depressing and would have driven you to drink.

Chin chin.