shewhomust | Entries tagged with links

Two recent articles in The Guardian, each with echoes and source material:

Saturday's article reports that the University of Leeds has bought A pamflyt compiled of Cheese, contayninge the differences, nature, qualities and goodnes, of the same, a handwritten booklet from the sixteenth century, the earliest known book about British (I suspect that's 'English') cheese. Checking back to the online version of the article reveals that they had already published this news a year ago. But since that time, the copy of the 'pamflyt' uploaded to the University's website has been transcribed. So it's worth repeating.

A few days later came an article on bakery tourism: people who travel implausible distances to sample the products of a particular bakery. I like this idea: not so much having such refined taste that you have to cross the Pennines to buy your sourdough, as planning something special as the endpoint of a journey you will enjoy anyway. The article describes this a a pilgrimage (though it says it in Korean, which is classy); and (despite anything I may recently have been saying to the contrary) I like this idea of pilgrimage as a journey with a purpose, and it seems as reasonable to plan your holiday around bakeries as around restaurants - and if you wanted to do that, there is a guide book (which the Guardian duly name-checks, but does not offer to sell through its bookshop). I'm tempted, even though many of the treats described are too sweet for me: I want what the article starts out by invoking, "the perfect loaf or croissant," not "[your] signature 'croissant bomb' - a crispy outer filled with chocolate or hazelnut or salted caramel."

Or maybe I shoud just go to Denmark, where they are apparently having a rye bread revival.

A scientific project set out to crowdsource the answer to this question, and discovered, to no-one's surprise, that it would be quicker to ask "What don't gulls eat?" In fact, if there is a surprise in its findings, it is that for all the starfish and profiteroles and rubber sealant from the observer's car windscreen, the most important food item for gulls is earthworms.

Full story in The Guardian, which also has a wonderful but appalling picture gallery: seriously, not for the squeamish.

The Thames barges were unique vessels: between 80ft and 95ft long, 20ft wide, capable of setting a spectacular 3,000sqft of sail (bigger than a tennis court) and carrying up to 170 tons of cargo (the equivalent of four articulated lorries). Flat out on a beam reach, they could fly along at 12 knots (about the same speed as an America's Cup yacht of the era). Not only that, but they could be sailed, famously, by "one man, a boy and a dog" - though, as Jim said, it would have to be "a bloody good dog".

From the Guardian's obituary for Jim Lawrence, one of the last people to skipper a Thames saoling barge. In later life Jim became a sailmaker, and "[h]is sails featured in TV programmes such as The Onedin Line... and a long-running Beck's lager ad campaign." Which means that I have seen his work, because that last refers to the green sails of the Alexander von Humboldt. This connection makes me happy, though I have no photographic evidence for it.

I wouldn't normally think of a road tunnel as a must-see attraction. At best it's something that makes the journey easier - and if I'm on holiday, I'm more likely to complain that it also makes the journey less interesting. But I might make an exception in this case.

Bonus link: more about the art works, from the tunnel's website.

I have a bee in my bonnet about so-called "cosy" crime fiction, so I was intrigued by the promise of an article on the subject in yesterday's Guardian. Inevitably, when I came to read the piece, it was about something completely different.

My rant goes something like this: when I started to read crime fiction, long ago, you could also refer to it as "detective fiction." There were variations, but mostly there were a group of people, someone would be murdered, and someone else would assume the task of examining the relationships between the survivors to find out which of them had both reason and ability to commit the crime. There were books in which the emphasis was on action, fear, suspense rather than motivation, but these were something slightly other (possibly thrillers). In the intervening period, the balance has changed, and now if you say "crime fiction," the reader will anticipate something noirish and violent. There may be a mystery to be solved, but equally all may be in the open, and the only question is who will survive and who will triumph. Classic, golden age type, stories in which the crime is a lens through which the characters and their world can be studied - these are regarded as "cosy" (which is to say, not very highly regarded at all). Once, at a crime fiction event, I asked a speaker, an expert on Scandi-noir, whether there was such a thing as Scandi-cosy? He said no, but he had to think quite hard about it: the question hadn't occurred to him before. The criticism, I think, is that "detective fiction" in this sense is cosy because by solving the crime, the detective restores order; such fiction is comforting, whereas noir crime is virtuous because it afflicts the comfortable. I think rather that tales of violence among gangsters, hard times on the margins, allow middle class readers (yes, like me) to feel that these are things that happen to other people; cosy crime brings murder and suspicion among people like us...

Anyway, the Guardian article considered cosy crime to be inherently light hearted, humorous. That's my Achilles heel right there, of course. "For my money," says author Oskar Jensen, "today’s greatest exponent of playful detective fiction is Alex Pavesi, whose Eight Detectives is a gloriously original, intricate and often very funny series of practical jokes played on the reader."

boybear lent me a copy of Eight Detectives: I thought it clever, if cold-hearted and at times slightly macabre. It did not occur to me to consider it as humorous...

That aside, if crime is noir and cosy is funny, how am I to describe such classic crime as - well, I've just finished Ann Cleeves' (very early) Murder in Paradise. Perhaps I should go back to calling it "detective fiction."

Bonus link, from the same page: Tom Gauld's Christmas tree.

Rigby's Encyclopaedia of the Herring has much weird and wonderful information about fasting on Fridays (and other herring-related subjects).

The Starry Night: I knew that it is possible to photograph the Milky Way. of course, and I've seen some very impressive results from people doing it. I had somehow failed to realise that it is a Thing. But yes, there are whole societies dedicated just to photographing the Molky Way, and here is the announcement of Milky Way Photographer of the Year. There are some wonderful pictures here. though they don't necessarily benefit from being seen en masse: the family resemblance becomes overwhelming.

On Twitter (with thanks to

durham_rambler, who watches Twitter so I don't have to.)

It's a while since I've read one of the Guardian's Long Read features; long enough that when I came across this piece about the trope of the disabled villain, I was initially baffled. Was it some sort of paid supplement? But no, it is an interesting and thoughtful essay about a literary cliché which has a long history and is maybe not entirely a thing of the past. From James Bond to JRR Tolkien via Shakespeare, author Jan Grue considers some literary examples, and eventually, of course, he reaches Roald Dahl:

It is no accident that the biggest recent debates over sensitivity reading have been initiated by two companies that strive to maximise the value of the intellectual property of dead authors. Their real sensitivity is to the market...

I might have posted about the row over the new editions of Roald Dahl, and I never got round to it: Grue has not written the post that was taking shape in my hed, but he struck a chord all the same. And the piece as a whole is better than what I would have written, so it's all good.

In yesterday's paper: the Ladies of Llangollen: This article illuminates the third member of the household, the servant Mary Carryl.
On her death, the money she left to the Ladies (visitors would pay her for garden tours) enabled them to buy Plas Newydd, guaranteeing continued stability.

Traditionally, it's the proprietor who leaves money to the faihful retainer, so they won't be homeless when the property passes to the heir. I liked this twist, which reverses that convention. It must have been a tidy sum, to judge by the picture of the house, which is about three times as big as I had imagined it.
In yesterday's paper: finding youself in someone else's narrative: This article about the downside of kindness videos took some finding, because searching The Guardian for 'random acts of kindness' keywords prioritised a whole page of more positive coverage. I probably err on the side of caution: I'm very hesitant about photographing strangers, ao my pictures tend to show mysteriously empty streets...
On the other hand: The same article quotes someone who "has been researching consent and ethics in memoir and other life-writing for 10 years." Good subject: even at the very informal level od this journal, I do sometimes hesitate over including other people's stories. At a more sustained level, I have been reading Ellen Mellor's memoir Tea, Comics and Gender: it's very strange reading the autobiography of someone you know (and finding yourself in it!) but it's Ellen's story to tell, and she has taken pains over hoe other people are presented. Recommended, by the way.
The front page of today's paper: A picture of a dodo! Scientists plan to use gene-editing to recreate a dodo. Is this a good idea? I don't know, but I enjoyed the picture. (It makes a change from cabinet ministers.)
A phone call from the car rental company: They have a car for us. Hooray! I have rebooked my appointment with the optician for tomorrow.

I have broken my (prescription) reading glasses.: Yesterday I visited the optician and picked out a frame (my only requirement is that the reading glasses be as different as possible to any other glasses I own, to minimise the risk of wearing the weong glasses) and in a week's time I will have new ones. With luck they will work even better than the old ones, since my prescription has changed quite a bit. Meanwhile, I am squinting at things with my nose to the paper.
We - unintentionally - dined on vegetarian haggis.: I had included haddis in my cheese order, since these are the people (or the successirs of the people) from whom I have long bought my haggis. The delivery note says "not vegetarian", but I can see how expressing it like that could lead to errors. The worst thing about it, though, was not that it was vegetarian byt that it was tinned; also in a plastic 'stomach' as a result of which the texture was completely wrong. Which was disappointing.
Other endangered foodstuffs:: A Guardian article discusses seven of the UK’s most endangered foods, of which we frequently eat two, saddleback pork and beremeal. The illustration shows something unlike any bere bannock I have ever met...
Not the finger in the ear show: In 1982 the EFDSS made a half hour programme in the BBC's Open Door slot, about why you might like folk music better than you expect (the defensive note is theirs).

Watch on YouTube

Some familiar faces and some unexpected fashion choices (Martin Simpson in a pink bow tie?)
One for my own benefit: Thank Goodness it's Folk: Sam Hindley and James Fagan on Sheffield Live - because I believe the latest show had lots of Les Barker, and I'd like to listen to it.

From the Guardian's Country Diary:: Maes Howe at mid-winter.
Also from the Guardian:: the traditional smell of Christmas (can you contribute to the Encyclopaedia of Smells?
Explore the portfolio of the Frères d'art:: I've barely dipped into it, and am already a little breathless (Look at this fisherman with a cormorant! or This one's called 'Disconnection'!...)
With thanks to the Flickr contact who made the introduction.

Quite late in the pre-Christmas period, we learned that S. would be holding her traditional Christmas morning party this year. I say "traditional", but it's a tradition that had lapsed a year or so before lockdown (she spent a couple of Christmases abroad, apart from anything else). It's always a good party, but it's always a struggle to fit a traditional Christmas around that break in the middle of the day; and it's not as if I'd been well ahead in preparations, anyway. No problem: we have no-one to please but ourselves, anyway. We observed Christmas on a one-day delay, and I'm very happy with that solution.

So on Christmas Eve I took the first of the two steps of the process of preparing the Christmas cake; on Christmas morning we drove into Newcastle for S.'s party, which was small but perfectly formed.

And on Christmas afternoon I took to the sofa with a detective story: what could be more seasonal than that? Except that what I picked off the pile turned out to be a very emphatically Hallowe'en story - three murders echo each other over a period of a hundred years, a ghost is reported to walk, and the third death, which leads to the story being unravelled, takes place over Hallowe'en. If you were looking for a seasonal mystery novel to read over Hallowe'en - and you weren't likely to be triggered by the very horrible deaths of three young women - I entirely recommend Martin Edwards' The Frozen Shroud. But 'horrible' is the right word, I think: the resolution plays entirely fair by the rules of the Detection Club (as it should) but the journey there is through the territory of horror.

Yesterday was Christmas Day Plus One. We opened presents and ate roast turkey: I bought a turkey joint from Sainsbury's, which probably wasn't as good as doing it myself but enabled me to do all the vegetables and trimmings to my satisfaction.

And today is Boxing Day Plus One, and a dinner of leftovers is in the oven.

Must get back onto real time. Have a Literary Clock (with thanks to the Guardian for the link).

I had never heard of Sheila Paine until I read her obituary in the Guardian's 'Other Lives' section. Now I want to know more, to read the books she wrote about her travels - that may not be so easy! Something to explore when we return from holiday ...

But I wish I'd seen this exhibition of her photographs.

The annual puffin count is on (in pictures).

They just can't resist disco lights.

Which is bizarre enough, but the article mentions in passing that scallops can have up to 200 eyes. Seriously? Yes, really: the Smithsonian Magazine confirms it (with a video.

I wouldn't want to eat something with 200 eyes; but it looks as if they are in the mantle, which you don't eat. So that's all right...

I had heard about the department in the Vatican whose responsability it is to come up with Latin words for things previously unknown to Latin about which the Pope might wish to speak.

But it seems there is also an organisation with the similar task of finding Gaelic names for wildlife not traditionally settled in Scotland. Mostly this seems to concern birds and insects whose range is extended northwards by climate change. But there are also some species imported as exotics, like the red-necked wallaby, which colonised the island of Inchconnachan on Loch Lomond after it was imported by a former owner. Gaelic speakers can now express their opinions of the uallabaidh ruadh-mhuinealach.

Endurance.

Lighthouse map!

via, who explains "The map is even better than it might seem at first glance: the colors are the real colors, the patterns are the real patterns, and the size of the dots is the distance at which each light is visible."

Moss piglets! Water bears! Coming to you from Phil Gates's garage roof.

(We were awake early on Sunday).

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/774620.html

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News from Nowhere

Entries tagged with links

Bread and cheese, and more bread and cheese

What do gulls eat?

Lost worlds

Reasons to visit the Faroe islands

Laughing at crime

Fish for Friday

Pictures at an exhibition

Puffins in the moonlight

A long read

Five things at the breakfast table

Five things

Wise men bearing links

Time slips

Another life

Dispatch from the Farnes

Things I never knew about scallops

What's the Gaelic for 'wallaby'?

Word of the day

Maps! And lighthouses!

Tardigrades!