Angels of the sea

"The only true Turtle Soup is made from live turtles killed for the purpose. The turtles which die on their way to England and are kept in cold storage are known in the trade as 'angels' and are no good at all for soup or anything else. The turtle fins, and again from live turtles only, can be very good grilled and served with a sauce Madere."

Eye-opening culinary history from Andre L Simon's Guide to Good Food and Wines (1956).

Frozen, white, dead turtles with their flippers spread like angels' wings ... it's enough to put you off eating turtle for life.

But if it does, M Simon offers plenty of alternatives. His book also has pointers on the best ways to eat porpoises, elephant seal's tongue, cow's udder, and rats.

What it lacks in detail it certainly makes up for in breadth. Nigel Slater, you're on notice.

Very good going

Thanks to some moderately heavy rain in Queensland over the Christmas break, my trip home from the in-laws' turned into an all-Aussie adventure featuring driving through floodwater and on dirt roads to avoid a bridge which had been cut by the rapidly rising Condamine River.

All tremendously fun stuff, but in this day and age, travel ain't what it used to be.

In the Twenties and Thirties Evelyn Waugh spent several years journeying around the world and gathering material for novels like Scoop and Black Mischief.

In 1946 Waugh's favourite bits from the books were collected in When the Going Was Good, blurbed by Penguin as featuring "wit and adventure in four continents."

This portrait of a bright young thing, out and about in the last decades of the Empire, depicts travelling as it should be.

To holiday in style, one learns, means packing a solar topee and dinner jacket, while always having some native "boys" on hand to carry one's steamer trunk.

When Waugh drops in on a rooftop cinema night in Aden, he encounters a society rendered nearly insensible by the combination of an inhospitable climate and an inadvisable dress code.

The first film was a Pathe Gazette, showing the King leaving London for Bognor Regis twenty months previously, and an undated Grand National, presumably of about the same antiquity. A fine old slapstick comedy followed. I turned to remark to my host how much superior the early comedies were to those of the present day, but discovered, to my surprise, that he was fast asleep. I turned to my neighbour on the other side; his head had fallen back, his eyes were shut, his mouth wide open. His cigarette was gradually burning towards his fingers. I took it from him and put it out. The movement disturbed him. He shut his mouth, and without opening his eyes, said, 'Jolly good, isn't it?' Then his mouth fell open again. I looked about me saw in the half-light reflected from the screen that the entire audience were asleep ... Later, 'God Save the King' was played on the piano. Everyone sprang alertly to attention and, completely vivacious once more, adjourned to the club for beer, oysters and bridge."

While heading Out East affords a chap a certain leeway, it's important not to let standards slip too far when on board ship:

".. the soldiers had an interesting snobbism. During the day, though cleanly shaved and with carefully brushed hair, they cultivated an extreme freedom of dress, wearing khaki shorts and open tennis shirts and faded cricket blazers. At dinner, however, they all appeared in dinner jackets and stiff shirts. One of them told me that the reason he travelled second class was that he need not trouble about clothes, but that he had to draw the line somewhere."

Of course, when travelling in hot countries, one is apt to come across natives, and foreigners.

The first must be improved at every opportunity, whether they like it or not:

"The impression that I had already left British soil was dissipated almost at once by the spectacle of a pair of Tanganyika policemen who stood with the ticket collector at the station door and forcibly vaccinated the native passengers as they passed through."

Foreigners come in all shapes and sizes, and are best regarded with a kind of amused detachment:

[the ship's passenger list] was reinforced by a draft of the [French] Foreign Legion on their way to preserve discipline in Indo-China. The men travelled fourth class, sprawling about the lower deck by day, battened down in the hold at night ... Two of them climbed through a porthole one night in the Suez Canal and escaped. Next day a third tried to follow their example. We were all on deck drinking our morning aperitifs when we heard a splash and saw a shaven-headed figure in shirt-sleeves scrambling up the bank behind us. He had no hat and the sun was at its strongest. He ran through the sand, away from the ship, with gradually slackening speed. When he realised that no-one was pursuing him he stopped and turned round. The ship went on. The last we saw of him was a figure stumbling after us and waving his arms. No-one seemed the least put out by the occurrence."

March or die, old chap...

Happy Christmas

"Oh Hurrah shouted Ethel I shall soon be ready as I had my bath last night so wont wash very much now."

-Daisy Ashford, The Young Visiters, 1919 (via Slightly Foxed magazine)

And a Merry Christmas to you all. Thanks for reading.

Birds, battles, fiends and cads

"The old soldiers ... were mostly the descendants of the borderers, whose propensity for war might perhaps be innate ... One of these, during a walk, in which I fell in with him, from Newcastle to Ovingham, described the minute particulars of the Battle of Minden and how, in the absence of Lord Sackville, they shook hands, the whole length of the line, vowing to stand by each other without flinching ... this tall stout man ... appeared occasionally in his old military coat etc as long as he lived, and after he died this coat, which had been shot at, both at Minden and else where, was, at last hung up, on a stake on the corn rigs as a scare crow."

- Thomas Bewick, My Life, 1862.

I'd struggle to write this blog without being able to order books online. But there's no real substitute for the pleasure of rooting around in a good second-hand bookshop. Which is how, a couple of weeks ago, I came across this memoir of naturalist, artist and woodcut engraver Thomas Bewick (1753-1828).

Bewick is best known for his landmark History of British Birds, published over four years from 1797, which in turn is remarkable not only for its bird plates - there are many superb examples here - but also for the finely detailed tail-pieces with which he filled the book's spare space.

These tiny woodcuts include stock scenes from country life as well as more grotesque vignettes; like a huntsman hanging a cat, or this devilish scene, which Wikipedia tells me is mentioned in Jane Eyre:

"The fiend pinning down the thief's pack behind him, I passed over quickly: it was an object of terror."

My Life also features a fair bit of social history. Bewick was much concerned by the plight of the near-destitute Seven Years' War veterans he met on his travels. At the Battle of Minden (1759), an Anglo-German army inflicted a heavy defeat on the French, with the British infantry beating off repeated French cavalry charges with point-blank volleys of musketry. Lord Sackville, the allied cavalry commander, repeatedly refused to let his men ride to the rescue of the beleaguered foot regiments.

What a cad.

The sound of summer

Brisbane is being soaked by relentless summer rain - again - today, so I thought this might make the best tribute to Captain Beefheart, whose death was announced yesterday. Can you hear the windscreen wipers?

For a sprawling peasant's take on one of the Captain's finest moments, follow the link from Hooting Yard.

Dylan Thomas: His part in my downfall

Back in the good old days, when I was trying to get my first job on newspapers, a standard interview question was: "Why do you want to become a journalist?".

The standard answer always began with platitudes about an "enjoyment" of writing and "reading newspapers", before being airily expanded to take in some sort of notion of "service to the local community".

But if I'd been honest I would have told them that I'd been reading too much Hunter S Thompson and wanted to be like the young reporter from the Dylan Thomas story Old Garbo. Embarrassing but true.

I can remember when I first encountered Dylan Thomas. It would have been about 1980, in the pages of Look and Learn, a magazine for swotty schoolkids to which I was almost religiously devoted.

I'm not sure why the editors of Look and Learn thought that a profile of one of English language literature's biggest piss-heads would be suitable reading for their audience of impressionable young scholars, but there he was, complete with a full-page drawing depicting the poetical menace - looking like a wild-eyed schoolboy - scandalising a dinner party by pelting the guests with bread rolls.

From memory, the article glossed over the role the demon drink played in this outburst, leaving me rather puzzled about (a) what a dinner party actually was, and (b) why grown-ups would act this way.

I think I put it down to an excess of poetical temperament, an as-yet-undefined quantity which exerted a growing fascination on me from then on.

Now then, where was I?

Old Garbo, from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, is a loosely autobiographical tale about a young reporter trying to get in with Mr Farr, the senior reporter on his Welsh paper, the Tawe News.

"He was the senior reporter, a great shorthand writer, a chain-smoker, a bitter drinker, very humorous, round-faced and round-bellied, with dart holes in his nose."

Mr Farr covers "all the big stories, the occasional murder, such as when Thomas O'Connor used a bottle on his wife .... the strikes, the best fires."

Young Thomas plays court to Mr Farr and is rewarded with an invitation to a Saturday night pub crawl down the docks, where, slightly mysteriously, "you can see the sailors knitting in the public bar."

The best bit for me comes at the start of the night, in the back room of the Three Lamps.

"I leant against the bar, between an alderman and a solicitor, drinking bitter, wishing that my father could see me now and glad, at the same time, that he was visiting Uncle A. in Aberavon. He could not fail to see that I was a boy no longer, nor fail to be angry at the angle of my fag and my hat and the threat of the clutched tankard. I liked the taste of beer, its live, white lather, its brass-bright depths, the sudden world through the wet brown walls of the glass, the tilted rush to the lips and the slow swallowing down to the lapping belly, the salt on the tongue, the foam at the corners."

That "sudden world" glimpsed through the walls of the glass - it's like a gospel of delight for drunkards.

Anyway, this was the world I thought I was entering as a journalist 60-odd years after the story was written.

A world of pub backrooms, death knocks, intrigue, parades of (in this case Welsh) grotesques, camaraderie, and easy-going drunkenness.

It was a dying world I thought I glimpsed in the early days, when one paper I tried to get a job on still had its printing press downstairs, filling the offices with the smell of ink and hot metal, and reporters repaired to the back rooms of poky little boozers at regular intervals.

But I soon found out that death knocks are no fun, houses that have been burnt out leave a stink in your clothes which lingers for days, and trying to make sense of an inquest while suffering with a screaming hangover is not to be recommended.

Looking back, even at this distance my capacity for magical thinking is wince-inducing.

The only two books I've ever stolen in my life were by, or about, Dylan Thomas. One of them has Old Garbo in it. No, I'm not proud of it.

What books or writers have led you astray - and did you enjoy it?

An innocent abroad

When I put it to one of my more sagacious workmates that I was reading a biography of PG Wodehouse his response was: "Is he enough of a deviant for it to be interesting?"

Jeeves' creator didn't go in for drunkenness, or infidelity, or excessive displays of emotion, or any of that angst-ridden poet stuff.

But the man who emerges from Robert McCrum's Wodehouse is certainly not without interest.

Skewered by Sean O'Casey as "English literature's performing flea", Wodehouse was a man who managed to avoid serving his country in not one, but two, world wars, and a man who could write:

"I never feel that real people are interesting. Even if they are, they never actually do funny things, at any rate in sufficient quantity to make an article."

A man with a near-pathological lack of interest in the wider world, who described himself as a "mere writing machine" and saved all his best material for the printed page.

In person Wodehouse was benign, good natured, but somewhat dull. Evelyn Waugh's brother Alec, who you may recall as "disgusting Uncle Alec", described the unchanging pleasures of Wodehouse's company thus:

"He looked exactly the same. He had not put on weight. He was always completely hairless. He was his familiar, massive, genial self. He had no peculiarities of manner or expression. He was not funny. He never repeated jokes. There was no sparkle in his conversation. He did not indulge in reminiscences. There was a straightforward exchange of talk ... 'It is an extraordinary thing,' he would say, 'Marlborough beat Tonbridge and Tonbridge beat Uppingham, but Uppingham beat Marlborough. What do you make of that?'"

His innocence made him a dupe of the Nazis during World War II but, McCrum says, it also gave him "an exceptional good nature and a profound humanity."

And Wodehouse's prose "danced on the page like poetry, marrying the English style of the academy with the English slang of the suburbs" in a "lunatic celebration of an Edwardian twilight" boasting lines like these:

"You see before you, Jeeves, a toad beneath the harrow"

"He spun around with a sort of a guilty bound, like an adagio dancer surprised while watering the cat's milk."

"Like a man who, stooping to pluck a nosegay of wild flowers on a railway line, is unexpectedly struck in the small of the back by the Cornish Express."

And as for that "performing flea" squib .... years later, living in permanent exile in the USA, Wodehouse was able to gloss it like this: "Thinking it over, I believe he meant it to be complimentary, for all the performing fleas I have met have impressed me with their sterling artistry and that indefinable something which makes the good trouper."