Hooptedoodle #334 - Local Research to Get One's Teeth Into

High-profile local advertising - Barker & Dobson advert on the Liverpool Overhead Railway, mid 1950s. B&D's factory was just a few miles up the hill, in Everton

I was born in Liverpool, as I keep mentioning here (possibly as some form of excuse?), and grew up supporting Liverpool Football Club. The other big club in the city, Everton, also has a long and proud tradition. Since as a kid I spent some years forbidden to travel to away matches, I often used to go with similarly paroled friends to Goodison Park, to watch Everton when Liverpool were playing in far off places.

Nowadays, in the age of hate and trolling, the Liverpool vs Everton thing can be as unpleasant as you might expect - families banned from intermarrying etc - but in my youth things were a bit less frenzied, and I grew up with a soft spot for Everton which I might be well advised to keep quiet about now.

Everton FC - 1909

Everton, as you may or may not know, have been known as "The Toffees" since what my dad's cousin Harold Shaw used to refer to as "time immoral". Like all such traditions that we absorb in early childhood, I never questioned it or wondered about its background.

A bit of cod [personal] history. There were an astonishing number of sweet factories in Liverpool. Now I think about it, this is obviously because, as the headquarters of Tate & Lyle, Liverpool was the place through which most of the cane sugar from the Caribbean arrived in Britain. If it hadn't been for post-war rationing, we'd all have had no teeth.

Another fact which has only dawned on me gradually is that many of the makers of sweets I was familiar with as a kid were Liverpool-based. This is not just because they were local firms who had a grip on the market - a number of them were nationally famous, and they just happened to have their factories in the city.

I got involved over the last couple of weeks in a pleasant exchange of email reminiscences about vintage sweets. I did a bit of gentle research to find out what happened to such-and-such a maker, and mostly I learned that the history of  the UK sweet industry is pretty alarming - a lot of hostile takeovers - and very complicated. I also learned something, at long last, about why Everton FC are the Toffees.

I've always been familiar with Everton Mints, which were a hard, black-and-white, humbug-like boiled sweet with a toffee centre, manufactured by Barker & Dobson, whose factory was in Everton. B&D, founded in 1834, were big and successful - they made chocolates and posh biscuits and all sorts - in fact their gift tins still change hands for decent prices in eBay. It's possible I always assumed that the football club's nickname had something to do with B&D.

B&D factory - Everton, 1960s

The height of sophistication - B&D ad from the 1920s - apparently the lovely lady has a weakness for "Viking" chocolates [made with raw fish?]. As the copy line states, "Nowadays it's Barker & Dobson's chocolate". Don't laugh, somebody probably got a bonus for that one.

...and, of course, since toffee was trendy, they would work to cater for the latest advances in home entertainment. Here we see a tin commemorating how Mr & Mrs Cavity and their children would sit around the steam radio, enjoying light entertainment and chewing ferociously. [A sub-plot of selection boxes of toffee was that I always finished up with the walnut toffee, or the mint one, both of which were grim.]

...and, as time passed, B&D were always there, at the cutting edge. Now we have the Gummy family enjoying TV, slurping away on toffees "and other specialities". Mr Gummy, as you see, smokes his pipe while eating toffee, which is pretty disgusting really.

Anyway, it didn't. A lady named Molly Bushell (1748-1818) started making toffee containing ginger on an open-air stove behind her cottage in Everton, sometime around 1770, and she became quite successful. At this time, Everton village was something of a tourist attraction, with splendid views of the river from the slopes of Everton Hill. As the business grew, Molly was helped by her daughter, and also by a cousin, Sarah Cooper. In later life, she appears to have fallen out with Mrs Cooper, who opened a rival shop in Browside (also Everton). Much later, the remaining interests of these cottage businesses were taken over by the firm of Noblett's, who from 1876 or so took over the manufacture and marketing of Everton Toffee. Everton FC came into being in 1878, and the sale of toffees at the games quickly became a tradition, vendors offering "Mother Noblett's Toffee" inside the ground.

Sarah Cooper's toffee shop in Browside - note Everton reserves training in the sloping field opposite

Mother Noblett's Toffee advert - Liverpool Echo

Noblett's Toffee Shop - they had a shop in London Rd, and this one at 30 Old Haymarket. According to my Gore's Directory for 1900, the shop to the left of "Leonard Noblett, confectioner" is (or had been) John & T Edwards, wholesale grocers; on the other corner of Albion Place is Lipton's, the famous tea importers and blenders. I would guess this photo must be approximately contemporary with the 1909 football team picture. Old Haymarket was pretty much laid waste to make room for the entrance to the new Mersey Road Tunnel, which was started in 1925.

Tavener-Routledge were another famous Liverpool sweet maker - their fruit drops were much loved. They too have disappeared. So - where did they go?

The other lot - Liverpool players Ian Callaghan, Phil Thompson, Terry McDermott and John Toshack check out the lollipops during a state visit to Taverner's factory in Edge Lane - 1970s

Very complicated - a succession of local dinosaurs ate each other until big national dinosaurs came on the scene and ate everybody in sight. Barker & Dobson at various times owned the rights to Vicks (cough sweets?) and Victory V lozenges (which were addictive, since the recipe contained chloroform - no, really - which had to be changed, of course). B&D were subsequently bought by a Blackpool firm named Tangerine (not another football reference?), and later the whole lot was bought out by Bassett's.

When I was at university, I shared digs for a while with a guy who was addicted to these things. He used to get through a pack in an evening, which made him a dangerous man to be near. He lived to become a chemistry professor, but frankly it's a wonder he never exploded.

You can still buy Everton Mints - these days they are branded as Bassett's, but I don't think this is quite the same Bassett's who used to make Liquorice Allsorts and jelly babies in my youth. Bassett's now is just one of a series of long-established brands acquired by the Cadbury group. They are most certainly not in Everton!

Only thing I don't understand now is that there seems to have been a brand of toffee called "Molly Bushell's" marketed in Australia in fairly recent times. If this is nonsense, and something I misunderstood, then apologies - it won't be the first time. 

Just a coincidence? Was Molly transported to Oz for damaging people's teeth? Any ideas?

Hooptedoodle #333 - Fake News

I thought it would be best to put this note out now, to avoid any baseless rumours.

I have come under some pressure recently to put myself forward as a prospective leader of the Conservative Party - it was even suggested that it might be expected of me. I have thought about it long and hard for at least seven minutes, and I regret to say that I shall not be doing this; I do not wish to disappoint anyone, but I think it is only right and proper to be straightforward about the matter.

(1) I have become alarmed at what I can only see as falling standards of behaviour in the House of Commons. I have to assume that the emergence of a reality-TV celebrity as President of the US has triggered an appetite for the proceedings of the British Parliament to be converted into a reality-TV show in its own right. Whatever, I feel I might find the working environment to be insufficiently dignified. Call me old-fashioned if you wish.

(2) I fear that my Thursday bridge evenings would cause something of a clash with the requirements of the job, and I could not live with myself if I did not give the thing my full attention.

(3) The timescale is very short - there is not enough time for a proper lobotomy, even a private one.

(4) I have some difficulty with the idea that the internal squabbles of the Party are somehow more important than the fate of the nation. I accept that the problem appears to be my own, but, again, I would find this a distraction.

Thus - with all due thanks and sincere appreciation to those who have encouraged me to stand for election, I confirm that I shall not be doing so. I am confident that whoever does get the job will do at least as well in the role as I could have done, so I extend to them my best wishes.

If anyone feels the wish to suggest some suitable candidates, I would be delighted to hear from them.   

Hooptedoodle #332 - Where Are We, Anyway?

This follows on from a conversation I had with the Contesse, which rambled around the (supposedly) related topics of spatial awareness, how we find our way to somewhere (in a car, for example), and the impact of satellite navigation systems, both on our lives and the way we think about travel.

I was very interested to consider the different approaches to this - that's the wrong wording - "how we think about it" is better. I also realised that since I moved to live in the country I have changed my own thought patterns.

If you are flying an aeroplane, or sailing a boat in the open sea, then the information you need to get to somewhere is likely to be a direction - a magnetic bearing. You will have to conform to accepted legal sea-lanes and so on (which is a bit like streets, I guess), but otherwise the actual direction of travel is the important item - and maybe whether you have enough fuel to get there.

On the ground it isn't like that.

Street Map - follow the Yellow Brick Road

 I grew up a townie. Lived in cities for years. When I was a kid, we didn't travel as much as we do now, and we tended to stick to our own locality. If I needed to go further than usual, all I really needed to know was which bus to catch, and where it stopped - then it became the driver's problem to get me there. When I started cycling, I found that to visit my uncle in Woolton I needed to know more than the simple fact that the no.73 bus went there - I needed to know an actual route. That route might start off by being very similar to the route which the bus took, but it would get refined to avoid (or take advantage of) particularly steep hills and dangerous bits, and to shorten the trip as much as possible. The route I would learn would consist of a string of street names and turning instructions, and it would be tweaked to be suitable for a young chap on a bicycle.

Go to the end of Rose Lane, turn left into Allerton Road, go along until the right turn at the junction with Queens Drive, and go along Menlove Avenue for about 3 miles, turn left into Woolton Village High Street, go over the hill and bear right after that into Manor Way... and so on.

The instruction set would be a string of information not unlike what your sat-nav will tell you - names of streets, and when to turn into the next street. If I got lost, on my bike, or if one of the streets was closed for roadworks, for example, I might know enough about the area to be able to improvise, or I might take an educated guess, or I might need to look at a street map if things got tricky.

When I am driving my car to somewhere by a route I do not know well, if I pull over for a break along the way and someone asks me "where are we?", the odds are I won't actually know. I can look at the display on the sat-nav, and it might tell me that I can expect to be in Worcester at 17:14, and it might tell me that I am driving on the A6, and the next turn is in 8.7 miles. As to where we are - unless I have a rough idea from other knowledge, or there is a sign of some sort, or something distinctive to use as a landmark, I don't really know. Obviously that is not something that I absolutely have to know for the purposes of this stage of this journey. Unless something goes wrong.

Sat-nav explains things in terms of the streets - safest way if you're a stranger in these parts

If something goes wrong, then I had better have a road atlas in the car, or be able to ask someone who knows the area. If, during my break from driving, I phone someone and they ask me where I am, I may only be able to give them a rough idea - I'll know where I'm headed for, I may know how far I've driven, or how long I've been driving for, but apart from these I would need some familiarity with the area to offer an opinion. This becomes suddenly rather important if the stop is because I have broken down, and I need to request the rescue service to help me. I might be able to tell them "I'm on the A6, somewhere just south of Shap", or my mobile phone might be able to offer me a GPS reading.

Otherwise, then, we normally know where we are hoping to get to, how long it will take, how long we have been going, and that's probably about it.

When I was a boy I was fascinated by maps - I used to stare at random pages in the family's big Times atlas, and spot some unknown little town in India, and wonder who lived there, and what they were doing at this moment (I did once wonder what were the chances that someone in that town was, at that very moment, looking at a map and wondering who lived in Liverpool - I was a rather odd child). It would be possible to spot all the villages off the A6 as they passed through the sat-nav screen, and maybe even to wonder who lived there, but that sounds a rather stressful way to pass a journey.

Righto. Almost 20 years ago I moved to the country. You can forget street names, for the most part, unless you are in a village. The sat-nav will tell you that you are driving on the B1904, perhaps, but that means nothing - no-one knows the road by that name. A journey, I find, has stopped being a succession of streets and has become a string of places I am going to travel through. Thus if I wish to drive from my house to the Flight Museum at East Fortune, for example, I know that I will travel via Auldhame, Halfland Barns, Blackdykes, Leuchie, Balgone Barns, Kingston, Congleton Mains, past the garden centre at Merry Hatton and then to East Fortune. These places will be villages, farms, big houses, sometimes a lake or a quarry, whatever - the focus is on the places themselves rather than the names of the roads which connect them - mostly the names of the roads are meaningless, unless they are fairly big roads. Many of the roads look similar, in fact. I got to know the area by doing a lot of cycling and from a period during which I used to distribute a community magazine. The places I know by their names are the nodes of some form of mental map, I guess, rather than the connectors. As part of my knowledge of each place, I also know where all the roads out of that place go to, so I can build a route as a series of hops between locations.

In the country the places themselves become important - this isn't just a change of scale, it's a different thought process

This is a completely different way of finding your way around. As a by-product, it suddenly dawned on me (after a lifetime of not having dawned on me) that the reason so many towns on the British mainland have a London Road is not because everyone wanted to name one of their streets after the beloved capital, but because it is (or was) the way you got to London by horse from there. Street names are mostly decorative these days - Acacia Avenue, or Widdrington Crescent (named after some glory-grabbing Victorian town councillor) - the idea that a road's name might commemorate the fact that it once had a useful function did not occur to me until I lived somewhere they had very few streets. Duh.

Entirely Separate Topic 

This afternoon we went for a walk on the farm - it was a very fine day - very pleasant. Near the cliffs at Tantallon we saw a raven. We know they are around, but very seldom see one. Apologies for the not-brilliant photo - this was on a mobile phone, and the bird was some distance away, but there is no mistake. Raven. South-east Scotland, April.

Hooptedoodle #331 - Zeno and the Comb-Over

Zeno of Elea is credited with being the originator of a number of famous paradoxes - of which Achilles and the Tortoise is probably the best known. I reckon Zeno was something of a one-trick pony - a lot of his repertoire was based around a single concept - the problem of visualising an infinite number of infinitesimal events. Once you've got the hang of that, his stuff is probably not worth spending much time on. At least not if you have as little imagination as I do.

Zeno

 His Paradox of the Millet Seed may be described - and debunked - very briefly thus:

A single millet seed, when it falls, makes no sound; however, if you drop a ton of millet seed it will definitely make a noise. The implication is that a very large number of zeroes adds up to something greater than zero, which Zeno identified as obvious nonsense. Without getting into a philosophical discussion of infinity, this is flawed from the outset. When Zeno says that a single seed makes no sound, what he means is that we/he cannot hear it. There will be some disturbance of the air, even for one seed, so the point at issue becomes the threshold of human hearing, which, apart from anything else, varies from individual to individual. For example, you could drop a large iron bucket next to my mother and she would be unaware of it.

Achilles and the Tortoise is rather different, but again depends on the infinite divisibility of time and space. Achilles (who must have been a hustler) challenges a tortoise to a race, and gives the tortoise a start. By the time Achilles reaches the spot where the tortoise started, the tortoise will still be a small distance ahead. By the time Achilles has run this additional distance, the tortoise will still be slightly ahead. And so on - forever, says Zeno. Achilles will never catch him.

Where this puzzle falls down is that the infinite series of incremental distances during which Achilles fails to overtake the tortoise does not add up to the full race distance - it adds up to the point at which Achilles catches up with the tortoise. It does not require a celebrated ancient scholar to understand that there will be some point in the race at which Achilles catches up with his opponent, and that at all points before that he will not yet have caught him. After that, of course, Achilles disappears into the distance. The process of summing to infinity the decreasing steps only serves to mask what is obvious anyway, though it does raise the separate issue that Achilles would have to be careful to make sure that he didn't give the tortoise too much of a start, or philosophy as we know it would never recover.

A related, everyday paradox is that of the application of a simplified description to something which is really rather complicated. The example I have in mind is the concept of baldness. A man with no hair at all is obviously bald. A man with a lot of hair is not bald. A man with exactly one hair on his head is probably bald, but what about two hairs, three, 5374? - how many hairs does he require to stop being bald? The problem here is obviously one of terminology; "bald" is a rather crude on/off term - we really can't consider this seriously without some definitions and a lot of counting. For practical purposes, if someone describes someone else as bald, then they normally mean "the impression I got was that they didn't have much hair", which is not very precise but seems to serve for most everyday situations, without wasting too much time on the matter.

There are many such words - what is a "tall" person? Taller than average? Taller than me? Very unusually tall? There is a whiff of percentiles and survey data in there which is all a bit wearying, so we don't normally worry about it.

Tall.

OK.

Enough. For today's post I only wish to consider the matter of baldness, so I guess we are in Zeno's millet seed country.

I visit my hairdresser every four or five weeks - five if it was cut very short last time. Normally a Thursday morning. My haircuts are quick and inexpensive, since I do not have much hair. Every time, we have the same discussion, as I glower in the mirror at the thinning section at the front - I ask her if she thinks it is yet time to get rid of that front bit. Not yet, she says - it is still hanging in there. If at any time I find that we are performing some trick to pretend that I have more hair than I really have then a klaxon will sound and we will stop and reconsider. Similarly, I have asked my wife to kill me if she ever finds me performing any kind of comb-over.

We'll be in touch

Reasons? Well, just personal baggage really. Mr Trump is a shining illustration of why we shouldn't do this, probably, but this train of thought is really triggered by the fact that today is the eleventh anniversary of my dad's death, and my memories of my dad are always dominated by the adventures to which he subjected us with his damned hair. If I must learn just one thing from my father, please let it be that.

Before anyone feels moved to offer condolences on this sad anniversary, please don't bother. My dad and I were never very close, unfortunately. He was a very clever man, but a very difficult, uncomfortable one. If it were possible to be given no capacity for empathy at all then he must have been close. With my dad, you could agree with him, and do what he said, or you could disagree with him, and fight about it, or you could do what I did, and move some hundreds of miles away, to get on with your own life. I don't feel bitter about any of this, by the way - everyone is different, everyone has to deal with things in his own way.

Eventually, of course, my parents became old and less able to cope, so they moved up to Scotland to be near me, which was the right thing to do, and I am happy to believe they enjoyed their last years up here together, and I certainly had to get involved in a lot of running around to help them, which is probably as it should be. My mum is still alive, and is now safely resident in a splendid little care home very close to my house, with which we are very pleased, but my dad's passing, though it was a shock at the time, meant mostly that my life suddenly became a lot more peaceful, and of course I got the opportunity to shuffle one more place up the queue for the Reaper.

Oh yes - the hair. When I was a little boy it became apparent that my dad was going bald. He must have been in his 20s. He had a bald patch on the crown of his head which he concealed by combing his hair over the patch, and keeping it in place with Brylcreem. All was revealed when he was sitting at the kitchen table, studying for his engineering exams - while his mind was elsewhere, he would wind a pencil into the long bits of hair, and tease them out to remarkable heights. Hey. My dad was baldy.

As the years passed, though most of this was out of my sight, this became more of a problem. By the time he moved up here, he must have had very little hair on top of his head, but he attempted to conceal this with the most complex edifice of hair from the edges. This was combed across from all directions - if you stood behind him, there was a strange horizontal parting above his neck, from which the hair headed upwards. These partings were all over the place, with hair heading in unnatural directions - the impression was that his cap probably screwed into place. He also was a devotee of Grecian 2000 dye - I don't know what shade he used, but the effect on his (presumably white) hair was of a vague nicotine stain - like pee-holes in the snow. And everything was cemented into place to combat the forces of gravity and weather with copious amounts of Harmony hairspray.

This progression does not seem to include my dad's shade

The cap was the life-saver, of course, but it took him ages to get ready to go anywhere, and he always had his comb with him.

What could go wrong?

On one occasion he had what was probably a mini-stroke - he fell into a flower-bed in his garden, and just disappeared. By the time the ambulance arrived he was indoors and sitting up and obviously recovering, but the ambulance could not leave until he had found his comb and arranged his hair. While they were waiting, the ambulance driver suggested to my mum that they might cut his hair in hospital, if only because of the impossibility of keeping it up to spec.

She, for the one and only time I ever heard, very quietly said, "Let's hope they cut it, and we can all get some bloody peace".

I'd never thought about it before, but she must have been required to help with this palaver. She must have washed and dyed his hair for decades - he certainly wouldn't have been able to do it all himself. She must also have cut it for him, since any self-respecting professional would just have refused. She was, in fact, an accomplice. Poor woman - presumably this was just to keep him happy.

I wonder what it was he thought he was doing? By this time, I guess it had just become a ritual (not unlike 50mm x 45mm MDF bases, I suppose), which had become somehow essential. Whom did he think he was fooling? What (to be blunt) did he think he looked like?

If my mother had been so inclined, or if he had had any friends (he didn't), then someone might have said, years earlier, that having a weird, nicotine-coloured pavlova on top of his head did not give the impression of hair, not to anyone, and that from the back, in fact, all this effort produced something not unlike a polar bear's arse. Not a worthwhile investment of time. Ridiculous. And all that combing and spraying while the world waited to go out for a walk was pointless.

Eventually, after a long and unusually healthy life, he started getting some angina problems. His medication was not very successful, he had periods of irregular pulse which were causing some alarm, and it was decided to take him into hospital in Edinburgh for tests. I was there when he left in the ambulance - once again there was something of a drama while he prepared his hair, but he was sitting up in the ambulance when he went.

The tests didn't go very well, and he was transferred to the Royal Infirmary, outside the south side of Edinburgh. While there he became ill, and then died, quickly and without much discomfort. All over. It was unexpected - a bit of a shock, to be sure.

The next morning I drove to the Royal Infirmary to sign the paperwork, and to collect my dad's possessions, which were in a couple of plastic carrier bags. His clothes, his spectacles, his shoes, his raincoat, his toilet bag, his cap, his wallet and the eternal comb. That seemed a bit weird - that's all you get back. I dropped the comb in the car park while I was stowing the bags, and I just put it in the litter bin. I was not going to waste any more time on that, thank you.

When my mum became too ill to live at home any more, I cleared her house. By this time my dad had been dead for nearly nine years, but his coiffure was still very much in evidence. All the armchairs and much of the bedding were stained with Grecian 2000 - very recognisable shade of Old Nicotine - and I found warehouse-sized cartons of Harmony aerosols in the cupboard in the spare room and in the attic.

And I bet he thought that no-one ever knew. Your secret is safe with us, Baldy.

Hooptedoodle #330 - The Anfield Iron

I'm not going to make a meal of this, I always find it very uncomfortable when there is scope for a "me too" tribute to former celebrities. So this is going to be a very simple "thank you" to a hero from my youth, a football player, no less, who in his prime was a central part of my lifelong club, my home-town team, in the years when, miraculously, unbelievably, they progressed from being the second best team in the city to become the undisputed top team in the country (a long time ago now!). Tommy Smith died today, peacefully, after a period of illness, aged 74.

Tommy Smith, Liverpool FC

Tommy was a local lad, a working class kid from an impoverished background, and his chief characteristic was that he was the toughest, dirtiest, most intimidating defender of his day. It was a personal misfortune of his that he was a contemporary of Norman Hunter of Leeds, who had a lot of the same qualities but was a superior footballer, so that poor old Tommy only ever got a single international cap for England.

No matter. He was a sporting hero from a bygone age. Nowadays, given the price of season tickets for the Premier League, fans are not really looking to see local kids playing for their team - they expect to see expensive Brazilians, Spaniards, Africans, Frenchmen, whatever. I suppose it's a bit like other expensive forms of entertainment; I confess that if I spent a lot of money to go to the opera, I'd be disappointed if the cast all came from the streets around my birthplace.

Tommy had serious injury problems toward the end of his career - latterly, he was often able to play only because he was stuffed full of cortisone injections, a practice which would probably have club management gaoled in these more enlightened times. As a result, he could hardly walk in his last few years.

Never mind - he will always be young for those who saw him in his pomp. He will always be the man who headed the goal which put Liverpool ahead in the final of the European Cup (Champions' League), in Rome in 1977, versus Moenchengladbach - the first year Liverpool won the competition.

Thanks, Tommy. Cheers, la.

Hooptedoodle #329 - The Ascent of Schlimm - Part (2) of an occasional series

The Grand Duke yawned, and as he did so he realised that he had actually dozed off for a moment. It was very warm in the room. He opened his eyes and jumped with fright - there, on the other side of his enormous desk, stood his Minister of Finance, young Edelbert Schlimm.

"What a fright you gave me, Schlimm! - I was pondering the matter of the floral theme for this year's Watchmakers' Guild Festival. I thought perhaps daffodils?"

"Highness, we did daffodils last year. In fact, I believe it has been daffodils every year for the last eleven festivals - something to do with avoiding the cost of repainting the floats."

"Ah yes - as I recall there was only one float involved last year, with the Schweinheim Children's Choir - what happened to the rest of the processional vehicles?"

"The festival has been downsized, Highness, since there are no longer any watchmakers and only 27 people attended the last one, including the parents of the choir."

"Yes - now I remember. All right - why don't we go for daffodils this year?"

"Excellent idea, Highness."

The Grand Duke stared at his Minister, musing over the remarkable change in his appearance in recent months. He was impeccably suited and groomed, his shirt and his shoes were hand-made, in his lapel he wore the scarlet and white silk ribbon of the Grand Knight's Cross of the Order of Sankt Tobias and - the Grand Duke winced to observe - he had a discreet diamond stud in his left ear. He was also surprisingly suntanned, considering it was only April and the fog and rain of what passed for Spring in the Duchy did not usually cause sunburn.

"Reminds me - I sent for you. Where have you been?"

"I'm sorry, Highness, I have been very busy."

The Grand Duke frowned.

"But I sent for you over a week ago, where have you been?"

Schlimm was impassive.

"Complicated - mostly I've been in Dubai, I think. Yes - mostly Dubai. What was it you wanted?"

"A number of things I was concerned about - if you hold on a moment, I have a written note here somewhere."

Pushing his reading glasses back up his nose with his index finger, the Grand Duke scrabbled around among the chaos on his desk for a few seconds, and produced a crumpled scrap of paper, which he smoothed out and studied for a little while.

"Right," he said, "for a start, who are all these foreigners wandering about the castle? They are frightening the kitchen staff, and last week a couple of them walked in here and started measuring things. Never said anything, just wrote down some notes and sketched drawings in an exercise book. I was trying to watch TV. Are they here to redecorate?"

"No, Highness - they are here in connection with the sale and lease-back agreement I told you about."

"You never told me any such thing, not that I remember - also these fellows don't speak any German - they're English, I think. What's going on?"

"I apologise, Highness, I was sure we had discussed the matter. The castle is far too big for the needs of your family; the idea is that we sell the place for redevelopment - you and the Ducal Family and your immediate entourage will live in a modern apartment in the West Wing, with a nice view across the swamp."

"But my family have lived here for many centuries, Schlimm - what is to happen to the place? - and what about all the paintings, and the furniture, and the collection of ceremonial armour, and the stuffed animals, and everything else? This is my personal history, our glorious heritage."

Schlimm bowed slightly.

"With respect, Highness, personal history is a luxury appropriate only to those who can afford it. I am expecting a report from the preliminary survey shortly, so we may discuss it then, if that suits you. The current suggestion is that the remainder of the castle buildings will be developed as luxury apartments. The architects are very interested in the paintings and the other artifacts - if there is anything they can't use they have offered to sell it for us on eBay. There are various ideas for the use of the Great Park - I am trying to retain a small garden for you and the Duchess. They may even stretch to a greenhouse."

The Grand Duke passed a shaking hand over his haggard face.

"A greenhouse? I remember none of this, Graf Edelbert. Have you mentioned it to the Duchess? Is she in favour of these plans?"

"The Duchess has been away skiing since before the discussions started, Highness - I had hoped you might raise the matter with her when she returns? There are also some interesting ideas involving the sale of her hunting lodges to an American hotel chain. The concept is that they would make very attractive health spas."

The Grand Duke removed his glasses and closed his eyes - he really did not feel well at all.

"Schlimm, I think I'm going to have to rest for a while. Before you leave, can I just mention the subject of beer?"

"Beer, Highness? - shall I get you a beer?"

"No, Schlimm, I just need you to explain something to me. Recently I suddenly fancied a beer - haven't had one for a while - and asked old Tauber to bring me a bottle of the Alter Drosselberger, my favourite. It was horrible - like horse urine. Also, the label was in English. I was so upset I rang a phone number which was printed on the label, and I got through to a helpdesk which I think was in India."

"Well, Highness, the Alter Drosselberger is selling very well, the brewing company is one of our more successful enterprises. I am sorry if you received a bad bottle."

"But we used to make the finest beer in Europe, one of the few things of which we could still be proud - it won international medals and everything. Good God, Schlimm, I own this brewery - my family has owned it since the 17th Century. I am going to visit the place and find out what's going on - I shall sort them out, you'll see - tradition still counts for something!"

Schlimm stared at his immaculate shoes, and aligned the crease in his Italian trousers.

"In fact, Highness, you are not strictly the owner of the brewing firm these days. You do retain a minority stake in the company, but you have only 15% of the voting shares. My brother and I have 80% between us. The actual Blickhof brewery is long gone - it is now a shopping mall and an indoor swimming pool and sports centre. The recipe for the beer was updated to cater for modern tastes, and the contract for production of the stuff is the subject of a tender every two years. Recently there has been a change - for a while the beer was being made and bottled in Burton on Trent, but it has now moved to a firm in Turda, Romania. No doubt it will move again if we get a more competitive offer."

There was a silence. The Grand Duke sat with his eyes closed for a while, and Schlimm was beginning to wonder if he had fallen asleep again when he eventually spoke, slowly and without any discernible emotion.

"I really do not understand. The fact that we made the best beer in Europe was crucially important - it was a source of national pride, and it was a noble tradition. This is not just a matter of revenue or earnings yields, it is a question of self-respect, and of ethics. If we can get our beer made more cheaply elsewhere, so that you and your brother make even more money, then I congratulate you, but I think you have missed the point. If I phone up to complain about the horse urine beer, I speak to a man in India and we cannot understand each other. That sums up exactly how much we have come to care about our customers and our traditions. I am appalled."

Schlimm smiled condescendingly, but the old man did not see him because his eyes were still shut.

"Your ideas, Highness, are as traditional and as outmoded as is much else about the Duchy and the way it runs. 'Pride in our product' is a very old-fashioned philosophy. Nowadays commercial ventures exist only to make as much money as possible for their owners. That is their primary - arguably their only - function. If our beer really tastes like horse urine then we will sell less of it, and we will make less money - that's when we know we have to do something about it. That is how it works nowadays. Your ideas of quality and pride are worthy and they do you credit, but, like the dinosaurs, they are things of the past. If you can get no help from our helpdesk number, then you should be delighted that you are dealing with a company which wastes as little money as possible on such matters..."

He broke off here, his voice ending on something of a squeak, because the Grand Duke had taken an old army revolver from his desk drawer, and was very deliberately taking aim at him.

The redevelopers are here

Hooptedoodle #328

***** Late Edit *****

To balance things a bit, my compliments to the BBC, for the most relaxing report on B****t I've seen so far - please enjoy...

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Hooptedoodle #327 - The Inevitable Herring

Something has been niggling me this last couple of weeks. Something not quite remembered, but somehow familiar, if I could just put my finger on it.

I finally remembered a few days ago. In about 1970 I saw a film, Spring and Port Wine, which starred James Mason - good film, in fact - of its time. A gritty domestic comedy set in Bolton (Lancashire, industrial North West of England), written by the excellent Bill Naughton. [It is interesting to recall, in passing, that James Mason was born in Huddersfield, so, even though he was always Rommel really, he did have some credentials for a provincial role.]

Anyway - Mason plays a well-intentioned but domineering father - very heavy - and things come to a bit of a head when his teenage daughter (played by Susan George) turns up her nose one evening at the herring which is served up for her tea. With much preaching about how lucky she is to have a herring at all, and how many people would be delighted to have such a herring, the father decrees that it will be served up again tomorrow, and the next day - there will be no choice. The damned herring will appear daily (presumably) until she eats it.

Any bells ringing? At the time, we all thought the father was a bit pig-headed, but what did we know? Nowadays, this would be regarded as a valid negotiation, apparently. You will be offered the same fish every day until you realise how wrong you have been to refuse it, or until the alternatives become so unbearably awful that you change your mind.

I can't remember how the story line developed - must watch it again - I can't recall if there was a backstop Plan B to cover the possibility that she never ate it. Presumably the father knew he was right, and that right would prevail. Strength and stability.

Must try and get hold of the film - I need to remind myself what happened...  

***** (Very) Late Edit ***** 

OK - OK - a number of people sent me chasers - it seems that they, too want to know what happened in the end. Very sketchy synopsis follows.

Things become more tense, the herring disappears, mysteriously, both daughters leave home (the younger one, she with the herring problem, turns out to be pregnant). The mother pawns the father's best overcoat to get some cash for the younger daughter, the father finds out, goes ballistic and the mother moves out too.

Not before time, the father has some kind of inspirational moment, and he determines to change - he realises that his family are far more important than his principles. The film ends before he makes much progress, but we can see where he's headed.

As for the herring, it seems likely that the kid brother gave it to the cat. At this point, I'm struggling to sustain the extended analogy, so let's drop the matter and get back to the bunker.

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Hooptedoodle #326 - Missing Pips - Today's Pointless Conundrum

This is a puzzle that occurs to me at almost exactly 7am each day. Just how exactly is, I guess, the essence of the puzzle.

I have a digital radio next to my bed (it's actually the one that used to be in the kitchen, until the volume knob became temperamental - you know how it goes). At 6am each day it switches on BBC Radio 4 - the "Today" programme on weekdays - so that I may update myself on the latest glories of Brexit and Trump and all the other things which guarantee that I may start my day as depressed as possible. At 7am it switches off - the assumption being that either I'm already up and functioning, or else I have probably had enough delight and happiness for one morning.

The reality, of course, is that I have set the menu on the radio so that BBC R4 will come on at 06:00 and switch off at 07:00. The radio knows what time it is because the exact time is transmitted constantly along with the programme signal - so you would expect that to be pretty accurate. I mean, we are speaking of the speed of light here.

Astonishing, really - in the digital age we just expect everything to be spot on. It's worth remembering that it was only the coming of the railways which necessitated some standardisation of clocks throughout Britain, and, before that, the coming of scheduled stagecoaches was a big push towards standardisation of the calendar - prior to that it didn't matter a huge amount if your village had a different date from the village down the road. Now we have so much accuracy we can't even remember why it's important.

I digressed there - sorry.

The point of my post is that each morning the radio switches itself off just as the "pips" of the time signal are being broadcast. I don't know much about the pips, really, except that they've always been part of listening to the radio - even when it was a wireless. Six pips - 5 short ones and a long one - like this...

Originally, I think these were generated by the Greenwich observatory, but for the past 30 years or so they have just been a service provided by the BBC - they are timed exactly so that the long final pip indicates the start of the next hour.

Here's the 8am signal - impressively accurate

Because my radio is busy switching itself off at just about the time the BBC are broadcasting the 7-o'clock pips, I only hear the start of the sequence - I never hear the sixth pip. OK - we may debate accuracy and stuff like that, but the number of pips I hear before the radio cuts out varies. Yes - that's right - calm yourself now - I don't think it's anything to worry about, but the number of pips I get to hear varies mostly (randomly) between two and four - very rarely five. Never six. The BBC, which ensures accurate precision of the timing of the sixth pip and which broadcasts the time continuously so that my radio knows exactly where we are up to - yes, that BBC - manages to either fool my radio very slightly or get the timing of the audio signal slightly wrong - maybe both - every morning.

A couple of seconds is near enough for me, of course, but I don't really see how this works. Is it possible that there is some buffering or delay in the programme transmission? - I have occasionally noticed that if you switch two DAB radios to the same station they may not be quite in sync - this is especially true, I find, if you listen to the digital radio service on your TV at the same time as the same station is connected via the DAB unit.

Anyone understand how this works? Is it possible that the BBC are going to the trouble of broadcasting an exact time signal which isn't actually accurate by the time it reaches the listener? Imagine the potential chaos - stagecoaches could be crashing into each other at crossroads all over the country.

Disaster.

It'll all end in tears

Anyone know how this works? 

Hooptedoodle #325 - The Worry of Being British

My wife passed me this - if you have seen it before, apologies. I have no idea where it comes from, but it is of rather higher quality than most similar efforts, and it is so long since any aspect of Britishness made me actually smile that I thought it might be worth sharing.

The theme, of course, is the list of behaviours that being British forces on us - tick them off if they apply, but don't tell anyone what you're doing, naturally...

The Worry of Being British

• Worrying you’ve accidentally packed 3 kilos of cocaine and a dead goat as you stroll through “Nothing to declare”

• Being unable to stand and leave without first saying “right”

• Not hearing someone for the third time, so just laughing and hoping for the best

• Saying “anywhere here’s fine” when the taxi’s directly outside your front door

• Being sure to start touching your bag 15 minutes before your station, so the person in the aisle seat is fully prepared for your exit

• Repeatedly pressing the door button on the train before it’s illuminated, to assure your fellow commuters you have the situation in hand

• Having someone sit next to you on the train, meaning you’ll have to eat your crisps at home

• The huge sense of relief after your perfectly valid train ticket is accepted by the inspector

• The horror of someone you only half know saying: “Oh I’m getting that train too”

• “Sorry, is anyone sitting here?” – Translation: Unless this is a person who looks remarkably like a bag, I suggest you move it

• Loudly tapping your fingers at the cashpoint, to assure the queue that you’ve asked for money and the wait is out of your hands

• Looking away so violently as someone nearby enters their PIN that you accidentally dislocate your neck

• Waiting for permission to leave after paying for something with the exact change

• Saying hello to a friend in the supermarket, then creeping around like a burglar to avoid seeing them again

• Watching with quiet sorrow as you receive a different haircut from the one you requested

• Being unable to pay for something with the exact change without saying “I think that’s right”

• Overtaking someone on foot and having to keep up the uncomfortably fast pace until safely over the horizon

• Being unable to turn and walk in the opposite direction without first taking out your phone and frowning at it

• Deeming it necessary to do a little jog over zebra crossings, while throwing in an apologetic mini wave

• Punishing people who don’t say thank you by saying “you’re welcome” as quietly as possible

• The overwhelming sorrow of finding a cup of tea you forgot about

• Turning down a cup of tea for no reason and instantly knowing you’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake

• Suddenly remembering your tea and necking it like a massive, lukewarm shot

• Realising you’ve got about fifty grand’s worth of plastic bags under your kitchen sink

• “You’ll have to excuse the mess” – Translation: I’ve spent seven hours tidying in preparation for your visit

• Indicating that you want the last roast potato by trying to force everyone else to take it

• “I’m off to bed” – Translation: “I’m off to stare at my phone in another part of the house”

• Mishearing somebody’s name on the second time of asking, meaning you must now avoid them forever

• Leaving it too late to correct someone, meaning you must live with your new name forever

• Running out of ways to say thanks when a succession of doors are held for you, having already deployed ‘cheers’, ‘ta’ and ‘nice one’

• Changing from ‘kind regards’ to just ‘regards’, to indicate that you’re rapidly reaching the end of your tether

• Staring at your phone in silent horror until the unknown number stops ringing

• Hearing a recording of your own voice and deciding it’s perhaps best never to speak again

• The relief when someone doesn’t answer their phone within three rings and you can hang up

• Filming an entire fireworks display on your phone, knowing full well you’ll never, ever watch it again



***** Late Edit *****

Interesting - my unofficial publicist, Tango01, the famed international masturbator and creep, saw fit to share this post with the infinite number of monkeys which constitutes PMT. I think the joke - unpretentious as it is - was probably worth sharing. 

The majority of them are American, of course, and missed the point in grand style. Much half-remembered WW2 mythology about what the US and British may have said (or believed?) about each other. I'm always pleased to welcome visitors from PMT, naturally, but it surprises me that, since they are the coolest dudes on the planet, visitors from these lofty heights never deign to leave a comment, or say hello - they simply go back to giggling behind the bikesheds amongst themselves. Yes it is depressing, but rock on anyway, Tango. Maybe your head will get better one day.

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