Author: LanterneRouge

😎 Former scientist, now graduated to a life of leisure; Family man (which may surprise the family - it certainly surprises him); Likes cycling and old-fashioned B&W film photography; Dislikes greasy-pole-climbing 'yes men'; Thinks Afterlife (previously known as Thea Gilmore) should be much better known than she is; Values decency over achievement.

My hinnies – they just wouldn’t sing!

Incompetence: ÉȘnˈkɒmpÉȘt(ə)ns

Noun: inability to do something successfully

Synonyms: ineptitude, ineptness, inability, lack of ability, incapability, incapacity, lack of skill, lack of proficiency, amateurishness, inexpertness, clumsiness, ineffectiveness, inadequacy, deficiency, inefficiency, ineffectuality, ineffectualness, insufficiency.

Well, that pretty much sums up our attempts to deliver a longstanding colleague into a splendid retirement by providing him with some home-baked memories of his youth; a competitive bake-off that was themed on his Geordie roots. We had borrowed the idea from an earlier attempt to broaden the social horizons within our workplace. The highlight of our previous gatherings was a ‘Traybake of the Month’ competition in which anyone could offer-up their version of a particular pastry which was then tasted and judged by all. The entries were usually terrific with only an occasional misfire, but that was then.

This is now …

Boss: “We could have a Geordie-themed bake-off before his retirement lunch. And he can be the judge!”

So that was that, a one-off ‘Geordie Traybake of the Month’ competition was conceived. We hit an immediate barrier. Despite trawling the internet and contacting various Geordie’s that we knew, we could only come up with two non-savoury home-bakes that were specifically linked to England’s northeast: Stottie cake (a kind of loaf) and singin’ hinnies (a sort of griddle scone). I ‘bagged’ the singin’ hinnies for my entry and left the others to their own devices and what ingenuity they showed.

The Hairy Bikers’ chocolate cake was a half-good idea, but only half-good insofar as one of the biker duo actually hails from England’s northwest (Cumbria in fact, like me) and couldn’t possibly be considered a Geordie. I thought about submitting a protest and seeking the cake’s disqualification as ‘not entirely Newcastle’, but suspected that it would be in vain as my boss was cunning enough to present only half the cake anyway, and she could always argue that she had brought along the Newcastle fraction and not the Cumbrian bit which she considered worthy only to be trashed. In truth, the cake had apparently self-destructed after being filled with a poorly conceived butter icing and only half could be salvaged.

The next entry was a straightforward iced sponge cake; its northeast credentials satisfied by a customised rice-paper photograph of Cheryl Cole as a topping. I thought a trick was missed by using the topper to make a Geordie cake; representing it as a Geordie tart would have been funnier, but the cake certainly had more taste than the muse that inspired its decoration. Nevertheless, it also had its problems. That the topper wished its recipient ‘Happy Birthday’ rather than ‘Happy Retirement’ could be overlooked, but the teensiest issue remained – it was not baked by one of us, but by a ‘ringer’; a surrogate maĂźtre pĂątissier. If it had won then a protest would have been inevitable.

An engaging bit of lateral thinking led to the third competitor’s entry. Nixed by the lack of native Geordie traybakes, he had discovered a chocolate brownie recipe that included Newcastle Brown Ale as an ingredient. Inspirational stuff! Nevertheless, if one considers a published and tested recipe to comprise a sort of standard operating procedure to produce traybakes, then, as the experienced and professional quality assurance expert that he is, how could he confuse degrees Fahrenheit with degrees Celsius and bake his brownies at 275°C? And why did they not burn to a cinder? It turns out that his day may have been saved by his partner’s suggestion that his oven temperature was a tad high. So, I ask myself, where is the fairness in our traybake competition when someone making chocolate brownies gets outside help, and not just any outside help, but assistance from a person that coincidentally just happens to be a chocolate brownie expert herself? Sadly for my hopes of victory they tasted particularly fine and included a dob of caramel within them; sweet and gooey is always a winning combination.

Finally, my singin’ hinnies. Twenty minutes to prepare and twenty minutes to cook. I could make double the dough and use half of it for a practice run and the other half to knock out a dozen expertly-crafted Geordie-based griddle scones to secure a sweet victory. If only. Several hours later my singing hinnies comprised a soloist not a choir. A single, solitary artiste. The rest had been under-cooked, over-cooked, unevenly cooked or simply crumbled to nothing on the griddle. (I’m still struggling to understand what kind of recipe includes lard as half of the fat in the dough and then calls for the heated griddle to be smeared with even more lard to cook the damn things). At the tasting, ‘Boss’ thought the flavour of my sole surviving hinny evoked bubble and squeak, an easy mistake to make as ‘bubble’ is fried in pure lard and my hinny tasted of nothing else either. (I should add a mea culpa – when the first of my hinnies crumbled on the griddle, I thought it wise to add a bit more lard to the remaining dough to make it bind better!). Clearly I was not going to be a contender, but if a chap is going to fail, he may as well fail magnificently.

The Brown Ale Brownies won and rightly so, but I like to think the hilarity invoked by the taste of my singing hinny and the story-telling of the ineptitude of all our bakers was the real prize and one that was shared across the board. Self-detonating chocolate cakes, surrogate bakers, appalling quality control and lard. Oh god, the lard!

Postscript: Singin’ hinnies are so named because of the squealing sound that they are supposed to make when being cooked on the griddle. None of mine ‘sang’ which should have set the alarm bells ringing, but the experience did inspire a limerick which will be added to my ‘Little Book of Bollocks’, so not all was lost:

I was hoping I’d be able to bring
A traybake that was fit for a king.
‘Cos it’s not every day
That a chum goes away,
But my hinnies? They just wouldn’t sing!

Singin Hinnies not singing, and before crumbling to nothing
Singin Hinnies not singing, and before crumbling to nothing

Flying high with the BBC

I’d never seen Shakespeare’s Henry the Sixth plays until I watched the first of a two-part (condensed) adaptation of them in the BBC’s ‘Hollow Crown’ series. Although I’ve never been a great fan of film or TV versions of Shakespeare’s work, I was riveted by Hugh Bonneville’s performance as the king’s Lord Protector. For me, Bonneville was terrific in the BBC’s comedy series ‘2012’ about ‘planning’ for the London Olympics, but even so, this was a revelation. Simply magnificent.

“Good on you” to the BBC for creating such an accessible production and “Boo” to those Shakespeare traditionalists that criticised the adaptations necessary to make it work on TV for a modern audience. Bonneville’s character could have been speaking directly to such critics when he proclaimed: ’tis but a base ignoble mind that mounts no higher than a bird can soar.

Good stuff all round!

“Oh God!” you say, “Not folk music?”

“I like Bellowhead”.

“Who?” you ask.

“Bellowhead” I say “a contemporary English folk group”.

“Oh God!” you say, “Not folk music?”.

Or at least that is how I imagine most conversations with the uninitiated would pass on the subject. But Bellowhead is not your average folk group. Oh no. It is an 11 piece folk ‘big-band’ that has headlined concerts for a dozen years and is now, sadly, towards the end of its farewell tour. It is also a band about which The Independent said: “With the exception of The Who, Bellowhead are surely the best live act in the country”.

One of the group, Paul Sartin, has described them thus: “We’re not a period piece band. To be a party band, the music has to be accessible, and therefore contemporary … we use the songs as a template, chuck everything into the mix and see what comes out”. They certainly do and it ticks the “contemporary take on tradition” box that brings both relevance and a wider audience to a sometimes staid cultural heritage.

I mentioned to an acquaintance that is ‘in’ to folk music that I was going to see Bellowhead at the London Palladium. A fairly dismissive reply (“I saw them, they’re just noisy”) immediately identified him as a straw-sucking, acoustic-only, 1960s traditionalist who would gaze softly into the distance whilst listening to the semi-strangulated vibrato of a nasally-congested singer seeking to remove earwax at the same time as spitting out more words than the phrasing within a melody could possibly dictate. Personally, I would rather have a good night out.

And that is why I travelled with ‘Management’ from Aberdeen to the London Palladium where we took part in a shindig of the first order. I won’t go into detail because it was one of those occasions that you had to experience; words alone could not sum it up. Two quick points though: thankfully, the audience appeared very ordinary when contrasted against the imagery of shirtless collars, waistcoats and neck-wringing bandanas that normally conjures up the attire of a stereotypical traditionalist, but more importantly, much more importantly, everyone left grinning widely.

Ready to go ...
Ready to go …

It was terrific. You can get a taste of them here, read about the Palladium concert here  and find out more about the band here.

Saturday Night at the Palladium!
Saturday Night at the Palladium!

“I thought Coq au Vin was love in a lorry”

… and now Victoria Wood has gone too; the comedian that penned the one-liner that passes for the title of this posting has died. There has been a heavy toll taken of performers recently, but, for me, hers is the most egregious loss. Too soon and too young. A genuine laugh-out-loud writer and a comedian that could turn her hand to serious drama. I would rank her wordsmithing, her comedic delivery and her characterisations (both serious and humorous) alongside that of Ronnie Barker. I don’t often rate the Daily Telegraph’s opinion highly, but it got it right in her case, “She made the mundane seem magical”.

Sometimes I’ll write a limerick in my own trivial way to mark the passing of a celebrity, just to amuse myself, but not on this occasion. Instead, I’ll be amused by a few phrases of hers taken from ‘The ballad of Barry and Freda’ (aka ‘Just do it’) on the unsated desires of a late-middle-age, libidinous housewife:

Some lines from Freda:

I’m on fire, with desire — I could handle half the tenors in a male voice choir

This folly is jolly; bend me over backwards on me hostess trolley!

Get drastic, gymnastic — wear your baggy Y-fronts with the loose elastic

No cautions, just contortions: smear an avocado on my lower portions!

Be mighty, be flighty, come and melt the buttons on my flame-proof nightie!

Not bleakly, not meekly — beat me on the bottom with the Woman’s Weekly

And some replies from a very reluctant Barry:

No derision, my decision: I’d rather watch the Spinners on the television.

I’m imploring — I’m boring — let me read this catalogue on vinyl flooring!

Stop stewing — Pooh-poohing — I’ve had a good look down there and there’s nothing doing.

Stop pouting! Stop shouting — you know I pulled a muscle when I did that grouting.

Stop nagging! I’m flagging; you know as well as I do that the pipes want lagging.

Don’t choose me, don’t use me, my mother sent a note to say you must excuse me.

Better still, see it all here.

The sun at last!

Well, after what seemed to be a dismal and eternally dreich Spring, today the sun finally shone again on Aberdeen and the Shire! And that is reason enough to post a snapshot of our stunning scenery. This one is not the most dramatic Deeside view, but a favourite of mine looking downstream from the Brig o’ Feugh towards the confluence of the rivers Feugh and Dee. Nestling distantly in the background is the Banchory Lodge Hotel whose gardens sit where the rivers join. The hotel’s magnificent situation simply beckons you towards afternoon tea on its lawns!

A downstream view towards the confluence of the River Dee and the River Feugh
A downstream view towards the confluence of the River Dee and the River Feugh

Credit where credit is due

‘Firstborn’ was recently exclaiming about the apparent necessity for all sorts of projects and activities to have not just a name but one that lends itself to a clever acronym that is, more often than not, a bit forced. The example she gave was of some draft American legislation entitled Repeated Objectionable Bothering Of Consumers On Phones, or ROBOCOP. Now, one cannot belittle the aims of the bill if it does stop unwanted marketing or sales calls, but wouldn’t it be better to put time and effort into ensuring the legislation is well drafted rather than to create a laboured acronym that has little relevance to the subject, or is it just de rigueur to show that your a**e is as smart as that of your neighbour?

Anyway, the reason to touch on Firstborn’s minor rant is to highlight one of my favourite anti-smart-a**e acronyms and, in doing so, to acknowledge the person that first coined the sub-heading of the ‘A View From The Lanterne Rouge’ blog.

John Pope, a mildly eccentric fisheries scientist with an erudite quote for every occasion, once published a paper in the so-called ‘grey’ literature in which he developed a hybrid means of estimating fish population size and the associated mortality rates. In this case ‘hybrid’ refers to a mix of statistical rigour and some ‘chuck it out if you don’t like it’ ad hockery. I can’t remember many details of the method, but it was named ‘If thy cumulative-Z offendeth thee, then cast it out’ or, more catchily: ITCOTTCIO. An antidote to wise-guy acronyms! (For the uninitiated, cumulative-Z is a term that refers to the accumulated mortality of fish spawned in a given year as they pass through their different age groups in successive years).

John’s Biblical reference to ‘casting it out’ originates in the gospel according to Matthew chapter 18 verse 9: “And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee” and it indulged his whimsical use of scriptural and canonical references linked to his surname (see: John Pope. Response to the Note by M.S.M Siddeek . J. Cons. int. Explor. Mer (1982) 40 (3): 306 for the all-time classic example). But, as Ronnie Corbett would have said, “I digress”. The purpose of this post is to point out that John described his new method as ‘artless but enticing’, an epithet that I have commandeered to describe any of my attempts to be creative, including this blog.