I would never in a million years have thought that George ‘Gideon’ Osborne and I had anything in common, but bizarrely we do. It appears that we are both on Team Demelza regarding the current TV production of the Poldark novels.
Initially rather shaken by this discovery, I can show this to be the only thing that we have in common through the following illustrative diagram in which Team Demelza comprises the sole element belonging to the intersection of Osborne and me or, as the mathematicians would have it:
Me ∩ Osborne = {Team Demelza}
As far as the Poldark series is concerned, I view Osborne as more of a George Warleggan type, or ‘Evil George’ as the Graun’s commentary on the series calls him … now there’s a coincidence 😉
A former captain of the Australian rugby union team, John Eales, was nicknamed ‘Nobody‘ by his international team-mates in recognition of his excellence and consistency. It was a play on words insofar as: “Nobody’s perfect“.
Eales was, but I have to confess that occasionally (and despite my best endeavours) I’m not perfect (no, seriously!). And sometimes that is even made clear to me by my nearest and dearest 😉
It’s at those times that I take solace in the words of Tim Dowling, Guardian columnist and downtrodden husband:
“I have long maintained that the secret to being a good husband and father is taking the time to point out to one’s wife and children that they could do a whole lot worse“.
I even printed it out in coloured foil, framed it and put it in Management’s Christmas stocking a few years ago …
… it’s sooo true!
… or if you prefer Homer Simpson’s take on the situation: “I won’t lie to you, fatherhood isn’t easy like motherhood” 🙂
A not-so-guilty secret of mine is the enduring appeal of the bawdy ‘laugh-out-loud’ passages in Tom Sharpe’s novels, and since his demise I have to say that I’ve missed them. So how did a family discussion on the geographical origins of the surname ‘Otway’ (family friends) bring Sharpe’s prose back to mind?
Well, it seems that Management couldn’t remember John Otway and Wild Willy Barrett’s rendition of ‘Really Free’ (not that it had anything to do with our conversation). Nor did she know that the song had come to the public’s attention via an appearance on The Old Grey Whistle Test. Writing in the Independent a few years ago, Robert Chalmers reflected on the event in pure Tom Sharpe fashion:
“… Otway vaulted on to a PA tower and overbalanced. He brought down the speaker stack but fractured no bones when he landed on the sharp corner of a bass cabinet as the impact was cushioned by his testicles“.
O wad some Power the giftiegie us To see oursels as ithers see us!
How true, and the quote that made me laugh today comes from Kentish Man (or is it Man of Kent?) and Graun columnist Stuart Heritage. This is how he sees those of us living north of the border and in the far southwest of Englandshire:
“Scotland, full of beautiful countryside and majestic red deer. Cornwall, full of rich a**eholes from Islington called Sebastian who’ve got crap ginger dreadlocks and septic wounds where their nasal piercings used to be“.
and just so the Cornish don’t feel too ‘got at’, this is what he thinks of his home county of Kent:
“Wander far enough north and you’ll soon find yourself lost in the unwanted hinterland of Bromley. … Go west and you’ll enter Sussex, which is to all intents and purposes Kent with a violent Laura Ashley infatuation. Go south and you’ll drown in the sea, which doesn’t sound great but is at least preferable to spending any meaningful amount of time in Folkestone”.
I don’t know how true this is as I have only ever ventured to Canterbury (which seemed fine) and Bromley (that had a cocktail bar sans cocktails) and I vaguely remember passing through Folkstone very early one morning after disembarking the ferry from Calais and, true, it did look a bit grim. But even though I think it may be a bit harsh, I do recall a fellow student from my Masters course – Simon, a nice chap – lamenting in laconic style that he came from Kent, except in his words it appeared to be even worse: “I come from Gravesend; name says it all really“.
Postscript: I learned today the difference between a Kentish Man and a Man of Kent (ditto a Kentish Maid versus a Maid of Kent). I’d heard of the former as it was the title of Frank Muir’s autobiography and I thought the term applied to anyone from Kent, but no. Men and Maids of Kent may originally have been Jutes whereas Kentish Men or Maids may originally have been Saxons, the former traditionally hailing from that part of Kent east of the River Medway and the latter from west of the river, although some doubt the historical accuracy of the river as the boundary. And it might all be mythical anyway …
I doff my cap to the latest set of Ig Nobel Laureates. These two awards in particular will, I’m sure, prove beneficial to my colleagues and me:
Ig Nobel Peace Prize: Gordon Pennycook and colleagues, for their study “On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit”
Ig Nobel Perception Prize: Atsuki Higashiyama and Kohei Adachi, for investigating whether things look different when you bend over and view them between your legs.
Okay, so I have to admit to watching Poldark last night even though I had some concerns during the last series after Management seemed a tad over-interested in Ross and his six-pack, only to be:
(i) reassured by her exclamation during his topless scything scene that: “I don’t like men with squares on their chest“;
and
(ii) rather concerned by her somewhat loose grasp of anatomy
Anyway, none of that is of current interest as the highlight of the present series, for me at least, was last night’s exchange between Demelza and Sir Hugh Bodrugan;
Sir Hugh: “Have you come to steal my heart?”
Demelza: “No, sir, I’ve come to visit your cow.”
They don’t write ’em like that no more! A true classic.
Poldark once he’s got the girl (image posted by Bulloverman’s Tomb of the Bizarre)
I don’t intend this blog to be political, but the recent stooshie about French Mediterranean beach resorts promoting religious intolerance by banning the burka made me think …
Although a secular state, France is a predominantly Catholic country with its own religious conventions, so the questions of the day are: do nuns go paddling at the beach? If so, what do they wear and should it be banned too?
The habit of a lifetime
Nuff said!
Postscript: I found the illustration, above, by googling ‘nuns paddling’. Bit of an eye-opener there for a naïve north country lad!
Having spent more than 30 years honing and fine-tuning the sort of diplomatic skills necessary to work effectively in the national and international fisheries science arena, I was delighted to be told by a colleague before a particularly ‘difficult’ session of an international coordination meeting that:
“There’s no need for Maggie to go with you, you’re bolshie enough on own”.
In my days as an early-career fishery scientist (to avoid being ageist we’re no longer allowed to refer to young scientists as, er, young scientists) I was thrown in at the deep end of a couple of contentious issues, one of which entailed the development in the 1980s of a harpoon fishery for basking sharks in the Clyde Sea area.
Given the public distaste for launching harpoons at large docile animals, coupled to the greater vulnerability of sharks to over-fishing and the short-lived nature of historical basking shark fisheries off the Scottish west coast, the renaissance of such a fishery attracted a lot of unfavourable press.
Yours truly was asked to carry out a literature review to navigate between the various perspectives and to give an objective overview. That was something of a challenge because exclaiming “Trust me, I’m a government scientist” is not the sort of clarion call that is viewed sympathetically by media outlets. In those days even the most egregious sound-bites peddled by the more extreme environmental lobbyists would usually be received more compliantly by the press than the words of a perceived government lackey (and as there was a lot of nonsense floating around with which I naturally disagreed, I didn’t end up a favourite of the press or the fishery’s critics).
Unsurprisingly, the fisherman concerned was largely demonised by the media. That was a real shame (although he sometimes seemed to be his own worst enemy) since up until then a great deal of what was known of basking shark biology came from collaborations between the fishermen and scientists. Moreover, at least four ‘popular’ books were written by Scottish basking shark fishermen of the 1940s and 50s – Harpoon at a Venture by Gavin Maxwell was the best known – and all contained interesting, if largely anecdotal, information.
One of those authors, ‘Tex’ Geddes, the so-called Laird of Soay, was Maxwell’s harpoon man and, like Maxwell himself, he was an instructor for the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War. The Independent’s obituary of him described him as “an accomplished knife-thrower and bayonet fencer, a boxer, a former rum-runner in Newfoundland, an orphaned lumberjack “tree monkey” whose father had been blown up while dynamiting a log jam and who had been expelled from school at the age of 12 as “unmanageable“). Nae bad, even for a Peterheid loon!
Anyway, our contemporary skipper was, like Geddes, something of a character albeit a less extreme one. We took part separately in a number of TV programmes, each facing hostile interviews covering the controversial fishery, including Channel Four’s ‘Fragile Earth’ series and the BBC2 ‘Nature’ programme fronted by Michael Buerk (famous for his ‘Ethiopian famine’ reports in the earlier 1980).
I think it was in the former (but I may be wrong) that our modern-day ‘Tex’ was asked about the moral issue of using a harpoon gun to kill such large and charismatic animals, sometimes in full view of families gazing down on the Clyde from the ramparts of Culzean Castle. Bearing in mind that he was being filmed standing on the prow of his boat, almost sideways on, with his harpoon gun fully loaded and pointing with priapic grandeur from below his midriff, his reply made me laugh. Having thought for a second or two, he focused attention on his weapon by sweeping his arm downwards with a flourish and proclaimed:
“That’s ma tool!”
I rather warmed to him after that 🙂
“That’s ma tool!” or “How to make friends and influence people”.
