And how to eat an artichoke!

Artichoke has much more to it than shown by chefs; it's one of the great messy starters.  The whole thing should have the whiskers removed from the bottom of the beast and the outermost leaves removed; boiled in salted water and then served with a small bowl or ramikin of Normandy salted butter; the dinner then peels the leaves one by one from the beast, dipping the base of the leave into the butter and stripping the gorgeous titbit of flesh away.  When you have used up the leaves which repay their dividend, then remove the rest of the useless flaccid small leaves and the wretched and aptly named choke, poor the remainder of the butter over the exposed and delectable heart and scoff!   You will end up with butter all over your chops and a huge pile of discarded, stripped leaves in the middle of the table/

As for Jerusalem artichokes... if you've ever had to spend a couple of days digging them out of someone's garden then you would not regard them with anything other than horror.  Double-digging in a wet and cold Spring to a depth of 2' over an entire garden and I'm pretty sure I did not get all of them; but after two days I was so tired and cold, I couldn't dig any further down. Ifor, the bloke whose garden it was kept saying what good topsoil it was...

Another light has gone out, and yet another

Just recently almost my last remaining really  close friend has died.  For the blog let's call him RJW. 

RJW as he was popularly known in the UK Diplomacy hobby was one of the founding fathers of the UK hobby, His 'zine, Mad Policy was one of the foundation and seminal zines of Diplomacy, first published in August 1972, he went on to publish more than 150 issues with a circulation which was international.

Mad Policy was also home of the Zine Poll for a lot of the time, eventually winning it, after a controversial change of rules in the eighties, which then resulted in RJW passing it on to John Piggott in 1986*. 

RJW was also one of the organisers for many years of Manorcon, which was an eminently successful games convention in the UK started in 1983 and still running. 

Richard was also instrumental in formulating the idea of the formation of the IDA/UK.  As Stephen Agar says: "...interest in Britain was focused on the Calhamer Awards which were organized by the IDA in the States. Thanks to some electioneering, British zines were nominated in 9 of the 11 categories and duly went on to win all 9 awards. This feat was accomplished by the fact that 75 of the 400 or so active UK players had voted in the poll, as opposed to a mere 50 votes from the 2,000 or so active US players. The US promptly changed the rules."  This coup was deliberately plotted it has to be said as a slightly nationalistic response to being patronised by some US players!  However, RJW remained good friends with people like Edi Birsan and Conrad von Metzke, in spite of some opprobrium.  It's worth saying that Richard loved to cock a snook at any kind of pomposity or pretension.

RJW also hated any kind of mawkish sentimentality, which rather showed itself in his spare, dry wit and prose.  He absolutely loved to puncture my innate tendency to pomposity.  Now, I shall have to resort to listening to what he would have said, like an additional internal critic.

His Imrryr by-line in Mad Policy was from Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone series, RJW was a very avid collector of Moorcock and read a lot of Science Fiction.  He was also a great fan of Star Trek, Doctor Who and Blake’s 7 and also particularly loved the film Excalibur.  Besides this he was a very great fan of early 60s UK female pop singers like Susan Maughan and Sandie Shore and collected rare songs and records by such until he died.  His collections, besides a mountain of SF, also included cigarette cards, which he turned into a semi-profitable hobby in his retirement.

On a personal level, Richard was my best friend.  His qualities were those of a true Englishman as both he and I saw them: honourable, decent, honest and loyal.  His passion as a one-time resident of Essex was for the county and England cricket teams, the latter which I shared with him, and he did so love to crow over the success of his team over mine in the county championship.  But Richard's real passion was for the football (soccer) team closest to him in his youth and to his heart throughout his life, which was West Ham.

One of the reasons why Richard became and was such a close friend of mine was that we both shared a passion for strategy board games that took a long time... Britannia, Civilization (the Hartland Trefoil game) were just two of these.  If you don’t get on with someone very well, spending many hours staring at each other over a board would have been intolerable.  He played to win and was a very careful strategist, hugely capable when it came to assessing probabilities.  Which was understandable as he had a gift for figures.  He started his working life as a statistician with British Aerospace before progressing on to a very senior position for BAe.  This involved supporting negotiations with the UK government providing statistical and financial information for BAe during these.  He said that his experience in playing Diplomacy was invaluable in achieving results at these meetings!

But I would not wish to give the idea of an earnest man, as those who have read Richard's press saga in this august zine, you will know or guess that RJW was witty, charming, creative and highly intelligent in print as well as in person.  A great conversationalist, some of our joint flights of fantasy and extemporisation got us into some strange situations!  You will have (or can) read of the spoof which he and I perpetrated on the UK hobby in launching my zine Gallimaufry under a pseudonym, as part of which he created Selena King, a femme fatale for the hobby, and then proceeded to torment Pete Birks with her for a while, by getting people to send cards from her from all over the world!

Let me finish with my recollection of one such piece of insanity, which occurred back in the late 1970s.  In those days there was an annual holiday get-together called Eurocon, typically taking place in France.  That year Richard and Claire had agreed to give me a lift down and back.  In France in those days, there was nearly always spare capacity in hotels so getting a couple of rooms was not too much of a problem.  Until on the way back we found one which, to our horror, only had one last room left above the kitchen.  So I said that I would sleep in the car, but Richard and Claire being lovely people, because the room had a cot bed, wouldn't hear of it.  So we went downstairs, Claire went out for a walk and left Richard and I to secure the room.  This caused some whispered conversations which we realised was caused by them thinking that Claire was une Belle de la Nuit and that we were going to enjoy a bit more than just the meal and a sleep.  Madame's son, who was our waiter, was terrified by the thoughts of what we might do later on and so we regaled him with little winks and whispered "Ménage a trois!".  We could not resist.  Needless to say we had a fitful night as the room was above the kitchen with all the pots and pans, but eventually we got to sleep!

He was my friend: decent, honest, charming, witty, loyal and funny besides being a great gamesplayer!  After 40 years of friendship I will very much miss him.

*I have just heard that John has also passed away, a couple of weekends ago, Sic Transit Gloria Rana...

A trip to remember

My father made us 'do' Copenhagen on the cheap by buying a Dormobile and a second-hand 2 man pup tent for 'the boys' (as if you could use a collective term for a sadistic thug of an acquisitive, amoral elder brother and an introverted, bookish younger sibling - both over 6' - constantly at war).  "It will be educational..."

2 weeks of driving in a battered old camper van at never more than 45 mph through the Low Countries (so named because slow, long-distance travel on endless flat autobahns is horrible). Nights spent rolling up to campsites putting up a ropy old tent in the near dark with your mortal enemy before squeezing back into the van to eat warmed through tinned rubbish*, before the pair of us increasingly feral siblings were shoe-horned into the leaky old tent.

Mile after mile of boredom; across the N German plain and up into Jutland... Dutch fields, German fields, Danish fucking fields ... we stopped for a day in Copenhagen - my mother insisting we saw the Tivoli Gardens, but we had no money for the rides etc. then up the coast to the Helsingborg ferry, down the Scanian coast to catch the Lübeck ferry.

By this stage my father confessed that money was a 'bit tight' so we weren't to go near the hot buffet ...  I was so, so hungry i started silently weeping, shoulders shaking; folk at other tables started to turn and stare at us so I was allowed to get 2 bangers, mash and baked beans as my parents reckoned that would be cheapest ... Back to the table with 5 minutes to boarding giving my father his wallet back... "How much?" "s'free - part of the fare" I engulfed this heavenly, properly cooked food in 2 minutes. It was the highlight of the holiday for me... we had to grind our way back, penniless, ravenous ... I'm amazed they let us back into the country ...  2,700 miles in a fortnight at an average of 28 mph... 😢

*I've mentioned before just how abysmal a cook my mother was? Well on this trip she managed to plumb new depths of culinary disaster... the exploding steak and kidney pie trick she left at home... but boiled spuds with no salt, burnt baked beans, boil in a tin frankfurters came with us because "We can't trust that foreign muck"  Jesus, the rest of us were so fucking hungry we used to bless the late arrivals because on the few occasions we were early my brother and I used to go and stand near where others were cooking whimpering and salivating away, tears in our eyes hoping they would take pity on us and feed us a few scraps.  My father would come and haul us back lying through his teeth that "Food was ready"

Where have all the libraries gone...

Sorry, not to have posted sooner.  Been on the loo.  It's only recently I got rid of my copy of Ranganathan's Colon Classification System, which has a certain ironic resonance.  Actually, it's not so much a system, more a selection of principles which a classifier can apply to where to put books so that no other person can find them.  This is because only 1 in 10 librarians actually understand it, so what hope does Joe Punter have.

On the other hand, the Dewey Decimal Classification system was designed in the late 19th Century before modern advances in science and engineering; it originally sort of spread all knowledge evenly around.  After this, the sub-classes have gradually been increased until "629 Applied Science (aka Technology) - Other branches of Engineering" includes most of what the modern world uses.  You know, computers, cars, aka modern technology etc. etc.  This means that you need some very long numerical additions to differentiate between things.  Try 629.22199982988.  Guess what?  Some of these are so meaningless that they now rival Ranganathan for incomprehensibility.  In an effort to actually assist the punter in finding, say a car manual for a particular make of car; modern information scientists (sic) have resorted to using the first three letters of the make in order to help.

Of course, in modern libraries, whole number groups have been hunted down, rounded up and sold off in order to pay for internet access, making the whole classification system redundant*. Yee hi There was a secondary purpose. This was to enable vast areas of space to be turned into internet cafes, drop-in and drop-dead (deadbeats and old fogies like me) centres. Dewey is still used.

*I went into what was a reasonably major library a while back - I worked there in the 70s.  It now resembles a slightly seedy community centre with a few oversized women and blokes with ponytails and glasses pretending to be experts in finding information on the internet.  There are a few shelves of books, all leaning drunkenly into each other, dog-eared and looking slightly defeated like the staff...

 Dun't need none of that book lernin.

Just as well.  You won't find it in a modern British public library.

Thunderbangs and Pink Grandad

The Thunderbang, a wonderful cardboard and paper giveaway with the Dandy, came out about 1962, I think. My brother and I used this to great effect until my mother burnt them... You would creep up on a neighbour and accidentally crack one off, so to speak, the neighbour would scream and you would say, I wasn't sure it worked, can you try. And then you'd get the neighbours at it too.

Apart from Mrs Williams... a very Welsh (coincidentally), very nasty piece of work who flat out accused my mother of killing my grandfather*. I painted BUM on her perfectly manicured front garden in weedkiller. It was quite small so I had to keep the number of letters down. And it worked quite effectively. I think my Mum and Dad guessed it was me, but although I heard the old harpy complaining to them about their evil kids, all that happened was I got an extra ice cream!

*For those that keep track of my ramblings, this was Pink Grandad. A tremendous, Olympian figure who enlisted at the start of the Great War and was eventually invalided out at the end of 1917; I know he was at the first battle of the Somme, so how any of us that descend from him (three at current count) did so is a miracle. When he fell down the stairs and died, they had to do an autopsy, as they do with all sudden deaths. Apart from being mostly deaf and completely blind, the poor old fellow had been gassed, and subjected to all the diseases of the Western Front. His heart gave out in the fall, but these never actually fully left him and one of the things they found was the Bubonic Plague. You could not make this up. He was bloody tough. 

The Paralymics 2012

The Channel 4 adverts for the Paralympics are brilliant.  They have also been showing little vignettes about the sport called Meet the Paralympians, which are excellent.  You can catch these on YouTube.  But also I must to say that Eddie Marsan (who I thought was OK, but not that good), is superb as Dr Ludwig Guttman in The Best of Men...  As is Rob Brydon.  Someone implied elsewhere that my reaction to these guys and girls was that of pity; there may be some of that, but there is infinitely more admiration, the feeling you get when you see human beings overcome disadvantage to succeed and also that in every essential way they are people we need to emulate, who inspire me, at least. What they do affirms all of us in our humanity.

But you have to be my age to realise just how the public's attitude to disability or deformity has come.  We aren't there yet, us theoretically normal people, but we are a lot further than in the 1950s when we would be told not to touch or be near anyone with a disability.  "They ought to be locked up"  and that from a sensible, otherwise pleasant middle-aged working class Mum.  At the back of the comment was a kind of shibboleth, a superstition that if her children touched the afflicted one, then they would somehow become infected.  I am happy that that is no longer as bad.

In France, though, with hunchbacks it is different.  A friend of mine loved going to France as all the pretty girls wanted to touch his back for luck.  This please him no end, but not so much his wife!

A new thing arises...

OK, sometimes I rush in here and shout about some foodie programme or other. But if are halfway interested in Chinese food and culture (and why not!) and you watch no other please watch what remains of Exploring China: A Culinary Adventure - that's the i-Player link. About 3.8 weeks to go.  I was caught out last night; as BBC2 are showing this series at 8 on Sundays on Beeb2. And it is brilliant, both in terms of sharing some of the back story of two chefs who I really like and also the food and culture of China. If you're into any of that then don't miss it...

Me? I dived out of bed (read NHS stuff to know why I was there) out of horizontal mode, down the stairs switched stuff on and cued the recording, missing the first 15 minutes of episode 1. I will watch the i-Player bit when the Olympics are over but I watched/listened to the rest whilst prepping, cooking and eating my evening meal. Simply the best. An awesome piece of programme making; it tells you more about what and where China is than most travel documentaries.  And I love both Ken Hom and Ching; I dreamt once about Mich-bot and Ching doing a cooking series called East meets East...