The Inn at the Edge of the World

Alice Thomas Ellis, The Inn at the Edge of the World, 1990

    'What's he a professor of?' asked Jessica who had, intermittently, wondered about this for some time. He didn't strike her as being cast in the donnish mould.

    'Teeth,' said Eric contemptuously. 'He's a dentist.'

    'Ah,' said Jessica. 'How revolting.'

    'He makes a fortune in one way and another,' said Eric, 'and he gets months of holidays.'

    There followed one of those satisfying discussions, in which all parties are in agreement, about the iniquities of the medical and dental professions and the shortcomings of the NHS, leavened by individual accounts of appalling experiences, both surgical and financial, which each participant had undergone at the hands of one or more practitioners of these humane skills.

It is a joy to read (and reread) Alice Thomas Ellis's books, and as I've only read two so far, I speak with the assuredness of opinion as you have only come to expect, Dear Reader – and I can thank side-bar resident dear Ur-Spo over at Spo-Reflections for the introduction. It would seem, however, that her books are not everyone's cup of tea, but I particularly enjoy her shrewd, dry wit and sharp observations of people's frailties. Her characters might be flawed or peculiar but are drawn with an amusing and subtle touch, and her black humour belies what is her strongly conservative Catholic eye when probing the human condition and what she sees as the failings of the modern world.

An observant reader may have noticed I've already had a rave over The 27th Kingdom and today's is another of her books needing some airspace hereabout. As it seems an age since I first read this amusing book (and had plucked out my favourite passages for these pages to then languish forlornly in the Draft Department) I've had to recently read it again to remind me what is going on in her take on the vacuousness of the modern Western Christmas. Not a chore, may I say! She's such fun. And there's always a little sprinkling of the otherwordly, shall we say.

The professor entered with a girl in the duffel coat. He seemed annoyed and Jessica wondered what he had to be cross about when, so far as she knew, nobody was trying to kill him. At present she felt she was the only person in the world with something to be really cross about.

    'They've been at it again,' he said. 'I nearly caught them this time. There's just enough snow to show up footprints on the lawn.'

    'They were playing music,' said the girl in the duffel coat unexpectedly.

    'Bollocks,' said the professor. 'They weren't. It was the wind in the wires.' This was clearly the continuation of an argument which had begun earlier and was leading nowhere.

    'They were,' said the girl, and Mrs H. brightened at the prospect of discord.

    'It was probably the ghosts again,' she said. 'You're haunted.'

    'I'm not haunted,' said the professor, as though he'd been accused of having lice. The distinction of having a ghost was obviously outweighed for him by the nuisance of trespass. If the dancers on the lawn came from another element he still resented them pushing his fence down. 'It's bloody-minded locals,' he said and stroked his crotch fretfully, which made Jessica think of Mike again. Perhaps it was the fault of feminists, she thought, which caused so many men to have to keep publicly checking on their masculinity.

But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here with these abrupt introductions to some of the local flavour at the Edge of the World and need to put a bit of flesh on these bones. The Inn in question is a hard luck sort of business in the remote and Outer Hebrides, and its desperate Outsider owner, Eric, decides to clutch at some out-of-season business by advertising it widely as a Christmas destination for those who don't want any festive cheer. Despite his wife's scorn, five people actually respond, so the lascivious Mabel decamps to Glasgow at the moment of their arrival, leaving Eric to valiantly manage his guests with the aid of a couple of distinctly odd locals. 

The usual motley assortment thus land upon the island's distant shores, loners, mostly, each with some baggage in tow or some social graces left behind, and they hunker down on this moody, wintry, and slightly eerie place and proceed to get to know one another and some peculiar locals, as there's simply nothing else to do. And A.T.E. works her magic on them.

Among the unlikely alliances formed amongst the five guests, are Jessica, a jaded and fairly famous actress who is a household voice and face of soap and tea-bag advertisements and the like, and widower Harry, the "disciplined and tidy" ex-military man who "had been sad for almost as long as he could remember". But then, they should be naturally drawn to one another as Jessica is to find herself a potential murder victim on the island, and Harry is constantly ruminating on and longing for his own death. It is his admiration of General Gordon and his envying him his early death that, finding himself in a purposeless existence, Harry starts writing his biography. 

General Charles Gordon in Khartoum

Luckily, I had read Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians immediately before I first read The Inn and was well and truly boned up on General Gordon, so it was with delight that I greeted his appearances in the book as an old friend:

    'Don't cry,' said Harry.

    'I'm so sorry,' said Jessica. 'Men hate tears.'

    'I don't mind,' said Harry. 'I don't like to see you upset.' He would have told her that he himself sometimes wept, but he knew that women cannot bear to see men weep. 'How about a brandy?'

    'And soda?' said Jessica, attempting to substitute a smile for a snivel. 'Drink to General Gordon?'

    'Why not?' said Harry. 'He was an amazing fellow for looking on the bright side.'

    'I suppose he'd need to be,' said Jessica. 'Stuck in Khartoum like that. I've nearly gone mad stuck on Crewe platform for an hour – and nobody was proposing to massacre me.'

    'I know something to cheer you up,' said Harry. 'I'll read you some last words.'

    'Thanks a lot,' said Jessica, drying her tears.

And later on, after a goodly dose of her holiday reading, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a depressed Jessica turns to Harry for a restorative tonic:

    'Harry,' said Jessica, at the door of his room, 'could I have a B and S?' She made no apology.

    'You don't look well,' observed Harry.

    'I'm all right,' she said. 'Only I've just been reading about Hell again. I think nineteenth-century Hell is probably worse than the Hell of other ages – ... I know what today feels like. It feels like a Protestant's Sunday. No joy. Worse – a reminder of Hell. I shan't try and skip Christmas again, it isn't worth it.'

    'Gordon was good on hell,' said Harry. 'Shall I tell you?'

    'Will it cheer me up?' asked Jessica.

    'It might,' said Harry.

    'I'm not sure if I'm frightened of death or Hell,' said Jessica, 'or both, or neither, or whether I've merely got indigestion, or maybe I was last incarnated in some Victorian villa with bad drains, and I can't shake the memory off. Tell me about Gordon and Hell.'"

    Harry turned to his notes ...

The other dubious pairing is between Ronald and Anita. Ronald is a self-centred psychoanalyst, "a single-minded, foraging creature intent on a goal imperceptible to others" whose long-suffering wife and cleaning lady both have finally left him and whose utter flailing about domestically has forced him to take lodgings over Christmas at the edge of the world in order that he might get fed and watered. 

Anita the lonely and insecure spinster in charge of stationery in a big store, who yearns for elegance and taste (and love), was foisted with nauseating festive offerings by her impossible buyer this year. In silent protest and a surprising act of defiance, she chooses an anti-Christmas escape, imagining the remote hotel to provide a chic retreat from all the wrong notes being hit by the tasteless, peopled with the like-minded. While her ideals are merely that, and, despite his ungracious demeanour, the slightly desperate Anita finds herself automatically responding to Ronald's apparent need for female guidance.

    'Are you more or less ready, Ronald?' asked Anita.

    'What for?' asked Ronald.

    'You are coming with me,' explained Anita patiently, 'to talk to a lady I met, who knits special sweaters with a special pattern so that when her husband and sons get drowned she can identify the bodies.'

    'Oh yes, of course,' said Ronald. 'I remember now. I said I'd come with you, didn't I?'

    'Yes,' said Anita. 'You did.'

    'I'll go and get my coat,' said Ronald after a short silence, illustrative of some reluctance.

    'You can't spend the morning pigging crisps and nuts in the bar,' said Anita on a sudden surge of gaiety.

    So that's the way the wind's blowing, thought Eric. For she had sounded quite like a wife in a not unreasonable humour.

The fifth wheel in the non-Christmas assemblage is Jon. A minor actor, young, vain and handsome, and clearly mad. He is obsessed with Jessica, with whom he shares an agent and who cannot quite remember him or understand his giving attention to her, and stalks her to the edge of the world with goodness know's what intention. Well ... ultimately, murder. Sorry! Spoilers abound around these pages.

    'Schmuck,' said Ronald as Jon left the room, and Jessica was briefly diverted by this evidence of a different aspect to a character she thought she had summed up. He's human, she thought. Anita, however, found his remark lacking in dignity and professional finesse.

    'He's unbalanced,' she reminded the psychoanalyst. 'He needs treatment.'

    'He's a schmuck,' repeated Ronald stubbornly. Jon had reminded him of his least favourite patient, and by association, of the wifeless, cold and foodless house to which he must soon return. There was, he thought self-pityingly, nothing more depressed than a depressed psychoanalyst, for no one else was so familiar, by way of observation and practice, with the subtle gradations and bleak possibilities of this melancholy state. He took the remains of a once-hot roll from Anita's plate and piled jam on it – an act which could be construed as displaying a heart-warming familiarity and ease of manner, or a lack of any knowledge of social decorum whatsoever. Anita couldn't make up her mind.

Which reminds me, there was a bit of plainspeaking over at Samuel Pepys's diary yesterday, too. "But my Lord Mayor I find to be a talking, bragging Bufflehead ... when in discourse I observe him to be as very a coxcomb as I could have thought had been in the City." &c. &c. and concluding, "I am confident there is no man almost in the city cares a turd for him, nor hath he brains to outwit any ordinary tradesman." But I digress ...

Like any good formula for a book, throw together an odd assembly in a remote location and just see what happens. Add some Celtic lore, in the form of Selkies, and perhaps some ghosts and you have the perfect preternatural Christmas getaway for our not-quite Famous Five. And because I cannot resist spoilers, five go out but only three will return! Make this a Christmas read, or get in early as a just any old time of the year read and I will be disappointed if you don't find it entertaining.

Image credits: 1, 3: Flying With Hands; 2: Wikimedia Commons: 4: via Pinterest

General Bewilderment Lane

 

In which lane do you swim, Dear Reader, in the Pool of Life? If you find yourself in the General Bewilderment Lane, I bid you hearty greetings, for that is where Your Correspondent is to be found these days. What is going on? Why even is it? How did we get into this handcart hurtling toward the proverbial? Etc., etc. Although, truth be told, in the pool in which I have been swimming lately, it is much more optimistically called the Free Play lane. Safely out of the way of those more determined, and where a bit of aquatic physio can be done between the laps, for the recovering hip is still a work in progress. Rather like the Soul, too, for it is the season of Lent for thems who swing that way. Which I also have been, lately. Swinging, that is.

Behold some of this morning's scenery:

Laps under the watchful eye of the Navy

View back into Woolloomooloo Bay

Walking home past these tidy runabouts

Training tall ship the Young Endeavour

Missed the bus so had to tackle the 112 stairs

This Piscean may be a new hatched 60 but it's still a piece of cake!

Image credits: 1: Judy Horacek; Rest: Flying With Hands

The Daughter Of Time

Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time, 1951

Would you call Truth, Dear Reader, a trickster or a friend? 

"Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority", so sayeth Francis Bacon in 1620. Or more, "History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it", as pronounced by Winston Churchill in 1948?

It would appear that it is as slippery as an eel, indeed, when a little bit of amateur sleuthing reveals that both these well-known quotations might, after all, be misattributed and misquoted, respectively. History as laid out by Historians, for consumption by minds young & pliable or seasoned & cynical, must surely be littered with both facts and fancies, despite the best intentions (or worst). And the Truth, well, objective Truth, about History as it is made can be very subjective, even slipping into Legend or Propaganda, depending on who gets to write it. 

Anyways, it's not all po-faced seriousness around here, it's just Your Correspondent's introduction to a long-overdue book spoiler. From the Golden Age of Crime Writing, no less. Ah, who doesn't love them? So breezy, such scintillating dialogue, a little hint of glamour, nearly always a brace of young lovers and a (usually) well-deserved victim whom everyone has motive to bump off, red herrings galore and a tidy & happy ending. So many of my favourite things. 

And wherein you might find exchanges about royalty, vintage fashion and brazen opinion all elbowing for space on the one page: 

    'Oh, not Mary Queen of Scots!'

    'Why not?' asked Marta, who like all actresses saw Mary Stuart through a haze of white veils.

    'I could be interested in a bad woman but never in a silly one.'

    'Silly?' said Marta in her best lower-register Electra voice.

    'Very silly.'

    'Oh, Alan, how can you!'

    'If she had worn another kind of headdress no one would ever have bothered about her. It's that cap that seduces people.'

    'You think she would have loved less greatly in a sun-bonnet?'

    'She never loved greatly at all, in any kind of bonnet.'

    Marta looked as scandalised as a lifetime in the theatre and an hour of careful make-up allowed her to.

    'Why do you think that?'

    'Mary Stuart was six feet tall. Nearly all out-sized women are cold. Ask any doctor.'

Bliss.

Is this Mary's seductive cap, so quoth?

Or is it this velvet bonnet?

This book, though, is slightly different from the, oh, couple of dozen I've knocked off in the past while. No locked room in a country manor, or quaint village with the attendant eccentrics, or even Mayfair ballroom in interwar London here. No cyanide, sparkling or otherwise, or Morris Dancer's decapitation, or shooting stick as grisly murder weapon. Rather, our dapper and charismatic detective, Inspector Alan Grant, is laid up in hospital, bored and recovering from a Workplace Incident and whiles the time casting a fresh policeman's eye over a four hundred-year old whodunit, wherein the victims are not even sure to have been dispatched, let alone how.

Using only his Little Grey Cells, to borrow from another favourite meticulous detective, and the legwork of a keen young researcher to ferret out the necessary facts for him from real and invented sources, "Give me research. After all, the truth of anything at all doesn't lie in someone's account of it. It lies in all the small facts of the time", he investigates not the plight of the imprisoned Mary Stuart, as she's plain silly, but the mystery of the fabled missing Princes in the Tower*, alleged to have been murdered by, or for, the wicked King Richard III. The challenge to Historians is on!

The Princes in the Tower, 1878
John Everett Millais

I was very moved as a child by John Everett Millais' sepia reproduction of the tragic princes and its accompanying lurid description, an essay by one Ehrma G. Filer in the vintage University Society's encyclodædic children's series on our shelves. She told the tragic tale of their lives and their wicked uncle, and finished with the flourish, "These unfortunate little Princes stand there proudly, though their hearts are beating fast. They remind us far too well of the old unhappy days of long ago, before the spirit of democracy ruled the world." Sob!

The villain of the piece?
The seductive velvet cap suggests not!

History, as taught in the sad and scratchy curriculum of the 1970's in Australia, no longer plumped out the tales of the Kings & Queens of Britain, so what I knew of Richard III was from the said Bookshelf for Boys & Girls, Shakespeare and general knowledge. Of course, the 2012 discovery of his skeleton under a carpark in Leicester brought me somewhat up-to-date and illuminated the scale of the rehabilitation of his reputation by some. And it turns out that Ms. Tey's popular 1951 book was one where many of the arguments of his innocence in the murders were laid out. 

In no time all, for I swing like the wind, I do, the Ricardian side won me over completely upon the discovery that the "contemporary" account of the whole matter, the oft-referenced one by the celebrated Sir Thomas More who was a mere child during Richard's reign, was likely written by one Cardinal John Morton, who was an actual enemy of the king. Morton and More were likely propogandists for the Tudors, and before dear Richard, the last of the Plantagenets, was even cold in his shallow and hasty grave, their lurid tale had become the Truth, and was dished up to children centuries later as History. Lo! we have a textbook example of the fallibility of Great Minds and the undeserved influence they wield. 

Inspector Grant swiftly tosses out the Morton/More evidence and sets to his Case as a detective–looking for motive, means & opportunity among the other players of the time. Looking, in other words, for Facts.

The fact that Sir Thomas was a martyr and a Great Mind did not cut any ice at all with him, Alan Grant. He, Alan Grant, had known Great Minds so uncritical that they would believe a story that would make a con. man blush for shame. He had known a great scientist who was convinced that a piece of butter muslin was his great-aunt Sophia because an illiterate medium from the back streets of Plymouth had told him so ... As far as he, Alan Grant, was concerned there was nothing so uncritical or so damn-silly as your Great Mind. As far as he, Alan Grant, was concerned Thomas More was washed out, cancelled, deleted ...

And is this the first use of the word cancelled to apply to a public persona? In 1951? How modish!

Not to mention the long term consquence of Cromwell's insistence on a warts & all portrait:

    'If you ask me,' the surgeon said, absent-mindedly considering the splint on Grant's leg, 'Cromwell started that inverted snobbery from which we are all suffering today. "I'm a plain man, I am; no nonsense about me." And no manners, grace, or generosity, either.' He pinched Grant's toe with detached interest. 'It's a raging disease. A horrible perversion. In some parts of the States, I understand, it's as much as a man's political life is worth to go to some constituencies with his tie tied and his coat on. That's being stuffed-shirt. The beau ideal is to be one of the boys...'

I'm with you Ms. Tey. Whatever happened to one's Sunday Best for being seen out and about town? How times haven't changed.

If you have not met Inspector Grant before, do not think he is just a cynical curmudgeon, intent on taking a wrecking ball to tradition and scholarship. He is a charming and insightful man. Viz. his contemplated Christmas surprise for his frugal and modest housekeeper Mrs Tinker, whose care he will submit to after leaving his hospital bed. He had been lavishing elegant handbags upon her each year, which never again see the light of day, suspected to be squirrelled away in a drawer as treasures:

Next Christmas he was going to open this shabby sack of hers, this perennial satchel à tout faire, and put something in the money compartment. She would fritter it away, of course, in small unimportances; so that in the end she would not know what she had done with it; but perhaps a series of small satisfactions scattered like sequins over the texture of everyday life was of greater worth than the academic satisfaction of owning a collection of fine objects at the back of a drawer.

Was it Colonel Mustard
with the candlestick in the library?

No, The Daughter of Time, is not your typical Cluedo trope. There is no tidy ending to the mystery, save ol' Pipistrello being pretty darned convinced that Richard III has come off badly in the court of public opinion. And while Ms. Tey has quite possibly massaged and stretched what is really known about Richard and his nephews, it is a witty and pleasurable read, even if you are not drawn to the escapist pleasures of the Golden Age of Crime fiction.

* ERII had allegedly been approached three times for permission to have DNA testing done on the two skeletons found interred in 1674 under stairs in the Tower of London but refused. Or maybe it was the Church of England, the custodians of the remains, that refused. Either way, the mystery continues!

Image credits: 1,6: via Google; 2,3,5: Wikimedia Commons; 4: Flying With Hands

Twelfth Day-ish

Greetings, Dear Reader! I hope your Twelve Days of Christmas have been delightful and that 2026 looks to be full of promise for you. Although Epiphany has passed, in this household our tree is still up, for it is Candlemas that will be the day for its packing up, so you might think we are still in the throws of the Festive Season. There has, indeed, been a little bit of this and that, but in the main it has been a fairly quiet affair this year.

Xmas lunch à deux

Excepting that we did something different by flying* to the capital of the People's Republic of Victoria on Christmas morning. There we went to a couple of fancy restaurants and slept in a fancy hotel, bookending a descent upon our dear friends' home to polish off their leftovers on Boxing Day. Short and sweet was the visit. The Barmy Army was in town for the cricket, so the hotel prices were simply outrageous, and the weather was freezing, so it almost feel like we'd gone to Ye Olde England for a couple of days!

Friend M's Xmas cake

If you remember that the Pipistrellos went mad a few years ago and gave up carbs, it is still the same merry caper in the Something-to-Eat Department, but a bit of throwing it all to the wind when the occasion calls for it, most especially for some chocs, a bit of Xmas cake, a glass of bubbles &c. &c.

 

But rest assured, in the main we have been traditionalists for the rest of it.

Over in Restoration England, if you're not up-to-date with the goings-on of Samuel Pepys, his last diary entry was also for Twelfth Day[-ish]. Amongst the outings of his busy last day of Christmas, he and wife Elizabeth went to a playhouse and saw Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night". It was "acted well, though it be but a silly play and not related at all to the name or day."** He confided to his diary on this otherwise pleasant and busy last day of Christmas, being "somewhat vexed" that his wife left her bundle of pricey clothes she'd been toting in the coach on the way home, "though, I confess," he adds, "she did give them to me to look after, yet it was her fault not to see that I did take them out of the coach." Cough. Anyways, he promises that Christmas now done, his resolutions of less carousing and plays and more hard work and making money, are in full swing as from tomorrow.

Are there any resolutions coming from Your Correspondent in response to Mr. Pepys fine promises? Not really. Just a bit more time needs carving out for Ye Olde Blogge ... Off to a cracking start, methinks! So what were some highlights of the year past?

 In my orthodontist's 'hood

On a whim, ol' Pipistrello decided to start some orthodontic work a few months ago and in a couple of years the gnashers should be looking a tad less uncoventional, shall we say. I was surprised to learn that you don't have to be a whipper-snapper to do such things, and your teeth won't fall straight out of your head if you try to move them around in an ageing jaw. Indeed, the charming orthodontist is also doing her mum's teeth at the same time, and she's in her 70's!

A still Melboure dawn

In the Dancing Department, it had been a corker of a year, until it wasn't :( Last January saw me off to the capital of the People's Republic of Victoria to take part in my first intensive workshop with a famous ballet teacher visiting from the U.K. It was as satisfying & gruelling as expected and I went through an entire box of Epsom bath salts and a tube of embrocation during my stay! But, amongst it all, I did enjoy the sight of hot-air balloons drifting over the cityscape at sunrise from my window.

I shall not see a link between 40 dance classes
in a month and a bit of, ahem, wear & tear

Fast forward a few months and my Dance Card was positively chockers, viz. see above. Then, disastro! in May and an old pre-ballet hip injury flared up which saw everything crash to a halt and then the calendar was drearily marked for doctor-MRI-physio-physio-physio-Pilates ad nauseum, until the green light was given to ease back into dance classes. Of course, after a few months of being good and cautious about pushing things, I did go and get a bit carried away just before Christmas and have had a bit of a setback. The days are again filled with physio-physio-physio but things are looking better for stepping back soon into the studio.

Mr. P's paw pre-surgery

It had also been a bit of a shocker of a year in the life of the Pipistrello colony, with the associated dislocation, relocation and emotional roller-coasting that attends the passing of an older member. And Mr. P  had his own brush with disaster in an encounter with a staircase determined to come off the better. We are still here, thankfully, a bit banged up in the chassis compared to this time last year, but still running! And there were some lovely times to be had with family, friends, books, music and the rest. So 2025 was a mixed bag all up. Now, let us see what comes ...

* And was somewhat disappointed that the be-antlered Qantas hosties did not offer up a mince pie as comestible, as I thought they might.

** He had seen it once before, as a "new play", but couldn't enjoy it then as he'd snuck in with a friend after chancing upon it on a walk and was in the guilts over having sworn to his wife he wouldn't go to a play without her. 

Image credits: 4: via Pinterest; rest: Flying With Hands

Merry Christmas!

 

Dear Reader, I wish for you glad tidings and good cheer at this Christmastime.

My offerings to you of salutation this past year have been the slimmest of slim pickings,

such that I almost feel I should perhaps reintroduce myself to you.

But let us have that pleasure, hem hem,

in the New Year and I shall regale you then with this & that.

Pipistrello x

Table Talk: Dinner With The Pepys's

Samuel Pepys 1666 portrait
by John Hayls

Mr. Pepys's rather entertaining diary entries are popping up in my email inbox* these days, and as such can furnish these pages with some much-needed Table Talk. Goodness knows how starved you must be, Dear Reader, for any crumbs that might come your way, hem hem, so a couple of his recent delightful dinners (read lunches) hosted with relatives, both of the beloved and unloved varieties, can serve as fine a way as any of announcing Your Correspondent's reappearance about these pages. And apart from partaking of the occasional cake for supper**, his menu seems not too dissimilar to the Pipistrellos! 

Wednesday 26 March, 1662

From Robert Venables
The Experienced Angler, 1662

... At noon come my good guests, Madame Turner, The. [Theophilia Turner, aged ~11], and Cozen Norton, and a gentleman, one Mr. Lewin of the King's LifeGuard; by the same token he told us of one of his fellows killed this morning in a duel. I had a pretty dinner for them, viz., a brace of stewed carps, six roasted chickens, and a jowl of salmon, hot, for the first course; a tanzy [herb-scented pudding] and two neats' tongues [cows' tongues], and cheese the second; and were very merry all the afternoon, talking and singing and piping upon the flageolette [Ed.: oh, misery, the recorder]. In the evening they went with great pleasure away, and I with great content walked half an hour in the garden, and so home to supper and to bed ...

The Pepys's, Samuel and Elisabeth, are entertaining some beloved Cozens (sic) to a chicken apiece and more on this day in March several hundred years ago, and one Mr. Lewis who is singing for his supper by entertaining the party with a sordid and salacious tale of murder. (No doubt young Theophilia was all agog at the story.) Anyways, the merry Stone Feast was in honour of Mr. Pepys fourth anniversary of the successful operation to remove his bladder stone, performed at Mrs. Turner's house. The miracle of his surviving another 45 years, I read, is that he was the first patient of the day of Mr. Thomas Hollier, whose hands and instruments were relatively clean and not besmeared with the gore of others. 

Nota bene: Avert your eyes now and skip the next excerpt if you don't wish to read Claire Tomalin's*** gruesome biographical account of this pre-anaesthetic operation to remove his "tennis ball"-sized stone (fear not, a tennis ball in 1658 was a much tinier affair at around 1 or 2 inches diameter), which, of course, he kept for posterity. But, for the strong of stomach, what follows is positively fascinating:

The surgeon got to work. First he inserted a thin silver instrument, the itinerarium, through the penis into the bladder to help position the stone. Then he made the incision, about three inches long and a finger's breadth from the line running between scrotum and anus, and into the neck of the bladder, or just below it. The patient's face was sponged as the incision was made. The stone was sought, found and grasped with pincers; the more speedily it could be got out the better. Once out, the wound was not stitched—it was thought best to let it drain and cicatrize itself—but simply washed and covered with a dressing, or even kept open at first with a small roll of soft cloth known as a tent, dipped in egg white. A plaster of egg yolk, rose vinegar and anointing oils was then applied. Pepys, no doubt now fainting with shock and pain, was unbound and moved to his warmed bed.

Anyhoo, back to the dinner table:

Tuesday 8 April, 1662

Hendrick de Fromantiou
Still life with Oysters, 1661

Up very early and to my office, and there continued until noon. So to dinner, and in comes Uncle Fenner and the two Joyces [more Cozens]. I sent for a barrel of oysters and a breast of veal roasted, and were very merry; but I cannot down with their dull company and impertinent. After dinner to the office again ... By the way home and on Ludgate Hill there being a stop, I bought two cakes, and they were our supper at home [!!].

Mr. Pepys, ever the genial host, mostly keeps his critique of those in his orbit to his diary pages but occasionally words are had between relatives or work colleagues. A couple of weeks ago came an entry with the following admission:

... This noon came a letter from T. Pepys, the turner [and yet another cousin], in answer to one of mine the other day to him, wherein I did cheque him for not coming to me, as he had promised, with his and his father's resolucion about the difference between us [over an annuity and threats of a law suit, and many "high words" have passed betwixt them recently]. But he writes to me in the very same slighting terms that I did to him, without the least respect all, but word for word as I did him, which argues a high and noble spirit in him, though it troubles me a little that he should make no more of my anger, yet I cannot blame him for doing so, he being the elder brother's son, and not depending upon me at all.

Between the theatre, the office, church, overseeing his household and his "paynter" working on his and Elisabeth's portraits and his builders working on some home improvements, diligently practicing his "musick", and whatnot, Mr. Pepys is a busy young chronicler of Restoration England. Such a distraction for the reader some several hundred years removed, but dinners with the Pepys's are soothingly familiar.

* Subscribe to www.pepysdiary.com and you, too, can have his diary entries to read each morning, annotated by readers. It doesn't matter when you start reading the diary, it just keeps recycling over the years and there's been a few runs through already, apparently. Consider his writing as part of your morning blog feed, except the commentators chat amongst themselves rather than with the author!

** And the odd reference to overindulgence of food and/or drinke and the need to, ahem, have a little Roman-style purge in his back garden to make a bit more room for the supper he never seems to forego.

*** Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, 2002

Image credits: 1: Wikimedia Commons; 2: via Google; 3: PubHist.com

It's A Slippery Slope

"Prepare the sheep's head in the usual way." 

So sayeth the rather unhelpful opening instructions to a recipe for Sheep's Head Stew, according to a popular Edwardian-era recipe book consulted by the doughty domestic historian Ruth Goodman on the olde BBC programme Edwardian Farm.* 

Time-travelling farmers,
Alex, Ruth, Peter & Chums

Even Your Correspondent, a two-year long Carnivore, doesn't have an autopilot procedure for tackling such a beast's bit**. When, I hear you cry, did such traditional knowledge fall out of the domestic sphere? Ditto, as another for inst., olde dressmaking patterns, with their spare and breezy instructions to go ahead and sew up some complicated garment as you "ordinarily would". The Edwardian era was only just over a century ago, merely twice the temporal distance from my earliest memories, and without the aid of Mr. Google, I have no notion how to prepare a head o' mutton for the pot nor sew a leg o' mutton sleeve. For shame!

Leg o' Mutton sleeves, if you please

Back to Dear Ruth on the telly, she was preparing this frugal yet filling aforementioned staple while her fellow time-travelling adventurers had gone off to cook some limestone in a kiln for several days, as you do when the rather acidic soil on the farm you are to work needs some tonnes of quicklime and there is no local agricultural store to pop into, it being, you know, not invented yet. For the Gentleman Viewer this was an instructive lesson for when the agro-chemical industrial complex goes up in smoke, and some back-to-basics is required to keep starvation from the door, for forgotten manly commonplaces necessary to life lie thick on the ground these days.

Indeed, the observant reader will have already gleaned many valuable tidbits from around these pages, (granted, all unsolicited advice, but provisioning against the end-of-days has become rather a niche herein and I am confident you will thank me later), viz. the tongue of a hoopoe will restore the memory of a forgetful person, amongst the many choice nuggets. 

A hoopoe for those who forgot what it even was

And, of course, will have noted that the Pipistrellos have at their fingertips a most excellent book of instruction on keeping calm and carrying on when the electricity is switched off forever, and thusly a perpetual source of practicality and delight, and from which I share from time to time over at my Commonplace Book:

Chockfilled with canny know-how

But today's cautioning about the slippery slope to a new dark age, Dear Reader, is less to do with such diverse canny know-how falling by the wayside, like how to clear a blocked chimney (Edwardian Farm tip: feed down a bundle of scouring holly!), and more to do with the sort of permanent cultural amnesia which besets us when we stop thinking about once-quotidian abstract ideas. Or, to put it plainly, how if you don't use it you lose it. Like the forgotten habit of Biphasic Sleep.

Apparently, up until the Industrial Revolution, we humans slept in two stages between sundown and sunrise, our so-called First and Second Sleeps, separated by The Watch, when we were up and about for an hour or so and getting on with things prosaic, practical or personal. Who knew? 

Since self-help books in the olden days were confined to the Properly Improving, such as The Art of Dying Well ***or Galateo: The Rules Of Polite Behaviour**** (and good paper would never be frittered away on the Blindingly Obvious, like perhaps a little pamphlet entitled Muttonheads Guide To Sleep), when sleeping (or attempting to) straight through the night came into vogue for various reasons, since nothing was written down reminding us otherwise, we basically, and incredibly, forgot how we used to sleep.

Daresay Flaming June never forgot how sleep worked

Which is a comfort to know, really, for those beset with middle-of-the-night insomnia, and for which is recoursed judicious applications of Animal/Vegetable/Mineral and the like. Embrace The Watch! could become a catchcry, if not just for reminding ourselves how our forebears lived their lives. 

We really need to take notice of stuff and write things down. And the more pedestrian the better. This is the rôle of the diarist, of course, and the contemporary writer, to capture the zeitgeist, not I. The occasional scribblings around here tend to hearken back more to nostalgic doings, coloured with purple prose since English is fun, and anyways is really only useful while the electricity works and the cloud can keep it all going. But at least I've figured out that if we stop doing and thinking about the stuff we take for granted, it's possible to wake up one day and hey presto! it's the Dark Ages again. No fun.

ps: And don't get me started on the pruning of Nature Notes words, like acorn and kingfisher, from the Oxford Junior Dictionary to make space for so-called technology words like blog and voice-mail! Call me old fashioned but blog, as fond as I am of this little playground, is hardly going to be a forever word worthy of muscling out beauteous words like bluebell. Remember, kids, if you don't use it you lose it!

* Thank you, Dear Cro, sidebar resident over at Magnon's Meanderings for the televisual heads-up this week!

** Although, I do know how to prepare lamb's fry! As I tiny tot I would volunteer to do so as I found holding the liver under the running cold tap and skinning the membrane to be a strangely sensual experience.

*** A tip from Saint Robert Bellamine: Fasting is meritorious and very powerful in obtaining divine favours.

**** Bonus two tips from Giovanni della Casa: 1) Don't fall asleep or pull out a letter to read when in the pleasant company of others, thus demonstrating little appreciation of others and their conversation, and 2) Avoid proclaiming how greatly you are enjoying food and wine, for this habit is fit only for tavern keepers.

Image credits: 1: Rijksmuseum; 2: via Google: 3: via Pinterest; 4: Royal Collection Trust; 5-6: Flying With Hands; and 7: forgotten as I didn't write it down!

Merry Christmas!

 

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, Dear Reader!

I wish for you Bright Things for the year ahead, as well as Peace and Prosperity.

This passing year has been notable for the slim pickings and prolonged absences of Your Correspondent, for which a mumbled apology of "Busy Busy" really cuts no mustard, but here we are. I hope to turn a blogging corner when the calendar flips to 2025 and resume to a normal-ish transmission.

Love from Pipistrello

x

E is for ...

 

... is for

England

Which is where Your Correspondent has lately been. It had been nearly twenty—count them—twenty years since the Pipistrellos' last visit in the dead of a winter past and haven't things changed?

Of course, Excellent Company (for which we can thank friends and family) is always a given, so no surprises there, but making debuts in the E-is-for-Excellent Department, we had Weather, viz. blue skies, no wind, deliciously warm (30 degrees one day!) and whatnot, Food*, and Coffee, wherein solemn baristas now reign supreme, even outside the Capital. 

Green Park looking more parched Australian summertime yellow

Speaking of reigning supreme, you will no doubt be delighted to read that we bumped into the Windsors. Our arrival to London was celebrated with the Opening of Parliament and since we were staying in a club** just up from St. James's Palace, we skipped down to The Mall and a few minutes later, lo! Charles & Camilla, the dears, rode past in all their regalia in their gold coach. I gave Cams a hearty wave but I don't think she saw me. But the holiday was anyways off to a cracking start.

'Ullo 'ullo! What 'ave we 'ere?

For all the visits and spells living in London, this was, surprisingly, only the second time I have clocked any Royalty. The first time was when I was working there in the 90's, at the polo, cough, when ERII popped into view at the end of a pair of binoculars I was scanning from the stadium seating. Even though she was obviously there to watch the Prince of Wales play for the Cartier Queen's Cup, I still got a surprise when I found her and an involuntary, "Oh, my goodness! The Queen!" fell out of my mouth. And whereupon some withering commentary about yokel-Colonials fell out of the mouths of my fellow merchant bankers, hem hem. Of course, the PoW's team did win and there was an amusing moment to witness ERII present him with the cup and wonder what transpired between them. Something along the lines, "Gosh! Thanks, Mummy!", methinks.

Anyhoo, back to Merrie Olde England in 2024, hasn't the recent embrace of vehicles Electric made a welcome change to the air? Electric buses and cabs and cars galore. Mind, the Pipistrellos do like a bit of vintage in the Transport Department and we got to satisfy our taste there with a couple of vintage train rides. So fun, so smart, so comfy, and so worth doing if you like a bit of trainspotting.

Nota bene: An Excessively long slide show follows, Dear Reader, but who else is there to show?

There were crooners on board!

Poirot would expect nothing less on a train ride

Stunning marquetry within

Each carriage features distinctive decor

We had the good fortune to stay with neighbours from Sydney who live half of each year in Devon, and had several days of these sorts of views:

Thatched roofs with decorative critters atop - owls, pheasants and whatnot

The Eagle-Eyed will recognise Burgh Island,
the setting for Agatha Christie murder mysteries

 

One of England's Avon Rivers

There was a bit of merriment to be had during our Devonian sojourn, what with an 85th birthday to be celebrated with a village summer party, capped off with dancing a maypole in the bottom of the garden! Of course, the Wise Reader knows that choice nuggets about Maypoles can already be found about these pages, so no more needs to be said about them, save that even in miniature, they're jolly good fun.

Then away to Bath for a couple of days, where there was rather a bit of this to be seen:

Another River Avon

The most Excellent Holburne Museum,
a.k.a Lady Danbury's house in a Netflix Excrescence

We lovers of Vintage Transports had the added delight of a new Agatha Christie series filming outside our hotel whilst there. The street was blocked to traffic while it filled with all manner of vehicles and, later on, actors haring up and down, crunching gears and bunny-hopping and generally turning the owners' hairs white as they got to grips with the cars. Such larks!

Propmakers shaved around 100 years off the streetscape

In other Excitements, ol' Pipistrello squeezed in a couple of ballet classes in the busy schedule, one in the De Valois rehearsal studio at the Royal Opera House, no less! Through the stage door, sign in and then up the lift and a walk through corridors strung out with costumes on rails, and there you are.

Dame Ninette de Valois
gracing the cafe at the National Portrait Gallery

And finally, E-is-for-Eye-Wateringly-Expensive, for that is how we generally found things. I had the most expensive haircut in my life as an impulsive treat before flying home, but managed to soothe the sting by buying some wellies on sale, yay!

So that's it for E. You may exclaim, "Robbed! We were promised England but only got served a bit of the South! Where's the rest??"

To which I might draw a literary parallel as Excuse, courtesy of Knightsbridge-dwelling Edwardian couple, Bruce & Edith Ottley:

"'Bruce,' said Edith, 'you won't forget we're dining with your people tonight?'

    'It's a great nuisance.'

    'Oh, Bruce!'

    'It's such an infernally long way.'

    'It's only to Kensington.'

    'West Kensington. It's off the map. I'm not an explorer - I don't pretend to be.'"

Ada Leverson, Love's Shadow, 1908

* Despite the unlikeliness of the Great British Afternoon Tea guiding a couple of carnivorous carb-phobics as a holiday culinary theme, a roll call of delicious fishes follows: Dover sole, Cornish monkfish, mackerel, turbot, salmon poached and smoked, potted shrimps & oysters, not all on the same plate, obv. 

** No, not My Club from the olden days but a new one.

Image credits: 1: Rijksmuseum; all else: Flying With Hands