Sing Up

More vocal pyrotechnics today.
There's a new generation of musicians out there who are blowing away the old guard and setting the bar ever higher (okay, I admit to being in love with Alina Ibragimova but she doesn't just look good, she plays with astonishing brilliance).

Here be another of those annoyingly young, beautiful and outrageously talented people, the delicious Diana Damrau in a great scary fright wig kicking the crap out of the Queen of the Night's aria from "Die Zauberflöte".
You want voice control? Holy fuck!



This is taken from a DVD of Mozart's Die Zauberflöte live from The Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. Colin Davis conducted, Dorothea Röschmann played Pamina (getting so effectively menaced by Diana Damrau in the clip), but the DVD is worth the price for Simon Keenlysides' Papageno alone. Touching and hilarious.
Go buy the DVD. As a single man without a girlfriend I've found it to be the most fun I can have on a rainy afternoon. Hey ho.

A Little Something For The Weekend

Hell, yeah!
I've been listening to lots of Andreas Scholl and Philippe Jaroussky of late. Great music for the cold weather, especially this song from Purcell:
"… I can scarcely move nor draw my breath,
Let me freeze again to death …" Yay!

This one's on Andreas Scholl's glorious "O Solitude" CD which I recommend you go and buy today. Your life will be immeasurably more splendid for doing so.



Ever wondered where Laurie Anderson found the inspiration for O Superman?

Hahaha

Hoorah for Cyanide and Happiness.

This cheered me up so much this morning.

WTF Monday

Phil spotted this delightfully named newspaper in Germany last week.

In case any of you Colonial types don't share the same slang as we do, "waz" means (politely) "urinate."

What's Cooking With Phil And Dive? - Haggis!

"Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o' the puddin-race!
Aboon them a' ye tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy o' a grace
As lang's my arm.
Etc. …"

I won't go on for all eight verses as you'll need to have poured an awful lot of Scotch down your throat to enjoy that.
Suffice to say we missed Burns Night this year, what with one thing and another, so Phil invited me over on Sunday to enjoy a belated Burns afternoon (and a splendid victory for England over Italy in the Six Nations Rugby).

I only really enjoy one of Burns' poems: To A Mouse: the one that starts "Wee, sleekit, cowran, tim'rous beastie" and includes the line so brilliantly deconstructed by Eddie Izzard: "The best laid plans o' mice an' men, gang aft agley."
So instead of an incomprehensible Scottish poet we shall dedicate this post to Mr. Burns and Waylon Smithers.
Excellent!

So …
What do we have here?
Yes, you guessed it: it's a sheep's stomach stuffed with the heart, liver and lungs of a cute little lamb, all minced up with onion, oatmeal, suet, spices and stock.

The Scots of late appear to have abandoned their glorious culinary heritage of copious quantities of offal, mountains of root vegetables and fantastic whisky in favour of salt, industrial fats and oils, sugar and more salt; their current diet consisting of deep-fried pizza, deep-fried Mars bars and puke-inducing fizzy lager.
Shame on them! They are certifiable idiots for neglecting something so sublime as the haggis.

So let us wrap the beast in foil and put in the the oven in a tray half filled with water for about an hour and a half (up to three hours for a big one).

While that's cooking, come hither and admire the other ingredients for today's feast: viz. some root vegetables.
Tradition has it that haggis must be served with "Neeps and Tatties" but Phil is a damned good cook and we are filthy heathen Sassenachs so we shall be adding a couple of extras today.

Neeps, by the way, is not an abbreviation of turnips, but for some linguistically perverse reason is the Scottish term for Swede (that's rutabaga for any Colonials from across the water).

Like myself, Phil is a great one for sauces, and the phrase "'as tha' nowt moist wi'it?" can oft be heard at mealtimes. He's accompanying the haggis with a rich, red wine, mushroom and red onion gravy, hence the non-traditional mushrooms and red onion on the chopping board.

As well as dicing and boiling the neeps and tatties (and mashing them with a little milk and butter and ground black pepper) and reducing the gravy he has steamed carrots with thyme in a nice popcorn-style sealed foil envelope. Yum!

At last, the haggis emerges from the oven!
Lacking the traditional - and somewhat cumbersome and impractical in the kitchen - ceremonial sword, he pierces the beastie with his Sabatier knife and the fragrant innards gush forth as the thing tries to turn itself inside-out.
To quell the raging beastie he anoints it with good malt whisky, as is only right and proper.

And here it is.
Lashings of good, hearty spiced offal, sweetbreads, diverse innards and oatmeal. Haggis is a true taste sensation and this one was awesome!
Add to that, the traditional neeps and tatties and perfectly al-dente herby carrots, enriched with that glorious gravy and you have a fantastic winter feast.

Many thanks to Phil for cooking up a storm.

WTF Monday - "My Cheesy Valentine" Special

WTF Monday is back for a one-off special this week.

This Valentine's Day, what better way could there be to let the Object Of Your Afflictions ™ know precisely how you feel about them?

Happy Valentine's Day, Blogville.

Life With The Twigtwees

Ever heard of the Twigtwee Nation? Me neither.
Reaching for my books I discover no trace of them in Angie Debo's "A History Of The Indians Of The United States," nor indeed in Dee Brown's "Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee."
Turning to the interweb I find this, but it doesn't help much.

Anyhoo … They were there in 1763, just west of Robyn's house, in what's now Amish country.
And now they're gone.
Here's the map I was talking about yesterday. It's from the 1763 continuation volume of my 1756 Smollett, in the section regarding the Colonies.
I was delighted to discover the Twigtwees (they're in Ohio if you can't spot them), mostly because it's such a splendidly silly name, but also because I had never heard of them before and it's always nice to find something new to puzzle over.
The map is chock full of bizarre places that have since sunk without trace into the quagmire of history or mutated into something even stranger (hello, modern America).
Explore with me …

This is the original before I scanned it in.

You may be able to read a little about the Colonies (and that part of the Seven Years' War that became known locally as The French And Indian War) if you click on the photo.

And here's the whole thing scanned.

I had to scan it in sections, being careful not to damage the binding, and then assemble the pieces using Photoshop's spiffalicious "Auto-align layers" and "Auto-blend layers" tools (see my old Photoshop posts for more boring stuff on that).

To make things readable I've saved the map at a larger scale in several pieces.

They're pretty memory-hungry but find the piece where you live and see who was there in 1763.

Fun, huh?

We start, somewhat predictably, in the top left hand corner, where we find New South Wales.

Yup … Not only did we use North America as a penal colony before you guys got uppity and we had to dump our trash on Australia instead, but we also stored all our Australian names there, too.

Hey, recycling's good! Shit, New England's made up almost entirely of recycled town and village names from East Anglia. I'd be totally freaked trying to follow road signs there.

Next up comes more stuff that will only be of interest to Canadians.

I do like Lake Begon, though; I wonder if it influenced Garrison Keillor?
It's not that far from where he located Lake Wobegon.

More bits of the frozen north.

Hey, if you want you can download all of these and stick your own big map together.
Better still, get your kids to do it for you.

Cool, huh?

Okay, maybe not.

Now we're getting to the real stuff!

This is out Maria's way. Cornhusker Country.

I wonder if she knows about the appropriately named Lake Tinton?

I can't seem to find it on any modern map.

Nor can I find any trace of the River Moningona (even then labelled "little known").

Moving east we find ourselves in Prudence's neck of the woods.

Some pretty uppity folk out here in 1763.

Look out, England, Revolution's stirring in those woods!

Hokay, so this one's not much use unless you want the whole map.

Or maybe if you have an unnatural attraction to cod.

Back out west to the mighty Mississipi (spelled with only one 'p' back then).

If you know anyone from St.Louis, it didn't exist back in 1763.
I like the "French Fort. Ruined" note at the mouth of the Ohio.

And I must say I prefer the old spelling of Kansez.
It's also nice to see the Ohio River was once known as the Fair River.
And there on the right are the enigmatic Twigtwees.
What a weird place it must have been then … er … plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, as we say in Europe.

Here's where we find Neetzy and Katherine, long before the battlefields of the Civil War and before even the fœtid village in a swamp that became your nation's capital was founded.

Out to the left hand side of the map we find Robyn's ancestors, recently arrived from England and scratching a living between the Confederate Indians (the good guys who fought on our side against Les Frogs) and the Miamis and the enigmatic Twigtwees.

And here's a big old compass, way out in the Atlantic.

I think it must have sunk as it's not in the Times Atlas these days.

Say hi to Shan ("Hi, Shan!"), up near the top of this map, somewhere near a place called Mentos (as close as I can guess it) that no longer turns up on Google Maps.
That Earl Granville must have been a greedy bastard. He's got a hundred mile wide band of land stretching the whole width of the map, labelled "Earl Granville's Property."
Well, it's somebody else's now, buddy!

And of course, Savannah, now home to our own lovely Savannah, then still in all its antebellum finery (indeed its pre-Revolutionary finery).

It must have been quite a place back then.

It's quite a place now!

Last up is … er … The Bermudas, in case anyone's interested.

Apologies to Ms.M, who lives somewhere so far beyond the known world that it fell off the edge of this map (indeed you'll note from yesterday's later map that the Rocky Mountains around her home were then so young they were called the Stony Mountains), and also to Petrea, Vanda, Katie and the California Girls, whose homes were then occupied by various Nations and a few wandering Spaniards building Mission Houses and therefore of no interest whatsoever to English map makers.

Hey ho … What little we knew.

As I said in the last post, I'd love to hear any tales you might have of the history of where you live now.

Toodle pip from Ancient Albion!

Crap In The Attic

Those of you who have, for some inexplicable reasons of your own hung around here for many a long year might remember tales from my attic. Some may even recall the creature that lives up there, lurking in the dark corners, always just on the edge of sight, making occasional scurrying and crunching noises as it catches and eats its prey.
Yup, I was up there again last weekend and "The Thing That Eats Spiders" is still there.
Considering how many spiders I have in the rest of my house the fact that I have never seen a single one in the attic led me some years back to the inevitable conclusion that something up there eats them.

I like spiders as a rule. They're clean, they don't require any looking after and they eat those filthy flies and bugs that shit all over your food. A cobweb at the kitchen window makes for a great flyscreen, and a pretty entertaining one at times.
But we also have the 'giant house spider' here (Tegenaria duellica), a monstrous bastard, tales and photographs of which I have posted in the past but no way am I going to go and look at them again now. And those, together with the lanky scuttling things that come in here off the fields at harvest time and startle the crap out of me, make me glad that The Thing That Eats Spiders lives up in my attic. It's nice to know that I can rummage around up there in the semi-darkness and not find a bunch of six inch wide, fifteen mile-an-hour hairy bastards running up my arms.

Anyhoo …
Apart from the lack of spiders, there are many and varied wonders in my attic. Fifty-two years worth of accumulated crap to be precise. Together with some useful stuff I have no room for down here in the land where spiders live.
Every once in a while I find I need something that's stored somewhere in a box in the attic, so I head on up there and come down a couple of days later with boxes full of crap I never knew I had, having completely forgotten what it was I went up there for in the first place.

Last weekend I happened upon a box full of old prints and maps going right back to the 1700s; stuff I had picked up over the decades either because it seemed like a good idea at the time or because it came in a job lot with an item I actually wanted.
The box was labelled "Unframed stuff" and in it I found something that might interest those of you living in our Lost Colonies.

This is a Lowry map of your neck of the woods from back in 1802.
A couple of you I know live in places that are actually marked on here, but most of you now live in what was then wild and uncharted wildernesses of guesswork, peopled with the occasionally mis-spelled names of the folk who lived there before the blessings of civilisation rained down upon their heads.

 Here's an enlargement of the middle part of the map. Click on either of these pictures; I've saved them so they blow up pretty big, so they may take a couple of seconds to load.
I must confess to sitting here for ages, wasting my time in a pleasant yet futile manner, figuring out where you all live and what has happened in those places since this map was drawn.

From over here in the Ancient World, folk in the US of A seem somewhat obsessed with history, probably because their own has as yet been so brief. It would be nice to learn a little bit of the history of those parts where you now live, like when your settlements were founded, what happened to the people who lived there originally, what your town or city has become known for and any other little snippets of history that might startle or entertain us.
Write 'em here in the comments or do a post of your own about them (Robyn and Petrea get a pass on this one for all the excellent work they already do detailing local history online).
I'd love to know.

Ooh, ooh! A quick addendum:
I just remembered there are big, fold-out maps in my lovely eleven volume 1756 edition of Smollett's "History of England" (the brown ones in the eighth photo down in my "Pimp My Dante" post) and I'm pretty sure the Colonies are in there somewhere.
I shall have a rummage and scan in what I find for the next post.
Hooray for old crap!

Gary Moore 1952 - 2011

So farewell then Gary Moore, taken from us at the tragically young age of 58.

I'm too shocked to say much. The man was that rarest of guitar players, one with taste, tone, touch and the ability to make you scream "Holy Fuck!"

I've played his songs on stage almost as long as he has and I shall miss him greatly.

Forgive me if I pay tribute by posting myself playing the song he'll be most remembered for.

Rest in peace, Gary.

More Boring Stuff About Flints

I had intended popping up to Norwich Castle this morning to take photos for a post but the weather was crap and quite frankly, I'd rather be sitting here in the warm.
When the weather improves I promise I'll go there.

In the meantime, I did manage to take some photos of more flintwork from around the city so here is some of that. The photos with the clear blue skies were taken a while back but I've used them here as the Guildhall is covered in scaffolding right now for repairs to the clock tower so I couldn't photograph the flintwork.

This is what I was talking about the other day: fine coursed knapped flintwork.
Click on it to enlarge it and go "Ooo" at the pretty colours. It would be even better if the smegging sun was shining. A pox on Februarys.

Anyhoo, this type of facing was only used on high status buildings as producing squared-off blocks from rough flint nodules is a royal pain in the arse.

This is part of Suckling House, originally a Flemish merchant's house in the 1400s but later owned by the unfortunately named Mayor and Member of Parliament Robert Suckling.

It now houses the kitchens at the back of the restaurant in the delightful mediæval courtyard of Cinema City, our lovely little independent movie house that is enlightened enough to have food-free nights, where no fucking popcorn can be crunched and I where can actually enjoy the movie for a change.

At the other end of the social scale of flint houses are these cute little nineteenth century fishermen's cottages in Cromer, built with flints picked up off the beach and trimmed with brick quoins.

The mediæval walls of both Norwich and Great Yarmouth were built from flint rubble faced with knapped flints. This is the North-West Tower of Great Yarmouth's walls, sitting beside the river.
Shame about the fire escape but health and safety legislators have no concept of beauty.

Just around the corner from Suckling House is The Bridewell, Norwich's medieval prison and now a rather spiffy museum. The quality of the coursed and knapped flintwork shows just how far civic architecture has fallen over the centuries.
Hey and indeed ho.

Norwich, however, still maintains some standards, witness this little curiosity.
A delightful medley of fine flintwork and glazed faience (see posts passim), it is actually the modern public toilet at St.Andrew's Hall.

And just opposite St.Andrew's Hall and Monastery sits (surprise) St.Andrew's Church.

This beautiful building boasts lots of lovely flint detailing on the outside and some some boffo monuments inside. Built by rich wool merchants (see my old Dragon Hall posts, here and here) it gained later infamy as the rabble-rousing preaching house of John Robinson, pastor to the clique of idiot fundamentalist bigots who set sail for the New World as the Pilgrim Fathers and whose descendants have since caused us all no end of trouble.

 

I'll finish up today with a couple of my favourite Norwich buildings.
First up, that monument to Ethel and Bert, the Ethelbert Gate at the top end of Cathedral Close.
This glorious little architectural gem was built in the early 1300s at the cost of Norwich's famously rebellious citizenry as recompense for burning down St.Ethelbert's Church and the timber parts of the Cathedral's Norman Monastery during the 1272 riot
(see posts passim for lots of local rioting peasantry - yay).

 And last but not least we have the fabulous Guild Hall at the north end of Norwich's marketplace.

Built mainly in the early 1400s on top of a wonderful vaulted undercroft dating from 200 years earlier, this was a gaudy "Up Yours!" to the poor from the monstrously rich wool merchants and guild masters of what was then England's second city.
They also kept all the city's arms in it, but that didn't stop the peasants revolting on a regular (and occasionally successful) basis.
The wonderful chequerboard flint and stone decoration to the east end pictured here was added a hundred years later as a kind of "Yo! Check out my bling!" statement.

The other end is much plainer but the flint makes a lovely contrast with autumn leaves.

This end housed the armoury and is now a museum. The old miscreants' cells and police house in the sticky-out bits (you can tell I'm an architect by my grasp of terminology)  are currently a rather good tea room and a rather tacky crystal shop.

Finally, here is the Guildhall's frontage on to the market place.
Sweet, huh?

So what are you waiting for? Get out there and build stuff out of flint.