Slater's Top Totty

Having no bons mots of my own today I was pleased to discover a report in the morning rag which caused me no small amusement. I have many ancestors who were involved in the licensed trade, ranging from a 7 x great-grandfather on my mother's side who was accused - some 300 years ago - of selling beer without a license to, on my father's side, a great-grandfather publican who is reputed to have drunk himself blind. I suspect they would have as amused as I.

It seems that in our House of Commons there is a bar which features guest beers. One of the recent guest beers was Slater's Top Totty, a blonde beer.


As you can see, the pump clip features a buxom blonde wearing rabbit's ears, a bow tie and a bikini. The beer is described as"stunningly seductive! A voluptuous variety of hops with a fruity, fresh finish". Most people, I am sure, would regard that as a bit of harmless fun. No so, however, one Kate Green, MP, who told the House, "I was disturbed last night to learn that the guest beer in the Strangers' Bar is called Top Totty and there is a picture of a nearly naked woman on the tap." The beer has been withdrawn from sale in the Strangers' Bar.

My view is that Ms Green needs to get a life and find a sense of humour. But I bet Slater's web site is getting a lot more hits and sales of Top Totty will go through the roof! The brewers will have the last laugh.

The time has come

It is now almost two years since I agreed to take over once again as webmaster for the Lions District. I say "once again" as I had already done the job for three years and been relieved, only for my successor to, well, really to give up on the job. I had great difficulty in getting any information from him such as where the site was hosted and how to gain access to the host server. In fact, I never did manage to do that and in the end I just gave up and launched a completely new site on a different server. Designing that site took me a long time and I was not too unhappy with the outcome, except that I needed input from other district officers. Despite direct requests to some and general requests to all, there has been almost no input apart from that I have written myself. I really have neither the inclination nor the time to keep nagging so, as the title perhaps infers, the time has come for me to call it a day. When I get back from France the district convention will have come and gone and the 1st Vice District Governor will officially be the District Governor Elect. That will be the appropriate time to write asking him to find a replacement for me.

The law of dimishing returns and other things

It seems that the more television channels to which we have access, the less there is worth watching. Maybe I'm wearing rose-tinted spectacles, but surely there was a time when every week we could watch at least one who-dunnit or police procedural, a sit-com and a variety or comedy show. And what do we have nowadays?

I recorded the second episode of Birdsong and we watched it on Monday. The critics might have thought it speeded up after the first rather slow episode but I can't say I noticed it. It got so slow at one point that the Old Bat nearly fell asleep. My verdict? Just like the curate's egg - good in parts. Overall, though, a bit disappointing.

What we have been enjoying is watching the DVDs I bought a couple of years ago - the complete set of that classic sitcom As Time Goes By starring Judi Dench and Geoffrey Palmer. We have just the second reunion special to watch and that will be it. I have been promising myself I will buy the 'Allo, 'allo DVDs. Maybe when we get back from France. Why can nobody make sitcoms like that now?


Very cold this morning - seems as though winter has finally arrived. An extra layer under my coat when I walked the dog - and a scarf for the first time this winter. It was so cold in the night that we both woke - despite the tick duvet - and had to huddle together for warmth. I think it will be a case of blow the expense, I'll leave the heating on tonight.


Can you hear the sound of Madame Defarge's knitting needles?

The news this morning is that Sir Fred s stripped of his knighthood and henceforth is back to plain Mr Goodwin.

Fred Goodwin was CEO of the Royal Bank of Scotland and built it into one of the biggest banks in the world, for which he was duly honoured with his K. The came the collapse and the taxpayer had to bail out RBS to the tune of £45 billion. Sir Fred, of course, was duly sacked/asked to resign. Now the committee of senior civil servants has heard the baying of the crowd and recommended to Her majesty that the knighthood be rescinded. The last Brit to face this ignominy was Anthony Blunt, who spied for Russia. Others have been Robert Mugabe and Nicolae Ceaușescu. But just what, I wonder, had Sir Fred done to warrant stripping him of his 'Sir'? He hadn't been accused of beating his wife or kicking his dog. He hadn't picked the flowers in the park or even walked on the grass when he shouldn't have done. He certainly had not spied, committed acts of mass brutality or, as far as I am aware, acted in any way dishonourably. His 'crime' was to have made commercial decisions that turned out to have been wrong. Granted, they turned out to have been extremely expensively wrong - but at the time that committee of civil servants, the Honours Committee, was happy with them. Now they have, as I said, given in to the baying of the crowd. Who next, I wonder? And what non-crime will he have committed?


Meanwhile, today is the first of the month and we have a new picture on the kitchen calendar.


Those snowdrops are in Withdean Park. They are not yet in bloom but are well on the way.

An open letter to my American friends

As well as all the usual clichés, there are four phrases that really grate on me:

• give someone a heads up;
• touch base;
• keep me in the loop;
• push the envelope.

Those phrases are, of course, a result of you Americans mangling our beloved English language. I know you are not the only ones to do it, those irrepressible Australians have done it as well. Or I should say, have tried to do it. Frankly, their efforts are more laughable that irritating. "Strides" for trousers; "tinny" for a can of beer. Those really are just puerile.

There are other ways you have marmalised the language as well. For your information, pants go underneath trousers and vests go underneath shirts. The sleeveless garment worn over the shirt is a waistcoat (sometimes pronounced weskitt) and over this one wears a jacket, not a coat. A coat is a garment worn over the jacket and usually comes down below the knees.

Of course, all this started when you dear folks had a bit of a paddy and threw your toys out of the pram. Well, the tea into the harbour. (That's another thing: words like colour, harbour and honour all have a "u" in them.) Anyway, since then you have, I'm sorry to say, fallen in with some very dubious, not to say shady, characters. A thoroughly bad lot, some of them. There were the French to start with. They so mesmerised you that you turned a blind eye to all their shenanigans when they started lopping heads of left, right and centre. And then they conned you into buying Louisiana. After the French it was the Spanish. And what did you get from them? Las Vegas and Los Angeles? I ask you!

Surely you must have noticed by now that those southern European countries are very bad company to keep. Just look at Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Each of them threw over their monarchy and resorted to dictatorship - and just look at the state of their economies now. You need to be very careful or you will find yourselves losing that triple A rating as well.

Another of the unforeseen results of that tantrum is that you elect a new head of state every four years. As soon as one moves into the White House, you start planning to remove him - and spend many millions of dollars in the process. We, on the other hand, have a head of state who, come next Monday, will have been in office for 60 years. And we know who her successor will be. And he's been in training now for a good many years. And what's more, we are already starting to train his successor!

Now, dear ones, why don't you just admit that it was all a ghastly mistake and set about making the Queen your head of state? Look at all the benefits there would be: you could play the real man's game of rugby instead of that padded-up set-piece you call football; and I'm sure that, clever people that you are, you would very quickly pick up the rules of cricket. Of course, there would have to be something in it for us. For a start, you could promise to stop mangling our language.

So, why don't you think about it? Give all your mates a heads-up, put do keep me in the loop. We can touch base again a bit later, but please make sure you don't push the envelope too far.

Time

It's a funny thing, time. It's possibly the thing shared out between mankind more equitably than any other. We all have exactly the same number of seconds in a minute, minutes in an hour and hours in a day. Doesn't matter how rich or how poor you are, you just can't alter the fact that you have 24 hours in a day and the poorest man in town has just as many as you.

Some of us are slaves to time. I like to think I'm not one of those poor saps, but I'm not entirely sure. I mean, I wear a wristwatch and it's not unknown for me to check the time as I leave the house in the morning to take the dog for a walk. At least I no longer have to feel tied to leaving the house at a set time in order to catch the train so as to be at my desk etc etc. But surely now that I am retired I don't need to get out of bed at the same time every morning? Now I'll admit it - I don't. I do use an alarm clock but it's one of those with a snooze button - and I make shameless use of said button!

(And there's something that strikes me as odd. That snooze button means that the alarm will sound again a little later. But why is the chosen interval nine minutes? It seems such a peculiar length of time. Why not ten minutes?)

I made a little too much use of it yesterday morning. Sunday mornings are special. I can lie in a little but I do like to have eaten breakfast and done the washing up in time to get out on the streets before most people are out and about. There's something special about being the only person on the street while the birds are still enjoying themselves with the fag end of the dawn chorus (it seems to go on for at least two hours) and the street lights are yawning themselves to sleep. "Out before the streets have been aired," as my old granny would have said. It also means that there are no cars being driven around. One downside is that as I come back home, somebody in one of the houses I pass is cooking bacon!

The there is a peculiar knack I have of being able to tell the time within about five minutes either way. It might have been hours since I last looked at a watch or clock, but I seem to be able to say something like, "It's about five and twenty past seven" and find that the time is indeed somewhere between twenty past and half past seven.

(Another little diversion. Did you notice I wrote "five and twenty past seven" just then? "Five and twenty" is an archaic way of saying "twenty-five" - in times past people would have said , for example, "four and thirty" - hence the nursery rhyme about four and twenty blackbirds. Nowadays the only time it is said is when talking of 25 minutes past or to the hour.)

One of my little foibles is that I hate to be late. If I am not five minutes early for an appointment, then I am late. It really doesn't matter what the appointment is or how firmly the time is arranged, I have to be at the appointed place five minutes before the appointed time. For instance, I might arrange with fellow Lions to meet at about ten o'clock to set up, say, the book fair. Now it really doesn't matter if people turn up ten minutes before ten or ten minutes after, as far as I am concerned the time is engraved on tablets of stone and I have to be there at five minutes before the hour arranged.

I am well aware that this is a foible I take to extreme lengths. We are due to go to France and are booked on a particular train through the tunnel. I know full well that if we arrive at the terminal a little late we will be switched to the next available train. I also know that if we are early we might, just might, be offered a slot on an earlier departure. But that is not something I am thinking about when I fix the time we should leave home. I know how long the drive is, and I add half an hour in case of a puncture or heavy traffic. I have never suffered either, but I console myself by saying there's bound to be a first time.

As I was saying earlier, we all of us, rich or poor, have the same amount of time at our disposal. What is important is what we do in that time. And what's important to me right now is that it's time for coffee.

Cheerio for now. I'll be back tomorrow.

Birdsong

I don't think I shall ever know how I managed to remember enough of the plots and characters of Macbeth, Emma, Great Expectations, 12th Night and all those other books and plays that I studied in order to pass my English Lit 'O' level and English 'A' level - let alone all the poetry by Milton, Wordsworth, Keats et al. I suppose reading each one several times in quick succession, discussing them in class and writing essays about them dunned them into the soggy mass of my brain in just sufficient detail for me to be able to convince the examiners that I merited a pass mark. Nowadays I read a book, put it down and two weeks or even two days later I have forgotten what it is about. Just occasionally I come across a book that does manage to stay in my memory, even if only vaguely. Birdsong, by Sebastian Faulks, is one such. Although I have read it several times, I would have been hard pressed to describe the plot in anything other than broad brush strokes and could probably recall the names of none of the characters. All the same, I consider it to be one of the best books I have ever read and a copy rests on my bookshelf alongside some of my other "best" books. It was therefore of considerable interest to me to read that the BBC were to show a television adaptation of the book.

This, it transpired, would be in two 90-minute episodes, the first of which was last Sunday. We were unwilling to stay glued to the TV screen until 10.30pm so I recorded the programme. During the week the Old Bat and I were slightly concerned to read that the programme had been the subject of quite a few complaints. A few of these were about the main female actress appearing topless but most were about inaudible speech. We wondered just how much we would enjoy watching the programme, or even if we would manage to sit through it all. We agreed that we had to watch it before the second episode is broadcast this evening in order to decide if that will be worth recording.

So perhaps it was not really necessary for Clémence Poésy to bare as much as she did although to my mind those scenes demonstrated the intensity of the love between Isabelle and Stephen and I make no complaint. (The programme is, after all, screened after the 9.00pm watershed.) Nor have I any complaint about the volume of the diction. When the characters are speaking in whispers it adds to the realism of those scenes - and even I heard and understood 90% of the so-called muttering. No, I have no complaint about gratuitous nudity or inaudible diction. I did think the drama moved rather slowly at times with Stephen and Isabelle seeming to spend an inordinate amount of time gazing across crowded rooms at each other - well, maybe not really crowded rooms, but in places where other people were about. According to one critic, tonight's concluding episode speeds up dramatically. I shall look forward to watching it - and maybe I will take the book to France next week to read yet again.

Daphne and friends

On our kitchen table sits a white jug, a small, white jug about three inches high. I think we found it in a junk shop and bought it for small change. It doesn't sit on the table all the time, only when there are a few flowers to go in it. It makes a very good flower vase for small posies. At present it is holding a few shoots I cut from the daphne in the garden. I'm told the scent hits you when you open the kitchen door, but I have to bury my nose in the flowers to appreciate the scent.

If my eyesight were as poor as my sense of smell I would be registered blind. This is not something that bothers me and I'm not looking for sympathy (I don't suppose I would get it anyway) - just stating a fact. Although this is something I have lived with all my life, many people assumed that smoking was the cause. I haven't smoked now for 6.. 7.. nearly 8 months and although there might have been just a small improvement it's certainly not as though I have thrown open the shutters and let the sunlight flood into the room! This olfactory shortcoming has both advantages and disadvantages. For instance, if the dog rolls in something obnoxious while we are out, I don't notice the horrible small in the car or at home. On the other hand, I only know the toast is burning when I see the smoke. My wife learned early in our relationship that her use of perfume had no effect on me.

Despite what I wrote in that last paragraph, there are some times when scents do get through to me. Occasionally, when we are going out for the evening I will catch a whiff of perfume in the car. Some scents are more likely than others to get through the blockage. Lavender is one of the best.

It could have been twenty years ago that I noticed a delightful scent coming from the border in front of the drawing room window at my cousin's farm. A small shrub was the source, a small shrub with rather plain, pink flowers. With four petals laid out like a miniature star, up to about a dozen of these small blooms clustered together in various places around the plant. This was daphne; daphne odora to be exact. We visit the farm each Easter and the shrub blooms in March so we were treated to the scent most years. After several years we decided to plant a daphne in our garden. None of our local garden centres were able to help but I eventually, by sheer chance, located a grower in Scotland and placed an order. The plant he despatched failed to arrive and a second was sent, wherupon two turned up. I asked the grower what he wanted me to do and he told me to plant both, which I did, in large tubs as we understood that these plants are not lovers of chalky soils like ours. That was a good few years ago now and although one of the plants has since died, the other is going strong. I cut a few pieces last weekend when the buds were still quite tight but the warmth of the house has them coming out fast.

After the daphne is over the small, white jug will be washed and put back in the cupboard until the lily of the valley is ready. We have a lot of that in the garden so I always pick a bunch to have in the kitchen even though I don't get the full benefit. The Old Bat likes it, though. Later, in the summer, the jug will be used again - for sweet peas.

And so this olfactorily-challenged, inadequate gardener tries to keep the kitchen smelling sweet through the spring and summer. I don't always succeed, but daphne never lets me down.