Ted Hughes: Half Man, Half Biscuit

Not for the first time (for the second, actually, in a worryingly short period of time), the sound has gone on the television, so we are reduced to watching it with subtitles - very amusing during the news, when the subtitling is largely gibberish. But last night there was a rather wonderful (and well subtitled) programme on BBC4 devoted to what the title called The Great British Biscuit (though somehow the Oreo snuck in there). It was one of Nigel Slater's journeys back to the foodstuffs of his childhood and he was just the man for the job (he did the same thing with sweets last year, and his book Toast is just full of the delights and comforts of the things we first eat and drink in childhood). Slater remembers and understands the impact and deep meanings of food (especially sweet things) to the growing child, and the intense emotional involvement with particular kinds of sweets and biscuits. My own idea of the very pinnacle of biscuit perfection was Huntley and Palmer's Milk and Honey biscuit - a decorated oval cream sandwich with an oval cutout filled with some kind of ultra-delicious honey mixture. It's been described as a 'custard cream on steroids', but that does no justice to its formal elegance and sheer effortless class. It's no longer available, of course - and anyway I rarely eat biscuits now. They've gone from being an essential staple, a comfort and a delight to having virtually no place in my life.
  Among many other brands (I never met a biscuit I didn't like - unless it was those little pink wafers, about which Slater was, I thought, over-generous), I was partial to the Tunnock's Caramel Wafer (though the Tunnock's Tea Cake was no competition for the magnificent Munchmallow). Tunnock's is a Scottish firm, and at the University of St Andrews some bright sparks set up, in 1981, a Tunnock's Caramel Wafer Appreciation Society - a typical piece of laboured undergraduate wackiness. Amazingly, it is still going strong, and duly featured in Slater's programme. In its early days, the society used to send out Caramel Wafers to the great and good, inviting them to autograph and return the wrappers. Among those who did - three times, on three wrappers - was the craggy Yorkshire poet Ted Hughes, who not only signed his name but scrawled a few lines of verse. Here they are - the Ted Hughes Tunnock's Trilogy:

1. To have swallowed a Crocodile
    Would make anybody smile.
    But to swallow a Caramel Wafer
    Is safer.

2. St Columbus [?Columba] ate a heifer
    then wrote a psalm on the hide
    Good News!
    So I ate a Caramel Wafer
    and rhymed on the wrapper's inside.

3.Where the Devil can't get
   He sends the Old Woman.

Perhaps that last couplet strayed from somewhere else...

Research news

Researchers at the University of Auckland in New Zealand have been conducting a 'trial' in which a group of husbands had to agree with their wives' every statement and request, regardless of whether it was, in their eyes, right or wrong. The impact on the men's 'happiness' was so calamitous that the 'experiment' had to be abandoned, leaving the women only very slightly 'happier' and the men quivering wrecks (as we scientists put it). Conclusion: 'The results of the trial show that the availability of unbridled power adversely affects the quality of life of those on the receiving end.' Who'd have thought? Needless to say, 'more research is needed', the obvious next step being to swap the sexes round and see how it goes. Meanwhile, we are left to wonder what any of this tells us, what possible use such 'findings' could have - and how this stuff ended up in the BMJ.
 For myself, I'm all for further research. Since agreeing with everything has such dire effects, it surely follows that disagreeing with everything the Mrs says is the way to optimal happiness. I'll let you know how I get on...
 

Whittier

Born on this day in 1807 was the Quaker poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier - hugely popular in his day (though the critics weren't uniformly kind) and today all but forgotten, except as the writer of the beautiful hymn Dear Lord and Father of Mankind. This was not written as a hymn, but is taken from a much longer poem, The Brewing of Soma, about the dangerous practices of Vedic priests. What's more, Hubert Parry's great melody Repton, to which the hymn is sung in Britain - and which fits it so perfectly - was not written for Whittier's words but as an aria in his oratorio Judith. It was adapted to Whittier's verse by the director of music at Repton - hence the name.
  For myself, I also remember Whittier for the stirring narrative poem Barbara Frietchie, a favourite of my father's and a regular feature of his impromptu morning recitations. I even remember fragments of it:

'Up from the meadows rich with corn,
Clear in the cool September morn,
The clustered spires of Frederick stand,
Green-walled by the hills of Maryland.'

Into this Edenic scene rides Stonewall Jackson's cavalry...

'Up rose old Barbara Frietchie then,
Bowed with her four score years and ten'

and defiantly she raises the Union flag in her attic window.

'"Halt!" - the dust-brown ranks stood fast.
"Fire!" - out blazed the rifle-blast.'

But Barbara Frietchie isn't done yet.

'"Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,
But spare your country's flag," she said.'

Jackson is shamed, his conscience stirred.

'"Who touches a hair of yon gray head
Dies like a dog! March on!" he said.'

How's that for caesura? You can read the whole poem here...

Ravilious, Cricket, Canary

A very welcome birthday present last weekend was a handsome volume of Eric Ravilious Wood Engravings, beautifully produced by the Mainstone Press. The versatile and prolific Ravilious was as naturally gifted a wood engraver as he was a watercolorist, a true heir of the great Thomas Bewick. And one of his most successful pieces of work was the wood engraving of old-fahioned, tall-hatted gentlemen cricketers that has graced the dust-wrapper of every edition of Wisden's Cricketers' Almanack since 1938 - though now in sadly reduced format.
  Ravilious loved cricket and was an occasional player. In 1935 he turned out for the Double Crown Club - essentially a dining club for book publishers, designers and illustrators - at the beautiful ground on the hill above Castle Hedingham (where Ravilious lived at the time, with his wife Tirzah). He reported that he was 'not out, hit four balls and made 1, also bowled a few overs  and in consequence feel as stiff as a poker' (every occasional cricketer knows that feeling...). Playing another game at the same ground only weeks before the outbreak of the war, he tonked three sixes over the boundary - 'one of the pleasures of life,' he recalled afterwards, 'hitting a six.'
 Ravilious took up wood engraving young - before he had discovered his abilities in watercolour and lithography. Tirzah recalled seeing him at work at his parents' house in Eastbourne. The family's pet canary 'was very fond of him and would sit on his head or flutter on his fingers and peck at the chips from his woodblock while he engraved. Eric was very good at whistling and, by curling up the tip of his tongue and then straightening it in his mouth, he could produce a double note. The bird loved his whistling and would sing so loudly that we were unable to hear ourselves speak and he would have to be removed  to another room...'
 Eric Ravilious was appointed an official war artist in 1940. In September 1942, he flew with an RAF air-sea rescue mission off the coast of Iceland which never returned to base. He was just 39.

Talking of enjambment...

That's exactly what I'm doing, over on The Dabbler.

'Their babies are maggots'

I caught this arresting insight into the life cycle of the fly on the radio this morning. Some chap was talking about a pretty damning report into conditions in GPs' surgeries, one of which had been found to have maggots crawling about on the floor. What had happened, this chap explained, was that some rubbish bags, which should have been outside, had attracted flies. And the thing about flies, you see, is that 'their babies are maggots'. What a sweet image that conjures up - Mummy and Daddy Fly doting on their little wriggling offspring: 'Look at the dear little things' coos Daddy Fly, laying a protective wing on Mummy Fly's thorax. 'Didn't we do well?'  I bet the Chap is (was?) the kind of GP who talks about 'tummies' and 'collywobbles' and 'Mums' and asks 'How are we?'
 Still, we needn't worry about this report. Another chap popped up to assure us that 'the point is around rectifying problems'. A deft deployment of that fine weasel word 'around' - a sure sign that someone has fouled up.

'His just fame waking, though his loved dust sleep'

I came across this beautiful epitaph while browsing in an anthology the other day. It was written by Lady Catherine Dyer for her husband, Sir William, who died in 1641, and can be seen in the church of St Denis at Colmworth in Bedfordshire.
The epitaph looks like a sonnet, but  its 14 lines are made up simply of seven rhymed couplets, some of them elegantly enjambed. It is in fact the second half of a two-part epitaph, the first part of which (16 lines long) is rather more formal and lacks the intimacy and direct emotional power of the grief-stricken continuation. 'His just fame waking, though his loved dust sleep' is a beautiful line though. Both parts can be read here, with a little background information.
This (the second part) is surely one of the great English epitaphs...

My dearest dust, could not thy hasty day

Afford thy drowzy patience leave to stay

One hower longer: so that we might either

Sate up, or gone to bedd together?

But since thy finisht labor hath possest

Thy weary limbs with early rest,

Enjoy it sweetly: and thy widdowe bride

Shall soone repose her by thy slumbring side.

Whose business, now, is only to prepare

My nightly dress, and call to prayre:

Mine eyes wax heavy and ye day growes old.

The dew falls thick, my beloved growes cold.

Draw, draw ye closed curtaynes: and make room:

My dear, my dearest dust; I come, I come.