'In our language it means "mother's milk"'

 My induction into the bitter world of Fernet-Branca is going all too well – already I love the stuff. I think, however, even I might draw the line at galasiya, the (mercifully fictional) national tipple of (equally fictional) Voynovia. In this scene from James Hamilton-Paterson's Cooking with Fernet Branca, Marta has received a worrying visit from two local carabinieri, which, thanks in part to Gerald Samper's presence, has ended well. Relief all round. Samper tells what happens next...

'"This calls for a drink [declares Marta]. A very special drink from Voynovia ... Just an amaro [she tells the carabinieri]. If you like Fernet you'll love our galasiya."
"Well, just a small one, signora. We're really still on duty." 
... The glasses of dense black liquid are passed around. It looks like sump oil.
"Salute!" everyone echoes, and takes an obligatory quaff.
Holy bicycling Christ, I think as projectile tears leap from my eyes and splash into the glass. I dimly recall Marta having mentioned this stuff as being a more butch version of Fernet Branca made by huntsmen or something. Actually tasting the distillation of gall and lighter fuel simply confirms what I've long known, that Voynovians lack an essential element of human physiology. A central nervous system, possibly. Through dancing lenses of tears I can see the maresciallo has been equally hard hit but is bearing up with noble shreds of dignity. 
"Madonna putana della Madonna, ma quanti gradi ha?" he rasps at last, his vocal cords evidently cauterised.
"Ninety-two, I believe," says Marta brightly, examining the bottle. "But they seldom put it on the label. Everyone in Volnovya knows galasiya. In our language it means 'mother's milk'."
... The maresciallo's sidekick, I notice, is looking thoughtfully at his empty glass and shaking his head with an incredulous smile. A serious drinker. When his commanding officer has recovered enough to walk, the two men take their leave ... Watching through the window, I am touched to see [him] solicitously take his senior comrade's elbow before he finishes his totter to the car. All very mystifying, but the interlude has taught me one thing: that in a world containing galasiya, the brothers Branca must look to their laurels.'

I don't think even Kingsley Amis, the past master of writing about booze and its effects, could have topped that evocation of the impact of galasiya on the unwitting drinker.

The Light Programme

 Born  on this day in 1945 was the BBC Light Programme, a national network devoted largely to light entertainment and light music, which replaced the BBC General Forces Programme, which had itself replaced the BBC National Programme for the duration of the war (and had done a great deal for the nation's morale). The Light Programme was the soundtrack of my childhood and boyhood, and even lasted into my adolescence, coming to an end in 1967, when it was remade as two networks, Radio 1 and Radio 2. By then, I had migrated to pirate radio, initially Luxembourg, then Radio London, which I preferred to Caroline and the others because it played more American music. However, my first hearing of Bob Dylan's 'The Times They Are a-Changin'' was actually on the Light Programme, where its impact was the more electrifying for the easy-listening musical mush surrounding it. Mostly the music I heard on the Light Programme through my boyhood was not for me – my parents' taste was for shows like Sing Something Simple and Your Hundred Best Tunes – and what it gave me chiefly was comedy and exciting serial drama. The comedy ranged from The Al Read Show, a particular favourite of my father's, to Take It From Here (featuring the home life of the Glums), Beyond Our Ken and Round the Horne (which still make me laugh) to The Goon Show (which doesn't), Hancock's Half Hour to The Navy Lark and The Men from the Ministry – all of these, and other shows best forgotten (The Clitheroe Kid, anyone?) were the comedies I listened to and mostly loved, in those innocent days before we had television in our house (or in many others). The exciting dramas that seemed essential listening to my junior self and his brother included Journey Into Space, Dick Barton – Special Agent, The Flying Doctor (set in Australia) and the suave amateur detective Paul Temple. Different times.
   Some of the old Light Programme's output can be heard these days on Radio 4 Extra, and some programmes have endured into the present: Desert Island Discs, which is little changed, Woman's Hour, which is changed beyond recognition – and The Archers, that 'everyday story of country folk' (as it was when it began in 1951), to which I remain reluctantly addicted, through thick and thin. It was the first radio programme I became aware of, as my grandmother (who lived with us) listened to it daily. Misunderstanding the title, I assumed it must be something to do with medieval soldiers firing arrows at each other. Life is full of disappointments. 
 

Olympians All

So, who won the first Olympic medals for the Irish Free State, at the Paris Olympics of 1924? The answer is surprising – Jack Butler Yeats, the painter brother of the poet William, and Oliver St John Gogarty, the original of Joyce's Buck Mulligan. This was in a more civilised Olympic era when prizes were awarded for artistic as well as athletic endeavour – a feature of the Games that lasted until London 1948. 
  Yeats won a silver medal in the Painting category with the picture above, The Liffey Swim, depicting a traditional Dublin event. The chap in the fedora and the lady in the yellow hat behind him are probably the artist and his wife. The painting now hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland. As for Gogarty, he took a Literature bronze with his 'Ode to the Tailteann Games', a piece commissioned by the Irish government to mark the revival of said traditional games (a revival that proved short-lived).  
  In 1928 the painter William Nicholson was surprised to find himself the recipient of an Olympic gold medal, but I've written about that before – here...

Clarkson's Concerns

Unsurprisingly after so much cool wet weather, it has been a pretty terrible butterfly season so far, especially for those of us not living in the South of England (though around Lichfield at present grassland butterflies like the Meadow Brown, Ringlet, Gatekeeper and Small Skipper are all doing fine). Jeremy Clarkson, petrolhead turned farmer, has noticed the lack of butterflies and other insects on his land, and publicised his concerns. I pass this piece on partly because it has the rare distinction of containing not a single use of the phrase 'climate change' – hurrah for that. I hope this conspicuous absence might be a straw in the wind, but I rather doubt it, especially with the ludicrous 'Ed' Milliband in place as Energy and Climate Change Secretary. The madness will, I fear, go on...

'Their shadows all a brilliant disrepair'

 Time for a poem. 
Opening my Richard Wilbur New and Collected Poems at random, I happened on this – a poem to which, as with so many of Wilbur's best, all I can really add is an awed 'Wow!'...

Statues

These children playing at statues fill
The gardens with their shrillness; in a planned
And planted grove they fling from the swinger's hand
Across the giddy grass and then hold still

In gargoyle attitudes, – as if
All definition were outrageous. Then
They melt in giggles and begin again.
Above their heads the maples with a stiff

Compliance entertain the air
In abrupt gusts, losing the look of trees
In rushed and cloudy metamorphoses,
Their shadows all a brilliant disrepair,

A wash of dodging stars, through which
The children weave and then again undo
Their fickle zodiacs. It is a view
Lively as Ovid's Chaos, and its rich

Uncertainty compels the crowd:
Two nuns regard it with habitual love,
Moving along a path as mountains move
Or seem to move when traversed by a cloud;

The soldier breaks his iron pace;
Linked lovers pause to gaze; and every role
Relents, – until the feet begin to stroll
Or stride again. But settled in disgrace

Upon his bench, one ageing bum,
Brought by his long evasion and distress
Into an adamantine shapelessness,
Stares at the image of his kingdom come. 

1967

 I was startled to learn the other night that the top-selling single in the US in 1967 – you know, 1967, Summer of Love, psychedelia, Haight Ashbury, flowers in your hair – was the theme song of the film To Sir With Love, performed by the can belto artist still known as Lulu. What's worse, it beat one of the greatest singles ever – The Box Tops' 'The Letter' – into second place. Also left trailing in Lulu's wake were 'Ode to Billie Joe', 'I'm a Believer', 'Light My Fire', 'Happy Together' and 'Groovin'', while another of the greatest singles ever made – Aretha Franklin's 'Respect' – languishes at number 13, just ahead of Stevie Wonder ('I Was Made to Love Her'), Arthur Conley ('Sweet Soul Music') and Sam & Dave's 'Soul Man'. Not much evidence of the spirit of '67 there, though 'All You Need Is Love' just makes the top 30.
  Things were little better in the UK, with the two top-selling singles both recorded by the artist formerly known as Gerry Dorsey – Engelbert Humperdinck, whose 'Release Me' and 'The Last Waltz' were huge hits. However, over here, the great anthem of the Summer of Love, Scott Mackenzie's 'San Francisco', was beaten only by the all-conquering Humperdinck, and 'Whiter Shade of Pale' and 'All You Need Is Love' are also in the top 10. 'Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever', The Move's 'Flowers in the Rain' and Traffic's 'Hole In My Shoe' all made the top 30. So, the lesson is clear – the Summer of Love never happened in the States, it happened over here. Or, alternatively, there's not a lot we can usefully learn from perusing the singles charts of yesteryear – unless it is that much of what sold best (the stuff I haven't mentioned) was forgettable dross. 'Twas ever thus, and not only in the music field. 

Laughs and Bitters

 When I wrote recently about James Hamilton-Paterson's Gerontius, I mentioned that I was 'strongly tempted' by another novel of his with the intriguing title Cooking with Fernet Branca. Well, I yielded to that temptation, bought it (for a song), and I'm happy to report that it's one of the funniest comic novels I've read in recent years. It might even be, almost, what one excited reviewer called it: 'A work of comic genius.' I have certainly been laughing immoderately every couple of pages at least – a positively Wodehousean hit rate, though there's nothing of P.G. about the book. Published in 2004 and described as 'a gleefully tasteless bad dream of modern Italy', it's told through the eyes of Gerald Samper, a snobbish, somewhat effete, thoroughly absurd Englishman in Tuscany, who makes his living reluctantly ghost-writing celebrity memoirs, and has a penchant for cooking pretentiously disgusting food, passing on recipes for such delights as otter in lobster sauce and rabbit in cep custard. (He is rather reminiscent of Damien Trench, Miles Jupp's creation, in the radio series, In and Out of the Kitchen, though Trench's recipes are nothing like so outlandish.)
   Arriving at his new house in the Tuscan hills, Samper is appalled to find that he has a neighbour (albeit at some distance), Marta, whom he instantly mistakes for a half-mad, sex-hungry eastern European peasant woman, though she is in fact a Voynovian aristocrat who writes film music: Samper not only lacks self-awareness but basic awareness of, or interest in, other people. The narrative unfolds through two parallel accounts of events – Samper's often delusional version and Marta's more grounded account of dealing with her tiresome neighbour, whose antics provide her with plentiful entertainment. And what of the Fernet Branca of the title? The notoriously challenging drink is omnipresent, to the point where Samper and Marta each believe the other to be hopelessly addicted to the stuff, though in fact Marta, who has an unwanted box of it, is plying Samper with Fernet to get rid of it. It crops up also in Samper's recipes, one of which is for garlic and Fernet Branca ice cream. Yum.
  Fernet-Branca is an old-fashioned Italian amaro (bitters), a class of drinks of which I am very fond. It's made, of course, to a secret recipe, involving some 27 ingredients, and is very strong (39 per cent alcohol) and very bitter, with a sharp medicinal tang to it – just my kind of drink in fact, but somehow I'd never got round to trying it. Until last night, when, inspired by Cooking with Fernet Branca, I poured myself a glass, over ice, as a digestif. What can I say? It did not disappoint – it was the ultimate bitter bitters, with an almost eye-watering impact, but, once I'd got used to it, I became aware of subtle and intriguing undertones. I look forward to sampling it again – perhaps in the form of a Hanky Panky cocktail (gin, sweet vermouth and Fernet), created by Ada Coleman, head barman of the Savoy's American Bar back in the day, for the actor Charles Hawtrey (no relation to the Carry On actor who stole his name). On first knocking one back, Hawtrey declared, 'By Jove! That is the real hanky panky!'. Many other cocktails feature Fernet-Branca, and it is apparently the favourite tipple of the fraternity of barmen, hence its nickname, the 'barman's handshake'. In Argentina, where most of the stuff is sold, it is drunk with Coca-Cola – I don't think I'll be trying that...
  Anyway, I am grateful to James Hamilton-Paterson for not only providing me with excellent reading material but sending me off to listen properly to The Dream of Gerontius, and inspiring me to finally buy a bottle of the ultimate bitters.