Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Soap
Having moved off soap wrappers which became an important feature of my last year in the world of work, have been wondering why the boiled beef tasted slightly of soap. Not an unpleasant taste, but definitely soapy. I think the answer must be that, given that you make soap by boiling up animal fat with caustic soda, the boiling of beef in the hard water we have around here and which is, presumably slightly alkaline, does the same sort of thing. Maybe there is some chemist out there who knows the answer.
The water that said beef was boiled in has now been turned into soup by the addition of small amounts of flour and gravy browning (via some gravy we had with cold beef), larger amounts of pearl barley, left over potato and cabbage. All very satisfactory and down to the last quart or so.
Yesterday to London to pay St Paul's our annual visit, carelessly arriving in mid afternoon when one has to pay the full whack of £9 a head. I had forgotten that if one arrives a bit nearer evensong one can get in for free. Remains a most impressive building. Nothing else like it in this country as far as I am aware. I wonder if the French do one? Maybe one has to settle for the Pantheon there. Intrigued by the funerary aspects of the place. We were greeted by a rather dandified gentleman with an angel in a rather raffish pose around a cannon - the main point of interest being that the gentleman was more or less completly unclothed and the angel (who looked rather nondescript at close quarters) rather less so. It seems that the gentleman was the captain of the ship which broke the line at Camperdown - a victory of getting on for Trafalgar dimensions - against the Dutch. Unfortunately he was killed in the process, with the upside that he became the national hero of the hour. I forget what the Dutch were doing on the French side at the start of the revolutionary wars. Wellington had by far the biggest memorial - far outdoing that for Nelson - but his included one recumbent and one equestrian statue, both full clothed, perhaps reflecting the fact that Wellington lived on into a more staid age. Things were a bit fairer in the crypt where the two sarcophagii were both equally large and impressive.
There did not seem to be any very clear criteria for getting one's monument in the cathedral but it seems to help if you were a popular military gentleman or if you had some connection with the cathedral itself, perhaps as bishop or organist. A few arty types get in too.
The oddest monument was to the captain and crew of HMS Captain which appeared to have foundered in a storm and to have been the subject of a major scandal in consequence. The inscription which preceeded the list of the dead - in strictly descending order of rank (and I did not know that the assistant bosun ranked above midshipmen) - was very odd indeed. I learn from Chambers that the ship in question was a rather experimental iron clad battleship which, in the event, turned out to have far to much sail and far too little freeboard. A time of naval transition - and, perhaps, given our glorious history, we were a little slow to move on from the sort of ships that had served so well in the past.
And a factoid for the pub quiz. I learn that the important article of French clothing called a redignote is named for the English riding coat, there having been a tremendous craze for things English among the French chic in the second half of the eighteenth century. Seriously posh French insisted on having English grooms for their riding horses and English jockeys for their race horses - rather as we now like to have French labels (if not French chefs) for our food.
The water that said beef was boiled in has now been turned into soup by the addition of small amounts of flour and gravy browning (via some gravy we had with cold beef), larger amounts of pearl barley, left over potato and cabbage. All very satisfactory and down to the last quart or so.
Yesterday to London to pay St Paul's our annual visit, carelessly arriving in mid afternoon when one has to pay the full whack of £9 a head. I had forgotten that if one arrives a bit nearer evensong one can get in for free. Remains a most impressive building. Nothing else like it in this country as far as I am aware. I wonder if the French do one? Maybe one has to settle for the Pantheon there. Intrigued by the funerary aspects of the place. We were greeted by a rather dandified gentleman with an angel in a rather raffish pose around a cannon - the main point of interest being that the gentleman was more or less completly unclothed and the angel (who looked rather nondescript at close quarters) rather less so. It seems that the gentleman was the captain of the ship which broke the line at Camperdown - a victory of getting on for Trafalgar dimensions - against the Dutch. Unfortunately he was killed in the process, with the upside that he became the national hero of the hour. I forget what the Dutch were doing on the French side at the start of the revolutionary wars. Wellington had by far the biggest memorial - far outdoing that for Nelson - but his included one recumbent and one equestrian statue, both full clothed, perhaps reflecting the fact that Wellington lived on into a more staid age. Things were a bit fairer in the crypt where the two sarcophagii were both equally large and impressive.
There did not seem to be any very clear criteria for getting one's monument in the cathedral but it seems to help if you were a popular military gentleman or if you had some connection with the cathedral itself, perhaps as bishop or organist. A few arty types get in too.
The oddest monument was to the captain and crew of HMS Captain which appeared to have foundered in a storm and to have been the subject of a major scandal in consequence. The inscription which preceeded the list of the dead - in strictly descending order of rank (and I did not know that the assistant bosun ranked above midshipmen) - was very odd indeed. I learn from Chambers that the ship in question was a rather experimental iron clad battleship which, in the event, turned out to have far to much sail and far too little freeboard. A time of naval transition - and, perhaps, given our glorious history, we were a little slow to move on from the sort of ships that had served so well in the past.
And a factoid for the pub quiz. I learn that the important article of French clothing called a redignote is named for the English riding coat, there having been a tremendous craze for things English among the French chic in the second half of the eighteenth century. Seriously posh French insisted on having English grooms for their riding horses and English jockeys for their race horses - rather as we now like to have French labels (if not French chefs) for our food.
# posted by Jim @ 3:24 AM 
