Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Shirt sleeves
Yesterday's small plain bloomer for breakfast today, and very good it was too despite being a day old. Golden crust, slightly crackly. Today's, not yet tasted, does not look quite so good, with the crust a more muddy brown.
Getting there was the first shirt-sleeves job of the year, having started out with jacket. Which led me to ponder on the oddness of the expression. Did it derive from the days when clerks in offices had detachable shirt sleeves so as not to get their shirt sleeves proper dirty? Came back to consult OED on the matter and found it was no help at all. The phrase has been being used in its present sense for 500 years or more and there was nothing about detachable shirt sleeves. The next word listed was shirty, with no indication of how it came to mean bad tempered, then shish, then shisham, this last being a valuble timber obtainable from the Indian sub-continent. Then the s-word proper, of ancient lineage (old english, middle lower german and old norse (including here old icelandic)) but said to be no longer in decent use.
Further pondering on the various dress rules and habits of the various religions of the book, the result of stumbling across http://hazeraves.blogspot.com/ from where you can buy, amongst other things, the latest thing in head scarves from Selangor in Malaysia. It seems that they do not always have to be made of some dark, heavy material. But why did older Italian women always wear black? Was black cloth cheap and practical? Did the priest say that it was proper? Do they still do it? Not much evidence of same when we visited Florence last year. Maybe it only happens in films about godfathers. Perhaps the common thread is puritanical and practical: dressing for show is bad; perhaps a more reasonable line to take in the olden days when more of us were poor and for whom show was the way to penury, sickness and starvation. Or perhaps it is fear of the possibly disruptive effects of show. If we all dress down then we don't start covetting (or covering) our neighbours's partners, with all the complications that can bring in its train. Which associates to the arrangements in some countries of yore where you let everything rip for a few days from time to time. Saturnalias. You could repress this sort of thing for most of the year, leaving people free to get on with growing carrots and making pots - but you had to let the genie out of the bottle from time to time. With lower grade versions surviving into early modern England. Perhaps the residues are holiday romances for girls and gross behaviour in foreign bars for boys.
Good news from the Wheatsheaf on South Lambeth Road. Firstly, that it has reopened and now sells a very fine pint of Doombar. Secondly, that it is the first pub that I have come across since I moved onto my Mount Gay umbrella which actually serves the stuff. It came with a rum-buff barmaid who was able to go on about the various amounts of caramelization in the various brands of rum. Sadly she very soon realised that I knew next to nothing about rum and returned to her crossword. Must make a point of visiting the place with my umbrella; perhaps that way I will hold her attention for more than 30 seconds.
Muddy brown loaf now tasted. And it tasted much better than it looked. Maybe the indoor glasses made all the differance. Washed down with a couple of pints of lentil soup. This last made with ready washed carrots from Mr S. The carrots tasted OK when cooked, but they looked very odd when first removed from their plastic bag, being much too damply red, and, in one case, in consequence, being more or less rotten. But the rest of them settled down to a more natural colour after a few hours in the air.
Getting there was the first shirt-sleeves job of the year, having started out with jacket. Which led me to ponder on the oddness of the expression. Did it derive from the days when clerks in offices had detachable shirt sleeves so as not to get their shirt sleeves proper dirty? Came back to consult OED on the matter and found it was no help at all. The phrase has been being used in its present sense for 500 years or more and there was nothing about detachable shirt sleeves. The next word listed was shirty, with no indication of how it came to mean bad tempered, then shish, then shisham, this last being a valuble timber obtainable from the Indian sub-continent. Then the s-word proper, of ancient lineage (old english, middle lower german and old norse (including here old icelandic)) but said to be no longer in decent use.
Further pondering on the various dress rules and habits of the various religions of the book, the result of stumbling across http://hazeraves.blogspot.com/ from where you can buy, amongst other things, the latest thing in head scarves from Selangor in Malaysia. It seems that they do not always have to be made of some dark, heavy material. But why did older Italian women always wear black? Was black cloth cheap and practical? Did the priest say that it was proper? Do they still do it? Not much evidence of same when we visited Florence last year. Maybe it only happens in films about godfathers. Perhaps the common thread is puritanical and practical: dressing for show is bad; perhaps a more reasonable line to take in the olden days when more of us were poor and for whom show was the way to penury, sickness and starvation. Or perhaps it is fear of the possibly disruptive effects of show. If we all dress down then we don't start covetting (or covering) our neighbours's partners, with all the complications that can bring in its train. Which associates to the arrangements in some countries of yore where you let everything rip for a few days from time to time. Saturnalias. You could repress this sort of thing for most of the year, leaving people free to get on with growing carrots and making pots - but you had to let the genie out of the bottle from time to time. With lower grade versions surviving into early modern England. Perhaps the residues are holiday romances for girls and gross behaviour in foreign bars for boys.
Good news from the Wheatsheaf on South Lambeth Road. Firstly, that it has reopened and now sells a very fine pint of Doombar. Secondly, that it is the first pub that I have come across since I moved onto my Mount Gay umbrella which actually serves the stuff. It came with a rum-buff barmaid who was able to go on about the various amounts of caramelization in the various brands of rum. Sadly she very soon realised that I knew next to nothing about rum and returned to her crossword. Must make a point of visiting the place with my umbrella; perhaps that way I will hold her attention for more than 30 seconds.
Muddy brown loaf now tasted. And it tasted much better than it looked. Maybe the indoor glasses made all the differance. Washed down with a couple of pints of lentil soup. This last made with ready washed carrots from Mr S. The carrots tasted OK when cooked, but they looked very odd when first removed from their plastic bag, being much too damply red, and, in one case, in consequence, being more or less rotten. But the rest of them settled down to a more natural colour after a few hours in the air.
# posted by Jim @ 4:31 AM 
