A Decent Old Pub And An Indecent Young Lady

I bought this postcard the other day, attracted, as usual, as much by the message on the reverse as the picture on the front. I seem to recall I have been to Coventry only once in my life, some forty years ago, but I have driven around it on various by-passes quite frequently. The picture shows St Mary's Guildhall which, if Google Street Cam is to be believed, looks relatively unchanged 100 years later (I wonder how it survived the horrendous bombing of the city during World War II?). It used to be the residence of the Lord Mayor of Coventry and it is from there that the famous Lady Godiva is said to have started her famous horse-ride. Looking more closely on Google maps, there seems to be a decent old inn just around the corner from here called the Golden Cross, so maybe it is time to visit Coventry again. It is a sad sign of age that the driving force behind such a return visit would be a decent old pub rather than an indecent young Lady!

The card was posted in August 1908 and sent to a Miss L Dorman in St Leonards-on-Sea. The message from Dora to L was full of those questions that will never be answered.

Dear L,

Hope you have not got off because of poor George. Hope you are enjoying yourself as I am. 

With love, Dora

Excuse such a muddle but I am in a hurry.

Where did L not get off to, because of poor George? What was wrong with poor George. My mind plays with pictures of Miss Dorman recreating Lady Godiva's ride but having to get off her horse because poor George has collapsed with apoplexy. It is time I went for a drink and forced such silly thoughts out of my mind.

Looking For The Picture Within

The new scanner, which can handle my old medium format negatives, allows me to go travelling through photographs I took thirty years or so ago. It also allows me to play one of my favourite games : looking for the picture within. The picture on the left was taken in Paris, thirty or so years ago. The selective enlargement - the picture within - has all the atmosphere of a busy Paris street scene and a little bit more. It is a one act play; a piece of two dimensional monochrome performance art. What photography does better than anything else is freeze a moment in time; preserve a collection of emotions, movements and interactions in photographic aspic. I can happily spend hours scanning and dissecting, looking for shapes and trails : looking for the picture within.

A Pint Of Gladys Please

You may recall that a couple of weeks ago we went on the trip from The Rock to the Milltown Brewery in Huddersfield. Following a thoroughly entertaining explanation of the brewing process (and before a thoroughly enjoyable sampling session) I got talking to the Head Brewer, Neil Moorhouse about the challenge of coming up with names for his frequently changing seasonal beer specials. He likes to maintain a link with mills and the textile industry - it is the Milltown Brewery after all - so I suggested "Bobbin Ligger". A bobbin ligger was a person who worked on the machines that filled empty bobbins with spun thread. Specifically their role was to carry (or "lig") the empty bobbins to the machine and carry away the full bobbins. My father started work as a bobbin ligger in a mill in Bradford in the 1920s and my mother also worked in the mill at the same time. Neil liked the name and said he would use it for his next seasonal special and I agreed to design a pump display card for it. 

For the display card I used an old family photo which shows a group of mill workers and which, I think, features my mother (she is the one on the left of the group). It will have been taken in Ickringill's Mill in Bradford, and whilst the women would not have been bobbin liggers (a job normally reserved for young men just starting in the mill), the atmosphere of the old sepia shot seemed to match the name perfectly. I was thus delighted to discover, on entering the pub on Friday evening, that Bobbin Ligger is now available and to celebrate I bought a pint or three. As the picture features my mother, Gladys, by the second or third pint I was walking up to the bar and proudly proclaiming "A pint of Gladys please".  I know that some of my "beery" followers will be wanting tasting notes but I have to admit that I was so caught up in the celebratory mood that all I can tell you is that it is a thoroughly refreshing hoppy fusion which at 4.1% ABV achieves a  perfect balance of strength and flavour. I am not sure that description does it justice so, in the interests of research, I have decided to go back to the Rock tonight for another "pint of Gladys".

Watching The World Go By

My apologies. For the moment I am watching the world go by. The Lad is home for a week before going back to University and therefore my life, and my blogs, are postponed until next week. The picture is a re-scan of a negative I took back in the 1970s. 

The King Of Corsica And A Kettle Of Fish

The King Of Corsica came back today. And Alexander came back yesterday. Alexander (The Lad) returned safely from his two months in Africa. Most of the time he, and his three friends, were working at a hospital in the middle of nowhere but for the last few weeks they have been on holiday : in the Masai Mara and on the island of Zanzibar. They had a fascinating, enjoyable, and occasionally challenging time, and we are just pleased they are back safe and sound. 

The King of Corsica is a slightly different kettle of fish. The King of Corsica was the name of a pub on Berwick Street in Soho, London. Many years ago some twit without any feeling for history or tradition decided to rename it The Endurance (presumably to mark the fact that a name that had existed for several hundred years would endure no longer!) The original name commemorated the German, Theodor von Neuhoff, who became involved in the struggle for Corsican independence from Genoa in the eighteenth century. For a brief period he was crowned King of Corsica but then had to flee the island and he made his way to London where he fell into debt and lived in poverty in Soho. Despite his poverty and exile he had important friends and Horace Walpole, the Earl of Oxford, paid for his funeral and his gravestone when he died in 1756. They also named the local pub after him : that is, until some idiot came along and decided it needed a re-launch.

That will have been during the last forty years because I have just discovered a photograph I must have taken back in the 1970s which features the pub with its original name (but, alas, with a dreadful modern frontage). As my pride and joy, my brand new scanner that can scan my medium format negatives, slowly  picked its way through the 40 year old negative, the King of Corsica came back to life, if only as a memory. Welcome home to both the King and to Prince Alexander.

Sepia Saturday 136 : King Edward's Grandson

Our image prompt for Sepia Saturday 136 provides a composite illustration featuring both cricket and baseball. No doubt the chap who runs Sepia Saturday thought it would be a suitable image to mark the opening of the London Olympic Games despite the fact that neither of the games can be found in the modern Olympic programme. The prompt sent me off to the family photographic archives in search of something sporting but I eventually came to the reluctant conclusion that I am a couch potato descended from a long line of similar vegetables. The family name might just as well be Maris-Piper and my grandfather might just as well have been King Edward (and let me add before anyone else does that his wife should have been called Desiree). 

After a lengthy (and enjoyable) search through the shoe boxes I eventually came up with the above photograph which features a gritty Yorkshire cricket team. My connection to it is the chap in the flat cap on the right - the team manager I assume - who is no other than my great Uncle Fowler. The very same man who collected all those old postcards, the man who was a bowling champion on the crown green, that same man was a cricket team manager. I will dig a little deeper and no doubt discover that he also was a long-stop (or whatever they are) on the baseball field as well. That's a fair amount of digging but it is the kind of exercise I like. Now why don't they make family history research an Olympic event?

Avert your gaze away from all the athletic exertions this weekend by taking a look at the SEPIA SATURDAY BLOG and following the links.

Graveyard Calculating : So Many Beers, So Little Time

Last birthday, or perhaps it was last Christmas, Alexander bought me a book entitled "1001 Beers You Must Try Before You Die". So far it has remained uninvestigated on my desk, but the other day I picked it up (as you can imagine it is not a light volume) and flicked through its pages and started to do a little graveyard calculating. Given that average life expectancy for a man in the UK is currently just over 78 years, that means that even if I started now and managed to find, sample and consume one of the selections every week, I would have to arrange for the final 273 bottles to be packed into my coffin with me. Given that I have always fancied donating my body to a Medical School for dissection practice, this would mean that the 273 bottles would fall into the hands of the medical students : and we all know they would probably finish the collection off in about 45 minutes. So it is time to start, it is time to launch a fine symbiotic dual quest : drinking more beer and living longer. It is time to tick off the pages.

We are lucky at the moment because there is such a wide and wonderful range of bottled real beers available, not just in specialty shops but also in local supermarkets. My first bottle (Sierra Nevada Pale Ale) was bought in my local Tesco store and, despite the fact that it had been lovingly brewed and bottled in Chico, California and shipped halfway around the world, cost me less than £2. Whistling the Star Spangled Banner I carefully poured the rich amber liquid into a Portland Microbrew glass (a present from a fellow blogger, thank you Christine) and read the Tasting Notes for the last time.

"Fresh grassy, resiny hop nose with orangy undercurrents; also fruity with maybe just a hint of peachiness. In the mouth, it is crisp and dry up front, with a slightly toasty malt character that then blends into a clean and assertive hop bitterness and a long perfumed bitter finish"

I won't pretend to have noticed a tenth of those flavours, perfumes or undercurrents and I will therefore provide a Yorkshireman's assessment of its' overall character : A GRAND GLASS OF BEER.

A Rough Night At Whitby

Time for an old postcard and it is an odd little number called "A Rough Night At Whitby". WE, who sent it in 1903, wanted to tell Miss E L Bull of Bignor Place, Newport, Isle of Wight that "absence makes the heart grow fonder". Did it? Did WE board a tramp ship once the Whitby waves had died down and sail south to the Isle of Wight to reclaim his Bullish love? Or did the heart grow less fond and did WE remain in Whitby all his life, gorging on their famous fish and chips and carving trinkets out of funeral jet? I have had a quick look at census records and can't find any mention of Miss Bull, which is perhaps a good thing. Better not to know. Better that the story is lost forever under those stormy North Sea waves.

Sepia Saturday 135 : Toffees And Health

Our Sepia Saturday prompt image this week features a group of children being instructed in healthy eating by "the Health Fairy". And what is healthier that a fizzy drink and a plate of iced buns?

This photograph must have been taken in the early 1950s when I was about five years old. That is me in the silly hat with the Mona Lisa enigmatic smile and that is my brother Roger next to me with the kind of label attached to his blazer that would allow him into the Winners' Enclosure at Ascot. I am not sure about the girl sat opposite us, but no doubt she grew up to be a British seaside resort boarding-house landlady (if you have never been acquainted with such institutions, count your blessings and imagine). The occasion would have been one of the annual Christmas Parties organised by the firm my father worked for - the toffee and sweet maker, Mackintosh's. The Health Fairy never put in an appearance at one of their toffee-chewing, chocolate-licking Christmas parties - but you could hardly expect her to.

FLY ON OVER TO THE SEPIA SATURDAY BLOG AND FOLLOW THE LINKS TO SEE MORE OLD IMAGES AND NEW REFLECTIONS

Connect Me To A Brewery And Leave Me There To Die

It was the Pub Treat on Wednesday and twenty or more of us boarded a charabanc and headed for the Milltown Brewery in Milnsbridge, Huddersfield. I am a veteran of many a brewery trip over the years but this was my first visit around a modern microbrewery. Small, it may have been, but it could easily match its bigger brothers and sisters in terms of both information and refreshment.

Neil Moorhouse - the Director, head brewer and bottle washer - made us all very welcome and soon had us tasting malts, sniffing hops and marveling at the array of stainless steel tanks, tubes, pipes and kegs. But going to a brewery without sampling the product would be a little like visiting New York and never looking up, and therefore by far the most memorable part of the evening was sampling the various brews currently on offer. There was a deliciously dark Maltissimo (5.3% ABV, but who's counting); the fruity golden Orion (a star of a beer if ever there was one); and my old Friday night favourite Slubbers Gold (a well balanced, flavoursome brew you can easily enter a long-term relationship with). Chatting with Neil afterwards, I rather think we might have come up with a new brew : I supplied the name and hopefully he will supply the important element, the brew itself. I will keep you informed of the outcome.

I was saying afterwards to a couple of my friends that I suspect that there has never been a time in history when such a rich and varied selection of real beers has been available to the discerning drinker. The growth of the craft microbrewery movement - both here and in other countries - has revolutionised the market and brought a broad smile of approval to the faces of beer lovers everywhere. Long may brewers like Neil and his colleagues continue to brew, and long may we enjoy their output. We sang songs on the chara' on the way back to our pub. Had I a voice that could master a tune I would have sung that old World War 1 soldiers' song :

"I have no pain, dear mother now,
But oh! I am so dry.
Connect me to a brewery
And leave me there to die".

Excavations 3 : A Love As Pure As A Single Malt

EXCAVATION UP MY BACK PASSAGE
A Summer series highlighting some of the discoveries made whilst de-cluttering the back passages of my house.

I know, it's cheating. As I reach into the recesses of my back passage I am carefully working my way around a host of cuddly toys and a heap of rotting VHS cassettes in search of books. But I like books. I can pick them up and flick through the fading pages : try doing that with a stuffed Winnie The Pooh or a cassette of Zulu. 

My objet trouve for today is a book that was once very close to my heart. If you had asked me 28 years ago which book I would have taken to the proverbial desert island I would probably have answered Ian Sinclairs "Introducing The BBC Micro" I bought the book months before I bought the computer and with glorious anticipation I read it again and again whilst I tried to gather together enough money to buy the object of my desires. 

It dates from a time when I used to record the date and place of purchase of books on the title page (try doing that with a Kindle edition!) and therefore I can trace the immediate history of the purchase. It was 1984 : Isobel was still a medical student and I was trying to keep things going by working both as a lecturer in South Yorkshire and also moonlighting for the European Commission in Brussels. It was obviously during one of my regular trips to Brussels that I bought the book and it was with money I earned by working for the Commission that I bought the computer itself a few months later.

I loved that computer with a love as pure, and as brazen, as single malt whisky. I would work on it late into the night and dream of it when I eventually went to sleep. And as with so many old girlfriends - for sure, it was a girl - I wonder what ever became of it. I can't remember ever having got rid of it so perhaps it is waiting for me at the end of a rainbow; or, more likely, at the end of my back passage.