Can you tell the difference?

Raphael

Dow

Zoffany

A quick offering I prepared earlier, relating to my post on the famous Gilbert and Sullivan patter song

Calendar Notes: looking forward and back

Coin minted by Brutus to mark the assassination of Julius Caesar (on the ides of March)

As part of my review of the year I have been spending some time looking at dates on my fast-filling diary for 2017. I am using my Outlook calendar for lightweight-travel sake, but with my visual wiring, I do prefer a real live wall calendar, preferably with boxes I can write in.

Thinking about calendars, looking at 50% off calendars in the shops and practicing my high school Latin (!) by deciphering the mottos on the Harrow School crest on my walk yesterday all converged. This morning I had a eureka moment. OMG, only just realised! (after all these years, lol) Calendar comes from kalends: the first day of a Roman month. We all know about the ides of March, from Shakespeare, don't we? (translated as 15 March)

In the Roman year the days of the month were denoted by reference to the kalends, ides or nones which were the first day of the month, the middle of the month and eight days before the ides respectively. The dates were set by counting back from the next named reference day. So today would be 4 days before the kalends of January.

As I tell my kids: I may not pick up on it at first, but I always work it out in the end.

Avoiding New Year's Resolutions

HMS Resolution*

I have been a follower of Chris Guillebeau's blog, the Art of Non-Conformity for many years. Each year at this time he conducts an annual review, and this year I am going  follow along with his procedure in this outline post. The aim is to not make resolutions, but rather a personalised plan of action for 2017.

He recommends first making a pen and paper list of what worked well and what didn't work so well in the past year. So that is what I am working on today. And as he notes, from my initial thoughts that "not much happened in 2016" it is amazing what I have achieved when I spend some time to think about it.


* New Zealand connection: Resolution was Captain James Cook's ship on his second and third voyages of discovery. On both trips he visited New Zealand

Christmas Dinner for one or two

As Christmas day approached I was reminded of some fun facts my German cousin Annegret taught me. I visited her in Frankfurt two years ago in the run up to Christmas. She introduced me to a couple of traditional German TV programmes for the festive season. One is watching "Sissi" a highly romanticised story of the courtship of  Emperor Franz Josef I*and Princess Elizabeth. Empress Elizabeth, as she became, was a fascinating but quite mentally unstable woman (in my opinion) and this film was a large part of her mythmaking. Elizabeth was born the year that Victoria came to the throne. There are some interesting parallels between her story and that of the late, lamented Diana, Princess of Wales

The other TV tradition is watching "Dinner for One" a short black and white film, in English. More properly watched on Silvester (New Years Eve), it has become a German tradition to watch in the festive season. People have put theories forward on why it has become a cult classic in Germany, while remaining unknown in English-speaking countries, but essentially it is a mystery.

https://youtu.be/zVd_VLO9xcc?t=2m27s

This article gives you a bit more background (and a  better quality video: skip the first 2 1/2 minutes if you want to miss the German intro)

The scenario seems poignantly relevant for me this year as I spent Christmas Day (and every other day of the holidays) with my elderly client, in my current role as live-in carer. Christmas Day was just her, me, and the turkey. Unlike the film, no alcohol was involved.
a. because I was working, and
b. because this is a teetotal home.

I have been working as a relief live-in carer for the past 4 months, and it certainly raises some talking points about a slew of topics. I'll be discussing some of them with my family when we celebrate a very belated Christmas when I am back home in February 2017.

*New Zealand connection: yes that's the emperor our famous Franz Josef glacier is named for.

Butts of Well-Aged Wine

Butt. Yes you can say it without sniggering.

A butt is an obsolete unit of liquid measurement in Britain.  A butt is 126 wine gallons. Wine gallons? yes it is a thing, and explains another of those bizarre American differences. The American gallon is based on the old wine gallon measurement.

It sometimes seems that what ever measurement standard the rest of the world choses, America has to be different. So an American gallon is different from an imperial gallon: another reason why American recipes can be difficult to follow successfully. (that and "stick of butter". What kind of a measurement unit is a stick? Tablespoons of butter for something that normally comes in solid form is bad enough! ...mini rant over) Anyway an American gallon is based on cubic inches (231 cubic inches) while an imperial gallon is rounded to 4.54 litres. This means that an American gallon at a nominal 3.785l is considerably less than an imperial gallon. One of the reasons for that the Americans stuck with the old gallon measure is that the British imperial system was not adopted until 1825, by which time America had ceased to be a colony.

Butt may be archaic as a measurement, but it lives on in the names of British pubs, as does tun. A tun is equivalent to two butts. So we have pubs such as The Three Tuns in Henley,

or the Half Butt in Essex

Oh, and for another blindingly obvious fact (that I only recently realised) a quart is a quarter of a gallon.

Tomorrow I am going to continue the theme with old wines and Shakespeare. Then on Saturday I am looking forward  celebrating Christmas Eve with more recent vintage wine and Shakespeare,. But more of that anon.

Wine Gums, Hock and Rhenish.

Important fact at the outset: wine gums don't actually contain wine. But this British brand does have the names of wine (and spirit) varieties impressed into them, as well as having an assortment of shapes. Kiwi wine gums are just one shape, a squat cylinder, in a variety of colours/flavours. Now I have some inkling of how wine gums came by their misleading name.

Seeing the name on one of the wines got the wheels of my brain turning clunkily. I knew Hock was a generic name for white wine, probably from some past literary exposure. That or exposure to poor generic white wine in New Zealand of the 1970's. But why? Turns out Hock comes from Hochheim, from Hochheim am Main. Hochheim was the centre of the wine export to Britain for German wines from the 17 century. So Hock became a common term for German white wine. If it is used nowadays, it usually implies low quality white wine.

A similar and even more antiquated name for white wine from Germany is Rhenish. We see it cropping up in Shakespeare in Hamlet:

"as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down, The Kettle-drum and trumpet thus bray out The triumph of his pledge" and in The Merchant of Venice: "There is more difference between thy flesh and hers than between jet and ivory; more between your bloods than there is between red wine and Rhenish." I had never made the connection that Rhenish wine refers to wine from the Rhine area: specifically Rheinhessen, the area between Worms and Bingen. Must go back and sample more wine: I wonder if it used to drunk from Westerwald stoneware?

Wealds and Wolds

As I was writing yesterday's post I noticed the wald of Westerwald is German for forest. Of course I knew that : Schwartzwald Kirschentorte means Black Forest Cherry Cake. As I said to my sister Jane before I travelled to Germany: " I know a few German words: from cookery and Opera" to which she wryly replied "that will be very useful in everyday conversation!"

Any way, I am currently living close to Harrow Weald and I have been wondering about the meaning of weald, but hadn't yet got around to looking it up. There is also the Weald of Kent which one of my clients referred as his vantage point when watching V-1 flying bombs falling on London as a boy.

Time to look it up: turns out that weald comes from West Saxon, and means the same as "wold" which is the Anglian form. So yes, from the same root as the German "wald"  Harrow Weald was once part of the ancient Forest of Middlesex.