I just heard the sad news of the death of the Hollywood legend Tony Curtis, star of many wonderful movies, including one of my all-time favourite films, the classic comedy Some Like it Hot. I’ve almost worn the out the DVD I have of this gem, I’ve watched it so many times, so I can’t resist putting up one little clip as a tribute.
They just don’t make ’em like that any more!
Well, dear readers, I have a huge amount to do before the new academic year starts next week, including three days of purgatory this week in darkest Swindon serving on the STFC Astronomy Grants Panel. So, to cut distractions down to a minimum, I’ve decided to impose a blogging ban on myself until a light appears at the end of this particular tunnel.
Normal services will be resumed as soon as possible but, for the time being, there will now follow a short intermission.
This is definitely off the beaten track as far as my blog posts go, but I think it’s Quite Interesting so I thought I’d share it with you. I was wondering the other day where and when the traditional “British” dish of fish and chips originated. The answer is fascinating, and a little bit controversial too.
The practice of eating fried fish in batter started to appear in England during the fifteenth century; it was derived from the Pescado Frito cooked by Portuguese Sephardic Jews – Marranos – who had moved to Britain to escape persecution in their homeland. By the Victorian era “Fish Fried in the Jewish Fashion” was extremely popular in the working class districts of London, particularly in the East End. Dickens refers to a “fried fish warehouse” in Oliver Twist, which was first published in 1837. It seems to have become available in large quantities with the rapid development of trawler fishing in the mid 19th century.
Incidentally, there is a prominent relic of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews who settled in the East End right next to Queen Mary, University of London in Mile End (see left). The burial ground has, I think, recently been moved but it neverthless provides a timely reminder that immigration is by no means a new phenomenon as far as the East End is concerned.
The traditional way of frying the fish involved oil and I don’t know precisely when the practice of using lard – which is what is used in many modern shops – came on the scene, but it clearly would not have met with Jewish approval and must have been a more recent development.
The origin of chips is more controversial. The first occurence of this usage of the word chip in the Oxford English Dictionary appears in Dickens’ novel A Tale of Two Cities, dated 1859, in the phrase
Husky chips of potatoes, fried with some reluctant drops of oil
Some say the practice of frying potatoes like this originated in Belgium or France, and that chips are a British version of pommes frites or french fries. This style of cooking potatoes could have been brought to London by the Huguenots (French Protestants who settled in the East End of London after being forced out of their homeland). However, there is some controversy about how and why chips became so popular throughout Britain. Some claim the practice of eating fried potatoes was already established in the North of England before 1859. It also seems that fried chipped potatoes were served in working class eating establishments throughout Victorian London. Many working people – especially single men living in lodging houses – lacked the facilities or the ability to cook anything substantial at home, so preferred to buy their food ready made. At an Irish Ordinary you could get a filling meal of beer, meat and fried potatoes for about tuppence (in old money). Such establishments proliferated all over London during the 19th Century as the number of navvies and other itinerant Irish labourers grew in response to the demand for manual workers across the country.
I think it was most likely the presence of a nearby Irish Ordinary that led a Jewish londoner called Joseph Malin to hit upon the idea of combining fried fish with chipped potatoes. At any rate it’s reasonably well established that the very first commercial Fish-and-Chip Shop was opened by him in 1860 in Cleveland Street and business was so good that it was followed by many others across the East End of London and beyond.
There’s something rather inspiring about rediscovering that Britain is nation whose traditions and institutions have always been so reliant on foreign immigrants. Even Fish and Chips turns out to be from somewhere else. Makes you proud to be British.
I’m going to be too busy to post much this week so I thought I’d take the opportunity to point out a couple of things for the benefit of regular readers, newcomers and occasional visitors to this blog.
First, about RSS Feeds. If you wish to subscribe to the whole blog via an RSS feed you will find it at
https://telescoper.wordpress.com/feed/
If you wish only to see posts in a particular category, you can do so via
https://telescoper.wordpress.com/category/categoryname/feed/
So if, for example, you only want to read the “Science Politics” items via RSS the feed is at
https://telescoper.wordpress.com/category/science-politics/feed/
A full list of categories, together with the number of posts so far published in each one, can be found on the home page. You can use this to browse my back catalogue, so to speak, although I should point out that I didn’t file that many of my earlier posts in categories and haven’t had time to go back through them and sort them out…
I also wanted to make some comments about comments. Please note what it says on my home page:
Feel free to comment on any of the posts on this blog but comments may be moderated; anonymous comments and any considered by me to be abusive will not be accepted.
You may use a nickname or anonymous handle on a comment, but I insist on a valid email address that identifies you (although the email address will not be visible to anyone but me). The system that operates on comments is that, if you haven’t posted before, your comment will be held until I have approved it. Comments are posted immediately from “approved” users but I reserve the right to moderate them if they turn out to be abusive. Serial offenders are put on a blacklist and their comments will be treated as spam.
Even if you are a regular commenter you may find that some comments don’t appear straight away. That is because I operate a spam filter – spam comments outnumber genuine ones by more than two-to-one – and it sometimes makes mistakes. If this happens it is probably because your comment contains several embedded URLs, which makes the spam filter suspicious. I usually manage to rescue comments blocked in this way, but it may take a while before your comment appears.
Let me point out that there is a separate RSS feed for comments at
https://telescoper.wordpress.com/comments/feed/
if you wish to follow discussion that way.
I realise that there isn’t really a convenient way to communicate suggestions for improvements or to ask general questions about the blog, so when I have a bit of time I’ll set up a permanent page to serve that purpose.
Now that I’m back from a period of rest and recuperation I thought I’d try to get back into the swing of things by posting a few short items about things I found interesting in the papers. One item today caught my eye as it touches on a theme I’ve addressed before: Freedom of speech, and its limits.
This story concerns sports presenter Clare Balding who is apparently presenting a new TV series called Britain by Bike. I don’t know much about her or the new series, but it was reviewed last week in the Sunday Times by a person by the name of AA Gill who referred to her as
…the dyke on a bike, puffing up the nooks and crannies at the bottom end of the nation
Not very nice at all. I’m not linking to the original article (a) because it’s behind a paywall and (b) because I don’t want to send the Evil Empire of Murdoch any traffic. You can find the gist of it in a story at the Guardian.
I didn’t know that Clare Balding is a lesbian, but then there’s no reason why I should have thought about her sexuality as it’s not at all relevant to her job. Apparently she is quite open about and comfortable with her orientation, but the obviously pejorative reference to the word “dyke” got her understandably riled. She complained to the Sunday Times editor, a nasty piece of work called John Witherow, who replied
In my view some members of the gay community need to stop regarding themselves as having a special victim status and behave like any other sensible group that is accepted by society.Not having a privileged status means, of course, one must accept occasionally being the butt of jokes. A person’s sexuality should not give them a protected status.
Clare Balding was unhappy with the response, saying
This is not about me putting up with having the piss taken out of me, something I have been quite able to withstand, it is about you legitimising name calling. ‘Dyke’ is not shouted out in school playgrounds (or as I’ve had it at an airport) as a compliment, believe me..
She has now made the matter to the Press Complaints Commission under article 12 of its Editor’s Code of Practice, which states
The press must avoid prejudicial or pejorative reference to an individual’s race, colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation or to any physical or mental illness or disability.
There’s no denying that the word “dyke” is a pejorative term for a lesbian so one would imagine that this will be an open-and-shut case. Note also that the response from John Witherow explicitly refuses to accept the terms of article 12. Whether he likes it or not, sexual orientation is specifically protected in the Editor’s Code of Practice to which he is a signatory. John Witherow probably thinks so little of this code that he hasn’t even read it. If he is exonerated it will prove beyond any doubt that the Editor’s Code of Practice is simply a sham.
Whether the right to free speech should be bounded by law is a topic that has come up several times on this blog, including one very recent example and one rather older which has direct parallels with the Clare Balding complaint. I think it is right that this matter should be dealt with outside the law courts. Gill’s comment may be nasty but I don’t think such things should be regarded as criminal, unless they are clearly intended to harrass. If, for example, he’d screamed the word dyke through her letterbox, I think that would be a criminal matter.
However, the problem with voluntary “codes of conduct” such as this – including those that form part of certain employment contracts – is that they usually amount to nothing other than window-dressing, at least when it comes to sexual orientation. The word “dyke” is as offensive to a lesbian as the word “faggot” is to a gay man, but cases involving these words are rarely taken as seriously as those involving racial or gender-based terms. Can you imagine the outcry if AA Gill had used the word “nigger” or “paki” in a review?
Mentioning “sexual orientation” in a list isn’t the same as taking the related prejudice seriously or trying to something about it. The fact of the matter is that lesbians and gay men may be more accepted in society now than they were twenty years ago, but there are still many walks of life in which this is not the case. In fact, I think the depressing reality is that the vast majority of heterosexual people simply don’t like homosexual people and resent their apparent “acceptance”. You can argue about the rights and wrongs of “politically correct language”, but the problem it is trying to address in this case is very real and it is often the only thing that prevents overt abuse, as indeed it is with racist abuse.
Having said that, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the Sunday Times gets away with this clear violation of the PCC code. It would just be another example of gross hypocrisy to add to the many that already demonstrate that political correctness is a very thin veneer. Far better, in my view, to dispense with the code of practice altogether if this happens than keep it there and openly flout it. At least then we’d all know where we really stand.
Well, dear readers, the old batteries definitely need recharging so I’ve decided to take spot of annual leave during which I’ll be away from the blog. Accordingly, in the words of the old BBC continuity announcers, there will now follow a short intermission..
Back in a week. Toodle-pip!
PS. The suitably restful and very typical bit of 1950s “light” music accompanying this is called Pastoral Montage, and it was written by South African born composer Gideon Fagan.
Only time for a brief post today, as I’m shortly off to London for some external examining in the East End.
It’s interesting that yesterday’s #SpoofJenks day generated so many contributions that the Guardian decided to get the main instigator, particle physicist Jon Butterworth, to write about it on their Science Blog. My own contribution of yesterday gets a mention there too.
I have to say I found the whole thing very amusing and wholeheartedly agree with Jon Butterworth (whose original spoof started it all off) when he explained that his primary aim was more to let off steam and less to try to persuade Simon Jenkins of the error of his ways. I felt the same way. Better to poke fun back than allow him to get to you.
I didn’t feel parody was necessary in Simon Jenkins’ case because his arguments are full of factual errors and non sequitur. In fact, it did occur to me that his piece might be deliberately ironic. Could one of the prime movers behind the Millennium Dome really be serious when he talks about the wastefulness of CERN? Perhaps he’s spoofed us all. But even that wouldn’t excuse his snide personal attack on Martin Rees.
Anyway, as you will have noticed, I just went for straight mockery and had a good half-an-hour of lunchtime fun writing it. A few people seem to have liked my piece, but at least one blogger found it “unpleasant”. You can’t win ’em all. For what it’s worth, I still think he deserved it.
In fact, I posted a considerably less vitriolic reaction to Jenkins article on Saturday, but trying to respond in rational terms was something I found very frustrating. Only a few hundred people read this blog so it’s pretty futile to try to take on a columnist from a national newspaper that’s read by hundreds of thousands. I’m not sure he’s listening anyway, as he’s written similar drivel countless times before. Far better, in my view, to join the collective piss-taking. At least it got the Guardian interested.
Maybe after all this Jenkins will actually engage in a dialogue with scientists instead of merely insulting them? Perhaps. But I’m not holding my breath.
This is Simon. He is 67 years old. Simon has had a tough time of it recently. He really needs your help. This is Simon’s story.
Simon was quite bright as a small child, but things started to go wrong for him early on in life. He was bullied at public school by a vicious gang of “nerds” who forced him to look at their calculations. Later, a terrifying incident with a pipette in a chemistry lesson left him emotionally scarred. He started to have paranoid delusions and nightmares about Men in White Coats. More recently he began to suffer hallucinations involving Mammoths. He suspects all scientists are after his money. His behaviour is obsessive. Every gadget fills him with terror. His actions are bizarre and unpredictable. He is no longer able to cope with everyday life and needs constant supervision.
Fortunately, Simon has a generous and loving friend called Alan (who edits a national newspaper). Alan noticed that Simon had severe problems and decided to care for him. Alan provided sheltered accommodation for Simon and created a job, so Simon could earn a basic living doing simple tasks, such as writing a column in The Guardian.
Sadly, however, things have recently started to go wrong. Simon’s behaviour has deteriorated even further. He has become increasingly incoherent. He is unable to write his column without repeating himself over and over again. Worse, he sometimes gets out of the padded cell secure unit office Alan has provided for him, wandering about the premises foaming at the mouth and raving about the Large Hadron Collider. This is embarrassing Alan and the other people he works with. Simon has also recently been found sticking pins in a wax effigy of Lord Rees.
To make matters worse, Alan’s business has started to fail. He is losing money and can no longer afford to pay for Simon’s upkeep. Alan has become depressed by his newspaper’s falling circulation and the stress of having to cope with looking after Simon. He is desperate for help.
Without your assistance, the future looks bleak for both Simon and Alan. Please send your contributions to Alan’s Personal Assistant:
Poppy Cock,
The Guardian,
Kings Place
90 York Way
London
N1 9GU
Please mark your envelope Get this Nutter off my Hands Appeal and make your cheques out to The Margaret Thatcher Home for the Bewildered (Maximum Security Divison). If you can’t afford to send money, any other gifts would be appreciated, especially crayons and colouring-in books (but not if they are about science).
Thank you for your help. Have a nice day. Unless you’re a scientist.
PS. You may find updates on the progress of this appeal on Twitter (look for #SpoofJenks).
Just finished my last batch of exam marking and am off to do today’s Azed so no time for a proper blog but I couldn’t resist putting up this brilliant skit on homeopathic medicine, passed on to me by Anton.
I offer this as my contribution to homeopathy awareness week.
..but I’m nevertheless quite pleased with the way it’s turning out!
In the Dark 