Always a difficult letter “V” plus at this stage in the A to Z I am only 2 posts away from “pantsing it” so forgive me if this post is a little briefer than normal…
Winston Churchill giving his Victory V sign
English singer-songwriter and entertainer Robbie Williams does the reversed V sign at a paparazzo photographer in London in 2000
Winston Churchill’s iconic V-sign – meaning V for Victory, is a sanitised version of the V-sign going back to the Battle of Agincourt and the days of the great English Long Bow-men. So effective were these bowmen both in terms of accuracy and power – being able to rain down armour-piercing arrows on the enemy – so the French threatened that if they caught the English bowmen, they would cut off their first two fingers – the ones used to draw their bow and so, as two lines of soldiers faced each other across no-mans-land, the English bowmen would wave their first and second fingers in a V-sign to show that they were still armed (or fingered) and dangerous. The true V-sign is delivered by raising your forearm smartly to the vertical, fingers spread, brandishing a V whereas Winston Churchill held up his Victory V palm forward in a respectable but recognizable reference to the classic gesture.
Hatters in the 18th and 19th centuries, used a toxic substance, mercury nitrate in the making of felted hats. Milliners are makers of ladies’ hats in particular, but hatters might have made felted hats for women as well as for men. Felt can be made from the fur or wool of many creatures and the mercury compound helped in the process by making the fibres more robust and easier to stick together by felting. Originally, felters had used camels’ urine for a similar purpose although as the trade grew further afield from camel lands, they substituted their own piss. Then a hatmaker who made particularly fine felt was discovered to have been taking mercury for the treatment of syphilis and the compound found its way into his work via his urine.
Hatters started to use mercury nitrate directly in their work – the compound is bright orange and the process became known as carrroting or secretage, perhaps because it was a trade secret. At this stage, the mercury nitrate was not so harmful, but once the felting has produced a fabric, it must be shaped to a mould of the hat shape with steaming and more rubbing (felting). The fumes were very poisonous and hatters developed tremors and other symptoms of mercury poisoning. It is for this reason that mercury barometers are banned in case firemen should inhale the fumes during a fire. Eventually, the process was outlawed and Mad Hatters became a thing of the past, of perhaps the most colourful and well-known forms of occupational hazard.
One of the most famous Mad Hatters, is the one who appears in Lewis Carrol’s “Alice in Wonderland” under the name of “Hatta”, and having grown up in Oxford, where Charles Dodgson had written as Lewis Carrol, and with Tenniel’s amazing illustrations, the hatter was imprinted on my brain from an early age…
A more recent and equally tragic incidence of mercury poisoning is depicted in the film “Minamata” in which Johnny Depp plays a “Life Magazine photo journalist, Eugene Smith, persuaded to photograph the victims of the disease as a result of a nearby factory polluting the sea and poisoning the fish eaten by the local people. The terrible contortions to affected bodies go far beyond the madness of hatters, a moving watch…
The languages from the Wikipedia article on Cant, are today:-
Though similar sounding, Early Hours and Early Doors, are quite different in origin. The first is another example of Cockney rhyming slang whilst the other, though now associated with football commentary, has an earlier origin.
Although theatres no longer practice the Early Doors system, the phrase was popularised in football commentary and much like Back to Square One, has achieved a universality in the wider world. From this excellent blog on word origins – “Why footballers, commentators and fans say ‘early doors’, when ’early’ or ‘early on’ would work just as well is probably due to Big Ron, otherwise Ron Atkinson, a well-known television football commentator, a former player and manager now regarded as one of the characters of the sport.” However, in the wider world, Early Doors has indeed become a favourite elaboration on ‘early on’.
Early Hours is rhyming slang for flowers and is a clever reference to the fact that the flower markets in London opened very early in the morning to allow the fragile blooms to reach the shops in peak conditions. Early Doors, on the other hand, goes back to the Nineteenth Century theatres and music halls in London who came up with the idea of charging a premium for patrons to go into the theatre and select their own best positions in the unreserved areas. This is seen in modern days in paying a premium fare to board a plane at the front of the queue rather than experiencing the general scrimmage.
We all come to know the meaning of this expression at some point in our lives because it is a frequently used simile for people ignoring refusing to acknowledge the most obvious thing in a given situation, just as an elephant in the room would be hard to ignore. The origin of the expression is less well known but is from an 1814 short story by Ivan Krylov – a poet and fabulist ( a composer or teller of fables), called “The Inquisitive Man”. A man who has just visited a museum runs into a friend and is effusive about the wonders of nature he has just seen, and he enumerates them. His friend, who is obviously familiar with the museum, says to him “but did you see the elephant? (…) I’ll be bound you felt as if you were looking at a mountain.” But the first man has failed to notice the elephant – absorbed as he was with the smaller exhibits – embarrassed, he begs his friend not to tell anyone that he had failed to notice the elephant in the room.
A fable, as opposed to a mere story, consciously tries to tell us something with a special or enlightening meaning and I am sure that Ivan Krylov would be proud to know that his short story has given us a phrase which has no equivalent for its simplicity and memorability. We may talk of Occam’s Razor, or that which is Staring Us in the Face, but the Elephant in the Room wins hands down!
Lastly, today’s example of Cant (see the letter C post for an explanation or go to Wikipedia) is Engsh, from Kenya.
Today we come, for the first but by no means the only time, to sailors’ jargon – in particular, sailors from the days of the great wooden sailing ships of both the (English) Royal Navy and what we would now term the Merchant Navy. Sailors’ lives are still lived apart from their families, from “landsmen” even from sailors from other ships, most of the time – so as a profession and even as individual ship’s crews, sailors develop their own special lexicon of words and phrases. This is not, I think, to keep their communications secret as is the case with say, Cockney rhyming slang – rather it is just a collection of job-related jargon – yet some of these phrases have gained wider parlance although their original meaning may have been lost or obscured in the process. Some sailor’s phrases are obvious enough in meaning “washed up” for example, but others need a bit of explanation such as the following…
“The Bitter End” – this has assumed the meaning “when you get to the very end of a situation – the “end of the road” but it is in fact, a misquotation of the seaman’s phrase “having reached the biter end”. We are familiar with the sight of the capstan – a massive winch radiating spokes pushed on by sweating sailors and used to haul up the ship’s anchor. However, the thickness of the anchor rope (hawse) and its wet and even slimy condition, would not have made it possible to wrap it around a capstan, Instead, a thinner rope went around the capstan and was attached to the anchor rope where it came aboard by a sharp hook called a ”biter”, that dug into the anchor rope and pulled it aboard. This thinner rope was only as long as the distance from the capstan to the “hawse hole” and so when the “biter” got near to the capstan, the hawse had to be secured momentarily, and the “biter” repositioned at the hawse hole again, ready to pull in the next section of the hawse. This moment was known as “reaching the biter end”, and whilst the sense of the expression was understood very appropriately by non-sailors, the real meaning together with the biter (as opposed to bitter) was lost.
That the expression should have gained such wide traction, is a testament to the evocative idea of reaching, with bitterness, the end. Another expression which has travelled far beyond its (non-naval) origins, is:-
“Back to Square One” which expression I have heard even in non-English parlance – though quoted in English, which is a surefire sign that no better expression exists in that language*. Its origin dates back to the early days of Sports coverage on the BBC Home Service (now BBC Radio 4). Commentators could not figure out how to describe the movement and position of the ball action on the football field and so the Radio Times (a magazine of programme listings) published a diagram of a football pitch with all the lines and markings and numbering the important areas of the pitch. The commentators soon abandoned this cumbersome descriptive system and realised that describing the action, the possession, the player names, the direction of travel and the kicks and tackles, was all that was required for listeners who could fill the rest in with their imagination. Brief as the usage of “Back to Square One” was, historically, it gained widespread and even international usage to mean “Back to the Beginning”. We will discover I coming posts that many phrases have disputed origins and an alternative suggestion for “back to square one” is the game of Snakes and Ladders, but only one snake can take you back to square one and so it is not a universal occurrence during the game and I for one side with the football commentary explanation!
The French, whose language was once the official language of International Diplomacy, have never forgiven the English language for having usurped its place and one expression of this anger, is the attempt to root out “Franglais” words – English words that have been adopted by the French for want of a better native word, or vice versa. I would suggest that this rigidity is the very reason for the success of the English language because despite its occasionally quirky pronunciation issues, it is easy to learn since you can string words together in any order (no waiting for the verbs at the end of the sentence) and without having to gender them and yet be understood. As well, English happily admits Franglais or any other foreign words for which it has no equivalent – such as Picnic (from the French – Pique-nique) to enlarge its diversity! Examples of English to French Franglais include blazer, brunch, burger, blog and brainstorming – and that’s just the B’s! Ironically, the attempt by the Académie Française, to restrict the entry of English words, is the very reason why they enter common usage in French-speaking countries (Quebec is equally disdainful of Franglais) – if a language is set in aspic, not allowed to grow and meet the challenges of new objects and ideas, what are people to do?
By Item is held by John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14511438
“Between a Rock and a Hard Place…” – this is not hard to understand once you realise that it is a sailor’s term – a rock is a rock and the “hard place” means the “shore”, a “lee shore” is a shore that a ship is being blown towards, and since it is impossible for a sailing ship to sail directly into the wind but only diagonally towards it – so if your ability to sail diagonally towards the wind and away from a lee shore, is compromised by a rock to windward and you are in a very dangerous position…
“Cold Enough to Freeze the Balls Off a Brass Monkey!” – you may be beginning to see the “lost in translation” aspect of sayings overheard from sailors by landsmen in which case, you will not be surprised to learn that this expression has nothing to do with statues of simians cast in brass losing their genitalia!
A “monkey” on a wooden ship, especially a warship, was a (usually) wooden tray with rounded depressions in which cannon balls were stacked in preparation for the battle – the last thing you wanted was heavy cannon balls rolling around the deck of a pitching deck – let alone a “loose cannon” – so cannons were secured (against recoil on firing) by strong ropes and cannon balls were kept on a monkey. I said that monkeys were usually made of wood, but admirals or very lucky captains, who had made a lot of money from their share of “prizes” (captured ships, evaluated and paid for by the Navy) – were allowed to prettify their ships with gold leaf, dress their crews in custom, fancy uniforms, and purchase brass monkeys rather than the standard issue wooden ones. Now here’s the thing, a monkey was carefully designed so that you could pile the cannon balls up in a pyramid to maximise your supply of cannon balls in as small a space as possible but the thermal coefficient of expansion of brass (the monkey) and iron (the cannon balls) is different – the brass monkey shrinks more than iron in very cold conditions. Now, the carefully spaced second and subsequent layers of the pyramid are too big for their positions and can roll off the monkey hence “Cold Enough to Freeze the Balls Off a Brass Monkey!” – Simples! Not!
Lastly, we come to a term probably used by Soldiers as well as military Sailors – “The Butcher’s Bill” – which sad term represents the reckoning of dead and wounded following a battle.
I hope you have enjoyed the elucidation of these sailor’s terms and rest assured there will be more to come – but for now, that’s the B’s done!
If you have seen my Theme Reveal for the A2Z Challenge 2022, then you will know that I am writing about becoming Vegetarian gradually as a response to the crisis in food supply chains sparked by the pandemic and made worse by the WAR in Ukraine. As well, I am keeping to the theme I originally planned of food which can be eaten in its own right as well as becoming an ingredient in other dishes…
I have touched on Tofu before in the M post Mangos, Miso and Mirowaves… where I described how to use Miso to add flavour to Tofu – because here’s the thing – many people consider Tofu to be a tasteless waste of time. Tofu is what we in Britain, call a Marmite substance – (Marmite or yeast extract is something that divides people completely – you either love or hate it – I am a Marmite lover…) but since Tofu is a source of protein and vegetarians and vegans need as many sources of protein as possible, then Tofu cannot be ignored. Both Tofu and Miso are Japanese inventions along with Tempeh, a block of the leftover pulp from making Soya Milk (the source of Tofu) which has been welded together by a cultured fungus and in case you think that sounds icky, it does have a slight resemblance to chicken, so another good vegetarian source of protein – and let’s not forget that mushrooms are fungi too!
I’m sorry if I have not made Tofu sound attractive so far so let’s start again, Tofu is cheese made from Soya Milk, it has a delicate taste but which can be enhanced in a number of ways, infusing with miso, serving in strongly flavoured dishes where it’s blandness is a nice contrast and the following freezing technique. Like dairy cheese when it is first turned into curd, tofu is full of whey to a greater or lesser extent depending on how much it has been pressed. If you freeze Tofu, the whey will turn into ice crystals that compress the curd surrounding them so that when you defrost the tofu, even more whey will drain out to it and the Tofu will be like a sponge and tougher – less prone to disintegrate when stirred into a sauce, plus the sponge soaks up the sauce so that each mouthful is tastier.
I have not made Tofu myself, though I once worked for a man who did make it commercially and who gave me that last tip – my job was to come up with dishes made from tofu since he was only making a burger and a peanut burger. I added custard tarts, quiches and pasties (all vegan) to his range – the pasties used the freezing technique. However, I wondered how easy it is to make Tofu at home and found this article which seems to be pretty simple to follow. Since Tempeh is a much more complicated thing to do – Roxy and Ben freeze their leftover soya pulp, which is known as Okara, and use it as a supplement to flour in baking. The photo at the top is from their site. They point out that you can press the Tofu to different degrees according to your taste or intended use and when you buy it from a shop, you can either buy Silken or soft Tofu in little cartons, or Hard Tofu – swimming in it’s own whey. Silken tofu is good for making say, a custard tart whilst hard tofu goes into stirfry and other savoury dishes. In Japan, there are several other types of Tofu – for example one that can be deep-fried and then slit open to form a pocket which can be stuffed with other things – pretty neat!
Tomatoes, like potatoes, which are part of the same family of plants, were brought back to Europe by the Spanish where they had been refined from their wild cousins (and who doesn’t like a wild cousin) by the Aztecs. Both plants suffered some resistance towards eating, partly because they belong to a family of poisonous plants that include Deadly Nightshade and Mandrake, and certainly, in the case of the potato, they were regarded as the food of the conquered – the Spanish didn’t even bother to bring potaoes back for twenty years having failed to notice that the whole Aztec economy was based on controlling the staple crop of dried potato pucks. The people grated the potatoes, squeezed out as much juice as possible, placed them outside to freeze at night (they lived in the mountains so frost every night), squeezes out more liquid the next day and after repeating the process several times, they had freeze-dried potato!
As you can see above, there are many varieties of tomato (as with potatoes) and although they are in fact fruit (Love Apples is one popular name) they are regarded as vegetables because their sugar level is quite low and they have more umami than sweetness. The Wikpedia article on tomatoes is scathing about the way modern tomatoes have lost much of their sweetness by breeding for uniform ripening and longer shelflife – no surprises there then…
Where would we be without tomatoes in our culinary lives – they are the basis of so many sauces from classic Italian pasta dishes to Heinz baked beans – although the latter have only traces of tomatoes which are amplified with sugar, salt and acidity. There are so many that I will give you just two examples.
Oven-Dried Cherry Tomatoes 1. In a roasting tin, roll cherry tomatoes in a dessert spoon of olive oil and distribute them evenly. Sprinkle with slat and pepper 2. Bake in the bottom of a very low oven – less than 100°C for four or five hours or until shrunken and wrinkled 3. Eat hot or cold
Cauliflower Romagna 1. Break cauliflower florets into tiny pieces and fry in oil with as much garlic as you like until they are browning – don’t worry about burning – cauliflower is very strong and the taste benefits from caramelisation 2. Add tinned tomatoes and a little stock to cover the cauliflower, also herbs, fresh or dry, of your choice – thyme, basil, marjoram etc. 3. Cook until the cauliflower is soft, although a little al dente is good, and the sauce will have reduced somewhat – serve! This is a dish which, if you are on a gradual journey towards more vegetarian eating, you can add small amounts of chopped up chorizo or prawns to…
Type 2 Diabetes and Vegetarianism
Type 2 diabetes runs in families and if you have the genes for it, you have it all your life – even if it only manifests later in life, so don’t feel guilty as people used to be made to feel, because the onset, whilst caused by too much sugar in the diet, is inevitable if you have those genes even though those without won’t develop it from eating too much sugar – they may also get overweight but not get diabetes.
The good news is that Type 2 is reversible – eating a less sugary diet and eating foods that release their carbohydrates slowly, can prevent or even reverse the onset of Type 2 Diabetes. Eating a vegetarian diet of low-glycemic foods that keep blood sugar levels steady, such as whole grains, legumes, and nuts is the way to go. So, on top of ethical, environmental and financial reasons to eat a more vegetarian diet – you can add health grounds. If you go completely vegetarian, and even more so – vegan, then there is the risk of deficiency of vitamin B12 and Omega fatty acids but there are foods (such as Marmite) which can help as well as supplements but it is for this reason that some people prefer to be Flexitarian or Pescatarian rather than go the “whole hog” if you will pardon the expression…
Special Shout Out!
Yesterday was Earth Day, but because I am now pantsing my A2Z posts, I didn’t read until this morning, the S post from one of my favourite bloggers ever since I started with the Challenge in 2020. This year on Part-Time Working Hockey Mom Tara,who used to work for Starbucks, has been guiding us through the finer points of coffee in which Starbucks train all their management. Yesterday, for S, Tara told us about Sun V’s Shade Grown Coffee – something I and I think, most people, have no idea about. I will let you read Tara’s words to learn why this was an especially pertinent subject for Earth Day. Tara is a prolific blogger all year round, unlike me who grinds into gear for April and collapses in exhaustion in May – please check her blog out! Despite the title of her blog containing the word “Mom”, and her having worked for Starbucks, Tara is Swiss, though she is an Americanophile!
If you have seen my Theme Reveal for the A2Z Challenge 2022, then you will know that I am writing about becoming Vegetarian gradually as a response to the crisis in food supply chains sparked by the pandemic and made worse by the WAR in Ukraine. As well, I am keeping to the theme I originally planned of food which can be eaten in its own right as well as becoming an ingredient in other dishes…
There are two themes running through my A2Z challenge this year and whilst you may think that rhubarb and Mercantilism are pretty random blog-fellows, in fact, the one illustrates the historical application of the other nearly perfectly! Some years ago, I was reading the lengthy series of historical novels – Poor Man at the Gate, by Andrew Wareham when I came across a passage in which the protagonist, by this time a member of the government, was discussing the reasons for a chronic shortage of silver in circulation. The reason given was that the Chinese were insisting on being paid for goods, not in trade for other goods, but exclusively in silver. The goods we so wanted, were silk, tea and rhubarb! I did a double-take thinking “how would you even ship rhubarb halfway around the world?” I had to investigate… The Chinese were acting out Mercantilism, one of the tenets of which, was that you should try to accumulate silver and gold to make a country rich, and you did that by trade restrictions – restrictions on imports and pushing exports for hard currency. The opposite philosophy, which came in the mid-19th century, was liberalism which pushes entrepreneurship and free trade – Liberalism favours individuals getting wealthy whereas Mercantilism favours the State accumulating money. Mercantilism confuses monetary wealth with the wealth that a wide selection of goods offers. The state – which is big in mercantilism, may grow wealthy in money, but the population came off badly. The British tried to get around the import bans by trading with merchants upstream from the government and eventually resorted to selling opium and getting a nation hooked on it – not one of our finest hours… The Chinese government retaliated by completely withholding the rhubarb – of course, it was not the fruit, but the powdered root which had medicinal value – it was touted as a cure for digestive disorders, flatulence and constipation. So much of the medicine did we buy, that the Chinese reasoned that we Brits must be really bunged up and that withholding the vital rhubarb would soon bring us to our knees – perhaps literally! If you want to read more fulsome explanations of Mercantilism then you can find them here and here.
The thing is, mercantilism has never really gone away, indeed the Chinese (and several other south-east Asian countries) have done very well for their economies by practising this economic philosophy whilst in the US and Europe, we have embraced the liberal and neo-liberal philosophies – there has been some meeting in the middle with globalism – China, South Korea and Taiwan exported lots of geegaws to the West which our consumers happily consumed, but with the fallout from the war in Ukraine threatening globalism, a resurgence of protectionist policies – apart of mercantilism is on the cards…
Enough with the economic philosophy stuff – now to the fun bit – Rhubarb as food! Rhubarb is properly speaking, a vegetable that we happen to regard as a fruit. It is the petiole, or leaf stem that we eat, never the leaves which are quite poisonous – containing a lot of oxalic acid – very bad for your kidneys. The fleshy stems can even be eaten raw – especially when young and tender – my partner used to eat it as a child, by dipping the end in sugar… Rhubarb stems contain vitamin K and also the antioxidants – anthocyanins (which give it its red color) and proanthocyanidins. Brought to Europe for its medicinal properties, the increasing cheapness of sugar, meant that by the 18th century, rhubarb was transitioning to culinary usage. It needs sugar because it is quite tart or acid so although it is a favourite in pies and crumbles, it is also (like gooseberries) a good sauce element to serve with oily fish like Mackerel. I have shot myself in the foot for a recipe by talking about Rhubarb and Ginger jam in my post about ginger, for this is a classic pairing. I also talked about how to concentrate young and tender rhubarb stems so they don’t cook to mush and that technique can be used for any soft fruit that has the same tendency – such as strawberries. Strawberries are also sometimes paired with rhubarb – to the disgust of rhubarb purists…
MONTY RAKUSEN/GETTY IMAGES from https://www.tasteofhome.com/article/forcing-rhubarb/
I will leave you with this magical image of the forcing sheds where early season rhubarb is picked by candlelight for early season, extra sweet shoots. We live near the Yorkshire Rhubarb Triangle where such sheds abound, if you live in the US, then half of all rhubarb comes from Pierce County, Washington. Here in Yorkshire, this is the time of year…
If you have seen my Theme Reveal for the A2Z Challenge 2022, then you will know that I am writing about becoming Vegetarian gradually as a response to the crisis in food supply chains sparked by the pandemic and made worse by the WAR in Ukraine. As well, I am keeping to the theme I originally planned of food which can be eaten on their own as well as becoming ingredients in other dishes…
As the WAR in Ukraine rages on, Ukraine’s minister of agrarian and food policy, announced that – Ukraine’s government has banned the export of wheat, oats and other staples that are crucial for global food supplies as authorities try to ensure they can feed people during Russia’s intensifying war. New rules on agricultural exports introduced this week also prohibit the export of millet, buckwheat, sugar, live cattle, and meat and other byproducts from cattle (see article). As things are, Ukrainian farmers will be lucky to get out to fertilise the soon to sprout winter wheat – ironically, whilst Ukraine is often referred to as the bread-basket of the world, and the yellow colour on the flag of Ukraine symbolises the wheat, the fertiliser used to grow Ukrainian wheat, comes from Russia, illustrating the perfect storm of food supply chains that Putin has, with lack of, or incorrect, foresight, loosed upon the world. Every World War is different, and make no mistake, we are in a world war, because the countries and peoples affected by the WAR, lie far beyond the extent of the fighting. Economies and supply chains require no declarations of war to involve and decimate. European countries will feel the loss of Ukrainian wheat, but the other grains on that list – buckwheat and millet are vital imports to many developing countries such as in Africa. Russia looks likely to take all of Ukraine’s coast and ports so that even if they stop where they are at that point, and back down, how will exports to those developing countries take place?
We may have no choice but to eat less meat since as we saw in the last post, it takes so much grain to raise beef cattle, and we should face this shift with no complaint since there are many people in the world who will have less choice than we do. We will not be being forced to live solely on the staple dish of bread (or as Marie Antoinette would have it – cake) but undoubtedly some things will change our eating habits, whether we like it or not. The rich will, of course, continue to afford the full menu of choices.
Bread is a Staple Food! Of the ten world staple foods, wheat, the source of most breads, is at number three, after maise and rice, which might come as a surprise to Europeans, whose massive use of bread and whose knowledge of foods foreign is often dismal. Maise, or Corn, is, of course, the source of Cornbread, whilst Rice is the main ingredient in most Gluten-Free flour and the bread made from it. After these three staples, comes Potato which is also used in some bread recipes together with some wheat flour. The rest of the ten staples do not significantly feature in the world of bread – Cassava, Soybeans, Sweet Potatoes, Yams, Sorghum and Plantain. If you know of any breads made from these, please correct me by sharing in the comments!
Before looking at bread as an ingredient, let us take a quick trip around the manna itself. The first thing that comes to mind, is a loaf of bread, and to make this, you need hard wheat, as opposed to the soft wheat used for cake and some softer, cake-like breads such as brioche, of which more later. If you take morning toast and sandwiches, you have the main ingredient of two of the daily meals and think of beans/spaghetti/cheese/eggs on toast and that represents supper for some people, or think pizza, or hummus and pitta bread. Most bread is Leavened (made to rise), with yeast, but Soda Bread (risen with baking soda activated by buttermilk) also has it’s place. Sourdough is very trendy but has a long history and depends on natural yeasts which gradually accumulate and become something unique in each baker’s precious starter… But there are many unleavened breads – a plethora of flatbreads – from all over the world – Middle Eastern pitta bread, to South Asian Chapatis or even Aboriginal Australian Dampers.
Some like hearty wholemeal, seedy granary or dabble with ancient grains but many people, at peril to their health, like the refinement of white bread! During World war Two, The refinement of bread was regarded as wasteful and wholemeal was the order of the day, so once the war was over, white bread boomed – a whole generation put themselves at risk of diverticulitis – the cure? Bran cereal made from the bran taken out of the flour to render it white!
But what of bread as an ingredient?
Bread goes stale with varying degrees of speed – not that it can’t be eaten, but it is hard and dry, however, since it is still nutritionally sound, there are many ways to use up stale bread by turning it into an ingredient – breadcrumbs, bread pudding, bread-and-butter pudding, Apple Charlotte – the latter made with bread crumbs. Rusk goes into sausages and that could be meat or veggie and of course, bread itself is Vegan – seems those one-celled creatures, the yeasts, don’t count… I once, briefly, had a restaurant, and I worked hard at developing a range of sophisticated puddings, however, I made a rod for my own back by including bread-and-butter pudding, because over 50% of customers chose that – of course, it may be that they liked my particular recipe, or maybe they couldn’t be bothered to make it at home, though why ever not, I can’t imagine – preparation time, even for a full family size dish, is 10 minutes at most. My restaurant version, though, is even quicker and I made them to order.
Frewin’s Bread and Butter Pudding Preheat the oven to 170C, 325F or Gas mark 3 Take a ramekin or very small bowl, and grease it with butter Cut a few slices of Brioch Bread and butter them with softened butter Cut a slice into pices to fit the base of the ramekin Sprinkle a teaspoon of the sugar of your choice Sprinkle half a dozen plump raisins or mixed, dried fruit (must be large, fresh and soft, no small gritty ones) Repeat till the ramekin is full to the brim (this won’t take much, leave small gaps for the mixture to find its way in) The mixture for a large pudding is 5 eggs beaten into 1 pint of milk but you will have to scale down for just a couple of ramekins. To make it even richer, substitute a little single cream for part of the milk. Sprinkle a little sugar over the top of the pudding and make sure no dried fruit is standing proud as it will go bitter if burnt. You need a pre-heated oven to finish the pudding – but start off in the microwave if you are in a hurry, or bake completely in the oven if you are not. You could assemble your puddings and leave to soak while you have your main course and finish off between courses. One minute or so, in the microwave and a couple of minutes in the oven. Watch as it microwaves and when the surface begins to rise, transfer to the oven. Keep checking and when the pudding has risen (as it will, splendidly) and is browning a little – your pudding is ready!
Kvass is a barely alcoholic drink made from stale rye bread from the Eastern European Countries through the Russias. When the USSR broke up, instead of embracing the western passion for Cocoa-Cola, the people of the east, in a patriotic passion, started to drink a lot of Kvass. what did Cocoa-Cola do? They bought Kvass factories on the basis that if you can’t beat them – join them! I can buy kvass from various Polish shops near me, but I was really intrigued by the fact that this drink was made from bread and that you could make it yourself, so I decided to have a go! There are many recipes on the internet and I am still trying them out, some contain beetroot, or fruit, but here is a good one to start with. So Rye bread is an example of a bread not made with wheat and many people are turning to it to avoid some of the side effects of wheat, gluten, bloating etc. – but the main reason to start including it in your diet is just that it is a rich flavour and when toasted, is crisp on the outside and soft in the middle – yummy! And now you know what to do with the leftovers!
So here were some ideas for using bread as an ingredient – care to share your favourites?
Carrie-Anne over at Welcome to My Magick Theatre, is writing about Ukrainian history and culture for this year’s A2Z Challenge and has a list of charities you may wish to donate to for the Ukrainian cause.
Zalka Csenge Virág posted on International Women’s Day, 10 tales about women and war (including a Ukrainian tale) over at The Multicoloured Diary.
Last Saturday was Nakba Day. It is no accident that there are more people in the world who do not know what that means, than there are people who do know what Holocaust Memorial Day is – the Zionist Project that is Israel has worked assiduously to make sure of that. Nakba Day is the day marking “Memory of the Catastrophe” for the Palestinian people – the day in 1948 when their society and homeland was destroyed and the majority of their population displaced. Those that remained have faced slow attrition – no let us call it what it is – Genocide and never less nakedly than right now when the stolen state of Israel is nakedly stealing more Palestinian homes in Jerusalem, invading their most holy place of worship with troops and tear gas during the holy month of Ramadan and then bombing the civilian population of Gaza in “self-defence” for their reaction to these provocative events. Meanwhile, state players around the world stand by and watch without condemning – HOW DID WE GET HERE?
And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
[…]
And you may ask yourself, “Well… how did I get here?”
Talking Heads – Once in a Lifetime
During the recent A2Z Challenge, I encountered a fellow writer Iain Kelly who wrote about his State Trilogy. Iain lives near Glasgow which approximates to the northern capital of his future, dystopian State and in which the population live amongst other things, without alcohol. Glasgow is renowned for its drinkers of the beer known as “Heavy” if not for heavy drinking, and having bought Iain’s book, the question that constantly reverberates for me as I read it, and which he gradually answers, is how did things get there from here? How do you get people to accept what is fundamentally unpalatable? There is an irony in the promotion of Holocaust Memorial Day by Israel as part of its justification for a Jewish homeland in Israel – several ironies. The state of Israel was avowedly secular yet it uses a religious/tribal identity to define its raison d’etre and within that irony is nestled another. Many Orthodox Jews believe that God expelled the Jews from Palestine 1500 years ago and they have no business being there until God gives them permission to return. The monstrous act which was the Holocaust (whose veracity must rightly be defended against Holocaust deniers), is another example of something so unpalatable that one must wonder, how were the German people led to that unspeakable place? Other Orthodox Jews, within Israel – the Religious Right, are calling for an ever closer equivalence to the holocaust to be perpetrated on the so-called Palestinian people and they are driving the Zionist project in a way it never intended to be driven even if the desired end result might be the same. Why so-called?
Why the “so-called” Palestinian peoples – an exercise in Re-branding?
The state of Israel calls the Arab residents of the Occupied territories– Palestinians rather than Arab Israelis because this makes them seem like they don’t belong in the de facto state of Israel. They do! It is the mass of Jewish immigrants who have flooded into Israel that have a questionable claim to the land. The Arabs who live mixed in amongst Jewish people in the rest of Israel are referred to by Israel as Arab Israelis (or “Good” Arabs) but they prefer to refer to themselves as Palestinian Israelis in solidarity with their oppressed brothers and sisters but more of that later. The establishment of Israel has never been ratified in International Law and was imposed on the land of Palestine by force. Before this, Palestinian Arabs and Palestinian Jews, both rich and poor, lived in harmony. Genetic testing could not tell the difference between the two groups because there is no difference – they are both classified as Semitic people and their different languages are nevertheless both classified as Semitic languages. These facts might come as a shock to most young Israeli citizens because the state lies not only to the rest of the world, but also to its own citizens, that, is Propaganda. Israeli children are taught to regard “Palestinians” as Arabs who do not belong, as terrorists who are trying to steal the country from those to whom it truly belongs – once again, this is the opposite of the truth. Palestinians are portrayed as terrorists who oppose the noble project of Israel – but those of us on the outside must never forget that one state’s terrorists are another people’s freedom fighters. This link to a film by a Palestinian filmmaker illustrates the degree of prejudice in a 15-year-old Israeli girl…
Just as the Nazis in Germany promoted the myth of the noble Aryan, so the Zionist project has cultivated the image of the sun-bronzed, hard-working, enterprising Kibbutznik striving to wrest modern farms from the dry land alongside their indolent Palestinian neighbours who are content to subsist on their backward farms consisting of olive groves and a few goats. The Jaffa orange, though developed originally by Palestinian Arabs, was developed by Zionists into a major export brand and similarly with the development of Avocado farming. Young people from around the world, and not just Jewish young people, volunteered on Israeli Kibbutz and became a party to this propaganda view. It is worth noting that wells dug by kibbutz often sucked dry the wells of Arab neighbours for their more intensive agriculture so stealing the water as well as the land… Now, as resistance to Israel increases as evidenced by the support for the BDS movement (Boycott, Divest, Sanctions), Israeli origins of agricultural products may be concealed rather than trumpeted. I live just outside Bradford, UK which has a large Moslem Pakistani population who have vociferously embraced the Palestinian cause in recent years. Imagine my disgust then, when shopping in an Aldi supermarket, to discover that mangos which had no indication of their country of origin, were in fact from Israel. The lack of labelling made me suspicious so I examined the box – bearing in mind that fruit boxes usually celebrate their country and company of origin with colourful artwork – nothing! So I lifted the box up and on the underside, printed in very small letters, was the name of a company which when Googled, turned out to be Israeli. I complained to the store both about the lack of labelling and the origin of the mangos from occupied lands and they were swiftly withdrawn…
Truth is the first casualty of war.
The attribution of this well-known quotation is the subject of some controversy but I prefer the slightly more elaborate 1758 version by Samuel Johnson in “The Idler” – “Among the calamities of War may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.” There are two sides then to successful propaganda – interests that motivate the lies and credulous people to be deceived by the lies.
Truth is such a fundamental issue, if we do not have the correct facts about any given situation, then how can we make the correct decisions, the object of Israel’s lies about its Zionist project, is to obfuscate the facts so that, for example, if Israel cites the right to self-determination and a homeland, we think that it sounds reasonable without thinking that that is no good if it means that the Palestinians must lose their self-determination and their homeland. If Israel says rockets are being fired on innocent Israeli citizens by Hamas terrorists, we will not compare the proportionality of the response or the degree of provocation…
One central lie of the Zionist project has been to remake the very definition of Anti-Semitism. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of antisemitism extends the meaning to include any criticism of Israel. This definition has then been forced onto most countries in the world by means of bullying, threats and blackmail. Lest you think this an insignificant thing, well in Britain, this was used to assist in getting Jeremy Corbyn removed as the Labour Party’s Opposition Leader by constantly alleging that Labour Party members were making anti-semitic comments (mostly criticism of Israel) and that, under Corbyn, these were not being dealt with. This was an unwarranted interference in the democratic processes of the UK but so great was Israel’s fear of Corbyn – a supporter of Palestinian rights – being elected to the position of Prime Minister that Israel’s lobbying, propaganda and dirty tricks machine went into overdrive. Needless to say, the Centrist yes man Keir Starmer, who replaced Corbyn as leader, knows his place in relation to Israel and will not rock the boat…
In the US Joe Biden is equally hamstrung to prevent him from offering the kind of criticism one might reasonably expect from a man of his political persuasion because major Jewish donors are amongst the Democratic party’s main financial supports. Very few Americans have any idea how much money the US gives to Israel each year and would be shocked if they did although their government, no matter which party was in power, would justify it thus; Much of the “aid” to Israel is spent on American goods (for which read American arms). Israel deserves protection from its unfriendly neighbours in the Middle East and is America’s major ally in the Middle East. True that, though America’s other ally in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia reveals the true reason for US machinations in the region – oil! Saudi Arabia and America did a deal after World War 2 whereby America guaranteed not to interfere with Saudi Arabia’s religion in return for the guaranteed supply of Saudi Arabia’s oil. Saudi Arabia is an anomaly in the Islamic world since it is led by an oil-enriched royal family who has promoted a fundamentalist sect of its desert tribes to worldwide prominence whilst leading an opulent and perhaps decadent lifestyle behind closed doors. Saudi Arabia once supported Palestinian interests but as its own position in the region is increasingly threatened by Iran and more recently Turkey, and with America as a mutual ally, it should not be surprising that Israel and Saudi Arabia, whilst having no official Diplomatic relations, find their interests increasingly aligned…
Origins of an Illegitimate state…
UNSCOP (3 September 1947; see green line) and UN Ad Hoc Committee (25 November 1947) partition plans. The UN Ad Hoc Committee proposal was voted on in the resolution.
Much is made by Israel, of The Balfour Declaration. It is the first, and one of the few unequivocal declarations of support for the idea of a Jewish homeland and was issued during World War 1, just after Britain had declared war on the Ottomans who were in league with Germany. Palestine was occupied by the Ottomans and German/Ottoman forces clashed with the (British) Egyptian Expeditionary Force in the Southern Palestine Offensive – a little known part of the First World War since the story of the Western Front has eclipsed the war in Palestine. At the end of the war, with the Ottomans defeated, Britain was given a mandate to rule Palestine by the League of Nations and this, together with the Balfour Declaration, significantly led the way towards the creation of Israel. However, following the Second World War, with Britain anxious to please both Jewish and Arab interests, the newly formed United Nations, was unable to get its Partition Plan for Israel – Resolution 181 – across the line as although it was accepted by the Jewish population of Palestine it was rejected by the Arab population as well as neighbouring Arab countries. (See proposed Partition Map to right.) Britain had handed control of Palestine to the UN who eventually withdrew precipitating a civil war in Palestine until the Zionists unilaterally declared the formation of the state of Israel. Surrounding Arab countries joined in the fighting – the 1948 Arab- Israeli War – but America immediately recognised Israel as a state and began lending support. It has been said that the US has regarded Britain as a static aircraft carrier at a convenient location for stopping to refuel on its way to act as putative world policeman and Israel fulfils the same role as Britain in the Middle East. When Israel purchases armaments from America, it does not have to wait for delivery – there are already massive arms stocks cached in Israel, sufficient for any imaginable war America – or Israel – might want to wage in the Middle East. Israel, firmly supported by America where the Jewish lobby had been carefully nurtured by the Zionist project, eventually achieved a secure position by means of a series of short sharp wars and by making a pragmatic peace with the Egyptians. The Palestinian Arabs who fled their homes to avoid being caught in the crossfire, were not allowed back and their land was “legitimately” seized by the new state whilst the diaspora of Palestinian Arabs were left to foment in reugee camps in neighbouring countries. Israel weathered the storms of world opinion and terrorist threat and I return to my original question – how did they do it?
Bully to Intimidate and Enforce…
If the last section implied that Britain was wholeheartedly behind the Zionist project and that Zionists gave her an easy ride of governing under the British Mandate – think again! In the run-up to the creation of Israel, many acts of terrorism were perpetrated by Zionist groups against the British administration and soldiers, against Arab Palestinians and even against other Zionist groups with different views on how to proceed towards the goal of creating Israel. One of the worst atrocities for Britain – was the bombing of The King David Hotel in which 92 lives were lost. These tactics were designed to put pressure on Britain to withdraw from Israel and so if one wants to ask from whom the later PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organisation) and their ilk learnt that terrorism might get you what you want or at the very least, get your enemy’s attention, well then, they learned it from the Zionists…
There are three main groups of Palestinians in Israel – those imprisoned in Gaza , those who farm in the West Bank and those who live intermixed with Jewish neighbours in the towns and cities. The Gaza strip is often described as the world’s largest prison since residents are completely controlled by Israeli security as to how or even whether they may leave Gaza’s confines. Goods in and out are also controlled by Israel and it has been alledged that at times, Israel has calculated exactly how much food is required by the population of Gaza and then allowed just a little bit less in. The farmers of the West Bank are the ongoing victims of land theft by illegal settlers – a thorny optic for Israel since the rest of the world has become increasingly aware of the shrinking land belonging to Palestinians and the corresponding growth of Jewish settlements. This runs contrary to the long espoused idea (by outsiders like America and the EU), of a Two-State Solution to offer both Israelis and Palestinians permanent lands but the West Bank is so riddled with illegal Jewish Settlements that this is beginning to seem impossible. Israeli “activists wield slogans like “from the river to the sea,” or “no settlement is illegal.” Israel was considerably emboldened under Trump, whose son-in-law Jared Kushner pushed Israels cause – the US controversially moved its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem – an act of provocation to the Palestinians given that Jerusalem is sacred to Jews, Moslems and Christians and is supposed to be a neutral zone.
I have already referred to the “Good Arabs” who live in the town and the evidence that this latest conflict is different because this time, the Good Arabs are siding with their much more put upon brothers and sisters in Gaza and the West Bank and threatening or indeed committing civil insurrection.
Bullying tactics, whether they are directed at the state level or at individuals who displease the state, are designed to intimidate and enforce what the state wants and Israel is equipped with one of the world’s most assiduous secret services -Mossad who can dig the dirt and put the squeeze on individuals, groups, politicians and whole state apparatus. Israel may be too small to develop its own aircraft industry but they make up for it in other ways… Israeli firms have developed the “best” in spyware such as “Pegasus” which they now sell to other rogue governments around the world to enable them to spy on their dissident citizens via everything they can do with their phones and to record sound and video without the phone’s owner being aware of it. Another export of Israel to those who support it and to America in particular, is the hosting of training sessions for “Law” Enforcement officers which include the technique of neck kneeling employed in the murder of George Floyd which triggered the worldwide Black Lives Matter movement. Links back to the Israeli run training courses were highlighted and questioned – unwelcome attention from Israel’s point of view and which contributes to the slow sea change in opinion of Israel and other governments (lack of) response to Israel’s actions against the Palestinians… It is fair to say that Israel leads the world in techniques of bullying from straightforward violence against the person right up to the most sophisticated forms of social enforcement…
Control the Narrative…
The tricks used to establish and maintain control of Israeli politics both internally and externally are nothing new and they exemplify perfectly that maxim “History is written by the Winners!” Up to now, the Zionist project has been winning – but will it last?
One of the tricks of controlling the narrative is not to allow a hint that there even exists opposition on a political level. However, even Jewish groups who are dismayed at the atrocities being carried out in their name are starting to coalesce in opposition to Israel. The Jewish Voice for Peace says about Zionism that “Through study and action, through deep relationship with Palestinians fighting for their own liberation, and through our own understanding of Jewish safety and self-determination, we have come to see that Zionism was a false and failed answer to the desperately real question many of our ancestors faced of how to protect Jewish lives from murderous antisemitism in Europe.”
Indigenous people around the world are finding their voices against each and every one of their own Settler Colonialist states – not least the Native Americans and the Australian Aboriginal peoples and they are turning the property laws by which these countries are governed back on those who stole their land and with that, comes solidarity with other oppressed groups.
Israel has strenuously attempted to counter the use of words such as Genocide and Apartheid from gaining currency in relation to its treatment of the Palestinians but they are fighting a losing battle – this article in Mondoweiss details the recent blows to Israel’s propaganda and posits that Israel is beginning to face an endgame… Let’s hope…
The history of Israel is a very complex topic and I know this piece only scratches the surface in an attempt to answer the question “How did we get here?2, but I hope it gives food for thought and that the links will take anyone wanting to know more further along a search for truth and understanding. I will leave you with one final quote…
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Edmund Burke (in a letter addressed to Thomas Mercer).
Born in 1920, my mother was 19 when she joined the army for World War 2. Yet she had already had two phases in her life, growing up as one of six with a gamekeeper father who was bitter about lost opportunities following the First World War. His brother had emigrated to America before the war but couldn’t take my grandfather with him because he was under 16 and the family was put out at losing one potential bread-winner, let alone two. The brother said my Grandfather should enlist and that he would send money so that my Grandfather could join him after the war – which he did send the money, but the family spent it and my Grandfather had to become a gamekeeper instead of a teacher – his first choice, since with so many men killed and women having to support their parents, teaching became reserved for young women. This made my Grandfather bitter and he wouldn’t allow his children to do homework and advance themselves – instead, saying that they would go into domestic service at 14 – and that is what happened. It is sad that whatever social mobility and reduction in entitlement was brought about by WW 1, passed my Grandfather by in his disillusionment. Meanwhile, his brother in America put his upbringing on a farm to a different use, becoming a teacher at an agricultural college and marrying a Southern belle and setting his family on an upwardly mobile trajectory. So before the Second World War, my mother had had five years of domestic service, first as a maid and then after being taken at 16, to Morocco (or maybe Tunisia, she wasn’t sure) to assist in looking after a baby during a family holiday, she became a children’s nanny. My Mother had many stories about her time in domestic service but they are not for “the day that’s in it” VE Day – suffice to say that domestic service was hard to leave and the war offered the one way which could not be frowned upon and so she joined up. My mother quite quickly rose to be a Sergeant in the signaling corps, which for women, meant manning telephone switchboards and after working at a number of bases, she went to live and work on the island of Portland near Weymouth, where, in vast underground bunkers, the invasion was being planned. Living on Portland was as near to the front line as most women got, the island was a target for bombers and even fighters, given its strategic role and its nearness to German-occupied France. My mother told tales of having to grab her landladies children and dive for cover when a German fighter strafed the back gardens of their street and how a German bomber crashed in the High Street. The last time I took my mother to Weymouth before she died, on a beautiful sunny day with the beach thronged with holidaymakers, she pointed out a hotel where a German bomber, fleeing home after unsuccessfully reaching its mission target, loosed its bombs killing an entire wedding party that had just arrived at the station for the wedding feast. I grew up seeing my mother in tears on Remembrance Sunday, thinking of the six men, any one of whom she might have married, as well as all the others who never returned from other front lines, yet the poignancy of all that loss, and the realization of just how recent the war was, only a few years before I was born, was never stronger for me than on that sunny day in Weymouth. There were other stories from my mother’s war, the bullying Sergeants that she took on, the girls she had to protect from untoward attention, and the spy that she prevented from stealing secrets and who was caught and shot a few weeks later. Latterly, my mother decided not to repeat these stories about the war anymore. In the run-up to VE Day, I have heard other veterans say the opposite, they had never talked about it until recently but now felt that “it doesn’t matter anymore” and so have told their tales. Everybody had their own way of dealing with their memories in the aftermath of this traumatic but highly stimulating time. I often thought that our generation, the baby-boomers, had nothing remotely to compare with the traumas of that war – until now, when once again, literally the whole world has been turned upside down. Yet still, it is nothing like WW 2, unless you are on the front-line in a hospital, for most of us, this momentous time is about “staying at home”. It would be immoral to envy my parent’s generation for their experience of the war and yet the choices were clear for them, to literally fight a great evil – the warlike references to fighting the Covid 19 virus are a mere shadow of such events – yet the choices we face are far more complex – too complex for many people, including many of the politicians who are supposed to steer our ships. Many people just want it all to be over and things to get back to the “old” normal. I hope, in a positive way, that there is no return to rampant consumerism, unchecked, unconsidered planet-destroying growth. I hope it is the death of capitalism as we have known it – and I am very afraid that there is the possibility of the opposite happening – of those on the right using the crisis to entrench their power and mismanagement ever more firmly. So let us today, remember the sacrifices made in that other war, and the joy of it’s ending but let us not forget the long road to recovery that followed, not always fairly, and not shy away from the difficult choices that face us in our testing times.
Lying in bed this Saturday morning, I started checking my emails on the phone. There was an alert to a post by Deborah Weber over at Garden of Delights for the letter Y (part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge) – Yeppsen – the amount that can be held in two hands – an obsolete word as many of Deborah’s words have been, unusual, interesting words. Then it was over to an email chain from my school friends of 47 years ago and one of them mentioned panem et circenses (yes we were posh enough to study Latin) or in English – bread and circuses. Just to check I had translated it right and to see what it originally meant, I checked it out on Wikipedia which as well as attributing it to Juvenal’s “Satire X”, told me that the phrase is an example of a metonym. Well despite the posh-ish education, I had never heard of this so it was another link on Wikipedia to find out what that means! To explain, Wikipedia (last updated on 30th April 2020 so hot stuff!) had to examine and contrast Metonyms and Metaphors as well as touching on Synecdoches and Toponyms and even Metalepsis. You see how this internet surfing goes… Back to the meaning of Bread and Circuses – Juvenal was expressing disappointment that the mass of Roman citizens had ditched their republican ideals of taking their politics seriously and electing their, politicians, generals and officials – instead they fell for cheap bribes of grain (for bread) and circuses (entertainment). How little things have changed, we in the UK have a Prime Minister who made up the story about the European Union bureaucrats requiring straight bananas in future. He was working as journalist in Brussels and was too lazy to research real stories about the EU and later took us out of the EU – whilst in the US – well let me go no further down the critique of the political technique of distraction – you all know who I am talking about…
A depiction of Juvenal in the Nuremberg Chronicle, late 1400s.Wiki Commons
So what is a Metonym? Well, an example would be talking about The White House meaning, not the building itself, but the President and all his men and women in the West Wing who constitute that part of the US government. Now that is only part of this in-depth article in Wikipedia and if you are interested in linguistics and philosophy, then head over there pronto! I did read it all, and it was interesting to me even though I realized that I use metonymic phrases all the time without realizing it, but what I thought about it was a) you can use things without needing to understand the deep philosophical/linguistic issues and b) that this is the sort of stuff I bet Deborah Weber would love! So I decided to go and read Deborah’s About page where I learned that Deborah is a Spiritual Guide and Alternative Health practitioner. I find myself very torn by this because – as my stepdaughter has told me – I am a materialist. I prefer rationalist, but that does not mean I do not have a spiritual view of life either. My first blog, Ripple, from which I quoted on bread, yesterday, was named for my belief that we all emanate energy and effect into the world, and even after we die, that energy and effect carries on spreading out into the world. What you do in life, for better or worse, goes on and on so that even though I don’t believe in an afterlife, I do think that how you live your life is very important not just in a karmic sense within your lifetime, but in terms of what you leave behind, how you change the world. So I really like to describe myself as a Spiritual Humanist. I think I will do a whole post on this but for now I just want to say that there is much about Deborah as a blogger and health practitioner that I love and much that I find difficult such as Akashic Records. But hey! That’s okay, things don’t have to be binary, we can handle grey areas rather than mere black and white… So all this happened before I even got out of bed…
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