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E – Early Hours – flowers, Early Doors, and The Elephant in the Room…

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19th Century Music hall goers

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.

The opening of New Covent Garden from The Evening Standard

So now we come to “The Elephant in the Room”

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 digital collage in the Max Ernst style by seriykotik1970

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.

D – In Deep Water (Out of your Depth), Dead in the water, Doozy!

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Ludolf Backhuysen, An English Vessel and a Man-of-war in a Rough Sea off a Coast with Tall Cliffs,

There are many phrases used by sailors to describe the position of ships that also, often denote relative degrees of safety or jeopardy and In Deep Water is one of them. Given that the most dangerous things that can happen to a ship are those that happen close to the shore (land) you might imagine that In Deep Water might be a safe place to be but this expression means that, in the event of the ship sinking, there is no possibility of salvaging anything. After all, in extremis, one option to save the ship, or at least its crew and perhaps cargo, would be to run the ship aground or “beach” it, but if you are in deep water off, say, a rocky cliff, then beaching is not an option…. Other positional terms include In Deep Water has changed its meaning to be almost synonymous with Out of Your Depth,(when you are swimming and can no longer touch the bottom and thus stand)but “in deep water” still somehow retains the menace of destruction eg. “The boss wants to see you – you’re in deep water!”

https://ateliersartmuseesnationaux.fr/en/engraving/KG000206

Which segues nicely into “Dead in the Water” – a phrase that refers not to dead people but dead ships. Certainly, in a naval ship was dead in the water it would mean that it’s masts and spars and very likely it’s steering had been shot to pieces by cannon fire and that the ship cannot move with the wind and thus cannot manoeuvre – it is a sitting duck and any crew still standing are likewise vulnerable. However dead in the water could be applied to a ship which is completely becalmed but we shall return to that with the letter “I”.

A word I used in a reply to somebody made the post today because I had no idea where it originates – Doozy. I first encountered it in a short story by Kurt Vonnegut Junior, one of my favourite writers and it seems that Doozy is an American term. In the story, the government has determined that intelligence must be equal amongst all men – and since the lowest levels cannot be raised easily, those with high IQs must be brought down a peg or two (another one I will have to look up!) and so the husband of an unremarkable wife, intelligence wise, receives regular electric shocks to the brain, eliciting the sympathetic response from his wife “You poor love – I can tell that one was a doozy!” The word stuck in my brain and I began to use it, however, because of the context of the story, I assumed it to refer to very bad things. In fact, it means “The very best of its kind” whether that thing is good or bad. This site suggests the meaning is a corruption of Daisy which was used especially in the late 1800s as a slang term for someone or something considered the best. I’ll buy that…

There are no Cant languages beginning with “D” “in the Wikipedia article.

C – Cockney, Cant, Chip on your shoulder, Codswallop – Just weird…

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If you thought yesterday’s tales of Brass Monkeys, was weird, then the origin of the word (etymology) “Cockney” is probably the weirdest etymology of any word I have ever come across!

One of the Penguin 60s and a great introduction to the work of Margaret Visser

I first learned the story of the word Cockney or Cockeney, from the incomparable writer of prose – Margaret Visser. The cover reproduced above is from the great 60p Penguin book which contains extracts from two of her books including “Much Depends on Dinner” – a socio-historic account of what we eat and why we eat it. In the extract “Man’s Eye View” Margaret recounts how “when a hen produced a small, malformed egg, as sometimes happens at first laying, the unsuccessful object used to be called a ‘cock’s egg’ or ‘cockeney’ in early English. The word was often used of a foolish or spoilt child, the pride of its doting mother; and then by country people to put down soft and ignorant city-dwellers. The expression was taken over by Londoners and used with pride: it is the origin of the word Cockney.”

Margaret Visser is a sublime writer of prose and although much of her writing is about and around, food, I strongly recommend her “The Geometry of Love – Space. Time, Mystery, and Meaning in an Ordinary Church”

This embracing of a term that was meant to be insulting, is symptomatic of the East Enders (of London) – to consider themselves different (better) than others as is their development of Cockney Rhyming Slang. Linguists have several terms, all with slightly different meanings, for such linguistic phenomena –

Cant – which can be divided into Cryptolet, Argot, Pseudo-language, Secret Language or – and this is the best fit for Cockney Rhyming Slang – an Anti-language. According to Wikipedia Cant is “the ‘jargon’ or language of a group, often employed to exclude or mislead people outside the group” Anti-languages “borrow words from other languages, create unconventional compounds or use new suffixes for existing words”. Cockney Rhyming Slang works in a unique way, with a double layer of hiding the meaning. Confusing enough to say “Give us a butcher’s hook” when you mean “Give us a look”, but to those familiar with the phrase, it is not even necessary to say the whole phrase, just “Give us a butchers” hence the jump from butchers to look is made even more obscure! I urge you to read the full article on Cant because it is fascinating. Meanwhile, here are a few examples of Cockney Rhyming Slang beginning with C. “Can’t keep still!” = Treadmill (a form of hard labour punishment in 19C prisons). Crowded space = Suitcase – this conflates the rhyme with the fact that a suitcase can easily be stolen in a crowded space such as a railway station. And most definitely not PC by today’s terms “Cut and Carried” = Married – a wife would be cut off from the support of her original family and would instead be carried or provided for by her husband.

Since the Wikipedia article on Cant (language) provides a compendious and most excellent list of examples from around the world, I am going to include their links in each day’s post for all except the letters D,O,Q,U and W for which there are no examples. So to catch up to date – here are the A-C examples of Cant…

1739 Dockyard worker

With A Chip on your shoulder! – we are back in the world of sailors – or at least as close as the naval dockyards. Samuel Pepys, though more famous as a diarist, had a day job as the civil servant tasked with sorting out and rationalising the naval dockyards and although I know not whether the following custom can be ascribed to Pepys or not, it is certainly the kind of efficiency he might have instigated. So – during the construction of wooden ships, there is, necessarily a lot of waste wood – offcuts if you will. The workers in the yard were allowed to take these offcuts home for use as fuel – BUT – only if they measured less than a foot long, and these pieces of wood were referred to as “Chips”. At the dockyard gate stood an official charged with judging whether the chips were small enough to qualify and one can imagine that as with all positions of relative power, the system was open to corruption, favouritism and cronyism. So whilst all the dockyard workers might literally have had chips on their shoulders, the expression became used to describe one who did not get on well with the measurer of chips and who could not get away with any chip slightly over the limit… For a fuller account click here.

Codd-neck bottle. (2022, September 21). In Wikipedia.

Codswallop… Nowadays used as a term for rubbish or nonsense, the origin of the word is uncertain and several theories exist – I will let you judge…

Codd-neck bottle. (2022, September 21). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codd-neck_bottle

In 1872, soft-drink maker Hiram Codd of Camberwell, London, designed the bottle shown above which became known as a Codd Bottle. It was used to bottle carbonated soft drinks or fermented but non-alcoholic drinks such as ginger beer by filling the bottle whilst upside down and once full, the pressure of the co2 gas would force the marble in the neck against a rubber seal where the pressure would keep the bottle sealed. The BBC’s Antiques Road Show were presented with a perfectly intact Codds Bottle whose value they placed in the thousands of pounds due to rarity value. As they explained, children, on finding the bottles, knocked the tops of to get at the marble – hence the rarity. They also asserted that to open the bottle and pour the drink out, you had to hit or wallop the marble smartly and force it downwards – hence the codswallop! Other theories are that the word wallop was slang for “beer” and that beer drinkers disdained the non-alcoholic offerings such as ginger beer, as rubbish. Codding is an old word for joking, so somewhere in those ideas – codswallop emerged and lived on well beyond the life of the Codds Bottle, to mean rubbish. This illustrates how the original meaning of a word or phrase, can not simply be lost, but theories can multiply, and with the world-wide web, theories can spread – often without the rigorous referencing that might allow the truth, in so far as any historic truth can be known, to emerge.

B – The Bitter End, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, Brass monkeys, Butcher’s Bill, – Sailors’ terms

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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!

A to Z 2023 Theme Reveal – Words and Phrases we know the Usage of but Have Forgotten Their Origin…

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This is my fourth year of the A to Z Challenge and I am frantically trying to get posts written ahead of time – as I have promised myself each year apart from 2020 when I only discovered the Challenge on the first day and so had to pants it all the way through. Still, that was the year of lockdown and so there was a certain amount of time available! So here we are again…

It takes time to forget things – whether as an individual whose head becomes, eventually, too crammed to contain everything at the front of our minds, ready for use, or as a society, a group of individuals. At least with a group, there is less chance of forgetting things because we can utilise our collective memories – if one person is having a senior moment, perhaps another will have the thing, the word, or the phrase, to hand. Nevertheless, things do get forgotten, and language mutates so that the original sound and its meaning are lost – there is a Pub in Leeds, West Yorkshire, called “The Skyrack” and on its swinging picture sign (originally provided for those unable to read), there is a picture of a very large oak tree – something which shines no light on the meaning of “skyrack”. However, across the road is another pub called “The Shire Oak” and this reveals that “skyrack” is an ameliorated version of “Shire Oak” – the very large oak tree which once stood on this spot. Over time, the word has been run together and changed out of recognition.

Another way that the meaning of things gets lost, is because words and phrases get borrowed from one group of people to another, things that have an obvious utility at the time, but later, when the original group are no longer around, become obfuscated. We shall encounter a lot of words and phrases from the days of wooden sailing ships where sailors had many phrases that described their work – work conducted far away from their homelands and whilst the sailor’s object was not to disguise their meanings – why should they – but simply because they needed a large lexicon of their own special work terms. We shall encounter other phrases whose origins have been lost because the originally referred to practice has died out…

On the other hand, many groups of people have chosen or found it necessary to conceal their meanings from others – Cockneys, fairground workers, criminals and those persecuted for their race, class, gender or sexuality. Even children within a family may develop a whole language of their own – for fun or to keep their communications private and themselves safe. If you were in one such family and feel able to – please share in the comments…

And so I will not just be looking for the lost origins of words and phrases whose meanings we know and still use, but reflecting on the type of words, their original purpose and the scheme of the language they “hail” from, and right there is a word describing the way that sailors would call out to passing ships, out on the great expanses of the world’s oceans – where they “hail” from, what is their identity – that is what people most want to know about a passing stranger…

Post Script
I have been participating in a writing group led by Deborah Bayer of “Healers Write, Writers Heal” who is also participating in the A to Z Challenge 2023 and by chance, she shared a poem which is exactly about the modification of words and the development of secret languages in families. In the poem “Besayadoo” by Yalie Saweda Kamara, she describes sitting with her Grandmother, who herself talks in a patois English, and watching two boys, thug-like in appearance, give a tender touch and salutation as they part. Grandmother understands the gestures but cannot understand the word besayadoo, and the poet has to translate it as “Be Safe Dude!” at which the grandmother says that the boys are not the thugs they appear to be. You can read the poem over at The Slowdown – a blog which invites you to do just that, through poetry…

Tsundoku – an Aspirational list of books to read this year…

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In lieu of a list of New Year’s Resolutions, I have decided to publish a list of tsundoku, a Japanese word which means “the piles of books waiting to be read”. Of course, if I were to make a New Year’s Resolution, it would be to post more here and to prepare for the 2023 AtoZ Challenge well ahead of April! However – back to books!

I learned from the blog “Big Think“, that the writer Umberto Eco, a favourite of mine, had a personal library of some 30,000 books “When Eco hosted visitors, many would marvel at the size of his library and assumed it represented the host’s knowledge — which, make no mistake, was expansive. But a few savvy visitors realized the truth: Eco’s library wasn’t voluminous because he had read so much; it was voluminous because he desired to read so much more.“

It is in this spirit of aspiration that I share with you the list of books teetering on the edge of various bookshelves around the house waiting to be read. I blame the charity book table at my local CO-OP as well as the access to secondhand books at reasonable prices on the internet… So in no particular order:-

Beautiful Losers – Leonard Cohen

The Favourite Game – Leonard Cohen

The Eyre affair  – Jasper Fforde

South from Granada – Gerald Brenan 

The Atheists Guide to Christmas

Wolf Hall – Hilary Mantel

First we make the Beast Beautiful – Sarah Wilson

Atlas of Vanishing Places – Travis Elborough

A Mind to Murder PD James

This Too Shall Pass – Milena Busquets

Natives Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire – Akala

Siege – Geraint Jones

Land Rover s

the Story of the Car that Conquered the World – Ben Fogle

Kosovo War and Revenge – Tim Judah

The Shifting Realities of Philip K Dick

The Course of Love – Alain de Botton

On Love – Alain De Botton

Samarkand – Amin Maalouf

I Coriander Sally Gardner

On writers and writing Margaret Atwood

Midnight All Day – Hanif Qureishi 

Mostly Harmless – Douglas Adams

Gigi and the Cat – Colette

My Brilliant Friend – Elena Ferrante

Ecstasy – Irvine Welsh

Hellhole – Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson

Utopia Avenue – David Mitchell 

The Plot Against America – Philip Roth

An Instance of the Fingerpost Iain Pears

Right of Thirst – Frank Wheeler 

Dream Angus – Alexander McCall Smith

Winter in Madrid C.J. Sansom

Caribbean – James A Michener

The Fault in Our Stars – John Green

The Kappilan of Malta – Monsarrat

The Open Society and It’s Enemies – K. R. Popper

The Moor’s Last Sigh – Salman Rushdie

Blink – Malcolm Gladwell

History of the Rain – Niall Williams

Parable of the Talents – Octavia Butler

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal – Jeanette Winterson

The Wild Silence – Raynor Winn

The Lamplighters – Emma Stonex

My Name is Lucy Barton – Elizabeth Strout 

No One Writes to the Colonel – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Chameleon – Samuel Fisher

Anil’s Ghost – Michael Ondaatje

Untouchable – Mulk Raj Anand

Her Fearful Symmetry – Audrey Niffenegger

Not the End of the World – Kate Atkinson

Cowboys and Indians – Joseph O’Connor

The Paper Man – William Golding

The Visible World – Mark Slouka

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher – Hilary Mantel

The Late Bourgeois World – Nadine Gordimer

Hag-seed – Margaret Atwood

Codex – Lev Grossman

Wilderness Tips – Margaret Atwood

A Little Life Hanya Yanagihara

Sapiens – Yuval Noah Harari

The White Tiger – Aravind Adiga

Absolute Friends – John le Carre

Love and Other Impossible Pursuits – Ayelet Waldman

Sex Wars – Marge Piercy

The Geometry of Love – Margaret Visser

Stay – Nicola Griffith

Whistling for the Elephants – Sandi Toksvig

The Memory Keepers Daughter – Kim Edwards

Land Rover – Ben Fogle

Mantel Pieces – Hilary Mantel

The Dust That Falls From Dreams – Louis De Bernieres 

Who knows how many I will read before this time next year…

Happy New Year to anyone who stumbles in here!

What if Chess were about Love?

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What if Chess, instead of being a metaphorical game of war and strategy, were instead, the pursuit of love? Instead of trying to get with the King in order to kill him, moving to the same square by the opposite Queen – or King was the attainment of bliss. Queens may rush about the board whilst hubby is stuck at the office, out bringing home the bacon and should it prove that they swing the other way, then they may be cloaked in the invisibility that Queen Victoria’s disbelief in sapphic love affords them and the game may be quickly concluded if both parties are willing. Kings, on the other hand, are slow movers when it comes to finding lasting love, for all their possible willingness to philander and play the field, whether hetero- or homosexual, a lasting love is hard to find…

What of the other pieces on the Chessboard – who might they represent and how might they come into play? The pawns are clearly children – they are small and can only take correspondingly small steps – unless they reach the other side of the board, by which time they are suddenly all grown up and can be whoever they want to be! They may be the children of the King and Queen or perhaps nephews and nieces yet despite their diminutive stature they may have important roles in the game – how many friendships have begun over the heads of children at the school gate? Children’s parties, babysitting, children as go-betweens – many are the opportunities afforded by children to adults in the pursuit of love…

who is to say that a King or Queen cannot use their partner’s bestie to further their cause

Then there are the other adults divided, according to whose shoulder they stand at, King or Queen, into his or her friends and relations. Bishops are the moralists – always ready to jump in and pour cold water on one whose fires have been lit by lust for another but even they, with their decisive, diagonal strikes, can be manipulated into furthering their besties, nephew or nieces, son’ or daughter’s cause. Rooks are those stalwart friends whose loyalty can always be relied on, even if their movement is limited to left and right and who is to say that a King or Queen cannot use their partner’s bestie to further their cause – after all, they are on the same side, aren’t they? The Knight though, is the real best friend, for even though their moves are complicated, they offer great utility and are the ones to watch out for once sent forth to do the King or Queen’s bidding.

Whether you frame the game in terms of High School trysts ( a whole cast of friends, besties and teachers), singletons struggling to find The One, extramarital hanky-panky or the ongoing search for love and companionship in widowhood, Chess could be re-imagined as the Game of Love not War – you may never look at a Chess piece the same way ever again…

Photo by Josh Cris Gayle on Unsplash

Some Grand Master games worth studying:-
Shakespeare – Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew
Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby
Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice
Boris Pasternak – Dr Zhivago
John Steinbeck – Of Mice and Men
Charlotte Bronte – Jane Eyre
Nicola Griffith – Ammonite

A2Z 2022 Challenge – The Roadtrip…

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If you saw my Theme Reveal for the A2Z Challenge 2022, then you will know that I wrote 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 kept 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…

Another Road Trip – I have chosen one post for the sign-up list and posted my first Road Trip Review! There were a couple of posts that didn’t get much attention – the post that garnered no comments and perhaps no visitors, was Sesame, Steamers and Supply Chains… – granted it was quite short, but at least it made me, make a new batch of Gomasio… Chorizo – as an ingredient – Not Going the Whole Hog… was also one that didn’t get much love despite the splendid pun in the title if I do say so myself…But when I came to try and choose a favourite that I would like people to go to, I found it really hard, I felt that they all succeeded equally in the goals I set myself and they all received a similar level of interest – perhaps Rhubarb and the Return of Mercantilism… for building a story of economic theory around a delicious fruit and with some beautiful photos garnered from the web, or perhaps Olives, and Overeating… because I was able to use some of my own photos (What are we to do with the gigabytes of pictures we take?) – In the end I decided on Rhubarb, but if you missed any or want to revisit, here is a list of all the 26 posts – and as Julia Child famously said at the end of each show – “Bon appetit!”

Apples – as an ingredient, and Analogues of Meat…

Bread – in Geopolitics, in Vegetarianism and – as an ingredient…

Chorizo – as an ingredient – Not Going the Whole Hog…

Dates, Dehydrators and the Death of Globalism…

Eggs, Aquafaba and Equipment

Fish and Freezers on the road to less meat…

Ginger and Grow Your Own…

Hominy and other processed grains habituating Healthfood Shops…

Idaho Potatoes, Ice Cream and Inventiveness…

Jerusalem Artichokes, Juicing and Hide the Vegetables…

Kimchi, Kefir, Kombucha and Killing it in the Kitchen…

Lemons and Land Use…

Mangos, Miso and Mirowaves…

Nuts and “Nature” Naming…

Olives, and Overeating…

Persimmons, Pulses and Pressure Cookers…

Quinces and Questioning …

Rhubarb and the Return of Mercantilism…

Sesame, Steamers and Supply Chains…

Tofu, Tomatoes and Type 2 Diabetes…

Urid Dal, Umeboshi and You (pronounced U)…

Vegetarians to Carnivores – the whole spectrum…

Water – the Vital Ingredient…

Xigua and Xouba…

Yoghurt and Self-Preservation…

Zucchini, Spiralising, and Eating Flowers…

The A2Z Challenge 2022 Reflections Post…

P.S. I will be posting my own form of Road Trip – reviews of sites I will be visiting over the coming months – if you are reviewed, I will let you know in a comment on your site… The first of these is up now:- A2Z 2022 Challenge – Road Trip Reviews 1…

A2Z 2022 Challenge – Road Trip Reviews 1…

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For my own version of the Road Trip that follows the A2Z Challenge each year, I like to visit other blogs and then post a review of several together – here goes…

Each Year I have participated, I have had some commenters from India which is always a thrill because it feels like I am truly part of a global village and not just a US/UK English speaking bubble! This year there were three new readers, and in her “W” post, Afshan Shaik revealed why that was.

We created a whatsapp group just for 2022 A to Z challenge, and the group is a backbone to me whenever I feel like quitting the challenge. We pushed each other and finally have reached the last leg of the challenge. The group helped me with ideas and boosted me when I felt the heat of challenge. I am voice typing most of my posts of the last leg of challenge due to my ailments and the group is the only reason – I am able to continue the challenge. Our group members are:

 Deepa – https://fictionpies.com/

 Anuradha – https://momandideas.com/

 Aparna – https://prernanayak.blogspot.com/

 Afshan – http://afshan-shaik.blogspot.com/

 Renu Sethi – http://day-to-daystories.blogspot.com

 Jayashree – http://pagesfromjayashree.blogspot.com

 Ranjana – https://reflection-by-ranjana.blogspot.com/

So three of this list regularly came to visit, comment and contribute ideas and recipes so I thought I would start my road trip by properly visiting these friends to a depth I did not manage during the challenge due to having to pants most of the posts…

Afshan Shaik whose blog is The Pensive, was a frequent visitor and it was from her post on “What’s happening on WhatsApp?”, that I learned of the above Whatsapp group and realised that I knew several of the names. Now some bloggers tell you about their lives and yet do not succeed in conveying who they are as a person – Afshan is not one of those – whether she is writing about “covidiots”, Indian politics, the problems with trying to feed her beloved daughter or the nature of blogging, you are being treated to Afshan’s personality and good humour, her passions and the things that make her angry. Afshan has a maid, which for people in the UK, is a luxury reserved for the very rich, but I guess in India, it is a way of trickling down earnings to people who need it and is quite normal for many people in India. Interesting then to read of Afshan’s having to take up her maid’s duties – one senses a greater appreciation of the maid, during the lockdown, and on the other hand, her amazement at just how stratified the servants were in Downton Abbey, which she reviews for “D”. I urge you to make the acquaintance of this lively minded young mother…

Jayashree of Jayashree Writes, offers us a guide to her favourite (or whatever fits the letter of the day) Indian food. A software writer, she’s lived in America and Singapore since venturing from her native India, which has no doubt cross-pollinated her cooking! Certainly, she has embraced Tofu since living in Singapore, but the dishes she offers in the A2Z are classic and not too stretching in either skills or ingredients, so most people could enjoy them – I know I am going to…

I had a comment from Anuradha of “Mom and Ideas” on my very first post of the A2Z Challenge and I naturally returned the visit where I found a post about the difficulties of raising a three-year-old – however, from the “B” post onwards, her challenge took a completely different direction – a tale, written on the fly, about a woman discovering she has a superpower… No this wasn’t the wish fulfilment fantasy of a power to quell unruly three-year-olds, but I won’t spoil it by telling you what it is – go check it out… Plus Anuradha manages to start each paragraph with the letter of the day – so much for the slur that women’s brains are addled by children – not in this blog!

Deepa, in her “Fiction Pies” blog, has generated a piece of flash fiction each day – starting with “Animal Farm” and going through to “Zeitun” by way of “Tintin” at the letter “T”! As well as the clever fiction – Animal Farm was a riff on Putin’s war in Ukraine – there is a little review of each book in case you are not familiar with it. I hadn’t heard of Zeitun but will be purchasing it for sure… Deepa was the one who thought up the WhatsApp group which supported this group of friends and how lovely must that have been!

Aparna, at Life of a Woman, a blog name which could easily be a movie title, writes film reviews of the films that she loves and which sustain her as she lives the life of a carer to her daughter, hence, like Afshan, Aparna tells us about herself through her emotional and personal reviews of films. This does not mean that her reviews are only from her point of view and that others might experience them differently, but rather that the reviews tell us about both the films and Aparna, and as I said above, for me, this is what makes a great blog, the opening up and reaching out to others from our own small corners of this tenuous space, the internet…

Renu Sethi of Inner workings of an (in)sane mind, like Aparna, lives in Mumbai but she loves to travel and to photograph her world (hrer other blog is World through my eyes ). Although, like a butterfly, she darted off without completing the Challenge, still like a butterfly, she returned to carry on though it may be an on-off thing, but why not, so many of us complete the madness of April only to collapse in exhaustion until the following April – if having some letters to cover helps Renu continue blogging – good for her. As to her writing, anyone who can begin a post with “Raising a husband can be an exhausting task”…

Ranjana whose blog Expressions (subtitled reflection-by-ranjana), boldly chose to write all her posts as rhyming couplets. This (to me) could be irritating, but giving a fair chance, I found myself enchanted by the content, the manner of it’s telling and the cleverness of the rhyming. Try T#Trickledown Theory… Ranjana is not one of those who dry up after the Challenge and I have enjoyed her subsequent posts too…

Between them, these seven bloggers have turned out a prodigious output during the course of 2022 and if this is the result of supporting each other in a WhatsApp group – then we should all be so lucky to have such a group of friends…

The A2Z Challenge 2022 Reflections Post…

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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…

That is the paragraph I introduced each post with as I set out to share knowledge, ideas and recipes and to find a receptive readership – have I succeeded?

I had about ten days’ worth of posts pre-written but I soon ended up pantsing it – consequently, the first couple of posts Apples and especially Bread, were longer and the posts got shorter as time went on. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because if readers, and that means almost exclusively, other A2Zers, are trying to write their own posts, reply to comments and visit and comment on other people’s sites, then they will not all be up for War and Peace. Certainly I struggle to keep on top of all those things and I intend to revisit a number of sites as well as prospect the big list for new treasures on the Roadtrip! So I do put a lot of links in my posts, partly because there is no point simply repeating what someone else has said better, and in greater length and breadth elsewhere; and secondly, whilst I included some of my own recipes, where I needed to use someone else’s recipe, I would rather send people there directly rather than copy or paraphrase.

As always on the AtoZ, I have made some new friends and had visits from old ones, each day, some comments would come from a group of Indian ladies who had a Whatsapp group going to support and encourage each other on the challenge but which meant that they also visited some same sites – like mine and shared some great comments revealing the ways in which their world is both different and similar. Later in the day, the American commenters would appear whilst Europeans – more or less in the same time zone, could appear at any time. Having switched to WordPress last year, my stats tell me that I had 1,264 page views in April – up 660% on the previous month although this just reflects that A2Z is the highlight of my blogging, and once the Roadtrip is done for me, I am a right blogging slacker! The US came top of the league of visitors, followed by India, and then the UK – where I live. Looking at the comments on some other blogs, I would say that my numbers are quite modest – I guess those people blog all year round, but I have been happy with the people who came and came again and seemed to enjoy…

The most popular post was Jerusalem Artichokes, Juicing and Hide the Vegetables and it caused a huge spike in hits to the site for reasons I am not sure of, the number of comments though was average although to ever say that comments were ever average sounds all wrong – I have loved the comments and many of them have been appreciative and I shared some of my favourites in my V post – Vegetarians to Carnivores – the Whole Spectrum…

Reflecting more personally, I have realised that I have been encouraging something in others that I really want for myself! I am diabetic Type 2 and really need to lose some weight plus I am increasingly drawn to vegetarianism on ethical and economic grounds ( no good reason to eat other animals and meat is too great a cost on the planet compared to vegetables) but this poses a dilemma… I just received an invitation to talk with a dietician about going on a low-carb diet to try and bring my consistently, slightly too high blood sugar levels down. What they are suggesting is the Keto diet or if too faint-hearted for that, then what sounds like the stage four Atkins diet. I have been trying to move myself in this direction over the last few months anyway, but writing the A2Z Challenge has focused me on practising more of what I preach! But like many complex issues, nothing is black and white, if I do the low-carb thing, I am going to eat more meat than I usually do, because although I am already sourcing as many plant-based proteins as possible, it is easier to achieve using meat. It takes more energy to consume bacon and eggs than you get from it! Hopefully, if I lose the weight and the blood-sugar levels come down, then I can move into a more permanent vegetarian regime.

What else have I revealed about myself in the last month, well I had my own restaurant briefly, followed by a frozen yoghurt shop. I like writing ( I finished the book I was writing in last year’s A2Z), I like photography and used some of my own pictures in the odd post. If I could have dinner with any one person alive or from the past, I think you can guess that it would be Elizabeth David – as long as I could appear at the same age as her and look my best – swoon… I have managed to get a few more literary references in (because Elizabeth David is cooking literature, not merely cookbooks!) there is a verse from Andrew Marvell and a quote from Don Marquis’ wonderful cockroach who is the reincarnation of a free-verse poet.

As to the A2Z team, they have been great as ever and I loved the graphics – Yayyy Angela.

! I would like to do a guest post on my daily posting process because most people know what they are doing, but two years ago when I was a newbie, I learned a lot from certain people – it’s easy to forget and assume they know their way around. It would cover getting and sizing pictures and the importance of pictures, promoting your post each day and the various means of doing that, and general words of encouragement to share whatever it is you’re into – just saying…

Have I missed anything out? Well, I am sure I will remember some other favourite recipes so I will do the odd food post, and if you would like to be notified about those in particular, then let me know in the comments. I did mean to say in the post that included microwaves, that the Welsh language, an ancient and venerable language as it is, contained no word for the new-fangled microwave contraption – so they christened it the Popdy-Ping!

Will I be back next year – you betcha! I am thinking that since I enjoyed posing about one of my passions, I should perhaps write about music, or the origin of certain phrases, or art or…

And on that note…

Hope to see you on the Roadtrip!