British Food, Part III: Sometimes Having Flavours Is a Mistake

British Food, Part II: Things That Don't Belong in Cans

British Food, Part I: Ways That Nobody Should Eat Meat

Medieval Sculptors Who Never Saw a Lion

The weather's been heating up, so we've temporarily abandoned the British Museum for the Victoria & Albert, which has a lovely wading pool in the middle to cool your feet in. There's a Grace Kelly exhibition on right now, which seems to have attracted an alarming number of perfectly groomed women in designer clothes, but we didn't let that stop us. They rarely paddle in the pool.

While the British Museum maintains a dignified pretense of Documenting Highah Culchah, the V&A makes no bones about what its collection really is: loot. Pages cut out of sacred books, ornamental corners knocked off palace staircases, tomb memorials packed up and shipped oceans away from the bones they were meant to honour – it's the accumulated booty of a global empire.

The beauty of getting all this stuff in one place, however, is that one has the opportunity to make quick comparisons. My eighteenth-century predecessors had to make the Grand Tour to get a look at Western medieval church sculpture. I polished it off in a forty-minute stroll.

I was interested to note that one can pretty well mark the date that European sculptors first got a real lion to look at. Prior to about 1500, anything with four legs and a beard is probably a lion, no matter what it actually resembles. I collected a good many photos of this menagerie, but I wasn't quite sure what to do with all of them when I got home. So I downloaded them to my favorite lol-cat site (icanhascheezburger.com) and made them all into lol-lions. Here they are.









As Mike points out, I'm always at least two years behind the latest meme. Luckily, he seems to find that charming.

Lessons I Learned at the British Museum

One of the many delights of our suite here is that it’s only a hop, skip, and jump away from the British Museum. We’re getting wily about popping in on weekday mornings, when bus tours and school groups usually aren’t present. We take a stroll through one of the galleries, and slip away when giddy teens and South Koreans begin to gather around the Rosetta Stone. Here’s what I’ve learned so far.

1. Religious iconography consists largely of someone having a very, very bad day. What with starving Buddhas, flayed saints, and mummified kittens, religious artifacts always seem to involve a horrorshow. We stayed away from the temporary exhibition focusing on Mayan ritual bloodletting, and from the macabre reproductions of Bronze Age funerals, but we failed to notice in time that the otherwise peaceful classical marbles included this depiction of Mithras slaying a bull. It’s a fascinating thing, in a grisly way. While Mithras is giving the poor beast what-for with a knife and a couple of fingers up the nose, a dog is tearing at its shoulder, and a snake is biting it, and (if you look closely) a large scorpion has got its testicles in both claws and is pinching for all it’s worth.

2. If you want to get the best work out of an artist, commission a portrait of something good to eat. This seems to be a truth that transcends all ages and cultures. Representations of objects and people may be crude or stylized, but show an artist a cow, and the results are always beautifully detailed and naturalistic. The Egyptian nobleman in a tomb painting may be shown in stiff profile, but the geese will be in action poses, and the hares will be complete down to the last whisker. Etruscan terracottas may lack facial features even when they depict the gods, but a sheep will have every curl in its fleece carefully fashioned, and a smile carved on its snout. I hypothesize from this that the status and income of artists has always been pretty much what it is now.

3. The history of Europe consists of people burying things to keep them away from other people. Honestly, if it weren't for hoards, we wouldn't know anything about the West prior to the invention of banking. Medieval people, with their usual directness, cut to the chase and stuck everything they had in a chest of some sort, so it could be buried at will: "Bob, we need a saint. Can you get us one?"

"I've got nine bits of Saint Eustace right here."

"Brilliant. Put them in a box, will you? You never know when you'll have Danes. And this time, make sure it looks like Eustace, will you? That one of Saint Agnes with her breasts off made everyone think she was holding a plate of bread."

True story. Take my advice, and avoid the religious antiquities.

The Doors of London

Every quarter hour, from our rented suite in Camden Town, we hear the bells striking at St. Pancras New Church. During our first few days here, I was ill-informed enough in both physics and geography to believe that I was hearing Big Ben. Not so. We are, however, hearing the same tune: Westminster Chimes – or, as it’s known locally, “the Bongs.” St. Pancras is a ghastly looking place, its Portland stone facings permanently stained by exhaust and its early Victorian imitation-classical architecture looking about as reverent as a piss in the font. Why is an edifice completed in 1822 called the “New Church,” you ask? Because St. Pancras Old Church, originally built in the Year of Our Lord 314, sits just down the way. By the Mary Wollstonecraft memorial in its churchyard, Percy Shelley and the author of Frankenstein once planned their scandalous elopement.

This is the kind of historical experience I’ve been having in London: so much past crammed into every corner, overlaid, overlapped, combined, confused, and/or integrated – the resemblance to a parish jumble sale militates against a sustained sense of wonder. One simply loses track. Stan, for example, had a bit of a moment at the British Museum this afternoon, beside the skull of an ichthyosaur. “Bought by the Trustees in 1821? My gosh, that’s an awfully long time ago. Oh – wait...”

It’s been fairly easy, though, to forgive myself this apparent inability to take London seriously. And having done so, I’m free to enjoy whatever bits of the city’s history take my fancy. I’m currently very interested in the doors of our building. No two are alike. Some open to the right, some to the left, and some have two narrow leaves and open in the middle. Some have doorknobs in the centre, some have no doorknobs at all. All have a variety of keyholes (placed anywhere from knee height to eye level), and at least one of these will require a skeleton key. The array of colours is kaleidoscopic, and the variety of doorknockers, hallucinatory. This is what happens when you have about a century and half to personalize things.

The British mania for gardening has also left its mark on the building. The garbage bins in the courtyard rest under a bower of ivy, roses, and climbing hydrangea. The roof is a paradise of container gardens, some of them so cleverly planted that the pots are invisible. Even in this wet climate, it must take an impressive amount of hand-watering to sustain all these flowers and shrubs.

For real horticultural loopy-loos, however, one must visit the Hampton Court Flower Show, which is currently underway about an hour and a half from here. As part of Stan’s London conference, we were offered a chance to visit the Show as an excursion. I kiboshed the idea, conjecturing that a couple of hours in the blazing sun among blue-haired old ladies and their prize rhododendrons would finish Stan off completely. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The BBC has running coverage of the Show, and he's fascinated by it. There are water gardens, spice gardens, historical gardens, and Girl Guide gardens, and the gardeners themselves are maestros of the horticultural world. One man has been cross-pollinating clematis plants – just clematis plants – since he was sixteen years old. This year, he's introducing a clematis that doesn’t climb. We might end up seeing the damn Show after all.

For the record, the suite we’re renting is in Sandwich House, on Sandwich Street. I assume the name commemorates the famed John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich (better known to his many lowlife London acquaintances as “Jemmy Twitcher”) who allegedly invented the eponymous food sometime in the eighteenth century, because he was too busy gambling to eat dinner. Like its namesake, Sandwich House is a bit off the square – long exposure to weather and a complete lack of heat expansion joints has cracked the cement of the stairs and walkways, and some of the embedded steel beams have rusted or declined. A chartered surveyor tucked a letter through our door a while ago, explaining the long and complicated set of procedures necessary for getting the structure's loads distributed properly again; it made me sympathize for the first time with people who want to tear down all the heritage buildings and start over with condos and box stores. At any rate, we opened our door yesterday to find a structural engineer with a piece of blue chalk and a radar gun inspecting beams in our wall. Here are the tell-tale signs that your building might have structural engineers:

Jelly Babies

Years ago, we were in London with the kids at a performance of Phantom of the Opera, and Mike and Marley came back from intermission with (among other spoils of war) a small plastic bag full of soft candies. These candies were so odd in shape, texture, and flavour that neither child would eat them, and they ended up, as people’s unwanted leftovers so often do, in Stan’s possession.

He has been looking for more ever since. He absolutely loved them. No other sweet – not licorice toffees, not Twizzlers, not Popeye candy cigarettes – has ever pleased the Ruecker palate more than the weird gummies from the staircase concession stand at Her Majesty’s Theatre. As the original bag had no label on it, his search has involved a long sampling of unlikely confectionary items – most of which, I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot cattle prod. Alas, to no avail.

The key to the mystery was finally provided by a BBC quiz show which Maryanne got us hooked on. On an episode of QI, the host, Stephen Fry, posed a question about a “sweetie” popular in the UK. He passed around bowls of samples to the panelists. “That’s it!” cried Stan. “That’s the candy.” And our first point of business in London became the location and purchase of “jelly babies.”

The jelly baby is not a “gummy” per se, but a soft fruit candy with a powdery white coating. (“What is this stuff on them, anyway?” a panelist asked. “Cocaine,” rapped back Fry.) They have an unheimlich shape, like a mummified Cupid, and according to QI, you can tell whether a woman has children by watching how she eats them. Childless women tend not to bite the candy’s head off, while mothers, apparently, have no scruples about mere confectionary decapitations – having, one assumes, already resisted the urge to eat their own young in the flesh.

In any case, jelly babies are readily available here, and Stan has been on a bender with them since we arrived. “What is it you actually like about these ghastly, horrid, beastly things?” I asked. Stan got a far-away look.

“They have a surface that’s slightly harder than the interior,” he said slowly, gazing out the window.

“And...?”

“It –” His eyes, with a limpid look, seemed to get even bluer, and the shadow of an unwilling smile just touched the corners of his mouth. “– yields slightly to your tooth.”

So there, such as it is, you have it.

Iceland Air

I was very excited about our stopover in Reykjavik on the way to London. Iceland is, of course, the most literate country on earth. Its libraries’ shelves are usually about two-thirds empty, because so many volumes are in circulation. Every Christmas, Icelanders buy enough books to supply three to every man, woman, and child on the island. They have the highest per-capita number of artists and writers in the world. All this, in a country where the prime minister still lists her number in the phone book. I expected great things.

The flight itself, on Iceland Air, was educational. Instead of polyester flaps on the headrests, the seats had squares of cream-coloured leather, elegantly embroidered with useful tips on Icelandic life and language. Take care, for example, not to confuse the noun form of the word “love” (àst) with its verb form, or you might end up saying, “I ate you." The in-flight entertainment included similar tid-bits, informing us that two-thirds of the Icelandic population believe in elves, and that the national dish is cured shark-flesh.

The flight crew were all flaxen women with flat cheekbones, who seemed perfectly capable of killing any of us with a thumb, if necessary; the head attendant, Helga, was a strapping Juno with a pillbox hat. Communication with the passengers was mostly in Icelandic, in which delightful language, flight announcements are tilkynningen and cosmetics are snyrtivòrur. English translations were also provided, but tended to contain unhelpful errors. One instruction concerning lifevests, for example, suggested that we securely fasten our seatbelts around them. I was also a bit disappointed to discover that the breakfast did not include many kinds of herring, and that swan-shaped cocktail dresses were not included in the airline’s dutyfree catalogue.

Our entire experience on the ground in Reykjavik consisted of a half-hour gate delay, followed by a dash through the airport to catch our waiting connection flight. As gate delays go, however, I’ve never had a better. It was just dawn, and the fields around the runway were clustered with blossoming lupines – so many, that the eye lost the green of the leaves with distance, and saw only a luxuriant blanket of mauve blooms. Snow buntings burst out of the flowers to loop and zoom and generally behave like drunk stunt pilots. On the horizon, the marshland flats gave way to low, black mountains and a sky of shining mist.

I’ve since discovered that wild lupines aren’t native to Iceland; they were recently imported from Alaska to help rehabilitate lowland areas affected by deforestation. Lupines are good ground cover for erosion-prone land, and fix nitrogen in the soil to boot, but they’ve taken over so completely that botanists now fear for the native lichens and mosses which were still surviving among the tussocks and rocks. Only in Iceland do serious environmental threats come with a faint, sweet scent, and delicately patterned white-and-purple petals.

Le Forum

It’s easy for me to remember the date of my first visit to Montréal, because glaziers were still replacing store windows on Boulevard Ste. Catherine. After a hard-fought Cup victory for Les Habs, fans had poured out of the Forum and rioted down the street, throwing bottles and looting stores. Two years later, police were still picking up miscreants based on the night’s security footage.

Since then, a new facility has replaced the Forum, which now houses a multiplex movie theatre and a number of chain stores and restaurants. A small section of the arena’s famously rock-hard seating still stands, in case any old-timer wants to sit there with his memories, and perhaps fling a nostalgic toe-rubber onto the mall floor, where young men practice breakdancing and couples neck surreptitiously while waiting for their showtimes. A good deal of hockey memorabilia has also been left in place, though one has to thread the long walk to the theatre bathrooms to see most of it. The best part features team photos of the Canadiens, going right back to the early days when their sweaters had just begun to sport a capital C, and players had names like Newsy Lalonde and Sprague Cleghorn. The men of the team’s glory years seem surprisingly old compared to today’s highly honed youngsters, and one can trace, from year to year, the development of gap-teeth and L-shaped noses. In those helmetless days, you could always pick the goalie out of a line-up.

And there, of course, was the Rocket, his little black eyes shining with mischief and his grin trying hard to hide itself, as though the priest might still give him a whack with the yardstick if he saw. His brother, Maurice Richard, was once interviewed by the CBC, and the journalist, after eliciting some recollections of Rocket’s early days, asked him to compare old-school hockey with the modern game: “Do you think Rocket could still score fifty goals in a season now? With hockey the way it is?”

“Non,” Maurice answered flatly. "More like thirty, maybe."

“You really think the game has gotten that much harder?”

“Wahll, you know,” he drawled, “he’s nearly seventy...”