Americanisation

Anyone who has a blog with Google "Blogger" can investigate their vital statistics. This is something that I do from time to time. In fact, today's post builds on a similar blogpost I published back in November of last year.

As you know, this blog is churned out lovingly transmitted from England's premier county - Yorkshire. One would expect that most Yorkshire Pudding visitors might hail from The United Kingdom and indeed for the first ten years of this humble blog's existence that was always the case. However, in the past twelve months American visitors have very much been in the ascendancy. Last month there were 4850 visitors from The United Kingdom but 9726 from The United States. Double the number of British visitors.

As I admitted last November, I am an unashamed Americophile and this remains the case in spite of Trump, in spite of school shootings, in spite of climate change deniers, in spite of Walmart and Bible bashers and the huge divide between rich and poor. I love America and recall with great affection the happy times I have spent there. America is such a big country with so many facets, so much variety, so many fine people. Forget the stereotypes.

It is easy to think of Jennifer in her South Carolina home, tapping away at her keyboard waiting for "The Fish Guy" to return and it is easy to think of Mr Brague in his neat Georgia house reading his favoured blogs and writing his erudite comments while replying to Ellie in the kitchen - "I'll be through soon honey!" And it remains easy to think of Jan Blawat in Sloughhouse, California, raising her prize poultry and fiercely maintaining her independence.

But that's just three of the 9726 Americans. What about the others? The ones who never comment.

A big shout out to Hank in Melville, Montana and all the guys and gals who get down to "Bill's Place" on a Saturday night. Hank has got a cabin by Sweet Grass Creek where he lives with his dog Ronald and enough guns to overthrow a banana republic. Life has been hard for Hank since Judy left him and since ranching in central Montana fell upon hard times. Hi there Hank! How ye doin' buddy?

WD Ranch, Montana where Hank used to work

And another huge "hello" to Kelly-Ann Schwartz  in Red Hook, Brooklyn where she shares a spacious post-industrial warehouse apartment with her partner. Kelly-Ann works in upper Manhattan at an advertising agency, servicing various Chinese clients including Huawei. After a long session on the treadmill at her local gym, she likes nothing better than a large glass of Chardonnay and a visit to "Yorkshire Pudding" on her tablet. Hiya Kelly-Ann! Thanks for your support babe!

Down in Miami Beach most weekends, tiny fingers move hesitantly over a keyboard. They belong to a Scottish American who happens to be the most powerful man in the world. Enduring a stressful workaday existence in the full glare of the world's media, DJ fires out a few angry tweets before settling down to peruse his favourite blogs. "Yorkshire Pudding" takes him away from daily pressures even though he doesn't understand many of the big words. Hello DJ my friend! Take it easy old man!

With all of you American visitors, I am now considering dressing like the average American guy - leather cowboy boots, silver spurs, a stetson hat, chequered shirt and Levi jeans. Does anybody know where I can purchase chewing tobacco? I may also consider writing "sidewalk" when I mean "pavement" or "footpath" - and "trunk" when I really mean "boot" with reference  to cars.

God Bless America!

Bottle

Back in September of last year I found an old bottle on the dried up bed of a depleted reservoir. I blogged about it here.

On Thursday, as I squelched through soft ground and mud to get my pictures of those arum lilies, I spotted another old bottle. It was just lying there, half-submerged in the boggy ground. I picked it up and brought it home.

Yesterday I cleaned it up with hot, soapy water. I was delighted with what emerged - a beautiful old green-tinged scotch whisky bottle. The glass is attractively imperfect. Lord knows how long the bottle had been lying there close to the arum lilies. It is not a place where people would often go so the bottle may have lain in that location for up to a hundred years.

You may perhaps have heard of the scotch whisky brand - Johnnie Walker. Well, before that name was adopted that particular fiery amber liquid was called  "Walker's Kilmarnock Whisky" - Kilmarnock being a town in Ayrshire, Scotland. 

In the 1860's, the Walker family had the bright idea of using square bottles to assist in the storage and transportation of their whisky. Those bottles were mass-produced using cheap glass manufacturing processes. These green-tinged  bottles persisted for at least sixty years so I suspect that the bottle I found  was possibly thrown down in the 1920's.

Who discarded it? Perhaps a drunkard who had been drowning his sorrows or a pre-war toff who had been partying in nearby Whirlow Brook Hall. We will never know for those imagined whisky drinkers are already dead.

Glass production methods were much improved by the 1930's  and besides by then Walker's Kilmarnock Whisky was  known as "Johnnie Walker" with the famous striding man on the label.

The base of  my new bottle

Veganity

Shirley spotted this Sheffield public bus down at Pond Street Bus Terminus. She snapped  it on her phone. "Lose Your Veganity" is a clever slogan for BOSH! Of course it is a little bit naughty but essentially it is saying - try vegan cooking with the help of "Bish Bash BOSH!" You can see the front cover of the book below the slogan.

Down in London, six red buses are currently displaying identical advertising. Just the other day, on Twitter, someone posted this picture of The Number 13 on its morning route:-

Meantime your genial blog correspondent has been visited by an old and most unpleasant acquaintance called Gordon Gout. He first came to me in January 2005 and in the intervening fourteen years there have been intermittent visits connected with the chemistry of my body. Often months have gone by without a single visit.

Currently my left big toe is throbbing like the devil and I am limping rather than walking. In  my experience, gout is like an internal poison. Okay, the toe is throbbing but the rest of me is somehow physically stressed and I will not be back to normal until Gordon Gout disappears. It will be like a cloud lifting.

On Thursday, I managed to hobble a few yards in Whirlowbrook Park. I wanted to take some pictures of the arum lilies that grow there each spring - down in the muddy hollow adjacent to Limb Brook. They are spectacular plants that look as though they belong in science fiction.

Gabo

Gabriel García Márquez was often affectionately referred to as "Gabo" in Latin America. Born in Colombia in 1927, he died in Mexico City in 2014. Many critics consider him to be the greatest writer that South America has ever produced.

That being said, I had never read any of his six novels until this very month. The one I picked was "Love in The Time of Cholera", first published in 1985. To be honest, I picked this one simply because I was intrigued by its title.

It is colourful, passionate, observant and quirky and Edith Grossman who translated the text from its original Spanish did an excellent job of  processing García Márquez's authorial voice into English.

The novel spans sixty years in a sleepy, post-colonial Colombian port. The key players are Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza. It takes a lifetime of letters and waiting and diversion before their love can finally be consummated. Apparently, their story was somewhat inspired by García Márquez's parents' protracted love story. 

Of course, I could bore you silly with a detailed plot summary but I won't do that. Instead, I will just give you a glimpse of  García Márquez's characteristic command of language with this quotation from near the end of the novel when in old age Florentino and Fermina are at last beginning to see the way ahead:

They were both intimidated, they could not understand what they were doing so far from their youth on a terrace with checkerboard tiles in a house that belonged to no one and that was still redolent of cemetery flowers. It was the first time in half a century that they had been so close and had enough time to look at each other with some serenity, and they had seen each other for what they were: two old people, ambushed by death, who had nothing in common except the memory of an ephemeral past that was no longer theirs but belonged to two young people who had vanished and who could have been their grandchildren. (page 305/306)

I very much enjoyed "Love in The Time of Cholera" and plan to read "One Hundred Years of Solitude" before too long. Maybe some visitors to this blog discovered Gabo long ago but I have only just found him.

Bananas

The 6th Duke of Devonshire (1790 -1858)

Nearly every morning I eat a banana. We always have a cluster of bananas in our fruit bowl. Perhaps I am a banana addict. I need my fix every day.

The history of bananas is long and complicated. They originated in the Indomalayan region but there is evidence of bananas being grown in  Africa and Arabia by the medieval period. Commercial plantations began to be established in the late nineteenth century and nearly all the bananas we consume today are derived from the Musa acuminata  group - commonly referred to as Cavendish bananas.

Now the name "Cavendish" is very familiar in this part of the world for it is the family name of the Dukes of Devonshire who still own Chatsworh House in north Derbyshire, just  nine miles from this keyboard. It was the Sixth Duke of Devonshire - William George Spencer Cavendish (1790 -1858) - who first cultivated Cavendish dessert bananas in his glass houses at Chatsworth. Their descendants can be found in vast plantations across the Carribbean and Central America but nowadays mostly in India and China which are by far the world's biggest banana producers.

Interestingly, it is thought that the term "banana" is of West African or Arabic origin - arriving in the English language via Portuguese or Spanish. You would have perhaps expected the name to have originated in the islands we now call Indonesia but that is not the case.

Though we are all very familiar with Cavendish bananas there are in fact a thousand different varieties of banana. Some are short and stubby, others are red or filled with small seeds. Others are large plantains that don't get very sweet and are used as the starchy element in main meals. They are very popular in Jamaican cuisine.

There is so much more that might be said about bananas - about their susceptibility to disease, about the different ways of cooking them, about their place in humour, about the slipperiness of their skins, about the nutrients they contain and about modern cultivation and transportation methods. But I will leave you today with one of my favourite sayings - when something seems impossible or ridiculous - "If you can get there by two o'clock then I'm a banana" or "If Manchester United beat Barcelona next week then I'm a banana" and so on. Apart from being great to eat, bananas are also endearingly silly.

Outskirts

I have tramped along every path and byway in and around Sheffield. It's hard to come across anything new but yesterday afternoon I took my first pictures of the stone object shown above. I must have driven past it a hundred times without noting its existence.

It's called Barncliff Stoop and it stands by an ancient road known as The Long Causeway. Very probably that road was first marched along by Romans as they headed westward over the hills to Buxton and Chester. Later the roadway became a trading route linking South Yorkshire with the west and it is believed that Barncliff Stoop was one of several erected in the fourteenth century to guide early travellers and merchants.

Three miles further along The Long Causeway, you reach Stanage Pole. It stands on the border between Yorkshire and Derbyshire and once marked the boundary between the ancient kingdoms of Mercia and Northumbria that preceded the birth of England itself.

In the distance on the moors, close to a stand of trees you can see Stanedge Lodge - a grouse shooters' lodge and the highest residential building within Sheffield's city boundaries.

I turned back at Stanage Pole, returning to the reservoirs at Redmires. The top reservoir has been undergoing significant maintenance, including strengthening of the dam wall but now they are allowing rainwater to refill it. It's going to take a while unless the heavens open for a few days in a row.

Near Wyming Brook Farm, a girl was cantering around a paddock on her trusty steed. I noticed her lilac coloured helmet popping up above the gritstone wall and managed to snap the picture shown below.

Also by Wyming Brook Farm, I spotted this sweet and newly born lamb which I have named Robert in honour of either the English poet Robert Browning or Robert Brague that redoubtable blogger from the heart of The Peach State, USA. Take your pick. Robert bleated at me and then gambolled off to find his mother, perhaps fearing that I might have been there to do him harm.

Browning

Robert Browning 1812-1889

This morning I woke up thinking, "Oh, to be in England/ Now that April's there". And I further thought, who wrote those lines? Uncle Google led me to "Home Thoughts from Abroad" by Robert Browning. The poem was written in 1845 when Browning and his wife-to-be, Elizabeth Barrett, were apparently already living in Florence,  Italy.

Home Thoughts from Abroad

Oh, to be in England
Now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England - now!

And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops - at the bent spray's edge -
That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children's dower
- Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

It is easy to sense Browning's nostalgia in this poem. He is missing his homeland - even though it is perhaps worth pointing out that he was born and raised a Londoner so the rural idyll to which he refers would have been some distance from his daily experience of the world during the first thirty three years of his life.

I think that the "melon-flower" of the last line references Nature in Italy. It is so different from what he left back home and far less stimulating. 

Ultimately, I must confess that I do not like this poem very much. I think that some of the rhymes are as forced as the images of springtime that Browning has conjured up. For me the overall effect jars somehow and I am left thinking - well if you missed England so much, why didn't you simply pack up and leave Italy behind? I think it lacks the emotional authenticity that I am habitually drawn to in good poetry.

I find the ending especially problematic. The poem just judders to a halt without proper reflection on the differences between springtime in England and springtime in Italy. No, I am sorry Robert, though it starts well, I give this poem 6/10. Must try harder. What do you think?