Should Nelson Come off his Pedestal?

You know, I don’t see my mother and stepfather more than a couple of times a year, They live in Worthing and with the best will in the world their days of long drives or train rides and staying in hotels are a thing of the past. So to use a phrase, Mohammed must go to the mountain. When I do, I have this mischievous streak that makes me introduce the topic of removing Edward Hodges Baily’s statue of Admiral Nelson from the top of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square in London.

This is partly because I rather enjoy their reaction to it. The argument in favour goes – Horatio Nelson may not have owned saves, in fact he didn’t, but he was certainly in favour of continuing the slave trade and wrote in letters that he was considering speaking out against William Wilberforce in the House of Lords. Well, Trafalgar put paid to that and we’ll never know for sure if he would or not. But Nelson’s connections with the slave trade were brought into discussion in the furore following the pulling down of the statue of slave trader Edward Colson in Bristol in 2020 and there were articles in several of the dailies with people arguing for and against pulling Nelson off his pedestal.

My mum’s and step-dad’s reactions? To paraphrase – this is nonsense, it all happened over 200 years ago – you can’t change the past. Well, I certainly don’t agree that’s it’s ridiculous, but okay, it was over 200 years ago and you cannot change the past (although when I invent my time machine, watch this space). But it isn’t about that. It’s about changing your relationship with the past, if anything. It’s about asking the questions whether, with all we know now, we feel that this is an individual we should still regard as a national hero? And engaging in debate. Surely, if Nelson was as worthy of the honour as they thought he was in the 1840s when the column was erected, then a bit of honest discussion isn’t going to change that. But if he wasn’t, well, then burying our collective heads in the sand and ignoring it because it was more than 200 years ago surely is not morally justifiable.

Despite the way that I present my opinions to Mum and Tony, I do try to keep an open mind. If you can prove to me that Nelson is a good symbol of qualities that I value and respect, then I promise I’d be one of the protestors standing in front of the column to guard it from the bulldozers. But then, that would involve being prepared to have a discussion about it in the first place. And that probably ain’t happening any time soon.

Chariots of the Shaggy Dogs

Here’s a nice mythology question for you. What links Tata, Utnapishtim, Bergelmir and Deucalion? I’m sure you know or can work it out. Especially if I widen it out from mythology and include Japhet, Shem and Ham. And Noah. Yes, they all survived floods. Tata in the Aztec flood myth, Utnapishtim in the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, Bergelmir ( a giant) in the Norse flood myth and Deucalion in the Greek.

Now, probably ever since the discovery of the epic of Gilgamesh tablets by Austen Layard in the middle of the 19^th century and its translation over the following decades this has led to much speculation ever since on just why it is that catastrophic world-threatening floods proliferate in the mythology and/or religions of so many cultures, many of whom surely cannot have had any kind of contact with each other.  Some writers have used it to try to disprove the literal truth of the Old Testament, while some have used it to try to prove the literal truth of the Old Testament. Some have tried to prove that all the flood myths derive from a single catastrophic event in human history – the great thaw at the end of the (last) ice age for example.

An author I very much enjoy, so long as I’m allowed to digest his work along with a healthy dose of salt, is Graham Hancock. He suggests that the proliferation of flood myths may have their origin in the ending of the last Ice Age. Well, I’m certainly no expert, but it’s not totally impossible. However, being as that is far too sensible an idea, Graham Hancock beefed up the silliness by suggesting that the reason why it made such an impression on humanity was because it was responsible for the destruction of a great, technologically advanced civilisation, (based in Antarctica) the survivors of which spread their knowledge and skills throughout the world. Hence the growth of world civilizations in different parts of the world at the same time. As a piece of fiction it’s great. As a theory, it suffers from a huge drawback, namely that there is no real evidence of the lost civilisation. Ah, but that’s because of a conspiracy amongst historians and archaeologists to deliberately NOT search where such evidence might be found. Hancock doesn’t say this in those words, but that’s the gist.

Like I said, I exercise my right not to agree with his ideas, but I don’t half enjoy reading about them. His book about the supposed location of the Ark of the Covenant, called “The Sign and the Seal” is a particular favourite. I doubt very much that the conclusions he reaches are correct, but I enjoy the journey that takes us to those conclusions.

Which is more than I can say about the work of one of Mr. Hancock’s better-known predecessors, Swiss author Erich von Daniken. Which is really what prompted this post. You see, I can’t remember exactly where, but I heard his name mentioned the other day, and I googled him, and was astounded to find that he only passed away earlier this year. I haven’t really heard anything about him in years. Von Daniken wrote the hugely popular “Chariots of the Gods” which is, if you like, a seminal text in the field of pseudoscience which theorises that mythology is ‘evidence’ of technologically advanced aliens visiting Earth in pre-history. I read Chariots of the Gods. Once. Personally, I preferred the Goodies’ 1970s parody . Within their ‘Book of Criminal Records’ there was a short section entitled, if memory serves me right ‘Was God An English Astronaut?”, where a cartoon compared the front of a Gothic cathedral with a space rocket – and a peeled banana, just for good measure.

They were all a bit thick really

This whole Trojan thing from my last post is getting a bit out of hand. A little research reveals that not only can you have a trojan horse and a trojan mouse, but you can have trojan cows, trojan dogs and trojan animals in general. With the cows and dogs, a trojan cow would be one that is a carrier for a disease that while the cow itself shows no symptoms, it can infect a whole herd who will. The term trojan dog refers specifically to a stray that has been rehomed from mainland Europe, which bears a significantly high risk of carrying infections that are extremely rare in this country but much more common on mainland Europe. Cue a mental picture of politicians of a certain, more right-wing persuasion ranting about the evils of ‘ these bloody Trojans, coming over here, infecting our pets and stealing their winalot.”

It’s an altogether more negative use of the adjective Trojan, somewhat closer to the original horse itself. I’ll be honest, I’ve always had mixed feelings over the whole Trojan War myth. I mean, I’ve never been entirely clear whose side you’re meant to be on. Without wishing to be mean, the Trojans are, in some ways a bit thick. Hecuba, mother of Paris, dreams that she will give birth to a flaming torch. Whatever lights yer candle, pardon the pun. The dream is interpreted and Priam and Hecuba are told that the child she will give birth to will be responsible for the destruction of Troy. Priam, unable to bear the thought of killing the child gives him to a herdsman to dispatch. He can’t bear to do the deed and takes him and leaves him on a hillside. He comes back nine days later, the baby is still alive and well, having been suckled by a she bear. He takes the kid home to bring up, and what happens next is set in motion. Stupid.

As for the Greeks, well, again, somehow most of them come across as the kind of people you wouldn’t want to play in a quiz team with. Let’s start with the greatest of them. Achilles. Now, he was made mostly invulnerable by being dipped in the River Styx as a baby. Only the heel by which she held him was not touched by the water. Well, I’m not being funny (you can say that again, says the reader) but – what would have been wrong if she had gone for a double dip? Or failing that, at least given his heel some proper protection? No wonder his shade was so angry in the Underworld.

Agamemnon. What a pillock! Lesson 1 in commanding an army. If your secret weapon is a virtually invincible Myrmidon with a short temper, don’t piss him off by stealing one of the girls he has taken as spoils of war. Oh, and when you get home, keep an eye on the missus if she suggests you should have a bath.

Even Odysseus, the supposedly smart one, was perfectly capable of acting like a complete div. (ah, these charming old world phrases). Having escaped from the attention of Polyphemus the cyclops and blinded him in the process, why the hell would you taunt him and reveal your real name when you’re sailing away. On the sea. Ruled by Poseidon, God of the Sea, and father of Polyphemus. It was like he didn’t even want to get home.

The Romans, so I’m told had a phrase – to tell the whole story from egg to apple – meaning to tell the whole story of something from start to finish. This refers to the Trojan War story. The egg is the egg from which the children of Leda and Zeus were hatched – Helen being one – while the apple is that eaten at the banquet following Odysseus’ return home and his defeat of his wife Penelope’s suitors. Well, if you go through the whole story from apple to egg there aren’t many characters who manage not to put a foot wrong somehow or other. I’m drawn to Penelope. After 10 years of Odysseus’ absence a group of dastards (once again, check the spelling) pressure her to accept Odysseus’ death and take one of them for a husband and new King. Penelope says she can not make a choice until she has finished making a death shroud for Odysseus’ Dad. (Not making this up.)She spends all day weaving it and all night unpicking it. Not sure when she sleeps, but you still gotta admit it’s smart. I can’t help thinking that if she’d gone to the war rather than Odysseus, they’d all have been home before the postcard.

Remembering the Wooden Mouse of Troy

In my post about the Gavin and Stacey quiz, I used the word phrase ‘gift horse’. It occurred to me to look into the derivation of the saying ‘don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. I’ll be honest, the idea of a horse as a gift did make me think of the wooden one given to the good people of the city of Troy. But then that never quite made sense to me. I mean, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth - because you might get a Greek spear in your eye for your pains? Somehow that didn’t work. Nor does the idea that the Trojans should just have blindly accepted the gift without checking It out. That’s essentially what they did anyway and look how that worked out for them.

No, the saying really means, when you get given a horse – and I have to believe that the gifting of an equine was maybe more common in days of yore than it is today -  you should just accept it with gratitude and not yank its mouth open to have a look at the teeth. Apparently, that’s a good way of checking the age and condition of a horse. A real horse that is. With a wooden one you can just count the rings. The point of the saying is to be grateful when you receive a gift or a piece of good fortune and not insult the giver by checking it and looking for flaws and negatives.

So, when would you think that we have the first recorded use of the saying, or something very similar? Actually in the 4^th Century AD in St. Jerome’s Commentarium in Epistolam ad Ephesios (Commentary on the Letter to the Ephesians) and it went something like this – Noli equi dentes inspicere donati”. Ah, they don’t write them like that any more. Basically it means, don’t look at the teeth of a horse you’ve been given. Maybe not as big a hit as his Latin translation of The Bible, but sequels can be difficult to pull off at the best of times.

Speaking of the Trojan Horse, I wonder how well acquainted you are with the term – the Trojan Mouse? If you’ve never heard of it, well it can be used in different contexts, for example, a small-scale change in an organisation – maybe in policy, maybe in procedure, whatever – that is designed to have a large-scale effect. I first heard of it in terms of a tactic you can use to persuade someone in a higher position of authority than you are to do something you want them to. Basically it involves introducing an idea to said authority figure in such a way that they come to believe it’s their own idea, take ownership of it and see it through to fruition. I wouldn’t say that I’ve made a habit of doing this and I wouldn’t say it’s been a conspicuous success every time that I’ve tried. But I did have a notable success once.

I made a point of dropping it into the conversation with a former deputy headteacher of mine that a colleague in another school had just told me that their headteacher had just instituted a policy whereby when a member of staff reached 20 years with the school – or at least within the local authority – then a recommendation would automatically be sent to the powers that be that they should receive the discretionary £250 award for long service from the authority. The Monday afterwards at the weekly staff meeting, our Head announced to the staff that, as a sign of how much he valued his staff, he had come up with a policy whereby everyone reaching 20 years with the school would automatically be recommended to the Authority for the discretionary award for long service. How did I know that the deputy would mention the idea to the Head? Because the Deputy was in his 19^th year with the school

Oh, he wasn’t quite the first person to benefit. Who was? Well, come on, who do you think?!

Oh. What's Occurin'?

I rarely quiz at the weekends. In fact I rarely quiz on any days other than Thursday every week, and one Wednesday each month. But I did go to a quiz on Sunday. Last month three of my daughters, my son in law Dan and Mary all attended a Disney themed quiz. I didn’t, partly so that I could look after my grandson Ollie, and partly because I’m strictly a Disney generalist while the girls and Dan are all ultra fans. They won, and the prize was a very impressive £50 meal voucher and £50 in cash.

Now when they got back their comments regarding the question master were of the ‘arse’ and ‘elbow’ variety.  Bear that in mind.

I staked my claim to a place in the team for the venue’s next quiz, last Sunday’s quiz, on the subject of sitcom Gavin and Stacey. Now, I always enjoyed Gavin and Stacey, and in the couple of weeks leading up to the quiz I watched every episode and all 3 Christmas specials again. Then , on Sunday afternoon, I decided to test myself. I googled Gavin and Stacey quiz. The first one on top of the search results page had 50 questions. Most of them were easy, but the half dozen or so I didn’t know, I memorised. Okay.

We got to the quiz, and on the way I joked, wouldn’t it be funny if the question master was such a rookie that he had just downloaded that same quiz off the net? Well, when we were given the answer sheets it certainly looked as if the question master really was just such a rookie. Because the headings for the five rounds were exactly the same as the headings on the quiz I downloaded. Then the quiz started. And the first question was the same as the first question on the quiz I’d downloaded. So was the second. And the third. In fact all of them.

Look, I didn’t plan it that way. But who was I to look a gift horse in the mouth? As it turned out anyway the gift horse was nothing like the gift it had seemed to be. For after the break between rounds three and four, our question master announced that the quiz was proving too easy, and so he’d made up another round using Chat GPT between the rounds. I wasn’t unduly worried. Even when he announced that this last round would be a Who Says This ? round. Well, we got there having scored 50 out of 50. Then for the improvised round, rather than using full quotations, he used which character says these short phrases. And the trouble is that many of them are said by more than one character at different times. So we got 6 on the round and lost by a point. Gutted.

I have never used Chat GPT for quiz questions. In fact I have never used it at all and after that I certainly won’t be using it for quiz questions any time soon. Do I blame the question master? Interesting question. Well, on the one hand, making up a quiz round after you’ve already started asking the questions is a no-no. But then so is downloading a quiz wholesale off the net which any member of the public and potential player could download themselves for free. The latter worked in our favour, the former worked against us. C’est la vie. We applauded the winners, thanked the question master, stayed until other teams started leaving then said our goodbyes without a word of complaint. I’ll leave it to you to decide how many of those were to be heard in the care on the way home, though.

Who's Afraid of the acute accent?

You may have noticed that that I’ve become rather interested in the history of chocolate in the UK over the last few weeks, following my acquisition of chocolate tins made for gifts to the troops from Queen Victoria in 1899 by Cadbury, Rowntree and Fry. I’ve been looking more specifically at Rowntree this weekend and it’s led me to ask a question that I haven’t been able to answer definitively. Namely, Nestlé acquired ownership of Rowntree Mackintosh in 1988. Was a conscious policy of insisting on the correct name Nestlé instead of the anglicised Nestles adopted, and in particular, was it adopted at this time and for this reason?

If you’re an old codger or codgess like me, I’ll bet you remember adverts from the 60s and 70s for Nestlé Milky Bar. Except you don’t. Because what you remember were adverts for Nestles Milky Bar. You remember how they went –a little skit in which a fresh faced, spectacle-wearing young shaver dressed as a wild west sheriff foils some dastards (check the spelling) in the course of their dastardly deeds accompanied by the jingle

“The Milky Bar Kid is strong and tough

And only the best is good enough

The creamiest milk, the whitest bar

The goodness that’s in Milky Bar”

Cut to aforementioned kid yelling “The Milky Bars are on me!” and the singers hit us with a final musical sting

“NESTLES Milky Bar!”

Watch very similar adverts from the late 80s onwards, and this sting has been replaced by “Nestlé Milky Bar!”

Don’t get me wrong, I happen to think that this is no bad thing. When you think of it, it was always a bit insulting to suggest that anglophones could not handle the complexities of the acute accent. I mean, for heaven’s sake, we Brits have 9 different ways of pronouncing the -ough – letter combination and most of us cope pretty well with that without incurring permanent injury.

Of course, it’s just as likely that advertisers of the time felt that British punters were more likely to go for a brand that at least sounds a bit British. Milky Bar dates back to 1936, and the very first Milky Bar Kid advert hit our screens as long ago as 1961. You’ve doubtless been asked the question – which screen character was first played by Terry Brooks in 1961 ?– I certainly have both asked it and answered it before now.

For what it’s worth, I’m kind of glad that we go the whole hog pronouncing the accent in Nestlé now. If nothing else it makes sense of their punning bird feeding chicks trademark. Just a thought.

A bit of a blow for Cadbury, I'll warrant.

When you get right down to it, it’s very difficult to know what members of the Royal Family really feel about things. It seems to me that the higher position they hold on the royal pyramid, the less scope that they have to show partiality. So I don’t actually know if His Majesty the King really doesn’t like chocolate. But obtaining a set of Queen Victoria Boer War chocolate tins has made me do a little bit of light research about the connection between the royal family and chocolate. What do you know, I found out that King Charles has withdrawn the Royal Warrant from Cadbury’s chocolate, and if I’m correct this is the first time they haven’t had one for over 170 years.

Queen Victoria first granted the Royal Warrant in 1854. We can be pretty certain that she was a bit of a fan from the way that Cadbury’s were her first port of call when she wanted to send a present of the finest British chocolate to soldiers fighting in the Boer War and it was in the course of finding out more about this that I discovered that Cadbury have lost their royal warrant.

The Royal household doesn’t go into details about why companies lose their warrant, but since 2010 Cadbury’s have been owned by US based Mondelez International. It’s believed that the King faced calls to withdraw warrants from companies still operating in Russia, as does Mondelez. Has it made a material difference to Cadbury’s? I’m sure that they would have rather kept it, given the choice, but I doubt it will have made much of a difference in terms of cold, hard cash. All it means is a certain loss of caché, no invitation to warrant holder shindigs and having to remove the crown logo from packaging.

I am coming to the point now. I’ve looked into royal warrants of appointment and would like to ask you this. Which monarch do you think was the first in the UK to grant a royal warrant? Yes, go through all the usual suspects – Victoria – Georges IV and III – Elizabeth I. Answer – Henry II in 1155.

Sort of.

I say sort of because, like a depressingly large number of quiz ‘facts’, the answer isn’t quite as simple as that. In 1155 Henry II gave a Royal charter to the Weavers’ Company in London. Royal charters were the predecessors to Royal Warrants of Appointment. But that doesn’t mean it was actually the first, it means that it was the first we have documentary evidence for, which is not quite the same thing. In the 1400s the Royal Warrant of Appointment replaced the royal charter, but I have been unable to find out who actually received the first. William Caxton was an early recipient, receiving the warrant from Edward IV in 1476. But was he the actual first? I don’t know.

It’s interesting to see who can grant warrants too. The only Royal Warrants out there at the moment were granted by King Charles and Queen Camilla. However, from the end of this year, I believe, the Prince and Princess of Wales will also be able to do so. Should King Charles predecease Queen Camilla, then she would continue to issue warrants.

There you go.