An addition to a very unsavoury pantheon

My mother, in the kindness of her heart, has sent another object of worship for Miss Dog. The current collection is most peculiar - the design of dog toys being, clearly, one of the areas where surrealism remains rife. There is the Sea Slug. She ripped this apart a month or so back; the Professor has repaired it, having replaced the lost kapok with strips of fabric cut for rag rug making purposes (so the next time the holothurian comes to bits, it will spill horrid multi-coloured intestines). There is a vulture called Gloria. There is the Right Wing Politician (a rag doll of Senator John McCain, which allows of various silly statements along the lines of 'oh look, there's a right wing politician lurking in the long  grass').  Now, there is a bright blue mule with a silly expression and, rather worryingly, cloven hooves. Miss Dog thinks she is wonderful. I have called her Mavis - for that 'Mavis, the Girl in Blue' is a particularly egregious camp-ism for a member of the police force. It seems to suit her.

Fettled

The good Tony is putting up the wardrobe we acquired from the Professor’s aunt, the one now nesting in a home for the somewhat confused. It’s a much better item of furniture than the one it replaces, with a good deal more infrastructure, and Tony seems to be really enjoying putting it together (a process not yet complete). There was a lot of  ‘that’s neat. It’s nice to see something properly made’, etc. Rational craftsmanship gives him genuine pleasure, which I find endearing. Meanwhile, before dismantling the old wardrobe, a somewhat unsatisfactory object bought from the antique dealer we christened Mrs Villain, I can’t think why, we had to empty it, and it was logical to chuck out items of no further use. Some garments were declared legally dead, or rag rug material, or suitable for the charity shop. But I have to admit that throwing out some of the shoes I will never wear again cost a pang or two. The shoes I wore when I was stepping out in my early twenties, are the ones I have just binned. I looked after them; they were re-heeled and generally kept nice, and are still in good nick. But not new, so nobody else would want them, and with my collapsing big toe joints, I couldn’t conceivably wear them. Time to be sensible. But, though the Marilyn Monroe vertiginous slingbacks and the red lace-up boots from Anello & Davide didn’t quite merit a tear as they went in the rubbish sack, there was a certain mistiness.

Ex Africa Semper Aliquid Novi

Yesterday I had, I think, the most surprising seminar of my teaching career. I teach a second-year medieval history course, and I take a seminar group last thing on Friday. They tend to be a bit lacklustre, tired, and/or thinking of the weekend, so it tends to be lacking in excitement. However, this particular group of miscellaneous nineteen-year-olds is additionally ornamented by a middle-aged black man. From an earlier chat when he stopped to ask me a question after a lecture, I knew that he’s from a small up-country village in the Congo. I haven’t been rude enough to enquire what freak of fate has brought him to Aberdeen in middle life: we do have a lot of African students, though they don’t generally come our way in history – both because they tended to be practically oriented in their studies, and also because they feel at a disadvantage in Eurocentric history courses. However, a recent curriculum overhaul now insists that students take at least one course per year outside their chosen discipline so we may find ourselves seeing more of them. This particular chap is charming but quite diffident, and has been very silent in class, though I noticed last week he was gaining confidence. In last Friday’s class, we were looking at the monsters and marvellous creatures on the Hereford mappa mundi, aided by a preliminary slideshow about unnatural history in the middle ages. I stuck up a slide of a mermaid with a comb and a glass in her hand, and asked the group what medieval people believed about mermaids. There was the usual thunderous silence (students’ almost total lack of general knowledge is a melancholy reality – apart from the Harry Potter fans, who can at least do basilisks and mandrakes, none of them ever recognise anything). Then my African student piped up, and said, ‘fishermen catch them, you know, and we buy them in the market’. He then proceeded to unfold his tale: apparently, if you catch a mermaid, you cut the tail off and throw her back, because she can grow another tail .The tail is preserved by salting, and what you do is add a small piece to whatever’s in your pot and because mermaids are powerfully magic, you will become irresistably eloquent, or have power over your enemies, or what you will. ‘So you don’t buy fillet of mermaid?’ I said, ‘just a bit for magical purposes?’ ‘That is correct’, he said gravely.  The rest of the students continued to sit mumchance, but the quality of the silence had changed from mere complete absence of thought to mute flabbergastedness.  Things went back to normal for a bit till we got to another of my slides – I was pursuing the idea that a number of  descriptions of monsters sound like traveller’s tales and trying to attract their attention to the difficulty of formulating an accurate description of something utterly unfamiliar. I’d given them Ctesias’s description of a satyr, a man covered in hair and dwelling in Africa, and followed it up with a picture of a chimpanzee with a quizzical expression looking particularly human. My African student piped up again, with a truly wonderful story. He told us that there was a bit of his local jungle where one didn’t hunt because kings were buried there. A rash and unprincipled individual  went there with his gun, and shot a monkey. As he went to pick up his catch, a chimpanzee emerged from the bush, carrying a gun, and addressed him severely. ‘That’s no monkey’, he said, ‘that’s a human being’. He insisted that the man nick himself, and the chimp did the same, so that they could compare their blood to that of the dead monkey. ‘You see’, he said, ‘that is human blood’. He put his hand on the dead monkey’s chest, and when he lifted it, the bullet was lying on the surface, and the monkey was breathing again. He told the man that his punishment was to be lost in the forest for three days. My student, who was about twenty-five at the time, was part of the search party who went looking for the missing hunter. When he turned up three days later, he said the searchers had passed him repeatedly but couldn’t see him, and conversely, he hadn’t been able to attract their attention. By this time, the rest of the students were looking sort of stunned. ‘Which goes to show it can be very difficult to tell the difference between humans and animals’, I said, trying to wrest the class back on course. We finished my slides, returned decorously to the Hereford map, and looked for Yales and Blemmyes and Bonacons till the hour was over. But it’s a terrific story, and I can’t help wondering what the other students made of it.

 

Saints who are also Dogs

This blog has been prompted by doing some work on Byzantine Jerusalem. In about 510 AD, a bloke called Theodosius was travelling about in the Holy Land. He says, 'in the province of Asia there is the city of Ephesus,  which contains the Seven Sleepers, and their puppy Hyrcanus at their feet'. The story of the Seven Sleepers is known to me, a sort of Christian Rip van Winkle narrative.  A group of Christian youths hid inside a cave outside Ephesus around 250 AD, to escape emperor Decius's persecution of the Christians. They woke up again 180 years later during the reign of the Christian emperor Theodosius II, and were seen by a variety of people before dying and going, doubtless, to heaven. The whole narrative caused me to reflect on dog saints. To be sure, the puppy Hyrcanus is not officially designated a saint, but all the same, he might be quite a good patron saint for Ellie, who has not, as yet, been known to sleep for 180 years, but most assuredly likes her bed. I rather like him being called Hyrcanus - implying large and fierce - which in fact suggests that he was little and squashy. Are there other Dog Saints? In the apocryphal Old Testament, we have Tobit's Dog, who perhaps doesn't do anything beyond being a dog, but might be thought of as a role model. In the Greek Orthodox church, there is a strong tradition that St Christopher - he who carried the Christ Child across a raging river - was not merely a giant (as western tradition allows) but a Cynocephalus, a dog headed monster. Additionally, there's a number of remarkable medieval icons of a dog headed St Christopher to prove it. In the west, the middle ages produces the story of the Holy Greyhound ( I believe the most legitimate version is known as St Guinivere, but I could be wrong). A purely folkloric narrative of the loyal dog who tries to protect a child and is misunderstood. Ellie would, I am sure. tell me that she knew all about being misunderstood, but to be perfectly frank, achieving saintly status by sleeping for 180 years is slightly more within her grasp than being bold and pro-active, so perhaps we should dedicate Ellie to St Hyrcanus.

Beautiful Food

It has been Day of Decorative Dinner. First of all, we picked the small, sour apples off the various trees around the place, and since they don’t cut it as eating apples, and the Professor’s on a diet, made apple jelly, adding thereunto crimson crab-apples. The result glows in its jars like giant cornelians. The Two Nice Girls produced a pumpkin, or squash, this week which is a subtle greyish-turquoise on the outside, and bright orange within, from which I have made a orange soup (not without difficulty, since in its raw state, it’s as hard as wood). Also on today’s hit list was a Romesco cauliflower, that is, one of those beautiful bright green Art Deco ones, in which the florets rise into little spikes. This is in the process of becoming a cauliflower gratin. I hadn’t planned it that way, but it’s added an extra dimension to my  operations to be dealing with one gloriously coloured item after another.

Campi Phlegraei

We left the Vinegar Works this evening under the most extraordinary skies. The Professor, who has had to bone up on the science of all this of late, said knowledgeably that it was to do with dust particles. The effect was somewhere between Walt Disney and an eighteenth-century aquatint of the eruption of Vesuvius, a band of clear eau-de-nil on the horizon, three quarters of the sky filled with rolls of blazing pinkish-orange clouds, and clear bright blue above. It changed, naturally, in the hour and a half it took us to get home, but there was another fine moment when the jagged black saw of Bennachie was silhouetted against an incandescent orange sky, with some puffs and drifts of opaque black cloud which made it look like a live volcano. Not that one wants a live volcano, exactly, but it was all very much what most eighteenth century aesthetes seem to have meant about the Sublime, including being magnificent without being personally inconvenient.

Spit and Polish

We have found a whole new match between us and what Tony likes to do. An ex-army man either loves to polish or cannot be made to do so, and he turns out to be the first sort. We have inherited Peter’s good aunt’s dining furniture, all well made, good in itself, and just a bit down on its luck. Some of the chairs have been catching the sun for decades and the mahogany has bleached: the whole thing seems to appeal both to Tony’s liking for things shined-up, and his considerable talent for bodging – with the aid of scratch-restoring wax,  damp-ring-removers and so forth (items of the higher brown-furniture-care which are mysteriously available in the Banff ironmongers, leaving us genuinely puzzled by who buys the stuff), he is polishing, restoring, darkening down the blonded bits, and generally hauling them back to a state of  looking quietly good, and when he has finished with the wood, he will reupholster the seats. We have some grey linen brocade put by for the purpose. This is all very nice for us, of course, but it’s an added bonus that it evidently gives him tremendous satisfaction.

Meanwhile, I have finally got rid of my cold. Godmama has given me hempadu to take, which is Malaysia’s answer to this sort of thing, another friend has given me calcium and magnesium, and the Professor is on at me to take echinacea. If I keep on with all of them, soon I will be able to leap tall buildings with a single bound, no doubt.

Mysterious Largesse

We got home from work the other day to find that the local council had left a Food Waste Bin on our doorstep. This was ever so slightly mysterious, since, in the thirteen years we have lived here, the council has never made the slightest attempt to uplift anything from the house, let alone food waste. Everything gets taken down to the recycling centre, by us. Still, we are reasonably grateful for a new compost bucket – it hasn’t needed the Cooncil to teach us about making good use of organic material, we’ve been making compost for years. We are generating slightly more food waste at the moment than usual, as it happens, because the Two Nice Girls who grow and deliver our weekly box of organic veg love rather more roots than we do. We have introduced the sheep to the pleasures of the giant oriental radish: there is a limit to the amount of pickle any household can absorb, and one or two huge flavourless cabbages have also gone sheepwards. I don’t know. I’ve been trying at intervals for years, but I’ve never evolved a way of making red cabbage really attractive. I also have a limited tolerance for celeriac (you can make celeri-remoulade, then you can make it again, and after that, well, you’re a bit stuck, really) and I can’t see the point of kohl-rabi. Considering how much the Two Nice Girls charge, it still seems a pretty good deal. It was down to the Two Nice Girls, incidentally, that I made one of the strangest soups of my adult life.  It was a beetroot soup, which is one of the nicer things to do with beetroot (along the lines of potage Crécy, only redder). I thought it might add a certain something if I dropped in a cinnamon stick. It did. The effect might have been less unusual if I’d subsequently remembered to take the cinnamon stick out before I liquidised the damn thing.  Cinnamon is very good for you, which is just as well, really.