I BET ATLAS SUNG......

I am confirmed as  'Trésorier,' which is all fine until I wonder however will I be unconfirmed?  Being Treasurer of a voluntary organisation is like taking up one of the more violent religions: apostasy being impossible, or at least very hard.  You slog away like Atlas holding the mountain of paper and bank accounts and audit reports on your shoulders, year after year, suffering the brickbats of all those who accuse you - often with reason - of not been able to add up until you can find someone else to take over from you.  It is not often that a Hercules comes around - and even then if you remember the story he tricked poor Atlas by saying that he would take the world upon his shoulders while Atlas went off for a spot of needy retirement, but would Atlas just mind holding the world one last time for a couple of minutes while he, Hercules, rearranged his lion skin to make himself slightly more comfortable for the eternity to come.  Of course once Atlas had taken the world back, Hercules, cad that he was, disappeared fast.  His word as obviously not his bond.  He wasn't British, clearly.  Although to be strictly fair Atlas had tried to trick Hercules before.

But what, I wonder, ever happened to Atlas?  They don't tell you these things in legends.  They say only that Atlas fathered many children.  Goddesses of the day were attracted, apparently, by strong men holding up the world.  I suppose they must have had their sex standing up, which is not recommended when you are trying to conceive. But I suppose gods make their own rules. Anyway despite having to hold up the world, Atlas pulled.  That much we know.

What we don't know is whether Atlas is still there doing his bit for mankind.  If that were the case you'd have thought the world would have got itself together to hold an Atlas day to give thanks. I mean if Atlas got tired he might drop the world into.......er.........space, I suppose, and we'd be left to drift around the sun for ever and a day, or until the sun burns up and we shall - as Tom Lehrer succinctly puts it 'all fry together when we fry,' though he had in mind something depressingly thermo-nuclear happening before that.

So maybe Atlas just got bored one day and wandered off - or maybe he succeeded in handing over the task of world's strongest man and multiple goddess inseminator to one of his many sons, who maybe was a lesser man than his father, or who maybe had arthritis or rheumatism and so cast the world into outer or, rather, inner, space.  And here we are today. Twinning Associations and all.

Where exactly were we?  Oh yes! Giving up.  Relinquishing the burden of Trésorier of the Twinning Association.  All is not actually lost because the Twinning Association is running out of funds at a fairly substantial rate and we shall have to draw a halt to our activities in a year or two, unless some benefactor comes along.  In past years that benefactor was the European Commission, plus a rather larger and younger membership with deeper pockets than is the case today.  Hosting and entertaining a coachload of visitors for a weekend costs some £5,000 - and although we have some income to offset this, the sands of our bank account are running out.  These visits take place every other year - alternating with our visits to them when they bear the cost - and we have enough money to host one more visit after this one. But then the bank account will be empty and it is just possible that I shall be free.

This time we shall entertain the visitors when they arrive to a Reception in our charming Physic Garden and the next day whisk them off to the Penderyn Distillery for aperitifs.  Then to a hotel for lunch before a ride on the Brecon Mountain Railway with a stop scheduled:  photographs for the taking of.  The following night, we shall uphold the Entente Cordiale by dancing and singing in the Town Hall.  Not boring disco dancing; we shall dust-off the lovely folk dances that they do better than we such as the bull dance in which you all make a circle and someone takes a tea towel and waves it, matador style, in front of someone they fancy.  That person then has to act the part of a bull charging the tea towel to the music. After a few passes the bull becomes the matador and the tea towel is dangled before another swain.  We sing French, Welsh and English songs; I have accrued a compendium over the years.  Singing like this - for enjoyment rather than exhibition - is something that has almost entirely fallen out of the social calendar.  We don't even sing in pubs anymore.  It is all rather sad.  Atlas would have sung, wouldn't he?  To keep his spirits up?

A BEAR HOWEVER HARD HE TRIES ...

A headline in the paper suggests that even babies now are becoming addicted to iPads. Where will all this lead?  It makes me feel old.  When I was small electronic devices - other than the radio - were unknown.  Even television didn’t exist for most people and the radio was something big and boxy.   But life seemed liberating.  There was so much to explore, so much to engage the brain.  Now the default position of any age is to turn on something electronic; it’s a way of parking the brain. 

    Yet what fun there is to be had elsewhere.  Yesterday,  the town’s Twinning Association - or what is left of it now after almost more than twenty years - gathered for its AGM.  When the association first started in 1988 I found myself Vice-Chair.  I knew about European grants and I could speak French.  Those grants were the foundation of a healthy bank balance and I still think it was a shame they were scrapped. For a few thousand pounds here and the Commission was able to build an immense amount of cameraderie and understanding between nations and doing so was undoubtedly fun. We haven’t yet had a marriage from our twinning but there have been a great many sporting contests and language exchanges and trade promotions between our two towns. 

    Our twin town - Clisson - lies on the borders of Brittany, a little way inland.  Lying on the river Sevre, it isn’t too far from Nantes and is at the centre of the Muscadet vineyards.  Become a member of the Twinning Association and you will learn a lot about Muscadet, growing the vines, making the wine and drinking the product. The Clissonais will descend again on us in May and as usual their coach will be full of the stuff.  Nice to know the 'Entente Cordiale'  is in good heart.

    Clisson is a pretty town and at its heart sits a medieval castle of the sort that would grace any town in Wales.  It is every bit a proper castle with dungeons and battlements and wells full of skeletons.  Unlike our little castle here in Cowbridge - built incidentally around the same time - which never apparently heard a shot fired in anger.  The Castle at Clisson played a full part in that interminable struggle between England and France known as the 100 years war and later it was pressed into service during the French counter-revolution of the 1790’s which became, in this part of the world, the Wars of the Vendée.  This sad and forlorn contest saw some bloody and cruel fighting ever, with atrocities against civilians committed left, right and centre.  The French Republic won, of course, but not before virtually wiping the population of the Vendée off the map. 

    Clisson changed hands several times during this fighting and the town was wrecked although the medieval roofed market place was spared because each army wanted ready shelter for their troops. Around Clisson the countryside is fairly flat with, at the time, plenty of windmills.  The sails were used by the counter-revolutionary forces as signalling devices. The town was then rebuilt in an Italian style

    All these things and many others I have learned over the years in the course of frequent visits. But it is a question now of how long the Twinning Association will carry on.  The next generation seem to lack interest, preferring to find their fun electronically I suppose.  The old Committee officers have resigned: I gave up the Committee a long time ago when they refused to proceed to twin with a town in Ireland that I had worked hard to secure.  That town, Leixlip, also had a very fine castle and was the place in which Guinness had first been brewed, its recipe devised by a bishop.  It isn’t far from Dublin and I can recommend a visit. 

    But last night I found myself back on the Committee as Treasurer. Another rod for my back in a busy year.  Still it was a fine evening.  Our newest recruit, Elisabeth, played the piano (she played Ave Maria on the grounds that it was by a French composer, Gounod, as well as by Bach) and we sang some songs and told some jokes.   I asked her then to play ‘The Teddy Bear’s Picnic’ whose music was written apparently in 1907,  but whose words didn’t appear for another quarter century. How do you write a song without words?

    Anyway that was my cue to recite ‘A Bear However Hard He Tries.......’ the AA Milne piece whose EH Shepherd illustration was the first literary appearance of Winnie the Pooh - a companion who took the place in my childhood of today's ubiquitous electronic devices.  People seem to think that being able to recite a poem (or remember any sort of script) indicates a prodigious memory.  But it actually isn’t very difficult, being simply repetition. Anyone can learn a script.  But I am content to let them think I have some special skill.  It must be the only one I have.  I shall open a bottle of Muscadet for lunch to celebrate and try to find out what being Treasurer entails.
   
   
   

DIPLOMACY

I am running short of verveine tea again.  It is my usual bed-time tisane and without it I wake up shortly after falling asleep and toss and turn.  I’ve been taking it now for many years; the problem is that you can’t buy it in Britain.  Although here the supermarket shelves stock an ever expanding range of herbal teas, verveine in its various forms (verveine and peppermint, verveine and orange) is not among them.  Verveine by itself tastes like cat’s pee.

    So I buy it in France whenever I go over there, but I haven’t been since last August and that is why I am running low.  My neighbour sometimes brings some back for me. I received an email message from her last week containing a number of interesting recycling ideas such as using old boots for plant containers and making chandeliers out of old wine bottles.  It was written in French which made me think possibly she was at her French home in Tharon rather than fifty yards away on the other side of the road.  So I replied hopefully in French, but she said she was in fact over the road and wouldn’t be crossing the Channel again until Easter.

     I looked on the internet and tried our local health store. ‘You asked about this before,’ said the woman who runs it, looking at me suspiciously. ‘It’s impossible to get hold of.’  And so it is.  Nasty Continental habit. Obviously!

    The trouble is I need the stuff more than ever just at the moment what with the hoo-ha in the Ukraine and the outbreak of the First World War being rehearsed nightly on the television in the shape of that excellent drama 37 Days that traces the diplomatic missteps that blundered the Continent to catastrophe.  Even today it seems all rather worrying.  Of course everything has settled down, but only after two world wars and it is quite possible to argue that Russia’s actions today in the Crimea have their roots in the various German invasions.   Queen Victoria should have taken better care of her grandchildren.

    There once existed a game called ‘Diplomacy.’ (It may exist still for all I know).  The players each represented a major European country in about 1900. Turkey was given honorary status in this respect, though not Ukraine.   You were allocate armies and fleets which you could move around the board attacking other countries and defending your own. You could also form alliances, temporary or permanent.

    I once played this game on a Saturday in the Occupational Psychology Department of Birkbeck College, London where I happened to be studying. Each team representing a country had its own room complete with telephone, which meant that you could set up alliances in secret from the other players.  My team was playing France and I proposed the immediate strategy of a permanent alliance with Great Britain. Imagine, I said what Pitt and Napoleon might have achieved had they worked in alliance!  With France’s armies and Britain’s fleets they could have ruled the world.  The world might have been all pink (or at least pink and blue) instead of only half of it.  (Quite why British rule should have been represented by pink is a question that has never been satisfactorily explained). 

    Anyway this strategy worked brilliantly and during the course of the day we successively wiped the Italians, the Turks, the Germans and the Russians from the map.  Then in the last move of the game, in a stroke of perfidy that I am still smarting from, Britain attacked France, thereby demoting her from joint winner to second.  I never played the game again.

    Now the West and Russia play Diplomacy with Ukraine. There will be a solution however uncomfortable it may be to one or other party, but I suppose we shall have to pass through a lot of unnecessary pain to get to it.  So it is no wonder I need my verveine and peppermint tisane to help me sleep.  Of course other people would prefer something stronger.  A glass of malt whisky has long been recommended for insomniacs. But my stomach rebels and its rumblings would outdo Vesuvius.  While this is much to my chagrin, it is to the distinct benefit of my pocket.  For the price of a glass of malt I can buy a whole month’s supply of tea.

    Still all is not lost for I wrote for help to my friend John who lives near Le Havre and received an immediate reply.  Touched by my plight he went immediately to the French supermarket and purchased fifty sachets. This he put in an envelope which will be winging its way here shortly.  That is if the customs don’t intercept it on the grounds that I am importing an illegal botanical specimen.  You never know. 

WHY AM I CALLED PERIWINKLE?

Our intelligent and kindly bookseller - 'Ross at the Bookshop' is how he invariably announces himself when he telephones - agreed the other day that he would take some copies of my book 'The Ill-Fated Battalion' to complement his displays of other books on the First World War.   I took them down to him earlier in the week.
      The Ill-Fated Battalion deals with the twin tragedies of the 1,000 men and boys of the 7th Battalion, The Royal Scots, in the summer of 1915 first at Quintinshill near Gretna, where the train in which they were travelling ran into another train standing on the same line, and then at Gallipoli where they became cannon, or rather machine gun, fodder, displaying all the while great bravery and spirit.  I began to write this story in 1983 on an old manual typewriter but concluded, by the time I had got to the end, that it was horribly overwritten and therefore turgid despite the fascinating story, culled mainly from contemporary newspapers retrieved from the bowels of the British Museum Newspaper Library at Colindale.  So I put the book away and put the effort down to experience.
     But with the anniversary of the First World War - and indeed the anniversary of the 1915 railway accident itself - looming, I thought I should take another look at the material and rewrite the book on a computer which is what I did.  I published it myself last year through Completely Novel.
      People who have read it have been kind enough to say that they like it, except for one individual who gave it a very dusty review on Amazon on the sole grounds as far as I could make out that I had omitted reference to some equally compelling Gallipoli bravery by another regiment involved in the same operation.  Still, there's no pleasing some folk as we all know.  We'll see how Ross makes out selling it to his patrons.
     It is hard, though, to drift into Ross' shop without coming away with a purchase and a displayed paperback caught my eye.  The book's author was Eric 'Winkle' Brown and it was his account of his life as a test and experimental pilot during the war years and afterwards.  He is credited by the Guinness Book of Records with having flown more types of aeroplanes than anyone else, ever:  four hundred and eighty seven types in all, including many German, Italian and Japanese planes captured at the end of the Second World War.  Many of these I had never heard of.
    But it was the nickname 'Winkle' that intrigued me - for my own father who had also been in the Royal Air Force during the war used to call me by the same name: 'Winkle' or 'Wingle'  (the two sound very similar); and sometimes 'Wingle Wangle,' and sometimes again 'Periwinkle.'
     I don't think I ever asked him whence the name came; I just accepted it.   I had thought - because he liked to read Edward Lear's poems to me - that it came from 'The Quangle Wangle's Hat' which goes.....

On the top of the Crumpetty Tree

The Quangle Wangle sat,

But his face you could not see,

On account of his Beaver Hat.

For his hat was a hundred and two feet wide,

With ribbons and bibbons on every side

And bells and buttons and loops and lace,

So that nobody ever could see his face

Of the Quangle Wangle Quee.

This gets us to 'Wangle' but from 'Quangle' to 'Wingle' is rather a jump so I wondered if my father might have picked up this nickname for me from Eric Brown, the author of this book whose purchase I was now contemplating.  

     What made this seem more possible was that I could read from the blurb that Eric Brown was only six months older than my father.  More than this they both were attending schools in Edinburgh at the same time, he the Academy and Eric Brown the Royal High School. Maybe they had met in Edinburgh, or maybe they had met sometime during the war or afterwards.  Or maybe, of course, not.

       I have since learned that Eric Brown's nickname was short for 'Periwinkle' and Wikipedia suggests he was thus dubbed by his service colleagues on account of his small stature. (Among other things a periwinkle is a small marine snail). This seems improbable to me. Periwinkle is a feminine name; moreover why call anyone after a snail? No, I feel sure there must be some common connection - a character in a film perhaps.  Or it might be an Edinburgh appellation or something to do with aeroplanes or indeed both. 

     I suppose it is possible that he had to be 'winkled' out of his cockpit on a couple of occasions when the aircraft he was flying crash-landed and so got the name that way with the idea that of pulling a short body out of a carapace of cockpit.  Maybe several airmen were so dubbed. Maybe the usage was common.  Maybe I had to be 'winkled' out of the cosiness of my mother's womb.  She always said giving birth to my head was not the problem but my shoulders got stuck.   I was born in Edinburgh and lived there long enough to have acquired this nickname if the nickname were local.   

     The matter is intriguing me now, so I would welcome any ideas anyone may have.

Meanwhile I can vouch for Eric 'Winkle' Brown's book which is most exciting if you like aeroplanes as I once did and it has rekindled a lost period in my life when I learned to fly (one of my few claims to fame is that I learned to fly a plane before learning to drive a car and all courtesy of the Air Ministry as I think the Ministry of Defence then wasn't).  

     But here's a funny thing:  I used to suffer from terrible and embarrassing air sickness, until I was actually flying the plane myself.  Then I could throw it about the sky without feeling the least queasiness.  Now why should that be?