beliefs, food+drink

Wassail!

Tonight is Twelfth Night. According to the OED Twelfth Night is the evening of the fifth of January, preceding Twelfth Day, the eve of the Epiphany; this was formerly the last day of the Christmas festivities and observed as a time of merrymaking. This is predicated on the medieval custom of starting each new day at sunset, so that Twelfth Night precedes Twelfth Day Which would be Epiphany, 6 January).

Tradition has it that if you don’t take your Christmas decorations down by Twelfth Night they have to stay up all year or you bring bad luck upon yourself. Although there does seem to be a “lease break” at Candlemas (2 February).

In many parts of England, especially the southern cider-making counties, one of the Twelfth Night traditions is Wassailing the apple trees to ensure a good crop the following autumn. In fact the term Wassail, by association, has at least there uses: the celebration of the apple trees, the hot mulled punch which is drunk at such occasions, and as a toast. All derive from the Middle English wæs hæl, meaning literally “good health”. To quote Wikipedia:

In the cider-producing counties […] wassailing refers to a traditional ceremony that involves singing and drinking the health of trees in the hopes that they might better thrive. The purpose of wassailing is to awake the cider apple trees and to scare away evil spirits to ensure a good harvest of fruit in the Autumn. The ceremonies of each wassail vary from village to village but they generally all have the same core elements. A wassail King and Queen lead the song and/or a processional tune to be played/sung from one orchard to the next, the wassail Queen will then be lifted up into the boughs of the tree where she will place toast soaked in Wassail […] as a gift to the tree spirits […] an incantation is usually recited […]

The words of the incantation and any associated carol(s) vary, for instance there is:

Here’s to thee, old apple-tree,
Whence thou mayst bud, and whence thou mayst blow,
And whence thou mayst bear apples enow!
Hats-full! Caps-full!
Bushel, bushel sacks-full!
And my pockets full, too! Hurra!

The one I prefer is the ancient Gloucetershire Wassail which begins

Wassail! wassail! all over the town,
Our toast it is white and our ale it is brown;
Our bowl it is made of the white maple tree;
With the wassailing bowl, we’ll drink to thee.

There’s also this Wassail carol, which is more often these days sung as a Christmas carol (which it never was!):

Here we come a wassailing among the leaves so green
Here we come a wandering so fair to be seen
Love and joy come to you and to your wassail too
And the Gods bless you and send you a happy New Year
And the Gods send you a happy New Year
We are not daily beggars that beg from door to door
We are your neighbour’s children whom you have seen before
The Gods bless the master of this house, likewise the mistress, too
And all the little children that round the table go.

Needless to say the details vary from place to place. The Wassail punch may be cider, beer, wine or mead based. As one is thanking and encouraging the apple trees my gut feel is that the punch should be either cider based or contain apple in some other form. I also recall that some traditions use cake rather then toast and some have bonfires. You can also indulge in making a lot of noise (like banging on tin buckets, blowing horns etc.) in order to drive away the evil spirits.

So if you want to go out tonight and wassail your apple tree(s) then as long as you stick to these rough principles, and don’t drink all the punch before the apple trees have their share, you don’t seem to be able to go far wrong. Just remember that if you want to dance round the tree as well, you’d better go deosil (clockwise) but as it is a few days away from full moon you will probably be excused doing so sky-clad — although there is nothing saying you can’t should you wish!

Wassail!

science, thoughts

More on the Calendar

Following up on my post of a couple of days ago, I saw a further article in Wired about the proposed new Hanke-Henry Calendar.

What is interesting is that when I looked at this Wired article, they had a poll asking whether readers wanted to retain the existing Gregorian calendar or change to the HH version. To my surprise almost two-thirds for the almost 20,000 voting said they would prefer the new Hanke-Henry Calendar.

Hmmm … Maybe! I bet if we went there most of this support would vanish. Such, in my experience, is the way of people.

While I think the Hanke-Henry Calendar is interesting, and would probably support it, I continue to have two reservations.

Firstly, it starts the year (and therefore every week) on a Sunday which, as I mentioned before, is counter to the international standard on dates (ISO 8601) — but when did that ever matter to Americans? However this is really easily fixed by starting the year on a Monday, although that does mean the new calendar couldn’t be introduced until 2018 without moving the names of the days. I see no problem with a 2018 start date as that will give everyone time to adjust.

(Out of interest, using Henry & Hanke’s method Christmas Day would always be on a Sunday, whereas using my Monday method Christmas Day would always be on a Monday.)

Secondly, and more seriously, while Henry & Hanke do away with the annoyance of leap years and leap days, they have to introduce an alternative to ensure the calendar keeps roughly in line with solar time as the years pass. So they introduce the leap week — an extra week added at the end of the year every 5 or 6 years. That’s fine, but is it every five years, or every six? Actually it is some arcane combination; there is no good (read, easy for Joe Public) method for determining when to add the leap week.

According to the Wired article the leap week is “inserted into years starting or ending on a Gregorian-calendar Thursday” which “would almost perfectly account for Earth’s 365.2422 day-long orbit around the sun”. This is unutterable madness! Why base the leap weeks on the “old” calendar we’re replacing?

Currently there is a simple method for calculating what is a leap year. A method which Joe Public is capable of understanding. But the Hanke-Henry system would leave people with no clue as there is no simple pattern to what would be leap week years. How many people are going to keep track of the “old” calendar just to calculate leap week years? Answer: none! Within a few years people will have no clue when leap week years are (the calculation is arcane, to say the least), just as now almost no-one can calculate when Easter falls despite that it follows a simple rule.

But I reckon this too can be pretty well fixed with a simple algorithm. How about this? … In the new calendar every year is 364 days (52 seven day weeks), except when the year is divisible exactly by 5 when you add the leap week unless it is also a century or half-century year. So years 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020 and so on would be leap week years; but not 2000, 2050, 2100, 2150 etc. According to my calculation that runs about as close as this calendar can to true, being just a couple of days out after 500 years. That’s about as good as you’re going to get given that with a 7 day leap week system the variations from true solar time can be up to a week or so. This way people will know very easily what are leap week years and what aren’t. No need to perpetuate the calendar we’ve tried to replace.

(Actually after 500 years the calendar is maybe lagging solar time by slightly too much, on average, so you might want to add back the leap week in 2500. But that is maybe a refinement too far at this stage.)

Now who would like to sort out the moveable feat known as Easter? Shall we just adopt the Pagan feasts?

food+drink, quotes

Gastronomy


“Should not the supreme aim of gastronomy be to untangle the confusion of ideas that confront mankind, and to provide this unfortunate biped with some guidance as to how he should conduct himself and his appetites? Buffeted continually by the studies of scientists, the inventions of dieticians, the fashions of restaurateurs and the disguised marketing campaigns of a thousand trade associations, his own tastes are often his last point of reference. The tyranny of political correctness, undermining him further, makes of him a man who avoids endangered species, factory farming, deforestation, genetic modification and inhumane slaughter. If he is unfortunate enough also to have a religion, then he will probably live the meanest of lives in the most tightly fitting of gastronomic straitjackets. By walking such a culinary tightrope, he believes that he will reap his rewards in long life, good health, moral superiority and in heaven hereafter. Yet all around him our unfortunate sees good vegetarians pushing up daisies, teetotallers’ hearts tightening and sugarphobes queueing in dentists’ waiting rooms. Reader, recognise that all your years of abstinence and your naive trust in low-fat yoghurt have not saved you from a pot belly, heavy jowls and an inadequate sex drive. A life of dieting has rendered your face pinched and furrowed from harsh judgement of your fellow diners and your evenings long and lonely.”

From “Boned Stuffed Poussins à la Marquis de Sade”, one of many excellent pastiches in Mark Crick, The Household Tips of the Great Writers. With thanks to Katyboo for the post-Christmas present!

words

A Word in Your Ear

Raree Show

1. A show contained or carried about in a box; a peep-show.

2. A show or spectacle of any kind.

3. Spectacular display.

According to the OED the word dates from 1681 and “is formed in imitation of the foreign way of pronouncing rare show” (Johnson). It has also been suggested that raree may represent rarity but Johnson’s statement is probably the correct one given that the early exhibitors of peep-shows appear to have been usually Savoyards, from whom the form was no doubt adopted. Recall that the diarist Samuel Pepys observed a marionette show featuring an early version of Punch & Judy (not quite a peep show but not unlikely they derive from the same tradition?) in London’s Covent Garden in May 1662. This was performed by an Italian puppet showman, Pietro Gimonde (aka. Signor Bologna).

freedom of speech, medical, science

Nanny State's Fatal Addiction

A few days ago the Heresy Corner blog wrote a piece exposing the worrying tendency of officialdom and do-gooders to slam down hard on things they don’t like (eg. smoking, alcohol) but with completely the wrong timing and emphasis. The writer shows that they did it with smoking and now they’re doing it with alcohol, and suggests that it is little more then self-defeating persecution. Consider the following extracts …

Alcohol consumption in the UK in fact peaked in 2004 and has been declining ever since. It’s now 11% lower than it was. There was an especially large fall in 2009. The UK ranks also below the European average in terms of consumption, an under-reported fact that may have something to do with Britain’s having the second-highest level of alcohol duty in the EU. The fall in consumption has been most dramatic among young people (the same is true of smoking) as a combination of draconian ID-checks (these days, you’re lucky to be sold a bottle of wine no questions asked if you’re under 40), rising prices and a media obsession with teenage drunkenness has made the traditional slow transition to the adult world of social drinking far more difficult to accomplish. This, of course, may help to explain why, when they finally are allowed to drink, so many young people seem unable to handle it.

As the harm reduces, so the zeal of the harm-reducers increases, as they focus all their energy and determination on ever-smaller numbers of the recalcitrant. At the same time, new targets come into their sights.

Two media organisations in particular enjoy scaring their audience with exaggerated levels of gloom. The Daily Mail and the BBC […] It’s not just alcohol and tobacco that regularly get this level of alarmist coverage. It’s also… illegal drugs, obesity, sex-trafficking, climate change, internet porn and the “sexualisation of childhood”.

Nanny statism, of course, is what happens when the government takes the regulation of morality away from bishops and gives it to doctors, social workers and professional experts.

I would actually say that this is what happens when you take the regulation of morality away from the people themselves. What happened to the personal responsibility that this government is supposedly such a believer in?

What is just as worrying, as is pointed out by Tim Worstall at Forbes is that the numbers upon which this alcohol policy are being built are themselves a complete fiction. As Worstall points out …

[W]hat drives political action is not the truth but what people believe to be the truth. So, if you can whip up a scare story about the ill effects […] then, as long as people believe you, you should be able to get some action taken […]

“Some 1,173,386 people in England were admitted to casualty for injuries or illnesses caused by drinking in 2010/11, compared with just 510,780 in 2002/3 […] The figures for last year represent an 11 per cent increase on the previous 12 months, when alcohol-related admissions stood at 1,056,962”

[…] there are two things odd about these numbers […] The first is that no one at all is measuring how many hospital admissions are as a result of alcohol. That’s just not what is done:

“It’s largely a function of methodology. Alcohol-related admissions are calculated in such a way that if you are unlucky enough, say, to be involved in a fire and admitted to hospital for the treatment of your burns, it will count as 0.38 of an alcohol-related admission — unless you happen to be under 15, when it won’t count at all.

“If you drown, it counts as 0.34 of an alcohol-related admission […] Getting chilled to the bone (accidental excessive cold) counts for 0.25 of an admission, intentional self-harm to 0.20 per cent of an admission.

“These fractions apply whether or not there was any evidence you had been drinking before these disasters befell you.”

So […] [w]e’re not in fact being told anything at all about the number of alcohol related hospital admissions. We’re being told about the numbers which are assumed to be alcohol related. And I think we can all see what the problem is here, can’t we? […]

Now, does all of this mean that there has been no rise in alcohol related diseases? I’ve no idea actually, but the point is that nor do you and nor do the people releasing these figures to us. The methods they’re using to compile the numbers, the things they’re not telling us about those numbers, mean that they lying to us with those numbers.

So basically the whole thing is a complete and utter lie from start to finish, and the numbers could be adjusted in the background to prove anything anyone wants. And politicians wonder why no-one believes nor trusts them. Would you?

So wither next? You’d better believe that these state-registered nanny do-gooders have their sights on all the “problem areas” mentioned above. Drugs have been a target for a long time; the heavy-handed mobsters must arrive soon. They’ve started on obesity already. And as for anything to do with sex, well we must ban that because, well, it’s just not nice is it?

Next we know they’ll be wanting to grant us licences to shag. Oh wait a minute. We have those already, it’s called marriage. It’s probably as well no-one takes blind bit of notice of that any more.

So be alert … your country needs lerts! Gawdelpus!

science, thoughts

New Year, New Calendar

Did you change your calendars yesterday for the bright new 2012 versions?

I bet you didn’t! At at least not to the overhauled calendar being advocated by Richard Henry and Steve Hanke of Johns Hopkins University in the USA, because the proposed Hanke-Henry Calendar is a bit radically different: it has a reformed pattern of two 30 day months followed by a 31 day month, four times a year. So the rhyme, “30 days hath September, April, June and November” would be revised to “30 days hath September, June, March and December”.

This means that every year would be composed of a regular 52 seven-day weeks, and every date will always fall on the same day of the week — like Christmas Day would always be, say, a Sunday. It gets rid of the silliness of leap years and of remembering how many days each moth has.

So who sees the problem? Surely if it was that easy it would have been done centuries ago.

Yes, that’s right the Hanke-Henry Calendar produces a year of just 364 days. Whereas the Earth year is 365.2422 days (hence our need for a leap day every four years to correct for that almost ¼ day error). So what do they do? Yes, that’s right! They impose not leap days, but leap weeks by adding an extra week to the end of December every 5 or 6 years. GOK how they’d cope with the moveability Easter!?

There’s another flaw, which the Scientific American article doesn’t pick up on. Hanke and Henry want their calendar to start with 1 January on a Sunday (as 2012 is, and which will next occur in 2017). The only problem is that the International Standard on dates (ISO 8601, and see also the Wikipedia entry) decrees that the week starts on a Monday and that week 1 of the year is the first week containing at least 4 days (which turns out to mean the week containing the first Thursday of the year). It’s that “week starts on a Monday” rule that is the killer. Thanks to 2012 being a Leap Year the next year when 1 January is a Monday is 2018. Hanke and Henry don’t want to wait that long! But it would give time for everyone to agree to the idea and get their ducks lined up.

It’s an interesting and actually quite a logical idea, but to be honest I cannot see it catching on. If we thought the brouhaha over Year 2000 was painful, this would be ten times worse as every date algorithm would have to be not just checked but actually changed. And in the 11 years since Year 2000 the electronic world has expanded ten-fold, maybe a hundred-fold, beyond what it was in 2000. Business would never stand for what would be a hugely complex change — although it might help the unemployment figures.

All those who’d like to try this calendar say “Aye”.

personal

Reasons to be Grateful: 7

Experiment, week 7. This week’s five things which have made me happy or for which I’m grateful.

  1. Royal Institution Lectures. Every year for almost 200 years London’s Royal Institution has put on a series of Christmas science lectures for children. And every year for the last 30 at least they have been televised. I won’t say I have watched them every year because there have been some awful series recently, especially when they were covered by commercial television. But thankfully they’re now back on BBC TV. This year there were only three lectures; there used to be five or six. And while I won’t say they’ve been dumbed down (though they probably have) they are certainly less imaginative and with fewer useful demonstrations than they were in years gone by when people like Sir David Attenborough and Prof. Eric Laithwaite were the lecturers. But they are still worth watching, even for me as a scientist. This year’s lectures, given by Prof Bruce Hood, were all about how our mind works; they’re still available on BBC iPlayer if you want to catch them.
  2. Parrots. I’ve written before about the Ring-Neck Parakeets which regularly visit our garden. I continue to find them an attractive, delightful and somewhat comic addition to our fauna.
  3. Lamb Curry. Last night I cooked a nicely hot (well I did use a good quantity of Vindaloo Curry Paste!) Lamb Curry with Cauliflower; Noreen did the Lemon Rice. It was consumed with a couple of bottles of my favourite Adnams beer. I’m getting better about not over-eating and always having a second helping, but curry remains one of the things which I cannot resist overindulging in. What could be better for New Year’s Eve?
  4. Sensible Consultants. Last Thursday I had my annual (joke — it slips by 3 months every year!) check-up at the Royal Brompton Hospital for my Obstructive Sleep Apnoea. Although I know there isn’t too much they’re ever going to do, I never look for ward to it. I’m clearly on their “stable and we don’t need to do anything” list as for the last few years I’ve been seen by a very nice Malaysian consultant nurse; but I realised she wasn’t on duty this year and wasn’t looking forward to an interview with a young know-it-all male Registrar with poor English. But I actually had a very pleasant ten minute chat with a sensible (and not unattractive) female Consultant. I do wish all consultants listened as well as she did and were as sensible and measured in their approach. Thanks, Michelle!

  5. High Street Kensington Christmas Lights. On the way home from the Brompton Hospital on Thursday I detoured via High Street Kensington to pick up Noreen who had been shopping (for my birthday present!). And along High Street Ken there are what I think are some delightful, if subtle, Christmas lights. They’re small clusters of yellowish fairy lights hanging in the trees, for all the world looking like mistletoe growing on the trees. They would have looked even better after dark. The photo isn’t good as it was a grab shot taken through the car windscreen in failing light, but hopefully you get the rough idea. If nothing else they’re imaginatively different, and they worked for me! I also like lights in trees.
thoughts

Revisionism

In looking at life, the universe and everything over the last days one of the things I’ve decided is that my blogging needs to be a bit less regimented — if only so I don’t get onto a treadmill with it.

So I’ve decided to do away with the regular “XXX of the Week” type features (where XXX is words, quotes, links, etc.). These features will still appear, just maybe a bit less regularly and not always on the same day of the week. It’ll be more when the mood or inspiration strikes me, so irregular. Hopefully that’ll leave me more spare processing power for commentary etc.

The 52 weeks photo challenge has ended, and having done it for two years I’ve decided not to take a break from it. But I do have another idea for an irregular photo series, which I hope to launch in the next week or so.

I have also streamlined the “categories” used to index posts. The previous vast list was completely unwieldy and growing like Topsy. So I’ve stripped it back to a couple of dozen categories and had a happy couple of evenings re-indexing everything. If you want to search for something particular there is always the search facility in the RH navigator.

So what’s the bottom line? Not a lot will change really. As it’s an experiment the weekly “Reasons to be Grateful” will stay as is. Otherwise everything will hopefully become a bit more flexible and a bit more diverse. All in accordance with the Second Law of Thermodynamics: entropy increases over time unless work is done to prevent it. And I don’t like doing work unless I have to!

So keep watching this space!

personal, thoughts

New Year, New Start?

So am I making any New Year Resolutions? As those of you who follow at all closely will by now realised the answer is a resounding “No”. As I blogged on New Year’s Eve 2010 I do not do New Year Resolutions; I view them as a self-fulfilling failures. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t review the year just gone (the good, the bad, and the things I learnt) and look at the year ahead and what I want to achieve. I’ve done that over the last couple of days and I have an idea where I need to focus over the coming year. No, it isn’t for sharing here — it would be way too much information!

However over-riding all of this I have a few guiding principles by which I try to live. I share them with you as my “New Year Message” and because they may help you, my readers, understand where I’m coming from:

Zen Mischief

Nude when possible, clothed when necessary

If it harm none, do as you will

Sex and nudity are normal

Treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself

Say what you mean and do what you say

Don’t worry about things you can’t change

Above all remember:

There are two approaches to life:
– to accept it, get on and enjoy it, or
– to fight it and become miserable & sad

Here’s wishing you a happy and successful 2012!