While we’re away: Two short stories
John Evans
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Parish Pump: Syntagma is away for August
We are away for the rest of the Summer. Have a great holiday and return refreshed for the Autumn reckoning. Best wishes Do you have a view? Comments Off
Syntagma is awayWe are away for a short break this week. Back soon. John Evans Do you have a view? Comments Off
Parish Pump: Syntagma moving serversThere may be some disruption of service for a while as we are undergoing a server upgrade. Suggested reading: The Green Man, which has been rewritten and expanded. Also, the funniest blog post I’ve read in ages: The real Barak Obama by James Delingpole. John Evans Do you have a view? Comments Off
DIARY: Gategate, AVgate, Cornish pasties, Kate of Troy, Ladder of Understanding
In desperation, she had it painted the same colour as her coat. Don’t think I made this up.
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I’ve just voted NO in the AV referendum. Mind you, it took me an age to find the polling station, which has moved from the social club it once occupied so conveniently. If there’s one way to reduce an already dismal turnout, it is to hide the voting booths in some God-forsaken hole that no-one knows exists. Our polling station is now situated in a Sea Cadets centre in what passes for the docks. A long walk along the canal produced not an inkling of where the place could be. I even asked a local resident but he didn’t know either. Not one to be easily robbed of my democratic rights, I continued to trek alongside the boat yards and finally, just as the road was about to give way to open country, a small sign announced: Polling Station. It couldn’t have been more out of the way. The three people officiating behind the “welcome” table were startled to see me and visibly jumped. It was 11am, so the place had been open for four hours. Surely they must have seen a voter by then? I didn’t ask in case it embarrassed them. I predict a low turnout, in our ward, at least.
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In the Westcountry where I live, every High Street has the same aroma. Where’ere you walk you’ll not escape the smell of Cornish pasties. “Real” ones, according to the signs above the shops. I admit the scent is enticing. Many visitors are drawn inescapably to the warm counters, where plump portions of browned meat nestle amid dollops of swede and lashings of onion, all encased in scalloped envelopes of delicious pastry. What could be nicer? Sadly, the taste rarely matches the loveliness of the aroma. Something is inexplicably lost on the journey between nose and mouth. I’ve been trying to figure this out for years and only now have I hit on the reason. The smell of a pastie simply contains the aromatic ingredients: delicate flaky pastry, the meat/onion melange, a touch of swede plus herbs and spices — although I’m informed that just pepper is involved. No matter, one of the main ingredients, salt, only emerges in the flavour, as does sugar, which is mainly in the pastry. And here’s the rub, a large shaking of salt plus significant amounts of the sweet stuff substantially alters, and degrades, the taste in comparison with the aroma. I’ve always found the flavours of salt and sugar objectionable in any case. Salt has a metallic taste from the sodium, and a hint of chlorine, while sugar has a carbony aftertaste that coarsens everything it touches. Maybe I’m oversensitive to those ingredients, breaking them down to their constituent parts, but they do make the taste very different from the aroma. Food technologists take note.
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The outburst of superlatives for the Royal wedding last week, derived in part from the fact that most households across the land watched the event on large, widescreen, possibly HD, TV sets. This was the first major HD Royal event. Royal London looked wonderful, as did the Abbey, which scrubbed up very well. When I first spotted Kate, she resembled Lot’s wife in the Bible, who was turned into a pillar of salt. Slender and all in white, she shimmered with fragility like an ice sculpture. In close-up, she emerged more as Helen of Troy. I wondered how many boats had been launched on the Solent that morning. The thirteen miserable Labour years of political destruction vanished forever. Olde England popped up unscathed from the shadows and relaunched the nation into the 21st century. It’s no wonder that most of the great turning points in our history are marked by Royal events, not political ones. Blair and Brown’s absence seemed right. There was no desire to be reminded of their murky, nation-destroying past.
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We all know the experience of saying one thing in one situation and seeming to contradict it in another. This is because we are addressing different realities across a step change of understanding. To observers it usually sounds like muddled thinking. Often, if we are self-reflective, we puzzle why both make sense in their context but not in a joined-up exposition. Sometimes we make the mistake of trying to reconcile them at one or other levels, or even attempt to merge them on a different plane. Einstein’s unified field theory may be just such an error. That some things rarely make sense on a physical level is obvious to everyone after a little examination. Where does this lead, confusion or clarification? It all depends on where you’re coming from on the “ladder of understanding.” John Evans John Evans is the author of The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face? Available from Amazon and all good booksellers. Recent Related Commentary Do you have a view? Comments Off
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We can reveal that, on the morning of the Royal wedding, Princess Beatrice walked into a wrought iron gate, part of which wedged itself firmly onto her head.
