The actual map (cheese not pictured).
As well as acting as an almanac of British cheese-making towns and counties, reading through the list of location-themed cheeses is like a roll call for the lesser members of Robin Hood’s merry men. Try reading them out loud; every name rolls off the tongue as pleasingly as the cheese rolls on.
There’s Davidstow, Swaledale, Harlech, Duddleswell, Coquetdale, Buxton, Cotswold, Berkswell, Goosnargh, Wensleydale, Red Windsor, Coleraine, Harbourne, Dunlop, Appledore, Lancashire, Beacon Fell, Bowland, Rothbury, Dunsyre, Teviotdale, Brinkburn, Caithness, Garstang, Cotherstone, Croglin, Dorstone, Derby, Lanark, Hereford, Tintern, Dovedale, Barkham, Bonchester, Chevington, Woolsery (see: Embarrassing Foreigners), Appleby, Parlick Fell, Whitehaven, Allerdale and, of course, the Stinking Bishop.
Granted, that last one isn’t a place. The cheese does whiff, though. It’s very tasty but it won’t win you the affections of any Maid, nor will it help you Marian.
And while some of these names are too specific to be as useful for guidance as, say, a decent map of the major British motorways, that’s a small price to pay for the sharp tang of history, on a cracker. Possibly with chutney.
Among the cheeses that aren’t affiliated with a specific location, there are names that read like another roll call; this time it’s hobbits setting off for a picnic on a summer’s day.
Picture a member of the Baggins clan with his feet up and a pipe lit, muttering to himself, “Well, bless my braces if that’s not young Rad-den Crowdie back from his dovecote with a basket of oatcakes in his hand; Gevrik and Tesyn the pasty-makers are already halfway to the old stones; Slipcote Gallybagger seems to be heading out too, even though he should really be hard at work, doing chores for the Lord of the Hundreds; and is that Black-Eyed Susan, she with the daintiest hairy feet of them all, skipping dalewards without so much as a backward glance? The scuttlebutt has it that she is courting the lothario of the Shire, young Master Pantysgawn . . .”
That last one is genuinely the name of a cheese, by the way, so don’t snigger. It’s an organic goat cheese, for proper cheese connoisseurs, and the name is taken from the Welsh farm where it is made.
Which leads us to a final note of caution: while there’s some fun to be had with Welsh names, be aware of local sensitivities around identity and culture. Should you wish to make fun of the Welsh, proceed Caerphilly.
WHAT TO SAY: “Who’s the most popular rock star in Cheddar? Curd Cobain.”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Really? Cheese puns? From the nation that gave the world Shakespeare? For shame.”
National Treasures
Superlatives are so lightly thrown around at the moment that anyone who has managed to remain relatively well-known for more than a fortnight without enduring any public disgrace has a legitimate claim on the title of National Treasure and all the benefits that come with it.
Okay, there are no benefits. It’s just a term that gets bandied about to show a kind of uncritical approval of anyone whose cultural credit is firmly in the black, sometimes not even that firmly. However, some people appear to have given more than their fair share to the British communal pot, the kind of people who act as ambassadors for Britain just by being (a) British and (b) really good at what they do on a globally recognizable scale. If (b) turns out to be a bit of a stretch, they’ll have made up for it with lots and lots of (c) charisma. These people are so embedded in the nation’s enjoyment of itself that even death can’t sever their eternal reputation, although time will definitely have a really good go at it.
Peter Cook was a national treasure, and so was his comedy partner Dudley Moore. Morecambe and Wise are preserved as national treasures on archive tape forever more. Paul McCartney still is one (although he is starting to wear out the welcome for “Hey Jude” at national events) and John Lennon’s posthumous status has been firmly nailed in place by the beatification—Beatlification?—of generations. Judi Dench must surely qualify, although she’s spoken very firmly against it—comparing national treasure status to being exhibited behind glass—and so must Emma Thompson. Then there’s everyone else, dead and alive: J. K. Rowling, David Frost, Helen Mirren, William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Alan Bennett, Victoria Wood, Jarvis Cocker, Maggie Smith, Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, Vivian Stanshall, Elizabeth Taylor, Sean Connery, Kate Bush, Michael Caine, Virginia Woolf, Stephen Hawking, Julie Walters, Trevor McDonald, Trevor Nunn, Trevor Nelso . . . oh, sorry, that’s from a different list: National Trevors.
The two people most commonly referred to as national treasures are Stephen Fry and Sir David Attenborough. The former because he resembles the kind of posh, fluffy and rather fearsome uncle that one might come across buried in a dusty old book at an aged relative’s house. He is a man who wears many shoes: he’s an expert on consumer technology; he’s the elegant Jeeves in the best-known TV adaptation of P. G. Wodehouse’s tales of the raffish gadabout Bertie Wooster; he’s two generations of the family Melchett in the TV comedy Blackadder; he’s a documentary maker, with films on endangered species and mental illness (from a highly personal perspective, as he lives with bipolar disorder); he’s Oscar Wilde in the biopic Oscar; he’s a celebrated author of novels, an autobiography and a guide to writing poetry; he’s a creator of wildly daft sketch comedy with Hugh Laurie—the future Dr. House and the Wooster to Fry’s Jeeves; and he’s the (mostly) genial host of QI.
That list of improbable achievements, each one a gem, is why the Brits love him so. And despite taking his place in a line of genuine idiosyncratic English characters who continue to fascinate down the ages (see: Quirks, Foibles and Eccentricities), he’s simply too ripe as an individual to possibly be available in real life.
Sir David, on the other hand, is very real indeed. As the British broadcaster of natural history programmes, he is possessed of three entirely admirable qualities that set him apart: nerves that do not flap even when he is being cuddled by wild mountain gorillas, a childlike sense of wonder when faced with any natural phenomenon, and a quietly authoritative voice that regally unicycles down the boundary line between awestruck observer, hoarse with reverence, and travel-hardened expert.
He’s the man with the hobby he can’t seem to let out of his mind for as much as a second. He’s the kind of person one suspects would allow conversations to happen around him in any direction they care to wander, and then find a way to divert them back to his particular field of interest. In Sir David’s case, this means the natural world, although at one time he was a controller of an entire television channel—BBC Two—at a time when there were only three of them, and the man who commissioned Monty Python’s Flying Circus, The Old Grey Whistle Test and snooker on TV, among other things.
And as if all that weren’t admirable enough, in 1972 Sir David let go of his management responsibilities, turning down the chance to become the director general of the BBC, in order to write and present enormously popular TV shows about animals and plants and fish and birds. He’s not just a boffin—and my word, the British love a boffin, especially one who is equally unafraid to have his hair ruffled by an elephant as he is to appear in an app with Björk—he’s the boffin who abandoned the rat race in order to race with rats.
WHAT TO SAY: “So Sir David Attenborough is Sir Richard Attenborough’s brother? Imagine the family arguments over Jurassic Park!”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Stephen Fry was in National Treasure, wasn’t he?”
Bonfire Night
Bonfire Night is a fondly anticipated event at which everyone gathers to ooh and aah themselves closer together. It’s no bad thing for communities to spend a moment watching the heavens explode. Bonfire Night, or Fireworks Night or Guy Fawkes Night, commemorates an attempt to blow up the palace of Westminster, more commonly known as the Houses of Parliament, for sectarian reasons that are not often discussed any more.
To put the event into proper historical context, in the early hours of 5 November 1605, guards were instructed by King James I to search the cellars underne
ath the House of Lords. He had been shown an anonymous letter sent to Lord Monteagle, warning him and all good Catholics to stay away from the state opening of Parliament. The guards found a man leaving an undercroft just after midnight and, in the undercroft itself, thirty-six barrels of gunpowder, hidden by coal and firewood.
Under torture, the man admitted his name was Guy (or Guido) Fawkes and that he had been waiting there to light the fuse once the king had entered the building. He and twelve other men had conspired to kill the Protestant king and place his young daughter Elizabeth on the throne, once she had been kidnapped, brought up as Catholic and married to a Catholic husband. They had leased the undercroft, filled it with gunpowder, and were just waiting for the right moment to strike. The public, outraged that their king’s life had been threatened in such a way—by Catholics, who were not popular in British society at the time—lit public bonfires in the wintry air to celebrate his good health. Once the plot had been fully uncovered and explained, and the plotters executed, these impromptu celebrations were enshrined in law, in the Observance of 5th November Act (which, impressively, remained in force until 1859), to ensure a public day of thanksgiving that the king’s life had been spared. The celebrations included fireworks, food and commemorative bonfires on which effigies of Guy Fawkes—and sometimes the pope—would be burned.
This has lasted as a tradition for over four hundred years. There are huge public fireworks displays, accompanied by a massive bonfire on which a figure is often burned, although not always by any means. In Ottery St Mary, Devon people run through the streets with burning tar barrels on their backs. There are tiny backyard bonfires too, with children waving sparklers and potatoes roasting in the embers. Kids used to make their own Guys, and until relatively recently many could be found on the streets asking strangers for money: “A penny for the Guy?”
Even people who could not name the king whose life had been spared (and there are a lot of us) grew up with this rhyme, to be intoned darkly:
Remember, remember the fifth of November
Gunpowder treason and plot
I see no reason why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.
And it has not been. Alan Moore used Guy’s status as a folk anti-hero when he created his graphic novel V for Vendetta, in which V, a lone terrorist in a Guy Fawkes mask, overthrows a British fascist state. The anticapitalist movement seized upon this idea, using V masks to secure their anonymity at protests. There again, the right-wing blogger Paul Staines uses the pseudonym Guido Fawkes to write a gossip blog about Westminster, claiming the name as a tribute to “the only man to enter parliament with honest intentions. The intention being to blow it up with gunpowder.”
So, rather than being a day to commemorate the first steps of a new nation, or the overthrowing of an imperial regime, Bonfire Night is a wilder event entirely. It’s an exorcism of folk demons, and while it has lost most of its anti-Catholic sentiment (although some traditions die harder than others), it still carries the idea that somehow someone should be punished for something. There’s a rude celebration at play, a sense of irreverence towards figures of authority. In places where a Guy is to be burned, he may be just a nondescript and makeshift man built of old, stuffed clothes, but he could also be Simon Cowell or Osama Bin Laden or Lance Armstrong or Margaret Thatcher. Whoever the local community deems to be the devil of the moment (see: Cocking a Snook).
And if there’s no one else, Guy Fawkes himself is always there, ready for another roasting.
WHAT TO SAY: “Have you checked the bonfire for hedgehogs?”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Of course, this is just a modern recasting of the ancient pagan festival of Samhain.”
Quirks, Foibles and Eccentricities
There’s a knack to being eccentric. It’s not simply a matter of growing a half beard; answering the phone with a hearty “good-bye!”; wearing a wetsuit to the office; and painting all your eggs to look like planets before you eat them. That’s just bad grooming, bad manners, a recipe for a nasty rash and an overactive God complex, respectively. And showing off.
However, there are few things Brits enjoy more than individuals with genuine quirks and foibles. The lawyer who writes only with a red pen, the postman who spends his weekends happily pretending to fly a Spitfire from the replica cockpit in his garage, the woman who collects toy frogs and displays them all over the house—these are all people who may not have the buffer of extreme wealth or a country estate in which to blossom into the full fullness of themselves, but they do it anyway. It’s easy to be unorthodox when you’re in charge. Sir George Sitwell had a sign in his mansion requesting that guests should not contradict him, lest it interfere with his digestion and prevent sleep. He also created a miniature pistol for shooting wasps—much harder to carry off that kind of thing from a tiny flat in a heaving metropolis.
They also like their experts to act as if knowing a lot about a subject has taken a toll on their ability to blend in with everyone else. This seems, in some way, to be a fair swap for the extensive knowledge they now possess. The television astronomer Sir Patrick Moore, for example, always had the air of a man who simply did not have enough time to care whether you found his manner bizarre—imagine being told about space by a stern human owl with a monocle—because he spent his entire time looking upwards through telescopes or (and this is the key detail) playing the xylophone.
Sir Patrick also comes from the tradition of the Great English Eccentric, one that takes in some truly marvellous oddballs, whose most unorthodox instincts were cushioned by extreme wealth, like Willam John Cavendish-Bentinck-Scott, Fifth Duke of Portland, who dealt with his natural shyness by electing to live in a network of chambers and tunnels, one of which led directly to Worksop Railway Station. He would travel there by carriage—blackened windows, naturally—have the carriage loaded onto the train, travel to his overground home in London, and then hurry to his private study while his servants were ordered to keep their distance.
He’d have hated the more ostentatious Baron de Rothschild, whose carriage was drawn by four zebras, and who trained a tame bear to slap women guests on the bum. Actually, that’s not eccentric, that’s just creepy.
Lord Rokeby simply wanted to be a fish, and he spent a good deal of his life immersed in water, either in the sea or in his private swimming pool, in which he took his meals, his enormous beard bobbing on the surface. Lord North was, by contrast, an otherwise unremarkable man whose sole quirk was that he would go to bed on 9 October and not get up again until 22 March. He even conducted dinner parties from his bedroom, which can’t have been awkward at all.
C. B. Fry, enormously talented world-class sportsman across the disciplines of cricket, football, rugby and the long jump, may have been beautiful enough to earn the nickname “Almighty” in the press, but he is most fondly remembered as a man who, with very little prompting, could jump backwards from a standing start and land on a mantelpiece.
That’s the kind of tradition a true eccentric can really work with, especially as none of these people were doing it for the attention. Particularly not Lord William.
The same can’t really be said for Quentin Crisp, although his motivation was far from self-aggrandizement. Born Denis Pratt, he simply wanted to express what would nowadays just be considered natural flamboyance and the desire to kiss a few boys, at a time when it was physically dangerous, not to mention illegal, to do so. So he changed his name, painted his nails, dyed his hair and stepped out to meet his destiny. He famously never cleaned his home, claiming the dirt did not get any worse after the first four years, and when his memoir The Naked Civil Servant was made into a popular TV drama starring John Hurt, he became a celebrated figure—in his own words, “the stately homo of England”.
There are people who have turned their quirks into art, like the inscrutably suited Gilbert and George, the singer and comedian Vivian Stanshall and the dour performance poet Ivor Cutler, and people whose quirks actively obscure their art, like
Lawrence, lead singer of the indie bands Felt, Denim and Go-Kart Mozart, who, it’s been said, never lets any visitors use his toilet and refuses to eat vegetables. And then there are people whose art is a kind of running commentary on some of their quirks. The bulk of Russell Brand’s stand-up act is about what happens when he is allowed to follow his instincts—even though they get him into trouble on a regular basis—and it is a narrative he delivers while gesticulating wildly and speaking in a peculiarly mannered manner that could almost be a caricature of the Great English Eccentric Lords of old.
He, however, is most definitely showing off. It’s only the fact that he’s doing it in a quirky way that saves his bacon. Not that he eats bacon, of course.
WHAT TO SAY: “So how did Quentin Crisp make a cup of tea?”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “I’ve started a Facebook campaign to make every 14 January National Winking Day!”
Nightcaps
Brace yourselves: one of the food products in this chapter has a name that, had the product been developed today, would not have been considered on grounds of public decency and supermarket giggling. And you may find that it temporarily distracts you from the matter in hand, which is to be a brief discussion of a couple of nighttime hot drink alternatives to Ovaltine. This is only natural, and nothing to be ashamed of. But to help create a frictionless reading experience, let me just say the word Horlicks and leave you to process it for a second.
Horlicks. I know. Amazing.
Actually the name comes from the brothers James and William Horlick, and it should be relatively familiar to anyone from the Chicago or Wisconsin area, as that is where they created, patented and manufactured the drink that bears their name to this day. And because it’s a brand name that has become so familiar in the UK, entirely stripped of any alternative meaning the individual syllables may carry when taken one at a time, Horlicks is actually used as a safe alternative to the comparatively far less racy bollocks (see: Grade-B Swearwords). You’ll hear bar wags mock-gallantly trying not to swear in front of the ladies by describing what a “total Horlicks” someone has made of parking their Jag outside. Or describing a rugby match in which one of the players got an elbow “right in the Horlicks” that took him off the pitch for a couple of minutes.
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