Suffering for beauty

 My father once told me that you had to suffer for beauty. This in response to my complaints about the rollers I had to put in my hair overnight, secured with stiff plastic pins. Evidently it was a time when large curls were required. This was the day after hair had to be dead straight. To solve that problem was less painful but much more awkward. Hair had to be either ironed (long hair that is – I doubt the iron treatment worked with short) or wrapped round the head and secured with bobby pins.

Ah, fashion. Even in our suburban fastness we yearned to be up to date.

In the 1950s – and maybe into the very early ‘60s – we wore flared or dirndl skirts held up by layers of petticoats some of which had rope sewn into them to keep them stiff-ish. This was usually topped by a twin-set and pearls. Twin-sets, for the uninitiated, were tight little short sleeved, crew necked jumpers topped by cardigans in the same colour. While pearls finished the outfit, I suspect that was only for our mothers; we may have worn a string of beads but memory doesn’t serve me here. These flaring skirts were just the ticket for rock and roll; in any movie or tv show of the period you’ll see expanses of white petticoats as the girls were thrown back over the boy’s arm. I can’t quite remember if the Bodgies and the Widgies preceded the Rock ‘n’ Roll culture but the flared skirts were in there somewhere.

Into the '60s we suffered for beauty another way. I recall wearing very, very tight trousers made from furnishing fabric with zero stretch, decorated with large florals. They were so tight that you had to stretch out on the floor to pull the zipper up. I rather think the same solution was required for the earliest denim jeans.

As the ‘60s progressed skirts suddenly became shorter and shorter. By the time I turned 21 in 1967 the skirts were so short they should have come with matching undies. There was a parallel fashion called “hot pants” which were shorts of extreme shortness. I still possess somewhere the outfit I wore for my 21^st (a party, by the way, which I absolutely hated as I loathed being the centre of attention). This outfit was a ridiculously short skirt with a little sleeveless top. The fabric was beautiful but honestly, I can’t imagine that I ever wore this. I have also kept a pair of hot pants with beaded turnups, shorter than some swimmers!

Australia’s short skirt history was ushered in by the scandalous appearance at the Melbourne Cup in 1965 of English model Jean Shrimpton in a dress daringly cut to four inches above the knee. This garnered an extraordinary amount of publicity. And while talking British models, do you remember Twiggy of the waif-like stature and the black-ringed eyes who looked for all the world like a famine victim.

Needless to say, short skirts eventually gave way to long skirts; if they reached mid-calf they were midi-skirts or maxi-skirts if they reached the ankle.

And a moment’s reflection on undergarments. After the dirndl petticoats left the fashion stage we went to the slim fitting “slip” as they were called, made of silk or synthetic with very narrow straps. Interestingly, girls’ school uniforms – sleeveless with box pleats usually – were called gymslips; as Americans might say: “go figure!” Your underwear drawer always contained full slips and half-slips just for skirts and I rather think the occasional long slip to wear under evening clothes.

Evening clothes in the ‘60s and probably into the ‘70s always included several long dresses. These were de rigueur for events like weddings or balls. Custom had it in those long-ago days that you needed to have your arms covered for dining, then you could be sleeveless for dancing. So evening dresses often had a small jacket or bolero made to match. I recall also having cocktail dresses; not sure how they were defined but they were always short. If you turned up to a function in the wrong length clothes you were utterly humiliated.

Although I was extremely thin in the Olden Days, I along with all other women in the ‘50s and ‘60s wore “step-ins”, very thick elasticated fabric which trimmed down your hips and tummy and had four hanging tabs to which you attached your stockings. (“Panty hose” came in with increasingly short skirts.) A garter belt which held up stockings without the horridly tight step-in became a sexy alternative, paired with loose French knickers.

From stockings we can segue to shoes. In the ‘60s we had appalling wedgies, shoes with a very thick cork sole. But then narrow, elegant high heels became the vogue and have stayed so ever since. Suffering for beauty certainly applies to wearing shoes with anything from three to four-inch heels, perhaps even higher. Yes, they make your legs look slim and shapely but oh, the agony of wearing and walking in them. In my latter years, alas, my heels have headed south and I have none more than one and a half inches.

And a postscript for a discussion of fashion. A raglan sleeve with a seam which runs from under the arm to the collarbone was named after Lord Raglan, the 1^st Baron Raglan who is said to have devised this style because he’d lost an arm in the Battle of Waterloo. Cardigans were also named after a military man, in this case the 7^th Earl of Cardigan, a British army major-general who led the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War. Apparently British officers wore knitted wool waistcoats during the war which morphed into the cardigan as we know it.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

British writer and broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge on politician Anthony Eden, once Britain’s Foreign Secretary: “He was not only a bore; he bored for England.”

 

New pet and food musings

The house has a new pet, a Pineapple Conure called Chico. It’s a species of small parrot, very friendly and endearing. It climbs up my daughter’s arm to perch on her shoulder and happily walks around the place when he (or possibly she) is let out of his (or her) cage, which is most of the time. It doesn’t yet fly but apparently will do some day. Chico loves walking around on the floor and yesterday walked into the shower where he tossed his head back in apparent bliss while the water ran on him. Remarkably, our large dog Yogi is not interested in Chico at all, and considering he could swallow the bird in two gulps this is a Good Thing.

Chico pecks, but is marginally less vicious than the cockatoos. These, by the way, have gone to eat the balcony rails and wooden tables of someone else’s house. We were rather fed up with their destructiveness and stopped feeding them. They kept coming back, but in fewer numbers and eventually stopped coming altogether. Unfortunately stopping feeding the cockatoos meant we lost the beautiful crested pigeons who also came for the feed. However, the bush/brush turkeys which came to feed on the cockatoo seeds as well are no loss; they are really ugly birds.

Because I like to keep you all up to date on the household pets, I should record that the extraordinarily boring lizard which took up space in the back room has gone to another home. I can’t imagine a more useless pet. The only way you knew it was alive was its occasional blinking and the fact that you’d find it in a new position every day in its cage.

The lovely big dog, Yogi, is still doing well in his own quiet way and suffers without complaint the attention of the children who all love cuddling and kissing him and climbing all over him. The Church Point mob now have a spaniel puppy which is as cute as the proverbial button. That’s along with their cat which needs a personality transplant; all it ever does when it sees you is run away.

Something was niggling my memory when I described the Pineapple Conure and it’s now come to the fore of my elderly brain. It’s the memory of a delicacy which my mother made if they had guests over and thus absolutely nothing to do with pets. Some segue, eh!

First you cut a pineapple lengthwise so the leaves of the crown lay flat. You then carve the pineapple flesh into cubes along the length of the core. Next step is to apply jelly crystals to the surface of each cube, alternating green with red and with yellow so the flattened pineapple looks like a multicoloured chequerboard. Toothpicks went into each cube so you could pick it up. I guess it was a delicacy because of the amount of time spent on getting it prepared.

Two other “cocktail” offerings which I recall are short lengths of celery with peanut butter along the length and skewers with a cube of hard cheese and an inch or so of pepperoni. These two were not in my mother’s repertoire but tended to appear at any party held by young people. Ah, parties … not my favourite activity. This was largely because in my teens and early 20s I was a little shy. No-one who has known me only in my noisy and ubiquitous days would believe this, but it is true. I was also not much of a drinker and certainly not of Red Ned, the rough red wine in flagons, common at university parties of the time. Again, those of you who only knew me in my whiskey drinking days would find this hard to accept but thus it was.

While I can’t blame university for turning me into an alcohol abuser, it certainly set me on a lifetime of smoking. I was only 17 when I arrived at university and desperately needed a strategy for when I was alone. The finding, lighting and smoking of cigarettes became a piece of theatre which made me feel occupied – and grandly sophisticated! I now know that there is a genetic element in smoking addiction and certainly both my parents smoked as I grew up. And, for that matter, drank, not much but always a whiskey before dinner. My father was somewhat of a wine connoisseur and tried to teach my brother and I about wines. It may have stuck with my brother but didn’t with me. Even in my drinking days I preferred “hard likker” to wine, which may have had something to do with the histamines in wine which tended to trigger very severe headache even up to migraines.

I suffered from migraines for all my life from the age of 11 to the end of menopause (one thing the menopause rubbish was good for!). They arrived each month with a ferocity which left me in a terrible state, needing injections of pain killers to allow me to sleep and let the migraine pass. It was hard to manage when I was out, or at home with the children. If I was Christian I suppose I would say it was a cross I had to bear. I have been migraine-free for some decades now but the memories of those migraine days are still there.

I’ve been in relatively good health most of my life although now the various aches and pains, swellings and sores and very compromised breathing, make me realise how very old I am today. I’ve purchased a few t-shirts to mark my ageing. The slogans are “It’s weird being the same age as old people”, “I don’t know how to act my age; I’ve never been this old before”, “I haven’t lost my mind … half of it just wandered off and the other half went looking for it” and “Grandma knows everything. If she doesn’t know, she makes things up really fast.”.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

The Hungarian-born British writer and humourist George Mikes: “Continental people have a sex life; the English have hot-water bottles.”

 Off on a holiday

Well, last Sunday morning I clambered aboard a mini-bus which picked up lots of others and deposited us to North Sydney where we did some more clambering, this time aboard a big coach.

There were 34 people and a very endearing driver/guide who filled us with information as we drove from place to place. For example, that the M5 tunnel is five and a half kilometres long, which incidentally correlates to five and a half kilometres of boredom. The whole trip was in fact stretches of boredom interspersed with food, eaten at various exotic beachside resorts. (At least the area around the airport didn’t stink as it did in the ‘50s because then you drove to the airport via a number of tanneries.)

Sydney is very, very big. If you add on Campbelltown which, strictly speaking, is another city, then Sydney is very, very, very big indeed. By the time you get out of greater Sydney, you would probably have driven through three European countries.

The boredom of long stretches of driving is largely because the entire flora of the NSW coast and inland is eucalypts of various descriptions, with she-oaks or casuarinas. True, past the border of gums you sometimes see rather wonderful vistas of cleared land dotted with homesteads, farm buildings, cows, sheared sheep and horses. What made these views special was the extraordinarily verdant green of the pastures because of the rain over recent months. There was also evidence from time to time of the terrible fires two-plus years ago but eucalypts are remarkable trees in their capacity to regenerate, so despite their blackened drunks, the eucalypt forests are also very green.

Another interesting fact from our bus driver is that Australia has 800 species of gum tree. We passed many with white and very straight trunks. They must have been ideal for the sawmills. But in the pastures, for windbreaks I expect, were great stands of what I think were fir trees. There’s no doubt that the Great Dividing Range, which seems to come very close to the coast as you go down south, provides spectacular vistas.

We also had two cruises, both of about two and a half hours duration: one up the Clyde River at Batemans Bay (where incidentally we had the best fish and chips I’ve ever eaten) and the other at Jervis Bay to see dolphins. Perhaps I’m hard to please but I must say both these trips were about as exciting as watching paint dry. The Clyde is very wide and its shores are covered with mangroves and eucalypts (of course!) and decked with oyster beds. We sailed up to a small town called Nelingen which was closed, so we were told. Considering this was mid-afternoon we were puzzled. It turned out that one place which sold souvenirs was in fact open but by that stage I’d decided not to risk the uphill walk to the shop. The cruise in Jervis Bay showed you a lot of Jervis Bay which is something like six times larger than Sydney Harbour but has infinitely less charm. We did in fact catch up to the dolphins in the last ten minutes or so but they were not obliging and only showed us a small curve of their backs and their fins.

One of the highlights of the holiday was a visit to Mogo zoo where you could get up close and personal with meerkats, strange moustachioed monkeys and giraffes who came right up to the keepers to be fed. The zoo also has cheetahs, lions (including white lions which were hiding), hippopotami or it may have been rhinoceros (also hiding), a couple of very grumpy looking gorillas and lots of zebras.

On this holiday, I observed again what I’d noticed in driving holidays many decades ago; the propensity of country people to build their homes right on the roadside or, if further away, at least facing the road. It’s extremely odd that they don’t find a spot off in the pastures which would give some privacy. Ah, well … a mystery not to be solved. I also noticed shipping containers in many of the gardens of the more run-down houses. Were they for storage or living? Another mystery not to be solved.

By contrast, at many places on this trip we drove through or into flyspeck towns packed with huge, modern and attractive homes, some with a holiday feel and others very suburban. In other, bigger, towns there were mixtures of these modern buildings and old-fashioned fibro houses or weatherboard, sometimes gussied up with smart paint. The tour organisers took pains to take us to attractive towns to have morning or afternoon tea and lunch. We’d pull up to a park (universally well kept) at a beach with covered benches and tables where our driver set out the goodies. And one very important fact: there was always a toilet block. Given that the average age of the people on tour was probably 80, access to a clean toilet is the sine qua non of a driving holiday. These small coastal towns down south could teach our Northern Beaches parks a thing or two. The only negative in some of the parks was the need to dodge kangaroo poop; in one park we saw a large group (troop?) of kangaroos snoozing in the shade of a large tree.

And speaking of coastal communities, on the way back via Wollongong, we actually avoided Wollongong itself and took the coastal road past a series of small beach-side towns like Thirroul, Austinmer, Coledale, Wombarra and more. They were delightful and many boasted houses of great charm. I’d say they would be a perfect place to go for a beach holiday except that I live in a beach holiday!

(Our driver, as I’ve said was full of facts. He told us not only that wombats and koalas have a common ancestor but that koalas poop olive-shaped poos but wombat poop is cubed.)

As I said earlier, this trip – and perhaps all coach tours – caters for an older tourist. If you live on your own, as many of my companions did, it was a nice way to have company on a holiday. At least one third to one half of the whole 34 was English. Most of the group were very hale and hearty and seemed to have no trouble keeping up the pace. I imagine, however, that this sort of trip with its long driving stretches and multiple stops (and loos) was just right for the energies of the slightly older. For the remainder of the passengers, some spoke such broad ocker that I wished I brought Let Stalk Strine with me. All, thankfully, were nice people, easy to please and appreciative of the company they found themselves in.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

Sir Robert Menzies, when accused by a Member of Parliament of harbouring a superiority complex: “Considering the company I keep in this place, that is hardly surprising.”

 

 

Ancient history

I was musing about my scars recently – as you do when the weather’s foul – and was thinking about how permanent they are. Well yes, of course they are – that’s in the job description for a scar. But I was particularly engaged with the scars on my forehead and down to my nose. They’re the reminders of my earliest introduction to sewing and its ancillary arts and crafts.

We lived in Eastwood when I was small and I would go next door to visit Mrs Onion (it was actually Unwin but the nick-name stuck). She was a great sewer and sat for hours at her sewing machine. I would pop up on the table facing her and presumably chatter away while I watched her work. On one inauspicious day, her sewing table collapsed sending me – and all the pins, needles and scissors – onto the floor. The scissors cut my forehead just above my nose and the pins and needles went into the rest of my forehead and my nose. I don’t recall the accident, but I do have a faint memory of our doctor dabbing at my forehead with some sort of antiseptic. Needless to say, I was extraordinarily lucky not to have been blinded and a bunch of now very faint scars was not a problem under the circumstances.

I have some scars on my arms and back where small lumps were removed – never (and again I was very fortunate) turning out to be a problem. The same applied to the moles which were taken off my front. I also have a small scar on my calf from tripping over a concrete step in the craft gallery where I worked a very long time ago. However, these scars have now almost disappeared in the forests of age spots, varicose and spider veins.

Other ancient history musings take me on the drive between our home (but I can’t remember if this was our Eastwood or Pymble home) and my grandmother’s home in Parramatta. Quite vividly, I can see a group of very large buildings on our route which I remember being told were homes for orphans. Perhaps these were Aboriginal children stolen from their families or children orphaned in other ways. I can’t remember any details other than a feeling of sorrow as we passed them by.

My grandmother came to Australia with my youngest uncle Alan after my grandfather died some time after we arrived Down Under. I remember very little of her house, which she must have chosen because we were then living also in Parramatta, except for a very ugly, dark and unwholesome goldfish pond. By the time we moved to the North Shore my uncle was married and my grandmother lived with us although she eventually moved to live with the same uncle in the Eastern Suburbs. I regret vividly not asking her much about her life in England. All I know was that she lived in a fairly large house with her husband, her four sons and two grandfathers who lived with them. Imagine how hard it must have been cooking each day for seven men. And one thing I do know was that she was taken out of school at 16 to help her own mother with her multitude of siblings. Consequently she became one of those “housewives” who only understood what the Germans called Kinder, Kirche, Kuche – children, “church” and kitchen.

I don’t remember that she did much cooking when she lived with us. The two things which stand out are the kasha she cooked for my father – disgusting buckwheat – and her legendary ginger cake which was in fact a honey cake for the Jewish New Year and any other time she decided to bake. She and my mother did not get on well. This I do remember. I was often irritable with her myself because she used to tell on me when I did something wrong. I must have missed many punishments because my mother was so cross that she “dobbed” me in.

Back to the memories which may have sparked my interest in sewing and other crafts as well as what had stuck from watching Mrs Onion sew. At one stage in her life my mother patronised a dressmaker and sometimes took me with her when she had to go for fittings. I recall walking to the sewing room through a long hallway lined on one side with shelves. These held bundles of fabric left over from each of the many, many dresses she had created and formed a kaleidoscope of colours and textures which I found breathtakingly wonderful.

When I gave birth to a girl (my second child) I determined to learn how to make her clothes. My mother was not interested in sewing but my father had worked with patterns and cloth all his adult life. So he showed me how to use a sewing machine and how to lay out the pattern pieces, pin and cut them. I became a dab hand at making delightful dresses for Jessica and eventually even clothes for the boys. This was after I took a course in sewing stretch fabric and could make a creditable go of creating t-shirts. I also sewed my own maternity clothes. In those days 50-plus years ago we actually wore special shapeless tent-like maternity dresses which were easy to sew because they didn’t have to fit. I am bemused by the young women of today who stuff their bumps into t-shirts and other “normal” clothes; I really don’t like the look but then I’m old and out of touch!

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations.

British actor A. E. Matthews: “I always wait for The Times each morning. I look at the obituary, and if I’m not in it, I go to work.”

 More words and memories

 

My dear friend Denise, who lives in delightful Lennox Head, was inspired to share her favourite multi-use word with us all. It’s “up”. Here is her list plus a few extras …

You can go up, lift up (a box), lift up (your eyes), look up (a word), look up (to the sky), hold up (as in robbery), hold up (as in hold up as an example), check up (on something), (have a) check up, set up (a system), stand up (to someone), shore up (support), tie up (shoe laces), cheer up, fold up, dry up, shut up, bring up (in conversation), bring up (your children) and bring up (vomit).

Let me know your favourite multi-use words so we can all share.

And now to memories, specifically memories of holidays.

Each time I hear a news report about Myanmar, I flash back in my mind to the single night I spent in Burma, as it was then, when I was 16. I’ve mentioned before that my parents took my brother and I on a major holiday abroad at that time. Burma was our overnight stop on the way back to Sydney. We stayed in an hotel which I think had been some European’s palatial mansion. It had circular steps to the upper floors and ceiling fans, which I called punkah fans, lazily rotating. After dinner, I took a stroll outside in the warm dark evening toward the low wall which bounded the property. I heard a low murmur and to my surprise, the adjoining wall which bounded the property next door, was being used by a dozen or so Buddhist monks who were just sitting there and quietly talking. I was told later that the next door property was the Buddhist equivalent of a monastery – a lamasery perhaps. It was quite spooky.

Another clear memory was an evening in Rome when our parents took us to the Hostaria dell’Orso. Housed in a 14^th Century building it had a bar on the ground floor, magnificent restaurant on the next floor up and a nightclub on the third floor. When I checked recently, I found it is still operating just as it had been all those decades ago and for some hundreds of years before that.

Also on that trip, history really smacked me in the face when we visited the site of Mycenae in Greece. Because I was an ancient history nut, my parents had let me choose where outside Athens we would go in our few days in Greece. Mycenae, in Greek legend, was the home of King Agamemnon who would initiate the decade long Trojan War to capture the beauteous Helen (who had run off with Paris of Troy) and return her to her husband, Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus. The site of Mycenae had been partly excavated by Heinrich Schliemann, who also excavated at Troy. He found, among many other objects, a beautiful golden mask which is called (incorrectly it is now thought), the mask of Agamemnon.

On the day we visited there were no other tourists; this was the early ‘60s and mass tourism was in the future. The guide who had accompanied us to Mycenae from Athens introduced us to a very, very old man who told us, through translation, that he had been a six-year-old child when Schliemann dug at Mycenae. His father was one of Schliemann’s helpers and the old man remembered meeting him. What a thrill! It was like shaking the hand of history.

Holidays in Australia were much more modest. The very earliest, not remembered by my brother and I but told to us by our parents, was a holiday in Bondi when we were living in Paramatta. From this holiday came the Great Tick Talking Point. Apparently I had a tick somewhere on my scalp. How my parents knew this is a mystery but when the tick was removed (by whom unknown), they kept it in an old Benson and Hedges tin and used to show it to their friends. Imagine! They’d been through the Blitz (my mother) and years of fighting with the British Army (my father) and experienced all the other depredations of war but they found a burrowing insect from their daughter's scalp to be marvellous.

The first holiday I remember was Jervis Bay. In what was then and still is a naval base, there was a large building surplus to the navy’s requirements which was turned into a holiday boarding house and was where the English Jews went for holidays. There were white beaches and green lawns and my brother managed to break his arm on one of these holidays which of course makes it memorable. A few years ago, the spouse and I were on a south coast driving holiday and took advantage of the navy’s generosity in allowing visitors to the base, provided they stayed in their cars. I was absolutely overcome when we drove around a bend and there was the building and the huge green sward in front, just as I’d remembered it.

As a child I also went to the Blue Mountains and stayed in the Hydro Majestic. Majestic is just how I remember it, with what seemed to me to be huge rooms with apparently outsized furniture. Returning in my late teenage, I realised the rooms and the furniture were all conventionally sized; it was just that I must have been very small.

Finally, my family, and many other English and Australian Jewish families, settled for a decade or so to have summer holidays at Surfers Paradise. Quite small and not well developed, Surfers was a cosy holiday destination with only one restaurant I recall: the Zuider Zee. We stayed in a very modest boarding house close to the sand and I recall my brother and cousin running around in the sun while I sat under a tree with my book. In teenage, however, I eventually ventured to the sand and have pictures to prove it. This was at the very beginning of “rock ‘n roll” and I remember a broadcast system which blasted Rock around the Clock across the beach.

Now, of course, I live in a holiday. Maybe I should book a week in Balmain!

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

Groucho Marx, when excluded from a beach club on racial (read antisemitic) grounds: “Since my daughter is only half Jewish, could she go in the water up to her knees?”

 English wonders

 

The English language is a truly wondrous thing. Its highways and byways catch you sometimes with surprise and oftentimes with pleasure.

Take collectives, for example. We all know about a pride of lions and a herd of elephants. But how about a “murder” of crows or a “parliament” of owls. I looked up some more for your delectation: an eyrie of eagles, an ambush of tigers, a confusion (or argument) of architects, an army of herrings, a bale of turtles, a battery of barracuda, a bellowing of bullfinches, a bevy of swans, a bloat (or crash) of hippopotami, a boil of hawks, a bubble of divers, a celebration of polar bears, a clowder (?) of cats, a coalition of cheetahs, a commonwealth of bees, a conflagration of arsonists and a converting of preachers – and all of this without going past the letter c.

There are also plenty of odd words describing one specific thing. “Dottle” is a good example. Dottle is the remaining plug of unburnt tobacco and ashes left in the bottom of a tobacco pipe when it has been smoked (precise definition from Wikipedia). Not something you need in everyday conversation but delightfully precise.

Take a word like “hull”. It means the husk or shell of a seed or fruit but in its verb form it means to remove a hull. So, for example, digging out the green leafy stem of leaves on a strawberry is called hulling the strawberry. I’m curious about the strawberries and cream which apparently are a feature of watching Wimbledon live. Do they have an army of minions (or indeed Minions) hulling thousands of strawberries every day of the tournament? What an extraordinary thing to put on your CV; “I hull strawberries at Wimbledon”.

Then there are words which have multiple meanings, some of which are odd. For example, if you are dressmaking, you “set” a sleeve into a bodice, vastly different from “setting” something down or “setting” something up. Which reminds me of the school age mantra: Flu breaks out, a thief breaks in, school breaks up and a car breaks down.

How about the odd use of simple words. Take “neck” for example. It is used perfectly sensibly for the bit of your body which attaches your noggin to your torso. But we also say “which neck of the woods do you come from”. And there’s “nick”.
It’s often used for a small cut. But we also say “in the nick of time” or “I’ll just nick out to the shops”.

You are supposed to eat “a peck” of dirt before you die, and you sing to your grandchild: “I love you, a bushel and a peck, a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck.” Both peck and bushel are old imperial measurements up there with guinea (one pound one shilling) and a “baker’s dozen” (13). The Britannica tells us that there are a few theories as to why a baker’s dozen became 13, but the most widely accepted one has to do with avoiding a beating. In medieval England there were laws that related the price of bread to the price of the wheat used to make it. Bakers who were found to be “cheating” their customers by overpricing undersized loaves were subject to strict punishment, including fines or flogging.

Even with careful planning it is difficult to ensure that all your baked goods come out the same size; there may be fluctuations in rising and baking and air content, and many of these bakers didn’t even have scales to weigh their dough. For fear of accidentally coming up short, they would throw in a bit extra to ensure that they wouldn’t end up with a surprise flogging later. In fact, sometimes a baker’s dozen was 14—just to be extra sure.

The word “hawk” is another example of weirdly different meanings for same word. Of course it’s the name of a bird of prey and, not too distantly, describes a person with bellicose views. It also describes carrying goods around for sale and it’s the word for expectorating or clearing one’s throat and bringing up phlegm.

If you’ve got any favourite examples of English at its best and most peculiar do let me know; you can share it with everyone.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations.

Donald McGill, British comic postcard artist: “Do you like Kipling? “I don’t know, you naughty boy, I’ve never kippled.”

Antimacassars and other strange customs 

I was going to write to you about antimacassars, a strange word which had fallen into disuse. Except it hasn’t. When I went into Google to check its spelling, I find that it’s still used to describe a piece of cloth draped as protection across the arms and/or back of an armchair. In the Victorian era, antimacassars were usually of lace or possibly embroidered cloth; now it seems they’re of any fabric and appear to be much more sturdy than their older relations.

At least we don’t have to live with other Victorian ideas like draping fabric around a piano’s legs because seeing legs, even on an inanimate object like a piano, was regarded as provocative. Seeing a lady’s ankle was a sexy as it got. Which is odd as in slightly earlier times as we saw in Pride and Prejudice and a myriad of other television series and movies, women wore extremely tight bodices with a great deal of bosom pushed up and out and men wore extremely tight “inexpressibles” of knitted material which one imagines were even more revealing than budgie smugglers.

O tempora, o mores – Oh the times, oh the manners!

It’s interesting how fashion – in clothing, manners, activities and more – has changed from my youth to now.

Take “Ban the Bomb”, the slogan of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a strong peace movement in the late ‘50s and ‘60s. It advocated the abolition of methods of mass destruction but is no longer active although its logo, a kind of revamped Mercedes symbol, is still co-opted sometimes by other anti-establishment movements.

And then there were beach inspectors. Even in the ‘60s, they patrolled Bondi Beach (and maybe elsewhere) looking for young women wearing scanty bikinis which were against either the law or the statutes of Waverley Council. I was humiliated by being complimented by one of these loathed public servants because my two-piece was supremely modest, the bottom half coming all the way to my waist.

In the ‘50s and ‘60s, men escorting women down the street would reliably position themselves on the kerb side of the sidewalk, a custom ingrained from when streets were muddy and passing traffic would fling mud or dust upwards. I doubt there is anyone alive under 70 who would do this for that reason. It’s a bit like women wearing gloves to go to town – totally foregone.

Kids today have their LOL (laughing out loud), BRB (be right back), BTW (by the way), FISH (first in, still here) and POS (parents over shoulder). But we had our own acronyms; as young teenagers we wrote SWALK on the back of envelopes (sealed with a loving kiss) and giggled at the supposed meaning of POSH (allegedly written on the suitcases of the sahibs and memsahibs sailing to and from India and standing for Port Out Starboard Home, instructions on which side of the ship to have one’s cabin) and the supposed meaning of the word Snafu, coined by the military and meaning Situation Normal All F**d Up.

We also had Pig Latin, an invented language where each word lost its first letter which was pushed to the end of the word with the sound “ay” afterwards. So, Pig Latin for Pig Latin was “igpay atinlay”. Astonishingly, it didn’t really catch on.

Ladies were not supposed to eat in the street in the Olden Days; if I ever find myself slurping an ice-cream as I wander along, I send up a silent “sorry” to my late mother.

Young ladies also didn’t get their ears pierced. That, apparently, was only for foreign people. So strong was this admonition that I didn’t get my ears pierced until I was a dashing 72.

We did a lot of singing the National Anthem in the Olden Days, including at the cinema where we had to stand and sing before the film (or fillum or pitcha). In those days it was, of course, God Save the Queen. It took me years to learn Advance Australia Fair when it was introduced as our National Anthem, and I’m still wobbly on the second verse.

By the way, the young Queen visited Australia in 1954, less than a year after her Coronation, which was celebrated by the publishing of glossy black and white picture books which we young girls sighed over. On her 1954 visit, my mother, along with an estimated 1.8 million others, took my little brother and I to wave flags as her motorcade flashed by. I recall wondering when I was older how she coped with the disgusting stench of the tanneries which lined the then best route from the airport to the city. Perhaps she had her bottle of sal volatile (smelling salts) without which, I understand, no lady would travel.

And another quaint custom of the Olden Days … When we young ladies finally met and married Mr Right we completely lost our identity, subsumed into that of our husbands; Betty Williams became Mrs John Brown or Helen White, Mrs Bob Jones.

 

 

Quote of the Week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations.

US poet Robert Lowell: “If we see the light at the end of the tunnel, it’s the light of the oncoming train.”