Malcolm's heroes of the day ...

are Ana M. Garcia and the team of researchers from from the the University of Valencia, the Generalitat Valenciana, and the Institut Municipal d'Investigació Mèdica, Barcelona:

Malcolm came across this first in today's Guardian:

Alcohol cuts the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, especially among women and non-smokers, and drinkers are at lower risk than teetotallers, according to researchers from Valencia University in Spain, writing in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.

"Our results for alcohol consumption generally point to a protective effect, especially light and moderate drinkers."

Or, from the original press release:

"Our results suggest a protective effect of alcohol consumption, mostly in nonsmokers, and the need to consider interactions between tobacco and alcohol consumption, as well as interactions with gender, when assessing the effects of smoking and/or drinking on the risk of AD," according to lead investigator Ana M. Garcia, PhD, MPH, Department of Preventive Medicine and Public Health, University of Valencia.

"Interactive effects of smoking and drinking are supported by the fact that both alcohol and tobacco affect brain neuronal receptors."

Since a previous study indicated:

Alcohol cuts the risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis by up to 50%

it's all A-OK.

Cheers, Ana! Sphere: Related Content

A glorious day ... what to do?

Find a decent pub and drink in the sun, obviously.

The Duke of York is quite a fine-looking building. Once upon a time it was the natural watering hole between Barnet and Potters Bar, on the old North Road. Today it is just out of earshot of the M25, a spit beyond the Greater London boundary line into Hertfordshire.

When the Lady in his Life and Malcolm started visiting here, it was little more than a roadside steak bar. It has brightened, expanded and now puts on a decent appearance. A bit suburban golf-clubby perhaps, but none the worse for that. A mixed clientele makes it a bit more appealing than the norm in these parts.

On draught three good beers, London Pride and Doom Bar as regulars. A grill and a bottle of Cab in between partakings. Then a long, leisurely sit in the pleasant beer-garden.

More out of cussedness (and a wish for both parties to drink) meant the Lady in his Life and Malcolm undertook the hike on public transport. The 84 from New Barnet all the way to St Albans is as far out as the London red buses venture: London travel passes seem to work as far as Potters Bar.

What's not to like? Sphere: Related Content

Baaah! ... humbug!

The duties of parenthood

Malcolm evolved a number of diversions for long-distance driving with his (then, much younger) off-spring.

• He played the famed legs game. Add up the number of legs on each pub sign to a total -- left-hand side of car versus right-hand side. So: the Bull and Butcher = 6 legs; the Carpenter's Arms = 2 legs (that's after a rules review: "It says 'arms' not legs!"). The cruncher was the Queen's Arms (see below):

So, count carefully. Eight lions and one unicorn. Nine fours are 36! Ah!, but it's the Queen's Arms, so it's necessary to add another two for 'Er Nibs! ... But you allowed the Carpenter's Arms for two! So, it's only fair ... Total score: 38! ... Game, set and match! Self-satisfied smugness on one side of the back seat; sulky silence on the other.

Don't knock it. As a piece of automotive child-care (which, after all, is the most extended father-child environment in the modern world) it worked a treat. Result: one accountant and two lawyers. However, the legs game doesn't work much south of Plymouth, or west of Anglesey.

• Malcolm's "Mr Blob" game. Spot the most circumferentially-challenged individual, and mock him. Awards were made on a regional, national and all-time basis. This game has been subsequently ruled unacceptable under EU anti-sizist regulation.

• The rat-wagon championship. Claim ("Bags I!") the most rusted, unroadworthy wreck observed on the journey. Points awarded for degree of oxidization, methods of disguising thereof, and -- of course -- corrosion and corrugation. Prime specimens were largely those magnificent well-rotted Citroen HY vans (see right). This activity was particularly useful while cruising along a Rue Nationale at a steady 28 mph behind such a beast. Again, points and prizes awarded on a sessional, daily and trip-wise basis. The all-time champion was recorded at the fish-market in Sète, though an even more worthy observation in Versailles had to be eliminated on the grounds of permanent immobility.

• Despite that eight-fold discriminator put into Macbeth's mouth by Bill Shakespeare, it is a well-attested fact that all dogs, particularly those seen in France on the end of strings, can be defined (on criteria of size and hirsuteness) as one of just three types: rat, rug or demi-cheval. Precise allocation into each classification can be extended into a minor family disagreement to occupy several kilometres to the next stop.
  

• Malcolm claims exclusive authorship of the food-chain invariable. This involves looking out for farm animals and, as the car sweeps passed at main-road speed, insulting them with a prognostication. So, any field of sheep must be greeted with pointed fingers and cries of "Mint sauce!" Unfortunate pigs should be saluted with "Apple sauce!" Anything resembling cattle needs "Yorkshire pud and two veg!" in a rising descant. Extra points and prizes are arbitrarily awarded as a bonus for originality and alternative thinking: hence the cry of "Bells of Saint Clement's!" in passing a flock of French ducks earned an ice-cream, or, soon after a glimpse of geese, the chant of:

Christmas is coming, the geese are getting fat:
Please put a penny in the old man's hat!
If you haven't got a penny, a ha'penny will do;
If you haven't got a ha'penny, God bless you!

• One whole journey, all six hundred miles, one thousand kilometers, from Calais to the camping grounds of Languedoc, had to be done "in character". The characters were evolved from a tape of Winnie-the-Pooh. So there was the-Lady-in-Malcolm's-Life as Kanga (straight type-casting, there), Malcolm as wise (but misguided) old Wol. One daughter pre-empted the lead-role as Winnie, and the solicitor-to-be saw herself as Eyeore. The future barrister-at-law was, of course, Baby Roo.

In the course of this trip, Malcolm (observing the slow passage of the French paysage) evolved a thesis that all human types could be defined in terms of A.A. Milne's anthropomorphism. As a notion it may not stand on a par with Freud or Jung, but at least it's as valid as those medieval "humours" which occupied elongated hours of study in Malcolm's student years.

Moreover, regarding the subsequent development of his three daughters, the self-chosen character identification was curiously psychologically-prescient.

Come to the point, Malcolm!

Well, this evening's meal involved lamb cutlets.

So, on Redfellow Hovel's dining table was a container of mint sauce. It's Tuesday, for heaven's sake!, so it's straight out of the fridge, still in the jar, onto the table. Yeah, yeah: alongside the brown sauce. So, what d'you wanna make of it? Huh?

Malcolm, reaching around the bottle of (rather nice) light ersatz-Burgundy for the jar, then noticed its USP, which his eye picked out, on a yellow roundel:

Suitable for vegetarians and vegans.

The Pert Young Piece, now the Barrister-at-law (but still "Baby Roo" of two decades ago) observed this. She cast a jaundiced eye, and said:

"Why not? There's always a first time. You never would know."

Sphere: Related Content

The Gray Lady goes on a pub crawl

Phone call from Number One daughter in the former Colony: had Malcolm seen today's New York Times? Yes, he had (on line, anyway), and he knew what had caught her attention.

A was a piece by Henry Shukman on the pubs of:

a corner of the northeast Cotswolds where I misspent my youth, an area littered with picturesque towns and villages, and studded — as I remembered it — with lovely pubs.

He then rattles off a sequence of pubs, mainly tied houses of the Hook Norton Brewery. They are (with Malcolm's passing thoughts):

• the Chequers in Chipping Norton (that's a Fuller's house, so expect London Pride and ESB);
• the Red Lion, also in Chipping Norton (it's in Albion Street, and a decent local);
• the Sun (about which there are, ahem, mixed reports) and the Pear Tree (effectively, the brewery tap: good beer, good place) in Hook Norton itself;
• the Plough in Kingham (a pretentious gastro-pub, boasting its Michelin star)
• the Falkland Arms in Great Tew (thatched and be-creepered exterior; oak beams, flagstones and inglenook fireplace within -- a place that makes the effort, and is worth finding); and
• the King's Head in Bledington (set back from the village green, another of those picture-postcard pubs).
  

Malcolm defers to nobody in his liking for Old Hooky (4.6% ABV), but he finds that choice of hostelries partly perverse. His would add alternatives:

• in Chipping Norton, the Bell in West Street, and Stones in the Market Place;
• the Masons Arms in Swerford (between Chipping Norton and Great Tew), a gastro-pub of distinction, and in glorious countryside;
• the Red Lion in Bloxham, on the road to Banbury; another Fuller's house: in good weather, watch the stream run through the garden, else a two-bar interior;
• the Tite Inn at Chadlington, another one with superb views and a decent restaurant, just a couple of miles out of Chipping Norton;
• and so on.

Fortunately, in the Cotswolds there's enough back-roads, villages and pubs to allow one to avoid the sweltering hordes.

There is more than a grain of truth in Shukman's gloom:

Closing at something like a rate of more than three a day, pubs have become scarce enough that for the first time since the Domesday Book, more than half the villages in England no longer have one. It’s a rare pub that still thrives, or even limps on, by being what it was meant to be: a drinking establishment.

Well, we cannot be sure about the pub-density in 1086, but change is happening. We can blame that on cheap alcohol at the supermarket, on the changing social habits, or whatever we like. Many pubs are adapting (they always have): either by becoming "sports bars" (Murdoch's monopoly of big sporting events, especially football, being the main accelerator there) or by becoming much more family-friendly and food-orientated. The developments, then, may not be entirely negative.

One can still locate what is purely "a drinking establishment", if one must. That's one of those grim establishments where a handful of old sods, dog at feet, each sat in his own corner, chewing a pipe, silent and morose: only the death-watch beetle broke the silence. Malcolm's experience is that such places always were the exception rather than the rule. Sphere: Related Content

The not-so-good and not-so-great, number 8

Here's one Malcolm should have made earlier (which, conveniently, gets him off the hook identified in his previous posting).

The Bird Flanagan

This is, at Rialto on Dublin's South Circular Road, heading towards Dolphin's Barn, a more than decent pub.

The name originates from a Dublin character, Willie Flanagan, of whom the legends are endless. Willie was born in 1867, died in 1925, and spent the time between as a sporting gentleman, occasional farmer, but mainly living on his father's money.

The pub-sign tells of one of the Bird's japes.

He would buy a fowl in a street-market, and ask the stall-holder to leave the bird hanging.

Flanagan would then lurk, until a police constable was nearby. Then, inviting suspicion by all means possible, Flangan would skulk and sidle his way back to the stall, grab his fowl, and run off, inevitably pursued by constable. When Flanagan had the full attention of passers-by, he would allow himself to be collared, only to produce the duly-authorised receipt for ownership.

But that was not the root of the pseudonym.

There are many variants of this story. Malcolm believes the most credible to go like this:

In 1909 Flanagan attended a masquerade dressed as the Holy Ghost. His impiety offended the others present, who may have roughed him up a little. Flanagan then proceeded to lay an egg (a rugby ball) and depart at some speed.

Horses feature largely in stories of the Bird.

He is supposed to have ridden through the lobby of the Gresham Hotel, approached the bar, and asked for a drink. The barman apologised for being closed during Holy Hour (the statutory afternoon closure). The Bird replied: "It's not for me, you fool. It's for me horse." Once upon a time, if Malcolm's memory holds, the (over-priced and under-stocked) bar in the Gresham was also the Bird Flanagan.

The Bird was one of the founding members of the South County Dublin Harriers. When James E. Norton produced a history of the hunt, he included an anecdote from the 1920s. Sheila Meyers hunted a grey from the Bird's stable, which the Bird entered for the local point-to-point, with Sheila up. When she reached the saddling enclosure, she found the Bird's groom feeding the horse a strong egg-nog:

Eventually we started and I could not hold one end of the animal and kept finding myself in front. I swear he was a little inebriated as he kept falling on his knees when landing over a fence and the others came up with me. This went on for what seemed like hours until I found we were within sight of the winning post. I was still pulling for all I was worth when we passed the post - I had won!

Inevitably, the Bird makes an appearance in many of the anecdotes of early Twentieth-Century Dublin.

There is a short story by Oliver St.John Gogarty, The Bird Milligan (which was included in a Mercier Press anthology). The amended name is not an error on Gogarty's part: he left Ireland in haste after losing a libel action; and thereafter was over-careful.

Brian O'Nolan (a.k.a. Flann O'Brien and Myles na gCopaleen) referred to the Bird several times. Of these the best story is this, from a Cruiskeen Lawn column of 1962:

The Bird's heyday seems largely to have coincided with the reign of King Edward. It is said that when His Majesty, attending an important race meeting at the Curragh, strolled with Castle worthies to drop the flag at the starting post, he was approached there by the Bird and touched (successfully) for a fiver.

The Bird had a brother, Frank, always known as "The Pope". Perhaps we shall come to him, his wanderings and astounding range of acquaintance, later in this rambling sequence. Sphere: Related Content

The not-so-good and not-so-great, number 2

Continuing with Malcolm's stop-gap postings, we are still stuck in the A's:

Annie Moore's

An excellent place of decent refreshment, located in Manhattan's E 43rd Street, nicely adjacent to Grand Central Station.

It bears a name borrowed from the girl who, on 20th December, 1881, left Queenstown on the S.S.Nevada. On New Year's Day, 1882 -- supposedly her fifteenth birthday --, she was the first immigrant to be processed through the new Ellis Island centre. To mark this inauguration of a place of hope and misery she was presented with a $10 gold piece.

She brought with her two brothers, and they joined her parents who had emigrated four years previously. It has now been established that she is buried in the Calvary cemetery, in Flushing, Queens. This was originally the burial place of the poor from the St Patrick's diocese. She shares the space with a slew of gangsters from Little Italy, but also luminaries such as Governor Alfred E. Smith, the 1928 Democratic Presidential candidate (the Irish connection is Smith's mother, Catherine Mulvihill, and his wife, Catherine Dunn), and Mayor Robert Wagner.

On the water's edge at Cobh there is a statue of the Moores. Annie is depicted as the only one looking back. It is matched by another, solo statue inside the main hall at Ellis Island. Malcolm has to admit, having stood by both, he found the connexion elegiac and emotive.

Anna Livia

The personification of Abhainn na Life, the River Liffey, whose characteristic brown colour comes from the peat-water of the Wicklow mountains (and not, as the credulous tourist would still be told, from St James's Gate brewery). Joyce celebrated Anna Livia Plurabella, and in return the powers that be renamed Chapelizod bridge in her honour; but for Malcolm, for now, it's Eavan Boland every time:

Tell me,
Anna Liffey,
Spirit of water,
Spirit of place,
How is it on this
Rainy Autumn night
As the Irish sea takes
The names you made, the names
You bestowed, and gives you back
Only wordlessness?

To celebrate Dublin's millennium year (1988) the magnate "Doctor" Michael Smurfit presented the City with a statue of Anna Livia, supine in a fountain. This allowed Dubliners to continue the long-standing tradition of awarding each new public artwork an alliterative address: she was the "Floozie in the Jacuzzi" when not the "Hoor in the Sewer". The authorities shifted Anna to make space for the Spike: she's supposed to be relocated at Croppy's Acre, before the old Collins Barracks. Meanwhile, her nickname lives on for the thing in Victoria Square, Birmingham.

Arthur Itis

The bane of many an ageing Dubliner, who, in part thanks to a damp climate, complains loudly of suffering appallingly from Arthur Itis.
Sphere: Related Content

It's a Charlie!

He had not been in Boston for the last decade, so perhaps we should excuse him.

Malcolm bought his ticket from the machine at Andrew on the Red line. Only then did he realise the profound significance. He was holding a "Charlie".

Are you sitting comfortably? It's story time!

Sixty years back, Walter A. O'Brien stood for election as Mayor of Boston. For the Progressive Party.

Now, Malcolm puts this as gently as he can, but sensitive souls should look away now.

The Progressives were actual ... err ... lefties. In UK terms, they could have existed quite happily to the right of Nye Bevan in Clem Attlee's Labour Party. In the growing US Red Menace (©Tricky Dicky Nixon), they were way beyond the Pale.

O'Brien could not finance publicity to match the two main parties, so he recruited the WPA singers and song-writers to aid and abet him. In fact, the names on the credit list for this song are Jacqueline Berman and Bess Lomax Hawes: sister of the great Alan Lomax, and former member of the Almanac Singers with Woody and Pete. This is the royalty of the folk-song revival. There is a full on-line exegesis of the song, including several excised verses: the point of departure there is public transport, rather than the music.

Inevitably, O'Brien finished bottom of the poll, and furthermore was on the hard end of a ten-dollar fine for breaching the peace of Boston, when he toured the town with a loudspeaker van. The song, though, had already entered the public consciousness and featured as a Bill Hanley cartoon for the Boston Globe:


O'Brien now retreats from Malcolm's narrative, to the great state of Maine, where for a further forty years he fulfilled a fruitful life as a librarian and book-seller.

But Charlie endures

Come 1958, the Kingston Trio went gold with Tom Dooley: they were an instant (and even deserved) phenomenon which marked the international arrival of the "Folk Revival".



Somehow the Kingstons picked up the song. Don't mock it, kids, this is as good as it got in the Dansette generation:



One credible version is that the story came to Bess Lomax and Jacqueline Berman Steiner from a San Francisco bar-owner known as "Specs", who cut him in for a third of the royalties. "Specs" passed the song to Will Holt (the adaptor of a Brazilian original into Lemon Tree), who recorded it in the 1950s. The good bigots of Boston objected to a song which lauded a "Commie" (O'Brien was never a Party member); and the disk was suppressed. The Kingstons (apart from that YouTube version above, where they are emphatic with the "Charlie O'Brien") seem to address just that problem in different recordings of the song, his name is replaced by "George" or even by "someone".

Charlie's climb to respectability was complete when the (now) MBTA launched the card in his honour. They roused up the legacy Kingstons (who are two-thirds ex-Limeliters), rigged them in Red Sox blousons, matched them with Governor Mitt Romney, and did a presentation at "the former Scollay Square" station (now Government Center):


Afterthought:

The Rough Guide to Boston (page 187 of the fifth, April 2008, edition Malcolm has here: it's the one with Beacon Hill on the cover) lists The Muddy Charles Pub as one to visit. Malcolm feels you should not bother. The clues are in the description:

Right on the MIT campus, this popular student pub has incredible waterfront views, cheap pitchers of beer, and a casual, grandfatherly vibe ...

Well, it's a long-way back from the river, which is out of view when the trees are in leaf. It's effectively a single large room (do you want to drink in a lecture room?). The beer is cheap, but choice is severely limited. It's almost impossible to find: the Rough Guide helpfully says "MIT's building 50"; but no student knows where that could be, except as a vague waved finger. And it's likely to be full of MBA students on a sandwich course. After those pitchers, you'll eventually find the toilets, a small hike away in the basement; and very definitely student bogs. Sphere: Related Content

Malty musings

Malcolm, after his previous posting (about the Crown Liquor Saloon, in Belfast; with which he beat The Times by a full day), began musing about the congeniality of pubs. In particular, is there some necessary link between age and agreeableness?

This gentle, and genteel, consideration was begun in the very pleasant surrounds, with good company, at the Spaniards on the top of Hampstead Heath. Too many visitors take a casual look, and make totally-erroneous assumptions about the Spaniards. For a start, all the Dick Turpin guff is absolute garbage. Inside, the Spaniards is tatty, substantially furnished with the throw-outs of any jumble sale around (see right). It is, indeed, quaint; and desirably so. In scope and clientele it is not just one pub but several. On warm and balmy weekends it crawls with families and their kids coming in from the Heath across the pinch-point in the road. During the working week it is a haven of peace, quiet and pleasure: logoed tradesmen brushing past besuited types. So Malcolm, after two pints of London Pride and a substantial ploughman's, felt at ease with the world. It would have been even more idyllic had the Adnam's been on tap: it wasn't, but Pride is a worthy runner-up.

A week ago he had one of the finest pints of Adnams Broadside imaginable in the George in Stamford. Now, Malcolm has a very tender spot for Adnams. He had a maternal relative who ran the Lord Nelson in Southwold many years ago, still the nicest pub in one of England's most attractive small towns.

In his early married life, Malcolm drank Adnams in the Angel in Bury St Edmunds; but that was in the days before the Gough family up-dated a respectable and estimable local hostelry and made it into something just too squeaky and streamlined for a simple pint. No worry; Bury is well provided with other places of resort, most of them serving Greene King Abbot Ale: younger Malcolm spent too many hours in the Fox in Eastgate Street, then on the outskirts, now hemmed in by new development and the A14 ring-road.

For years, though, Malcolm fought shy of Adnams off its own Suffolk turf. It seemed not to travel too well. That was an impression helped by some dodgy beer keeping. More recently the brand has been turning up more widely; and seems to have gained seven-league boots. This implies either a change of the basic formula, or (more likely) better carriage and cellaring. Either way, it is a serious improvement to English drinking.

Back to Hampstead

The turn of the millennium has not been kind to the NW3 drinker. Both the Nag's Head (a.k.a. The Cruel Sea) and the Horse and Groom (a.k.a "The Remorse and Gloom") are lost and gone. Malcolm misses the latter (a decent Youngs house in the trappings of a small gin-palace), but not the former: he does wonder, however, how the literati and thespian communities survive without either. The Flask, just down the Walk, is still there (though there are severe qualms about the imminent "touching up" being promised).

Jack Straw's Castle, at the top of Heath Street, was never in recent memory a wholly successful experience, and has now been converted to apartments. In passing, Malcolm urges all to ignore any claim to it being the "highest pub in London": that is The Gatehouse across the Heath in Highgate (of which more, doubtless, in a subsequent posting).

The Olde White Bear is not to be totally by-passed: it has a good beer selection. For Malcolm, it lacks that X-factor ingredient of atmosphere, of "agreeableness", as the necessary concomitant to the fullest enjoyment of good ale, which is the main issue of this posting.

After the rush to gentrify and gastro-pub anything in sight (which takes the worthy Wells Hotel—and its now-missing bar stool, identified as "Elizabeth Taylor sat here"—out of consideration), the serious drinker in search of gritty authenticity is left with only the Holly Bush, up the hill.

Malcolm likes the Holly Bush. The steep hill, the secluded position off the tourist-beaten track help to divert the less knowing to other watering-places. The clean exterior disguises the artful clutter, the domestic proportions, within.

He cannot help reflecting on its history. It was originally the stables of the painter, George Romney. So, next door and later at the lady's house at 10, Edgware Road (now, perhaps appropriately, an Odeon Cinema), Romney repeatedly—perhaps as many as a hundred times between 1782-1786—painted "Mrs Emma Hart", the late teenaged mistress of the Hon. Charles Grenville (example, see left). Not so much a commission, more an obsession, one might fairly think. However, "Who she?" one may well ask. Well, she was formerly Amy Lyon, daughter of a Cheshire blacksmith, and later Lady Hamilton of Nelsonian fame.

Say no more ...

... except that the Holly Bush serves Adnams.

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