It seems that the poor old turkey has had an identity crisis. For this we can blame the Portuguese. Following Vasco da Gama`s voyage around Africa by the 16th century they were perhaps one of the leading traders along the Americas. Anxious to preserve their monopoly on certain goods …
Alphonse Allais (20 October 1854 – 28 October 1905) was a French writer, humorist and painter. In 1883 Alphonse Allais exhibited a painting called First Communion of Anaemic Young Girls In The Snow, which was of course a white canvas. Allais’ painting was the companion piece to his Apopleptic …
Sing a Song of Sixpence, A bag full of Rye, Four and twenty Naughty Boys, Baked in a Pye. The earliest mention of this rhyme dates from the eighteenth century. The reference to blackbirds in a pie may refer to a medieval practice for putting live creatures, and even musicians …
Idily reading the sports pages this morning, I noticed a stray reference to “crimbo”, meaning “Christmas”. Crimbo! This word, which must have seemed cheerful, irreverent and rather modern at one point, today feels rather dated – to me, it is somehow redolent of the 1980s, although the OED has …
Today is boxing day. Once upon a time, there was a thing called a Christmas box. A Christmas box was a box with a small hole cut in it, like a piggy bank, through which coins could be dropped. It was kept in a church and, like a piggy …
Despite his status as one of England`s best loved poets, it appears that Alfred Lord Tennyson was in fact a festive grump. This is from his “In Memoriam A.H.H.” written in 1849 With trembling fingers did we weave The holly round the Chrismas hearth; A rainy cloud possess’d the …
I used to be taught by a teacher who insisted on apostrophising everything. He would always refer to the ‘phone and the ‘papers, the punctuation point standing in for the missing tele and news. The habit was at the same time wondrously fastidious and gloriously silly. It would be …
In his 1969 book Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), Dr David Reuben, a physician and surgeon, described chastity belts as an “armoured bikini” with “a screen in front to allow urination and an inch of iron between the vagina and temptation.” …
Hans Christian Anderson (1805 – 1875) The wonderfully weird writer of fairy-tales declared his love for many prominent, ultimately unavailable women. He enjoyed visiting prostitutes, but only to sit and chat with them. He died unmarried and a virgin and was so terrified about being buried alive he insisted …
When Samuel Beckett lived briefly in Berlin, his regular haunt was a restaurant called the Giraffe. While sitting there one day after finishing his meal, he was asked by his waiter “Why is there no expression of hope in your work?” After a trademark Beckett silence, he picked up …
