So are Scottish mountains a smash hit in Hollywood?
Not wanting to be uninformed about the great outdoors, he said to Ian: 'So these Munros? Are they named after that old movie star from Some Like it Hot?'
Hammer-time
When he was a student, reader Jeff Robinson bagged a summer job on a building site.
On his first day, one of the experienced hands asked Jeff if he'd be going with the other lads to the pub, that evening.
Jeff said he wasn't sure he'd make it, explaining that he was finding the work physically taxing, and would rather get a good night's kip.
'Naw, naw, pal,' said the other bloke. 'That's no' how it works. See, in the building trade we get hammerin' in the day. Then we get hammered at night.'
'So that's what I did,' Jeff confesses. 'Unfortunately, boozing so much meant I didn't save a penny the entire summer.
'So the next year I got a job as a solitary nightwatchman. No hammering of any sort, though plenty of pennies in the bank.'
'There's nothing as tasty as a combination of chicken and bugs,' says Chris Robertson. 'Let's just hope the creepy-crawlies are fresh.' (Image: Amusing product name)
A fish tale
Browsing in Waterstones, Neil Sutterfield spotted an advert for Nicola Sturgeon's autobiography, named "Frankly".
Our correspondent concluded this was a drab title, and has an alternative suggestion.
'How about 'Something Fishy',' says Neil, who quickly adds: 'Only because her surname is the aquatic Sturgeon, of course, and for no other possible reason.'
Cutting comment
The travails of trimming grass.
Reader Jill Locke hired a chap to mow the lawn, and wasn't delighted with the untidy results, as she explained to her husband.
'Is he cutting corners by not cutting corners?' asked hubby.
California dreamin'
As we've previously mentioned, this is turning out to be a thoroughly Scottish summer, with long periods of rain, followed by shorter periods of rain.
Occasionally the reign of rain is overthrown by flickering instances of sunshine.
On one of those hotter days reader Matt Saunders was chatting with a chum visiting Glasgow from LA.
'Just like home, eh?' said Matt.
'Weather's fine!' beamed the American friend, adding: 'Very like LA… minus a riot or two.'
'We can provide that, too,' said the accommodating Matt. 'Next time you're over, I'll take you to an Old Firm match.'
Solitary achievement
'The trouble with being punctual,' sighs reader Bob Stonehill, 'is that nobody's there to appreciate it.'
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Spectator
2 hours ago
- Spectator
How the railways shaped modern culture
Cue track seven of Frank Sinatra's 1957 album Only the Lonely and you can hear Ol' Blue Eyes pretending to be a train. It's not that he's a railway enthusiast (though Sinatra, like many musicians, was an enthusiastic collector of model trains). No, it's written into the words and music of Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer's song 'Blues in the Night': 'Now the rain's a-fallin', hear the train a-callin' 'whoo-ee'.' And so Sinatra sings it, just as Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee and Louis Armstrong sang it. It's an American classic, defined by the sounds that permeate the soul of American popular music: the sounds of the railway. Two hundred years since the world's first public train rattled from Shildon to Stockton on 27 September 1825, it's difficult to think of an invention between the printing press and the internet that has had as profound a cultural impact as the railway. It's not merely a question of economics or logistics. Or even the fact that until the first railway timetables, different parts of the British Isles operated in different time zones. (Ireland adopted Greenwich Mean Time only after the opening of the line to Holyhead in 1848. A watch was set each morning at the Admiralty in London, and dispatched to Dublin by express train and packet boat.) It's the way that railways have sunk into our collective consciousness, defining modern culture in ways so pervasive that we don't always recognise their presence. True, some are more obvious than others. The sound of a train is intrinsically musical and like all music, it's shaped by its environment. Listen, if you can, to the whistle of a British steam locomotive like the Flying Scotsman: a piercing shriek, designed to cut through the hubbub of a crowded island. North American steam locos sounded different. Their chime whistles were typically lower pitched and had two or three notes. The result? A long, deep wail on a plangent minor chord. Add the clatter of steel wheels on jointed track and you have the essence of rhythm and blues, with all its derivatives and tributaries. It's the sound of wide horizons, Depression-era wanderings and dreams of freedom. Trains chug, rattle and moan through the American songbook, from Bessie Smith's 'Dixie Flyer Blues' to Duke Ellington's 'Daybreak Express', Steve Reich's Different Trains and Aerosmith's 'Train Kept a Rollin'. You'll even hear one in the theme tune to The Simpsons. That's no surprise. Railroads built the USA and conquered the West: Manifest Destiny made tangible in fire and steel. Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman both hymned early steam locomotives. 'Type of the modern – emblem of motion and power – pulse of the continent,' exulted Whitman in 'To a Locomotive in Winter'. As late as 1957, Ayn Rand saw America's railroads as the nervous system of a libertarian utopia. Rand's descriptions of throbbing diesels provide the only authentic erotic charge in the pages of Atlas Shrugged. So engineers and hoboes became folk heroes, slaves escaped to the North via the Underground Railroad, and the names of railroad companies – the Wabash; the Rock Island; the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe – entered the lexicon of song. 'Trains are percussive. Trains sing. If you don't like trains you probably don't like music either,' said Peggy Seeger, and the music historian Spencer Vignes has catalogued more than 200 jazz, rock and folk songs inspired by railways, a list that barely scratches the surface. Even in the Old World, railways generated poetry, at least for those inclined to hear it. The first railway in Germany opened in 1835, but with Faustian prescience Johann Wolfgang von Goethe kept a souvenir model of Stephenson's Rocket on his desk until his death in 1832. In Britain the elderly Wordsworth thundered in verse against the building of the Windermere railway: the original nimby, initiating a very British ambivalence about rail development that persists to this day. Bat tunnels aren't the half of it. Opponents argued that Brunel's Great Western Railway would cause cows to miscarry, and Turner painted an apocalyptic vision of violated countryside in 'Rain, Steam and Speed'(1844). Yet within a century this disruptive new technology had become the essence of eternal England; the lyrical, nostalgic stuff of Edward Thomas's 'Adlestrop' and John Betjeman's Metro-Land. Every modern heritage attraction and repurposed Victorian gasholder can credit its survival to the evening in October 1950 when a group of British hobbyists decided to see whether, through sheer enthusiasm, they could somehow rescue and run the tiny, decrepit Talyllyn Railway in mid-Wales. Its beauty was its own justification, though Britons are far from alone in idealising their railway heritage. In Matsuyama, Japan, a replica narrow-gauge railway recreates the world of Natsume Soseki's classic novel Botchan. The culture of railways is international, but it adopts local colouring. 'All the little stations in the small towns of the old Austro-Hungarian Monarchy looked alike. Yellow and tiny, they resembled lazy cats lying in the snow in winter and under the sun in summer', wrote Joseph Roth. His elegies to a vanished empire revolve around its provincial railway stations – far-flung outposts of Vienna, where despairing exiles drink brandy in station hotels to the sound of last season's operetta hits. In the British Raj, meanwhile, railway stations became the crossroads of a subcontinent, enabling a new national consciousness. John Masters's end-of-empire novel Bhowani Junction uses a station and its people as a metaphor for a nation in transition, but India had taken imaginative ownership of its railways long before independence, with results that ranged from the culinary (Railway Mutton Curry now appears on menus in the former Imperial power) to the literary. Indian Railways has even renamed a station in Karnataka as 'Malgudi' in homage to R.K. Narayan's beloved fictional town. The distinctive dialect of Sri Lanka's Dutch Burgher railwaymen animates Carl Muller's novel Yakada Yaka – named after the gloriously onomatopoeic Sinhalese term for a steam engine, 'Iron Demon'. It's a similar story all over the world. Aircraft and motor vehicles might have supplanted trains in some (though far from all) regions of the globe, but the railway got there first, and it still dominates our ideas about travel. With their monumental architecture, major city terminuses are powerful statements of civic values – whether the iron-and-glass cathedrals of Paddington and St Pancras, the orientalist fantasy of Mumbai's Chhatrapati Shivaji or the modernist panache of Rome's postwar Termini. It would take until 1991, and Norman Foster's Stansted, before the aviation industry realised what Brunel and Stephenson had understood from the outset: that transport infrastructure can move the emotions, as well as passengers and freight. So that's music, literature, architecture, heritage and cuisine; and we've hardly left the station. How about the long-distance train as microcosm; a ready-made setting for thrillers like Graham Greene's Stamboul Train, Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express and Bong Joon-ho's dystopian Snowpiercer? Or the railway as promoter of literacy? The world's first travel bookstall was opened by W.H. Smith at Euston in 1848. Allen Lane created Penguin Books to serve rail travellers, and Kipling wrote his first stories for the Indian Railway Library. What of railway companies as patrons of art and design, from Raymond Loewy's art-deco streamliners for the Pennsylvania Railroad to the (now ubiquitous) aesthetic of 1930s travel posters (the Gill Sans typeface went mainstream only after it was adopted by the London and North Eastern Railway)? Or there's the European connection: the modernist line through Monet and Caillebotte's studies of light, steam and steel at Paris railway stations (Monet painted the Gare Saint-Lazare on at least 12 occasions) to the vorticists and futurists such as Filippo Marinetti, who imagined an archaic Italy smashed open by speeding locomotives. Trains drift through De Chirico's dreamscapes, and haunt the steampunk visions of graphic novelist François Schuiten. So it's certainly not all about nostalgia: Ernst Krenek's 1927 opera Jonny Spielt Auf climaxes with a classical violinist being crushed beneath the wheels of an unstoppable jazz train. But sometimes it really is. Between 1955 and 1960, the American photographer O. Winston Link documented the last days of steam on the Norfolk and Western Railway, creating black-and-white images of locomotives that surge and bellow through jet-age America like creatures from prehistory or myth. We're back where we started, with the (steam-powered) soul of the blues, and the lonely cry of trains in the night. But 200 years into the world the railways made, the trains of our imagination steam onwards. The journey continues, and whether we realise it or not, we've all got a ticket to ride.
Spectator
2 hours ago
- Spectator
‘Italian that just works': Broadwick Soho reviewed
This column sometimes shrieks the death of central London, and this is unfair. (I think this because others are now doing it.) It is not the city we mourn but our younger selves. Even so, the current aesthetic in restaurants is awful and needs to be suppressed: beiges and leathers, fish tanks and stupid lighting, all are nauseating. But I hated Dubai. You say Atlantis, The Palm, I say enslaved maid crying for her dreams. But there is refuge, at least from the aesthetic, and it is as ever the child of imagination and nostalgia. Broadwick Soho, the newish hotel in the street where typhus was chased down to a water pump, is a rebuke to desperate minimalism. It is a bronze and brick palace decorated, I think, in homage to Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess, or perhaps Citizen Kane's Xanadu, because all the treasures are here. In response, because most people do not want to feel dead when they are not dead, it has been named the best new hotel in London for decades, and it is, if you can still feel joy. It has welcomed Taylor Swift and Zoë Kravitz and many people more attractive than you and me. I forgive it that, because I have a quest of a very particular kind: one that perhaps only I care about. Do you want to know where all the flounces are, children – the flounces the Connaught threw out? They are at Broadwick Soho, courtesy of its founder Noel Hayden, the son of a Bournemouth magician, who has, in his parents' honour, made a hotel that Norma Desmond would love, because it is one long opening night. There are maximalist hotels in London, of course, principally the Savoy, but the Savoy has gone mad (if it was ever sane) and thinks it is a florist or a jeweller now. Broadwick Soho has balance. It must, because it has taken all the flounces, and its broader theme is elephants, then leopards. It has two restaurants, Dear Jackie in the basement and its diminutive Bar Jackie on the ground floor, both named after Hayden's mother, who apparently loves them (as Princess Diana loved Café Diana in Notting Hill) – and a rooftop bar called Flute, named after a local flute shop, now gone. Drinking here is like drinking inside a lushly planted garden, or a paint chart. The views are of Mary Poppins's own London, the attics of Soho, and it is fantastical in rain. I eat in Bar Jackie on a summer evening. It is slightly more restrained than the rest of Broadwick Soho, which is high-kicking into the dawn: red ceilings and red awnings; floral wallpaper for the comfort of theoretical elephants; immense, soft lamps; floral tiling on the bar. It must be hell to clean, but that is not my problem, not here. As if for contrast – I couldn't eat mezze here either – the food is plain American-style Italian, as at the lost 21 Club in New York City, and it works. We eat a very fine focaccia; soft, dense Cobble Lane salami; an extraordinary salad of trevisano and gorgonzola, walnuts and balsamic vinegar, which I will not forget; a delicate, not overlarge veal and pork ragu (there is too much stimulation to eat your feelings here – nausea will follow you); a tidy tiramisu. It is pleasing to be somewhere that cares so much about aesthetics, when there is so much carelessness around. If you are very thrifty, you can eat for £50 for two and, considering all the agony in the world, I think you must.
Spectator
2 hours ago
- Spectator
Medics make the worst patients
Provence Apart from three Covid years, the German rock cover band Five and the Red One (named, so they say, because one of them has a 'fire mark') have played a free concert on the Cours here in the village every summer since 2008. I first saw them in 2009 when my three daughters were teenagers. The four of us, along with our friends Monica and André, who were then in their mid-sixties, stood together near the front jumping up and down and singing along. Some of the wee ones who sat on their fathers' shoulders behind us might have children of their own by now. Last year a rowdy coterie let the well-built 6ft 3in guy who owns the expensive hat shop in the village crowd-surf and, discovering the burden was beyond them, let go. As he fell he narrowly missed crushing tiny Monica. Before Saturday's concert she said she wouldn't be joining me in the mosh pit this year. 'I've got to stop sometime,' she said. Understandable, but sad nonetheless. End of an era. American Cathy stepped up as a late substitution. She's going through a difficult time; her marriage ended in April and, as often happens when an individual is stressed, she's become accident-prone. Her body can't keep up with her brain. At the village's recent Bastille Day celebrations, she fell and banged her head on the way back from buying the second round of drinks of the evening; the third minor head injury she's sustained in a year. Onlookers told us she was out cold for a full minute. Medics are the worst patients. By the time her colleague Tina and I got to her she was sitting on the kerb beneath a plane tree telling everyone she was a doctor and to cancel the ambulance. Pointing to Tina, she said: 'She's a doctor too. I'm OK.' I'd cleaned the slightly bleeding wound under the hair at her left temple by the time the ambulance arrived a few minutes later, lights flashing and sirens blaring. Despite her protestations, the pompiers insisted on checking her over. 'You look fine, Madame, but come with us. Two minutes.' The ambulance doors closed behind them. After what seemed like an age we heard laughing and the doors opened. 'At least I got to sit in the ambulance with the young hot guys. I wanna dance to 'September'.' Ten minutes later, arms aloft, she led the entire dance floor in a conga line round the square. Unlike the French, I hate that sort of thing but in order to keep the patient under observation, I put my hands on her waist and followed. A row of outstretched arms formed a tunnel and the long line stooped to dance through. Afterwards we bumped into my friends Charlotte and Ed. As I introduced Cathy, they stared. I turned. The dancing and bending had reopened her wound and blood was pouring thickly down her face and neck. Grateful as I was to have Cathy at my side in the mosh pit on Saturday, I knew I couldn't let her out my sight. The band kicked off with the Steve Miller Band's 'The Joker'. They looked, sounded and moved as a rock band ought – a mesmerising and nostalgic spectacle. The audience of about a thousand souls roared in appreciation. David, the lead singer, effortlessly held the performance together, much as the conductor and soloist would for an orchestra. The mosh pit was, as usual, a heaving, beery, stomping, sweaty mess. People of all ages and nationalities forgot their worries for a few hours and joyfully sang and danced as one. I turned to watch the crowd during 'Sweet Child of Mine', and saw Monica and André coming to join us. For a while she and I held hands as we danced. Things got a little wilder during 'I Can't Get No Satisfaction', and as the band began to play 'Should I Stay or Should I Go', a favourite of mine, Monica left. Wise move. A few bars in, the crowd went mental. I'm not very big in flip-flops and Cathy's shorter than me. Soon we were swamped by huge guys, dripping in sweat, either barging into us or trying to engage. But, slight as I am, I spent 50 years in the environs of Glasgow and they soon backed off. A glorious three-part, revved-up sing-along to 'Twist and Shout' brought things down from the febrile heights of posh-boy punk and to the finale, 'Highway to Hell'. Afterwards, when the DJ took over, I saw David, whom I know slightly, on the square and gave him a hug which landed somewhere between maternal and teenage fan girl. Apart from his sodden Robert Plant curls, he was transformed from rock singer back into an ordinary 40-year-old German father of three. I asked him how the village compared to other venues. 'We don't do any other gigs,' he said. 'I'm forming another band and writing my own stuff, but this band stopped touring when we started having families and only gets together once a year for this. We do it for fun. Stay there. Don't move. I want you to meet my uncle. He's a really cool guy…'
