Myles Away From Dublin (8 page)

Here is a curious news item which the reader may have seen but which I reproduce to jolt the memory:

I feel several comments are called for here. Did not the agents who received the consignment act rather hastily? How did they know that those bricks were not whiskey? I’m serious. I am sure it is possible to change liquor into a solid form with, of course, a process for
reliquifying
it if desired ( – though, indeed, what’s wrong with eating one’s booze? A good plate of whiskey and chips might startle our tourists at first but ultimately attract them here in hordes). It is a fact that the fabulous rockets which now traverse space are powered by solid fuel, and it is pretty certain that domestic alcohol can be solidified also. That apart, I am sure that teetotallars will agree that a genuine brick is far more valuable than a bottle of whiskey. If one had enough of them, one could build a house. Who ever heard of a house being built with whiskey bottles? I have heard of houses being brought to ruinous decay with them.

In this country we have chemical and physical research bodies, in the universities and elsewhere, and I do think they should be asked to investigate the possibility of converting spirits and even beers into solid concentrates. What is called proof spirit is roughly half pure alcohol and half water. I imagine this water would have to be ignored and the alcohol only changed into cubes of the size, say, of sugar lumps. A person with a whiskey lump could thus, by liquifying it in water just as one melts sugar, have a drink of whatever potency he fancied.

Such factors as bottling, transportation, storage space, warehousing and breakages add materially to the price of whiskey as we know it. The cube system would practically eliminate them all.

And no doubt the new system would bring about many social changes. Reckless fellows would enter a café, order a large black coffee, and quietly drop perhaps half a whiskey cube into it, meditatively stir the cup, and then imbibe. There you would have ‘Irish Coffee’ with a vengeance! And the cubes could probably be sucked in bed, like sweets.

Also, the whole structure and appearance of pubs would change, becoming perhaps like modest chemist’s shops, or beauty parlours. But customers would not be long in getting used to going in and asking for half a pound of whiskey, please. And at festive times it would be seemly to have the cubes on offer in attractive containers, like boxes of chocolates, with a view of the lakes of Killarney or a pretty girl on the lid.

We are too stick-in-the-mud on this subject of liquor. Many drugs can be taken in solid form
per
os
or be injected in liquid form. Our present whiskey can be injected, of course, but we should also have the alternative of whiskey tablets, to be swallowed with a draught of water.

The passage I have quoted above presents another oddity. Assuming the bricks were not whiskey bricks despatched experimentally by the distillery and were ordinary bricks substituted by the thief for the bottles he stole, why did he bother? It must indeed have been a very troublesome procedure. We are told that the bricks were the same weight as the bottles. This would put the operator to the tedious labour of touring builders’ suppliers and construction companies’ yards in search of bricks of a specific weight. That alone could be dangerous, even if he was not so foolhardy as to produce a bottle of Scotch and say that he wanted a brick ‘of that weight’. My own procedure would be to weigh a bottle carefully and then, quietly at home, make my own concrete block of identical avoirdupois. This method, apart from being safer and trouble-saving, would be far cheaper. Ten cases were filled with bricks instead of whiskey, and that means 120 bricks. I do not know what a good builder’s brick costs but if we assume 6d, we are faced with an initial charge of £3. That’s plain extravagance.

‘The switch,’ the report says, ‘had the hallmarks of a professional.’ Aye, and a very fastidious one. Note that the bricks were neatly packed in straw. Probably he remembered from his schooldays that you cannot have bricks without straw!

Last Friday night I staggered into the machine hall of a Dublin newspaper, clutching a bottle. ‘Have a drink, my hearties!’ I roared. The men gathered round me holding cups intended for tea and I duly distributed my largesse. Then I began to sing:

For the benefit of the lay reader, I should explain that Hoe is the name of the makers of practically every rotary printing machine in the country.

Nearly every hardship has its concomitant softship. Even influenza, bleak visitation as it is, enables you to loaf luxuriously in bed with a fire in the grate, savour costly hot drinks (with scalding rum at night) and have friends calling to bring you interesting magazines. The younger members of the family stop pestering you for money.

The recent fortnight-long shutdown of the Dublin newspapers was not an unmitigated curse, though it did lead to some queer complaints. One lady said to me resentfully that she had nothing to light the fire with.

The stoppage caused certain social changes. One thing it discontinued was the Frigid Breakfast. Here the Husband had the morning paper propped up against the tea cosy, glaring into it in utter silence and completely ignoring the Wife. In the evening occurred Sundown Sulks.

The Husband brings home the evening paper which the Wife is very anxious to see. He reads it at his meal, afterwards collapses into a chair by the fire and continues reading it for three hours. This makes the Wife thoroughly cranky. At the end of three hours when it is nearly time for bed, he flings the paper down in disgust.

‘Not a damn thing in that paper,’ he mutters.

But look at the subject another way. For those accused of breaking the law the non-appearance of the papers was a bonanza. The court on conviction imposes a penalty and takes no account of the often greater penalty involved in having one’s name in the papers.

Nobody has any sympathy with a person found guilty of having been drunk in charge of a car, even possibly killing somebody. Passing dud cheques indicates not only a criminal tendency but is proof that the guilty party is a total failure in life, too lazy or incompetent to get a job, and is almost certainly a drunk. One stops asking such a person to the game of cards on Sunday night. Breaking and entering a lock-up shop and stealing cigarettes value £75 and £3–9–412 cash is a truly bad show hardly mitigated by proof that the accused comes from a most respectable family. A bank clerk convicted of stealing £4,662 may get some sympathy (for everybody hates the banks) but it is unlikely that he will get another job.

Yet all that sort of thing was going on every day while the newspaper offices stood dark and mum, and nobody was a whit the wiser. The disorderly classes felt strangely happy and even on the civil side, unseemly litigation between relatives over a will went on, so to speak, in private.

During the stoppage some people complained that their friends were dying and that they knew nothing about it. Well, I don’t know that that is so hurtful. Funerals are
miserable affairs and mere attendance at one will not bring the bold segocia back to life.

But one cannot help wondering whether we allow the newspaper to take far too big and dominant a place in our lives. Reading newspapers can be an addiction and a neurosis. No other words can explain the pitiful condition of the man who buys several newspapers every day, or those who condoned by purchase the black market which sprang up immediately in London papers, when the
Daily
Mail
and
Daily
Express
were freely sold out at sixpence per copy.

A prosaic subject, you say? Dull? Not at all, but fascinating and strange.

Take a look at the map of the world. It is nearly all water. It is literally true that there is water everywhere, whether in liquid, solid or gaseous disguise. Water is essential for the support of all vegetable and animal life. Apart from being thus essential, it is in human affairs most useful as a solvent and a catalyst. One way or another nearly all water comes from the sea.

Leaving the world aside, take a look at the map of Ireland. It is a small country, surrounded by the sea. Moreover, internally it is waterlogged. It contains an enormous number of rivers, great lakes and those
quasi-lakes
known as bogs. With water so ubiquitous and plentiful, it might be supposed that the Irish people would have fish as their staple diet, possibly more so than the Eskimos. In fact, however, fish consumption in Ireland is among the lowest in the world.

I have never heard any satisfactory explanation of this queer fact beyond one man’s emphatic declaration that the Irish simply don’t like fish. I do not find that convincing. In the days of my youth in Dublin, the suburban roads resounded with the banshee shrieks of women selling herrings from door to door every Friday morning. For how much? One penny each. And they were fresh herrings, delightful to eat if properly cooked, except for the nuisance of the bones.

How about freshwater fish? To my surprise I find that there are shops here and there where brown trout may be had. I have tried a few from time to time and can
certify that they are not fresh: they bear the
unmistakable
stigmatum of the ’frig.

I like fresh salmon but did not have any this year so far. As I write, the price is 21/- per lb.

The purest form of water known is snow, and rain the next purest, though rain contains dissolved gases in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, nitrates, sulphates and ammonia. Those who use rainwater for washing or even drinking find it delightfully soft, almost gentle. And so it is.

What is commonly known as hard water contains salts of calcium and magnesium. Those whose business brings them occasionally to London know all about hard water. A man finds it almost impossible to wash himself or shave, yet Londoners themselves seem to be unaware of their permanent sad plight. And to be fair to them, they do seem duly washed and shaved. A great many of them live, of course, in ‘suburbs’ which can be as far away as 30 miles from the centre and possibly have a decent local supply.

I read recently somewhere that to sustain life, a man must have a daily minimum water intake of two quarts. Most people ridicule this assertion and can prove it is wrong by reciting precisely how much water, or
near-water
, they do actually consume every day. They have three cups of tea in the morning, three more in the evening and perhaps a bottle of stout at lunch time. How could that build up to two quarts?

The facts will indicate that the matter is not so simple. First, man himself is 80 per cent water; second, if he gets absolutely no water for three days, he will die.
In fact there is water everywhere, even in the hard black coal one puts in the fire.

Take whole milk straight from the cow. The water content of the milk is 87 per cent. You are very fond, of course, of a good sirloin steak after a long cross-country tramp. 60 per cent of it is water. The water content of an egg is 74 per cent. By its very name the watermelon is suspect. Its water content is 92.4 per cent. Naturally, fruit bulges with water. The percentage contained by a peach is 89.4 The cod fish may seem a sound and solid character but 82.6 per cent of him is water.

Have you a strong weakness for whiskey? If so, the situation here is quite interesting. You order a glass and put 4/- on the counter. Exactly what is the beaker of yellow stuff that is placed before you?

What is legally defined as proof spirit is roughly 50/50 alcohol and water. It is in that form that spirits are matured in bond. Most whiskeys are now sold at a strength of 30 under proof, which means that 80 per cent of what you are given in your glass is water. With the glass you are given a jug of water. You slosh plenty of this water into the whiskey, bringing the aggregate of water to 90 or even 95 per cent.

True, it is nearly impossible to avoid absorbing water in one form or another. But are you quite sane to be paying four shillings for a modest glasheen of it?

Discerning readers will be pleased, I hope, that I have not called it ‘the humble tuber’.

There is a new word at large, ever oftener to be seen in the newspapers and in the chairman’s annual report on the affairs of big and famous companies. It is DIVERSIFICATION. It is not to be confused with, though often allied to, those other disturbing terms TAKE-OVER and MERGER.

In mercantile matters, diversification is a new affirmation of the ancient truth that it is unwise to carry all one’s eggs in one basket. The older and more honoured firms, for generations associated with one product and now financially prosperous, have decided that there is no good reason why they should not also engage in manufactures quite other.

The firm of Guinness is a good example. For nearly two centuries they were world famous for making brown stout. Their first small departure was in marketing Gye, a yeast extract. In recent years they have begun brewing ale and lager in a big way. They have fused with the British brewers Ind Coope, apparently mostly for the reason that Guinness will have access to the thousands of ‘tied houses’ that concern operates in Britain. All that is within the drink business. But Guinness have also entered into a sort of partnership with a big drug firm. They also make furniture and (believe it or not, for this sounds like whimsy, with the bells of Santa Claus’s reindeer sounding faintly in the distance) they own the firm of Callard and Bowser, the famous Scottish makers – or inventors? – of butterscotch. In a less
industrial mood, the firm also subsidises the writing of poetry. This type of development is enormously
widespread
. The Glaxo firm, who began with making a baby food in a small way, is now a giant among the manufacturers of drugs and pharmaceutical products. I am not sure that the people who produce Beechams Pills do not also make motor cars.

The Irish Sugar Company, a quasi-State concern, has taken it into its head that there is more to life than merely making sugar. For some time now they have been engaged in promoting the growing of fruit by farmers for canning, with a special eye on the export market.

The latest announcement has been that the company is installing at Tuam a plant for the manufacture of potato flakes and that it expects to be in a position to process 5,000 tons of potatoes this year. Potato flakes? I had never heard the term and at first took it to be a gentlemanly name for crisps, so widely sold in paper bags over the counters of pubs and other refuges. But no. It is a way with potatoes recently patented in the US and the official announcement says that the process ‘results in a product giving high-grade mashed potato by the addition only of hot water, milk and butter’. Not for the first time, I confess that I am a bit mystified by the notions of my betters. Is there something wrong with the century-old fashion of boiling potatoes, mashing them, impregnating the mash with parsley and serving piping hot with butter? Must the most familiar and durable food on earth also be ‘processed’ and, in Ireland particularly, should it be served with stewed steak marketed in cans?

I cannot repress a strong suspicion that in the whole spectrum of human food, the laboratory technicians are going off their heads, aiming at the day when all
eatables will be treated and interfered with in some way and that the ultimate aim is to make the cultivation of the little garden at home illegal. Even the water in the tap in Dublin is not safe; violent controversy rages over a proposal by the Department of Health to compel the Corporation to charge the water with fluorine, a chemical denounced by many world authorities as cumulative in effect and often proved lethal.

In Ireland for some centuries now the potato has been the fundamental, nonperishable food for man and beast and has become, indeed, an ingredient of Irish history. Nobody can say when the potato reached Ireland or even Europe; the old Irish records make no mention of it, grains being the basic root crop. The potato as we know it (not the sweet potato) seems to have been indigenous in South America and from there reached North America. Sir Walter Raleigh is credited with having brought the potato to Britain – and thus to Ireland – from Virginia in 1585, but it was unknown in Virginia until a century later.

Not total shortage of food, for food was being exported at the time, but the failure of the potato crop caused the famine in 1846/7, which in effect means that millions of the Irish people were in fact living on potatoes, and proving to be physically fine and long-lived specimens. In the vitamin-infested paradise of chemistry, this fact tends to be ignored. The disease was a fungoid visitation known as late blight. If one takes a global and serial concept of human destiny, the famine here, despite its horrors, was not an unmixed disaster. It accelerated the growth of the New World and the spread of this country’s name and influence everywhere.

The farmer or the modest gardener who grows this most handy food is often quite unaware of the astonishing number of enemies the potato plant has.
There are virus diseases (mild, latent and rugose mosaic, leaf roll, spindle tuber and yellow dwarf); fungus diseases (early blight, late blight, scab, fusaria, black scurf, wart); bacterial diseases (blackleg, brown and ring rot) and heavens! – insects. Ever hear of the Colorado Beetle? But I am straying into the parish of Colleague Lea.