I always look forward to bus trips because busses are places where the usual segregation of life in the United States is broken down, at least a little and for a short time. Riding to New York by Peter Pan bus, one is likely to encounter a broad cross-section of the East Coast population—students going home from college, people who don’t drive and can’t contemplate flying, people for whom this is the least expensive or the least stressful way to travel (plane travel being a nightmare these days, not to mention its enormous carbon footprint), people of color, immigrants from just about everywhere in the world—and a Babel of different accents and languages.

I had just boarded the early-morning bus for New York City and was looking forward to a quiet, relaxing ride, snoozing and watching the world whoosh by in soft focus through half-closed eyes. From the somnolent state of my fellow passengers, it looked as if almost everyone else had the same plan. After he had taken all our tickets and closed the doors, the mild-mannered driver introduced himself, welcomed us aboard, and launched into his obligatory spiel, pointing out the toilet at the back, reminding us that there was to be no smoking, and explaining at some length the rules about cell phone use on the bus: it was to be kept to a bare minimum, and reserved only for emergencies and quick messages such as informing someone of one’s time of arrival. All cell phone conversations were to be kept to no more than three minutes and  conducted in a low voice out of courtesy to the other passengers. Fine by me.

(Photo: Mike Richard/The New York Times)

Our driver eased himself into his seat, checked his mirrors, and started the engine. Barely a minute had passed before a distinctly unmodulated voice blared through the compartment, braying a hearty greeting from somewhere behind me (I had arrived extra-early to secure a window seat near the front). The person at the other end answered, it seemed, giving our fellow-passenger the opportunity to deliver his message that the bus was on its way and that he would be arriving in New York City at such-and-such a time. Presumably he did deliver the message but, alas, he went on to deliver a good deal more, and as a monologue, judging by the paucity of pauses at our end to allow his respondent to get a word in edgewise.  When he finally ended the call, I breathed a sigh of relief and hoped that now I could return to my reverie. But no, it seemed that the same man had a second urgent message to deliver, which he proceeded to discharge at the same volume as the first. Again it seemed that the message was unnecessarily long, and involved the person at the other end remaining almost entirely mute, since there wasn’t much space between our passenger’s power serves for return shots from his invisible interlocutor. After this second call, there was little respite before he began again, and now it appeared that he was systematically making his way through his entire address book. I found myself getting worked up into a state akin to road rage, longing to let loose on him with every fibre of my being, but held myself in check for two very personal reasons.

The first reason had to do with my nature. Ever since I was a child, I had abhorred a vacuum in a conversation. At school, if my teacher asked a question and no-one raised their hand immediately, I felt compelled to raise mine and break the awkward silence. If  I was attending a lecture and no-one asked the speaker a question during the Q&A period, I felt that it was my personal responsibility to come up with one.  But over the years I have learned that sometimes a spell of silence provides the necessary soil for deep thought; not only will more intelligent questions be forthcoming if people are given time to formulate their thoughts but, if given more time, shyer students or audience members will be more likely to screw up the courage to speak. So it was on the Peter Pan bus that morning. I felt that it was my bounden duty to speak, and yet I suspected that I would be better off keeping my counsel, even if I by speaking up I would be giving voice to the thoughts of half my fellow-passengers.

The second reason I held back from giving the man a piece of my mind had to do with a sense of loyalty. For our garrulous fellow-passenger was not speaking in English, but in an Indian language, most probably Punjabi. Although I hadn’t yet seen his face, I knew he was not only a fellow-Indian, but a fellow-immigrant. This knowledge inspired a host of conflicting feelings, including irritation, shame, and embarrassment, but also sympathy and protectiveness. I know how important it is for immigrants to keep in touch with family, and for this, the phone is not just a convenience, but a lifeline. The irritation of the other people on the bus was palpable, as I could just feel them thinking how annoying it was that “these foreigners” came to their country and not only failed to abide by the norms of civilized behavior but didn’t even bother to learn or to speak “our language.” It was clear to me that the general irritation was all the greater because the offending passenger was not speaking in English, and that made me want to spring to his defence, even as I itched to put a gag on him.

I knew how much non-English-speaking immigrants in the United States long to speak their mother tongues, but I also knew that little annoys native English-speaking Americans more than foreigners flaunting their languages in public. How much more so in an enclosed space, where everyone was forced to listen to it! As a fellow-Indian American I burned with embarrassment at my compatriot’s behavior and with shame that it was giving a bad name to our shared ethnicity in the eyes (and ringing ears) of the other passengers. For me, the general irritation was compounded by the fact that the fellow clearly assumed that no one else on the bus could understand a word he was saying, as he rambled on with impunity, feeling free to talk about personal matters and to chaff the person at the other end of the line in an intimate fashion. If I could have understood everything, it might have been mildly entertaining to listen in to this private conversation (if such a one-way monologue can be called a conversation), and if it had been an Indian language I didn’t know at all I could have screened it out, but in this case I grasped the nature of our friend’s relationship with the hapless recipient of his call, got the general drift, and understood words and phrases here and there, which kept me in a perpetual state of agitation.

Finally I could take it no longer: I needed to put a stop to this fellow’s bad behavior. But, given my (probably misplaced) sense of loyalty, I also needed to do so in a way that would not publicly embarrass him. I was uncharacteristically shy to speak up, but finally screwed up my courage to do so. I got up to use the bathroom at the back of the bus, and on the way down the aisle, located the offending party, still blithely rattling on, seemingly oblivious to his surroundings. On the way back, I paused at his seat, leaned over as unobtrusively as possible, and quietly asked him, in Hindi, if he could just keep it down. Then, without allowing time for an exchange or even making eye contact, I hurried back to my seat, not without having had the satisfaction of taking in his utter, gobsmacked, amazement as he realized that I might have been taking in everything he had been saying the whole time.

It worked! I succeeded in shaming him into silence for the rest of the journey. Satisfied that I had done the right thing, both by my fellow-passengers and fellow-immigrant, I was finally able to kick back and enjoy my long-awaited snooze cruise.

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Tregurnow pottery

It’s marvelous where a train of thought can lead you in a day, and how sometimes things seem to come together all at once.

Just yesterday I was looking at some photographs I had taken of favorite pieces of pottery and china. I particularly treasure the mug, sugar bowl, and milk jug from Tregurnow Pottery, started by Mag and George when they moved down from London to a fishing village in Cornwall. They were part of my parents’ close circle of friends in London before I was born, and they all had their first children within a few months of each other. Mag is the one who pierced Mum’s ears for her, using a red-hot needle, or perhaps a red-hot safety pin. She is also the one who gave me my pet name. Visiting Mum and me when I was just days old, she first called me by the name that was to supplant my given name until I was thirty, and is still the one preferred by my family and oldest friends.

In the summer of 1971, on a trip to England after we had graduated from high school, Andrew and I took a coach down to Cornwall to visit Mag and George and camped on the clifftop near Treen. We went to a performance of Iris Murdoch’s The Italian Girl at the Minack open-air theatre, waded in the fantastically cold ocean water at Porthcurno (where George swam year-round), tasted nut rissoles for the first time (Mag and George were strict vegetarians), and learned about the importance of conserving water from George, who was decades ahead of his time in his commitment to a simple, sustainable life.

Porthcurno Bay (wikimedia commons)

So I looked up Tregurnow Pottery on the Internet, and found the website of the couple who, back in 1999, had bought it from Mag and George after they retired, and started their own studio. Imagine my delight when I found that one of them, John Nash, had written a book about my parents’ friends, telling the story of their struggle to establish the pottery. I wasted no time in ordering The Potters’ Tale, and am looking forward eagerly to receiving and reading it soon. I was even more delighted to receive an e-mail message from his wife Mim and to learn that she is now a close friend of Mag’s. This in turn led to an e-mail exchange with my Uncle Ted, who had heard from Mag just last week and had greetings from her for my mother.

One thing led to another. I found myself looking up the Minack Theater and learning that it was built by hand in the  1930s, stone by heavy stone, by a remarkable woman called Rowena Cade, who died in 1983 at age 90, and would have still been going strong back when Andrew and I visited the theatre. I found a video postcard of the Minack on YouTube and showed it to my father. I even found the archive of all the shows ever produced there since The Tempest in 1932, confirmed exactly when we had seen The Italian Girl, and learned that Iris Murdoch herself had participated in the play’s adaptation from the original novel.

The Minack Theatre (from thenakedcreative.co.uk)

This morning, over tea and a doughnut with Andrew, he brought out an old paperback and presented it to me: “I found this while I was sorting through some papers.” Wouldn’t you know—it was Iris Murdoch’s The Italian Girl!  My father-in-law picked it up for me at the town dump (er, sanitary landfill) a long while ago, but it had slipped out of sight and I had forgotten all about it—until just now. Synchronicity.

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temenosretreatcenter.org

Classes are over, the tulips are already blown, and the spring breeze carries with it murmurs of sultry summer afternoons—elsewhere.

The prospect of getting away is delightful but the reality is daunting. All the planning, booking, advance arrangements, packing—it tires one out just thinking about  it. I never understood those people who spent half the year planning their next vacation and the other half talking about it. Now I sometimes wish I had one of them to take care of it all for me. Surely it would be easier, and almost as enjoyable, just to set up a tent in the nearby conservation area or sling a jungle hammock between two trees in the back garden. Or, easier still, to swing my feet up onto the sofa on the front porch with a cold drink and simply allow myself to drift.

But no, getting away—really away—is imperative. Sometimes to establish the conditions in which to relax fully, one has perforce to engage in a period of planning.

It’s not that I want to escape from reality, but rather that I want to slip out of the rut of everyday thinking, making the time to come alive more fully in a setting where there’s nothing to do but to be. One doesn’t need to go very far from home, but sufficiently far to be out of reach of that never-ending To Do list and sufficiently close that getting ready to go doesn’t have to be such a big hoo-hah.

That place is Temenos, a retreat at the top of a hill just half an hour’s drive from home, but one whose remove has been attended to with such thoughtful, loving care that it seems worlds upon worlds away. Just bring yourself, a sleeping bag, food and drink in ice-filled coolers; the caretakers of the trust provide the rest, making themselves scarce so that a space opens up for you to step into, but giving you quiet assurance that they are close at hand should you find yourself in need. After dispensing with your car a sufficient distance away, you load your things onto a little wagon and trundle it to your cabin, where you will find already-cut-and-split wood in all sizes should you wish to fire up a woodstove, but a propane cookstove as well. A metal-lined, heavy-lidded box keeps your food safe from bears, and there’s bedding, a simple wooden kitchen table, a hurricane lamp for light—no electricity or running water—and a little writing desk complete with log book in which those who have come before you have written over the years. Everything is clean and simple, basic but well-stocked. Large screened windows open up to the woods all round for light, air, and insect-free communing with nature. A sufficient walk away, just down the path from the woodshed,  is the outhouse; but oh, what an outhouse, screened, sturdily constructed, scrupulously clean and fresh, with utter privacy and a view of the woods. There are no lights from the surrounding towns.

photo: Tiffany Hrach (hrachgarden.blogspot.com)

That’s it. Outside and down the road apiece there’s a pump where you can fill gallon jugs with a rust-colored minerally water (the spot used to be a health spa many years ago, and after all, it’s on Mount Mineral); a small pond where you can take a dip with the turtles in the heat of the summer; a small, homemade labyrinth for meditative walks; a bog walk, silence but for the rustling of the wind in the trees, and little red efts everywhere.

I’m gone.

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Thanks to Arlee Bird of Tossing It Out, the founder of the Challenge, to Damyanti Biswas of Amlokiblogs, who first encouraged me to participate, and to the many fascinating people whose blogs I visited and who in turn visited mine, taking the time to post generous comments and to enter into thoughtful conversations.

It’s going to be particularly busy for me for the next couple of weeks, so don’t be alarmed if Tell Me Another has to take a bit of a hiatus; I’ll be back. In the meantime, you can use the list below to catch up on entries in the A to Z Challenge that you may have missed.

Autoantonyms

Brevity

Common Sense

Drive-ins

Emil and the Detectives

Finn Family Moonmintroll

Goodness Gracious Me!

Hobson-Jobson

The Iliad at Bedtime

Jam Today

Kindling

London, My London

Marathon

Never No More

O, Oh, and The Wonderful O

The Post Office

Quest

Roots, Rock, Reggae

Screaming Women

Tennessee Stud

Ultra

Victory V’s

Weeping Willow

Xenophobia

The Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò

Zee, Zed, Go to Bed

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inhabitots.com

There is a famous song for learning your ABC’s, to the tune of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” (You can listen to Mozart’s virtuoso variations on it here.) When I first came to the United States, American children used to sing the ABC song like this:

ABCDEFG
HIJK
LMNOP
QRS
TUV
WX
Y & Zee

Now I know my ABC
Tell me what you think of me.

But sometime in the 1970’s or 1980’s, or so I imagine, my generation of New Age parents felt that this version was too evaluative and could place an unacceptable degree of performance anxiety on their children. Their new version, now the dominant one, ended like this:

Now I know my ABC
Next time won’t you sing with me?

This child-friendly version presented the teacher and the children as equals, joining together in a shared learning enterprise.

The British version of ABCD that I was raised on was altogether different, so I searched YouTube for it. Aha! Surely the ABCD song on the British Council website would be the traditional version. But no, it was the new America version trying pathetically and disappointingly to preserve a thin veneer of Englishness:
 nothing but the American version with the British Zed tacked on.

In my childhood, children were taught their place in no uncertain terms:

ABCDEFG
HIJK
LMNOP
LMNOPQ
RST
UVW
XY Zed


XY Zed
Sugar on your bread
All good children go to bed.

No nonsense about sharing or equality. After reciting their lessons, good children will go off to bed as they are told to do, and without a fuss. No ifs, ands, or buts. Still, unlike the saccharine-sweet American version that now seems to have gained near-universal status, English children were compensated with bread, butter, and sugar. Delicious, and right before bed, too.  So crunchy and calming. So good for the teeth.

I searched the entire Internet in vain for my childhood version. The closest I could come was this bossy-pants of a little Indian girl who recited, sing-song style:

XY Zed
Sugar on the bread
If you don’t like it you can go to bed.

In India, as in Canada and many other ex-colonial countries, many people still say Zed, although Zee is gaining ground.

In regard to the pronunciation of the last letter of the English alphabet, take your pick, but I know what I like. Zed is the older form, apparently derived from the Greek Zeta (which is the sixth letter of its alphabet, far from holding pride of place at the end), in its turn taken from the Phoenician Zayid. The U.S. Zee, it seems, is a late- 17^th Century English dialectal form brought over by early English colonists.

While I was looking all this up, I discovered that Izzard is an old form of Zed. This gives me an entirely gratuitous excuse to include Eddie Izzard, one of my favorite stand-up comedians, discoursing here on British and American English.

And while I’m on the subject of British comedians, what better way to close out the 2013 April A-to-Z Challenge than with the A-to-Zed of Monty Python?

CODA: In the The Apple Pie ABC, the alphabet doesn’t end with Z, but with ampersand. Taking its cue, as the 2013 Blogging from A to Z Challenge comes to an end, I will do the same, and hope thereby to be granted a continuance. Thanks to the organizers and to all the bloggers I visited, and who visited me in turn. Do come again.

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The first book I remember owning was Nonsense Songs by Edward Lear. My mother must have bought it for me, along with a few other English children’s classics, like The Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan, to take back to India with us when I was four. I still have the book today, countless moves later, and have read and recited the rhymes in it so many times that their deeply humanistic nonsense is an integral part of who I am. (By the way, my father told me just the other day that the Marathi folk tradition is full of nonsense rhymes, too, which I didn’t learn as a child because when in India we lived clear on the other side of the country and I went to English-medium schools.)

Picture books and board books were not as prevalent as they are now, so my first book was a beautifully printed hardcover, which I regret to say I drew and wrote on, though thankfully only on the end papers. But in so doing I made it all the more my own, by bestowing upon it special marks of my affection.

The two most well-known of Edward Lear’s nonsense rhymes are The Owl and the Pussycat:

They dined on mince and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible [Lear's own neologism] spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.

and The Jumblies:

Far and Few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a sieve.

These I soon learned by heart, including the song in the case of the former, although the tune has now escaped me. Just about every poem in that entire collection is weird and wonderful, including The Pobble Who Has No Toes, Mr. and Mrs. Spikky Sparrow, The New Vestments, and Mrs. And Mrs. Discobbolos. But perhaps the quirkiest, the most touching, and overall the most perfect of them all, the one lodged most deeply in my brain, is The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.

First of all, the story is set on the Coromandel Coast. All I knew was that it had a certain ring to it; little did I realize that it was in fact the southeast coast of India, a Portuguese corruption of the original Cholamandalam. It was the saddest of love stories, not unrequited love, but love fully requited yet impossible because of the ridiculous strictures of society. At the same time it was hilarious, exemplified by the verse reproduced below, in which the Lady Jingly Jones reluctantly turns down the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò’s proposal of marriage.

That is all you need to know. It is patently obvious that the illustrations are inseparable from the text, both having come out of the zany head of Mr. Lear. Here’s a curiously English 1966 recording of David Davis reading it aloud, I leave you with another picture from my beat-up old edition, still holding together after all these years. Now just read, reciting it out loud, again and again, whenever and wherever possible; and, if you have any human feelings at all, shed a few tears for the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.

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hermanusrainbowtrust.blogspot.com

Xenophobia: an undue or irrational fear of foreigners or outsiders

Okay,  some will say, but this is a natural human fight-or-flight response, stemming from the days when outsiders were a threat to one’s very survival; for that matter, they still can be, and are.

Fair enough; but allow me to make just three points.

First, note the “undue” and “irrational” in the definition:  a natural instinct to be a little wary of outsiders at first encounter is understandable; but a paranoia that persists even after the outsiders are a known quantity is unreasonable.

Second, ask yourself if you know who these outsiders are. Do you mean the people who come from outside your community or country or who speak a different language from your own? I submit to you that any of us can feel like or be perceived to be an outsider, even if we share the same nationality and language as our peers and have lived in the same community from birth. Once you recognize the impossibility of knowing who the outsiders are, xenophobia becomes all the more irrational.

The third point is the kicker. I propose that the fear of foreigners or outsiders often stems from the secret knowledge that you are an outsider yourself.  A story from my own experience, not a pretty one, may serve to illustrate.

When I was at boarding school in India two new students, a brother and sister, thirteen, perhaps fourteen years old, joined us. It might have been mid-year, I don’t remember. What I do remember is that they had just come from England where they had been living for a time, their parents having returned to India. Naturally, everything was new and strange to them, and they couldn’t help but compare much of what they were encountering with their experience in England.  It seemed to us, though, that every five minutes they were saying, “In England this” or “In England that.” We claimed to find it intensely irritating and started jeering, “In England,” whenever they opened their mouths.

They were pleasant, quiet, and good-natured, those two. The problem was ours, not theirs, but we made it theirs by the way we treated them. Why were we so unkind and intolerant? The obvious answer is that in the 1960’s, barely 20 years since Independence from British rule, we didn’t take kindly to anything Indian getting compared negatively to its English counterpart. But if I search my own motives, a still more troubling—and telling—explanation emerges. I was arguably at least as much of an outsider as the two newcomers were, perhaps more, in that I was half-English, had been born in England, and, at 13, had lived outside of India for almost half of my life. Of all people, I ought to have had some empathy for them, to have been able to reach out and make them feel welcome. But I didn’t, however ashamed I feel about it now. If they ever read this story, I hope they will be able to forgive me.

I could attempt to justify my behavior with the protestation that at the time I was unaware of the personal motivation for it, for the fears about my own belonging that made me challenge theirs all the more vehemently. But that is precisely my point: I contend that many of those who engage in xenophobic behavior are unaware that what drives it is their own insecurity about their status as insiders.

We are all foreigners. And it is our human task to help one another feel a little more at home.

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There is a tavern in the town, in the town,
And there my dear love sits him down, sits him down,
And drinks his wine ’mid laughter free,
And never, never thinks of me.

[Chorus] Fare thee well, for I must leave thee,
Do not let the parting grieve thee,
And remember that the best of friends must part, must part
Adieu, adieu, kind friends adieu, adieu, adieu,
I can no longer stay with you, stay with you,
I’ll hang my harp on a weeping willow tree,
And may the world go well with thee.
— F. J. Adams, 1891

I don’t remember having seen any weeping willows in my childhood in India, and knew of them only through There’s a Tavern in the Town, a song my mother used to sing. Although she would never have said so to us children, she was probably homesick for England when she sang these old songs. That hidden emotion and the longtime association of the weeping willow with parted lovers imbued my image of the tree with sentiment, deep, but non-specific.

It was not until we immigrated to the United States that weeping willows became a common feature of the cultivated landscape, and not until we moved out to the farm in Winchendon and started homesteading ourselves that we learned of the practical dangers of planting them anywhere near a house.  Although the tree is beautiful—one of the first to turn a delicate yellow, then green, in the early spring—and useful for preventing erosion, it craves water, and its large, thirsty roots gravitate toward septic pipes and storm drains, work their way in through cracks and crevices, and soon block them.

When my parents moved into their current house, there was a small weeping willow down in the far corner of their back field, in the lowest-lying part of their property. It was well away from the house and its roots would be likely to gravitate down and ever farther away, so they let it be. It thrived there, and now, twenty years later, it has filled out the entire corner and grown up to its full, mature height.

The weeping willow (salix babylonica) is native to northern China. Being highly desirable, it was traded along the Silk Route to south-west Asia and Europe, and has now spread worldwide. The tree at my parents’ is now so large that it can be seen from the other side of the world. Here’s how we found out:

My nephew Pinakin came to the U.S. from India for his doctoral studies. When he visited us for the first time and I was driving him over to meet my parents, he asked me excitedly if he could navigate. “You see,” he explained, “I’ve looked you all up on Google Earth.” Sure enough, Pinakin gave me flawless directions across town. When we drew up at the house, he exclaimed with satisfaction, “It’s all here: the house, the fields, and the big tree in the corner!” That weeping willow can now be spotted from India via satellite! I can’t quite describe what that made me feel: the tree that has so long been a symbol of parting and loss is now a landmark that our distant loved ones can seek out, zoom in on, and find us by.

Earlier this evening, in the gathering dusk, when I gazed on that tree clothed in its delicate Spring green, with the last rays of the setting sun lighting the adjacent clouds on fire, I thought of my mother in India half a century ago, long before the days of satellites, singing of her distant loved ones.  When I was a child, I thought that the woman in “There’s a Tavern in the Town” was singing, “I’ll hang my heart [not harp] on a weeping willow tree.” I still think that my version describes best what we have hung on that tree, that continues to seek water and light wherever it is transplanted, regardless of the human heart.

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Old poster for Victory V’s

During the  year or so that I lived in England in the late 1960s I became something of an expert on English sweets (or candy, if you’re from the U.S.). I always maintain—and this from a person who takes pride in eating all organic—that the English (who have long been featured in the Guinness Book of Records for the highest per capita candy consumption)  make the best artificial flavors for their sweets. Barratt Sherbet Fountains, sherbet lemons, Trebor Refreshers, Maltesers, Maynard’s Wine Gums, Rowntree’s Fruit Pastilles, Crunchie bars, Bassett’s Jelly Babies, I loved them without reservation, and strove—always in vain—to emulate my Auntie Bette, the Queen of Sweets, in her expertise on everything related to confectionery and in the sheer volume she managed to put away.

I’ve written in an earlier story about how I was introduced to English sweets and to television advertising at the same time. Some of the advertising slogans and jingles are burnt into my brain. “Opal Fruits: Made to make your mouth water,” for instance. Victory V’s were old-school: no TV advertising for them. But their slogan was unforgettable:

Victory V: It’s got a kick like a mule

Victory V’s were not very prepossessing in their appearance: flat, rock-hard brick-like lozenges the color of dirty khaki. Their decidedly acquired smell and taste was no better: it was more than mildly medicinal, and seemed to shoot straight up your nose and into your brain. One might well ask why anyone would want to subject herself to such an ordeal, and it might have remained a mystery to me had I not read the ingredients list. That is interesting in itself, since most British food products weren’t required to have an ingredients list until quite recently. But Victory V’s did have one and when I read it I discovered why the product had such a “devoted band of asbestos-mouthed fans”: two of its active ingredients were chloroform and ether!

Yes—you read it right: chloroform—the stuff in which comic-book no-good-niks soak a rag to overpower their victims—and ether—the stuff that anesthetists administer before their patients go under the knife. No wonder so many schoolchildren consumed the nasty-tasting throat lozenges as if they were candy! After you had sucked your way through two or three of those babies, breathing deep all the while, you were guaranteed to feel no pain.

Remembering Victory V’s a little while ago, I wondered if perhaps I had misremembered about the chloroform and ether. If it were true, then surely they would not have sold these things over the counter in sweetshops, and to schoolchildren. Some quick research gave me a bit of a history lesson. Apparently, Victory V Lozenges started out in the mid-1800s as a patent medicine, Victory Chlorodyne Lozenges with the original ingredients of pulverised sugar, linseed, liquorice, chlorodyne (a soothing mix of cannabis and chloroform) and pure acacia gum. They was later renamed Linseed Liquorice V Lozenge Victory and sold as a confection. They acquired their current name, Victory V lozenges, back in 1911, even before the First World War, long before Churchill popularized the V sign in the Second.

My research also confirmed that my memory of the active ingredients had been correct, although it also revealed that the Victory V’s of today no longer contain them, just simulations of their original flavor, and that their sales have plummeted, most likely due to the public’s preference for natural ingredients over synthetic ones.  The new slogan is “Victory V: Forged for Strength”; but it just doesn’t have the kick that the old one did.

Note: Several of my favorite English sweets now have versions with natural favors and colors and, to my surprise, they are delicious. There is such a thing as Progress.

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Ford Super Deluxe V8 (gomotors.net)

In my childhood we used super to refer to something especially big, or good, or powerful. When we really needed a super superlative, there was the reduplicative super-duper. There was lots of super-modern talk about sub-atomic particles and super-atomic bombs; and, of course, Superman. The advertising industry of course, always needs to go one bigger and better, so they brought us super deluxe. But to express the extremes of the age, its unimaginable depths as well its over-the-top heights, we began to use ultra.

Ultra, the Multi-Alien (dialbforblog.com)

Ultra has been around since the early nineteenth century when it was used to refer to the extreme right in France, the ultra-royalists, and ever since, it has been used to describe rabid extremes or extremists, ultra-conservatives, for example. In the Second World War, apparently, Ultra was a code name used to refer to ultra top secret  decrypted information from the enemy. John Burgess coined the term ultra-violence to refer to the gratuitous violence in his dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange (1962).

(zazzle.com)

The A to Z Challenge is the ne plus ultra of blogging; nevertheless, with five letters to go, I am bushed, done in, gutted, knackered, and ultra-exhausted.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents