Fine frogs

Frogs do not get good press in the Bible. We see plagues of frogs being used as a weapon against Pharaoh, and in the Revelation of St John the Divine, we read:

And I saw three unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon, and out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet.

In spite of this, frogs like Kermit the muppet are generally seen as lovable creatures, but we all know that frogs were an ingredient in the witches' brew in Macbeth:

Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg and howlet's wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

 Perhaps the frog is only there to make up a rhyme with 'dog'. Whatever the reason, any fear we may once have had of frogs seems to have been dispelled.

A poll is a head, and when politicians go to the polls, or pay attention to opinion polls, they are literally counting heads, while a poll-tax is a head tax. In Middle English, a polwygle was what we would now call a poll-wiggle, a wiggling head, and this name lives on in America as an alternative name for a tadpole, though it has by now become a polliwog or a pollywog. The more common form, tadpole, comes from the Middle English word for a toad, grafted onto poll, presumably because it appears to be a tailed head which has yet to grow the rest of the toad.

The Old English origin of 'frog' lies in the word frogga, not too unlike the German frosch or the Icelandic froskr. A toad was tádige or tádie, so when children call tadpoles 'taddies', they are not so far from their remote ancestors, a millennium ago. The frogs would not be all that impressed — if the palaeontologists are to be believed, the frogs have been around in much their present form for about 200 million years.

A frog may also appear on a coat, where it appears to be the Portuguese word frocoi, deriving from the Latin floccus, meaning 'flock', which, along another line, also gives us out word 'frock', as in 'frock-coat'. This sort of frog is an attachment to the coat for holding weaponry, or else a fastening, where a covered button passes through a loop on the opposite side of the garment. On a horse's hoof, though, a frog is not an old-fashioned form of road-kill, but a horny growth, possibly derived from a similar Italian word, forchetta.

  

A frog march involves four men each taking one limb of a difficult person, and carrying them, face down, a position which leaves them likely to be injured if they try to struggle, and we say we have a frog in our throat when we have sore throat that makes us croak. That particular usage was first recorded by the OED as far back as 1656.

Railway lines also have frogs, grooved pieces of iron that are placed where one rail crosses over another, and the French are often called "frogs" or "frog-eaters" by the English when they intend to be offensive. Legend has it that the residents of the 3^rd Arrondissement in Paris, in the area near the Bastille known as Le Marais, or 'the marsh', commonly referred to themselves in the past as grenouilles, or frogs, so perhaps the term is not so offensive after all.

The act of eating frogs may turn out to be seriously offensive. In 1987, India banned the export of frogs from there to France, arguing that the loss of frogs led to increases in insects such as mosquitoes and also in tiny crabs that attack rice crops.

In all, the cost of insecticides and the losses to crops added up to more money than India earned in frog sales. Almost all French frog species have been protected since the 1950s, and the search for fresh supplies has caused problems in a number of countries, with the emphasis now on South-East Asia. Overall, it seems, the frogs are more good than bad.


So I am sad not to have seen any, so far on this trip.

What is better than a Swiss Army Knife?

I will come to that in a moment.  First, let me say that we made it up Mt Pilatus today. I will say more of this later, but here is some proof:

Pilatus Kulm, complete with zig-zagging track, scree slope and folded beds. A rather better shot will appear in a future book.

But what is better than a Swiss Army knife?  A Swiss Army band!

Chris was feeling a bit poorly, so we set out to buy her a hat.  Just a peaked cap, like the one I bought near the Bourbaki Panorama (another story to tell one day), just SF 11 of shopping therapy, and we had agreed to go quietly.  "Unless," I said, "we come across a Swiss oompah band in the streets and feel compelled to dance.

This is a Swiss Army Band, and it is better than a Swiss Army Knife.  You can't quite dance to them, and they are deadly.  Here is why:

Alp horns (so-called), in fact disguised artillery that scared the pants off Napoleon (to Josephine's delight,
but that's another story).

They may look harmless:

Harmless enough...

But wait until you look down one!

I gave these the professional once-over, and a wizened old soldier saw my knowing wince.  He plucked my sleeve ad drew me to one side, then led me into a back alley, where he showed me these:

"Zis is why we are never invaded," he told me, with a gap-toothed old  soldier's grin.  "We possess ze world's only supply of weapons of mass distraction."

Of Eurish and Croatian English

One of the things I treasure from Ljubljana is a pair of small pictures of a memorial to the visit to Ljubljana made by James Joyce in 1904.

He was a young man then, but some of his ideas would have been starting to gel.

Ulysses  was some years away, Finnegans Wake was two decades away, but the Eurish that he used to make polyglot puns in the Wake must have been all around him.  Few signs of this remain,  but on Platform 6 in Ljubljana's main station, if you are ever there, look on the right as you come up the stairs.

Eurish is still alive and well when it comes to communicating in Europe.  Most travellers know the English 'WC' in its German form of 'Vay-tsay', and we all know twah-let, the bastardised form of the French form of 'toilet'.  The other night, I stepped out of the dining hall, seeking the loo, bog, khazi or dunny.  I met another bloke who looked a bit nonplussed, as though he was trying to walk with his legs crossed.

"Vay-tsay?" I essayed.  "Twah-let," he replied.  I was no closer to identifying his nationality, but we we aligned.  We shruggeed to each other and divided to halve the load.  It occurred to me to wonder what his nationality was: one night in Bergamo in Italy, a man approached me with a question in Italian, of which I had a sparse few words, back in 1986: I have a few more now, but I still have a minimal grasp of syntax.

"Francesi?", I essayed.  He nodded and lapsed into French as poor as mine and we limped along, then my son asked mje what we were discussing.  "He is asking me where the xxx is..."

Before I could enlarge on this, slightly amazed American tones asked "You speak English?" and the rest of our chat was concluded in our respective versions of that tongue

Anyhow, back to the comfort search: I found the target room, and running through my assortment of Eurish terms,  I selected the one most likely to compute.  "Aha!", I cried in triumph.  It worked, we relieved ourselves, nodded mutely to each other at the wash-basin, and moved off on our own paths.  Eurish still works, but it is nowhere as potent a communication tool as English is in the modern world.

In retrospect, he may have been an English speaker, but I doubt it.

Today, Joyce would have a far poorer command of Eurish, because the billboards all carry English sentences like "We love to go shopping!" and other short samples of English.  Television is full of programs in English, with Croatian subtitles, English is taught in schools, and because they speak English, all of the brighter young children have assured jobs, albeit in the service industries.

Still, in a few cases, the command is less than it ought to be. These excerpts from a holiday guide show what can go wrong:

"Trogir lies on a small island between the mainland and the island of Ciovo, connected by bridges.  It is connected with all towns in Dalmatia by Adriatic road. because of the position and nature of protection, Trogir is favourite harbor for boaters.

As they near the airport and highways, not one place, no port, nor an island are not far enough that it could be avoided....

Tourist committed town has a good range of accommodation in various hotels, apartments and private houses, adorned by beautiful sandy beaches...."

The Swiss were once renowned for this sort of thing, according to Gerard Hoffnung, but in the cities at least, they are well beyond that. Out in Heidiland, where we were yesterday, I needed every scrap of German that I could muster.

But that's another story, saved for another day.

Anchovies as a case in point

'Anchovy', that humble little fish whose natural habitat seems ever to be the top of a pizza, is a symbol of probably one of the few words that has come into English from the Basque language, although we actually took it from the Spanish and Portuguese anchova, rather than directly from the Basque anchoa, which is also the name of one genus of anchovy.

And while anchovies may seems like a harmless salty topping for pizzas, they were also behind one of Alfred Hitchcock's films, The Birds, which was inspired by peculiar behaviour shown by shearwaters in and around the California town of Santa Cruz in 1961.

Some birds need no chemical help to go
completely berserk.

While Hitchcock drew on a Daphne du Maurier story for the basic story-line, the actions of the shearwaters helped shape the detailed plot of the movie. And those actions, it seems, were shaped in turn by a marine neurotoxin called domoic acid.

This chemical comes from a marine alga called Pseudo-nitzschia australis, and when the algae are eaten by anchovies, the toxin is then introduced into the food chain that leads to the shearwaters.

Most people only heard of the El Niño effect after the Peruvian anchoveta (Cetengraulis mysticetus) fishery fell to very low levels in the early 1970s, in part as a result of over-fishing, but also because of the climate changes brought by an El Niño event at that time. This is a different species of fish from the Mediterranean anchovy, Engraulis encrasicholus, but it was also able to be pickled and sold far away, without refrigeration.

The sardine, is a small fish of the herring family, cured and soaked in oil, which gets its name from the island of Sardinia, although the same or similar fish could also be gathered off the coast of Brittany, but even there, far from the Mediterranean island, the fishermen seem to have kept the Latin name for the fish. There is a 'sardine stone' mentioned in the Bible in Revelations which was also a precious stone, perhaps the same as the 'sardius', mentioned in Exodus and Ezekiel.

It is always risky second-guessing those who translated the Bible into English, but at a guess, this may be either the sard, which is another name for a carnelian, or perhaps a sardonyx, which has alternating bands of sard and white quartz.

Then there is the pilchard, a fine example of excrescence in the language. While this sounds suspiciously as though it may be obscene or scatological or plain unpleasant, it is none of these. In fact, an excrescence is something added on to make a word sound more euphonious. In Twelfth Night, Feste (often referred to as the Fool or the Clown) uses the old form when he tells Viola:

" . . . fools are as like husbands as pilchers are to herrings - the husband's the bigger."

Shakespeare knew the anchovy as well, and it rates a mention in Henry IV (Part I, II iv 588), when Prince Hal searches the sleeping Falstaff's pockets and finds a bill featuring this:

Item, Anchovies and sack after supper. ii s. vi d.

It appears that anchovies and sack was a repast much to the fat knight's liking. But then sack, capons, sauce, bread and more sack, were all much to the liking of Sir John. Dickens, however, seems to have a more mixed view: the Snagsbys in Bleak House serve "delicate little rows of anchovies nestling in parsley" to the Chadbands, and Mr. Pickwick speaks of anchovy sandwiches as "glorious" — at least in the presence of devilled kidney.

David Copperfield, on the other hand, was less impressed when dosed with anchovy sauce by his aunt, Betsy Trotwood, to stop him crying. In that case, though, the anchovy sauce was in between aniseed water and salad dressing, so perhaps the sauce was no problem at all.

Anchovy sauce was obviously held in low esteem, as Pip in Great Expectations notes an anchovy-sauce cruet in an inn where he takes tea with Estella, " . . . and somebody's pattens". These were wooden overshoes that help lift one's real shoes out of the mud, and on the basis of these items, Pip objects to the room, and they are ushered into another.

If there had been pilchers in the room, that would have been a greater reason to object, for what had been a pilch soon after the time of Sir John Falstaff, a flannel wrapper worn over a baby's nappy or diaper, was by now a pilcher, going by the name the fish had vacated when it became a pilchard.

The over-garment would probably have been more offensive to the sensitive Pip and Estella than even the muddiest of overshoes.

Quicksilver

While we were in Slovenia, we visited the town of Idrija, where there was once a mercury mine. When I get home, I will add some pics, but I am a bit busy travelling, right now.

The element mercury has been known since the time of the ancient Romans, who obtained it from mines in Spain and Italy, and called it 'living silver', or argentum vivum. We merely translated this to get our name 'quicksilver'. The word 'quick', in this sense does not mean 'fast' or 'rapid', but 'alive', a meaning we preserve when we speak of a fetus quickening in the womb, the quick on a fingernail, or if we speak of 'the quick and the dead'.

People often assume this last phrase to mean that those who do not move fast (in a lively manner or quickly) are dead, but that just reflects the way we now interpret the term. The Greeks called it 'water silver', hydrargyros, which explains why chemists use the symbol Hg when they speak of mercury. The chemists have no element with the symbol M, which is just as well, as it leaves them free to use that letter to indicate any generic metal.

Mercury was one of the seven metals (gold, silver, iron, mercury, tin, copper and lead) known in antiquity, and directly or indirectly by associations with the various gods, these metals gave their names to the days of the week. Our Wednesday, in French, is still Mercury's day, or Mercredi. Sunday belonged to the sun, which is gold, Monday to the silvery moon, Tuesday to Mars or the Saxon Tiw, both linked to iron.

Thursday belonged to the Saxon Thor or to Jove, whose metal was tin, while Friday belonged to Venus or the Saxon Frig and copper, and leaden Saturday was the Saturn's day. The astrologer's symbol for Venus and copper was a looking-glass and gives today's biologists their 'female' symbol, while the symbol for iron and Mars, the sword and shield of Mars, is now used by biologists to indicate 'male'.

Metallic mercury was fascinating stuff, with its ability to roll around like a liquid on a flat surface, and the way it would form an amalgam with many metals, forming an alloy which is in effect a metal-metal solution. It took us rather longer to discover that mercury is one of the 'heavy metals', like lead and cadmium, and that like those, it is poisonous, damaging the nerves. People like hatters who used mercury in their work often showed signs of this damage by twitching, giving us the expression 'as mad as a hatter'.

Later, the metal was recognised as a special sort of poison which could be used to destroy certain microbes, particularly those causing venereal disease, leading to the expression 'one night with Venus led to a lifetime with Mercury'. These days, antibiotics produce a far tighter control, and GPI, the general paralysis of the insane (otherwise called tertiary syphilis) that carried off Frederick Delius in the end is never seen today, because the spirochaetes are killed by everyday antibiotics given for boring and unrelated illnesses, long before they can get that far.

Long before the Romans, the Chinese and the Hindus knew and marvelled at the liquid metal, and it has been found in Egyptian tombs dating back to 1500 BC. It occurs rarely as the metal, and more commonly as the red ore cinnabar, mercury sulfide, which breaks down when heated to make sulfur dioxide and mercury metal vapour, which can be condensed.

Mercury is shipped in iron

bottles because iron does

not form an amalgam with

mercury.

These days, we don't play with quicksilver any more, and calomel, Hg₂Cl₂, is only rarely used in medicines now. The metal is still found in a few barometers and in thermometers, mercury switches, mercury vapour lamps and a few other things, but in most of the world, uses of mercury are becoming fewer and fewer.

The one use which cannot be entirely avoided is in the ubiquitous 1.5-volt dry cell or battery. Mercury is added to the mix in these devices to prevent 'gassing', where bubbles of hydrogen gas build up inside the cell until the pressure breaks the seal, causing corrosive electrolyte to dribble out and damage some piece or other of expensive equipment. The amount of mercury used in a dry cell is now much less, but there is mercury there still, inside the dry cells that power your electrical equipment.

One reason why we use less mercury today is that we know about the damage done by a form of mercury that caused Minamata disease, a form called methyl mercury, but while that is controlled better today, metallic mercury use is out of control in the third world, where alkali plants use a process that leaks mercury into the environment.

Mercury distillation apparatus, Thames, New Zealand.

Mercury is also being misused by enthusiastic gold hunters in Brazil and in parts of Indonesia, where crushed ore is immersed in mercury to dissolve the gold into the mercury as an amalgam. Then later, the amalgam is heated, and the mercury evaporates off, leaving the gold behind.

Much of the mercury is condensed out and used again, but each heating loses more mercury into the environment, where it must be building up right now. This pollution will last a long while: in California, the fish in some of the rivers of the Sierra Nevada still have raised levels of mercury, a century and a half after the gold rush, and so do fish in the San Francisco Bay.

In 1924, the German Siemens and Halske company thought they had found the Philosopher's stone when they found that gold was 'growing' in a new type of mercury vapour lamp, and they even took out patents on the process before they worked out that their mercury contained small amounts of an impurity from an earlier use — traces of gold, in fact.

Mercury made several scientists famous, including Fahrenheit, whose real achievement was not to make a thermometer, but to find a way of cleaning the mercury so it would work in a thermometer, and Torricelli, who made the first mercury barometer. Lavoisier cracked the secret of chemical reactions by heating calx, mercuric oxide, and others followed him. The best vacuum pumps used mercury as well, and it seems fair to wonder how many scientists over the past two centuries, were killed by quicksilver.

One thing is certain: plenty of miners were killed that way...

The Reichenbach Falls

Arthur Conan Doyle was tired of Sherlock Holmes, and wanted to kill him off. He did so by sending him to Meiringen in Switzerland, where he and his arch-enemy, Moriarty, struggle before they apparently both fell to their deaths. Before that, Holmes was allowed to write a note to Dr. Watson, who had been lured away:

MY DEAR WATSON,

I write these few lines through the courtesy of Mr. Moriarty, who awaits my convenience for the final discussion of those questions which lie between us. He has been giving me a sketch of the methods by which he avoided the English police and kept himself informed of our movements. They certainly confirm the very high opinion which I had formed of his abilities. I am pleased to think that I shall be able to free society from any further effects of his presence, though I fear that it is at a cost which will give pain to my friends, and especially, my dear Watson, to you. I have already explained to you, however, that my career had in any case reached its crisis, and that no possible conclusion to it could be more congenial to me than this. Indeed, if I may make a full confession to you, I was quite convinced that the letter from Meiringen was a hoax, and I allowed you to depart on that errand under the persuasion that some development of this sort would follow. Tell Inspector Patterson that the papers which he needs to convict the gang are in pigeonhole M., done up in a blue envelope and inscribed "Moriarty." I made every disposition of my property before leaving England and handed it to my brother Mycroft. Pray give my greetings to Mrs. Watson, and believe me to be, my dear fellow

Very sincerely yours, SHERLOCK HOLMES.

Well, as every Baker Street Irregular knows, Holmes didn't die, but the cunning Swiss tourism people still celebrate the death that didn't happen.

What most people don't know is that Moriarty also survived, only to be killed by an explosion in Australia when Holmes was assisting Henry Cruciform in experiments on an explosive called nitrogum, which was based on eucalyptus oil. This is a story I have now published.

Cruciform and Holmes met, the same night that Holmes "died", so I went to Meiringen in pursuit of the details today.  I mean, how else can I make a more convincing story of it?

Actually, I was looking for two main things: the geology and topography of the area, and unrelated to any present work plan, the way the cunning Swiss have managed to lock onto the story.  Consider the following:

A statue of Sherlock Holmes outside the Sherlock Holmes

Museum, which we only entered far enough to see if they

had a shop that sold caps (I needed one, but as I had

predicted, they only had deer-stalkers).

This was nearby

And this.

Here is a close-up

And this wasn't far off.

And as this shows, the whole thing is a fable: this pipeline carries the water up that comes down the falls.  Maybe.  I mean, would I lie?

And my faulty German says they are planning to claim Schwimmbad, the Sailor.

Serious stuff
The falls are, in fact, quite remarkable.  The train from Luzern to Interlaken arrives in Meiringen one hour and 17 minutes after leaving Luzern (Swiss trains are like that).  You walk out of the station, turn right, find the main road, turn right along that and follow it until you see a bridge.  Cross over and go along the left-hand (western) side to avoid a nasty roundabout.

Approaching the roundabout, head at about 10 o'clock, using the pedestrian crossings as rural Swiss drivers are a bit feral, and get to the funicular that takes you up (it is 20 Swiss Francs return and well worth it, as there is more climbing at the top.

On the way there, we saw this through the train window, and wondered how modern the Swiss were. The next two shots show the reality: the Swiss like to play games and dress up!

What we saw at Meiringen

Can you tell the passengers from the tourists?

And here are two shots of the falls themselves.  I will add more shots later.

Spray made good photos difficult, but there is a lot of water.

And as you can see, there is serious power there: note the hole through the rock.

Postcards from Plitzvicke Jezera

For those unaware of it, I am at present in Croatia, near the Plitzvice Lakes, today.  This is a world-class wetlands area that gets more than a million visitors a year.  One is transported from place to place by a neat little train-bus, and by barges, all covered in the entry price.  As you will see, it's a place worth visiting.

Hint: I saved the best pictures until last.

 

 

There are about 16 lakes, interlinked by waterfalls.

and waterfalls...

...and waterfalls,

with water in between...

with fish.  No fishing is allowed, so they are tame as tame can be.

By the way, i had a polarising filter, but I was too busy having fun to stop and fit it.

See what I mean?

That's all for now...  more later.

Writing for the younger reader

I am in Zagreb in Croatia, doing some general digging for several books, and my spare time has been taken up fighting the zombie armies who masquerade as "support" at the St George Bank.  In the end, I showed the what steely stuff we Old Writers are made of, and terrified the poor dears.  I will get back to how this is done in a few months, because as an old bureaucrat, I know how to spook the timid majority.

 This is a skill I owe it to humanity to share, but not right now.  Here's something I prepared earlier.

It was written for the Children's Book Council of Australia, NSW Branch journal, formerly News and Views, now iRead. You can find that version here, after about the middle of June, but this is a revised version.

During the Sydney Writers' Festival in 2012, I attended a sort of master-class-cum-workshop with a few other writers. It was conducted by Mal Peet, who suggested ahead of time that we read his Life: An Exploded Diagram, to provide a common point of discussion. (It's a brilliant book, by the way.)

Reading his book prompted me to ask in the workshop: what makes a book "a YA book"? We concluded that even if there is probably no such thing as a YA book, there are books that work well with that readership, because, like Peet's example, they offer a degree of insight and reassurance, and deliver notions in a logical way. That's the Short Manifesto.

We discussed Martin Amis' infamous "If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book…". Collectively, we sneered, though in fairness, the ageing enfant terrible (he's 63) was not being as offensive as we thought. He actually went on to say "…the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable." So he's ignorant, but not malignant. Every book written by anything past a novice is written in a minefield, surrounded by restraints.

The world of writing is like a church. Novelists want to be the Deity, but are accorded the status of cardinals. Essayists and critics are bishops, writers of hard-back, glossy-paged non-fiction are priests, writers of children's fiction are seen, by the cardinals, as mere ushers. Writers of juvenile non-fiction stand lower than the ushers, at about the level of the church cat—or something it dragged in.

With my deputy assistant mouse-catcher status, I hate it when people ask me if I will ever write "a real book". Like Amis, they know nothing of my craft. Every writer must consider who the reader(s) will be. My primary trade is as a science writer, writing for adults. On a given day, I might describe the qualities of rocket fuels, the operations of certain insidious poisons within the cell, or why quantum physics tells us mobile phones can't cause cancer.

If I were in the security services, somebody preoccupied with high explosives, readily-available deadly poisons, and lethal radiation would be a worry. I'm not a spook, but I worry about me, too, and that is why the material I write is informative and leads to understanding, but omits key elements. Let me put it this way: I don't do recipes.

I know who my story is directed at, but I also know who else might be reading. And I don't just mean Bad Guys, I mean potential young hell-raisers such as I was in my younger days. I explain the principles, the ideas, the features, but I hold back on the plumbing. (I'll explain plumbing shortly.)

For a writer, no subject should be off-limits, and that applies equally when I am writing for younger readers. Perhaps even more so, which is why my first reading is from the Book of Jerome (that's Jerome S. Bruner in his The Process of Education, 1960):

We begin with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development.

Talking with Mal Peet, we agreed that sex scenes were not necessarily off-limits for teens. After all, teenagers can get porn if they want it. In books, it's better to deal with feelings and to leave out what I dubbed "the plumbing", the IKEA assembly manual of carnality. Love and sex are part of life, and it is better to acknowledge them sensibly and move on: no prurient dwelling, and no nervous-Nellying, either.

Younger readers are less patient with nonsense, more demanding, probably more knowing than we realise or would like (let's be honest: we all feel the need to shelter the young, just a bit!). They also have massive gaps in their knowledge and experience, and that puts extra demands on those writing for a young audience. Fill the gaps, but fill them with Good Stuff!

Now, a short rant: some 59 years ago I had to memorise this: Dawson, Mackenzie, Isaacs, Suttor, Burdekin, Lynd, Mitchell, Gilbert, Norman, Flinders, Leichhardt, Roper, Alligator. I won't reveal what this vile and useless catalogue of trivia reflects, but my cohort had to memorise it. The list failed to impress me then, and I retain it to this day only as a party trick few can emulate. The young deserve better of their elders than to be set tasks as foolish as learning that list.

Adults know me as a science writer, but my satiable curtiosity about how and why things happened pushes me to be a story-teller who dwells on historical facts for younger readers. I don't sell them short, or "dumb down" for them, I am an honest dealer—except when it come to roping them in, captivating, entrancing, winning their hearts and minds, because then, like any good story-teller, I get in touch with my inner huckster. For example, see the second item in my Big Manifesto.

So: four things are required:
*  careful, considered, logically structured writing;
*  interesting content (or useful content or both); and most of all,
*  a guided journey into curiosity and wonder.

Last, there's the hook, the grabber. Think how many of your favourite fictional tales begins with a hook (though I gather that the jargon term for this is "portal"). It involves a trip through a wardrobe, a looking-glass or a TARDIS. Where is the rule that says non-fiction should be different? (Those four things are the Medium Manifesto.)

My writing always involves a pursuit of the curious. It might be a question like: what made people think rockets would work in a vacuum? Or what was the Clown in The Winter's Tale doing, planning to buy sugar when Shakespeare died before Britain settled Bermuda? Or how does ricin kill? Or why did so many sports begin in 1859 ±2? I got a whole book out of each of those questions.

To take a recent case, and this time I was writing for Year 5, I can not only prove that Hargraves didn't discover gold in Australia: I can also prove that he did something far more useful, because he and Enoch Rudder conspired to get a gold rush started. This is a good story, and soon I will use it in a larger work, written for adults, as well. (Actually, I started writing the adult book first, it went ugly, so I side-lined it and did the kids' version. Now I can go back and write the Big People version.)

Again, while doing a book for Year 4: I wondered who the oldest and youngest First Fleeters were. I'll stay with this one for a bit, because it shows how dogged pursuit puts the story into history. You can read more about this stuff in About Those Convicts, but here's the short version.

I knew that Elizabeth Hayward and Elizabeth Beckford were the oldest and youngest female convicts in the First Fleet. I looked them up at Old Bailey Online. Then I browsed the other cases heard that day, and found Samuel Burt, who steadfastly spurned having his death sentence for forgery commuted to transportation. I thought this a good yarn, a neat angle: a literate and well-spoken youngster who preferred to swing rather than go to the Antipodes. He must have been scared!

Well, I was wrong. Yes, Samuel yearned for the gallows, but it was because he lacked either the resolve or the depravity necessary to top himself. Thwarted in love, he committed a forgery and handed himself in so the hangman could turn him off. I knew then that I had a really good yarn. I dug and I dug then, asking the story-teller's favourite question: and then, what happened?

I found the answer buried in a 1790 issue of The Times: Samuel's lady relented and agreed to marry him. He allowed his sentence to be commuted, she came to visit in Newgate, caught gaol fever and died. His fate was sealed: he came out in the Second Fleet, was a model prisoner, and by 1794, he was pardoned and had a grant at Bulanaming near Sydney's Newtown.

Now here's the best part: I can't find Samuel anywhere after that! He may have left the colony, or settled into a quiet life, drowned himself or died in the bush: I have nothing else on him. So far. It will be out there somewhere, but I am satisfied with what I have. Half a story, when you are writing for the young, may be better than none, but half a story is definitely better than a whole polished one.

That story-teller's favourite question: and then, what happened? works two ways: it's good for us to pursue, but it's even better when the listener takes up the cry, the question, and joins in the hunt.

So with due respect to Mr Amis, by far my superior as a Lord Cardinal Novelist, this mere rodent control agent says, "serious brain injury" means no-mucking-about, hole-in-the-head stuff. Just try doing what I do, with a hole in your head! When you write for the young, you need to keep your wits about you, not have them leaking out to be scattered on the floor around you.

Martin, mate: Peter Kemp's 2010 review in The Times of The Pregnant Widow drove you into the foetal position, and your tantrum over his panning is famous. We speak of little else in our cheap and dingy garrets. Now, we writers for children know we write for the harshest, most forthright critics alive and we advise due caution. Keep writing for adults, old son, because no amount of brain injury can insulate you from the roasting our attentive young readers would give you.

Now here's the Big Manifesto, still a Work-in-progress: 

THE BIG MANIFESTO: 

A draft recipe for young people's history

I believe a good history for young readers should contain most of these:

• Facts and figures that resonate (i.e., should be memorable);

• Gross and gruesome bits (a sprinkle of ugh! factor makes for memorable);

• Lists offering perspectives and insights (several, logical);

• People's stories with different viewpoints and perspectives;

• Key events, seen from several different perspectives;

• Logical sequences that help readers understand how the story unfolds;

• Dates for readers to do timelines (maybe 16, sprinkled through, not essential);

• Comparisons: viewpoints, lifestyles, social and living conditions;

• Interpretations and reasons for things: insights on what was different back then;

• Unexpected details (contrasts with today, paradoxical bits etc.);

• Policies and practices that drove or determined events;

• Social conditions that influenced or facilitated behaviour;

• Economic and commercial considerations that drove decisions;

• Methods, technologies and techniques that made things possible (steam, germ theory etc.).

Now you really want to know what that list was?  Those names were the rivers encountered by Ludwig Leichhardt in 1844-45, as he explored northwards, in order.  It is totally useless for anything at all, other than as a frightening example of what comes from completely futile "education".

Footnote:
You will see signs of that in a book to be published on October 1 by the National Library of Australia.  It is to be called The Big Book of Australian History, and it will be available in both print as an epub-formatted e-book with loads and loads of links to original sources.

On being a fast learner of Slovene

We zigzagged from Sydney to Hong Kong to Paris to Zagreb, where we were got at by an ATM at the Zagreb airport.

I put my St George Visa debit card in the machine on the right and requested 3000 Croatian kune.  The machine did nothing but rejected the card.

To test it, I put the same card in the Bankomat machine on the left, and got my 3000 kune, which indicated that there was nothing wrong with the card, and that the first transaction had not registered: if it had dome, I would not have got my money because the amount was close to the daily limit.  Being canny, I took out the tablet and took a shot of the two machines, with my case in between.

Roll on a day or two, when I went to use the card again in Ljubljana (Slovenia), and it was refused. I tried it the next day on another machine.  It still didn't work.  My canny photography was now about to pay off.

Clearly, the St George Bank in Australia had decided that there is something suss going on.  That's careful of them, but you'd think they might ask first, and if not, then when the customer complains, they might do something about it.

24 hours on, I am still waiting.  I have followed up and told them that I want a response from a named officer, willing to use his or her initiative to think outside the box, as I have done.  All I have is one automated response.

In this, the St George Bank treats its customers with contempt. It requires you ring a number using a "freecall" number that is far from a free call, and phones here are hard to access in any case.  So I emailed them.  I told them I had photographed the two machines, with my suitcase in the middle, asked them to consider that my language should show them I am not an Eastern European crook, offering to send a pic of me, with the same bag, AND the card in question.  I referred them to where the pic was visible on Facebook.

I got back a stupid response telling me to call at a local branch (in SLOVENIA??) or to call their "free" number, and indicating that they could not give out personal details (which I had not asked for!).

Having an email address, I replied, attaching  the pic above

Luckily for me, this is one of three sources of funds available to me, but as the others are not through St George, the St George people don't know that.  A customer of thirty years' standing is thrown to the wolves.

Now the question is: will they pull their fingers out?  If they do, I will come back and edit this.  Note added July 8: while I put the fear of God in the media people at the bank, and got action, the "web support" people are still giving me the run-around.

Meanwhile, we are in Slovenia, and slowly gathering a few words of Slovene.  The Slovenians are the most western (not the most eastern, as I said) of the Slavic nations, and have a common border with Italy, but the language is wholly Slavic.  We saw a bearskin with a saddle on it, outside the WCs at a rural gostilna (restaurant) yesterday, and I established that a bear is a medved, which is also the word in Czech (and I think also in Russian).

This comes from two root words: one is med, meaning honey (think mead!) while the other is ved, knowledge, as in the Vedas.  The bear is the honey-knower.

Sadly, there are few helpful bits like this.

It msy not matter in a century from now.  The local languages are probably at risk: most people have some English, young people have excellent English, and half the TV channels are in English with subtitles, most ads have some English words in them and many of the songs are in English.

In a slightly academic discussion on language and politics, a Slovene explained  that the Serbs were disliked because they came to Slovenia, and because they could be understood when they spoke (the similar) Serbian, they failed to learn Slovene.

How, I asked them, were the English speakers any different from the Serbs?

Somebody commented in one of the papers I read that it is time to find a less loaded name for "English".  I happen to agree.

Desert Island Books for travellers.

Forget about sitting on a desert island.  I am about to rack up 34 hours of air-travel and layovers as I zigzag to Zagreb from Sydney, by way of Hong Kong and Paris.  I want something that will sustain and amuse me in flight, and I'm not sure how fully I can recharge my Android tablet that I use to read e-books on the go, so I need a few books of the paper variety.

The problem with a new book is that it might not be what you hoped for, and an old book, well, it might not be as much fun the next time around.  It also needs to be compact.  The best thing about e-books is that they weigh almost nothing.

One advantage of approaching advanced middle age (as I soon will be) is that you forget who done it in a murder mystery, at least if it's a murder of quality, the sort that P. D. James writes, the sort George Orwell was hankering for when he wrote The Decline of the English Murder.

Ah, now there's a possibility: Orwell's essays, or one of his social memoirs, but they're all a bit depressing.  They are all a bit gloomy, a bit intense, a bit like today, in fact.

Down and Out in Paris and London still shapes one of my habits: Orwell said that the person handing out leaflets has to stay until they are all gone, so always take one he said, whatever they are.  It appeals to my tastes as a conservative anarchist (we're the ones that don't believe in blowing people up).

Not that violence is Out.  I have a few murders on the tablet, which has readers for every sort of e-book known, and I have some J B Priestley social essays, so strike those.

I am tempted to take T. E. Carhart's The Piano Shop on the Left Bank, which was recommended to me by a bookshop manager who knew my tastes.  Forget The Decline of the English Murder, somebody needs to write The Decline of the Quality Bookshop, the sort where the staff actually read some of the books and make mental notes about who will like it, based on what else they like.

I took it down off the shelf: it appears to have been overseas with me once before, because the bookmark in the book is a ticket from the Wiener Riesenrad, that Ferris wheel sort of thing that is always showing up in films set in Vienna.  Well, I know I liked the book last time, it's compact, so it's on the short-list.

Roughly where we expect to be annoying the rocks
over the next two months.

The other tension is that when you are travelling, books tend to be discarded, and that means taking a Really Good Book isn't good, either.  Maybe what I need is one lightweight, compact, loved book that will last and some fat Airport Book.  Carhart weighs in at 240 grams, most of the other contenders are about 400 grams.

One of the books I am working on at the moment has the working title Not your usual rocks. It's one of a series that I am writing, most of them using up research that is left-over, but this one requires fresh material, so I am heading for mountains, caves, coasts, volcanoes, and with luck, some obsidian in situ.

They talk about things being stone dead, we hear of stony silences, but the funny thing is that rocks mostly tell interesting stories.  Hopefully, I will get some interesting new stories from my travels.

Anyhow, there may be a somewhat geological cast to my mutterings over the next two months.  I may even have something to say about the Silex Piano (you can trust that entry, as I provided most of the information that is there).

Sadly, my chances of seeing a real, live Silex piano are low. but you can't win them all.

About the albatross

The albatross has a name that comes to us from Portuguese, where it is alcatras, and while the vowel change that might yield us alcatros is understandable, the changing of the third letter is most unusual.

Most probably, somebody decided that the albatross, being a white bird, should be given a name containing alba, the Latin word for 'white'. It is also odd that the Portuguese name for the albatross should be so similar to the Spanish name for a pelican, alcatraz, known even to those with no Spanish as the name of a certain Californian prison island.

The same word that gives us the first part of albatross also appears in an album, which is a blank tablet with nothing yet written on it, and so gave its name to the sort of blank book we use to stick in photographs or stamps (incidentally, many stamp collectors who care about their craft specialise in collecting forgeries, since imitation is the sincerest form of philately, but I digress).

The alb, of course, is a white tunic worn by a priest, the white of an egg is the albumen (albumins are a class of water-soluble proteins), an albino is a person or animal with a lack of skin pigments and hair pigments, so they appear white, and albata is another name for German silver, a white alloy, while albite is a white mineral.

One of the few alb- words that breaks the pattern is a fish, the albacore, which supposedly comes via the Portuguese albacor, from the Arabic al bukr, which means a young camel. The albedo of a planet on the other hand, is its reflectivity, the extent to which its atmosphere reflects radiation from nearby stars. According to current theory, if an asteroid strikes the earth, the mud and dust which is blasted into the stratosphere will produce something not unlike a nuclear winter.

When the dinosaurs were wiped out by the increased albedo of our planet, caused by the Yucatan asteroid, or the volcanic activity of the Deccan traps of India (which may have been caused by the asteroid in any case), theory says they froze to death, or starved to death because there was no food available for them.

Some biologists think that a few of the dinosaurs survived, because they were warm-blooded and had feathers, and that these dinosaurs are with us today, only now we call them birds. There would probably have been some food in the sea for a considerable time after the earth went dark, perhaps enough to feed a few primitive sea birds until the dust settled and the sun returned.

It may be impossible to test this theory out, but we certainly have seabirds of high albedo today, like the albatross, named for its whiteness, and then there is the penguin, which sounds remarkably like the Welsh pen-gwyn, which would translate as 'white-head'.

The problem, though is that penguins only pass the equator at one point, near the Galapagos Islands, while for the rest of the time, they live only in the southern hemisphere, while the natural habitat of the Welsh until recent times was the northern hemisphere. And to cap that, most penguins have a black head.

It seems that the name 'penguin' applied originally to the Great Auk of the northern hemisphere, sometimes referred to as Pinguinis impennis, which did indeed have a white patch on its head, and that the name was later transferred to those cute and somewhat similar southern birds in waiter's uniforms of black and white — except that almost every species of penguin has a small patch of yellow, which has to serve some useful purpose, though I have yet to find anybody who could tell me what it is.

Puffins, Lunga, Hebrides.

I for one will keep an open mind on how the penguins got their name, since they have a layer of fat below the skin, and 'pinguid' is a rare but valid English word meaning 'fat'.

In fact, so fatty were the penguins that their dried carcases were used as fuel for the boiling-down of seal fat in the South Atlantic in less civilised times, but that stopped before we lost all of the penguins.

The great auk, however, went extinct in the 19th century, hunted into extinction by eager egg and carcase collectors, selling into a trade which cared more about ownership than conservation. I have some notes on that somewhere, so I shall return to the demise of the great
auk later.

Right now, the penguins of the world are holding their own, but the same cannot be said for the albatross, because too many of them are drowning when they try to take the bait from long lines set by fishing boats. Once they are hooked, the magnificent birds drown on the line. This usually leaves a mate on the nest, who must eventually abandon the nest, meaning even more albatross deaths.

A life of pie

The pie, as a pastry-surrounded food item, was certainly known to Chaucer, who tells us of the cook in his Canterbury Tales:

He koude rooste, and sethe, and boille, and frye,
Maken mortreux, and wel bake a pye.

The mortreux, (today, we call it a mortress), is a kind of soup or pottage of bread and milk, or else of assorted meats, and the rest should make reasonable sense if it is read slowly, but what sort of pie did Chaucer know?

There was at least one more, for in the 'Reeve's Tale' Chaucer tells us that the wife of the miller was 'peert as is a pye' — as pert as a pie, but this was no ordinary pie, but the bird we now call a magpie. The Wife of Bath says her fourth husband was 'Stubborn and strong, and jolly as a pie', or in Chaucer's language, 'Stibourn and strong, and joly as a pye', which is back to the magpies again.

The Prologue to the 'Cook's Tale' refers to a Jakke of Dover that the cook has sold after it has been twice hot and twice cold, probably endangering his customers. The Jack of Dover, as we would call it today, was probably a pie, but the rest of Chaucer's pies are all of the feathered, avian variety.

Shakespeare offers us a wide variety of pies, and in Henry VIII, Buckingham complains of the Cardinal of York: "No man's pie is freed from his ambitious finger", but here, too, we find chattering pies, obviously the birds again, while Macbeth announces the apparently alarming news that

Augures and understood relations have
By maggot pies and choughs and rooks brought forth
The secret'st man of blood. . .

Here, though, we have a remnant of an old habit of according names to birds: Tom Tit, Jenny Wren, Jack Daw, and in America, Jim Crow, and in Australia, Willy Wagtail. A proud member of the clan is Maggot Pie, or as we might say, Margaret Pie. It is curious that so many of the birds with given names are largely black, but that is a side issue: does this have anything to do with the 'four and twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie' of the nursery rhyme? Probably not, but the bird known as a magpie in England, and un pie (pronounced, roughly, 'earn pea') in France, is very like the bird generally known as either a peewee or a peewit in Australia.

Shakespeare also has several people swear 'by cock and pie', which is a pre-Reformation set of rules about what to do when church events coincided. Shylock speaks of how Jacob had from Laban ' . . . all the eanlings which were streak'd and pied', which is a sense of 'pie' that lives on today in our 'piebald'. The Bard also offers us references to the edible form of pie, which seems more often than not to be a mince pie, a pie made with dried fruits.

So the clown in A Winter's Tale plans warden pies for a sheep-shearing-feast, and his ingredients include sugar, currants, rice, saffron, mace, dates, nutmegs, ginger, prunes and raisins. Petruchio, however, speaks of 'a custard-coffin', in The Taming of the Shrew, but here the coffin is just a pastry casing for a custard pie.

A coffin is also the carriage of a printing machine, and we find pies enough in the printing shop as well. Pie or pye is a jumble of type, mingled together higgledy-piggledy when a forme of type has been broken down, and all the handset letters have gone all over the place. And that brings us back to birds again, because this meaning of 'pie' comes from the medieval Latin pica, and that is also the name of the genus into which the magpie fits.

And then we are back to printing again, for Pica is a type size, equal to about 12-point type in today's language, and also a measure of distance in printing, but in medicine, 'pica' is a craving for non-food items such as minerals. Given the small amount of meat that is usually found in the meat pies served to shearers and others in Australia, this possibly chance connection seems entirely appropriate.

By way of a footnote, the clown's ingredient list for warden pie inspired one of my books. Bittersweet.  I started wondering where the clown in Shakespeare's time would have got sugar, and ended up tracing sugar back to where it started, in New Guinea, 9000 years ago, more or less.  But that's another story...one you can buy for your Kindle, if you wish.

Not your usual colonial poet

Yes, another hint about what I am up to, though it also serves to mark National Reconciliation Week.

I am in pursuit, this week, of a mysterious Hugo.  He (or she, but I will use "he" hereafter) burst into print twice in Sydney in 1831, and I have reproduced his first poem below.  It is curious: in the first of the two poems, he uses an archaic spelling of waratah, he is clearly familiar with the plants of the area, and he shows a strong empathy with the Aborigines. These were not common characteristics in colonial Sydney in 1831.

Hugo's second poem suggests that he was quite religious, but I can't think of anybody in that era who fits the bill. I think 'Hugo' was a currency lad (or lass), but what happened to him or her?

The poem was first published as "Original Poetry" in The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, Saturday 16 July 1831, 4.

The Gin
"Where spreads the sloping shaded turf
By Coodge's* smooth and sandy bay,
And roars the ever-ceaseless surf,
I've built my gunya for to-day.

"The gum-tree with its glitt'ring leaves
Is sparkling in the sunny light,
And round my leafy home it weaves
Its dancing shade with flow'rets bright.

A waratah ('warretaw'), Telopea speciosissima.
This is quite a large shot: click on it to enlarge it.

"And beauteous things around are spread;
The burwan*, with its graceful bend
And cone of nuts, and o'er my head
The flowering vines their fragrance lend.

"The grass-tree, too, is waving there,
The fern-tree sweeping o'er the stream,
The fan-palm, curious as rare.
And warretaws* with crimson beam.

"Around them all the glecinæ*
Its dainty tendrils careless winds,
Gemming their green with blossoms gay,
One common flower each bush-shrub finds.

"Fresh water, too, is tumbling o'er
The shell-strewn rocks into the sea;
'Midst them I seek the hidden store,
To heap the rich repast for thee.

"But where is Bian?—where is he?
My husband comes not to my meal:
Why does he not the white man flee,
Nor let their god his senses steal?

"Lingers he yet in Sydney streets?
Accursed race! to you we owe,
No more the heart contented beats.
But droops with sickness, pain, and woe.

"Oh ! for the days my mother tells,
Ere yet the white man knew our land;
When silent all our hills and dells,
The game was at the huntsman's hand.

"Then roamed we o'er the sunny hill,
Or sought the gully's grassy way,
With ease our frugal nets could fill
From forest, plain, or glen, or bay.

"Where sported once the kangaroo,
Their uncouth cattle trend the soil,
Or corn-crops spring, and quick renew,
Beneath the foolish white man's toil.

"On sunny spots, by coast and creek,
Near the fresh stream we sat us down ;
Now fenced, and shelterless, and bleak,
They're haunted by the white man's frown.'

She climbed the rock—she gazed afar—
The sun behind those mountains blue
Had sunk; faint gleamed the Western star,
And in the East a rainbow hue

Was mingling with the darkling sea;
When gradual rose the zodiac light,
And over rock, and stream, and tree,
Spread out its chastened radiance bright.

So calm, so soft, so sweet a ray,
It lingers on the horizon's shore;
The echo of the brighter day,
That bless'd the world on hour before.

But sudden fades the beam that shone,
And lit the earth like fairy spell;
Whilst in the East, the sky's deep tone
Proclaims the daylight's last farewell.

"Fast comes the night, and Bian yet
Returns not to his leafy bed;
My hair is with the night-dew wet
Sleep comes not to this aching bead.

"The screeching cockatoo's at rest;
From yonder flat the curlew's wail
Comes mournful to this sorrowing breast,
And keenly blows the Southern gale.

"Avaunt ye from our merry land!
'Ye that so boast our souls to save,
Yet treat us with such niggard hand:
We have no hope but in the grave."

Thus sung Toongulla's wretched child,
As o'er her sleeping babe she hung.
Mourning her doom, to lead a wild
And cheerless life the rocks among.

Their health destroyed—their sense depraved
The game, their food, for ever gone;
Let me invoke religion's aid
To shield them from this double storm

Of physical and moral ill;
We owe them all that we possess
The forest, plain, the glen, the hill,
Were theirs;—to slight is to oppress.

Hugo

Notes
The following terms, asterisked above may need some translation. I am a passable botanist, but glecinæ had me beaten for quite a while.

Coodge: Coogee
burwan: burrawang
warretaw: waratah
glecinæ: probably  Glycine sp., a member of the Fabaceae

This poem represents early instances of several words like gin, gunya and waratah, but as I have a strong interest in such things  I have since found an even earlier case of waratah from 1804. Oddly, there seems to have been no other mention of the plant until 1826, when the modern spelling first appeared. By 1831, Hugo was out-of-date.

I continue to wonder who Hugo was, but I am working on it.