Haggis!

 In every country, there's a strange need to make up stuff for the unwary foreigner. In Scotland it's the Wild Haggis!
 Haggis is sheeps heart and liver and lungs wrapped in spices and oatmeal and its stomach, and then boiled. Personally I don't like the taste, but it's the food most associated with Scotland, and traditionally it gets served on Burns night.
 Is Haggis Scottish? Certainly, we've taken it as our own. However, like everything else it has a complicated history.

The use and vertues of these two severall kinds of Oate-meales in maintaining the Family, they are so many (according to the many customes of many Nations) that it is almost impossible to recken all;” and then proceeds to give a description of “oat-meale mixed with blood, and the Liver of either Sheepe, Calfe or Swine, maketh that pudding which is called the Haggas or Haggus, of whose goodnesse it is in vaine to boast, because there is hardly to be found a man that doth not affect them

— Gervase Markham, The English Huswife (1615), England.

Which is pretty early. But...

Thy fowll front had, and he that Bartilmo flaid; The gallowis gaipis eftir thy graceles gruntill, As thow wald for ane haggeis, hungry gled.

— William Dunbar, Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy (circa 1520), Scotland.

So, we're still in the lead (so to speak). But...

For hagese'.

Þe hert of schepe, þe nere þou take,

Þo bowel noght þou shalle forsake,

On þe turbilen made, and boyled wele,

Hacke alle togeder with gode persole,

                                          — Liber Cure Cocorum, circa 1430, England.

 From all this, it's impossible to say who actually invented Haggis. England and Scotland are neighbours, so historically it's easy enough for ideas to be transmitted frequently between the two. Haggis is a food that pretty much uses the whole of the ship in as efficient a manner as possible. It would be strange if haggis hadn't evolved independently amongst agricultural peoples over the whole of human history. Just like porridge, a high-energy food that's incredibly easy to produce.
 So, historians have argued that haggis is in fact much, much, older than England or Scotland. It's been argued that the ancient romans were aware of it, that the Scandanavians brought it over in their longboats, that it was even referenced in Homers The Odyssey. I think there probably is a grain of truth in this. Food evolves, ideas evolve. Rarely in human history does an idea spring forth without antecendant. Haggis is Scottish, inasmuch as we still eat it and it's culturally associated with us, but at the same time it almost certainly has wider historical implications.

It's where Listerine comes from.

 Glasgow has a good reputation for medical research normally, but in the last few months, Glasgow has been producing some really amazing medical science. At the beginning of the year, creating a 3D map of a cancer protein, in April building and developing a fabricator that can make drugs on demand, and last week a therapy for stroke patients that's had modest success.
 This isn't anything unusual, given that this is the city Joseph Lister did his pioneering work in antisceptics. The Hunterian museum at Glasgow univeristy has some of his medical props behind a glass case that you can go and see, if you can navigate your way through the byzantine cloisters of Glasgow university, and I would recommend it; Glasgow university is where sanitation in the hospital theatre got down to business.

Joseph Lister.

 Joseph Lister was born into a Quaker family in Upton, Essex, 5th April 1827. As a Quaker, he suffered institutional prejudice, and following a good educational display in maths,  science, and languages, went on to do art at the University of London (one of the few places he was allowed to go to). By the end, he came out with an Honours in Medecine and entered the Royal college of Surgeons aged 26. In 1854, he became friend and assistant to James Syme of the Edinburgh Royal infirmary.
 So, he essentially had an extensive apprenticeship in the world of surgery. In time, he became professor of Surgery at Glasgow university, and what struck him most was 'ward fever' - patients dying not from the trauma of surgery (no anaesthetic), but from something else.
 Like all good scientists, he didn't work in isolation. Others had noticed. Florence Nightingale famously made a connection between bad hygiene and mortality rates. However, less known to history was the work by a Hungarian doctor called Ignaz Semmelweiss. He argued that if a doctor went from one patient to another after doing surgery, that doctor would pass on to the next visited patient a disease. He recommended washing hands in Calcium Chloride between each patient. He was virtually ignored, and tragically died of blood poisoning in 1865. However, he had been on the right track and under his watch mortality rates dropped from 12% to 1%.
 At this time, Louis Pasteur and John Snow had developed the idea that bacteria were the cause of diseases, and these bacteria could be spread through the air or by liquid. It didn't take much of a leap for Lister to conclude that the deaths in hospitals were being caused by the transmission of bacteria to a body weakened by surgery. He concluded that the wound itself had to be cleansed. He covered the wound with a piece of lint covered in carbolic acid. He used this on patients who had a compound fracture. This is where the broken bone had penetrated the skin, leaving an exposed wound. This usually lead to gangrene and then death. Lister covered the wound made with lint soaked in carbolic acid, severely reducing deaths from this.
 Lister then invented a machine, which you can see in the Hunterian, that would spray a fine mist of carbolic acid around during surgery, and he became famous for reducing post-surgery deaths overall.
 The old, decaying, relics at the Hunterian just look like any other Victorian mad-scientist equipment, but they aren't. It's countless how many people were saved by this machine and its descendents. It's people like Joseph Lister who took a conservative, ossified, important branch of medicine kicking and screaming into a new mindset, where high levels of avoidable death just weren't acceptable anymore. The Victorians were both cool and weird - that the establishment fought against progress like this, in the face of good scientific evidence, shows how cliquey they were, even though they purported to be objective rationalists.
 Joseph Lister died on the 10th February 1912, leaving the world a much better place than when he came into it, and for that his memory is honoured, and why Glasgow loves to claim him as one of our own.

Deep-fried anything.

 As a Glaswegian, I have never seen a deep-fried mars bar. Honest. Friends from outside Scotland find this hard to believe, as it's one of the things we're famous for. It does sound like I'm lying to protect the reputation of the city (and, by extension, my own), but I'm really not. However our chip-shops do deep-fry pizzas, which they do put on the menu, so it's hard to believe that it's an urban myth.

It looks like something that normally lives fifteen fathoms down.

 According to a 2004 study by the NHS, 22% of Scottish takeaways did them. I've been in many takeaways, usually drunk, and I've never seen it on the menu anywhere. According to some fairly solid classroom rumour when I was at uni, you have to "ask" for it and provide your own Mars bar (it's like everyone involved knows, deep down, that it's not something to advertise), or any sweets that you bring with you. For example, at Easter they will apparently deep fry a cadburys cream egg.
 And that's the limit of my knowledge; a deep-fried Mars bar is one of those things I could never bring myself to ask for. In terms of health, it can't be as bad as deep-fried pizza or the bio-hazard they call British takeaway kebabs, but it's like Buckfast wine (a brand of caffeinated fortified wine). There's so many negative connotations that it would feel wrong to publicly purchase.
 Although deep-fried mars bars have yet to be linked to street violence, they symbolise our historically bad health record, and they are historical. When a foodstuff gets linked with a place, and it becomes famous, even when the foodstuff disappears from widespread use it can stay associated with that place. Whilst I'm not saying that Burns suppers a century from now will have the ceremonial deep-fried confectionary dish, I do think that they will be associated with Glasgow for at least a few decades more (the first one was reportedly sold in 1995 in Stonehaven, Aberdeen, but it almost certainly dates earlier). Like Chicken Tikka Massala, for better or worse, it's now forever a classic Glasgow dish.

Super Trouping for Glaswegians.

 Super Trooper, the ABBA song. It's one I, like everyone else, have heard many times. I vaguely knew the lyrics, but I was totally oblivious that Glasgow appears in them!




"Super Trouper beams are gonna blind me
But I won't feel blue
Like I always do
'Cause somewhere in the crowd there's you

I was sick and tired of everything
When I called you last night from Glasgow
All I do is eat and sleep and sing..."

 I've re-read the lyrics to try and find some meaning, but can't. I think our proud city was just used randomly, because it had enough syllables to fit into the tune. Which on the one hand is good as it papers over Glasgow's problems circa 1980, but on the other hand it's not easy to make out - I've heard that song a fair few times, and I had no idea. BBC4 are repeating every top of the pops from the 70s onwards, Super Trooper was on for weeks recently, and I still didn't hear it! It could be subliminal advertising, but Glasgow City Council have never been that devious or influential.

Glasgow, city of culture

 In 1990, Glasgow was the European city of culture.
 This was the culmination of a reinvention of Glasgows image. In the postwar period, Glasgow had suffered terribly from the effects of the loss of Empire. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Glasgow was popularly associated with violence and poverty, razor gangs, and drunkenness. Although Glasgow had always suffered from this image problem, it had been balanced by the sheer energy of the city that had at varying times made it the second city of the empire.
 Glasgow went through a malaise, where it lost its way and stopped being the wealthy, vibrant city it had been in the Victorian era. We were left with the ghost of better times, buildings funded by the tobacco lords and spice lords who had made their fortunes in the empire, some of the most famous scientists and engineers and politicians looking down from their plinths in George Square. This damage was building on itself; tourism was obviously low, and business was down as well. Glasgow needed to do something to get out of this terminal decline.

Gallery of modern art

 Starting from the early 80s, Glasgow city council went on a PR offensive. They ran a campaign, Glasgow's Miles Better, that was quite popular, to try and introduce some positive connotations with the city in peoples heads. Mr Happy from the mr men books was used as the cartoon character, and the ads painted Glasgow as a cultural centre that was also friendly to business.
 They dusted down Glasgows long-standing policy of making high culture freely available to everyone, and successfully worked a series of ambitious projects. The Burell collection, which had been lying dormant for decades, had a palace built for it and was opened in 1983. The SECC (Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre) was built in 1985; it looks like a cheap rip-off of the Sydney Opera House, and maybe it was, but having a generalised venue for culture and conferences and science exhibitions was good for business and for the local and international organisations to have somewhere safe and reliable they could use.

Burell collection

The big thing at the time was the Glasgow Garden festival 1988. This was a copy of two earlier ones in Liverpool and Stoke-on-Trent, which had been very successful. It was really a way to jolly people into not feeling embarassed or defensive about their city, that with some energy we could do the high-cultured stuff. In Thatchers Britain, although Thatcher was despised in Glasgow, it was good to say to the world that Glasgow was a place that could make money through business.
 At the same time, widespread attempts were being made to try and change the culture of violence, sectarianism and alcoholism that Glasgow had become notorious for. Projects to stamp them out, enforce laws, and to make them socially unacceptable were started in this time.
 All this paid off, as in 1990 Glasgow became the European city of culture, the same year that the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall was opened). By 1990, the big works had largely been done, but this synergistic approach had changed something. Of course, Glasgow did and still does have many problems. But the culture of Glasgow and the west of Scotland had changed for the better, the worst excesses of a decade ago were now not only unacceptable but could be changed.
 Glasgow in this period was an experiment, an attempt to use culture as a means of urban regeneration. It was a success, so it's been copied around the world.

Worst artists in the world?

Wood

McGonagall

Was William Mcgonagall the 19th century Ed Wood?
 Whilst it would be great to get Johnny Depp to play the official worst poet in the world (Vogon poetry doesn't count), are there any parallels between these two curious cultural icons?
 Both are regarded as the 'worst' in their fields. Not merely bad, anyone can simply be bad at something, but comically bad. Their work contains what the industry and the public regard as elementary errors that are so apparent that they are comical.
 However, the key is unintentional errors. If the errors appeared to be intentional, then they would lose their comedic appeal. The comedy arises from the delusion of greatness.
 William McGonagall was poet, and didn't he know it. His poems inadequately use poetic metaphor, and don't scan properly. Here's a sample of his most famous, the Tay Bridge disaster:

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember'd for a very long time.

 Edward Wood was an American filmmaker from the 1950s, who produced, directed, edited, authored, and starred in his own films. His productions were B-movies, with little commercial success, and were also created by his enthusiasm and lack of recognition of his limits. It was only decades later that his movies acquired a cult status, and as a result he is one of the most famous movie makers of Hollywood.
 William McGonagall also had no care for recognition from his peers, and made his money from performing his work in front of a crowd. Audiences would jeer and pelt him with fruit, for which he would recieve up to 15 shillings a night. He seemed to believe that the queen had enjoyed his work, due to a polite letter from the palace thanking him for his poem, and tried to perform for the queen after walking from Dundee to Balmoral. He was stopped by security. Whilst it has been suggested he was playing up to the crowd for money, I don't think this is the case. He went out of his way to perform, going over to America or walking 60 miles to see the queen, the sort of poetry most people write in primary school. I think he genuinely did believe in his talents. Like Ed Wood, who continued in his career long after common sense should have told him to stop.
 Both died penniless and were cruelly mocked by their peers and the public. Both had to be rediscovered by later generations. And both took mediocrity and produced strangely timeless work that's quite enjoyable.

TARDIS!

 
 As any visitor to Glasgow knows, we've still got police boxes.
 As a huge dr who fan, this is of course a source of great civic pride. Whenever I walk down Buchanan street, that blue box sticks out a mile away no matter how crowded (and it is always crowded) the street is. Even on May 4th, when we had Darth Vader and stormtroopers on Buchanan street, that didn't even come close.
 Of course, it wasn't always there. It was reintroduced in the late 90s (I think 1996). Before that, of course, they had been decommissioned by the early 70s due to the widepsread use of personal radios (and, no doubt, doctor who jokes). In 1994 Strathclyde Police decided to get rid of the remaining boxes. However, owing to the intervention of the Civil Defence & Emergency Service Preservation Trust and the Glasgow Building Preservation Trust, a few were kept around the city.
 But here's the shocking thing...they were red!

See how wrong it looks?

 Glasgow police boxes were all painted red until the late 60s. Aside from it just looking wrong, why red? Surely red is the colour of the fire brigade? If I saw a red police box, I'd assume it was for calling the fire brigade (to compund the confusion, they actually had fire extinguishers in them). Dr Who can't even be blamed here, because they'd been like that with introduction of the Mark I's (the Gilbert Mackenzie Trench design) in the 30s (police boxes went through several evolutions since their introduction in Albany, New York, in 1877).
 One thing that really annoys me -really really annoys me - is that they never leave the things alone. They're used as coffee shops, or repainted. In my opinion, this is wrong. They look great, tourists love them, and when you're drunk and coming round the corner past TGI Fridays in the early hours it just looks awesome.

I don't hate the 60s! Honest.

 

 Has anyone noticed the backlash against the 1960s recently?
 I once read a book, about ten years ago, that was about the 60s, and it began 'the 1960s are perhaps the most mythologised decade of all time'. Which I agreed with. However, in the last ten years or so, there's been something in the Zeitgeist that wants to re-evaluate the 60s, to explore it's dark side.
 I have to confess an interest. I love the 60s. When I somehow get hold of a time machine, that's where I'm going for a holiday. Youth culture and pop culture in general had an energy to it that's been lacking ever since, which is probably why it's been so romanticised. Woodstock, man landing on the moon, hippies - there was an innocent exuberance, which to our older culture can be charming. The 60s had an energy for change, but in a positive way.
 However, that would be to ignore the flip side of the coin, which is where this backlash is coming from in the first place. As a society, we can only ignore the dreadfulness of the 1960s for so long before it becomes decade-worship. The civil rights and feminist movements were a cornerstone of the 1960s, rightfully so, but they were the forced result of a culture that essentially punished you for not being male and white. The 60s could easily be a very dangerous time if you weren't part of that subset of the population. The 'establishment' that young people railed against was an oppressive regime that had had a long experience of silencing dissent. During the 1960s, most people were still aware of their place in society and knew to keep their heads down.

Kent state shooting

 Protests against the Vietnam war highlight the awful reality of actually having been around back then. Protests and demonstrations turned violent, and of course there was the Kent State shootings. The cold war had produced enough nuclear weapons for the repeated annihilation of all life on Earth, either by madness or by accident, and although protest was widepsread it was ignored.

JFK

 In Britain, to deal with the housing crisis, tower blocks had been enthusiastically built. However, the premise was flawed - tower blocks don't allow you to simply pile up indefinitely, there needs to be quite a lot of surrounding to space to let in light to the bottom and in case the things collapse like dominoes, so you might as well build normal 2-up 2-downs - the huge subsidises hidden, and whole commnuities were seperated. The pound lowered in value, and it became common for young men to go abroad for work. Britain in the 60s could be very, very, depressing.
 So why, then, has it been so mythologised? Why does our culture shy away from the bad side? Well, it could be that youth culture of the time is so appealing. Their fashions were ridiculous (but perfect for fancy dress), some of their beliefs were well-meaning but stupidly flawed (e.g free love, or no politics in the communes), it could be that they did amazing stuff in that decade (man on the moon, sexual and civil equal rights, forcing society out of its rigid old mentality), or maybe it's just that we would all like to outrage an older generation that we're outraging with our outragessness.
 None of these feel right. In my opinion, the 1960s are glamourised just because there was the mood of change. They had come out of the bland conformist 50s and the feeling was that they were making a much better, more interesting, society. Wages had been rising, young people had a lot more disposable income, and some more time before society expected them to settle down. We miss the feeling that things are getting better. We live in a world where politicians advertise themselves as managers of the economy, not changers of society. I lived through the birth of the internet, which was perhaps the biggest change to our society since the 1960s, but nobody really got excited about it. It just happened a bit at a time. Maybe this explains our new-found antipathy to the 60s - we know, deep down, that the opening years of the 21st century just won't be eulogised anything like the 60s.

All the world's a stage..but which one?

Swan theatre, London

Shakespeare in London. Shakespeare at the Globe.
 Right now, a replica of the Globe sits near the Tate Modern in London, the original lost to history. No photographs remain (what with the technology having not been invented yet), so how do we know what the Globe looked like?
 In 1596, whilst visiting the Swan theatre in London Johannes De Witt (a Dutchman) made a crude sketch of the Swans interior from the point of view of the upper galleries - a large stage,and an area behind the stage where the actors changed (the 'tiring', short for 'attiring'. It was multileveled so it was also used for balcony scenes), and a partial roof. The original of this has been lost, but a friend made a copy, and this is what's been passed down to us. This is the only known record of an Elizabethan London theatre interior, and in its defence it's probably similar to how the Globe looked.
 Then, a Bohemian called Wenceslas Hollar (in either the 1630s or 1640s) drew an illustration of London that showed London, but the perspective is from one that he couldn't have ever seen - diagonally above the tower of Southwark Cathedral. The only way he could have been there is if:

a) A building had existed there at the time. It didn't.

b) He'd been suspended by a crane.

c) He'd been levitating.

c would have violated the witchcraft laws of the time (when the law came down hard on you for it), and b is just silly, so he probably drew it from imagination. It suffers, though, from showing the second Globe, not the first, and Shakespeare had died in 1616, so it couldn't have been the one that premiered Hamlet. There was another illustration, an engraving by a Dutchman Claes Jan Visscher that clearly shows the original Globe theatre - the one that we all think of when we think of the Globe, a crude 'O' shape made of wood - and it's been the basis for what we've thought the Globe looked like to this day.
 Except that he'd never visited London. He'd done his engraving based on an earlier engraving from 1572, before the Globe had been built. So, probably what it was that the 'O' shape was a common design. Or there had been an earlier theatre that got burned down, rebuilt, and renamed by its owners. It's hard to say, like everything else about Shakespeare it's maddeningly elusive. All we have, apart from a few signatures, are speculations and reasonable predictions. Oh, and conspiracy theories.

Shakespeare day

 Today was St Georges day, the national day of England. It was also supposedly the birthday and deathday of William Shakespeare.
 I must admit, I am sceptical of this idea. It just sounds too neat. Englands national poet born and died on its national day. As with much of Shakespeares life, there is sufficient uncertainty as to allow speculation. Whilst we know when he died, when he was born is uncertain. All we know for definite is that he was baptized on April 26th, which his local church documented. At the time, convention dictated that a child was baptized on the first Sunday or holy day following birth as it was believed that if not and if the infant died then they were going straight to hell. So, the error bars for his birth-date could be as high as a week before. If he had been born April 23rd 1564, a Sunday, then this presents a problem. St Marks day was April 25th. However, some people thought this to be unlucky, so maybe they delayed until April 26th.
 Believe it or not, to have this amount of data is quite lucky. Stratford had only started to keep records from 1558, even though they had been ordered to in 1538 (it was viewed with suspicion as a way to increase tax collection). Unfortunately, this wasn't in time for Anne Hathaway, who was older by eight years, so no record of her birth exists.
 Shakespeares life is 5% fact and 95% speculation, and surprisingly many speculative ideas have been worked into the publics knowledge of the man. I am going to write a series of articles about this and about Elizabethan England, because it's quite instructive on the limits of how much we can know history.