Up Helly Aa!

Up Helly Aa is a relatively modern festival ... but its roots are very old. 

There is some evidence that people in rural Shetland celebrated the 24th day after Christmas as Antonmas or Up Helly Night, but there is no evidence that their cousins in Lerwick did the same. The emergence of Yuletide and New Year festivities in the town seems to post-date the Napoleonic Wars, when soldiers and sailors came home with rowdy habits and a taste for firearms. 

On Olde Christmas Eve in 1824 a visiting Methodist missionary wrote in his diary that 'the whole town was in an uproar: from twelve o’clock last night until late this night blowing of horns, beating of drums, tinkling of old tin kettles, firing of guns, shouting, bawling, fiddling, fifeing, drinking, fighting. This was the state of the town all night – the street was thronged with people as any fair I ever saw in England.'

As Lerwick grew in size the celebrations became more elaborate. Sometime around 1840 the participants introduced burning tar barrels into the proceedings. As one observer wrote, 'Sometimes there were two tubs fastened to a great raft-like frame knocked together at the Docks, whence the combustibles were generally obtained. Two chains were fastened to the bogie supporting the capacious tub or tar-barrel…eked to these were two strong ropes on which a motley mob, wearing masks for the most part, fastened. A party of about a dozen was told off to stir up the molten contents.' 

The main street of Lerwick in the mid-19th century was extremely narrow, and rival groups of tarbarrelers frequently clashed in the middle. The proceedings were thus dangerous and dirty, and Lerwick’s middle classes often complained about them. The Town Council began to appoint special constables every Christmas to control the revellers with only limited success. When the end came for tar-barrelling, in the early 1870s it seems to have been because the young Lerwegians themselves had decided it was time for a change. 

Around 1870 a group of young men in the town with intellectual interests injected a series of new ideas into the proceedings. First they improvised the name Up Helly Aa, and gradually postponed the celebrations until the end of January. Secondly, they introduced a far more elaborate element of disguise - 'guizing' - into the new festival. Thirdly, they inaugurated a torchlight procession. At the same time they were toying with the idea of introducing Viking themes to their new festival. The first sign of this new development appeared in 1877, but it was not until the late 1880s that a Viking longship - the galley- appeared, and as late as 1906 that 'Guizer Jarl', the chief guizer, arrived on the scene. It was not until after the First World War that there was a squad of Vikings, the 'Guizer Jarl Squad', in the procession every year. 

Up to the Second World War Up Helly Aa was overwhelmingly a festival of young working class men and during the depression years the operation was run on a shoestring. In the winter of 1931- 32 there was an unsuccessful move to cancel the festival because of the dire economic situation in the town. At the same time the Up Helly Aa committee became a self-confident organisation which poked fun at the pompous in the by then long-established Up Helly Aa bill – sometimes driving their victims to fury.

(Info taken from the Up Helly Aa Committee press pack for 2023)

Trees - the secret cloud makers

I love walking among trees. There's nothing quite like it. And research in recent years has proven that it's genuinely good for us. As I wrote back in November (see here) we now know that trees and other plants give off chemicals such as turpenes, pinenes and limonenes that can lower your heart rate, reduce your cortisol levels and even increase your production of so-called NK (natural killer) immune cells. These protect us from illness and can even send self-destruct messages to virus-infected cells and tumours. 

But being outside also makes us feel better on an emotional level. Some neuroscientists will tell you that it's because walking in green spaces allows the brain to ‘take a holiday’ from complex frontal lobe-based working. Researchers Rachel and Stephen Kaplan from the University of Michigan call it ‘Soft Fascination’ . The Japanese call it Boketto or ‘gazing absent-mindedly into the middle distance without thinking about anything in particular’. 

The smell of a wood or forest is wonderful. And it's mostly due to those chemicals I mentioned above. However, a paper published recently in science journal Nature suggests that these smells do something much more important than make us feel good. They may also contribute to cloud formation and keeping the planet cooler. The science is a bit complex so I'll try to break it down into something more digestible. 

Basically, those smells we love are actually part of the plant's protection against pests and pathogens. These include monoterpenes which are made using carbon dioxide that they collect from the atmosphere during photosynthesis. Monoterpenes are made up of ten carbon atoms and sixteen hydrogen atoms, and the exact arrangement produces slightly different compounds. The most abundant of these is alpha-pinene. As the name suggests, it’s responsible for the unique smell of pine trees. Once they’re made, monoterpenes can be stored in the leaf, locking them up until the tree needs to use them. 

Trees emit a lot of monoterpenes - well over 100 teragrams of carbon per year (a teragram is a one followed by fourteen zeros). That's around 100 million tons. And when they get up into the sky, they combine with ozone and hydroxyl molecules to form new particles called cloud condensation nuclei or 'cloud seeds' typically around 0.2 µm, or one hundredth the size of a cloud droplet. As the name suggests, water vapour condenses - turning from a gas to a liquid - when meeting these seeds. That's how clouds form and become opaque. Once enough water condenses it becomes too heavy to remain airborne and falls as rain.

It's not the only way that clouds are made but trees are a major contributor.

Researchers have discovered that alpha-pinene can exist in two forms: plus and minus alpha-pinene, referred to as enantiomers. These molecules have the same atoms in the same arrangement, but they’re mirror images of one another. They have the same reactivity with ozone and hydroxyl ions and, because of this, existing climate models don’t differentiate between the two. But maybe they should. The authors of the new paper have found that these different forms of alpha-pinene are released into the atmosphere at very different times, especially during periods of severe drought. By running experiments in closed environments (in domes and polytunnels like those at the Eden Project in Cornwall) that mimic natural forests and jungles, they found that trees release freshly-made minus alpha-pinene in the morning and stored plus alpha-pinene later in the afternoon. But, when drought conditions are created, the trees switch to releasing a lot more monoterpenes in general, along with other compounds like beta-pinenes. Which means that they create a lot more cloud seeds that could eventually help to create rain and shield them from the sun. 

Obviously, it's not a conscious act but it may be a system that trees have naturally evolved to ease drought at a local level. And because trees 'talk' to each other by way of an underground fungal mycelial network, they can coordinate a mass release.

All of this suggests that monoterpenes are more than just a nice smell to enjoy on a hike. Drought conditions are predicted to increase as climate change accelerates, so these molecules will become even more important in the future. 

So it's really not a good time to be destroying woodlands and forests to make space for more carbon dioxide and methane burping and farting burger cattle is it?

Source: Nature

Crinkle Crankle Walls

My good friend Lisa Oldham reminded me of these beautiful features yesterday. Incredibly, a wavy 'Crinkle Crankle' wall uses fewer bricks than a conventional straight wall.

It's true! 

Because the curves give the wall added stability, a wavy wall can be one brick thick instead of the traditional two or more. 

Since becoming popular in the United Kingdom, wavy walls have spread to other countries, including the United States. Wavy walls are gorgeous, great for growing fruit trees in the alcoves. A Suffolk historian called Norman Scarfe began compiling a list of such walls in 1960s and the list continues to be updated by a chap called Ed Broom who has now found over 100. 'Every time I think I’m done, another one appears', he says.

A lot of Crinkle Crankle walls are found in East Anglia where Dutch engineers drained the marshes of The Fens in the 17th century. These engineers are thought to be the original builders of the serpentine walls in the UK. 

Back then, the Dutch called them slangenmuur - 'snake walls.'

Lovely aren't they?

Vloggage: How old is that tree?

A simple method known as DBH (diameter at breast height) used by foresters to make a 'guestimate' of a tree's age.

   

(I did also cover this subject back in October 2022 here - but no video)

The London Stump

After the Eiffel Tower was erected in 1889 and became the tallest man-made structure in the world, Sir Edward Watkin MP led a campaign to build something taller. There was, no doubt, some degree of national pride involved in the project. Freeman’s Journal wrote in 1892 that: 

'In another eighteen months London will rejoice in a New Tower of Babel, piercing the skies some 150 feet higher than the renowned Eiffel Tower of Paris. Not only will the Watkin Tower look down 150 feet on the Eiffel Tower, but it will be capable of taking up three times as many passengers at a time.’ 

A proposed site was found in Wembley, Middlesex - then a small hamlet to the North-West of London - and designs were invited with a 500 guinea prize for the winner. Sixty-eight designs were submitted including Albert Brunel’s vision of a granite tower twice the height of the Eiffel, a plan by the Peternevouro company of Constantinople for a conical tower some 1,070 feet high called the ‘Upas Tree of Java’, and a design by J H M Harrison-Vasey which featured two and a half miles of spiralling road, a railway and ‘a captive parachute to hold 4 persons, regulated by a brake’. 

One of the more curious designs was submitted by Arnold F Hills, Director of the Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company and also President of the London Vegetarian Society. He put forward ‘Ye Vegetarian Tower’, which was shaped like an Egyptian monolith on four sturdy legs and topped by a 1/12th scale pyramid of Giza that ‘would house a colony of vegetarians growing fruit and vegetables in hanging gardens’. The structure would also have housed a temple, an international store, a club, museum, library and hotel as well as apartments with ‘a rent proportionate to their Alpine altitude.’ 

However, the prize and the contract were awarded to the firm of Stewart, MacLaren and Dunn of London, who suggested a structure that looked remarkably similar to the Tour d’Eiffel – just taller and with eight legs rather than four. It proposed two observation decks along with restaurants, theatres, Turkish baths, a ninety bedroom hotel and, at the very top of the tower, an astronomical observatory. 

The remarkably precise cost of building this 1,200 feet tall iron giant was £352,222. Watkin, rather cheekily, approached Gustave Eiffel himself to supervise the build but he declined, stating that, if he did, ‘the French people would not think me so good a Frenchman as I hope I am.’ The job was therefore passed to Sir Benjamin Baker, designer of Scotland’s Forth Railway Bridge, and the site was duly prepared. 

Watkin was a visionary but his imagination often outstripped his budget and many of his more grandiose plans never got off the drawing board (including an early version of the channel tunnel). While he had envisaged an amusement park around his tower with boating lakes, a waterfall, ornamental gardens, and cricket and football pitches, all that actually materialised was a very nice park and a new train station. His plan had been to build a railway line that connected Manchester and Sheffield to London (and, ultimately, to Paris) via Wembley Park so that people from all over the country, and, indeed, Europe, could come and marvel at the tower and its surroundings. But the tide of world events was flowing against him and the British government had other plans for their money. In 1889 Prime Minister Lord Salisbury had passed the Naval Defence Act which allowed him to fund the largest ever expansion of the Navy in peacetime. It cost £20 million of public money, a staggering amount when, at the time, you could build the world’s tallest tower for the price of a modern day semi-detached house. In a climate where such massive spending was taking place, money for what some were already calling ‘Watkin’s Folly’ was not forthcoming. 

Even before construction began in 1891, the design had to be modified from eight to four legs to reduce costs. But, despite the problems, the park itself proved to be very popular with those Londoners who could afford to visit. It offered fresh country air as a break from the industrial smog of the city and, once the first stage of the tower was completed (to a height of 155ft) people could travel by elevator up to a viewing platform to admire the surrounding countryside. Amazingly, photos do exist from this time:

However, four years into construction, the building company went into voluntary liquidation and then the land under the tower began to subside. Wembley was quite a marshy area in those days and the additional pressure exerted on the foundations by the reduction in legs caused the tower to start leaning. For safety reasons, the lifts were shut down and the tower was closed to visitors. No more money to complete the project was forthcoming. Britain had just fought a series of expensive overseas wars - the Second Boer War (1899-1902) alone had drained the government’s coffers of £217 million – and with progress halted and public enthusiasm waning, the project attracted the nickname of ‘The London Stump’. 

Watkin himself had retired from public office in 1894 following a stroke and died in 1901 leaving the tower without a champion. This was the final nail in the project’s coffin. 

The part-built structure remained standing and gathering rust until 1907 when it was finally destroyed with explosives. 

But all was not entirely lost. The park that Watkin had created remained as popular as ever and, in order to recoup its losses, the tower construction company turned to house building, creating the Wembley suburb that we know today. And his Wembley Park train station is now part of the London underground network.

The park still exists although it has changed beyond all recognition. Wembley Stadium was built on the site of the tower in 1923, as was the new stadium (which opened in 2007) , and the park has since become the site of the OVO Arena (formerly the Empire Pool Wembley), the Conference Centre, the Square of Fame, several hotels, apartments, flats and a school. 

It is busier now than it has ever been, which might have been some comfort to Watkin if he could have known.

You can view a catalogue of all of the designs for the tower at the fantastic Public Domain Review website here.

It's alive!

My new sourdough starter - affectionately nicknamed 'Bubbles' is now a week old (I last wrote about it here) and is frothy and yeasty and just about ready to make me some fine bread.

Watch this space for loaf news!

Oi! Jelly Ears!

You won't find a lot of fungi around at this time of year and, if you do, it tends to be hardy forms of bracket fungus or small growths like candlesnuff. 

However, there are plenty of Jelly Ears about. I wrote about them previously here.

Jelly Ears (Auricularia-auricula judae), also known as Wood Ears, are a good starter fungus for new foragers as they can't really be mistaken for anything else. 

For a start they are generally only found on rotten Elder trees or fallen branches (though very occasionally you might find them on fallen Beech, Ash or Sycamore). They feed on rotting wood. Secondly, they are fleshy and rubbery like ears and they form cups that only open downwards. There are other cup-shaped fungi, like the Scarlet Elf Cap or Snow Mushroom but their cups all point upwards.. 

Jelly Ears can range in colour from a tan/orange red to a deeper brown/red. And they are completely edible. 

When I was a boy people called them Jew's Ears (hence the scientific name), although this is now frowned upon. That said, it was never (to my knowledge) a racial slur. The folklore tradition is that Judas hanged himself on an Elder tree after betraying Jesus. The 'ears' were supposed to be a sign of his tormented spirit being trapped in the tree. However, the Elder is a very weak tree and most specimens would be unlikely to support the weight of a human adult. 

Jelly ears don't have a strong taste so they are best used being cut into strips and used as an ingredient in stir-fries, soups etc. The flavour can be intensified by drying and rehydrating and you will find bags of them in some Asian supermarkets. Nature can also do the job for you as you will sometimes find desiccated Jelly Ears while foraging. They turn a black and creamy white colour and become crispy but they can still be picked and are perfectly usable.

The only word of warning with these fungi is that you shouldn't eat them if you have haemophilia or you are taking blood thinners. Jelly Ears contain an acidic polysaccharide which has been found to have an effect on reducing blood coagulation. In traditional medicine they were used to treat heart disease, constipation, haemorrhoids, and gall, kidney and bladder stones.

As always, obey the forager's golden rule - if you're not 100% of identification (or if you have a medical complaint that could be affected), DON'T EAT IT.

Mummy, can we play indoors please?

Note: This post originally appeared on my old blog (now deleted for reasons explained here). But I decided it was worth reproducing it here just for the sheer naked HORROR of it. 

____________________________________________________________

Back in 2014 I'd been booked to do a spot at Museums Show-Off in London - an open mic event for people who either work in museums or have a connection to one. The idea is to get up on a stage in front of an audience and do a short comedic talk about the interesting things in your museum. I was  representing a popular virtual museum - BBC Radio 4's The Museum of Curiosity - which, at the time, I researched content and co-write scripts for. 

Museums Show-Off is a spin-off from Science Show-Off and both were the brainchild of comedian and science geek Dr Steve Cross. Steve acts as MC to the shows and, during this particular show, he shared some photos with the audience. I'd like now to share them with you. 

Let's start with these ...

Steve's talk was about children's playground equipment design and some of the worst he'd ever come across. Those first two images, for example, were on a housing estate in North London. Who designs stuff like this? As art, it's not even pleasant to look at. And what function do the pieces perform? Do you climb on them? Throw things at them? Have nightmares about them? 

But these weren't isolated instances ...

I realise that creating art is all about aesthetics - finding ways to stimulate feelings and sensations, positive or negative (the opposite, of course is anaesthetic - to dull them). But surely if you are designing play equipment for children, shouldn't it be a little less unwelcoming? 

And yet, if you google 'scary playground equipment' you'll discover, as I did, a whole exciting world of terrifying slides, revolting roundabouts and criminal climbing frames. Look!

This is, I realise, a very niche area of discussion but it does demonstrate the difference between art and design - design considers the end user. Although, as artists we SHOULD create the work that we want to create, we might have to compromise sometimes when considering who's going to see, climb on or slide down our work. 

After all, kiddie fun does not usually begin with shark-toothed dolphins with bleeding eyes, demon-haunted roundabouts and giant red monkeys that have been shot in the face. 

Unless you're a budding psychopath, that is.

A fishy blog

I live in Buckinghamshire about halfway between London and Oxford and (until Covid) was a regular visitor to both cities. One favourite landmark in Oxford that always makes me smile is the Headington Shark.

It was the idea of the owner, journalist Bill Heine. One April evening in 1986, he was drinking with his friend, the sculptor John Buckley, and asked a simple question: could Buckley think of a way to liven up his new home?' What Buckley came up with was a 25ft (8m) long shark which would sit on his roof, perpetually appearing as though it had just crashed into the house as if dropped from the sky. 

The fibreglass fish immediately caught the imagination of the public ... and the ire of Oxford City Council who began a protracted six year campaign to get it removed. Thankfully, public opinion ruled in favour of eccentricity over bureaucracy. 

The piece was designed to be an anti-war protest. 'You could see the Americans were taking off from Heyford outside of Oxford to bomb Gaddafi in Libya,' explains Buckley. 'I wanted to make a powerful statement about the barbarity of war and the feeling of vulnerability. Like looking up at the sky and expecting something deadly to come through your roof.'

I was lucky enough to meet Bill Heine at a talk in Oxford in 2011 and I bought a signed copy of his book The Hunting of the Shark, which tells the story of the sculpture (and the fight to keep it), which was then celebrating its silver jubilee. Heine died in 2019. 

Things like this always remind me of some of the best advice one of my old art teachers - Arthur Andrews - ever gave me: 'Always look up,' he said. 'That's where the history of a building lies.' And he was right. Above the anodyne shop fronts and double glazed plastic windows is where you'll find all of the most interesting features like gargoyles and grotesques, curious chimneys and follies. 

Watch the skies, people.

The light is returning

If it seems like this blog is heavily loaded with art-related content at the moment, do rest assured that it's a seasonal glut. Winter is always a fallow period for subjects like folk festivals, foraging and wildlife spotting so I'm using art to bolster the content. And because art is very important to me.

Come the spring there will be hundreds of events to talk about - just the period around May Day will be absolutely rammed with content. Plus, the new growth will bring us wild herbs and salad leaves, blossom and wild flowers, and sightings of insects and other animals we just don't see at this time of year. I'm already seeing snowdrops, crocuses and the first daffodil shoots nudging up through the frosty soil.

So bear with me - the light is returning.

Meanwhile, here's a little test for you: can you identify these trees from the new buds they're sporting?

They are: (Clockwise): Ash, Oak, Hazel and Wild Cherry.

Feeding the Worms

Feeding the Worms 

by Danusha Laméris 

Ever since I found out that earth worms have taste buds 

all over the delicate pink strings of their bodies, 

I pause dropping apple peels into the compost bin, imagine 

the dark, writhing ecstasy, the sweetness of apples 

permeating their pores. I offer beets and parsley, 

avocado, and melon, the feathery tops of carrots. 

I’d always thought theirs a menial life, eyeless and hidden, 

almost vulgar—though now, it seems, they bear a pleasure

so sublime, so decadent, I want to contribute however I can, 

forgetting, a moment, my place on the menu.

Walter Langley and the Newlyn School

Today I'm featuring the work of Walter Langley (1852-1922) of the Newlyn School of painters.

As you'll know from previous blogposts, I'm originally from Cornwall and it's there that you'll find my artistic roots. It was impossible to grow up in places like Penzance and Helston with an artistic dad and passionate art teachers and not be aware of the Newlyn and St Ives schools. Well, maybe 'schools' is too strong a word as there was no real physical grouping of individuals. Rather, they were like-minded artists who formed colonies at around the same time. We use the term 'schools' because what they did wasn't as grand a movement as Cubism or Modernism. What they did was demonstrate how different artists could be inspired by a place and represent the same subject matter in a myriad different ways. 

The St Ives School, which featured the likes of sculptor Dame Barbara Hepworth, potters Bernard Leach and Shoji Amada, painters Alfred Wallis, Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron and many others came to notice in the late 1930s and achieved great success in the 1950s and 60s. Much of their work is now on display in Hepworth's house (see here) and at the stunning purpose-built Tate Gallery St Ives. It has been said that they helped to change the direction of art. It has also been said that, at one time, the St Ives school was producing more exciting work than New York, Paris or London. 

Meanwhile, over near Penzance, the Newlyn school (and the nearby Lamorna group that included Dame Laura Knight, 'Lamorna' Birch and Alfred Munnings) had been working steadily since the 1880s with a stream of artists all drawn to the area for the quality of the natural light. Among their numbers you'll find such people as Stanhope and Elizabeth Forbes, Harold Harvey, Norman Garstin and the wonderfully named Albert Chevallier Tayler. 

They also had Walter Langley and he produced work like this:

That's a watercolour painting - a fact that staggers me. If you've ever worked with the stuff, you'll know how quick drying and unforgiving it is and how difficult it is to get depth of tone and colour. But Langley could do with watercolours what he could do equally well in oils.

Langley was born in Birmingham and at 15 was apprenticed to a lithographer. At 21 he won a scholarship to South Kensington College and he studied design there for two years. He then returned to Birmingham and took up painting full time, and in 1881 was elected an Associate of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists. In the same year he was offered £500 for a year's work by a Mr Thrupp (a Birmingham photographer). With this money he and his family moved to Newlyn where he was one of the first artists to settle. 

Politically left wing for his era, Langley was noted for his social realist portrayals of working class figures. Many of his paintings reflect his sympathy with the fishermen and their families that he lived among. One of the best known is his 1883 For Men Must Work and Women Must Weep (see next picture) based on Charles Kingsley's poem The Three Fishers (1851).

Although one of the first to settle in the Newlyn artists' colony, Langley initially benefited little from its growing fame, partly because of his working class origins and partly because, until 1892, he painted largely in watercolour rather than the more prestigious medium of oils. 

Later in his career his reputation grew. One of Langley's paintings was singled out as 'a beautiful and true work of art' by Leo Tolstoy in his book What is Art? while, in 1895, Langley was invited by the Uffizi Gallery in Florence to contribute a self portrait to hang alongside those of Raphael, Rubens and Rembrandt in their collection. Today his work is considered vital to the image of the Newlyn School and, alongside Stanhope Forbes, is the most consistent in style and substantial in output. 

There are several reasons why I love Walter Langley's work so much. 

Firstly, it's watercolour for the most part. I could never get the hang of oils as a kid - I'm only just coming to grips with them now - but I could use watercolour. What Langley showed me was that watercolours weren't all wishy-washy pastel shades and indistinct outlines. His paintings, while muted in colour due to the transparency of the paint, are nonetheless superbly detailed and beautiful. 

The second reason I love his work is that I used to see it every day. I lived in Penzance for a few years and the walk from my house to my best friend's house took me through Penlee Park where you'll find Penlee House Gallery & Museum and many of his, and other Newlyn artists', work is on display there. It was free and I popped in there all the time. There was, and still is, another gallery in Newlyn itself and that was just a short bicycle ride away.

Thirdly, and most importantly, I suppose, the people in his paintings are just so damned real. Yes, there is a degree of romanticising in all paintings but Langley's work doesn't lay it on with a trowel. The people he painted look completely grounded in the visceral realities of life in a working class fishing village. They're so real that I can almost hear them and the locations are all very familiar to me; Langley painted the towns and villages in which I grew up. 

If he were alive today, he'd still have plenty of powerful characters to paint - fishing is still the toughest of jobs and, in terms of fatalities, one of the most dangerous. It breeds strong men and resilient women. 

I have two excellent books about Langley. One is The Shining Sands by Tom Cross which looks at both the Newlyn and St Ives schools in detail. The other - my favourite - is Walter Langley: Pioneer of the Newlyn Art Colony by Walter's grandson, Roger. 

It's an excellent introduction to this brilliant artist and his work.