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On the south side of the Thames is a full size model of the Golden Hind. The original Golden Hind was the ship that Francis Drake used to travel around the world*. When he went around the world in his ship he was the first Briton to circumnavigate the globe and it took him three years. This replica Golden Hind has also been around the world before returning to its mooring place on the south of the Thames.

But it is the dock rather than the ship that I’d like to talk about. The dock is known as the dock of St Mary Overie. And the dock has a story as fantastical as those told about the Golden Hind itself.

On the site of the dock many many years ago lived a man who made his money by transporting people back and forth across the river to their jobs in the City of London. He was a horrible miser who tried to save every penny he could. He was always trying to come up with new schemes to save himself money. And finally he thought he had come up with a really great one he’d pretend to die.

He thought it would work something like this, he would pretend to be dead and his whole family would go into mourning. The best thing about mourning, as far as he was concerned, was that you had in those days to not eat anything for the entire period of mourning. This would save him a whole lot of money as he thought it would mean he wouldn’t have to feed his entire family for three days.

However the plan didn’t work out quite the way that he’d imagined. Instead of mourning when he seemingly died the family were quite happy as they all really hated him. So Mary, his wife, sent for her lover with news to come and join her for a big party that they were going to hold that evening. He was so excited by the news that he might get hold of the Miser’s money that he set off immediately for their house on the fastest horse he could get. Unfortunately he was in such a rush that he failed to pay attention to what was going on around him, his mind was so focused on the money, that he didn’t spot the branch of a tree that the horse (rather more sensibly ducked under) and he was killed instantly.

While all of this scheming and plotting had been going on the Miser had been quietly lying in his coffin thinking of all of the money that he’d been saving, it was only once the party started going that he began to realise that his money saving plan wasn’t working that he jumped out of this coffin and ran towards the party.

What he hadn’t quite realised was that his one virtuous daughter was sitting in the room with him praying for his eternal soul when he had jumped up out of his coffin. So convinced was she that she had just seen the devil’s work that she grabbed the nearest shovel and whacked her father on the head with it repeatedly until he really was dead.

Mary was so distraught by what had happened that she realised that she had to change her ways. Her husband and her lover had been killed and her daughter had become a murderess all in the pursuit of money. So Mary decided to give it all away, and became an incredibly charitable woman who worked tirelessly for the poor of London. She founded a nunnery which was known as St. Mary Overie. The nunnery was destroyed in the reformation but the church part became the church known as St. Saviour. Then in the 1900s the church became Southwark Cathedral.

* When the ship left England it was actually known as the Pelican but was renamed during the voyage. Drake renamed it just before reaching what was imagined to be the really treacherous part of the journey: the straights of Magellan. In fact that bit was relatively easy for the ship, it was the pacific ocean which was a big problem some months later. Those on board must have been especially pleased at this point as they had not been told when they left England that circumnavigation was on the cards. They thought they were going to Africa. Some people complained about the whole round-the-world thing but Drake killed them.

This post requires some pretty heavy duty swearing so if you have problems with that then you shouldn’t keep reading. Here’s a post that you can read today if you don’t like swearing (you can read it if you like swearing and then go on to the one about swearing of course).

There seems to be a lot of diving in football. So wouldn’t it be good if you added a five minute penalty for diving. It would work like this if you stay on the ground for more than five seconds after you fall on the ground then you must go off of the pitch for five minutes.

You can stand back up and complain but if you lie on the ground then you’ll have to leave the pitch for five minutes. I think that’s the only solution to stop diving. Go on then? What’s wrong with it?

I’m going to give us all some space to just get used to the idea that there is going to be some heavy duty swearing now.

And now we have had some space lets get on with it.

I was in a pub watching the England football game on Sunday. It was a quite big match apparently. I don’t tend to watch football, but I had been walking home when I bumped into my brother. He was on his way into a pub to watch the second half of the game (he does watch football but he’d been caught on a train which meant that he’d missed the first half). So on we went to the pub to watch the second half of the game.

The pub wasn’t the kind of pub that I usually go to. It is usually a pretty rough pub, and then when you throw in a large number of drunk shouty men then it gets even less of a nice pub.

One of the England players during the game made a slight mistake and one of the shouty men in the pub shouted out, “Fucking Yankie Cunt”.

Now I don’t know much about football but I know enough to know that there is a player on the England team (Owen Hargreaves) who has been getting some stick because he was born in Canada. The thing with what he’d shouted out was that he’d obviously gone for “Yankie” because he didn’t know what the derogative phrase for a Canadian was (it’s Canuck by the way). But even so, even if he didn’t know about the derogatory word for Canadian surely he should have gone for, “Fucking Canadian Cunt”. That works much better. Obviously had he known it, “Fucking Canuk Cunt” would work well too. But even though I knew enough about football to be able to correct him, I also knew enough about the situation that I was in to know that if I corrected him, he would have corrected me with his fist.

I currently live on, and indeed am about to move to a cul de sac. It’s one of those strange bits of French that have crept into the English language without us really knowing what it means. Some people might not even know it’s French.

In American English they have removed many of the French words from their language. So cafetière becomes French press and the American President says “the problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for Entrepreneur”*. Cul de Sac does remain in American English however. The average English speaker who has never learned French will know approximately 15,000 French words.

So what does Cul de Sac mean in French? If you put it into any translation engine you will find that it means “bottom of bag” which kind of describes the shape of the road, especially as many cul de sacs** have round bottoms. But actually that isn’t quite the end of the story as actually the word Cul isn’t the word for bottom in French that most people will have learnt at school (or wherever it is that people learn French these days). The word they would have learnt for bottom is Fond.

So what does Cul mean? Well literally it can mean bottom but more often when it is invoked it means something more akin to Arse (Ass if you’re American). So if you live in a Cul de Sac then you live in the Arse of a bag, try putting that on the particulars of your house and see how many people try arrange a viewing.

* Of course this story isn’t really true – it just seems true – and has been widely circulated. Supposedly Baroness Williams was told this joke by Tony Blair. But Alistair Campbell has said that Tony has never said this comment – so it definitely can’t be true then!

** Or is it Culs de sac?

Goldfish aren’t really Gold. Not really. Goldfish are really specially bred carp.

And their main lot in life seems to be that they want to change colour and also remember that they’ve done it. Despite the very common story that they have a three second memory this has been proven to not be true many times. Goldfish are very good at even recognising humans.

The food that they eat and their stress levels are factors in changes of colour, but the main issue is one of genetics. Often in a single goldfish’s life it will start as bronze then move on to a washed out white or orange colour with black tipped fins and then they change to orange with black tipped fins, then to all orange and then they end up as orange with white tipped fins. In the wild a goldfish would have been an olive-brown colour.

The food thing is an interesting factor because it’s often considered to be a big factor in goldfish colour. But genetics are more important here. For some animals though colour and food are important, like the flamingo. Weirdly the pink colour is from carotene (the stuff that makes carrots orange) it’s found inside shrimp too and it makes the flamingos pink (in the wild they don’t often eat shrimp but mainly get their carotene from algae. We feed shrimp to flamingos in captivity though to generate the pinkness). Those bred in captivity are more often just white. The one thing that doesn’t change in flamingos is their black feathers. They all have 12 black feathers, these are the feathers that are actually used in flight. The pinkness shows how good a mate they are because they can provide food to the young. But the black feathers show that they can actually fly.

This idea of animals changing colour due to their diet has been known about for a long time. In fact some of the earliest explorers thought that the reason that different races of people looked different was because of their diet rather than thinking that these people were actually different than them. It was often, but not always, those who came later who caused the racial stereotypes. And it seems like an easier thought process. The idea that the new people that you’d met were the same as you but simply looked different because they had food with new spices or rice or some other food you weren’t familiar with makes some kind of sense rather than the more horrible idea that the new people were somehow inferior.

Anyway, so although a change in diet can bring on a change in the colour of your goldfish, in this case you really are only speeding up (or slowing down) a process that is genetically pre-ordained. The only reason that our goldfishes are gold is because of the royal house of china whose colour was gold. In the same way that the only reason that carrots are orange (and not purple) is because of the Dutch Royal family.

So to sum up, a goldfish is basically just a show off carp. So here’s your round up of carp to finish the article:

Show off Carp	Demure Carp	Coy Carp