gamboling.co.uk

The sky is a very deep blue*. There is a word for what that colour is but in the end that word doesn’t stand on its own. All it means really is “a very deep blue”. We’re almost not fluent in esoteric colour names and have to translate them. But blue, that’s blue isn’t it.**

I’m sitting in a crowded pub and the sky is incredible, just fabulous. And noone is looking.

I wonder what would happen if I was to shout out “look at that sky.” Would people look at the sky, or me?”

*Why is the sky blue? Well we probably all vaguely remember something about it from school. But for that answer in full see an article in the near future. **There’s an article about this coming too.

There are two groups of women sitting in front of me.

Two groups of four. The one to my right ate all denying they are approaching thirty. The one to my left are denying fifty.

They are the same people, seemingly, to all intents and purposes. On of each personality.

The fashionable one -> The one who dresses like her children.
The quirky one -> The one who keeps a lot of cats.
The quiet one -> Very successful but doesn’t like to talk about it.
The conversationalist -> Doesn’t know when to shut up.

The only major shift in group dynamics seems to be that the younger group seems to have uncomfortable pauses. Whereas the older group don’t. Perhaps this is because the younger group see each other too often. Or perhaps the older group don’t see each other enough. Or is it perhaps the evolution of “not being able to shut up”?

Today another two halves of a conversation.

A: “Oh out in Japan they have the most amazing things to eat”.
B: “Like what?”
A: “Well, I’ve eaten snake, crocodile, shark fin soup – and just everything.”
B: “Wow that sounds weird.”
A: “You should go sometime, you could try it.”
B: “Oh. I don’t know.”
A: “Ah go on. You’ll love it.”
B: “Well I don’t know that I will, and right there is a problem. I don’t know that I like all those weird foods.”
A: “But surely that is the point. You’re not supposed to like it all. The fun thing is finding out.”
B: “No. I don’t think so. To me the unknown is a scary thing – A very scary thing. I don’t want to try new things. New things might take me to new levels or horribleness.”
A: “Or the opposite.”
B: “Yes, but that’s a risk I’m not willing to take.”
A: “So you don’t ever try anything new?”
B: “No. I do. I have. I’ve tried some very exotic thing, I just don’t often like to.”
A: “Okay then what the most exotic thing you’ve ever tried?”
D: “Well one time I had duck.”

I’ve been wondering, somebody had to*, about moustaches. But more specifically I’ve been worrying about what we should call the clump of hair that sits between the mouse’s nose and mouth. Is this a mousetache? Or is it just fur?

Perhaps we will never know.

*You may suggest that nobody had to have this thought. But you would be wrong.

I found a note in my notebook, which is where I like to keep them, which said simply, “Alphabetti Spaghetti Inventor”.

As I read it, it vaguely triggered a response in my brain. But one, sadly, only of recognition. Not the preferred version of, a thought that triggers more than the original note.

Generally, I’ve noticed my mind tends to bounce around a lot of topics all at the same time. Generally very quickly but here I was stumped. I seemed to only have a question and no answer.

All I could think was that at some point I wanted to know who invented Alphabetti Spaghetti.

The answer is: somebody at Heinz. Now maybe they know who it was but so far they haven’t got back to me on this issue.

However one thing they were very quick to deny was that they had ever made Swastika spaghetti in Nazi Germany. Apparently it’s a pretty persistent rumour. And it’s not true.

After hearing that I decided to revisit my note and se if it offered anything else up. I suddenly noticed that in fact I’d written “Alphabetti Spaghetti inventions” not “Alphabetti Spaghetti Inventor” and suddenly my memory was triggered.

My original point had been – I think – that I didn’t really see the point with bothering all of these monkeys and trying to get them to write Shakespeare when we’ve got Alphabetti spaghetti to help us.

My mind stated, I retire from this point. Although I wonder now if I’ll ever find this article in the future and wonder what I was going on about.

Two young Australian ladies were sitting opposite me on the train when one of them mentioned a great new insult I hadn’t heard before.

It was the first new one I had heard since the frankly fabulous, “you mind like the merciless”.

They were talking about wedding and had just stumbled through the semantics of whether you could be married and a bridesmaid. They decided that you couldn’t although they both knew of cases when the rules had been flouted. One of them, rather sensibly, pointed out that you couldn’t be a main and married and that was the end of it.

But then they got on to discussing a wedding that only one of them had attended. Clearly the attendee was not a fan of the female member of the happy couple, as she referred to her as “bridezilla”.

I began discussing the umbrella yesterday obliquely but then remembered that the words around it were not the only issue. The umbrella itself has it’s own interesting – if rather unexplored history.

It has been around for ages, the umbrella. At least four thousand years. Originally they were made of paper and were used to keep the sun off – more of which later. But then some bright spark in China added wax and lacquer to the paper inventing the first umbrella proper.

It didn’t arrive in the west until the 17 hundreds. But it was considered only necessary if you were a woman and it was considered bad form to require one if you were a man.

In fact a similar phenomenon occurred when supermarkets introduced the shopping trolley. They were almost never used by men because they wanted to show that they were manly enough (read: stupid enough) to carry all of their items in the shopping baskets.

Then came a man called Jonas Hanway. He dared to use an umbrella in public in English Society. But what did he care about English social mores? He was from Persia and like any sensible person did not thing getting wet made him look stylish.

He used his umbrella for thirty years to great effect. It was clearly such a good idea that it made it acceptable for other men to use them too. In fact he was so associated with the trend that a common nickname for the umbrella was a “Hanway”.

In 1852 Samuel Fox decided he need to do something with all the excess stock of steel that had been shaped to put in lady’s corsets but hadn’t been sold. So he decided to put them in umbrellas instead.

And that is the moment that me and umbrellas parted ways forever. By having steel in them umbrellas suddenly became lethal objects, carried at eye height on the busy city streets. They are, in many ways, a menace.

But despite my own personal differences with the umbrella it went from strength to strength.

Just over a century later we had the compact umbrella and, most puzzling of all, the umbrella in our cocktails.

What on earth is that doing there? Who invented the cocktail umbrella?

Well here’s a bit of a shock to the system. Nobody knows.

There are a lot of theories about the cocktail umbrella but very few answers. It seems clear the it’s more aimed as a parasol rather than umbrella as it’s made of paper. So it harks right back to the origins of the parasol. I’m not sure I would trust one of those little things to keep rain out of my drink. For that matter even if they are meant as a parasol. I’m not sure they are protecting the drink from getting a sun tan either.

In reality the idea of the cocktail was to bring the image of the beach bar to the drink. So the fruit is representing the fruit trees, as are the little trees that you sometimes get, the sparklers – the candles, and the parasols – the parasols on each table. In fact when you look at it this way the parasols are the bit that makes the most sense.

So what is the future for umbrellas? Well a young man called Richard Lawson has developed a device called a SPLU (SPring Loaded Umbrella). It’s got no sharp edges to poke people with, when it’s folded up it fits in the palm of your hand, and it doesn’t fall apart in strong winds. It’s pretty snazzy. And he’s in talks with Nike who have the power to make this thing actually happen.

But if that’s not the kind of technological advance you’re looking for then how about this:

Yes, that really is a hands free umbrella – velcro is a wonderful thing.

I have been alerted that my use of an uncommon word yesterday may have confused people. The word “bumbershoot” used in yesterday’s article Walter was absolutely appalled that we were proposing to dine al-fresco means simply “umbrella”.

That’s all very well and good you might say but why is it a word for umbrella?

Well despite it’s British English sound it actually comes from America. It first appeared at the end of the 18 hundreds at a time when there tended to be quite flamboyant slang. In fact other slang terms for the umbrella which never took off included “bumbersels” and “umbershoots”.

The word itself is a combination of “umb” from “umbrella” and the “shoot” from “parachute”. Why “parachute”? Well lots of people will tell you that it’s because an umbrella looks like a parachute. Which, I suppose, it kind of does. But more relevant I think is that parachute shares a beginning part with “parasol”. And it’s not inconceivable that in those flamboyant times this connection was something that stuck in their minds.

Incidentally there weren’t any aeroplanes at the time. But parachutes already existed to save you if you fell out of hot air balloons.

That’s all very well and good you might say but what is the story of the umbrella itself?

Well for the answer to that question I would suggest you return tomorrow when, by chance, I will happen to be discussing that very thing.