Notes on...

The worst thing that happened to me over the pandemic was I got ‘really into beer’. I was already into it in the most straightforward way: I liked drinking it and I liked getting drunk. I liked the ceremony of it: walking into the pub, ideally at noon on a balmy Saturday, inhaling that rich carpeted smell, ordering a simple fizzing lager and taking that first perfect big sip. Ah! But then I got into buying expensive boxes of IPAs and NEIPAs, things that self-describe as ‘hazy’, and huge heavy stouts with double-digit ABVs. I’d prowl the length of the taps, head low like a predator, asking: ‘Sorry could I just – yeah sorry could I just get a little taste of that?’ Then I’d just order the first one I tried. This started to affect my friendships.

What is it with men and trainers? Or rather, men of a certain age and trainers. I’m still trying to banish the horror-show image of Rishi Sunak wearing Adidas Sambas in No. 10 in an interview to promote his tax policies. Has western civilisation really come to this? Are we destined to succumb to rubber-soled hell, or is there still a place left for those of us who prefer shoes that last decades, not a couple of years before being consigned to the dustbin of athleisure history? For years I’ve played a game checking out men’s footwear on the London Underground. The proportion of trainers has risen exponentially, like grey squirrels stealing lebensraum from their indigenous red cousins, so that today you’re lucky if you even spot a leather-soled shoe.

I miss kippers. My wife won’t let me eat them at home, and they have become a rarity in restaurants. I stayed in a luxury hotel last month, and the manager was telling me that if I wanted anything – valet parking, room service, breakfast after 10.30 a.m. – I had only to ask. When I enquired if kippers were on the menu, he went as white as unsmoked cod and mumbled that the head of housekeeping had forbidden them because of the luxury soft furnishings. But I have medical science on my side: a report in the British Medical Journal last week said that fish such as herring could save lives, and the planet.

For a certain type of Barbour-clad middle-aged man, the best time of year is late summer, and the arrival of the grouse season. But if you’re in your twenties and living in Hackney, you’re more likely to get excited for spring and the arrival of wild garlic. Foraging has become a fashionable activity for twentysomethings. ‘Instagram has changed the game,’ says the nature writer and wild garlic picker Patrick Galbraith. ‘People love the foraging aesthetic.’ Some fans generously compare notes online on the most fruitful spots. Others gatekeep. The Instagram page ‘Real Housewives of Clapton’, which satirises the lifestyles of young bourgeois east Londoners, has gained a following making snide memes about hopeless amateurs foraging in Dr Martens.

North Korea has a problem with Alan Titchmarsh’s crotch. Last week a 2010 episode of Garden Secrets was aired on state television, but the network blurred Titchmarsh from the waist down. The offence was his gardening trousers – a pair of jeans. For the Workers’ Party of Korea, jeans represent an ‘invasion of capitalistic lifestyles’. They must be resisted. In a sense, Kim Jong-un is right that jeans are a sign of American dominance. In 1986 the philosopher Régis Debray declared there was ‘more power in blue jeans and rock ’n’ roll than the entire Red Army’. Communist states agreed. Western-produced jeans were banned in the Soviet Union and Maoist China.

Which items of food from your childhood did your parents force you to eat which now, blessed with the gift of choice, you wouldn’t touch with a proverbial bargepole? Pig trotters, cow heels and various items of offal, such as hearts, brains and ‘lights’, may spring to mind. Brussels sprouts, of course, and possibly dubious seafood such as cockles and whelks. Some may also rejoice that tripe and onions and beef dripping rarely feature on the menu these days, outside of Michelin-starred restaurants that really should know better. As I mull over these delicacies, all of which I have consumed reluctantly, my mind wanders back to Easter visits to my grandmother’s spick and span council house on the other side of the Pennines.

The snake oil salesman is back in town with an old favourite: apple cider vinegar – or ACV as it’s called by those in the know. The ‘wonder-juice’ has been around for centuries, peddled by Greeks and Romans alike. In recent years, it has become something of a panacea, a social media ‘superfood’. But just how good is this cloudy, acidic liquid? The purported benefits range from weight loss to curing cancer. I’m no oncologist, but the cancer claims seem a little dubious. That said, let’s not dismiss apple cider vinegar entirely. The likes of Jennifer Aniston, Kim Kardashian, Katy Perry and Victoria Beckham swear by it – and if Brass Eye taught us anything, it’s that celebrities are always right.

St Patrick’s Day is coming up and you know what that means… a Shamrock Shake at Starbucks, featuring those well-known Irish ingredients vanilla, mint and green tea. And then there’s the Paddy’s Day merch: shamrocks again. If the Princess of Wales as Colonel of the Irish guards turns up to celebrate the day, she’ll be sporting a sprig of it the size of a small broccoli. What could be better as a symbol of all things Irish than this botanical metaphor for the Trinity? Because, as we all know, it was St Patrick who, to describe the triune God to the native Irish, picked a shamrock to demonstrate the Three Persons in one God.

They are, to quote Mark Knopfler, down in the tunnel trying to make it pay. Transport for London has this week been holding auditions for buskers, assessing the performers for licences that allow access to pitches on the Tube and, for the first time, the Elizabeth line. It’s a bureaucratic approach to a traditionally informal activity, but passengers will get their tunes and buskers will get their money. Knopfler wrote his Dire Straits hit ‘Walk of Life’ after seeing a photo of a busker turning his guitar towards the subway wall to improve the echo. It’s the sort of attention to detail you need. Busking is the ultimate ‘give the audience what they want’ test – forget artistic merit, you have to entertain. Succeed and you eat, fail and you don’t.

Last week’s news that a mature magnolia tree had been felled in a suburb of Poole, Dorset, because wood decay made it a threat to nearby houses, will have touched the hearts of gardeners everywhere. For, in the words of the plant collector E.H. Wilson, after whom Magnolia wilsonii is named, magnolias are ‘aristocrats of the garden’. This is scarcely hyperbole, since magnolias can trace their lineage back to the Pliocene epoch, and are famous for their noble stature, and beautiful, showy and often highly scented flowers.

Tunbridge Ware trinkets, toys and showpieces were the fridge magnets of their time; now they are the ultimate collectibles. When in the 18th and 19th centuries the aristocracy and middle classes travelled to Royal Tunbridge Wells for its curative waters, traders in West Kent saw an opportunity. The visitors needed souvenirs or gifts and with the forests of the Weald providing plentiful raw materials, turners and craftsmen started creating wooden objects decorated with veneered inlaid marquetry and intricate mosaics. Toyshops, print galleries and stationers began selling a variety of Tunbridge Ware items: cribbage boards, paperweights, yo-yos, glove boxes, playing-card and postage-stamp containers, jewellery cabinets and thimble cases.

Michel Dancoisne-Martineau, Saint Helena’s French honorary consul, wants to set the record straight. Contrary to popular belief, he tells me, Napoleon wasn’t exiled to St Helena for life. In a highly idiosyncratic sentencing, drafted by the Russians and ratified by the other powers involved, Napoleon’s banishment was to last ‘until his deadly fame ends’. While Napoleon was living there (from 1815 until his death in 1821, his remains being returned to France in 1840), he was essentially confined to an estate named Longwood House, which sits at a fairly high elevation where the weather is often chilly and misty. There, Napoleon entertained visitors, gardened extensively, and dictated the bestselling book of the 19th century The Memorial of Saint Helena to Emmanuel de Las Cases.

The English have been eating pancakes on Shrove Tuesday for a very long time. Originally it was a way of using up eggs before the Lenten fast: the Saturday before Ash Wednesday was called Festum Ovorum or Egg Saturday, when all the eggs would be collected in preparation for the pancake making. Shrovetide in early modern England was a time for mischief and merriment, a chance to indulge. Feasting, games and blood sports featured – especially cockerel throwing, whereby boys would charge passers-by to try to land a hit on a pinioned bird with a cudgel. On Shrove Tuesday the church bells rang out, calling parishioners to confess their sins and receive penance – to be ‘shriven’. The bells rang while wives and cooks were making pancakes in the kitchen.

This Saturday, go to London’s oldest Catholic church, St Etheldreda’s in Ely Place, Holborn, and you will find a gathering of singers, along with actors, announcers and other public speakers, who have come to have their throats blessed. Two crossed candles are held up by the priest and either these or a piece of wick soaked in holy oil are touched to each kneeling suppliant, as a special prayer is said. ‘Oh God deliver us, by the intercession of thy holy Bishop and martyr, Blaise, from all evils of soul and body, especially from all ills of the throat.’ As with most saints in the early history of the church, the explanation of how Blaise came to be the patron of throats (and, since saints are generally multi-tasking, of wild animals and wool combers) is the stuff of legend.

Well, lucky little tiny tots at Top Days nurseries in Hampshire and Dorset. It’s Bambi on the menu for them now that the organisation running the schools has teamed up with the Eat Wild company, which promotes wild meats, to introduce venison into school lunches. They’re rolling out five dishes featuring venison, including deer mince in spaghetti bolognese and burgers. Some 3,000 children will benefit, and there will be more when the scheme is introduced in other schools. It is the obvious and sane solution to the problem of an ever-increasing deer population, short of introducing wolves to cull the creatures, which nowadays have no natural predators. The children get to eat venison, which is low in fat and rich in nutrients like iron and zinc.

What is it about a tunnel that excites us so? Last week’s story about the secret one in a New York synagogue fascinated the world, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that no one knew why the thing had been built in the first place. Police attempted to close it, and indeed fill it with cement, leading to fights with a group of young men trying to defend the tunnel, which went under the street and led to at least one other nearby building. Maybe it’s the word ‘secret’. Of course that explains our interest in Tom, Dick and Harry, the three tunnels dug during the Great Escape.

The British are fond of ferrets. There is a portrait of Queen Elizabeth I at Hatfield House holding one on a collar and lead. For Yorkshire miners in the 1970s, tales of ‘ferret-legging’ – an endurance test whereby two of the rodents were put down competitors’ trousers – were legendary. (The world record is held by Frank Bartlett, a retired headmaster, who managed to endure the bites and scratches for five hours, 30 minutes.) So it feels a little odd that ferret racing was invented in the United States. Rather than being conceived in the backroom of some raucous Jacobean tavern, it was a Friday night distraction for rednecks laying oil and gas pipes through the North American wilderness.

Before the Industrial Revolution shrank Christmas celebrations to two days, many workers across rural England might have spared a minute or two over Christmastide to bring out the family wassail bowl. Wassailing – sometimes in houses, sometimes in apple orchards – was a ceremonial toast to the health of friends, family and neighbours, or a ritualised routing of the bad spirits that lurk among fruit trees. Orchard wassailing, intended to guarantee bumper crops in the year ahead, was a rambunctious affair of gunshots, the banging together of trays and buckets and the blowing of cow horns (to scare away evil spirits), singing, drinking and bonfires.

For a heartwarming Christmas tale, look no further than the medieval legend of St Nicholas – a story of sex-trafficking, cannibalism and murder. The historical Nicholas is a hazy figure whose scant biography was embroidered in the Middle Ages. The 12th-century Norman poet Wace wrote a colourful account of his life. It opens with the story that has informed the modern Santa Claus. Nicholas, we are told, took pity on a man who had once been wealthy but had fallen into poverty. The man had three daughters. Things were desperate – the man concluded that the girls had to be sold into sexual slavery. Nicholas visited the man’s house on three consecutive nights and each night threw gold in through an open window.

Wouldn’t you just know it? Christmas cake, as in dense fruitcake covered with marzipan and usually tooth-destroying royal icing, is being displaced by chocolate cake. Almost half of a sample of 2,000 people surveyed by Ocado said they’d prefer chocolate to fruitcake. The trend is represented by Nigella Lawson, who is making something called a Winter Wonderland chocolate and raspberry cake instead. ‘Much as I happen to love a slice of dense, damp Christmas cake, especially when eaten with a crumbly slice of good, strong, sharp cheese, I am surrounded by those who abominate dried fruit in all its seasonal manifestations,’ she writes. ‘If no one in your family likes dried fruit, there’s no point having a Christmas cake gathering dust.