Engine
Vein is named after one of the three ancient copper mines at the enchanted
Alderley Edge sandstone escarpment in Cheshire. It is said that Merlin hides in
the rocks there. And what a lovely, delicious, copper coloured ale to take
inspiration from such resolute panoramic landscape. I think its strength lies
in its wholesome simplicity. Pale and crystal malts ride you to gustatory
Shangri La’s, on a magic carpet over mists of Danes drawn water, with the
abidingly faithful oarsman of Golden Hops agitatingfoams and froths in resonant canticles to
the heart and head- a winning combination!
Vegan,
Soil Assoc Organic, CAMRA Real Ale, Bottle conditioned
Notes
Well this
should be right up my street… a nice low ABV Pale Ale. Possible session
candidate. The label says “Light & Hoppy”, but notwithstanding the
mundane accuracy of this statement the bitter HOPPINESS FACEPUNCH is at first
overwhelming like a liver quiver Jackhammer attack. There is also an overtang
of yeast to deal with, but heyyyy its vegetarian, right? Underneath this
Marmite, the (limestone?) water used is clearly of a high quality, but this
is mitigated against by the (unnecessary in my opinion) heavy gassing of the
beer. The hops are Cascade variety, with “spice, orange and citrus” notes
which combine to give a heady floral backnote more redolent of Elderflowers
(probably due to valerianic acid). There is freshness and quality of
ingredients in this beer which is lacking in so many others, but for a Pale Ale,
there is far too much going on with the yeasty hops juxtaposing with the
higher note flavours and the omnipotent scorching volcanic gas for my liking,
and it adds up to a mission to drink a bottle of it. Should come with a
Gaviscon chaser.
Marks /10
4.0
(playing all the right notes, just not necessarily in the right order)
Floral
nose, fizzy bright & bold golden hops give this cheeky blonde strumpet of
a beer loads of character and verve. If it were a car, it would be an old
style Mini, lowered with thick tyres, fluffy dice and bull horns. Some would
say this beer is underpowered at 3.8%, but I would say the alcohol content is
fine, but with the hops gas and flavour it is boxing above its weight and
should tone it down to a more serene encounter.And that’s about it! No complexity or
subterfuge skulking in sublingual backwaters. And therein lays this beer’s
simultaneous strength and weakness. By going in balls deep with golden hops,
Mallinson’s has produced a delightfully simple bombshell, but alas, it is too
gassy, brassy and over the top with citrus squealing hops to fall in love
with this cover girl.
Some of
my most cherished beer experiences originate from North Wales, so it was with great enthusiasm
I sampled this beer. The bottle says Rampart is tasty. But in truth I have
found it TOO TASTY for its own good. There is a deep, mellow resonant
character to this beer, with an almost treacle- like camphorous and phenolic
quality mingled in, which wouldn’t be unwelcome in a Christmas pudding. You
want the alcohol content of 4.5% to slip gracefully through your senses and
not linger so heavily like a soggy Soreen slap. The brewers claim a “smooth,
spicy, citrusy” flavour to the goldings, which is at least partly true, but with
the fuggles it is a trifle too much (trifle being the operative word). All of
this stodge doesn’t allow the delicate silver waters of the Conwy to get
through to the palette, and the whole thing dies a death on the ramparts of
its own complexity.
Stand at
the end of the diving board and close your eyes in poise. Feel the
Palaeolithic breezes tone your expectant taut skin. Breathe in through your
eased nostrils, and enjoy the cool scent of grapefruit mingling with the dawn
humours. And then plunge… into CITRUS OCEAN WORLD. Swirling vortices of Neptune’s jollity spear you with the
sharp intent of a trident’s bane… myriads of shimmering sunlight needle
bubbles puncture your cerebrum in poppledash zig-zagging Clownfish elegance.
Minutes later, a somewhat slimy aftertaste of hops emerges.. washed up from
murky depths like kelp on Mystery’s timeless berthing shores. The demanding
nature of this thousand island tsunami is just brought within tolerable
limits for my admittedly modest taste, by what amounts to expert pastoral
brewing. This supremely refreshing beer isn’t exactly my cup of tea, but I
could happily spend a night on it, or enjoy it as a stand- alone
accompaniment in place of a white wine to a fish or seafood dish such as
paella, lobster thermadore, etc.
Welcome to my
series of organic beer reviews, conducted solely for the sake of wholesome
market research, and not in any way out of a sense of debauched devilment.
These 8 brews were plucked off the shelf of whole food stores in the North West
of England, and comparisons made. The first thing to note, is that although
these are “organic beer reviews”, and you would expect ORGANIC beer in a WHOLE
FOOD shop, several of them aren’t organic, or vegan, or even vegetarian. I have
reflected this in the final mark for the beer, but let quality be my guiding
light.
There are
stirrings in the spring hedgerows, matched by my minstrel heart’s yearning to
wander.
Holkham
Pinewoods is a National Nature Reserve, managed by Natural England, almost dead
centre of the North
Norfolk
coastline. It is essentially a band of managed sand dune & plantation sandwiched
between a vast line of open exposed beach and farm land barely reclaimed from
the salt marshes, a process which began in the seventeenth century. For such a
small nature reserve, it is impressively biodiverse, with many internationally
important species of wading birds. This arrangement of land management is
fairly common for this part of the world.
The
plantation of holm oak and fragrant pines was planted in the nineteenth century
to stabilise the dune, provide a wind break from the beach (winds can be violently
excoriating when whipping up the sand), and to prevent inrush of sand onto
farms. The plantation has gracefully reached maturity and adds an exotic
horticultural sense of curiosity to the reserve, with hollows, hides, quiet
contemplative corners and occasionally gnarled features or grotesquely deformed
trees amongst the regularity of the military stands.
I did an
East- West clockwise circular walk of the plantation, recommended by David
North in his book Wilderness Walks.
This provided a very pleasant start to the walk, walking into gentle afternoon
sunshine, with dappled glades and impressive pine in silhouette, and then rounded
the path to walk along the beach and strandline for the big views of the finale,
which was pleasantly devoid of people for long stretches. I also took a detour
from the book to visit the highest dune promontory on the range, which afforded
stunning panoramic views of miles of coast and farmland. It only added a mile
or so to the walk, and made an interesting panopticon from which to eat a late
lunch. The weather was sunny, kindly breezy, with high altitude ice providing a
fresh, ozone imbued haze.
The most
engaging feature I discovered was a pond called Salt Hole. It had previously
been an inlet for sea water prior to the earthworks of human reclamation when the
untamed dunes were mobile and only occasionally gave way to marshes, but the
pond eventually became cut off from the sea. Now moribund, with the darkness of
the plantation between it and its mother, Mor, it still drew up salt water from
the water table; an ancient longing for the succour of saline like a foetus
extending its umbilicus into the Earth. Still brackish, Salt Hole demonstrates
a remarkably constant pH, temperature, and salinity in a defiance of
homeostasis. It supports life, but sea dwellers like anemones and gobies. water
rail and little grebes, fringed by a crown of reeds. Although I didn’t see any
water rail, I could hear them as I walked by, making indignant calls like
startled piglets to my footfall.
“The business of
finding a nation's soul is a long and slow one at the best and a great many
prophets must be slain in the course of it. Perhaps when we have slain enough
prophets future generations will begin to build their tombs.”
Quote from Ralph Vaughan- Williams, National Music (1934) p.
129.
Vaughan Williams in his garden at 'White Gates', Dorking, Surrey
Well, since Vaughan- Williams was a prophet who unquestioningly did capture the nation’s soul in his music, here’s my attempt at building his tomb.
In 2011, a poll of 25,000 Radio 4 listeners revealed their
most loved ‘desert island disc’ was Ralph Vaughan- Williams’ The Lark Ascending. Inspired by George
Meredith's 122-line poem of the same name about the skylark, The Lark Ascending premiered as a
violin/piano piece in 1920, and then for violin/orchestra in 1921 as a
"pastoral romance for orchestra". Although it was substantially
written in 1914 before the Great War, he only revisited final composition of
the piece in 1920 with the help of the English violinist Marie Hall, during
their stay at Kings Weston House near Bristol.
The composer included this portion of George Meredith's poem
on the flyleaf of the published work, in tribute:
He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound,
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake.
For singing till his heaven fills,
‘Tis love of earth that he instils,
And ever winging up and up,
Our valley is his golden cup
And he the wine which overflows
to lift us with him as he goes.
Till lost on his aerial rings
In light, and then the fancy sings.
The Poet George Meredith, freewheelin' at 80
In a 2007 documentary about the Vaughan- Williams, O Thou
Transcendent (and the subsequent related BBC programme), it was claimed
that Vaughan- Williams was working on The
Lark Ascending while watching British troops embarking for France at the
outbreak of World War I, but this has turned out to be fanciful flag waving by
dewy eyed little Englanders hoping to appropriate Vaughan- Williams’ music as a
work of wartime patriotism. Sadly for them, there is no reliable evidence to
support this. I quote from Wikipedia (so it must be true):
The original source
for this [erroneous] story is the
biography by his wife Ursula, entitled RVW. She did not meet Vaughan Williams until 1938, 24 years after he'd
composed the work. George Butterworth [killed in WW1], who knew Vaughan Williams at the time of these events,
recorded the fact that the composer was preparing for a lecture on Purcell when
he wrote the piece. On the day that Britain entered the Great War, Vaughan Williams
visited Margate for a week's vacation. It was not an
embarkation point, so he would not have seen departing soldiers. The ships that
he did see were engaged in preparatory fleet exercises. These were noted and
documented by members of Ernest Shackleton's Endurance, which departed Margate around this time on its trans-Antarctic
expedition.
Presumably swept up by the fervent political climate of the
time, a young boy observed the composer making notes and, thinking the man was
jotting a secret code, informed a police officer, who promptly arrested the
composer. In any event, the war caused a hiatus in Vaughan Williams' composing.
He was 41 when World War I began. Though he could have avoided war service
entirely, or tried for a commission, he chose to enlist as a private in the Royal
Army Medical Corps. Prolonged exposure to gunfire began a process of hearing
loss which took it’s toll; eventually causing severe deafness in his old age.
The impact of the war was decisive in Vaughan- William's life
as a composer. Like so many people, it’s spectre affected him down in the fibre
of his being, and there is a haunting schizophrenia in his work before and
after the war. The world of 1914 and the beauty of The Lark Ascending, must have unfathomably seemed a million miles
away as he returned to the piece (but not the peace) in the post war years, having
witnessed such senseless mechanised death at close quarters.
If you ask me, The Lark Ascending is an empyrean work of
sublime bucolic elegance, which is nothing to do with wartime sentimentality
or flag waving. I can imagine RVW promising himself to get round to finishing
“that romance for violin & orchestra when the blasted war is over”, and
thinking of home and the rolling hills from the bitter trenches. Put your ornery Union Jacks away Daily Mail
readers, The Lark Ascending is a work
of enduring peace and tranquil optimism; of oneness with, and love of the
landscape, a youthful Arcadian dream that was robbed from so many.
Album: Ragas For Meditation
Label: Capitol Records -- ST 10518
Format: Vinyl, 12", 33 ⅓ RPM, Stereo, LP
Released: 1969
In an interview (printed in the booklet for The Hundred-Minute Raga) Nikhil said he had been influenced by Allauddin Khan, Ali Akbar Khan, Amir Khan, and to a lesser extent by Omkarnath Thakur, Faiyaz Khan, Kesarbai Kerkar, and Roshanara Begum. For Banerjee, music-making was a spiritual rather than a worldly path:
"Indian music is based on spiritualism; that is the first word, you must keep it in your mind. Many people misunderstand and think it's got something to do with religion—no, absolutely no! Nothing to do with religion, but spiritualism—Indian music was practiced and learned to know the Supreme Truth. Mirabai, Thyagaraja from the South, Haridas Swami, Baiju—all these great composers and musicians were wandering saints; they never came into society, nor performed in society."
My most vivid image of the rebirth of nature came to me when I was staying at the old family farmhouse in Farndon, a village on the River Trent near my home town, Newark. I was about four or five years old. Near the house, I saw a row of willow trees with rusty wire hanging from them. I wanted to know why it was there, and asked my uncle, who was nearby. He explained that this had once been a fence made with willow stakes, but the stakes had come to life and turned into trees. I was filled with awe.
In taking
me ol’ dad for a routine appointment, we paid an early morning visit to the hospital
restaurant. Well, it adds a dash of spite to get a pre- emptive dose of
coronary artery furring fry up before you see the heart consultant. But bugger
me, walking through the eclectic lustre of cafeteria plastic & chrome, was
an ostensibly innocent- looking pile of paper bags, which upon closer scrutiny
bore the name “Spunkmeyer” on them. I nearly choked.
Presuming,
correctly as it happens, it to be of American origin, I imagined a board room
somewhere very distant to here, and a red faced Texan looking at charts and
spreadsheets, brusquely barking orders at quivering anaemic accountants saying
he “wanted” the UK hospital market. The accountants look at each other, too
afraid to speak, and in a supreme act of cultural insensitivity and ignorance,
Spunkmeyer ends up splattering the walls of cafeteria up and down the NHS.
Actually,
the truth is even worse! Chairman and inventor of the industrialised cookie
dough manufacture process, Kenneth Rawlings, asked his 12 year old daughter
what she thought the company should be called. I wonder what he would have said
if she said “oohh shit butty please daddy.” It might as well be called Shit
Butty, much good that dredgeworthy colon- clogging wallpaper paste goop does for
you, crammed as it is with diabetes inducing high corn fructose syrup and vitamin
annihilating trans fats. Absolute shit.Give
me a cooked breakfast any day.
For the
word “spunk” in English, has a totally different additional meaning from that
in the USA. To Americans, the word
simply means “pluck, courage, verve”, or in Australia, “a good looking fellow”. But as
the etymology of the word derives from ancient Irishsponcc meaning of “poor wood/ faggots/ junk wood
which reluctantly provides a spark” it also has derived into a semi-
pejorative, (with shared roots in “punk”) meaning seminal fluid in English, which was first recorded in print in
1886. If you ask me, that’s long enough to realise that its use in selling food
might be a faux pas. Unless you wanted to sell your cookies with cream.
The State
represents violence in a concentrated and organised form. The individual has a
soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from
violence to which it owes its very existence.I look upon
an increase in the power of the State with the greatest fear, because although
while apparently doing good by minimising exploitation, it does the greatest
harm to mankind by destroying individuality, which lies at the root of all
progress.
~Interview
with left- leaning anthropologist Nirmal Kumar Bose (1934)~
You assist
an evil system most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees. An evil administration
never deserves such allegiance. Allegiance to it means partaking of the evil. A
good person will resist an evil system with his or her whole soul.
Two related documentaries here: Propaganda (2012), and Mind Control: America's Secret War (2011). The premise of the film Propaganda is that it is an information film by the North Korean authorities which was secretly translated into English by a Western journalist. Actually, that angle is a spoof. It's made by these people. However, the North Korean perspective brilliantly permits an outsider's view of capitalism, and it is surprising how much the west sees itself in the mirror of totalitarianism when the tables are turned. Be warned though: there are some disturbing scenes, and it is not light viewing in some places.
The 2nd documentary is a more conventional History Channel exploration of mind control experiments carried out by the secret intelligence agencies of the US, ala The Manchurian Candidate. If I was you, I'd get a few tins of beans and toilet rolls in, clean out the cubby hole under the stairs and be prepared to stay there for a while.
“Had the routine of our life at this place been known to the
world, we should have been regarded as madmen --although, perhaps, as
madmen of a harmless nature. Our seclusion was perfect. We admitted no
visitors. Indeed the locality of our retirement had been carefully kept a
secret from my own former associates; and it had been many years since
Dupin had ceased to know or be known in Paris. We existed within
ourselves alone.
It was a freak of fancy in my friend (for what else shall I call it?) to be enamored of the night for her own sake; and into this bizarrerie, as into all his others, I quietly fell; giving myself up to his wild whims with a perfect abandon. The sable divinity would not herself dwell with us always; but we could counterfeit her presence. At the first dawn of the morning we closed all the massy shutters of our old building; lighted a couple of tapers which, strongly perfumed, threw out only the ghastliest and feeblest of rays. By the aid of these we then busied our souls in dreams—reading, writing, or conversing, until warned by the clock of the advent of the true Darkness. Then we sallied forth into the streets, arm and arm, continuing the topics of the day, or roaming far and wide until a late hour, seeking, amid the wild lights and shadows of the populous city, that infinity of mental excitement which quiet observation can afford.”
from The Murders
in the Rue Morgue
"Distinct, coldly, calmly distinct, fell those few simple sounds within my ear, and thence, like molten lead rolled hissingly into my brain. Years — years may pass away, but the memory of that epoch — never! Nor was I indeed ignorant of the flowers and the vine — but the hemlock and the cypress overshadowed me night and day. And I kept no reckoning of time or place, and the stars of my fate faded from heaven, and therefore the earth grew dark, and its figures passed by me, like flitting shadows, and among them all I beheld only — Morella. The winds of the firmament breathed but one sound within my ears, and the ripples upon the sea murmured evermore — Morella. But she died; and with my own hands I bore her to the tomb; and I laughed with a long and bitter laugh as I found no traces of the first, in the charnel where I laid the second — Morella."
from Morella
Edgar Allan Poe (1809- 1849): Tales of Mystery and Imagination Illustration: Harry Clarke By South Utsire
Three slices of Humble Pie for ya. First up, on The Barry Richards Show (USA), where Steve Marriott introduces himself as "Dirk Bogarde, a stand in for Steve Marriott." Next, they go bongo down The Beat Club (Germany), and finally a soulful, organ infused version of Live With Me, played somewhere in the UK, I know not where, in 1970. That's a three course meal. Can you eat any more Humble Pie?
A few steps from the stile opposite Ogwen Falls is a world remote from the vehicle- bound one. Savour the design! A prehistoric convulsion [that] built cliff faces and ramparts from where, on a windless day, the lake may be observed playing with an image of Tryfan. Catching Ogwen’s mood is like grasping a fleeting dream. She will alow a devotee but a brief indulgence. One of her favourite caprices is concealment beneath a cloak of mist through which she might reveal a mere glimpse of her western lips and white pearls cascading down her slender neck. Beyond the lower cliffs one must reconcile to loss of intimacy: up ahead is a steep south- facing bank.
Ralph Maddern, from Walk Snowdonia Peaks.
By South Utsire
