Whale meat again

The parody of Vera Lynn’s lyric expressed the feeling of many of those whose meat ration during the Second World war included whale meat. My father, a child in London during the war years, remembered it as tough and tasteless.

An Internet search suggests that the meat reached people’s kitchen tables in cans. It would seem logical that it would arrive processed and preserved, stacked in boxes on freighters bringing supplies. Probably it would have come from North American sources, whaling fleets would not have been able to operate in European waters. The brand name under which it was sold seems to have been Whacon, although information seems sparse. It seems to have been unrationed so was presumably more easily obtained than traditional meat which had become scarce with the drive to grow grain and vegetables. Perhaps it was its availability which made it memorable..

Having one uncle who farms beef cattle and another who raises pigs, I have no problem with people eating meat and happily do so when visiting my Aberdeen Angus eating uncle. For health and economy’s sake, I eat vegetarian meals, but that’s more a matter of inclination than conviction.

I think, however, I would draw a line at eating whalemeat. They seem too intelligent creatures to deserve such a fate as ending up on a dinner table.

I had assumed that most Europeans shared a similar view of eating whales. I had assumed that the vast mysterious mammals had attained a place in the natural hierarchy where they ranked alongside cats and dogs in commanding human respect.

While watching the BBC 4 Scandi-crime series Trom, it was a surprise to discover that whalemeat was still on the menu for families. The fact that some eight hundred pilot whales are caught for meat each year was an unexpected discovery.

While some among the Faroese hunt whales, in France there has been great concern about a beluga whale that had swum up the Seine. There seems to have been widespread media interest in the operation to try to persuade the whale to return to cold salt water.

In contrast with the more abstemious Danes, France has seemed more often a place where animals of all shapes and sizes have ended up on the dinner table. Snails, horse, and each September the shooting down of all sorts of birds, not to mention the bullfighting popular from the Basque coast to Provence.

From a purely rational viewpoint, the resources expended on attempts to save a single whale seem irrational, but rationality has never formed part of our attitudes to animals.

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The end of the weekend

Sunday evening – once it would have seemed a moment of disappointment.

Weekends in Somerset in my teenage years had a format.  It was a format that cannot have been prolonged or frequent, but which seemed to have a quality never recaptured in later years.

Perhaps it was the second half of 1978, for it could have been neither much earlier nor much later.  There was a routine, a pattern, a sequence that shaped the hours from Friday until Sunday evening.

Sixth form college discos and birthday parties were always on a Thursday, perhaps the venues were cheaper, so there would be no going out at the weekends.

Friday night was spent listening to Tommy Vance’s Rock Show on BBC Radio 1, ‘TV on the radio’, declared the slogan. It was ostensibly a time spent working on ‘A’ level studies, though examiners would later agree that more time had been spent listening to music than on reading books.

Saturday mornings were a lazy time.

At two o’clock the radio would be retuned to BBC Radio 2 for the sports coverage, real attention being paid from four o’clock onwards when there would be live commentary from the second half of a featured Division 1 match.

In an age of constant live football coverage, it is hard to imagine it then being such a rarity. At five o’clock, the kitchen would be filled with the sound of the theme tune of Sports Report and the unmistakable voice of James Alexander Gordon would read the classified football results. Even if one missed an actual score, the inflection of his voice would indicate how the match had finished.

Saturday evening television was from a time when BBC programmes might attract tens of millions of viewers. There was The Generation Game, and Parkinson and Match of the Day.

Looking back, it’s hard to imagine why so many watched The Generation Game, even Bruce, the ever cheerful presenter must have felt frequent cringe moments. But when there are only three television channels, only one television in the house, and there is not much money to go out  do anything else, there was little alternative.

Late on Saturday night, there would be the Hammer House of Horror or Westerns where the bad guys would commit some heinous crime and would be tracked down and shot by the good guys. There was something unsatisfactory in the films where the bad guys did not get shot.

Sunday morning was a time for sleeping. Turning on the radio at midday, the Old Record Club would challenge the recall of songs and artists while the Sunday lunch was being cooked. At two o’clock, the music of Annie Nightingale’s programme  accompanied the doldrums of a Sunday afternoon. By evening time, there was a realisation that the work attempted while listening to Tommy Vance was still unfinished.

It would be difficult to pretend that there was much by the way of ‘enjoyment’ in such weekends; there was never anything remarkable, never anything exciting, never anything that might have made one say on Monday morning, ‘do you know where I went?’

Yet, in the nothingness, there was a contentment.

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Blotting out a judge

Walking through Dorchester yesterday, I passed a pub named after the judge responsible for the 1685 Bloody Assizes.

Looking up at the pub sign, that reputedly reproduces the judge’s image, I metaphorically spat at him and said out loud the words of the Jewish curse, the Yimakh Shemo, ‘May his name be blotted out’.

Perhaps my words were a retreat into a way of thinking that Nietzsche would have regarded as a mark of weakness, a seeking of refuge in some religious abstraction.

The wish that someone will be forgotten forever, the definitive curse in the Jewish tradition, might bring a monetary sense of satisfaction, but it does nothing to change the actual reality. It does not remove them from history.

The hanging judge is too much remembered. He will have fulfilled what is perhaps an irrational desire, irrational for we shall never know if it has been fulfilled. He will have fulfilled a wish to be remembered after he was dead, a wish that is deep-rooted in our human psyche. Even if it were only on a single pub sign in an English county town, he is remembered.

Turning the corner and walking down the main street of Dorset’s county town, I came to Barclay’s Bank. A blue plaque on the wall declares, ‘This house is reputed to have been lived in by the MAYOR of CASTERBRIDGE in THOMAS HARDY’S story of that name.’

Of course, the Mayor of Casterbridge never existed, and if he had, would he have wished for a plaque to remember him?

Michael Henchard, Hardy’s fictional character, ends his self-destructive life rebuffed by his daughter and alone.  He pronounces a Yimakh Shemo upon himself. Few people would ever write a will like that of Michael Henchard:

That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or made to grieve on account of me.
& that I be not bury’d in consecrated ground.
& that no sexton be asked to toll the bell.
& that nobody is wished to see my dead body.
& that no murners walk behind me at my funeral.
& that no flours be planted on my grave.
& that no man remember me.
To this I put my name.
Michael Henchard

Meeting a Jewish friend this afternoon, I recounted my use of the Yimakh Shemo when encountering the picture of the judge.

‘I don’t think his name would be respected by anyone’, he responded.

‘I would rather he wasn’t remembered by anyone’. .

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Maigret’s justice

Maigret entered the interview room where the person being questioned sat with Janvier. Maigret looked at the frightened young man sat opposite Janvier. ‘Why don’t you talk to me and let Janvier go to terrorise someone else?’

Sometime later, Maigret returned to the room. The young man had a bloodied nose. Janvier looked at his superior officer, apologetically. ‘He fell over and hit his face on the floor.’

Maigret glared. ‘I would prefer that he didn’t fall over again. He’s a human being.’

Maigret seems a reassuring character. Georges Simemon had a grasp of human nature, an understanding of the reality of post-war Parisian life.

Simenon’s stories come with a mood of justice. Amidst the seaminess and violence of life in Maigret’s Paris, there is a sense that the police judicaire will bring about a satisfactory resolution of cases. Villains will be apprehended and subject to due process. Maigret does not shy from telling the ruthless and the unpenitent that the guillotine awaits them.

Maigret’s justice is about people getting what they deserve. Working people can have confidence in the police. Criminals cannot hide behind expensive lawyers. There is an equality in the system which was probably far removed from the realities of the society in which Simenon lived.

I like Maigret. I like stories that are fair. I like the thought that ordinary people don’t get trodden on, I especially like the thought that thugs and bullies end up in the cage in the basement of the préfecture de police and will never again have the opportunity to cause misery.

With the passing years, I have found the Christian ideas of forgiveness increasingly difficult. Notions of ‘grace’, that you can do what you like and then say ‘sorry’ at the end and be forgiven for everything, seem fundamentally unjust.

Jewish teachings have become much more attractive. The Yimakh Shemo, the Hebrew curse, ‘May his name and his memory be erased’ seems more closely to correspond with the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, than does the easy forgiveness proposed by Paul.

Jews have no concept of hell, instead a year after the death of a person the person is allowed into the world to come, or they are destroyed forever.

The obliteration of names from memory seems a just reward. Maigret tells one prisoner that they will not be remembered for their crimes, instead they will be executed and they will soon be forgotten forever.

Maigret understood justice.

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Don’t patronise women

The evening news has become annoying.

Each night this week the bulletins have included the fortunes of the England women’s football team among the headlines. This evening no superlatives were spared in describing the victory of the women’s team over the Swedish women’s team. To listen to the vocabulary used  one might have imagined that the game was a watershed in the history of art or science. ‘Gravity-defying’ was the term used to describe the scoring of one goal.

‘Nine million viewers,’ said the presenter. Well, yes. It was at peak viewing time on the BBC, is that a great deal different than it would be for any programme that had been hyped for days.

Were I a woman, I would have been embarrassed at the ridiculous boosterism of the television reporters. I grew up in a community where there was no need for people to seek equality, it was assumed. Women in that community would have felt no need for anyone to talk them up.

Farm life demanded the efforts of all who could participate. My grandmother owned her own fields and had her own income. A diminutive figure of four feet ten inches, she was mother to seven, grandmother to twenty, and a woman with an extraordinary capacity for work.

Men assumed an equality without it needing to be discussed. Children would be as likely seen perched on the footplates of tractors or sat smiling on open trailers as being pushed in prams (of course, once a child reached twelve or thirteen years of age, they might be found driving the tractors themselves).

The working equality of farms meant boundless opportunities to be outside, and to wonder at the misfortune of those who had to endure life in towns and cities.

Perhaps it was the nature of country life that led to an assumption that all people were equal. Equestrian sports arose from country life.  Show jumping, dressage, cross-country had their roots in hunting, and woe betide anyone who might suggest a woman coukldn’t ride to hounds. It is some fifty years since Princess Anne rode in the Great Britain equestrian team in the Olympic Games.

When Margaret Thatcher became Conservative leader in 1975, no-one in our community thought it odd. Mrs Thatcher would have made a formidable figure riding a fifteen hands hunter.

Perhaps the notable story behind the football competition is that they have taken five decades to reach a point that women on horses passed almost unnoticed.

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