- about tea. This title actually has a point to make, concerning that stock British phrase "Would you like a nice cup of tea?"; we shall gloss over what other, less fortunate or civilised places that don't by default drink tea ask each other.
If you think about it, why would you offer to make a "nice" cup of tea? You wouldn't offer to make "a barely-acceptable" cup of tea, or even "a quite nasty" cup of tea, would you? By definition the drink you are making is going to be potable, hence nice. Or do you have one of those faces that just naturally looks sinister and you need to reassure folks that they can drink anything you make without fear of poisoning?
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| Case in point |
All The Haul
Today, unusually, your humble scribe attended the massive car boot sale at Bowlee, which meant abandoning Edna at The Mansion for the duration. I think she's forgiven us by now, but it was a pretty close thing.
Anyway, here's the haul. Art?
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| There you are |
Anyway, enough of me wibbling on about my purchases. I can't go on about the motley, yet here it is.
"Silhouette"
As usual, Conrad's mind throws up odd things here and there, and on this occasion it was whilst walking Edna in the twilight that I noticed the shadows in silhouette on the pavement.
"Interesting word. Where does it come from? it sounds French."
It is French, though it comes from the name of a person, rather than any Greek or Latin root. Etienne de Silhouette, a finance minister of the late 18th Century, who had to impose all sorts of strictures on the French economy, thanks to the Seven Years War*. His name came to be associated with doing things on the cheap, like portraits done as a solid shape instead of in oils.
Et voila, you might say. Unless you were German, in which case you might say "So!"
Michael Bentine
This is going back some. I think what brought me onto this person was a Facebook thread on The Flop House where people were posting about comedians delivering good straight dramatic roles. Michael, you see, was one of the creators of "The Goons".
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| No, Art, No! |
I speak of Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers. Those Goons. Get it right this time, Art.
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| Michael with the mad hair. Madder hair. With glasses! |
He was only in the show for the first couple of years before moving on, to do "Potty Time" amongst others. I didn't realise, but he went to Eton, one of the UK's premier public schools, which is to say it isn't public at all, and is shockingly expensive to get into. He got accidentally injected with live typhoid when in the RAF, which put him in a coma for six weeks and ruined his eyesight.
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| Michael, looking as serious as he got |
He then worked with RAF Intelligence, and I wonder if he ever came across that other RAF Intelligence officer, Christopher Lee? I recall Michael on "Parkinson" relating a grim little tale of liberating Belsen concentration camp, and of seeing rows and rows of bird boxes attached to fence poles in very orderly style; all uninhabited - birds wouldn't go near the place.
One other thing that Michael was, apart from silly, was a pistol marksman of outstanding ability. So much so that in 1969 he got invited to Bredbury Lines, the home of a certain organisation with the initials SSA, though not necessarily in that order. He was the first non-regimental person to ever get into the "Killing House", where - I don't need to go into that, do I? He also put it to the SSA that they ought to be training for counter-terrorism operations, which he saw as becoming a necessity in a few years**.
| Go on, call them potty, I dare you. |
And he was partly Peruvian, too. You know, where Paddington Bear comes from. The one in those documentary films.
* Involving, you guessed it, Perfidious Albion.
** He was right.
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