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Fryers delight

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FISH

 

Sometime during the summer in the early to mid-1980s, when I was living in Kent, two young people came to stay with me from land-locked Hungary. Because travelling opportunities were limited and money was short in the Communist country, people did not travel abroad as much as people in Western Europe. My two guests had never seen the sea, except in photos and on the TV or cinema screen.

One evening, I drove my guests to the Kent coast to see the sea. We parked by a beach. As soon as we had stopped, the two lads leapt out of my car and ran into the sea fully clothed. That is how excited they were to see real waves and the sea.

After experiencing the sea, they asked me about ‘fish and chips’, which their English teacher in Budapest had mentioned. We walked to a nearby fish and chips shop and placed an order. When the fillets of fish arrived wrapped in crisp golden batter, my friends looked at them, wondering whether or not they had been served pieces of fish. They had never seen fish prepared like this before.

Fish prepared, fried and covered with batter, as it is served in British fish and chip shops is actually not a dish of British origin. According to that mine of knowledge Wikipedia, it was the Sephardic Jews, who settled in the UK from the 16th century onwards, who introduced fish prepared this way. Alexis Soyer (1810-58), the famous 19th century chef wrote in his A shilling cookery for the people, published in 1854:

“There is another excellent way of frying fish, which is constantly in use by the children of  Israel … In some families … they dip the fish, first in flour, then in egg, and fry in oil“, which is more or less what happens in a fish and chips shop. 

This leads me to the real subject of the article: a reccommendation. There are many highly-rated fish and chips shops (‘chippies’) in the British Isles. The ‘Fryers Delight’ is one of them. This unpretensious shop, whose decor seems unaltered since the day it opened back in in 1958, serves excellent fish with superb chips cut in the shop’s kitchen, all fried in beef dripping. I have eaten there twice, and look forward to my next visit. The staff are friendly, and the prices are very reasonable and the food is good value for money. 

The FRYERS DELIGHT, which is open from noon to 10pm every day except Sunday is located at:

 19 Theobalds Rd, Holborn, London WC1X 8SL

Adding up

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CALCULATOR

When I was at high school in the second half of the 1960s, I studied, amongst other things, maths, physics, and chemistry. All of these subjects require calculation, sometimes quite complicated. There were no pocket calculators and few computers accessible to schoolkids in those days. 

For complicated calculations, we had to rely on working out the arithmetic with pen and paper, or with tables of logarithms, or using slide rules. Today, you would find it difficult to buy either a table of logarithms or a slide rule. By the way, calculating with the latter required one to make an estimate of the answer to ascertain which power of ten the anser should be. For example, should it be in the hindres, thousands or hundreds of thousands? Also, when making divisions using slide rules, there were almost always two possible answers, only one of which was correct. A rough estimation done on paper or in one’s head, would determine which of these two was the right one. 

If you are getting lost already, stop worrying because this will not get more complicated.

In the late ’60s or early ’70s, pocket electronic calculators entered the market place. At first, they required enormous pockets and pockets filled with money because they were quite expensive. Well, they were certainly beyond my means.

In late 1973, I began working in a laboratory with a view to collecting experimental data to be submited eventually in a PhD thesis. One of the other PhD students in our laboratory came from Kuwait. He would travel there occasionally to visit his family. When he returned from one of his trips home, he brought me a wonderful gift. It was a Casio pocket calculator. Reading this today, you will probably think that was a lousy thing to give, as you can go into shops all over the place and buy a pocket calculator for a very modest price, maybe no more than the cost of a packet of cigarettes. However, when I received my Casio, it was a very precious gift both financially and in terms of labour saving.

And, now one does not even need to buy a calculator because there will be one installed in your mobile telephone. I suppose this is progress. However, progress is a word I do not like to use because in medicine a ‘progressive’ disease is one that continues to get worse, often leading to death.

 

Picture taken at Russell Market in Bangalore, India

Hair today, gone tomorrow

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HAIR

 

The fastest haircut that I have ever had was in San Francisco (USA) in early 1995. The barber shop was staffed entirely by Chinese men, who were playing cards, maybe gambling, when I entered. Six minutes later, with my hair beautifully cut, I had already paid my bill. The barber could not wait to get back to his card game.

The slowest haircut that I have experienced (or, rather, endured), was in London. My wife suggested that I tried a salon near Holborn, which was also a training centre for budding hairderssers. For a modest fee, a student would cut one’s hair under the watchful eye of the professional hairdressing teacher. I was not against the idea as I had once had an excellent student cut at the London School of Fashion.

I don’t know whether the man allotted to practice on my hair was a complete novice or extremely nervous or just totally incompetent, but the experience was tedious to say the least. The appointment begun at 2 pm and was supposed to finish by 5 pm.  Throughout the afternoon, my student seemed to do little more than gather up swathes of my hair in his comb and then contemplate them. Very occasionally, he would snip a few strands of hair without much conviction. The afternoon wore on. 

By 4.45 pm, when all the other haidressing students had completed their tasks, my hair was much the same as it was at 2 pm. The teacher wandered over to me, pushed the student out of his way, and completed my haircut very competently by 5 pm.

Since then, I have had one more supervised student, which was performed by a very competent student, but she took much longer than an experienced hairdresser. Even if I have to pay more, I prefer my ‘short, back, and sides’ to be performed as rapidly as possible. 

Wasting time by the pool

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Pool side_240

 

My parents, like many other parents, wanted me to learn to swim. I was a reluctant learner. The reason was I could not believe that if I took my foot off the floor at the bottom of the pool or the sand beneath the sea, I would not sink like a stone. I could watch others swimming, but could not understand how they could do it and how much they enjoyed it.

Almost every Saturday morning, I used to be taken to one pool or another to get private swimming lessons. Year after year, these produced no results. I could not learn to swim. My parents must have spent a small fortune on these fruitless swimming lessons.

At school, we were taken to a public swimming bath at least once a week  during the Summer Term. The teachers supervising us were uninterested in those, like me, who were unable to swim. We were told to remain at the shallow end of the pool and not to move from there. This happened both at my primary school and also at secondary school.

Eventually my parents learnt of a Mr Brickett, who gave swimming lessons on Saturday ornings at the YWCA, which used to exist in Great Russell Street near Tottenham Court Road Underground Station. The red brick building still stands, but now it serves another purpose. 

Mr Brickett had a system that involved the pupil wearing an inflatable buoyancy arm-band arround each upper arm. Each armband had two separate inflatable chambers. With these fully inflated, I became convinced that I could make it across the pool without my feet touching the bottom. Each week, Mr Brickett would inflate the armbands a little less than the previous week, and then the pupil would be encouraged to swim to and fro across the pool. After a few weeks, I swam across the pool wearing my armbands. When I had done this, Mr Brickett revealed to me that he had not inflated the armband at all and that I was swimming without their assistance.  As I trusted Mr Brickett, I removed the bands and under his watchful eye I swam across the pool unaided. For this, I was awarded a certificate with my name and a Union Jack flag on it. It certified that I had swum 10 yards unaided, under my own steam.

 

I hardly ever swim any more, but I used to enjoy it a little bit, especially in the sea. I am glad that my parents persisted with the lessons, but regret that my slow progress led them to waste so much of their spare time by the pool.

 

Taking the plunge

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The cafetière (or ‘French press’ or ‘coffee plunger’) has been around for 90 years. It was first invented in 1929. It achieved popularity in England much later. I remember my mother bought one in the 1960s. It was then a ‘trendy’ way of making coffee. My mother used this device to make coffee for some time until one evening something awful happened.

Her brother-in-law, my uncle, was preparing coffee in a cafetière one evening, when suddenly the plunger, which usually needs some pressure to force down the coffee beneath the filter, suddenly shot downwards very quickly. As it did so, boiling hot coffee shot up and burnt my uncle’s hand and arm extremely badly. After this unfortunate accident, my mother, who was a very cautious and safety-conscious person, abandoned using her prized plunger, and reverted to making coffee through conical filter papers.

Although my mother would never use a cafetière again, I continued to do so. Many years after her premature death, I had a strange experience whilst plunging the coffee after feeding dinner to some guests. My wife had filled the cafetière vessel and had left the coffee to ‘infuse’. It was my job to take the plunge so to speak. I pressed down the plunger cautiously. It was harder than usual to press it. The plunger descended a little, but when I removed my hand it began rising. I pushed it again, getting it down a little further, but again the plunger rose up towards its staring position. I kept repeating the procedure, and each time the plunger rose a little. Eventually, I managed to get the plunger to remain near the base of the coffee container, and I poured out the coffee into cups.

I was mystified by our plunger’s abnormal behaviour.

After the guests had left, I opened up the cafetière to clean it. Beneath the plunger amongst the compressed coffee grounds, I disovered the reason for the odd phenomenon. Hidden amongst the dregs of the coffee there was a stainless steel tea spoon. Its previously straight stem had been gradually bent into a U-shape whilst I was trying to press down the plunger. What amazed me when I thought about it afterwards was that it was lucky that the glass vessel was tough enough to withstand the pressure exerted by the spoon on the glass while I was inadvertantly bending it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Archive

 

I write a great deal in my spare time. Apart from blogs like this one, I write books about subjects that require a considerable amount of research. I have a British Library (‘BL’) reader’s card, which gives me access to an unbelievable collection of material. However, even though I live not far from the BL, it is quite time-consuming getting to and from the material inside the library. Apart from security checks at the BL, one must leave many items, which are forbidden in the reading rooms (e.g. food, drink, all kinds of writing implements apart from pencils), in a locker in te basement. Once in the reading rooms, the BL becomes a joy to work in.

 

Over the years, I have been using another kind of library. It is on-line, and is reached by typing https://archive.org/ . Using its superb search engine, you can explore its collection in many ways, such as by author, by title, by keywords, etc. What comes up, if you are lucky, is a set of scanned volumes of relevant books or pamphlets. By clicking on an item, you are given the option of downloading it (.pdf, Kindle, and other formats), reading the scanned book using a very practical online reader, or reading a typed transcript of the entire text online. If the item is one you need, it is a lot easier reading it via this website than having to ‘schlep’ to the BL. This is especially the case if you do not live in London.

 

If you have not come across this website and you are looking for texts published long ago and not so distantly, head for archive.org, and give it a try!

 

My picture is part of a screen-shot of a page of results from archive.org