sugar

Before Madame Bovary and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, there were the Memoirs of a Lady of Quality. These “memoirs” by Frances, the Viscountess, Vane, published in 1751, were somewhat hidden inside one of Tobias Smollett’s novels The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle... In her “memoirs” the Viscountess thoroughly mocked contemporary social and moral conventions. 

 

At one stage the Viscountess describes her “emotional” devastation following the death of her first husband — a devastation which Horace Walpole, “a natural celibate” homosexual, explained thus: “Lady Townshend told me that when [Lady Vane’s] first husband Lord William Hamilton died, she said that she had no comfort but in the Blessed Sacrament — though at the same time she lay with an hundred other men. I said, that was not extraordinary; it was what she meant by the Sacrament — the receiving the body and blood.” Why the Viscountess memoirs were published inside Tobias Smollett’s work is for anyone to guess. Too saucy for the censors?

 

Tobias Smollett was a satirist with very pertinent observations of human nature, the kind of ill-nature we see too often in sociopaths, leaders (of men) who stay behind in the trenches, tricksters, snake-oil merchants, liars, aggressors, pranksters, you name it — which on the last conservative statistical count were traits associated with more than half of the entire human population while the other half could be counted as totally deluded. Nothing has changed much since Smollett days. Between the rabid Hawks on both sides of the American politics to the deceitful manipulations of “fake news”, the way we massage our employment application to the religious adventures in whatever silly dogmas, despite our generally good nature — we manage to survive in complete hope that we will be saved from ourselves and others, while we plan our next trick. The only difference between Smollett's vision and present times, though is that we take ourselves and our trickery very seriously as we prepare the next silly threats that could kill millions of people.

 

In 1944, George Orwell, wrote about The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle in the Tribune:

 

“Peregrine devotes himself for months at a time to the elaborate and horribly cruel practical jokes in which the eighteenth century delighted. When, for instance, an unfortunate English painter is thrown into the Bastille for some trifling offence and is about to be released, Peregrine and his friends, playing on his ignorance of the language, let him think he has been sentenced to be broken on a wheel. A little later they tell him that his punishment has been commuted to castration. Why are these petty rogueries worth reading about? In the first place because they are funny. Secondly, by simply ruling out “good” motives and showing no respect whatever for human dignity, Smollett often attains a truthfulness that more serious novelists have missed.”

 

I see a parallel between Smollett’s works with Till Eulenspeigel, the legendary 13th century trickster originated in German folklore whose adventures were told by ordinary people as comic relief against the authority of the state. When Smollett was writing, I guess he would have been aware of Eulenspeigel who had been mentioned by Ben Jonson in his comedy The Alchemist, and by Henry Porter in The Two Angry Women of Abington (1599). 

Till was a young long-lived trickster who played practical jokes ceaselessly, exposing vices at every turn, greed and folly, hypocrisy and foolishness in all, including his own. Anything that can go wrong in conversations does go wrong due to the disparity in wording consciousness between the participants. This misunderstanding of course has also been explored by more modern comedy routines such as Laurel and Hardy and Abbott and Costello. Till Eulenspiegel is the inherent, unpredictable muddler that throws any communication into disarray. Many of Till’s pranks were scatological, and involved tricking people into touching, smelling, or even eating Till’s excrement. Smollett was on a similar page and used scatological humour quite often.

 

The Expedition of Humphry Clinker was his last novel, published in London on 17 June 1771, just three months before his death. Considered by many to be his funniest work, it is presented in the form of letters written by six characters: Matthew Bramble, a Welsh Squire; his sister Tabitha; their niece Lydia and nephew Jeremy Melford; Tabitha’s maid Winifred Jenkins; and Lydia’s suitor Wilson.

Humphry Clinker is a stableman who makes his appearance about a quarter of the way through the book when they meet him at an inn. Clinker is taken on the “expedition” after offending Tabitha, an occasion which Matthew Bramble found very amusing. Clinker is foolish, good-natured and earnest. Despite his misunderstandings, Clinker is described throughout the letters as a talented worker and a “gifted” (bullshit) speaker — even attracting a “following of parishioners during a brief oratorical stint” in London. When Humphry is falsely imprisoned due to accusations of being a highway robber, he is eventually rescued and returned to Winifred Jenkins, the maid with whom he had developed a romantic relationship. It is thus accidentally discovered that Humphry Clinker is Mr. Bramble’s illegitimate son from a fleeting relationship with a barmaid, during his wilder university days. The book ends in a series of weddings.

 

One of Smollet’s comedic artifices is the differences in the descriptions of the same events and places seen by the participants. Attributions of motives and descriptions of behaviour show wild variation and reveal much about the character of the letter-writers. Amidst the high-society spa towns, inns and seaside resorts of the 18th century, they have with many opportunities for satirical observations on English and Scottish life, manners, and politics. This is London:

 

The milk... should not pass unanalysed, the produce of faded cabbage-leaves and sour draft, lowered with hot water, frothed with bruised snails, carried through the streets in open pails, exposed to foul rinsings discharged from doors and windows, spittle, snot, and tobacco-quids from foot-passengers, over flowing from mud-carts, spattering from coach-wheels, dirt and trash chucked into it by roguish boys for the joke’s sake, the spewing of infants, who have slabbered in the tin-measure, which is thrown back in that condition among the milk for the benefit of the next customer; and finally the vermin that drops from the rags of the nasty drab that vends this precious mixture, under the respectable denomination of milk-maid. 

I shall conclude this catalogue of London dainties, with that table-beer, guiltless of hops and malt, vapid and nauseous; much fitter to facilitate the operation of a vomit, than to quench thirst and promote digestion; the tallowy rancid mass called butter, manufactured with candle-grease and kitchen stuff; and their fresh eggs, imported from France and Scotland.

 

Food gets hammered in this novel. We’ve learned to pasteurise milk since and our beer is filtered “cold”. Nowadays we get the special sections in our newspapers and magazines with recipes that are, to say the least, boring as shit in healthy colour. Humour seems to have gone out of our life in favour of “lifestyle”. Living is a very serious affair in which we need to measure our calories, reduce our alcohol intake to nil, with vitamins added in pills of all shape and sizes to make us live longer in order to help the retirement village industry prosper as they harbour more and more bored demented shaking old folks, waiting for godot.  

 

We know that some food are bad for us. We are reminded — with amazing statistics — that for example sugar is “no good”. These statistics often harp on the number of “people saved”... It sounds a bit like a new extremist religion, with priests in white coats prodding our fatty tissues while pronouncing “that you need to cut sugar, alcohol and butter”... This is the joke of Hagar the Horrible, but we won’t go there just yet.

 

One of the certainty in life is death and taxes... Well, that’s two certainties, but in reality just one, because we try to dodge taxes as much as possible — and the richer we are the more successful we are at it. Dodging death is more impossible. So, despite this we do our best to delay this event by improving “our quality of life”. Living longer becomes the mantra while the statistical entertainment has replaced humour. We become longer-lived humourless shadows of genetic material. Even our humour is manufactured like a Model T on a Ford assembly line and rigorously tested by the seriously regular serious news hours. 

 

Matthew Bramble, the Welsh Squire of The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, might eventually end up in paradise, thus we should introduce this story of Welshmen loving toasted cheese, from Merry tales, Wittie Questions and Quicke Answeres, published in 1567:

 

... and that God of His Goodness, soon after His Passion, suffered many men to come to the kingdom of heaven with small deserving; at which time there was in heaven a great company of Welshmen which with their cracking and babbling troubled all the others. Wherefore God said to Saint Peter that He was weary of them and he would fain have them out of heaven. To whom Saint Peter said, “Good Lord, I warrant you, that shall be done.”

Wherefore Saint Peter went out of heaven-gates and cried with a loud voice, “Caws pob” — that is as much as to say “roasted cheese” — which thing the Welshmen hearing, ran out of heaven a great pace. And when Saint Peter saw them all out, he suddenly went into heaven and locked the door, and so sparred all the Welshmen out.

 

Then we cannot go pass the Welsh Rabbit (meaning rare bit) as explained by a certain Francis Grove in his “A classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue”, published in the 18th century... “The Welsh are said to be so remarkable fond of cheese, that in case of difficulty their midwives apply a piece of toasted cheese to the janus vitae, to attract and entice the young Taffy, who on smelling it makes most vigorous efforts to come forth.” 

 

So we eat too much sugar and we could save 155,621 lives from whenever death’s coming, by cutting our intake of sweetness by half. I suppose if everyone was healthy, doctors, nurses and hospitals would have to reinvent themselves as carers for the prosperous retirement village industry as they harbour more and more bored demented shaking old folks, waiting for godot.

 

Magical sweet statistics on a planet where the “free-world” is led by a Dorito/chip eating geezer who does not drink alcohol but would confuse napalm for holy water at Sunday mass. As well, a ten year old kid would publish more savvy tweets than his humourless psycho numbers. As the old proverb says: “beware of thy hinder parts from gun blasting”, especially while eating at the table or while tweeting on the bus...

 

As Gus says: eat less, shit more. 

Your local kook...