Changing my name

As a boy I was always called Duncan, my first name. I was told that in Gaelic it means "brown warrior." The surname, Pirie, means rock or stone in Gaelic, and is thus one of the most common boys' forenames, as a variant of Peter, Petros, Pierre, Pedro, Poytr, Patrose, and others. I was Duncan growing up and at school.

At university I fell in with a group of friends who took pleasure in giving us all in-group names other than the ones we were usually known by. It was a kind of tribal thing. In Frank Herbert's book, "Dune," Paul Atreides chooses a tribal name "Paul Muad'Dib" to be known by amongst the Fremen. In my case it was the middle name Madsen. Like several of the others, the tribal name stuck. It was the surname of the mother who died when I was 2, and of whom I have no memories. It was also the married name of the Grandmother who raised me. And of course it was the name of my grandfather, Nils Madsen, the illegitimate Danish son of a vicar's daughter, who ran away to sea at age 15 and went on to become a merchant sea captain and a fellow of Trinity House. It is a name I bear with fondness for its history. It's how I came to have a surname as my Christian name and a Christian name as my surname.

Chickens roaming the streets of Key West

When I last visited, I was surprised by how many wild chickens roam the streets of Key West. I developed the habit of spending New Years there in T-shirt and shorts rather than shivering up North or in London. It's not just the streets they roam, either. They inhabit parking lots, and come into bars and restaurants. The roosters are particularly magnificent, and have been adopted by the city as part of its image.

They are called "gypsy chickens," and are descended from two sources. Inhabitants kept chickens for eggs and food in past days, and released them when supermarkets provided food with less bother. The Cubans brought their fighting cocks to Key West, and turned them loose when cock-fighting was banned in the 1970s.

The result is a large population of street birds that roam at will. They are protected by law, and have no fear of people. They cross the roads in the gaps between cars, and motorists stop to let them pass. If numbers occasionally grow too large, the city provides traps to catch some of them, and some are sent to farms outside the Keys if the recipients agree to keep them as pets instead of using them as food.

Countless times I've had them around my feet in a bar, pecking at scraps of food on the floor, completely oblivious to my presence. They now form an endearing part of the character of the city.

A modest literary hoax

When I was a philosophy professor at Hillsdale I played a small joke on the student Literary Society. They accepted my offer to deliver a talk on "William McGonagall, Scotland's second poet." In the days before personal computers and the Internet, there was little the students might find out about the subject. The joke was that William McGonagall wrote appalling doggerel. He recited his stuff in pubs in Dundee, his home town, and collected small change from his audiences. Sometimes he printed his poems and sold them in penny sheets in the street. The point about him was not just the awfulness of his verses, but the totality of his self-belief. He thought he was a genius, unfairly overlooked, and deserved to be made Poet Laureate in late Victorian times. There were three small books of his collected verses that people bought decades after his death to recite at parties to solicit howls of laughter. The man had little sense of metre or scansion. His subjects were the news stories of the day, such as shipwrecks, train crashes and theatre fires. He wrote poems about the deaths of famous people.

When the students gathered, I solemnly recited his epic on the railway bridge that spanned the river Tay to Dundee. I then recited his poem on the Tay Bridge disaster. 

"Beautiful railway bridge on the silv’ry Tay,

Alas! I am very sorry to say

That ninety lives have been taken away

On the last Sabbath day of 1879,

Which will be remember’d for a very long time." 

The poem continues for many lines in this vein. I pointed out that McGonagall was undeterred by this tragedy, but went on to compose the third work in his great trilogy, "Beautiful new railway bridge on the silvery Tay," when the bridge was eventually replaced. At this point one of the students cottoned on and said, "This is a joke, right?" I admitted it was, and we all spent a happy evening reciting his works. McGonagall's atrocious verse has made him immortal, and his works are recited as an enduring source of pleasure. I doubt if anyone knows who the Poet Laureate of the day was, though.

Summer in a steelworks

My uncle was Chief Wages Clerk at Redbourn steelworks at Scunthorpe, and arranged for a school friend and myself to be given a conducted tour. It was informative to learn all the stages that were gone through in the making of steel from the ore to the finished metal. More that that, it was an awesome spectacle to see huge fiery cauldrons of white hot molten steel, and to watch it being poured into ingots. The reality of the heat and the noise was something that pictures and films cannot do justice to.

I applied for a summer job in the metallurgy laboratory of the steelworks a year later, and was accepted. It was a relatively quiet corner of the complex, removed from the inferno of liquid steel, and was where the quality of batches of steel was assessed on a daily basis. They would send us off-cuts of  each batch of steel, measuring about 3 inches square by about six inches long. We would start by taking sulphur prints of the exposed ends of the metal by placing sensitised wet paper of them. The paper would acquire different colours and patterns, dependent on the sulphur content of the steel. There were other lab tests to be done before we sent a report back that listed the steel's qualities. From this analysis the ultimate uses of the steel would be determined, with the higher quality steel destined to be pulled into wire, and the second rank stuff perhaps for building materials.

Everyone was reminded daily of the dangers of the site by huge boards that listed the numbers of people who had been injured, or perhaps even killed, in the previous week. The firm took pride when the numbers were zero. The small group of us in the lab bonded into a team, and it was a happy summer spent productively among friends.

Blogging about food

It began in 2007 when a friend went on a diet to lose weight. To help motivate him he began a blog to record every meal he ate. I was sufficiently intrigued when he finished to ask if I could continue it, and did so for 3 weeks. I made some interesting discoveries, including the fact that I ate fish or seafood about 8 times a week for lunch or dinner, and usually ate a small second breakfast in the mid-morning.

I enjoyed it sufficiently to start a food blog of my own. Since “food blog” was taken, I called it “anotherfoodblog.com” and recruited a few friends to post on it with me. We posted about restaurant meals and about food we cooked ourselves at home. One of our number was a wine connoisseur, who posted about wines. It built up a large following, and as our bloggers dropped out, we replaced them with new ones.

We photographed our food and tried to post a photo with every entry, where possible putting up an entry every day. It only took a few minutes of effort to put up a new post, and we were quite conscientious about regularly giving our readers something new to read. When any of us took trips abroad, we all enjoyed reading about the foreign food they tried. Astonishingly it went on for years. Originally we allowed comments and enjoyed some amusing exchanges, but finally the effort of dealing with monotonous and mindless spam led us to close off comments.

Eventually I was the only one left posting, and thought it had played its course. I never took it down, however, and still access it to look up recipes I tried or to repeat some of the dishes I made. For several years it was a part of my life.

French for HP Sauce

The bottle of brown sauce was on the table for most of my childhood meals. There still is HP Sauce, and it is still Britain's most popular brown sauce, but it no longer has the distinctive feature that brought a little magic with it. In addition to the black and white picture of the Houses of Parliament, the HP of the name, it had a description that sang its praises on one side of the label, and the same thing in French on the other side. This was presumably because French food was far superior at the time, and to bring a little of its class to a basic brown sauce. It had, and probably still has, a tomato and vinegar base with tamarind, dates and molasses to spice it up.

The label proclaimed "This high quality sauce is a choice blend of oriental fruits and spices and malt vinegar..." with the same in French on the other side. We would brush up our school French at mealtimes by translating the two sides of the label into the other language. As British cuisine has improved beyond measure from the rather primitive foods of those days, the use of brown sauce seems to have declined, with more exotic sauces now dominating both the domestic and restaurant scenes. The US equivalent is probably A1 steak sauce, but it lacks the prestige appeal of Parliament or a label that advertises its merits in French.

It so dominated mealtimes that I can still recite the entire message of its label in both English and French. Modern children who use brown sauce do not participate in the magic it came with, however, because the French part of the label was axed in 1984, to howls of grief from outraged users whose lives it had been part of.

My slot machine summer

When I was 15 a friend helped me to obtain a summer job in an amusement arcade at Cleethorpes. Along the promenade were a series of rides and amusement, starting with the carousel that featured painted wooden horses on which one rode in a circle while a steam organ played music. Then came Wonderland, a temple of rides such as the Ghost Train, and the floating ducks with hooks on top and numbers underneath that one fished out three of to win a prize based on the total count achieved. Much farther along was the arcade that hired me. It featured mostly slot machines in which one paid a penny to flick a ball to see if it could land in a prize-winning hole. There was a crane which for a small coin one could manipulate to try to grab a prize, but whose claws were so loose that it usually dropped off before it could be delivered to the exit slot.

My job was to give change and to fix machines. I had a huge bag of copper coins over my shoulder, and punters would come up to me to change their sixpence, shillings, and sometimes half-crowns into copper pennies that worked the machines. Repair was easy. The huge string of keys over my other shoulder opened the front of the machines so I could dislodge the jammed coin that had usually caused the problem.

Sometimes I was put on as a bingo caller while the official one took a break. The players sat on stools in a circle, while I would call the numbers as the balls emerged. I had to learn the lingo that accompanied it so the numbers could not be misheard. Thus "Doctor's orders number nine" could not be mistaken for five. Some of the little phrases around each number were there to give the game its familiar feel. "Two little ducks, twenty-two" and "legs eleven" described the appearance of the numbers, and "clickety-click, all the sixes, sixty-six" and similar intonations were part of the tradition that accompanied the game.

I did this for two summers in a row, and discovered how dirty copper coinage can be. I had to wash my hands several times a day to clean off the black from the coins that collected on them. It was great fun, though, and was the first real paying job I had.

Brave Captain Carlsen and the Flying Enterprise

I was eleven, just into my second term at grammar school, when the saga of Captain Kurt Carlsen dominated the headlines for days on end. He was the Danish-born captain of the Flying Enterprise, a ship that under a previous name had seen service in World War II. The ship's cargo shifted in an Atlantic storm, causing the ship to list heavily, in danger of sinking. With his ship at an angle of 45 degrees, Carlsen had evacuated his passengers and crew, but opted to remain and attempt to save his ship. Over the days we all saw front page photographs and newsreel footage of the ship leaning at an ever-increasing angle, making it only about 10 degrees over the water. We later read that it had been carrying, amongst other cargo, 5 tons of zirconium intended for the world's first nuclear powered submarine, the USS Nautilus.

A tug went alongside and managed to attach a tow line, and Carlsen's first mate opted to rejoin the ship to assist his captain. The saga dominated our school conversations as well as the news headlines. Would they make it? For 13 days we all held our breath. He made it into the Channel, with the ship practically on its side, but a fierce storm caused the tug to separate its line to avoid both ships being sunk, and the Flying Enterprise went down only about a mile from safety.

Carlsen was the stuff that heroes are made of. He declined £100,000 for his story from the Daily Express, and half a million dollars from Hollywood, saying, "I don't want an honest seaman's attempt to save his ship used for any commercial purposes." His first mate seems to have been less fastidious, because newspaper advertisements appeared showing him endorsing a brand of woollen cardigans.

Carlsen himself was awarded the honour of a ticker-tape parade through New York, an unheard of honour for a merchant sea captain. He went back to sea, and when he died in 1989 in comparative obscurity, his ashes were scattered, as he had requested, over the spot where the Flying Enterprise had found its last resting place.

Changing the wallpaper

Before wallpaper referred to a computer screen at rest, it described the patterned paper that people pasted onto the walls of their rooms. It was ubiquitous in my childhood, and covered the walls of every room in the house. When I was old enough to choose the wallpaper I wanted for my bedroom, I was allowed to have one wall in a very exotic multi-coloured pattern that was quite pricey, provided I had a fairly plain, low-cost paper on the other three walls.

Wallpaper was replaced periodically because of wear and tear, with scuff marks and spills gradually degrading its appearance. The main cause of its replacement, however, were the coal fires that burned in every grate before central heating caught on. The smoke from those open fires spread into the home at times and gradually built up a layer of grime that disfigured the paper and dulled its appearance.

Replacing the paper was a major operation. The paper on the walls had to be soaked before it could be scraped off with a flat bladed tool, and the replacement paper soaked in paste on a trestle table before it could be carefully put in place on the now bare wall. It then had to be wet on its outside, as posters are when they are pasted up, so it would dry without wrinkles or bubbles. The upheaval sometimes went on for days.

Wallpaper is still used, of course, but I rarely see it because many people tend to use emulsion paint on their walls these days. I read that wallpaper "is making a comeback," but I have not noticed that in the circles I move in.

Eating at the Gandy Dancer in an old train station

I was a guest of William Buckley, host of the US TV show, "Firing LIne" and editor of “National Review.” He took us to the Gandy Dancer, a restaurant at Ann Arbor in Michigan. It was famous for its food, but perhaps more famous for its ambience. It was converted from an old railway station no longer in use. The term gandy dancer was a slang term for a type of railroad track layer or maintenance worker who worked with a gandy, a long-handled tool, and who worked in co-ordination, like dancers. While the station itself was no longer in use, the tracks alongside it certainly were, just a few feet from the building.

Trains, often long ones, would pass by two or three times during the meal, making a loud noise that shook the whole building. Invariably they would ring their bell when the cab passed right outside the window. Every time this happened, all the diners would put down their knives and forks and applaud with a rousing cheer. The food was excellent, and probably still is, but the atmosphere topped it. The restaurant had decided to trade on the novelty of its location by keeping a railroad theme to its decor. It was one of the most exotic places I've eaten in, and certainly one of the most amusing.

Looking at "the worst slums in Europe"

I was on a train, aged about 20, passing through the Gorbals in Glasgow. This was an area of the city on the South side of the River Clyde. It had seen industrialization and had a very high population density. Poor people were crammed into low quality housing in the form of tenement blocks with poor sanitation and few facilities. It had been described as "the worst slums in Europe" in a famous 1948 article accompanied by a series of images that showed its squalor and poverty. When I saw it just over a decade later, the area was still in an appalling state.  

I was standing in the buffet bar of the train looking out of the window at the spectacle slowly unfolding outside. We passed what seemed like more than a mile of grimy, decaying buildings. There was virtually no colour except dark brown and black. It was depressing and dispiriting, and I was shocked that people had to live amid such squalor and deprivation.

There was a fellow passenger alongside me sipping his beer, and I couldn't resist the urge to comment.

"Isn't that appalling," I remarked.

"Yes," he replied, "and we've German bombers to thank for that."

"But I thought German bombers mostly hit Clydebank rather than Glasgow," I queried.

"Exactly," was his response.

He was alluding in a somewhat macabre way to the fact that many cities in England had seen their run-down city centres laid waste by the constant bombing during the Blitz, and the fact that this had led to their postwar regeneration. Since the Gorbals had not been destroyed, it had not been regenerated.

Brumas the superstar polar bear cub

When I was nine years old an event occurred that gripped the whole nation. In these days of more fragmented and diverse media outlets, it is doubtful that the birth of a baby animal would capture the heart of the nation the way that Brumas did. He was the first polar bear cub to be raised in Britain, and he was sensationally cute and cuddly. I remember his photos everywhere, day after day, and seeing footage of the bear shown in cinema newsreels.  Admissions to the London Zoo went up from 1m to 3m as huge crowds queued up for a glimpse of the animal. The baby Prince Charles, himself just over a year old, was carried through the crowds to see Brumas. 

I was given a bar of white soap in the shape of the white baby bear, with the name Brumas underneath, and I washed and bathed with it for weeks. There were Brumas money boxes on sale, as well as postcards and books, and of course cuddly little white teddy bears in the creature's likeness. He was apparently named after his keepers, Bruce and Sam (with the latter's name inverted).

It was later revealed that Brumas was in fact female, but had been mistakenly reported as male, and was widely thought of as a boy bear until much later. The sad epilogue to the story is that Brumas died only nine years later, achieving only half the average life span a polar bear generally lives for.

Baw Beese Lake

The lake at Hillsdale, where I taught philosophy, featured in many of our recreational activities. It had been named after Chief Baw Beese, head of the 150 or so Potawotamy native Americans who had fished and hunted in its vicinity. A friend had a house on its edge, and in Spring we'd sometimes sip drinks on its porch listening to the chorus of insects that punctuated every evening. In Summer and Autumn it was a setting for lakeside barbecues and small boat sailing. In the bitterly cold Michigan winters the lake would freeze over to a depth of several feet. We'd go jet-skiing over its surface, clad in down-filled jackets and mittens and with scarves pulled tight over our faces. Sometimes I'd go ice-skating with friends, but never far from the edge

Sometimes there was ice fishing. The lake froze so hard that small trucks could be driven out to its middle. A circular hole would be cut through the ice with a mechanical drill and saw, and fishing would be done through the hole. A brazier of coals would be set up to provide some relief from the winter chills. There would be six-packs of beer to while away the time spent waiting for a bite. Against my expectations, fish would often be caught in this way. In all the time I was there I never heard of anyone or anything breaking the thick ice or falling through it.

Superstar rosé

When I returned from the US in 1977, I spent a last summer in St Andrews, renting a small cottage in Argyle Street, one with a lovely walled rose garden at the back. Among the roses was a variety called Superstar, with astonishingly bright pink-orange petals. I made two wines that summer. One was a rose petal wine I christened Superstar rosé, made from those flaming petals. It made an elegant, fragrant rosé wine.  The other was a rhubarb wine, since the rose garden also had a copious supply of rhubarb. The rhubarb wine was very strong, in both taste and alcohol, so I diluted it with soda water, pouring it slowly and carefully so as not to lose much fizz, before tightly sealing each bottle. The result was a sparkling rhubarb wine I dubbed Rubocham. Sometimes after drinking some in the late evening, I would wake up to see a small edging of white on my lips, which may have been a product of oxalic acid in the wine. 

It was a glorious last summer. I left St Andrews in late August, and on the last day of August moved in with my friend Stuart to the flat in London on which I had bought a 13-year lease at a low cost. We moved in and slept in sleeping bags on bare floors with no furniture. I never again made my own wine, perhaps because on that last day of August my life changed forever.

Bang on Delta

Flying home from New Year in the Florida Keys, the second leg was overnight from Charlotte, North Carolina, into London's Heathrow. I was enjoying my champagne in business class, about 45 minutes into the flight, when there was a series of bangs from somewhere in the plane. The pilot came on to tell us that the crew could hear the sounds as well, and were turning the plane back rather than risk flying across the ocean with unexplained noises. It was a somewhat nerve-racking flight back because we didn't know if the wheels would come down. They did, and we landed safely between the fire engines and ambulances astride the runway.

Three hours later we took off again in a new plane with a new crew, but again, 45 minutes into the flight came more loud bangs. We went back again to Charlotte, and I made my second emergency landing in a single night. This time we stayed overnight in an airport hotel, and returned home uneventfully and safely the following night. The explanation given later was that unsecured cargo had moved in the hold, whose contents had been transferred from the first plane to the second, along with the passengers. Some of us had guessed as much.

Aylesbury duck

I helped my friend Harry win a libel suit against the Daily Mirror. Indeed, the story was so blatantly false that they gave him £20,000 rather than take it to court. I declined his offer of a cut because he needed the money to pay for repairs to his mother's roof, but I accepted a dinner at the Café Royal instead. This was a rather splendid building near Piccadilly, famed for its baroque, mirrored dining room, and frequented by many celebrities including Winston Churchill and Noel Coward.

When the menu came, I ordered a starter of Sevruga caviar, a very expensive dish. Harry, realizing this was going to be a great evening, decided to go to town himself by ordering the Aylesbury duck.

"I'm sorry, Sir," he was told, "that dish is only served for two."

"Oh, then I'll have it for two," replied Harry, and did so, eating the whole thing himself. It was a legendary meal, but including wine, it used up less than 2.5% of his award.

The legendary Café closed in 2008, but reopened later, completely refitted as the Café Royal Hotel. I doubt the hotel dining room captures anything like the splendour of the original.

Novelty shop

In the late 1970s, one of the naffest of decades, I acquired a maroon velvet jacket and matching trousers. I thought it would make a good alternative dinner suit to the one I’d bought years before in St Andrews for £7, from the “previously worn” department of Fordyce’s, and was still wearing. But the new set lacked a cummerbund and bow tie. I went to Turnbull and Asser, a famous men’s outfitter in London’s Jermyn Street. I asked if they could make me a matching cummerbund and self-tie bow in grey velvet, which I thought would nicely offset the maroon outfit. The man looked shocked and finally shook his head and suggested I should maybe “try more of a novelty shop, Sir.”

I didn’t, but I did find success at another men’s outfitter nearby. They duly made me a matching set, one that did indeed look good with the maroon velvet suit. I was surprised a few weeks later to receive a letter from Turnbull and Asser, with whom I had left my details, telling me that they had “in error” made the matching grey cummerbund and bow tie I had asked for, and asking me if I wanted to buy it from them. I did so, and thus acquired two sets in differing shades of grey. Both looked good.

Sea-plane to Victoria

One of the highlights of a Mont Pelerin Society conference in Vancouver was the invitation for us all to have lunch with the Governor of Victoria Island. Unfortunately this meant getting up at 6 am for a four-hour bus ride to catch a ferry to the island. After the lunch there was an equally long trip back. Admittedly there was a pause en route to look at some gardens. My colleague, Eamonn, and myself decided this was too much. We discovered there was a sea-plane ride to the island from just around the corner of our hotel at the harbour. Furthermore, it cost only 38 Canadian dollars for the trip.

After a leisurely breakfast, we sauntered to the harbour at 11 am.  It was my first sea-plane ride, and took about 35 minutes to reach the island, where it parked itself right at the water's edge after quite a scenic flight. We strolled up the beach to where the Governor would be speaking in time for the lunch, and then made the same trip back. We watched the conference party arrive on their bus hours later, after 6 pm. It was, of course, satisfying to have saved so much time and trouble, but the ride was also thrilling in itself, especially the take-off and landing on the water amid a plume of spray.

Three Bears Club

Most of us do silly things as students, and I was no exception. I joined with like-minded mischief-makers to found the Three Bears Club at St Andrews. We met in each other's rooms about once a fortnight, taking it in turn to host drinks, and we would plot mischief. Indeed, the whole purpose of the club was to stir up the university with elaborate and very public pranks. We all took absurdly pretentious titles such as "Head Polemicist" and "Grand Inquisitor," but our hallmark was technical accuracy. The plot had to look real if anyone took the trouble to check it out.

It was rather silly fun. We produced spoofs of the student newspaper and the student literary magazine, and we made a silent 1920s-style movie.  One of our events was a huge sherry party with hundreds present including the Lord Provost of St Andrews. Of the hosts, the infamous Three Bears, however, there was no sign. We mingled with the guests as if we were guests ourselves, and listened as the Lord Provost praised the Three Bears for helping to cement town-gown relationships.

There was an epilogue when we called the members together 25 years later for a reunion dinner at Rufflets Hotel in St Andrews, and laughed ourselves silly recollecting the humour of our student days.

Con Son prison island

When I went on a fact-finding visit to Vietnam in 1974 as part of a US Congressional team, the war was still on, but the South Vietnamese were fighting it without the Americans. The North Vietnamese Army was to conquer the South within a year, but our mission then was to assess if the South could hold out. We visited different parts of the South, travelling everywhere by military helicopter. On one occasion the general in charge treated us to a picnic just South of the demilitarised zone, with the North Vietnamese guns right across the river. Since there was a UN observation post just down the river, he had worked out that we would be safe.

One of the strangest visits we made was to Con Son prison island, where brutal treatment of prisoners had been alleged. On the notice board inside the entrance hall the names of the prison governors over the years were lettered. In the mid 50s they suddenly changed from French to Vietnamese, but the prison continued as before. There was no sign of brutality, or indeed talk of it when we spoke freely with prisoners. The infamous "tiger cages," depicted as rank pits of iniquity in the US press, were in fact above ground, with their chain-holding points long corroded and rusted.

One prisoner I spoke with ashamedly told me he had killed a friend in a drunken fight. I bought an elegant dragon's head walking stick he had carved, with a bullet casing as its tip. I later gave it to Dr Rhodes Boyson, an English MP friend, who was delighted with it. "Made by a murderer, you say?" he queried with delight.