All that comes with it

When we were over in the USA earlier this year visiting our friends Greg and Deb they let us have a look at some of the travel guides to England they had kicking around the house. Rather predictably the books were pretty London centric. That was fine; I was expecting nothing more. Virtually the entirety of the British media is London centric so it would be unreasonable to ask an American tourist guidebook to buck the trend.

What did irritate me however was that the only entry for West Yorkshire (an area encompassing two of England’s biggest cities and home to a population of 2.1 million) was for Haworth - a small village near Keighley.

Now I’ve been to Haworth and trust me, it’s not worth it. The reason it is internationally famous however is that it was the home to Charlotte, Anne, and Emily Brontë; authors of Jane Eyre, Agnes Grey, and Wuthering Heights respectively. There is a museum dedicated to their lives and legacy in the Parsonage where they used to live. I’ve been there too and it has won my coveted Worlds Most Boring Museum Award for several years in a row (even beating Holmfirth’s Postcard Museum). Not everything about the Brontës is boring however. Less well known than the Brontë sisters is the Brontë brother.

———-

Branwell Brontë was the only male sibling in the Brontës, and was regarded by the family as the most talented of the bunch. After providing him with a classical education at home, his father sent him to London to attend the Royal Academy, but he never actually turned up for enrollment - choosing to roam the streets of the capital spending all his money on booze.

Between the ages of 21 and 25 Branwell had a variety of jobs, ranging from portrait painter through private tutor to railway stationmaster. However he appears to have performed pretty abysmally in all of them. He was sacked from his tutoring job for fathering a child by one of the maidservants, and dismissed from his stationmaster’s position for financial incompetence.

At the age of 26 Branwell went on to take up yet another tutoring position, but was again sacked. This time for having an affair with the mother of his pupil, a lady called Mrs Robinson. You would have thought her name would have given him a bit of a clue really. Branwell maintained an infatuation with Mrs Robinson throughout the rest of his life. When her husband later died he was hopeful that their relationship could be rekindled, but he was spurned by the newly widowed lady who had no desire to marry a penniless tutor.

A broken man, Branwell returned to the family home and sunk into alcoholism and addiction to opiates. In the years that followed he descended ever deeper into mental illness, causing his family to despair of him. He became erratic, dangerous, and delusional; at one point even setting fire to his own bed.

Finally, aged just 31, he succumbed to tuberculosis, the same disease that would eventually wipe out the entire of the Brontës aside from the father. Throughout his life Branwell had stated that “as long as there was life there was strength of will to do what it chose”*. And so to prove this he insisted on dying standing up, propped on the mantelpiece for support; his pockets filled with old letters from his beloved Mrs Robinson.

His last words are reported to be “All my life I have done nothing either great or good”. To be fair it must be pretty tough to grow up in a family full of literary giants.

The Bermuda Triangle is all very well and good, but it is hardly a boon to mankind. I’m sure giant squid surfacing and dragging passing shipping into Davy Jones’ locker is very exciting if you are into that sort of thing, but give me Yorkshire’s Rhubarb Triangle any day of the week.

Leeds, Bradford and Wakefield mark the corners of the world famous Rhubarb Triangle (what do you mean you’ve never heard of it). Throughout the area the plant is grown in special forcing sheds and kept in perpetual darkness in order to enhance the flavor - a bit like veal, only with vegetables.

Rhubarb’s finest hour was in the second world war, where due to rationing children were often given a sprig along with a bag of sugar in lieu of sweets or chocolate. The plant was also frequently used to cut with more scarce fruits in order to bulk up recipes. There was even a factory in Bradford which produced wooden replica raspberry pips to place in rhubarb jam to fool the public that they were getting the pure stuff.

Unfortunately I learnt all this too late to attend the annual Wakefield Rhubarb festival. But I shall be their next year - waving my rhubarb stick above my head with pride.

Holmfirth, the small town where I grew up is now best known for being the location of Last of the Summer Wine, the longest running comedy series in the world.

The town’s relationship with the media doesn’t just revolve around programs about three old men rolling down a hill in a bath on wheels however. In 1898 a local firm named Bamforths began creating moving pictures and a film industry sprung up in the area which was a serious rival to that of Hollywood. In fact the process of editing is thought to have been invented by Bamforths in the 1899 film the kiss in the tunnel. What’s even more interesting is that the name Holmfirth (or Holm Frith as the town is referred to in some ancient documents) translates literally into Holly Wood. Well according to the mighty Wikipedia anyway.

I actually spent most of my childhood living in the Bamforth’s mansion, or at least a third of it - the house was split into three more modest homes. We had the middle section, and had two sets of stairs, one the grand elaborate main staircase covered in
ornamentation and coving, and the other an incredibly steep and narrow set of servants’ stairs. My bedroom still had the wires from the butler bell calling system in place, although unfortunately they no longer worked.

I had a webchat with Greg the other day. In between Greg doing duck impressions and entertaining me by playing an out of tune ukulele we had a conversation about badgers. Apparently they are the regional dish of Wisconsin or something. Whatever their significance they are very prevalent in the state - with everything from the local sports teams to health care systems named after them. Kerry and I are due to go and visit Greg and Deb this March, and he assured me that when we left we would leave laden down with a wide assortment of badger related merchandise.

I expressed surprise that badgers were even to be found in America, the Atlantic Ocean being a little wide for them to swim with their stumpy little legs. Greg assured me that they were native to the US and we left it at that; moving on to more important subjects - such as Greg’s theory that the older he gets the more often he sits on his testicles.

Something about the whole badger thing niggled me, and so the day after I did a little investigating. what I discovered shocked me to my very core. People of America, your government has been lying to you. The animals you have been informed are badgers are no such thing, they are forgeries. Here is the proof:

I’m not sure what the creature on the right actually is, I suspect it’s some kind of dyed wombat. The sinister agency behind the conspiracy are no doubt the same ones who have convinced you that aluminium is spelt aluminum or that Are you being served and The Benny Hill show are funny. I’ve seen X-Files, I know what goes on.

Write to your congressman, your senator, even the President himself. Demand that these cheap knock off badgers be replaced with the genuine articles. And while you are at it, you might as well demand that baseball be renamed rounders, basketball renamed netball, and if you do insist on calling that game football then the players should be made to stop picking up the damn ball.

Forget King Kong, Godzilla, and Jaws. Disregard Genghis Khan, Vlad the Impaler, and Ivan the Terrible. It is Thomas Midgley Jr. who can claim the rather dubious honour of being the most destructive being that ever lived.

I’m sure he never intended to hold this position, in fact I’m pretty convinced he only wanted to act for the benefit of mankind, but nevertheless he has caused a great deal of damage.

Thomas was born Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania in 1889. His father, Thomas Midgley Sr. was an inventor and Jr. wanted to follow in his footsteps. He enrolled in Cornell University and graduated in 1911 with a degree in mechanical engineering.

He went to work at General Motors where he was placed in charge of investigating ways in which to reduce the annoying and ultimately destructive “knocking” within the cylinders of the internal combustion engine. By a process of trial and error Thomas discovered that adding lead to petrol reduced the temperature and pressure within the cylinder, therefore suppressing the knock. General Motors aggressively marketed this new type of fuel and leaded petrol soon became the industry standard.

The process of adding lead to fuel was very toxic, and a number of workers at production facilities died of lead poisoning. This pales in significance however when compared to the global impact that leaded petrol has had on the quality of our air. It is estimated that as many as 5,000 people in the USA alone died every year from lead-related heart disease prior to leaded petrol’s phaseout in 1986. One study claimed that lead pollution damaged the intelligence of 10% of British children, rising to 17% in USA and it was conservatively estimated that a total of about 68 million young children had toxic exposures to lead from gasoline between 1927 and 1987.

Not the best invention in the world then.

In 1930 Thomas Midgley Jr turned his attention from cars to fridges. Seeking to replace the various toxic or explosive chemicals that were then used for refrigeration Thomas came up with dichlorodifluoromethane, better known as CFCs.

As you know, CFCs are thought to be the main cause of the hole in the ozone layer, which if it continues to expand unchecked will expose the earth and everyone on it to highly harmful carcinogenic UV rays.

Again, not the most beneficial invention to grace the earth.

In 1941 at the age of 51 Thomas Midgley Jr contracted Polio, a condition that left him severely disabled. In order to cope with his disability Thomas invented an intricate system of ropes and pulleys to help lift him out of bed. In 1944 he became entangled in his device’s mechanisms and strangled himself to death.

Three strikes and you’re out.

NASA Ozone Hole Watch