How we used to eat

Poor George Borrow is stuck in a meagre hotel in Pentraeth, Ynys Môn, in 1862. They don't get 'proper' meat very often, and so he's stuck with Box Harry:

Those whose employers were in a small way of business, or allowed them insufficient salaries, frequently used to 'box Harry', that is, have a beef-steak, or mutton-chop, or perhaps bacon and eggs, as I am going to have, along with tea and ale instead of the regular dinner of a commercial gentleman, namely, fish, hot joint and fowl, pint of sherry, tart, ale and cheese, and bottle of old port, at the end of all'. (Wild Wales, 203)

And that's what travelling salesmen got to eat. I'm going home to do something miserable with a leek. So much for progress…

I probably won't be online tomorrow - my Northern Irish and French chums Gareth and Stéphanie are paying a visit. Gareth, as a good loyalist, will no doubt exercise his right to march through my living room while I protest powerlessly from the bathroom.

Just for yow

An extract from George Borrow's 1862 Wild Wales, just for the inhabitants of the Black Country and Birmingham:

At Birmingham station I became a modern Englishman, enthusiastically proud of modern England's science and energy; that station alone is enough to make one proud of being a modern Englishman. Oh, what an idea does that station with its thousand trains dashing off in all directions, or arriving from all quarters, give of modern English science and energy. My modern English pride accompanied me all the way to Tipton; for all along the route there were wonderful evidences of English skill and enterprise; in chimneys high as cathedral spires, vomiting forth smoke, furnaces emitting flame and lava, and in the sound of gigantic hammers, wielded by steam, the Englishman's slave. After passing Tipton, at which place one leaves the great working district behind, I became for a considerable time a yawning, listless Englishman, without pride, enthusiasm, or feeling of any kind…

I'm not surprised. Next stop from Tipton is The Dark Place, home of The Hegemon! Birmingham was indeed an industrial powerhouse - but the workers came from all over the world, particularly Wales and Ireland. The industry is gone now - between Birmingham and Tipton is a wasteland of abandoned and demolished factories, the only vomit that of revellers - usually Gary O'D - drowning their sorrows, the only hammer the one I (literally) used on my wall on Friday night in a fruitless attempt to get my neighbour to turn his music down…