Post and Mail

I was sneaking around the new Postal Museum at Mount Pleasant when I discovered that, technically, there's a difference between post and mail, something that in my innocence I had never suspected.

The word post in the sense of letters sent in envelopes is actually the same word that you have in post in the sense of job, or guard post, or indeed leaving your post. They all come from the Latin postum, which meant put in place. When a soldier is posted somewhere, he is positioned there by an officer.

Back in the sixteenth century the a system was set up allowing the king to communicate quickly with all parts of England. To do this horses and riders were posted at various intervals along the main roads. When the king wanted to send a letter it was given to a rider who would gallop along to the next post where new horses were posted, the letter could be handed over and thus the whole system of posts ended up being called the post.

This leads to the interesting question of what has actually happened when a postman abandons his post, or how uncomfortable it is for a high-flying executive to be posted to New York.

Obviously, horses can't swim and so the whole postal system was just within Britain. If you wanted to send a letter overseas, to far-flung exotic places like Holland or Guernsey, you had to put it on a ship. A ship would carry a bag of letters, and as an old word for a bag was mail, these were the mail ships and the letters they carried were in the mail, and eventually they were just called the mail.

So domestic letters were post, and letters sent abroad were mail. This distinction has now fallen into the well of forgetfulness, and it's probably not helped by the existence of e-mail and blog posts.

Anyway, it does lead us forward to Alfred Harmsworth and the education acts of the 1880s. These brought in universal literacy in Britain, which meant everybody was able to read newspapers. This led to a boom in newspapers and the newspapers needed names. Alfred Harmsworth founded the Daily Mirror in 1904 and explained that "I intend it to be really a mirror of feminine life as well on its grave as on its lighter sides". The Mirror, you see, was originally aimed solely at women.

Alfred Harmsworth also founded the Daily Mail in 1896, and if you buy a copy today, and turn to page 60 you'll find a review of A Short History of Drunkenness: How, why, where and when humankind has got merry from the Stone Age to the present. It's by a chap called Mark Forsyth and is available in all good bookshops for a mere £12.99. Apparently it's very good. According to the review it's "astonishing" and "a book of some brilliance".

I think you probably ought to buy it.

You can read the review online here. And you can buy the book online from these people:

Amazon
Blackwells
Book Depository
Waterstones

The Inky Fool makes an important delivery.

A Short History of Drunkenness is Out Today

Quick, run to the bookshops! A Short History of Drunkenness is out today. And it's got a beautiful cover. And it tells you about ancient Sumerian pubs and Chinese lakes filled with wine and Viking mead-halls and Wild West Saloons and Egyptian orgies and mechanical cats that sell gin.

It's now available: available in all good bookshops, probably available in some evil bookshops. Or you can buy it over the internet from these lovely people:

Amazon
Blackwells
Book Depository
Waterstones

Or you can request it for Christmas, which is coming, or you can buy it for Christmas for all your friends and relations. For that matter you can buy it for your enemies. Margaret Atwood says that A Short History of Drunkenness is "Highly suitable for Xmas!" But it can be obtained now, in November, and it would probably work very well for Guy Fawkes Night or Thanksgiving or The Feast of Winefride, which is tomorrow.

So you'd better hurry.

According to the Oxford Dictionary of Saints the life of St Winefride was a "tissue of improbabilities", by which they mean it's untrue. But A Short History of Drunkenness: How, why, where and when humankind has got merry from the Stone Age to the present, is a tissue of improbabilities that are true. It's all been thoroughly researched and fact checked. So when I talk about 150 drunken elephants going on the rampage in India in the 1980s, it actually happened.

So off to the bookshops. They're lovely places.

The Inky Fool offices this morning

Wine Names, West Hampstead and Hubris

A little etymology, a little drink, a little bit of self-aggrandisement. The names of wine are always a little magical and mysterious, and as the job of etymology is to remove all magic and mystery from the world, I thought I would go through the names of some of the most common grapes and explain them.

For example, sauvignon blanc has a certain je ne sais quoi to it, or it does until you realise the sauvignon just means wild. It's cognate with savage, you see. They were just grapes that grew wild and so sauvignon blanc just means wild white.

A pinot is a pine tree, and so pinot noir is black pine and pinot grigio is grey pine.

Chablis means deadwood. However, the name is not direct. There's a town in South Dakota called Deadwood, and there's a town in France called Deadwood, except the French, being French, call it Chablis, because that's the French for Deadwood. The grapes simply come from near there.

The French word for blackbird is merle, and the French word for a little blackbird is merlot. This may be because blackbirds liked to feed on this variety of grape as it grew. Or it could be down to the colour.

Grenache comes from the Spanish Garnacha which in turn is comes from the Italian Vernaccio, which just means common. It's exactly the same root as vernacular, because the vernacular is the common tongue.

Temperanillo means the little early one, because it ripens early.

Muscat just means musky. Oddly enough, it's cognate with nutmeg which is, or was, the nut muscada. It has nothing to do with the capital of Oman, where Muscat means hidden (the city is in the hills). Also, I'm afraid, Shiraz has nothing to do with the Iranian city of Shiraz (even though there are several books that claim it does). Nobody knows where the name shiraz comes from.


There is an Italian town of Montepulciano, but they don't grow montepulciano anywhere nearby. This is a mystery.

However, my location tomorrow evening (Wednesday 1st of November) is not a mystery and never shall be. I shall be giving a talk at West End Lane Books in West Hampstead at 7:30. The talk will be about my new book A Short History of Drunkenness: How, why, where and when humankind has got merry from the Stone Age to the present.

So if you're in North London come along.

You may be wondering whether or not to buy the book. I would refer the confused to the Cambridge historian Professor Peter Frankopan who says:

'Sparkling, erudite and laugh out loud funny. Mark Forsyth is the kind of guide that drunks, teetotallers and light drinkers dream of to explain the ins and outs of alcohol use and abuse since the beginning of time. One of my books of the year. Immensely enjoyable.’

That ought to clear that up. The book is officially released on Thursday. You may buy it in a shop, or you may buy over the Internet from these people:

Amazon
Blackwells
Book Depository
Waterstones

Plonk and a Short History of Drunkenness

Plonk, as in "a bottle of plonk", as in "the cheapest wine on the menu", was, originally, a bottle of plinketty-plonk. And plinketty-plonk was, originally, just a humorous English way of pronouncing the French term vin blanc.

Well, I say English, but I mean Australian. The term is first recorded in that inverted land in 1927. It doesn't pop up in Britain until 1967, when the Daily Telegraph said that:

Surely the word ‘plonk’ is onomatopoeic, being the noise made when a cork is withdrawn from the bottle?

Which tells you something about the Daily Telegraph and perhaps about our post-truth world (did you know that that term post-truth was first recorded in 1992?).

The Australian line makes sense as they have something of a history of wine-making, albeit a stuttering one. The early British settlers (voluntary and otherwise) didn't know much about planting vines, so in 1803 the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Almanac printed some helpful guidelines that they had translated from a French manual. They included lots of instructions about what month to plant in, what month to prune in and so forth, which was was disastrous, as they had forgotten to adjust the French manual for the Southern Hemisphere and the eccentric Australian habit of holding summer in December.

I know all this because I have written a whole book on the history of drunkenness called A Short History of Drunkenness, which will be released in Britain on November the second. It's a tour through the ages looking at how people went about getting drunk in different times and places. If you were in Ancient Egypt and wanted to get stinko where did you go? Who did you go with? What did you drink? How much did you drink? And how did drunkenness fit in to the culture and the mythology and all that sort of stuff.

What was a Wild West Saloon actually like? Or a Viking feast? Or a medieval alehouse?

Anyhow, you should definitely buy it, not because I say so, but because Margaret Atwood says so. So there. She has tweeted of my little book:

Reading: A Short History of Drunkenness, @Inkyfool:Sulphuric acid in the gin? Highly suitable for Xmas! Many synonyms for "drunk."

When greatness descends upon the earth and comes anywhere near me, I come over all giddy, and need a drink.

A Short History of Drunkenness may, can, should and shall be purchased here.

Spengler and the Christmas Tree

A new Age of Miracles is upon us. For those not familiar with the works of Spengler, he had an idea that civilizations work in cycles. You have an Age of Miracles when all is wonderful, the woods are full of elves and it wouldn't surprise you in the slightest to meet a god on the way home.

Then you have the Age of Theology, during which all the sightings of the gods from the Age of Miracles are categorised and analysed and formalised and explained, and generally have all the magic taken out of them. And thus theology leads you to logic and logic leads you to an Age of Science.

In the Age of Science everything is logical and nothing is magical and this, according to Spengler, creates a great human thirst for something divine, which is why the Age of Science suddenly cracks, and the world is plunged back into an Age of Miracles, and the whole jolly cycle can start again.

Spengler used to be terribly fashionable, back during the World Wars when it looked as though civilization was really ending. And then even more so during the Sixties when it looked as though something completely new was starting up. But then the 1980s happened, and it was generally agreed that there would be no new miracles and that Mr Spengler had been wrong.

But now it turns out that Spengler was right. You see, I wrote in A Christmas Cornucopia that all true Christmas trees should contain a snake, because of the Christmas Tree's origin in the Paradise Plays of Medieval Germany. I even mentioned one Mrs Coulson of Swindon, who in the year 2000 found an adder in her tree. I even referred to it as a miracle, but as the last miracle.

Well, I was wrong and Spengler was right. The BBC reports that a lady in Australia has found a highly venomous tiger snake hiding in her Christmas Tree. Clearly a new Age of Miracles has begun. Why it should have begun in Australia, I don't know. Clearly God has a sense of humour.

And in case you were wondering what Christmas in Australia normally looks like, here's an illustration from 1881.

Riddled with kangaroos

N.B. Before anyone else points it out, that was a very, very, very rough summary of Spengler's ideas.

Myrrh, Myra and Father Christmas

It's surprising the number of people who ask me what myrrh is. It's partly to do with having written a book on Christmas, and partly that people just like saying the word.

The answer is that it's a kind of aromatic resin that you get out little thorny trees in the Middle East. The reason that the Magi turned up with a bunch of the stuff is partly that myrrh was just a nice standard gift. It smells good. You can rub it on yourself, or even use it to freshen your breath (in the sad old days before toothpaste). But in Matthew's Gospel, it almost certainly has a more precise meaning.

Gold was a gift for a king, as it symbolizes worldly wealth and power. Frankincense was often used in religious rituals praising God and therefore points out that Jesus is both King and God. And myrrh was used to embalm the dead. This practice goes back to Ancient Egypt, but it continues in the New Testament where, in John's Gospel, Jesus is finally embalmed thus:

And there came also Nicodemus, which at the first came to Jesus by night, and brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about an hundred pound weight. 19v39

So the gift of the Magi was there to signify the little baby's ultimate painful death, which must have been lovely for Mary. Imagine turning up to a baby shower with a shroud.

Anyhow, one place that was very good for harvesting myrrh was in what's now southern Turkey. Indeed, there was a whole city there that was named after its most famous export: Myra. The Bishop of Myra in the early third century AD was called Nicholas, and later he was called Saint Nicholas and later still he was called Sinterklaas, and nowadays we know him as Santa Claus.

That's complete coincidence, of course, but I rather like it. I like the fact that the full proper title of Santa Claus would be Saint Nicholas of Myrrh.

Anyhow, for more such Christmassy curiousities, you can of course snaffle a copy of A Christmas Cornucopia. It's around and about and terribly available from Amazon, Blackwell's, Book Depository, Foyles and Waterstones.

That's the ticket

Santa Claus Ate Father Christmas

Christmas is coming, the geese are getting distinctly plump, and I've written a piece for the Spectator on the origins of Santa Claus and how he devoured the English Father Christmas. You can read the whole thing here.

Also, of course, you can buy my whole book A Christmas Cornucopia: The curious origins of our yuletide traditions from Amazon, Blackwell's, Book Depository, Foyles and Waterstones, or indeed from any good bookshop (and some evil ones).

And for those wondering what the illustration is, that's Father Christmas in 1653.