The Times - UK (2020-11-14)

38 1GM Saturday November 14 2020 | the times

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very sorry if anyone ruined their

supper. On the chilli front, though, we

checked with the chef and are

reassured that the quantity is correct.

Kashmiri chilli powder, which the

recipe specified, is mild and mainly

used for its brilliant colour. If anyone

found themselves in difficulties they

were probably using a regular chilli

powder. Chilli powders apparently

come in all kinds of hot, and if you’re

trying a new recipe it would be wise

to stick to what the chef prescribes.

Revel in the detail

L

ast week I mentioned that an

exploding penis implant had

been deemed too much

information in an obituary. Nick

Winstone-Cooper raised a similar

point, albeit slightly less lurid.

“Your obituaries are consistently

beautifully written and very

informative. However, in the last

week the obituaries of Sir Sean

Connery and Geoffrey Palmer have

told me things I really didn’t need to

know —when they lost their

virginity. Sometimes, just sometimes,

less information will suffice.”

“Sorry to be pedantic,” writes

Andrew Hersom from Hull, “but

your headline says ‘Vaccine

milestone heralds normal life by next

spring’. Next spring means March/

April 2022, but the article itself refers

to normality by ‘the spring’, which is

March/April 2021. Hope this helps.”

That is champion pedantry indeed

— I doubt that anybody, of even the

most pessimistic persuasion, was

confused before he raised the issue.

report from the Front he filed

luminous descriptions of the bird life

on the battlefields — blackcaps and

warblers rebuilding their bombed out

nests and, “sometimes in course of a

heavy cannonading the skylarks,

high in the sky through which the

shells are hurtling, go singing as if

their ambition were to drown the

noise of the bombardment”.

After Perry Robinson’s death in

1930, his obituary recounted how he

and a friend had gone on a butterfly

hunt during a lull in the fighting in

the hopes of finding purple

emperors. None being forthcoming,

they persuaded friends in London to

send over some females, which they

put in a cage in the garden of the

press chateau. Within 24 hours the

garden was full of males.

Hot and bothered

W

hen I’m cooking I take the

view that if one ingredient

in a recipe isn’t to hand,

something else will probably do. One

of our cookery columns this week

proves that this laissez faire attitude

could end in tears or, worse,

perspiration and a raging thirst. We

ran some recipes in the Magazine

from a much-lauded Indian

restaurant, after which Martin

Kimber wrote: “We believe you have

some wrong quantities in the

ingredients. In one sauce for just four

people you list 2tbsp of salt and 2tbsp

of Kashmiri chilli powder. Surely

that’s far too hot — and unhealthy.”

He was right about the salt. We

meant to say two teaspoons, and we’re

W

ednesday is fashion

day in Times2, a fact

that seems to have

bypassed Tim

Garner, who turned

his critical eye on the section this

week. “The cover has four women on

it, and there are five on pages 2 and 3.

Turn over for no fewer than nine

women extolling the virtues of, wait

for it, a white suit! Turn over again

and there are five women, promoting

various items of fashion. I thought the

idea was for women to be taken

seriously, but this is vacuous. The

articles are pretty much all written by

women too. What is going on? Are

or, hideously, “pantsuit” in American

parlance, was also politically

charged. In fact the whole outfit was

larded with symbolism.

It’s a shame that fashion can still

be so easily dismissed as vacuous

when, as Kamala Harris

demonstrated, it can speak volumes.

And it’s great to look at. Long live

Times2 Wednesdays I say.

Bringing war to life

C

aroline Coy wrote: “I enjoy the

Archive section each day, but

today’s piece, The Unknown

Dead, was the most moving and

beautifully written that I have read. I

wonder who wrote it.”

This extract, from The Times of

November 11, 1920, was just the last

section of a much longer, unsigned

piece marking the burial of the

Unknown Warrior. It was headlined

“What we know of him” and with its

series of pen portraits of war

casualties could only have been

written by someone with extensive

first-hand knowledge of life — and

death — at the Front. The writer was

Sir Harry Perry Robinson, a war

correspondent for The Times

throughout the First World War. In

this role he covered the fall of

Antwerp in 1914, filed from Ostend,

Holland and Serbia, from 1915-1916,

then for most of the rest of the war

at British HQ in France. He was a

passionate naturalist, and before the

war had contributed articles to The

Times about the larger mammals of

the United States. When there was

nothing much of a military nature to

Symbolic outfit

shows fashion

isn’t wearing thin

you trying to exclude men altogether?

I have nothing against feminists per

se, but I thought what we all wanted

was equality, not to swap roles.”

I don’t know how he failed to

notice Prince Harry and Sathnam

Sanghera in those pages — perhaps

they count as honorary women —

but he’s right on one thing, equality

would be nice. The white suit in

question was the one worn by

Kamala Harris when she gave her

first speech as vice-president-elect

last weekend. There was some po-

faced reaction to our coverage. “It is

thoroughly disappointing to see your

headline featuring Kamala Harris’s

clothing choice,” one email read, the

writer being so disappointed that she

failed to read any further. “Not only”,

she wished to inform us, “is Harris

the first female vice-president, but

she also wore that suit to represent

women’s suffrage.” Yes, that was

exactly the point our fashion editor

Anna Murphy made in the article.

Not to mention that the trouser suit

Ros e

Wild

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