November : 2025 : Essays in Idleness

November 11, 2025

A note on food

In memory of Thermopylae, Salamis, Plataea; & Vimy Ridge

“An army moves on its stomach” (I wrote, some years ago), but it is hard to find anywhere in history an example of an army that cared much for the gourmand. Actually, I misstate. It is hard to find examples of officers who cared for what the troops were eating — so long as it was nutritious and sufficient and did not contribute to mutiny. For the most part military food has been indistinguishable from prison food, and presented in the same spirit.

This is partly understandable. War is not a picnic. I used to find it difficult to cook in the proximity of small, squalling children; I suppose the rattle of gunfire, the explosion of incendiary bombs, and the whistle of incoming mortars might be equally distracting to the higher sort of culinary exercise.

But the circumstances of a field kitchen are not wholly grim. Dried herbs and spices are very light to carry, and wherever one happens to be on campaign, there are the fruits of that countryside. Moreover, as most old soldiers will recall, and the readers of their diaries and memoirs in their absence, most days are not that exciting. There is plenty of time to think about food. There are long periods of boredom and waiting with nothing to look at but the sky; interspersed with short periods of pant-shitting terror.

Suppose, for a moment, a bit of imagination on the part of quartermasters and cooks, and a semi-intelligent rationing authority — a war might be conducted with a bit of dash. There could be rivalry between regimental kitchens, or between the galleys in His Majesty’s fleet. Food could be made a powerful inducement in the recruitment drives.

There are some little sparks like this, in history. In the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale, that extraordinary lantern-bearing angel, procured the voluntary help of Alexis Soyer, the leading London hotel chef of the day, to advise her on the organization of field hospital kitchens. These quickly became the place to eat — almost worth getting wounded. M. Soyer applied his very broad mind to analyzing the limitations of field cookery, then turning each limitation into a strength. (See his: Culinary Campaign in the Crimea, 1857.)

Morale is not a small thing in the conduct of war. A hot meal delivered in defiance of logistics in the cold muddy wet of the hideous trenches, comes to remind us of victory, in the very face of the enemy.

Instead, our military food traditions seem to descend from the Scots — those bold, hardy warriors advancing through Northumbria in the XIVth century, without baggage carts. In Froissart’s Chronicle we read of their diet: under-done meat from rustled local cattle, thin oatmeal cakes, and river water.

Perhaps that’s the way it has got to be. Certainly it is the way it was, from what veterans have told me (including my papa, and his papa).

So in remembering the men, and women, who served, we might delay breakfast today until past eleven. Perhaps then the sludge should be eaten from a tin bowl, with a slab of stale bread (no butter): not from any desire to fast, but to help us to remember them; and those for whom such a meal was their last, this side of paradise.

November 7, 2025

Promises & guarantees

There can be only two points-of-view on guarantees and promises: his who gives one, and his who takes one; though the views may be similar. For instance, both may be, and generally are, naïve. Acceptance may be personal, or may be “impersonal” or collective, but in either case, one is usually foolish to believe. And those believing only in themselves are the most foolish. In God we may trust, but in priestly or institutional accounts of the will of God we should “trust, but verify.” After a lifetime of broken promises, some of which were underwritten by legal or quasi-legal guarantees (marriage, for instance), perhaps I should know. Persons, even bankers and insurance agents, cannot be trusted, which is why the more respectable of them contrive to have something to lose.

As for commitments from the Vatican, … don’t get me started.

What will it actually cost us if we break our promises? By which I mean, will it ruin us? Can we, as it were, afford to lose a bet? And the other party, who takes the bet, does he take responsibility for it? He may deserve to lose. Did he calculate what he could afford, and was he prepared, like Kipling, to “never breathe a word about his loss.”

We have courts, and once had relatively fair ones. So long as this remained the case, it was possible to hope for a little justice, but even way back then, to hope for more than a little was an act of foolishness. The same was true in capital cases, and is true today. In Nigeria and dozens of other countries, the reader may slaughter whomever he pleases, without consequence, so long as he is practising a murderous religion.

A serious purpose of the law is to allow us to forgive murderers, and other felonious types. The notion that a serious crime is never committed, except incidentally against an individual victim, but always against civilization, represented by the state, has been with us whenever we were civilized. When we weren’t, we would have no alternative to — purely private — acts of revenge. Liberalism, as John Henry Newman and others have suggested, is destructive of civilization.

November 4, 2025

Depleasuring

Among the pleasures of old age — a physical condition I had the honour of entering into, during February of 2021 — is that one is given the opportunity to give up several of one’s pleasures. This isn’t offered as a choice, however. One simply cannot do what one was, perhaps habitually, doing before; although in some cases an old pleasure is replaced by a new one. I used to love long walks, for instance. Now I do short walks, followed by a fall, and then, all the excitement of getting up again. Since my son got me a “walker” — or “stroller” as I call it — this pleasure, too, has almost departed. But one gets used to not falling over, as I have now discovered.

A truly cosmic pleasure, in my former life, was reading; and somewhat ancillary to that, shopping in “beukstores.” Indeed, when compelled to live in some over-populous city, I would quickly establish where the beukstores were located, and visit them often during my daily, long-distance walks. Two features of my life assisted this compulsion. The other was my freedom from even short-term employment. For some reason, and it began long ago, I had never thought of applying for a job. Leisure was preferable. Jobs were simply supplied to me, miraculously, whenever it seemed I might need one. Indeed, sometimes they were forced upon me, by the terminally well-intended, with moral arguments as discouraging as decisive.. For I was born into that class of men who simply won’t “sign on” to the dole. (This bespeaks white privilege.)

For nearly five years I have not been in a beukstore, except when some saintly person gives me a lift; for I live in Parkdale — Vallis Hortensis as I call it — a part of this vastly populous city in which there are no beukstores; and in which none is conceivable, because no one reads anything intentionally, except filthy trash. (There used to be some who could read a newspaper.)

Being without new beuks is certainly an advantage, which the Catholic Church once recognized, for she created the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, to help her members stay away from works deemed heretical or immoral. A quick glance at universal modern conditions will tell you it is gone, and the Wicked Pedia will tell you it was “cancelled” in 1966. By coincidence, even though not yet a Catholic, I decided not to obtain beuks published after the moon landing in 1969; for it seemed that the readable and interesting ones had already appeared.

I had already noticed that the selection of beuks, generally, had much contracted in the beukstores, to make room for gifts and beverages, so I suppose that my not being able to visit them is no great loss. For now that one is old, one realizes, … what?