Tag: garden

A Few Snippets Here Celebrating Spring- Eternally a Time of Hope

The Cottage Gardener

Daffodils

Near where I live in Dulwich, at the Lordship Lane end of Friern road is a memorial to some civilians including children, who were killed by the infamous doodlebug bombs, whilst waiting for a bus during World War 2.

It’s a forgotten spot with a few small trees and scruffy grass where the buses wait before they return to central London. But in spring, at the time of greatest hope as life renews again in its cycle, it erupts with a beautiful display of golden miniature daffs. A fitting tribute to those innocent people that died there.

Despite daffodils being the national symbol of Wales, albeit a relatively new one it is Cornwall that is synonomous with daffodils in my mind, at least. They are still widely grown there commercially because the mild climate allows them to flower early for shipment to other parts of the UK. Indeed, the biggest daffodil farm in the world is opposite St Michael’s Mount near Penzance (4000 acres). The industry did take a bit of a battering during the 2nd World War when food production took centre stage and many different varieties of daffodil were thrown out into the hedgerows. Famously, in the Tamar valley near Plymouth the daffodil went the same way as mining and disappeared from the region with the wilding daffodils on the sides of the road the only reminder.

Further west in Cornwall, near Penzance whilst walking the coastal path between Mousehole and Lamorna Cove I was pleasantly surprised, in early March, to see many daffodils in the hedgerows flowering in the early spring sunshine with the more petite purple violets (with their faint old lady scent) skulking below. As Ted Hughes put it

‘ What a fleeting glance of the everlasting daffodils are…’

The sea is azure blue in Cornwall and the smash and grab of the raw Atlantic Ocean against the toothed cliffs is arresting. I’m sure John Le Carre thought so as he wrote in his cottage above the cliffs in Lamorna Cove. This pilgrimage of sorts to the place where some of the most profound dialogue I have read about human nature, love and the sad reality of life was something I had always wanted to do. And there were some stunning plants such as camellias in the steep sided valley leading to the cove but sadly the locals in the pub The Lamorna Wink were tight lipped about the real David Cornwell.

Anyway, Daffodils or Narcissi are named after the Greek god Narcissus because they seem to peer downwards, like Narcissus in his pool, and are so gay and bright that they probably would fall in love with themselves if they saw their own reflection like Narcissus. Perhaps that is why in the Granada production of Brideshead Revisited (after Sebastien is sick in Charles Ryder’s rooms) as an apology he fills his room with many different types of daffodils. Probably an appropriate symbol of homosexual love.

As Charles Ryder said he had been warned of the dangers of these rooms by his Cousin Jasper but said-

‘there were gillyflowers by his window that on warm summer evenings filled the room with scent…..‘

By gillyflower he means a scented flower but I’d always imagined he meant wallflowers which have their own connotations in courtship where it is used as a title for a number books in a type of whimsical romantic book of which there is a whole shelf at Dulwich library with names such ‘How to woo a wallflower.’

I have glanced through these books and given the content I can still flatter myself that if such dross gets published I may yet be a successful author even if my books are only read (as George Orwell put it) by desperate spinsters and the wives of fat tobacconists.

Madchester in the Spring Sunshine

When I told a friend that I was going on holiday to Manchester he looked puzzled. ‘Why?’ He said ‘To pay £100 a night for a B and B to watch the rain fall?’

Not to sound like Andy Burnham in a pitch to Michael Gove in order to get a few more quid for the levelling up fund but Manchester really is a great place now. Cosmopolitan, tolerant and even beautiful. So that rain cloud that brought the satanic mills to Manchester has now turned into an amazing rainbow of community although Im not sure Mancunians would put it quite like that.

Anyway when I arrived in Manchester in April the sun was shining and I could see the cherry blossom in bloom round the compact but beautiful cathedral in the centre of Old Manchester from my hotel window.

The hotel is quite famous because the IRA have tried to blow it up twice. The bar downstairs is certainly not the sort of place I would linger although in the morning they did a damn good Eggs Benedict.

Obviously the hotel does not attract the most salubrious characters either as they asked for a picture of my credit card to secure my stay and were really disappointed when they discovered that my bank, also for security do not display my credit number on the card.

The room looked good in the pictures but they had only wallpapered one bit of the wall…conveniently the bit in the photo and the windows and bathroom were not in good condition at all. At least if I had done a Liam Gallagher and thrown the TV out the window and used the wallpaper as toilet paper it wouldn’t have been very expensive to replace them.

There was also a surreal moment when I was locked out of the hotel because they lock the front door to the hotel rooms as a security measure. What they failed to consider was that the stairs to the hotel were accessible from the bar area so all you had to was walk round from there. So I was let in by a roguish, pumped man who had nothing to do with the hotel and was just drinking in the bar. It was a bit like the scene from the film Snatch (2000) when the two black men in it hold up a bookies, shoot themselves and then get trapped behind a security door until the larger than life Tyrone comes to see what they are doing because he is their getaway driver and finds the door easily pushed open.

But there are plenty of other diversions in Manchester aside from the gay quarter which is ironically on Canal Street with a memorial to the brilliant (and incidentally gay) code breaker Alan Turing who was shamefully treated by the British government and was forced into committing suicide because of his sexuality.

There are also a number of beautiful Victorian buildings such as the University and Victorian baths near Oxford road, Bury Market and its black pudding, Salford and Coronation street with Morrissey’s Salford Lads club, Chorlton( posh Manchester) where more Guardian newspapers are sold than anywhere else. Finally there is Cheetham’s library where Karl Marx and Frederich Engels met and discussed the plight of the working man in Manchester when it was the centre of the industrial world. At that time in the golden age of empire it was run by the ironic collaboration of Jews and Germans, centred around the Cheetham Hill area of central Manchester, just behind Victoria station.

Cheetham’s library itself looks so old and creepy that the BBC adaption of The Tractath Middoth was set here in the 2013 which is the story of a cursed book that two relatives seek to obtain or retain their inheritance.

The most impressive feature of Manchester is the new garden near the cathedral which remembers those martyrs, mostly young people, who were tragically murdered by a suicide bomber in the 02 arena just outside Manchester in 2017.

I did shed a tear or two at the immaculately tended and tastefully planted 0 shaped memorial there for the pity of human existence because we never seem to stop hating and killing each other for so little reason.

Tulipmania

Mike Dash has written a fantastic book about the craze for tulips that gripped the Netherlands in the 17th century called Tulipmania which made some people fabulously wealthy and ruined others. He tells the story of the auction at Alkmaar in the North of the Netherlands where an orphanage auctioned off its collection of tulip bulbs for a fortune at the height of the boom. It is considered the first financial bubble of modern times and is thus still part of the syllabus for junior members of staff in the financial services industry.

But Dash also talks about the origins of the tulip bulbs in central Asia and how the Turks took it from Tienshan mountains in that region and how it became one of the most important flowers in Islam because of its tolerance of heat and cold and its beauty. Dash claims its virus streaked flowers were more beautiful than any modern hybrid.

The reason it is revered in the East is because it bows its head to the sky, seemingly in humility to God, which is a particularly evocative image. The original flowers were red and thus a symbol of undying love as it was said they sprung up from where a man killed himself after hearing his lover was dead.

And so it is natural that it would be in the gardens of heaven where faithful Muslims would live in the most beautiful gardens drinking the wine they were forbidden on earth passed to them by their own personal harem. As tulips have to be tended by gardeners it was stated in the oral tradition of the prophet Muhammed that all gardeners would go to heaven, which I am naturally delighted to hear.

But we also have our holy plants in Christendom. One particularly unusual one is the particular hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna ‘Biflora’) which grows on the hills at Glastonbury and flowers at Christmas as well as in the spring. It is said that it sprung from Joseph of Arimathea’s staff when he was passing through Glastonbury and that the Puritans tried to cut it down in a fit of fanaticism during the Reformation but the tree was saved by cuttings taken by local people.

Anyway, a sprig is always sent by the vicar of Glastonbury to the Monarch at Christmas like the tiny pineapples of The Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall which were sent to Queen Victoria because they were so unusual.

Ofcourse this was a time when a pineapple didn’t cost £1 at the supermarket and were such an expensive luxury that some aristocrats included it in their coat and arms. Most amusingly, the Landmark Trust rent a property on a country estate in Scotland today that was built in the shape of a pineapple. A true folly!

But perhaps a certain kind of Tree of Knowledge can be found in the Botanical gardens at Cambridge. I don’t mean the apple tree apparently descended from the one that apparently dropped its fruit on Isaac Newton’s head but a semi-evergreen oak that keeps its leaves through winter…superficially a symbol of immortality but in fact probably a hybrid between an evergreen American oak and our own champion the English oak.

I can imagine in the pandemic someone like the writer Robert Macfarlane, the nature writer and  Don at Cambridge holding lectures under this great tree but I don’t know this for sure except that he did lecture outside. Certainly much knowledge has been imparted under this tree. I hope this doesn’t inspire some nihilist to cut it down because it is so symbolic; like the sycamore on The Sycamore Gap in Hadrian’s wall. Although, it was  heartening  to hear the outpouring of grief over a tree that is essentially a weed in the South East of England, most obviously on railway sidings much to the irritation of the accountants at British rail. Bring back Agent Orange, chimed the administrators!

The Butterfly effect, Gardener’s Revenge and the Peas that Changed the World

The Cottage Gardener

Sea Holly- A Gardener’s Revenge

There was a famous plantswoman of the early 20th century who was supposed to be as great as Gertrude Jekyll, the queen of the English herbaceous border…..

Unfortunately, Miss Wilmott was a  headstrong lesbian in unsympathetic times, who snubbed the RHS and squandered a fortune. But she does have a well- known perennial of the herbaceous border named after her called Eryngium ‘Miss Wilmott’s Ghost’.

It was claimed, perhaps tongue in cheek, that it was named after her because she used to sprinkle it in her rivals’ garden designs to ruin them.

But surely the real way of destroying a rival’s design is the methodical shredding of bindweed roots with a Magimix and then spreading  them out in their garden with a sprinkling of soil to bed them down. As you can see I have thought this through- a gardener’s revenge tastes sweeter than the first crop of peas….

This is because every tiny piece of bindweed root will form a new plant. So I’m sure she would have been quietly chuckling as the tendrils choked the plants and maybe even climbed up to the bedroom window to finish the job on the unfortunate owners of the garden.

The Butterfly effect

Last summer, in August 2023, I was at Oxford station waiting to change trains for Worcester and both on the way there and coming back there was a red admiral butterfly resting on the platform. Perhaps she (something so beautiful can only be a she?) enjoyed pirouetting in the slipstream of the train like the fluffy seeds of Oxford Ragwort, the famous annual weed which found a similar habitat on the railway lines of Britain to its native habitat of Mount Etna in Sicily.

I reached out to touch it but it fluttered away before I could fulfil my fantasy of re-enacting the scene in Lord of The Rings when the Elvish king whispers something in the ear of a butterfly on his hand so as to send a message to the other side of the kingdom. The true butterfly effect……

Ofcourse, it may be the sheer proliferation of Buddleia davidii along the limey banks of the railway line that had caused the red admiral to rest at the station. This is in tune with Richard Mabey’s book about plants colonizing urban areas called The Unofficial countryside. I believe he borrowed the phrase from another hero of mine, George Orwell. In August they would have all been in flower with their purple wands contrasting well with the bright yellow of Oxford ragwort making the journey from London that tiny bit less Russian constructivist.

Buddleia is a common plant in the UK now, even a weed because of it pernicious habit of self seeding along railway lines and into mortar of walls. But it is relatively well-behaved garden plant which can be managed by even the roughest gardener doing the hardest of cut backs because it is so vigorous.

But to me is will also be emblematic of the summer holidays in Norfolk because our family home had two large bushes outside that were always covered with purple inflorescences covered with the aformentioned red admirals during the summer break.

Seemingly, other butterflies and moths don’t get a look in. It could be that red admirals are one of the few pollinators attracted to the Buddleia or in the unlikely event that they are very territorial like our favourite British garden bird, the robin; whose beautiful love songs in the bleak midwinter are in fact a warning to other birds to keep their distance.

The Geneticists supper

Gregor Mendel, A Moravian monk is the father of modern genetics. Although he was little known in his time in the 19th century; his paper on the subject was rediscovered, fought over and eventually accepted as correct about 50 years later in England.

His system of catergorizing seeds according to their genotype and phenotype using a system of capital and lowercase letters such as AA Aa and aa has allowed the development of deliberate cross pollination by man to produce hybrid seeds with extra vigour. This effectively means that his discovery has pioneered the era of modern farming and therefore population growth because hybrid seeds and the ability to identify and breed them has resulted in much bigger yields.

Mendel became a monk in Moravia principly to escape poverty and it gave him the freedom to conduct the research of his choice.

Eventually he chose to conduct experiments on the genetics of peas which was either lucky or clever because the genetic attributes of peas can be mapped if traced over a number of generations.

As a by product therefore, there was a huge surplus of fresh peas for the monastery’s kitchen. Indeed when teaching his pupils , in his other role at the monastery, Mendel would often throw a handful of peas at a student that was day dreaming.

Anyway, the chef at the monastery was one of the most able in Moravia (modern day Czechia) and many young girls wishing to go into service trained with her. A particular speciality was rose hip sauce for meat dishes but the peas would have been well used too in pea soup, pork and potatoes with steamed peas and then perhaps some apple strudel with whipped cream( no peas, however sweet in that, I hope) .

Perhaps all this did offset the problematic issue of celibacy but not only were they eating delicious food and frankly fresh food does not get much sweeter than fresh peas but these peas were the by product of some extremely important scientific experiments that were to change the course of farming and history.

Like so many things it often strikes me how people don’t realize how important an event is at the time even. Never have the peas pushed round the plate by a fussy, pimply youth been of such significance!

Plants I’ve Known and Loved-Dreams and Realities of Allotment Time

The Cottage Gardener

The focal point of my allotment from my point of view is the apple tree called ‘James Grieve’ at the front of the plot which has had abundant harvests of tasty fruit for the last two years around mid August time- before that the tree was a young whippersnapper and was not thinking about reproduction…..

Rather like the Tree of Life in the garden of Eden it represents the fecundity of the red clay of our Brixton allotment site surrounded by gritty, urban South London. Or at least it does to me…my neighbours have a different point of view seemingly having hacked back my plum tree without asking me and attempting to plant some dreadful miniature conifer in its place which unfortunately died(Ha!).

Another neighbour has taken up residence on the old rubbish dump, like some Womble cruelly displaced from Wimbledon, reclaiming land from the knotweed, couchgrass and broken glass with gusto (Bravo!). Nevertheless, his actions are a little surprising as he used to be the head gardener at The Chelsea Physic Garden, a very highly thought of garden in horticultural circles. Maybe they will call this offshoot The Chelsea Physic Garden at The Brixton Dump. Indeed, it is a slice of The Physic Garden in Chelsea with its raised beds, huge echiums and other exotic flowers but I doubt the good news of this Guerilla gardening would ever reach The Chelsea Physic Garden as Brixton is in another universe as far as they are concerned.

I am also not fully sure I understand why he would eat anything from that soil…..heaven knows what has been in there especially with all the foxes and cats running about. That being said the foxes do a grand job of keeping the birdies off my fruit bushes in high summer so they aren’t all bad.

The blackcurrants have been a raging success; encouraged by bucketloads of Dulwich stables’s finest horse muck. Although because the berries mature at different speeds and the fact that July is peak gardening season I rarely pick that many of them.

Apart from the apples and blackcurrants there have been few successes except some solid showings from green manures such as buckwheat (which my fellow allotmenteers did not recognize much to my hubris) and phacelia (this plant has a very pretty purple flower adored by bees).

My main success has been to develop a system of Lasagna gardening that saves my gardener’s back from heavy digging by layering organic matter such as leaves, grass cuttings, manure etc. on the soil and placing cardboard on top to discourage the weeds. It has been modestly successful tied to a method of rotating the plots for cultivation so they build up fertility in a similar vein to the way Amazonian Indians clear patches of rainforest, use them for a few years and then as the soil decreases in fertility allow nature to reclaim them and restore them to biodiversity.

But actually in terms of vegetables- I, the champion vegetable grower (Monsieur ‘Poireaux’ MacDonald), is a pinprick of the horizon. The one major success I did have was growing Jersey Royal potatoes in the very early years of my allotmenteering. It was a mild spring so even though I planted the potatoes quite early, in mid-March, there were few hard frosts and then there was the right mixture of warmth and rain to ensure a bumper harvest of potatoes. The correct name for them is International Kidney, only when they are grown in Jersey’s rich soil are they allowed to be sold as Jersey Royals. Still I’m not selling them (just eating them!) and they grew so fast that I had many jacket potatoes stuffed with an assortment of bean and tomato stews with a Greek salad on the side to make even make the most Facist vegetarian coo in pleasure. My secret? Just beginners luck and more Dulwich stables’ finest although saying that it was a bit fresh so they did have a bit of scab…

Dare I admit my favourite thing to do at the allotment site is to listen to music, preferably The Lark Ascending, and watch my neighbours work. I usually sit in the shade of a huge sycamore in all seasons except winter and watch the birds, alas not the girls, float by.

Dare I admit in the wake of the cutting down of the sycamore tree on Hadrian’s wall at The Sycamore Gap (the scene of marriage proposals, picnics, lovemaking and god knows what else…) that the Sycamore is rather a common tree in London where the lack of sheep, which of course proliferate the fields of the North of England, mean that the seedlings are rarely grazed into oblivion. This means that places like railway sidings in London are often covered in sycamores.

Still its cooling, serene presence in all seasons is very calming so I can forgive it promiscuous nature through helicopter self sowing in the raspberry patch below and am glad that Thames Water’s laid back approach has meant that some over zealous allotmenteers ( including myself) have failed to execute this particular sycamore by shouting from the tree-tops ‘Cut it Down!’.

Of course, there are more sycamores at the wasteland at the back of the allotment site with an under-storey of brambles whose delicious blackberries have meant that it complements its layering shoots, barbed wire stems and aggressive root system with a self sowing apparatus that is frankly a gardener’s living hell.

I hope that this area can be tamed one day by an organic process and my fantasy is that I will buy a large quantity of the Japanese Loquat fruit from the Afghani fruit seller in Tooting and plant the stones through the wild wood that exists currently so that as climate change takes hold they will by succession turn the current area into an orchard with deliciously lemony apricot fruits. Whether they would be vigorous enough is unlikely although not impossible as I tried the process first in my own garden and some of the stones did germinate. Possibly they would not be quite vigorous enough to out compete the brambles but I would be there to lend a hand….

But I think it is necessary to day dream when you garden. Rarely will the results turn out as you hoped but the results may surprise more pragmatic gardeners.

Plants I’ve Known and Loved-Snippets from a Gardener, Traveller and Gourmand

The Cottage Gardener

Turnips

Turnips are not held in very high esteem by the British as a vegetable and more is the pity. Perhaps this dates back to the 18th century and ‘Turnip’ Townsend’s four field system of crop rotation which he began in Norfolk where turnips were grown over the winter to feed livestock.

The system was so successful that yields of all crops increased rapidly but perhaps meant that the turnip was pigeon-holed as not suitable for human consumption. Despite this when turnip greens are sold in Tooting vegetable sellers they are called English saag(spinach) a name I like very much although the turnips sold in Peckham Rye look less appealing. Rather like the devils balls you have to wonder where they have been before they arrived at the market.

Looking at those over-sized turnips rolling around in the detritus of a busy, urban place such as Peckham I can see why Sylvia Plath described them as ‘mute as a turnip’. But maybe she might have written poetically about them in the exotic surroundings of Peckham Rye with its sweetmeat and vegetable sellers, chaai-wallers, holy men and cheap cabs in a quasi-Kipling style.

The French, who call them navets, eat them in a delicious white sauce and the Portuguese use the tops in that warming winter soup of Caldo verde with potatoes, onions and bacon. Even the Americans are fond of them and probably have their boiled and buttered collard greens, which is what they call them, as in some Woody Allen fantasy, with freshly caught catfish fried near the swimming hole with Mary Lou or as  a side dish with deep fried chicken. Americans are famous for bastardizing other foods so I think I’m allowed to be a bit creative with the interpretation of authenticity in their food culture.

It was probably Baldrick, perhaps the most famous peasant scullion to have graced our screens, in the historically based TV series Blackadder which straddled the 1990s that put the final nail in the coffin of the hopes of turnips becoming fashionable. Baldrick was more than a little obsessed with buying a ‘Nice little turnip in the country..’ and when he spends the money Blackadder has persuaded the gullible Prince George the third to give him on a massive turnip Blackadder, in disgust, sticks it on his head. Such images definitely did influence popular culture back then when we were young but things are different now and perhaps with an uptick of interest in vegetarianism the humble turnip is due some sort of renaissance.

Marigolds

Among gardeners there is a certain amount of snobbery directed at marigolds and it is definitely a feeling I share to a large degree. In fact the huge bauble like marigolds of blindingly bright orange are the epitome of bad taste.

But perhaps the one saving grace of the marigold is that it is revered as a holy flower in Hindu culture and at the Day of the Dead festival in Central America. I often think of a TV programme called Ganges where I saw pilgrims being given necklaces of marigolds by the brahmins, in Benares, and containers of marigolds and candles floating down that holiest of rivers. The following scene in Ganges captured an extremely moving procession led by these aforementioned holy men with very spiritual chanting in it. So perhaps its more a question of the right plant for the right place. But definitely those fake British gardens with rows of tasteless flowers that pop up in the hill stations of India, as a reminder of the days of the Raj, are the wrong place.

The pot marigold is also revered in Christian culture as a symbol of the Virgin Mary to decorate church altars. Its latin name Calendula comes from the latin calendae meaning first day of the month because it bloomed every month of the year thus being useful for supplying the altar throughout the year. It is also known as the pot marigold because it was used as a cheap alternative to saffron in cooking.

Despite these positives the African marigold really is pretty dreadful and I fantasized that a top garden designer would attempt to convert his rich and tasteless clients into thinking that it was the must have plant to have in their gardens. This is what the character Miss Featherstone did in her column in a leading newspaper in Apartheid South Africa, in Tom Sharpe’s hilarious fictional book Riotous Assembly. Because she was an English aristo they assumed she had impeccable taste but because she thought the South Africans who read her column were very stupid to believe in Apartheid she created the most tasteless interior design tips for her readers because she guessed they did not have the sense to realize in what bad taste they were.

Of course I don’t treat my clients like fools. If they have the money to pay me invariably they have been successful in some field but usually because of the urban nature of the West have rarely done any gardening. The problem with that is that gardening is a creative science so there are not always distinct right or wrong answers to a question in the garden. Also, it is extremely pleasant to have some scope for creativity like a musician improvising….it can go wrong or can be the star of the show. Planting snakes-head fritillary bulbs in the lawn is a simple and not entirely original idea but it looks beautiful for that spring before the lawnmower says ‘ off with their heads’ Henry viii style in May.

Cucumbers

A not very interesting but little known fact about me is that both my flatmates have been Kiwis (New Zealanders) and both have absolutely hated cucumbers. No bad thing you might say given the questionable circumstances in which certain people, whose anonymity is very important to them, have ended up in A and E. Similarly, in Michael Palin’s semi-autobiographical film East of Ipswich: about the Suffolk seaside resort of Southwold in the repressed atmosphere of the 1950s, the only thing seemingly available at the guesthouse the main character is staying in is ironically cucumbers.

That being said I actually love cucumbers…to eat, I mean. In fact, it might form an important part of my favourite English summer menu of poached salmon and fresh mayonnaise, boiled pink fir apple potatoes and lightly dressed raw cucumber salad without its skin followed by the quintessentially English pudding of Cambridge Favourite strawberries, a little sugar and lemon juice and thick Jersey double cream.

I take it Roald Dahl didn’t like the cucumber when he created the snozzcumber as the disgusting vegetable that the Big Friendly Giant(BFG) eats in the book of  the same name. Certainly it is not nearly as delicious sounding as the BFG’s beverage of choice, Frobscottle, which tasted of a delicious mixture of raspberries, vanilla etc. I can understand with its spiny skin and bland taste why cucumbers aren’t peoples’ favourite vegetable but this demonization of it as the devil’s plaything does seem a little harsh in a culinary sense anyway……rather like comparing aubergines to cockroaches.

This summer I had deliciously cooling salads and beetroot soups in Lithuania and Poland of cucumber,dill and yoghurt in some very ordinary looking Lithuanian and Polish cafeterias that would stand toe to toe with the more famous Spanish salads and cold soups such as gazpacho and salmorejo.

And that is to say nothing of the most famous use of the cucumber, certainly in England, but possibly the world of the cucumber sandwiches served for afternoon tea. Victorian gentleman were so concerned by the reputation of these cucumber sandwiches for causing excess wind, perhaps because they did not share the BFG’s love of whizz-popping that it was not until a ‘Burpless’ variety was developed that they felt secure in eating those peculiarly English sandwiches without the fear of letting out a profondo belch.