No. 492: The winners
Trevor Grove reports: Competitors were asked to compose an octet on one of the following subjects: a new Arcadia; a recipe for a haggis; lament for the Green Belt.
This is a good opportunity to explode a couple of myths. Puncturing a Scotsman's haggis could, of course, prove a disastrously messy business and would certainly incur the wrath of whole clans of embattled crones, deter- mined to maintain the tradition of a native Highland cuisine and hurling their Elizabeth Davids into Loch Ness to prove it. But the fact is that haggis was also, until the end of the eighteenth century, a popular English dish, and only recently have its horrid origins been assigned exclusively to Scotland.
A more serious misattribution is that which popularly credits some forlorn and versifying Roman with the phrase Et ego in Arcadia—a predecessor perhaps of Villon and his Oa son: les neiges d'antan? No such thing: the phrase is a misquotation of Guercino's Et in Arcadia ego and appears inscribed on a Death's-head in one of his pictures. 'Even in Arcady, there am I'—a much more gloomy sentiment and definitely one in the eye for Thyrsis and Corydon.
Tony Robinson is a confident subscriber to the haggis myth and wins five guineas for this unequivocally Scottish recipe : Take the stomach from a pregnant ewe fresh- slaughtered in the highlands, Add a sporran filled with porridge and a pinch of graveyard lime; Drop in Andy Stewart's eyebrows and some tangle from the islands, And a dram of Lomond water with a withered sprig of thyme. Dice a Burns Night boozer's liver while the whisky's still a-flowing And the gizzard of a Hampden Roarer suddenly struck dumb. Add a square of Campbell tartan and a toenail (black, outgrowing). Boil the lot inside your kilt. (To serve twelve victims—if they'll come ...) Three guineas to Captain Rochester with his version of 'Tomorrow to fresh Fields and Pas- tures new': After the bombs and many years shall come Arcadia again. They'll pipe the skylark dumb Those youths who shall keep sheep on rubble highlands
And on the shores of—sometime 'traffic'—
islands; They'll know a Midland bank where grows wild thyme
And, where the BBC stood, groves of lime
And they shall peep on Covent Garden's lawns How moonlit Satyrs tryst with leaping Fauns.
Joyce Taylor- wins three guineas for her chaste lament:
Before the human tide came flowing Over the woods of oak and lime Before the cities' long ontgrowing There was a scent of hoof-pressed thyme: Deep in the sad suburban highlands There lingered yet forgotten Fauns Alone, alone in forest islands, Glimpsed from the verge of daisied lawns.
And one guinea to B. J. Kennedy for identify- ing the source of the rhymes: Shelley's 'Hymn of Pan.'
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