The disreputable former former former Prime Minister of the UK was quoted in their least-favourite newspaper this week:

I thought it was the wrong thing to do, and a bit petulant. Plenty of other European leaders sustain referendum defeats and carry on with their duties.

Once I’d processed the lack of self-awareness inherent in the hypocrisy of a certain eight-letter adjective, I came to reflect on the oddness of the word ‘sustain’. Things that ‘sustain’ us support or uphold us; yet we ‘sustain’ injuries and insults. How can it mean such different things?

It turns out that the word is derived from Latin: ‘-tain’ comes from ‘tenere’, which, as even a passing knowledge of European languages will tell you, means ‘to hold’. The ‘sus-’ comes from ‘sub’, as in ‘under’. So, ‘to sustain’ is to hold something up, supporting it from underneath.

Immediately, the two senses reveal themselves: things can support us, or we can do the supporting. While the former is largely positive, the latter is more complicated. We can hold together a friendship, and find that sustaining it is a wholly positive experience. Or we can hold up a weight that’s threatening to crush us, with almost unbearable burden and discomfort. The rich tapestry of life means that sustaining something can sometimes be both fulfilling and impossibly difficult at the same time.

To give the pompous wally his due, in the context of the quotation, ‘sustain’ could be read in the plain sense of enduring the defeat, or as a jibe about supporting the defeat by being a bit rubbish.

‘To sustain’ contains multitudes. It’s nice to see the complexity and ambiguity of the human experience reflected in language sometimes.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

Before I read this Financial Times article by Bryce Elder, I didn’t know:

• That ‘Trump’ branded watches existed.
• That anyone would try and sell such watches for $100,000, let alone successfully.
• What a “tourbillon” is, “and, though it probably does nothing, people appreciate the extra engineering required.”
• That a 75% gross profit margin on a luxury watch is not unusual.
  

Every day is a school day.

I left you with a cliffhanger on Monday, with my post about the WD Stephens fountain. I’m sure you haven’t slept since!

I told you that the placement of the WD Stephens fountain had required another one to be moved out its way… and this is the fountain that had to move:

A 1889 granite tribute to Edwin Dodd Colvill, located just up the road from the WD Stephens fountain. The text reads:

This fountain was presented to the city of Newcastle by Miss Caroline Sophia Russell Colvill in loving remembrance of her brother the late Edwin Dodd Colvill who was for upwards ????? years well and honourably known in Newcastle.

In the section below that, I can make out the words ‘Mayor’, ‘Stephens Esq’ and ‘1888’. Since we know from the WD Stephens fountain that he was the mayor in 1888, I suspect this recorded the commissioning or unveiling of the statue.

Below that, although there are a lot of missing letters, I’m fairly sure there is a quote from Matthew 25:

Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

Perhaps undermining the inscription, unfortunately nobody seems to know anything but the barest details of Colvill’s life—he may have been well known at the time, but he isn’t any more, which is, I suppose, a fate to which we all succumb eventually, fountain or none.

60 years ago, the ‘bullet train’ first ran on Japan’s newly built East Coast Tōkaidō Shinkansen line. In celebration, a nose cone from one of the first trains has just gone on display at Japan House in London. I’m not sure I’ll go and see it, but news of the exhibition did make me ponder.

When the Tōkaidō Shinkansen line opened in 1964, trains ran at a maximum of 130mph—faster than Britain’s East Coat Mainline, but not by all that much. Our (diesel-powered) trains ran at 100mph on sections of the line.

By the time the first generation of bullet trains retired in 1999, the line was running at a top speed of 168mph, and the now-electrified East Coast Mainline had bumped up to 125mph.

Thanks to a commitment to continuous improvements, today the Tōkaidō Shinkansen line runs at 177mph. Yet, the East Coast Mainline’s top speed hasn’t increased in the last 48 years. A line whose speed was once competitive has since stagnated.

But the UK certainly beat Japan on one big improvement: smoking was banned on East Coast Mainline trains in 2005, but astonishingly persisted—albeit in designated on-board smoking rooms—until March this year on the Tōkaidō Shinkansen line.

I’m pleased to report that the Victoria Tunnel is, thankfully, in somewhat better condition than its information board.

Yesterday, you might have been taken aback by the appearance of a certain ‘z’ on the WD Stephen’s fountain:

The engraved text refers to ‘great organizations’—but surely we Brits, and especially the fastidious engravers of fountains in the early 1900s, prefer our organisations with the letter ‘s’ in the middle?

The jarring truth is that we don’t: even to this day, Oxford University Press persists with the ‘z’ spelling. The ‘z’ spelling is the more traditional, owing to the etymological root in post-classical Latin organizare. The ‘s’ is a modern affliction. It seems to relate to the French spelling, organiser, though some sources suggest that the switch is attributable to the influence of printers who felt that it looked better on the page alongside all of the other ‘-ise’ endings.

I’m not with the traditionalists on this one: it’s ‘organise’ all the way for me, I’m afraid, even if the World Health Organization disagrees.

While you ponder ‘organisation’, you might wonder—especially if you’re my organist brother—what the word ‘organ’ is doing in there.

Well, the original meaning of ‘organise’—as you might guess—was to accompany with an organ. Someone might be singing, and one might then ‘organize’ the performance by playing along. The modern sense seems to have come about via metaphor: to provide things with a bit of structure and form is metaphorically quite like formalising some singing by ‘organizing’ it.

Perhaps because of my medical background, I had previously assumed that the ’organs’ were bodily organs, but that’s seemingly not the case—even though the two senses of ‘organ’ share a common Latin etymology (organum).

Come to think of it, it’s quite odd that a musical organ is both an ‘organ’ and an ‘instrument’, when ‘organs’ and ‘instruments’ are utterly distinct in the medical world… but perhaps that’s for another day.

The second image in this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

As I mosey to and from work each day, I pass a number of Victorian water fountains, none of which work. In the late Victorian era, much of Newcastle’s drinking water supply was rather too closely acquainted with its sewerage, so the building of fountains which supplied wholesome water was considered a noble and civic-minded endeavour.

This one, erected in 1906, is a tribute to WD Stephens, a local councillor, mayor, magistrate, businessman, and many other things besides. It used to feature a relief portrait of him in that big blank space, though it has long since been lost. The inscription reads:

1827-1901

A citizen of lofty ideals and strenuous endeavour.

Erected by public subscription in recognition of the openhearted charity, ceaseless activity & unfailing geniality which marked the public life of W.D. STEPHENS, Alderman & J.P. of the city of Newcastle on Tyne, Sheriff 1879-80, Mayor 1887-88

Distinguished as the president of great organizations for the promotion of maritime commerce he earned still higher appreciation in the cause of temperance and the betterment of the poor and needy.

Another fountain was booted up the road to make room for this one—perhaps I’ll tell you more about that another day—but karma comes back around, and the Stephens fountain itself eventually got booted out of the way of the central motorway and into its current location.

The fountain is Grade II listed.

I’ve worried about the Virgin Mary before, but this book review in The Economist gave me new causes for concern:

They knew that the Holy Spirit had made the Virgin Mary pregnant but that she was still a virgin. What they were not quite sure about was how those two things could both be true. How, in short, had God got in?

Theologians set about solving this riddle with great debate—and a healthy disregard for biology. Almost no orifice was off limits. God had entered Mary through her eyes, suggested one text. Another scholar thought He had come in through her ear. A third suggested that He had impregnated Mary through her nose—which was inventive, if hard to imagine being incorporated into the annual school nativity play.

This is one of those brilliant book reviews: it’s filled with humour and extracts the juice from the book without me having to bother with the whole volume. This seems just as well given the cutting verdict on the tone:

Mr MacCulloch’s great strength is that he knows a vast amount. His great weakness is that he has written it all down, over 497 pages, in a tiny font.

Oof. This is good stuff.

It was flavoured with strawberry and champagne, and was unexpectedly soft and chewy.

Henry and Joyce Collins were famed for making concrete murals. This photograph shows a portion of their mural ‘Newcastle through the Ages.’ This was part of a series they created for various branches of British Home Stores in the 1970s, by which time the pair were in their 60s. The Newcastle building to which this mural is attached is now occupied by Primark.

The Twentieth Century Society is keen on protecting post-war murals. I was surprised to see that Primark, with their extensive re-cladding of the BHS building, didn’t just get rid of this one—neither the mural nor Primark are to my taste, but I suppose there’s something commendable about protecting civic art.