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ACD Canon Re-visited

Of course the broadcast episodes of BBC Sherlock needed to make reference to many of the cases raised but never written about by Conan Doyle. The Abominable Wife became The Abominable Bride.  Vatican Cameos was mentioned in both The Scandal in Belgravia and The Sign of Three, even if we have no idea why John would assume that someone is going to die on both occasions. 

I have included the domestic complication of Mrs Cecil Forrester in my own story, as the case fic driving chapter 3 of Magpies: Two for Joy. Read it here. She features again in Exit, which pulled together a number of my OCs who come to pay their tributes to Sherlock at a memorial service organised by Henry Knight after Sherlock’s apparent suicide. You can read that one here. 

In fact, all but one of the case fics used in Magpies: Two for Joy are drawn from either the broadcast episodes or ACD cases mentioned but never written about, including  the case of Mrs Farintosh and the Opal Tiarais from ACD Canon, as a case referred to in The Speckled Band, but never described in any detail, which is in chapter 2. 

But GOSH, there are so many other prompts here! Plot bunnies start hopping about when I look at this list of cases! 

Does anyone out there reading this know of others which cover these cases or use these as prompts for their own versions? 

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Not Just London

While in the broadcast episodes of BBC Sherlock and Granada Holmes the vast majority of cases take place in London, ADC’s Sherlock got out and about more in his case work. 

Most of those “outside London” are within easy reach of London by train. Only one story takes place in Birmingham, which at the time was considered “England’s Second City”.

In The Adventure of the Stockbroker’s Clerk, Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson come to Birmingham to investigate an office at 126B Corporation Street.

It is surprising that there aren’t more stories based in the city, because ACD actually lived and worked in Birmingham for a while in the area of Aston between 1878 and 1881. Quite a few of his stories were written while he was there. 

In honour of this fact, my latest WIP being drafted is sited in Birmingham, because Sam is studying Automotive Engineering at Aston University. 

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“He still came to me from time to time when he desired a companion in his investigation, but these occasions grew more and more seldom, until I find that in the year 1890 there were only three cases of which I retain any record. During the winter of that year and the early spring of 1891, I saw in the papers that he had been engaged by the French government upon a matter of supreme importance,“ 

There’s lot of possible explanations for the reasons behind Holmes withdrawing from Watson of course, and I’m sure a lot has been already said about it, yet I’d argue that the stories themselves suggest it wasn’t just because of Watson’s marriage or practise. We’ve seen that, after a few months of insecurity where things were standing between these two, those things were no obstacles for them interacting in the least. Holmes withdrawing coincides with Holmes taking on more complex, dangerous, international cases, and I just get a sense that Holmes is trying to protect Watson from the ever increasing danger. And it’s devastating because it’s clear Holmes is not faring well alone. He’s wasting away, running ragged, not caring properly for himself. And Watson was already feeling the void of Holmes’ abscence 

In conclusion, I want nothing more for these two but to have their quiet domestic life back, where they just pour over newspapers or argue about the solar system or go on lunch dates and nothing more exciting happens than weird objects or people with strange little problems turn up at their door   

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I hope you don't think I'm wasting your time...?

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ACD Canon Revisited

So many aspects of the Victorian Sherlock Holmes have been “add-ons” by fan fiction writers of yesteryear. The deerstalker, the distinctive pipe, the cape… 

Let that fact be liberating to all fandom writers. Your version of Sherlock may well be what future generations of Sherlock fans will consider to be canon. 

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I had to laugh when someone (and it was an anon, to my best recollection, but if it was you, tell me so I can correctly attribute it!) pointed out that this is Mofftiss playing games with Arthur Conan Doyle, who never spelt out Lestrade's name in any story. It was just "G. Lestrade," which appeared in The Adventure of the Cardboard Box. Inspector Lestrade sends a letter to Sherlock Holmes in that story and signs it as “G. Lestrade”

ACD is known to have given the fictional inspector the name of a friend from his days at the University of Edinburgh, a Saint Lucian medical student, Joseph Alexandre Lestrade. No G in sight...

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Grow Your Own Food

This decorative display has a secret agenda - they are all awaiting their moment in our kitchen and then our dining table. We harvested over thirty pumpkins from our veg garden this year, ranging in size from these little beauties to this biggie below, still on our hearth, four months after we harvested. 

That’s a Pumpkin Rouge Vif D'Etampes, a heirloom variety introduced a century ago and often called “the cinderella pumpkin”. It is delicious!!!

To Americans, most pumpkins are Jack-o-lanterns, grown to be carved and then thrown away. Or they come processed into pumpkin pie mix for eating at Thanksgiving. Boring…

In fact, pumpkins and squashes are the mainstay of the winter menu for a lot of people. We’ve been eating them since November and I still have a dozen left. The little ones in the top photo are the result of a single packet of “mixed squashes” that I planted last April. There are two kinds of culinary pumpkins in there- sugar babe and jack be little - and four varieties of squash (pattypan, acorn and  two types of Japanese kabocha)).  They store magnificently for months in a normal room - no need for refrigeration- and feed the two of us brilliantly.  What’s nice is that they all taste a bit different from each other! Few are available in normal supermarkets. Total cost for two seed packets? Under three pounds sterling (think less than $5). And they keep us fed at a time when fresh vegetables are at their most expensive in the supermarkets.

We make roasted squash into soup for the freezer, with different spice mixes. We slice them up and roast them in a tablespoon of olive oil and spices - a great healthy alternative to chips. We stuff them with a mushroom, breadcrumb and herb mix then roast in the over for an hour. 

We didn’t water them, despite the drought. You can grow them in a pot or a grow bag if you are short on space. The biggest one above was planted straight on top of our compost bin, which is why it grew so big. 

All organic, low cost, home-grown food. No chemicals, no processing. Utterly BRILLIANT. 

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The English Kitchen Garden Pumpkins & Squashes

It's that time of the year when I start thinking about how much autumn rain will make my pumpkins rot. We tend to cut them after the first frost (which has already happened here in Southern England) and bring them into the greenhouse so they can fully ripen in the sun without getting wet or frosted.

All pumpkins, squashes, and courgettes are members of the Cucurbita family, which has quite an interesting history. Native to south and central America, the original wild versions had very hard skins and delicious seeds - evolved to appeal to large megafauna in times well before hominids (like humans) were around. Only the biggest could smash the hard skin and eat the flesh, dispersing the seeds through their digestive systems.

Mastodon dung has been found fossilised - with cucurbit seeds intact. When these and other huge animals went extinct at the end of the Pleistocene era (about 11k years ago), the cucurbits might have died out with them.

Luckily, humans were around by then and had learned to smash the skins, harvest the seeds, and keep them to eat. The varieties with the softer skins were "selected" first and their seeds survived.- symbiotic relationship. Harder varieties were often dried and their gourds were used to carry water and other foodstuff, once the seeds and inner flesh had been eaten. Some were allowed to dry intact and used as floats for fishing nets.

When humans eventually became settled agrarian farmers in the Americas, they began breeding more and more of the varieties they wanted to eat and use. Thinner skins meant more of the cucurbit family could be eaten, so natural selection favoured this feature.

In the age of exploration, pumpkins made their way across the Atlantic to Europe, first introduced to Tudor England by the French in the 16th century. Tudor recipes featuring pumpkins began to appear in cookbooks of the era. From soups and pies to preserves, pumpkins became a staple in English cuisine.

Not only were they a tasty addition to many dishes, but pumpkins were also widely used for medicinal purposes. Traditionally, every part of the pumpkin plant, from the fleshy shell, seeds, leaves, and even flowers, was believed to have healing properties.

The association of pumpkin pie as part of the USA's Thanksgiving celebrations is the result of British colonists bringing seeds across the Atlantic; genome testing shows how local varieties in the northeast were influenced by these incomers. The mention of a pie filled with alternating layers of pumpkin and apple, spiced with rosemary, sweet marjoram, and thyme, first appears in Hannah Woolley’s ‘The Gentlewoman’s Companion,’ published in England in 1670.

A huge variety of forms and shapes have been bred and in 2020 an estimated 28 million tonnes of pumpkins, squashes, and gourds were harvested worldwide.

Our harvest shows you a few of the wide variety:

The flesh (and skin) of these vary in texture and hardness; the harder they are, the longer they will last. We had our last pumpkin from last year's crop at Easter this year- that's six months after harvesting.

The first one we will be eating this year is below:

The plant managed to wedge the fruit between the fence and a brick wall! It cannot be budged- I shall have to cut it in bits to get it out. Straight into the oven for roasting and turning into the most delicious soup!

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Romans 3:23-24 NIV

[23] for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, [24] and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.

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