Monthly Meeting Minutes - 16th November 2021

Date of Meeting: 16th November 2021

 

Location of Meeting:

The Sherloft, My House, Portsmouth, UK

 

Attendees:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller)

 

Apologies:

Brenda the Headless Mannequin tried to get in, but we told her to "f off basically because of your f-ing attitude". She then apologised. But we pretended not to hear.

 

The Toasts:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) provided the following toast to Slater from Black Peter:

Slater was a stonemason

Who lived in Forest Row.

I'd like to tell you more of him

But that is all I know.

  

Motions:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) winced.

 

Presentation:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) presented his great new game:

Canonical Carrotchters

You must figure out which character from the Canon each of the following carrots is impersonating.

(You can click on them to see bigger versions if that helps)

If you want to check your results, the correct answers are HERE.

Any Other Business:

No thanks.

Monthly Meeting Minutes - 16th October 2021

  The Shingle of Southsea Holmesian Society

Monthly Meeting Minutes

Date of Meeting: 16th October 2021

 

Location of Meeting:

The Sherloft, My House, Portsmouth, UK

 

Attendees:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller)

 

Apologies:

Nope.

 

The Toasts:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) provided the following toast to Dr. Watson's egg spoon:

Egg spoon -

Spoon for egg -

Used by doctor

Who was shot in leg.

Or possibly arm.

  

Motions:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) made a sort of shifty motion with his left hand.

 

Presentation:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) gave the following presentation of an essay he wrote regarding Canonical cheese.:

The Cheeseboard of Sherlock Holmes

 

One of the important yet neglected branches of Holmesiana is that of Sherlock Holmes's association with cheese. There is clear evidence in The Canon for the great detective's turophile status which has, hitherto, gone unnoticed. I list here, then, the many cheeses spoken about in The Canon in the hopes of highlighting another facet of Holmes's character.

 

Holmes’s love of cheese might surprise some readers of The Canon. At first glance, there appear to be only three mentions of the dairy product.

Once in A Study in Scarlet:

“The theories which I have expressed there, and which appear to you to be so chimerical are really extremely practical—so practical that I depend upon them for my bread and cheese.”

Once in The Blanched Soldier:

“It wasn't merely that ghastly face glimmering as white as cheese in the darkness.”

And once in The Sussex Vampire:

“The doorsteps were worn into curves, and the ancient tiles which lined the porch were marked with the rebus of a cheese and a man after the original builder.”

 

But The Canon hides many secrets in plain sight and one need only take a second look to spot the many other references to cheese. For example, were you aware that Holmes was a fan of edam?

In chapter five of A Study In Scarlet we find:

““Old woman be damned!” said Sherlock Holmes, sharply.”

Edam is right there, hidden in Holmes’s sharp exclamation. And that’s not the only place it can be found. From The Engineer’s Thumb we find:

“…the plaster was peeling off the walls, and the damp was breaking through in green…”

From The Three Gables:

“But she is the ‘belle dame sans merci’ of fiction.”

The Sign of the Four:

“‘Then my comrade and I will swear that you shall have a quarter of the treasure which shall be equally divided among the four of us.’”

There are a total of thirty-two such references to edam scattered throughout the stories. Holmes must have been a massive fan of this mild-flavoured, semi-hard cheese. And that’s not surprising – it makes great cheese on toast.

 

Brie also seems to be a favourite. For example, in The Dancing Men:

“A nice old brier with a good long stem of what the tobacconists call amber.”

This is just one of eighteen such mentions.

 

The Welsh cheeses are given a far more vague reference. As, for example, in A Study in Scarlet:

“In one place he gathered up very carefully a little pile of grey dust from the floor, and packed it away in an envelope.”

There can be no doubt that this is a reference to the sound-alike Caerphilly cheese. The hard crumbly pale cheese is indeed quite like a “little pile of grey dust” in both appearance and flavour.

 

From The Greek Interpreter there is the following scene in The Diogenes Club:

“…cautioning me not to speak, he led the way into the hall. Through the glass paneling I caught a glimpse…”

“Hall-through-the”. How obtuse would one need to be not to immediately recognise the presence of Halloumi – the goat cheese which is often used as a substitute for meat? The dubious similarity in sound between “hall-through-the” and “halloumi” no doubt represents the dubious similarity between the taste of halloumi and actual food.

 

But that’s not the only cheese to be found in The Greek Interpreter – the English staple cheddar also appears:

“My companion let down the window, and I caught a glimpse of a low, arched doorway with a lamp burning above it.”

It is, perhaps, surprising not to find more references to cheddar. It is, after all, the best cheese in the entire world. But the only other mention I could find was in this same story:

“We had reached our house in Baker Street while we had been talking.”

 

The Six Napoleons adds a classic Swiss cheese to the cheese board, albeit with one “m” issing:

“No explanation save mental aberration can cover the facts.”

 

Blue cheese comes from The Blanched Soldier in the form of some delicious stilton:

“All evening, though I tried to think of other things, my mind would still turn to the apparition at the window and the rudeness of the woman.”

 

The Final Problem sees some Greek cheese join the cheese board:

“The question now is whether we should take a premature lunch here, or run our chance of starving before we reach the buffet at Newhaven.”

The context seems to suggest starvation is an option on a par with eating feta. This is because feta is awful.

 

So there we have it, the cheeseboard of Sherlock Holmes would contain edam, brie, Caerphilly, halloumi, cheddar, emmental, stilton and feta. No doubt there are more still to be found, but I believe this will do to be going on with.

 

Any Other Business:

Noooooooooooooooooooooope.

Announcement

You may have noticed that there was no 2021 September meeting of The Shingle of Southsea. This was due to tensions created by political differences between members of the society.

We are engaging in mediation and hope to resolve these differences in time to have an October meeting.

Monthly Meeting Minutes - 22nd August 2021

  The Shingle of Southsea Holmesian Society

Monthly Meeting Minutes

Date of Meeting: 22nd August 2021

 

Location of Meeting:

The Sherloft, My House, Portsmouth, UK

 

Attendees:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller)

 

Apologies:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) smelt it, dealt it and then said sorry.

 

The Toasts:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) said the toaster was broken.  

Presentation:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) presented the following five Holmesian "how to" videos:

How to think like Sherlock Holmes:

How to observe like Sherlock Holmes:

How to dress like Sherlock Holmes:

How to play violin like Sherlock Holmes:

 

How to tell different ashes apart like Sherlock Holmes:

 

Monthly Meeting Minutes - 24th July 2021

  The Shingle of Southsea Holmesian Society

Monthly Meeting Minutes

Date of Meeting: 24th July 2021

 

Location of Meeting:

The Sherloft, My House, Portsmouth, UK

 

Attendees:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller)

 

Apologies:

Yes.

 

The Toasts:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) provided the following toast to Watson's egg spoon:

Egg Spoon - 
Spoon for some eggs.
Eggs which pop out
Between chicken legs.

  

Motions:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) moved that we should advertise the Doyle's Rotary Coffin six month long Treasure Hunt which can be found here:

Doyle's Rotary Coffin Treasure Hunt

 

Presentation:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) has been taking taking film posters and substituting the tag lines for quotes from the Sherlock Holmes Canon. He presented these posters in three formats. A link to a PDF book of them:

LINK TO A PDF BOOK OF THEM

A tedious video:

And finally, as the actual pictures:

Monthly Meeting Minutes - 1st June 2021

 The Shingle of Southsea Holmesian Society

Monthly Meeting Minutes

Date of Meeting: 1st June 2021

 

Location of Meeting:

The Sherloft, My House, Portsmouth, UK

 

Attendees:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller)

 

Apologies:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) refused to apologise because it was someone else's fault.

 

The Toasts:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) provided the following toast to Victor Hatherley in the form of a haiku:

Victor Hatherley,

What did you go do that for?

No thumbs up for you.

  

Motions:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) yet again moved that we should advertise the fact that he has produced a free PDF download of a Chapter and Verse version of The Canon. The goal of it is to make it easier to reference passages and lines from the text. It is available here:

chapterandverseholmes.co.uk

and you are encouraged to download it and share it anywhere and any way you like.

The motion was passed quickly and carefully but some still got on the carpet.

 

Presentation:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) gave the following presentation of an essay he wrote regarding the Holmes's retirement:

Holmes’s Bee Farm

By "The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller)

 

First a warning. I beg the reader to bear with me. This essay will appear (Study in Scarlet style) to jump from one topic to another wholly unrelated. However, all will make sense in the end. Also, the dates I use for the following are from my own chronology – Watson Does Not Lie. Other chronologies are available for the Canon. But, broadly speaking, they all concur enough to work with the following observations and theories.

 

The earliness of Holmes’s retirement has puzzled many a Holmesian – he was only 50 at the time. I have recently also become puzzled by the location he chose for his retirement. The Canon suggests in SECO 1:4 that he had retired expressly to study bees – a study which would lead to the publication of a book on the subject ten years later (see LAST 1:363-368). Yet he retired to a cliff top cottage overlooking the English Channel.

There are several reasons this does not make sense. An exposed coastal location would often cause his bees to be scattered by high winds. He would be likely to lose several swarms. It would also reduce foraging options for the bees. To the south of the hives would be nothing but ocean, no plants. And it is also believed that seaside flowers are affected by the salt water and yield less nectar. Finally, the hive would be hit by sea water whenever there was a storm, which is not ideal for producing nice honey.

None of these factors would prevent someone from keeping bees. Plenty of people do keep bees in seaside locations with some success. But they keep bees in seaside locations because they lived there first and kept bees second. Holmes retired expressly to study bees. He could retire anywhere he liked. Why would he choose the least favourable location?

Could it be that he did not really keep bees at all? Did the literary agent misread Watson’s accounts and make incorrect corrections? Consider Watson’s preface to the Last Bow collection of stories. We may presume that this preface was supplied directly from Watson to the publisher, without interference from Doyle. Watson does not mention bees at all. He simply states that Holmes lives in a small farm “where his time is divided between philosophy and agriculture.” Note he says “agriculture” not “apiculture” as he surely would have done had that been the case.

The first mention of bees comes in SECO 1:4 which states Holmes has “betaken himself to study and bee-farming”. My belief is Doyle incorrectly altered Watson’s original words. He thought he was correcting an error, but he wasn’t. Having made this mistake once, it was repeated a further five times when Doyle made such “corrections” to LION and LAST – the only other places Holmes’s hives are mentioned.

 

Let us now consider a different discrepancy in the Canon. That of Holmes’s arms. In SPEC 1:274 in 1883, we see Holmes has strong arms which are able to straighten a bent poker with ease. But in BLAC 1:393 in 1895, Holmes reports that he could not skewer a pig with a harpoon because the task requires a strong arm. What had changed in the years between the cases? Why were his arms no longer strong?

In an attempt to fathom this change, I went off looking for information about Holmes’s arms throughout the Canon. I made two interesting discoveries.

Firstly, before 4^th May 1891, Holmes’s arms are only ever described as long. After 1^st April 1894 they receive several other adjectives: “thin” (EMPT 1:95, PRIO 1:35, ILLU 1:7), “sinewy” (EMPT 1:95), “wiry” (3GAR 1:436) and “nervous” (ILLU 1:7).

Secondly, no other story mentions Holmes’s arms more than EMPT. It is as if, they were especially apparent to Watson in this case.

So what happened between 1891 and 1894 to occasion these differences? The Great Hiatus. It seems to me that some change had come over Holmes’s arms during his absence from Baker Street. A change Watson was especially aware of when Holmes returned in EMPT. Most likely this occurred during the battle at the edge of the Reichenbach Falls or during his subsequent accent of the sheer cliff face beside it. Maybe one of Moran’s boulders did do some damage after all.

Consider EMPT 1:85-87. Recovering from a faint, Watson grabs Holmes by the arm and, feeling it’s damaged condition is compelled to ask “Is it really you?” It must have felt considerably different to the arm he had known before.

 

So, what is the link between the bee-keeping error and Holmes’s arm? Simple. In SECO, Watson never wrote that Holmes was going to study bee farms on the Sussex Downs. He wrote that he was going to study beef arms. Doyle saw this, assumed it was an error and “corrected” it.

 

Holmes, as I have said, suffered some sort of injury to one or both of his arms during his escape from the Reichenbach Falls. He returned to Baker Street in 1894 and attempted to continue his work with his now weak, thin, sinewy, wiry, nervous arms. He did fairly well but over the next ten years the arms continued to get weaker. Finally Holmes could stand it no more and announced his retirement in 1904. He took himself to the seclusion of a small cattle farm on the Sussex Downs where he could begin experimenting with beef arms.

No doubt inspired by the works of Dr. Victor Frankenstein a hundred or so years before, it was his intention to build himself new arms out of cow meat. After all, what could be beefier than beef?

The references to bees and bee-keeping found in LAST and LION, then, are actually supposed to be references to beef and beef-keeping. Sadly, as they passed through Doyle’s hands, he mistook these for errors and changed them.

Most puzzling is the alteration Doyle made to Holmes’s magnum opus. LAST reports on a small blue book titled in gold – Practical Handbook of Bee Culture. No such book ever existed. What it should have been called was The Practical Handbook of Beef Suture, and the fact that Holmes wrote it is testament to the fact that he must have succeeded in replacing his broken limbs with highly satisfactory beef arms.

Any Other Business:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) shared the following "music":