Tom Roper's Weblog

Drinks hitherto unknown to me: number 2

This post is one of a series you can cut out and keep to treasure forever; special hand-tooled goatskin binders, trimmed with dormouse fur, are available from my publisher, Grabber & Grabber, at a very reasonable 150 guineas; though actually the first one was not a blog post but a New Year's Day tweet: http://twitter.com/tomroper/status/1089860574

It is an education having teenage children. My son held a soirée last night in his bedroom for the gilded youth of Seaford. One of the young ladies brought with her a bottle of something called, and tasting of, Jaques. This, the label says is cider with fruit, and weights in at 13% abv. It is made by Scottish and Newcastle, whose marketing department don't seem to have thought very hard about negative connotations before naming the beverage.

From the OED:

1. a. A privy.
   b. transf. and fig.

2. Excrement; filth.

3. attrib. and Comb., as jakes door, jakes-like adj.; {dag}jakes-barreller, {dag}jakes-farmer, jakes-man, a man employed to clean out privies; so {dag}jakes-farming; {dag}jakes-house = jakes.

Triumph of good over evil

Change and decay in all around I see

I had an e-mail  asking me if someone could use one of  my Flickr photos, of a pub in Camden, the Hawley Arms. I said yes, as they promised to attribute it, as I publish my photos using a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 licence.
I am puzzled by the current popularity of the pub. I have not set foot in it for twenty years, but in my day it was agreeably dirty, loud and unfashionable. On the visit when I took the photographs, as I remarked in the photograph captions, it was closed for refurbishment, not a word that would have come to mind in connection with the old Hawley.
Now, as witness this by the Observer's Cocktail Girl, it seems to have become all the rage with the jeunesse dorée.