I happen to love figs. In Norway they usually cost one week’s salary per fig and they’re wrapped in tissue paper as if they’re very rare. Imagine our surprise today at finding absurdly cheap (for Norway) boxes of figs for sale at our local Turkish grocery store.
And now, crows:
This was a point-and-click crow and it’s not completely in focus but I am getting better.
A Bad Guide 
One week’s salary per fig! I nearly fainted! Here, in Extremadura, we have 5220 ha of fig trees and the most famous village where it’s cultivated is Almoharín (Cáceres). I’ve just read that the average price of early fig (our “breva” ) to wholesaler and fruit seller was 3.30 € per kg this year; anyway it was the more expensive fruit in this market in Madrid. On the other hand, the price of dried fig (“higo paso o seco”; the philosopher’s fruit*) ranges between €4 and €8/kg. Two weeks ago my wife bought 1 kg of fig and paid €1.5.
* http://higosdealmoharin.wordpress.com/noticias/
Ok, well, perhaps a week’s salary was a bit of an exaggeration. One fig at the Turkish place today cost 4.5 kroner, which is apparently €0.6114. I’m sure your average Norwegian makes more than that per week. How lovely to be able to pick them off the tree, I used to be able to do that in the west of England.
I liked the roadside price of passion fruit when we lived in Queensland. One dollar a bucket, including the bucket.
I was reading this week about how the Vikings navigated using crows. You’d take a crow with you, and if you got lost out of sight of land, you’d release the crow. If it set off determinedly in one direction, you’d follow.
It did occur to me that very few seamen would survive to tell you if the trick didn’t work.
Figs must have been dirt cheap at some point in British history – around the time when the phrase “I don’t care a fig for that” was invented.
Stu, the fig in that expression may have been a rude gesture rather than a fruit.
Here’s what it says at phrases.org.uk
Did you get lots of California Syrup of Figs as a lad, Crown?
Heavens, no. My bowels have always been in perfect working order and that’s a boarding-school sort of thing, something I managed to avoid. But I did get rose-hip syrup – I suppose, for vitamin C – and that’s delicious. I’ve found some lovely huge rose hips that I eat when I walk past them with Topsy.
“higa” means the female genitals
OK, let me rephrase: whatever it was must have been a dime a dozen in the day.
I puzzled for a moment over Jesús’ information that dried figs are more expensive per kilo than fresh ones. The answer must be that with the dried kind you get more fig per volume, and thus more figs per kilo, because most of their water content has been removed.
I prefer the fresh kind anyway.
We used to gather rose-hips over autumn weekends and hand them in at school on Monday. They’d weigh them, pay us so much per pound, and if your total over the season was high enough, you got a lapel badge to wear. Also, when you were out gathering, you could break some open, put the seeds aside for use as itching powder, and chew the flesh. Happy days.
If you have a walled corner facing southwest, you can grow figs here. Passion flowers too: fruit in a good year.
According to our Academy, “higa” (from “higo”) means mockery, disdain. Sometimes “higo” is used to refer female genitals and “breva” (early fig) to tits. You know lots of vegetables have been used to mention genitals organs like a kind of funny euphemisms.
“Higo” is also an insignificant thing, without value, from which those expressions that A. J. P. Crown has written. Instead of “higo” we use “comino” (cumin), “pimiento” (pepper), etc. as well.
There is an amazing word I love, “sicalipsis”, that means sexual malice, erotic mischief, and whose curious and funny etymology comes from Greek “ σῦκον”, (fig) and “ἄλειψις” (action of spread, to rub). It appeared for the first time in our dictionary in 1927 (!) and then meant pornography. The real origin of this word is controversial.
>A. J. P. Crown
When I was a child I learnt the best figs were those that had been pecked. At first it made me feel sick but soon I understood the birds know very well what figs are the ripest.
>Grumbly Stu
Somehow the dried fig has had a production (although it’s simple), that is, you have to put it to dry up so there is, at least, a risk that a bird, an insect or a fungus attacks it. The risk and the time must be paid.
Jesús: When I was a child I learnt the best figs were those that had been pecked
Thanks, I hadn’t thought of that. I’m going out to the garden now to pick plums, apples and pears. I’m hoping it works for them too.
We used to gather rose-hips over autumn weekends and hand them in at school on Monday. They’d weigh them, pay us so much per pound
Nobody seems to value them the way they used to. It might have been a hangover from WW2, when they were needed for dispensing vitamin C. Nowadays there are other, higher sources available.
Instead of “higo” we use “comino” (cumin), “pimiento” (pepper), etc. as well.
This would never work in English, because we only ever see dried cumin. Incidentally, I was just reading in the paper that the Basques don’t like coriander:
Elena Arzak, San Sebastián.
So much for the theory that the British and Irish are all descended from Basques.
As I’m concerned we also use only dried cumin. Anyway, neither my grandma, nor my mother, nor my wife (even nor my mother-in-low) uses this spice. As coriander, this herb is more used in Portugal than here; we use nearly always “perejil” (parsley) but I think its taste is similar. Basques and Portuguese are likely they add too much :- ). Even I have a plant of parsley in my balcony; actually, the shopkeepers give you free his herb.
>A. J. P. Crown
I forgot to add this link where they write about a defect in figs: bird-peck: http://postharvest.ucdavis.edu/PFfruits/Fig
I hope your daughter doesn’t apply for this university :- ).
Sorry, pay attention to me: when you see a small orifice (pretty much 0.5 cm in diameter) in the middle of a fig, eat it! (after to open it in case a worm).
I hope your daughter doesn’t apply for this university :- ).
Coincidentally I nearly applied there myself, in 1976, to study painting. They had a teacher there called Wayne Thiebaud, whose work I liked, but when I went to visit I found it was mostly an agricultural college, in the middle of nowhere. I wonder where I’d be now if I had gone there.
I don’t find parsley and coriander to be that similar, but I like them both. I love the idea that Spanish greengrocers hand out parsley for free. My parsley was all eaten by (“Spanish”, so called) slugs this year. Next year, I’m going to surround the stuff they eat with sheets of copper. Slugs hate copper, apparently. I think they get tiny electric shocks, somehow.
Do you have fig rolls in Norway? They’re so good they must have it surely.
When we harden off plants we put them on a table in the garden. My wife wrapped copper strip around the four legs – works a treat. My latest notion is that we should swap to growing all our veg in raised beds, and wrap the sides in copper strip. Maybe we could also fence them versus deer.
(As opposed to spring rolls, or hakien, they might be called autumn rolls, no?)
My latest notion is that we should swap to growing all our veg in raised beds, and wrap the sides in copper strip.
I was originally thinking of having a Berlin wall of copper flashing around our entire garden, but I never got round to it before “they” arrived. Now I’m thinking of setting planters on thin-gauge sheets of copper. They only eat a few of our things; parsley being their favourite, apparently.
Sig, I’m not sure about fig rolls in Norway. Fig Newtons is the name I remember – very good for structural engineers, though it seems they aren’t called after Isaac Newton after all.
>A. J. P. Crown
To kill slugs the best (guaranteed!) is a product with metaldehyde, although you must be careful with your dog. I’ve also read that a plate with beer is a good attractive.
At this moment I’d give a dozen fig newtons for one Garibaldi biscuit.
I’m not trying to kill them, just keep them off the parsley. I do kill mosquitoes (nobody’s perfect). A plate of beer is attractive, but I’m going to settle for a glass of wine now it’s 6 o’clock.
Apparently scattering spent coffee grounds is a good way to keep them off your plants, and has the additional attraction of being against EU law.
Speaking of Garibaldi, not about a biscuit exactly but poisons, I remember that I used to play, when I was a child, some matches so-called Garibaldi in whose composition there was white phosphorus, a lethal element (50 mg are enough to kill anybody):
That Garibaldi biscuit is nice indeed, AJP. (I must confess, however, that I’m a true cookie monster in any case.) But I definitely have a soft spot for fig rolls, which I have always known under this name, maybe due to Jacob’s delicious biscuits: http://www.english-shop.de/images/jacobs_figrolls_200g_L.jpg
What is this EU law about coffee grounds?
Newton is the next town* over; I drive through it several times a week. This rarely makes me think of fig cookies. On the other hand I often think of them when I see Choco Leibniz.
* Well, technically it is a city. But it likes to offset this by portraying itself as a collection of villages.
Apparently you are not to use coffee grounds as they have not been adequately tested to prove they are safe. Sounds to me as if it may be a consequence of REACH. http://ec.europa.eu/environment/chemicals/reach/reach_intro.htm
No doubt REACH is as well advised as the wonderful regs on the curvature of bananas and (separate rules) of cucumbers.
I’ve never seen slugs drinking coffee, but that colour must come from somewhere. It’s likely that they don’t put milk in, if they do drink it. Anyway, I’m glad you’re safe from rogue coffee grounds. We in Norway must take our chances.
Funny that they have Newton and Leibnitz cookies, is it something to do with calculus?
I have eaten the last fig and I’ll have to buy some more tomorrow morning. Because now I’m addicted.
We were told at school that if we ate the white phosphorus we would develop phossy jaw, a disfiguring illness that we as teenagers were eager to avoid what with all our other problems.
Sig, can you grow figs on Mars? You could make your own fig rolls.
Regulations like that (and not only in the EU) apply to commercial interests, i.e. prohibits use for commercial purposes and sale to non-commercial users. That means that it won’t be vigilantism, and you and Mrs. Dearie should find another cause.
As for the regulation itself, the page just says that you’re not supposed to use substances that aren’t tested. (Isn’t that common sense? And law everywhere?) It seems to be a tightening of earlier rules, as is happening in most countries, but the reason why it’s now a European rather than a national regulation is that the details shall be the same in all EU countries, so that one can safely buy and sell across borders without accidentally breaking a law.
Much the same for stupid cucumber and banana rules, 26 European countries used to have slightly different stupid definitions of grade A cucumbers that made it difficult for a business in England to pick up the phone and order 400 tons from Portugal next Monday. Taking the effort to bring them together is supply side economy — and a logical consequence of the Common Market rather than the European Union. What the EU — for all its shortcomings — provided was a quicker route than negotiations in international committee. Which is why all the harmionization of agricultural produce happened in a few years in the early nineties.
Find another use of the coffee grounds, i mean. You might start selling it commercially as a health product. That will be vigilantism. And take both pocket money and sleep from your customers — mainly well off women in the fifties with anti-establishment sympathies, I suppose.
Look, there can’t be a law against the Dearies selling their neighbours some coffee grounds. What the neighbours then do with the coffee grounds is their business.
I think this regulation is going to be hard to enforce. I feel like making a poster:
“you’re not supposed to use substances that aren’t tested. (Isn’t that common sense? And law everywhere?)”
REACH means that substances that have been used for years without any discernible problem have to go through an expensive rigmarole for approval. So of course it’s not common sense and of course it’s not law everywhere. But it makes a jolly good living for a bureaucracy that is a scandal of our age.
As for harmonising the international cucumber trade, why not just have a rule about cucumbers that trade across international borders and leave others out of it? In fact, why make such things compulsory? You could draw up the specifications and publish them and leave traders free to order 400 tons of cucumbers consistent with the definition of Euro Grade A, or indeed US Grade B, or Australian Grade C, or just strike a bargain between buyer and seller to their mutual satisfaction.
To ask the question is to answer it: leaving discretion to the traders might risk the benefits to the bureaucracy of being armed with the power of compulsion.
From WKPD: On 29 July 2008, the European Commission held a preliminary vote concerning the repeal of certain regulations related to the quality of specific fruit and vegetables that included provisions related to size and shape. According to the Commission’s press release, “In this era of high prices and growing demand, it makes no sense to throw these products away or destroy them.”
Such creeps never do explain when exactly was a jolly good era to throw away these products or destroy them. Such creeps also issue, as here, boasts of their decisions to reduce “red tape” without admitting that they were the very creeps who introduced the red tape in the first place. Pah.
Well, if “they have been shown to be EXTREMELY EFFECTIVE”, that means they’ve been tested and won’t be against the regulation. Unless forbidding sideeffects were found as well — sleeplessness among carpenter ants or something,
As I said, a tightening of the rules. The history is full of stuff that everybody knew was safe but turned out to be harmful. Putting it upon commercial interests to actually know what they’re doing is common sense happening everywhere. Now, it’s convenient to have the EU to blame, but without it, Britain and every other country would do the same thing, but slightly differently and at a different pace, so the producers would have to go through the process in 26 jurisdictions. That’s an awful lot of creeps to satisfy.
As for deregulation of cucumber rules, it was initiated not by the same bureaucratic creeps, but by a new set of politicians, i.e. flagged as a change in ideology. It may have been a change to the better, and if so, that’s why we elect new politicians in the first place. I rather think it was a mostly harmless symbolic gesture of the kind new brooms like to make. After all, most of the other harmonized standards are still in place because they make practical sense to the industry. Standardization happened decades and decades ago in every industrialised economy, and largely not upon initiative from the government but from the industries concerned, who knew that discretion to the traders cost a lot of money for all parties controlling eachother and paying lawyers and consultants to make waterproof contracts and specifications — and quarreling over the quality of the delivered product. Same with international standardisation inside and outside the EU.
I should add that when i use creeps it’s enterily quotative and in context. As an epithet it’s deliberately dehumanizing, and I don’t like it, whether said bureaucrats add value to society or not.
But this is getting far too serious for a Monday morning. Back to coffee grounds as a snail deterrant.
I hardly ever eat cucumbers, except as pickles. They’re 99.9% water so I just drink water, which I prefer anyway.
I had you booked for 100 kilos, but I’ll reduce the order accordingly. 399,9 tons.
But water makes dismal sandwiches whereas cucumber sandwiches are wonderful.
Yes, you’re right there. There speaks a cricketer.
I was never going to eat 100 kilos of cucumbers. Maybe 0.25 kilo, max. You engineers and your safety factors.
If I spoke as an engineer, I’d book you for a kilonewton.
I shy away from a grocery store as soon as I see queuecumbers.
>A. J. P. Crown
Average weight (kg):
– Water: 45
– Protein: 12
– Fat: 12
– Carbohydrate: 1
– Ash: 1
I feel rejected.
I’ve found an ally to defend cucumbers and the whole species with water in most of its compositions: the masked Cucumber.-
http://www.leconcombre.com/bio/index.html
Jesús And The Masked Cucumber sounds like a comedy, and yet “Jesus” is very rarely (never?) a comedy character.
You know the nearest comedy character to Jesus Crowned (of thorns) was Bryan. My eponym would need a special stress on his name.
► Jésus de Montréal.
There is also this Zézi who loves everyone on a construction site.
>Siganus Sutor
But “Jésus de Montréal » is more passionate than comical, isn’t it?
Wrong diacritic too. Not bad though, Sig.
>A. J. P. Crown
It seems recently (well, since February) this name with the accent on the “u” is in fashion :- )
Why, what happened in February?
Siganus wrote the post « Jesús t’aime » in this month.
I like seeing at the top, under “Recent Comments”, Jesús on Figs.
You can also see Jesus on: fish, pizza, NMR, hamburger, iron, frying pan, etc.: http://pijamasurf.com/2012/03/top-25-apariciones-misticas-en-objetos-extranos/
I don’t believe it but maybe it’s related to the phrase of saint Theresa of Avila: “God walks even among the pots and pans”.
Apparently He is everywhere.
But is He up trees?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2012/oct/05/stag-chases-man-tree-london-park-video
>Dearieme
Well, Jesus…trees…and figs…
I don’t know if he is up the trees but I remember when he ordered to Zacchaeus: “come down immediately! [from a sycamore-fig tree]” (Luke 19, 5):
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+19&version=NIV
Now I understand it, when we have experiencing a serious crisis (not of faith, exactly) and Zachaeus was a tax collector.
And incidentally, one of my brothers and a cousin called me Zacchaeus because I’m short (and them too) when they learnt that. Well, they also called me Cyrano due to my big nose (and, in this case, only my brother as well). :- )
You have a cruel family, Jesús, but I’m sure you were able to respond biblically.
It was childishness, I didn’t mind and I laughed too; I just wanted to justify why I remembered that biblical passage. Anyway, I accept the challenge. How about: “He who is without (sin) fault among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at (her) me”?
Or “Those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. And should pull the blinds when removing their trousers.” I’m not sure if that’s in the Bible.
Neither am I but it’s on Internet:
Thought this might interest you, Crown.
http://uncouthreflections.wordpress.com/2012/10/09/how-you-finish-a-skyscraper-is-the-most-important-part/#comments
Thank you. I think one of the best things about New York architecture is being able to view the buildings from different heights, like this person has done from his hotel room window, it almost gives the city an extra dimension. That won’t be so interesting in the new skyscraper cities in Asia that have sprung up so fast, because the buildings are all so similar in style, size and material (just being grumpy, I haven’t actually been to see them).
Jesús, that “glass houses…trousers” was said by the late British comedian Spike Milligan, so I expect that’s why it’s to be found elsewhere on the internet.