Proverbial Talks

In June 2010 I published The Rollright Letter [1] as one of a new series of dispatches from William of Salisbury. This dispatch started off with Tom Graves' experience of dowsing sacred sites but took an unexpected turn when I went looking on the web for an image of the Rollright Stones and discovered that Rollright...like Stonehenge [2]...is a complex of several sites, one of which is The King's Men.

And so with a leap of faith [3] and a bound of memory I found myself thinking of Humpty Dumpty...and from there, by way of all the king's horses, to Gogmagog and Tom Lethbridge's five chapters on the old religions and the buried gods of this sceptered isle.

So it goes.

Which led to Banbury Cross and a second nursery rhyme. So now the first question is who is Humpty Dumpty? And the second question is what is this wall he is sitting on...a stone wall perhaps?

Humpty dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty dumpty had a great fall
All the kings horses
And all the kings men
Couldn't put humpty together again.

End Notes

[1] This piece was first published online in July 2010 when included in William of Salisbury's Letter from Rollright.
[2] If this made you sit bolt upright in your chair, you should pour yourself out a glass of red wine and settle down to an evening in attendance at the Lethbridge Symposium where David Brandon reports on some fascinating insights into the Stonehenge sites.
[3] Soren Kierkegaard would have liked the expression 'a leap of faith'. See the essay of The Unfashionable Kierkegaard by Peter Drucker...yes the Peter Drucker...written in 1947 although all the web references seem to date it as 1933.

In 1957 T.C. Lethbridge’s published his first book entitled Gogmagog: The Buried Gods. The book was really two books. The first half (Chapters 1-4) describes Lethbridge’s discoveries and subsequent excavations in the Gogmagog Hills twenty miles east of Cambridge near Wandelbury.

But in the second half (Chapters 5-10) Lethbridge took the opportunity to set down what he then knew about England’s pre-history.

The two books complement each other but Lethbridge’s speculations are often at odds with the theories in Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough which held sway over the academic consensus in the 1950s. Instead he found himself closely aligned to the heresies being expressed by his friend and colleague at Cambridge University, Dr Margaret Murray.

According to Lethbridge, ‘Sir James Frazer’s dying god and the burning of the nature spirit may well be the result of an adaptation of the earlier beliefs of a pastoral people in an agricultural age. In Britain there seems to have been less of this than elsewhere. This may be why Caesar said that Druidism was found in its purest form in Britain.’

Lethbridge’s tenth and final chapter in Gogmagog included brief notes on legends such as the Cailleach (the Forest One) who kept a beautiful girl, Spring or the New Moon, imprisoned in a cave on Ben Nevis, controlled winds and winter…and could turn herself into a standing stone.

Here is Lethbridge on Cailleach: ‘Many localities in the Highlands are associated with her and in particular her name has clung to rounded hills of breast-like shape. She is the dark phase of the moon and the Great Earth Mother. Like Kali in many particulars and even name, she was goddess both of destruction and fruitfulness. Her husband is sometimes said to have been a seagod and perhaps Manann. Poseidon’s relationship to horses should be remembered here.’

Here is Lethbridge on the goddess Epona: ‘Usually Epona is depicted as a young woman with a horse and key to Heaven. It is probably her figure seen riding on numerous coins of the British Iron Age, together with a crescent moon symbol. She should be compared with the young girl imprisoned by the Cailleach in the cave of Ben Nevis, who escaped and rode away with Diarmid, the young phase of the Gaelic Sun God.

Epona’s mother was a mare and her father a god in human form, sometimes said to have been a mortal. She is clearly the same as Hippa of Greek mythology, who had a similar parentage. Epona represents the Earth Mother in her young phase as the new moon. Not a few English place-names probably retain her name rather than that of some imaginary Saxon.’

In the Gogmagog index we find 32 references for ‘horses’…for comparison there are 46 for ‘moon’ and 27 for ‘Saxon’. Lethbridge writes of ‘…the whole of Britain being full of traces of white horses’ and that ‘…the horseshoe has become a lucky talisman; but it was once a lunar symbol and a fertility charm…the horse was sacred to Diana because of its moon-shaped hoof’.

There is a horseshoe beside me on the window sill as I write. In Britain there are ritual processions of naked women on white horses. At Coventry Lady Godiva was, according to Lethbridge ‘…veiled in her hair’; At Southam she was ‘…painted black, the ceremony ending in an unveiling when the New Moon was then revealed’.

At Banbury the lady ‘…had bells on her toes to scare off the demon. Demons hate noise. That is what the bells are for.’ Different versions of the nursery rhyme have a fine, young or old lady.

Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross
To see a fine lady upon a white horse
Rings on her fingers
Bells on her toes
She shall make music wherever she goes

End Notes

[1] This piece was first published online in July 2010 when included as the final page of William of Salisbury's Letter from Rollright.

Sometimes things are so familiar that you no longer notice them. My mother sang Sing-a-song-of sixpence to me as a child...although my memory probably comes from Listen with Mother on the BBC Light Programme at quarter to two every day. I sang the rhyme to my children countless times and read to them from the many books of nursery rhymes we had around our house.

But the other day, after singing it to my grand daughter, instead of the rhyme fading away, it buzzed around inside my head in the irritating way of such things. Sing a song of sixpence a pocket full of rye; four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie; when the pie was opened the birds began to sing; now wasn't that a dainty dish to set before a king. Dainty? A pocketful of rye? Whatever does this all mean?

The clues are in the next verse. The king was in his counting house counting out the money; the queen was in the parlour eating bread and honey; the maid was in the garden hanging out the clothes; when along came a blackbird and pecked off her nose.

Well this is something you can sing casually for years without giving it any attention. 'Pay attention! Pay Attention!' was the refrain of Aldous Huxley's parrot in Island, written in 1954 by way of an antidote to Brave New World with its stark choice between technological fascism or mindless savagery. [1]

But when it starts buzzing around in your head it is something different. What a strange idea. A black bird...presumably one of the twenty four in the pie...pecking off the nose of a hard-working peasant who knew her place, and perhaps more to the point, was usually there.

Sometimes, tacked on the end, is a verse which goes something like this: ‘There was such a commotion that little Jenny Wren; flew down to the garden and put it back again.’ Why a wren? The smallest bird in England. Wrens huddle together in winter to keep themselves warm...and the wren was an augury to the Druids. Perhaps the lords of Lombard Street were fearful of too much transparency. 'Commotion' sounds just a little too much like a riot...and the rich and powerful have always feared the mob. Mustn't give the little dears ideas above their station! Suppress the last verse!

At this point, the flash of inspiration. 'Peter picked a peck of pickled pepper.' The peck is the point. The Hebrew word neshek - usury, is from the root n-sh-k which means to bite. After that it all falls into place. The smallest coin minted in England was the farthing. One farthing is one twenty-fourth part of sixpence…a little over four percent. You pay me back sixpence and a farthing for my sixpence loan. That farthing is the usury. Big time! [2]

The biggest usurers in medieval times were the Church and the Jews...to most people the words Jew and Usurer were synonymous. The clerks and agents and the priests dressed in black. Hence the blackbirds. And how strange that they should still be alive after an hour in the oven at 200 degrees Celsius. But this would have come as no surprise to an ancient Greek or Babylonian. Aristotle, who understood something of the nature of money, wrote:

'Usury is most reasonably hated because its gain comes from money itself and not from that for the sake of which money was invented. For money was brought into existence for the purpose of exchange, but interest increases the amount of the money itself and this is the actual origin of the Greek word: offspring resembles parent, and interest is money born of money; consequently this form of the business of getting wealth is of all forms the most contrary to nature.' Something dead becomes a living thing. No wonder it was ‘contra natura’.

Ezra Pound devotes the whole of Canto XLV to Usura with the repeating chorus usura contra natura...and Pound was a good orthodox Roman Catholic schooled in the Greek classics before educating himself in Chinese letters [3].

'Usury is that swelling monster contrary to nature, order and all good reason.' Thus spake Aristophanes. 'Tokos', the Greek word for usury, is from the root which means to breed or increase.

The Romans also understood the danger to the state posed by usury. 'The cancer of usury is an old venomous sore and the chiefest head and cause of rebellions in countries.' Tacitus wrote that.

Usury was no light matter five hundred years ago. Medieval man knew his bible and there is a phrase in the sixth verse of Psalm XV, for instance, that condemns the giving of money upon usury: ‘lo natan beneshek’. And Thomas Wilson in 1569 in his Discourse Upon Usurye wrote that 'Usury overthrows trade, decays merchandise, undoes tillage, destroys craftsmen, defaces chivalries, beats down nobility, brings dearth and famine, and causes destruction and confusion.'

Professor R.H. Tawney wrote a 169-page introduction to the 1923 re-issue of Wilson's influential 16th century tract...in ten brilliant short essays.

The issue of usury is the key to understanding European politics in Tawney's century. In the end the baby was thrown out with the bathwater but not without a mighty struggle. The Doctrine of Usury did not need to decline just because the established churches went into decline, and the doctrine can be brought back in secular form as an amendment to the US constitution on the other side of the pond or as a re-enactment of the usury laws of the 16th century on this side.

Michael Hudson has pointed out that '...neither Hebrew, Greek nor Latin had separate words to distinguish between 'interest' and 'usury' and that this distinction is a product of Canon Law seeking to carve out a form of financial gain (interesse).

However although the modern definition of usury as 'excessive interest over and above the legal rate approved by civil authorities' may pervert the original meaning of the word, the middle way developed by the Calvinists in Geneva makes excellent modern sense and would allow Christian teaching to be brought into line with Jews and Moslems under a secular law against usury. It could be a key part of any arrangement for Turkey to join the European Union.

I particularly like the provision in the 1545 legislation of triple fines for usurers. This, combined with the ideas in the Act of 1571 for the administration of the Doctrine of Usury,[4] would provide a sound basis for a bill in the Westminster Parliament.

Such a bill would cut back financial transactions to a fifth of their present level, regulate the exchanges by attacking their excessive profits and bonuses directly and making all but their core business in physical commodities unprofitable; and within a few years would transform the banking industry into a back office operation run by chartered accountants in accordance with the ethics and rules of their guild. [5]

Not a bad return on four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie. And the queen would still get her honey and cake. Sing a song of sixpence; a pocketful of rye...hmm...why rye and why a pocketful. Perhaps it bought enough gin to get mums through the night...or put the wee bairns to sleep. Babies have always screamed...and always will.

End Notes

[1] Brave New World was written in 1932. Brave New World Revisited (Harper & Row, US, 1958; Chatto & Windus, UK, 1959) was written by Huxley almost thirty years after Brave New World. It was a non-fiction work in which Huxley considered whether the world had moved toward or away from his vision of the future from the 1930s. He believed when he wrote the original novel that it was a reasonable guess as to where the world might go in the future. In Brave New World Revisited, he concluded that the world was becoming like Brave New World much faster than he originally thought. Huxley analysed the causes of this, such as overpopulation as well as all the means by which populations can be controlled. He was particularly interested in the effects of drugs and subliminal suggestion. Brave New World Revisited is different in tone because of Huxley's evolving thought, as well as his conversion to Hindu Vedanta in the interim between the two books. The last chapter of the book aims to propose action which could be taken in order to prevent a democracy from turning into the totalitarian world described in Brave New World. In Huxley's last novel, Island, written in 1954, he again expounds similar ideas to describe a utopian nation...a counterpart to Brave New World.

[2] An image of a wren is on the reverse of the farthing coin. Money, size and solidarity. Not a bad formula for 21st century left-wing politics. Perhaps the great and the good at the Eton College of Maynard Keynes and the Cambridge University of Henry Sidgwick & Alfred Marshall thought that usury smacked too much of Christianity...too much for a science of economics in a secular age. Besides R.H.Tawney and Beatrice Webb were beyond the Bloomsbury pale...more in Endnote [5].

[3] Cantos XLII, XLIII and XLIV move to the Sienese bank, the Monte dei Paschi di Siena and to the 18th-century reforms of Pietro Leopoldo, Habsburg Arch Duke of Tuscany. Founded in 1624, the Monte dei Paschi was a low-interest, not-for-profit credit institution whose funds were based on local productivity as represented by the natural increase generated by the grazing of sheep on community land (the Bank of the Grassland of Canto XLIII). As such, it represents a Poundian non-capitalist ideal.

Canto XLV is a litany against Usura or usury, which Pound later defined as a charge on credit regardless of potential or actual production and the creation of wealth ex nihilo by a bank to the benefit of its shareholders. The canto declares this practice as both contrary to the laws of nature and inimical to the production of good art and culture. Pound later came to see this canto as a key central point in the poem.

Canto XLVI contrasts what has gone before with the practices of institutions such as the Bank of England that are designed to exploit the issuing of credit to make profits, thereby, in Pound's view, contributing to poverty, social deprivation, crime and the production of "bad" art as exemplified by the baroque.

[4] R.H. Tawney reported that in 1595 the author of a careful study of the 1571 legislation on the subject of usury wrote that '...there be many simple men, which, having no insight into the statute, are not ashamed to say that it alloweth ten in the hundred.'

This careful author continues: '...which, indeed, is a mere scandal and slander, for it upholdeth a kinde of punishment, by the loss of the least usury that is taken...When King Henry did tolerate 10 pound in the 100 many did abuse that libertie under colour of the law; and when King Edward VI had utterly taken away all usurie, this inconvenience came, few or none would lend because they might have no allowance, whereupon her Majestie to avoid this evill made this remissive clause...'

And it is here that the author gets to the administrative genius at the heart of Queen Elizabeth I's 1571 Usury Act: '...the Borrower hath this libertie by this branche for his owne benefit: 1. If he promise usury he need not pay unless he will; 2. If he pay usurie, he may recover it again if he be grieved; 3. lf he be willing to pay usurie, he is at his own choice to complain.'

I refer to this as the act's Citizens Arrest provisions since in practice it works in much the same way.

[5] In his latest newsletter, James Robertson suggests that economics and ethics are starting to mix. They have been separated for well-nigh on two centuries so it is not before time. I blame my old alma mater, Cambridge University.

The economic enterprise started off well enough with Henry Sidgwick devoting his life to the invention of a secular ethics on which economic theory would construct its edifice. The ambition was to escape the strait jacket of 18th Century moral philosophers like Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus on the one hand; and the political assumptions of the liberal reformers like John Stuart Mill on the other.

All well and good...except that Sidgwick failed...setting the scene for the rot that was to follow, first with Alfred Marshall, who was the dominant figure in British economics (itself dominant in world economics) from about 1890 until his death in 1924, and then with John Maynard Keynes. We live in the shadow of the disaster that was the Cambridge Economics School.

As head of the Cambridge Economics department Marshall saw his mission as being to ditch all vestiges of Sedgwick's secular ethics. When Keynes took over...intent on being his own man...he led economics even further into the weeds by seeking to deconstruct the work, wealth & happiness of mankind...human ecology...by focusing on the management of decision making under uncertainty. To Keynes, this was what economics was really all about. Such hoary old Christian shibboleths as fate and free will were buried away in the small print.

Sidgwick stands accused of throwing out the baby with the bath water in his determination to eliminate any mention of such medieval Christian notions as usury. But neither Marshall nor Keynes made any attempt to reclaim it. They were men of their time. Darwinian thought cast a long shadow over the ivory towers of the 20th Century...in England as well as Germany.

The only ray of hope came from beyond the pale of academic economics in the work of the Socialist Economists. John Ruskin, William Morris and Bernard Shaw saw the problem and the Fabian Socialists under the guidance of Sidney and Beatrice Webb kept the flame alive and spread its warmth and light to the Americas. But it was a minority creed in a century when making money was the measure of success and making sense or making love a project for losers. Women, the arbiters of fashion and culture must bear a significant part of the blame for the adventure of civilization taking this wrong turn.

Shining like a beacon in the gloom was Professor R.H. Tawney at London University who realized from his studies of the 16th Century that the Elizabethans had been on the right track in their refusal to give up on the medieval Doctrine of Usury and their insistence on making it fit for the purposes of the new age being opened up by their Merchant Adventurers and Small Manufacturers. The practical application of a Doctrine of Usury was one of the key subjects of political debate for much of the 16th Century.

From his perspective as an investigative historian, Tawney recognized the role that minting money would play in the lives of ordinary people and how the exchanges of merchants, speculators and international financiers would destroy the people's coinage if allowed to run amok. Tawney also understood that the creation and destruction of debt...and its distribution...far from being a technical exercise residing in the outer limits of economic theory…was in fact the elephant in the room. Everyone knew it was there but no one dared talk about it...or, horror of horrors, study its nature or understand its ways.

Fortunately the work of the new business schools kept the subject alive into our own times by insisting on its relevance to governance. The work of Peter Drucker on Pensions and their unintended consequences as a new form of property...another elephant in the room all but ignored by economic academics…is noteworthy in this regard.

Another key development was Benefit Cost Analysis which provides a scientific method of Project Clearing and hence of Investment Selection. Finance has become the tail wagging the industrial dog. It is sufficient that a project meet society's economic criteria. Money is not the scarce resource of the mercantile age when the mining and plunder of gold and silver artificially limited the availability of money. Human work is the limiting resource...and ‘working days’ its surrogate...with Intelligent Tools and Energy Slaves as key to shifting the balance of work between toil and vocation.

E.F.Schumacher, Chief Economist to the British National Coal Board was much concerned about the metaphysical underpinnings of economics and wrote extensively on the subject. Below is an extract from William Shepherd's essay The Limits to Models, which presents Schumacher’s introduction to his essay A Machine to Foretell the Future?

‘The reason for including a discussion on predictability in this volume,’ wrote Schumacher, ‘is that it represents one of the most important metaphysical - and therefore practical - problems with which we are faced. There have never been so many futurologists, planners, forecasters, and model-builders as there are today, and the most intriguing product of technological progress, the computer, seems to offer untold new possibilities. People talk freely about ‘machines to foretell the future.’ Are not such machines just what we have been waiting for? All men at all times have been wanting to know the future.’

‘But a machine to foretell the future is based on metaphysical assumptions of a very definite kind. It is based on the implicit assumption that ‘the future is already here’, that it exists already in a determinate form, so that it requires merely good instruments and good techniques to get it into focus and make it visible.’

‘The reader will agree that this is a very far-reaching metaphysical assumption, in fact, a most extraordinary assumption which seems to go against all direct personal experience. It implies that human freedom does not exist or, in any case, that it cannot alter the predetermined course of events. We cannot shut our eyes to the fact, on which I have been insisting throughout this book, that such an assumption, like all metaphysical theses, whether explicit or implicit, has decisive practical consequences. The question is simple: is it true or is it untrue.’

Schumacher continues by taking an unusual perspective…that of the mind of God

‘When the Lord created the world and the people to live in it - an enterprise which, according to modern science, took a very long time - I could well imagine that He reasoned with Himself as follows: If I make everything predictable, these human beings, whom I have endowed with pretty good brains, will undoubtedly learn to predict everything, and they will thereupon have no motive to do anything at all, because they will recognise that the future is totally determined and cannot be influenced by any human action. On the other hand, if I make everything unpredictable, they will gradually discover that there is no rational basis for any decision whatsoever and, as in the first case, they will thereupon have no motive to do anything at all.’

‘Neither scheme would make sense. I must therefore create a mixture of the two. Let some things be predictable and let others be unpredictable. They will then, amongst many other things, have the very important task of finding out which is which. And this, indeed, is a very important task, particularly today, when people try to devise machines to foretell the future. Before anyone makes a prediction, he should be able to give a convincing reason why the factor to which his prediction refers is inherently predictable.’

Later in his ‘Roman Catholic Primer’ Guide for the Perplexed Schumacher writes of adaequatio and the Chain of Being where Man…wyfman and karlman…are at the top of the heap with dominion over the natural world; a thought too radical for the alternative movement who seldom read further than Buddhist Economics in Small is Beautiful.

The other day a man of the cloth stopped to give a lift to a hitch-hiker on his way to Banbury to see a young woman on a white horse.

The man was munching a sandwich and told the driver he had just been released from jail. He went on to explain he was a compulsive pickpocket, no sooner serving a sentence, he committed yet another offence.

They were stopped by a policeman for speeding and after taking down name, address and car number, he warned the driver he would hear further about his offence.

On arriving in Banbury the hitch-hiker asked to be put down and as he left he told the driver he was leaving him a present for being so kind to him. The driver protested he needed no return, but his guest left his sandwich bag on his seat before making off.

On arriving at his destination the priest opened the bag only to find it contained, not a sandwich as he expected, but the policeman's notebook.

Some years ago, alarmed at the way that local community life was being sabotaged by giant chain stores, a man of the cloth suggested that if people took goods from a local shop without paying for them that was both illegal and immoral, whereas if they did it in a supermarket it might be illegal but it was not immoral.

The tabloid press hailed him next day as the shoplifting vicar. None of the newspapers mentioned how giant stores were stealing the identity of local communities.

Proverbs lay bare our rural traditions. Of the fifteen proverbs in our series, there are three homilies: on happiness and sadness; on means and ends; and on friends and neighbours. But the other twelve have as their themes, hearth and home; and the daily business of putting food on the family table.

Now it might seem that birds in bushes and the woods and the trees do not quite fall into this category, but the practice of shooting pigeons for food was abandoned only recently upon Queen Victoria's orders.

As for the English woods, the legend of Robin Hood is no accident of history. It was the Norman kings who tried to declare the English forests to be their own private Big Game Reservations. And it was their Latin scribblers who invented the idea of the Poacher. Up until this time, the Danelaw boundary reached down as far as the Thames Estuary and the forests of Mercia and Northumbria were under the benevolent jurisdiction of the Scandinavian Settlers with their long established traditions of Common Property, Common Rights and Common Duties. What an alien concept poaching was under the Danelaw.

Otherwise our proverbs are all about fetching water from the stream; cooking soup on an open fire; grinding corn at the mill on the floss; milking the family cow; planting potatoes; tending the chickens in the farmyard; and making the kind of decision every farmer has to make: eggs now or chicken later.

Strangely there is little mention of pigs and goats, sheep and horses, dogs and cats, in our English or Swedish proverbs. Their complete absence is so unexpected that there must be a good reason for it. And I suspect it is an important one.

If I were to hazard a guess, then I would say that it is because these have always been regarded as family and not food. You may make a joke about your mother-in-law, but you are tempting fate if you have the audacity to make a proverb about your wife.

Doubtless somebody will now send in a long list of proverbs to disprove the point. If pigs could fly, talking the back legs off a donkey, and others of this ilk. But let us not dwell for I need to address a few words to producers of these Proverbial Talks.

These fifteen radio scripts have been written in prose with the thought that they would be performed for radio in much the same manner as Alistair Cooke's Letter from America. However some of the sketches might better lend themselves to a two-voice dialogue or conversation mode...a style which appears to be gaining ever greater acceptance with the producers of television news programmes.

Some trial and error would be advisable with your particular radio station audiences to discover the best mode of broadcasting for your listeners. But I fear I am teaching you to suck eggs.

Chickens and eggs are as English as custard and apples and as Swedish as sill och potatis or blodpudding med lingonsylt. Our folk wisdom is filled to overflowing with them. We even talk of a worthless person as a bad egg and it is a great compliment to be referred to as a good egg.

And then we say things like getting egg on your face to indicate that somebody looks foolish; or a chicken and egg situation when we mean that it is impossible to tell which is the cause and which the effect. We also tell people not to teach their grandmother to suck eggs when they venture above their intellectual station and try to teach those older and wiser than themselves. Americans sometimes talk of laying an egg when a stand-up comedian is forced to sit down promptly by a jeering audience.

Taking eggs for money used to be common verbal currency before there was a cheque in the post. H.G.Wells took this notion to extremes when he went to Russia in 1921. He packed both eggs and money...and found the eggs rather more useful as a means of exchange.

As for the Swedes, they talk about cooked eggs giving no chickens - av kokta ägg blir inga kycklingar; and advise their children not to count their chickens before they are hatched - räkna inte kycklingar förrän de är kläckta. The English have this one too.

Then there are egg and spoon races. And not only in England. The last one I took part in was at a midsommerfest on Ljusterö, a little way north of Stockholm. Meanwhile Jonathan Swift had reports of a terrible war starting over the touchy question of which end of the egg the spoon should break open. Gulliver finally managed to resolve the issue with skilful diplomacy but that is another story. Until that time the Big-enders and the Little-enders had formed themselves into parties and there was mayhem throughout the Land of Lilliput.

Nor is the chicken left out of matters by the humble oval body that we know as the egg. Call somebody chicken and you could have a vendetta on your hands. It is an insult reflecting less than favourably on the person's bravery. Chicken is also a game of sorts. James Dean got forced into playing it when rebelling without a cause. He won but his pal was killed. Nigerians play the same game where their highways have just one track of tarmac. And there is a very good joke about the Hell Run that goes from the copper fields of Zambia to the Tanzanian port of Dar-es-Salaam. Remind me to tell it you some other time.

So you see what a wonderful world there is among our proverbs and our folk wisdom. We even ask why the chicken crossed the road...and reply that he wanted to get to the other side. Very funny, but why a chicken? And as to chickens coming home to roost, this is definitely something to steer clear of. It means that your actions will have unpleasant consequences in the fullness of time...a sort of vernacular karma theory.

But a word of warning. Egging somebody on has nothing to do with chickens. It means to urge them or even incite them. It comes from the Old Norse word eggja...the word that has given us the English word edge. Tant pis! What a shame! I could have used it in my Proverbial Talks about the chicken and the egg. Very edgy!

Out of the frying pan into the fire is not something the Swedes say, but they do have something like it that means the same thing - ur asken i elden - out of the ashes into the fire.

Now this of course raises all kinds of interesting speculations on the differences in cooking techniques between the Swedes and their English, Scottish and Irish cousins.

I was once surprised when I roped in some Colombian friends to prepare dinner for guests at an Academic Inn Dinner-Discussion and found them throwing the meat into the open fire. And whenever our friends in Dalarna throw one of their weekend summer feasts, pride of place is given to the pig cooked by the men over an open fire.

But this is hardly evidence that the English did not also cook this way when the need was there. And pigs do not fit easily into a frying pan...except as bacon. Perhaps here is our clue. My usual source of reference at times like this is John Seymour and his Encyclopaedia of Household Crafts but for once he was unable to save my bacon.

Here in England we think of eggs and bacon as peculiarly English. And though the Americans have confused things by adding pancakes and calling it a New England Breakfast, we do not find the Swedes partaking in such strange early morning behaviour. In fact I have yet to find a Swede who does not become quite sick just watching an Englishman with his English breakfast...yet much of our bacon comes from Denmark, so the plot thickens.

What's more, it gets us nowhere nearer finding out why Swedes jump into the fire from the ashes, while the English jump there from the frying pan. Perhaps it is all in the subtle difference in the behaviour of the Swedish and English moth. For what other creatures would be jumping into fires anyway?

As to what it all means...the moral of the story...it is like this. Things may be bad, but you should look before you leap, because they could get worse. In fact, you could find that you are between the devil and the deep blue sea. In which case better the devil you know. On the other hand, nothing ventured nothing gained even though fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

With advice like this, the only safe course of action would seem to be to put out the fire...but not before you have burned your boats.

Quite clearly 'Too many cooks spoil the broth' is a universal truth because the Swedes have the same idea in mind when they exclaim 'Ju fler kockar, ju sämre soppa' - the more cooks, the worse the soup.

But perhaps we should ask ourselves why the Swedish word soppa which lends itself so readily to a translation as the English word soup is replaced in the English proverb by the Scottish word broth. I do not dare to go too far with this, but here are two hints.

In Old English there is this word, a most important word too, breowan, which means to brew. Hops are breowanned and as a result we have for hundreds of years had taverns where the ale doth flow and the men are men. Broth comes from breowan so the Chambers English Dictionary tells us.

It also tells us something else. The Irish, bless their cotton socks, talk about 'a broth of a boy.' Now the Irish talk about anything and everything, so this part of it all is no wonder. But 'a broth of a boy' is their way of telling you that he is the quintessence of a good fellow. Too much breowanning if you ask me.

In England any declaration that 'Too many cooks spoil the broth' invites the immediate retort that 'Many hands make light work.' This goes under the broad heading of English humour and is best left to the English. Besides, the remark is likely to prompt a clip round the ear, an admonishment not to be cheeky and just possibly, if the mood is right, a short discourse something along these lines.

'You, young man, may think these two remarks contradict each other, but that just shows that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and that you are too big for your boots. Older and wiser people than you know that two seemingly contradictory statements can both be true at the same time. In fact, if you did your Greek homework instead of sneaking off fishing after school...Oh yes, don't think we don't know what you get up to young man. We weren't born yesterday...then you would understand that there must be moderation in all things. You can have too much of a good thing. Yes, and even too little of a bad thing. Had you had a few more spankings when you were young, we would not be having so much trouble with you now.'

So when there is work to be done, the call goes out to the inn across the village green that many hands make light work, and out troop the men adequately brothed of course to do the ladies' bidding.

But something quite different is called for when the kitchen is so crowded that nobody can hear themselves talk.

'Martha. Away with you. Lay the table.'

'Jack. Make yourself useful. Take Nicholas and go and bring the wood in.

'Linda. Don't just stand there getting in everybody's way! Make yourself useful somewhere else. Too many cooks spoil the broth!'