Drying Times Indeed
by Nick Foulkes16 December 2009
It has been some time since I blogged and if anyone has missed my bulletins from the slightly surreal world in which I operate I apologise but I have been rather busy. As well as the usual short hops to Geneva (I am beginning to think that life in Calvin’s city would suit me rather well, it is very relaxing and if I am at loose end I can always visit a watch factory) I have been to Loch Lomond where it was wet and Meissen where it was cold and I have been busy instructing my friends and relations as to the correct items to purchase me for Christmas. I am sure that there was something else…oh yes… we have brought out the triumphant Christmas (or if you are American – ‘Holiday’) number of Finch’s Quarterly Review.
Tristram and I usually fling the newspaper together after supper one evening and we can usually inflate this splendidly otiose (and therefore utterly indispensable) journalistic soufflé in about as long as it takes me to smoke a Hoyo de Monterrey Double Corona – although if I am in a hurry and need to get home early we can polish it off in the time it takes me to enjoy a Partagas short and on one occasion we pulled it off in about the same timeframe that Tristram requires to gulp down a high tar cigarette.
You see it is not the act of creation that takes so much time, it is the production process. By the time we have finished our fine tobacco products Finch’s Quarterly Review is off to the printers where it languishes for about a month waiting for the ink to dry – quite how daily newspapers manage to plan their news so far in advance, so as to accommodate this careful drying process, is a source of continuing amazement for me. FQR does not arrive hot off the press, instead rather like revenge, we find that it is something best served at room temperature or below.
I did once raise this issue with Tristram and he informed me that, since Gutenberg and Caxton it was ever thus and that he personally, in his capacity as both a gentleman and an intellectual, would never knowingly handle a single sheet of printed matter that had not been properly seasoned and matured in a remote Yorkshire barn for at least three weeks (or a slightly shorter period during the summer months) before being bound and mailed out. Appeals to my snobbery and intellectual vanity usually succeed, but I also like to think of myself as a man committed to progress and scientific advancement.
At Finch’s Quarterly Review we are creatures of the modern world and just because printing has stayed more or less the same since Mr Geoffrey Chaucer brought out his Canterbury Tales, it does not mean that we will allow it to remain so. So, to borrow the language of the late Lord Wilson, I have forged an idea in the white heat of technology, and although it is not fully costed, I think it will work and it will certainly cut FQR’s drying time dramatically. In future I aim to equip every issue of Finch’s Quarterly Review with a butler who will be on hand, ready to iron your copy of Finch’s Quarterly Review, when it arrives, damp (rather than hot) off the press.
Indeed I rather whish I had had an FQR butler to hand when I was cycling down the Mall the other day. I must haven been going at quite a rate as my Charvet tie flew from my neck – such a shame as it was a beauty, a sort of salmon-meets-sunset shade woven in a pattern that recalled small postage stamps. Had an FQR butler been perched on the back of my Pashley, he would have been able to catch it as it flew through the air, instead, for all I know it fluttered over the railings at Buck House and is now adorning the neck of the Duke of Edinburgh.
You will of course be relieved to know that I always travel (even short distances) with a spare tie or cravat about my person and I was able to adjust my dress accordingly before stepping into my important lunch…but all the same it gave me a nasty shock and my mourning for this beautiful piece of Parisian silk has also conspired to have me neglect my blogging duties.
