The Second Book of General Ignorance (18 page)

They haven’t. ‘Health-and-safety-mad’ bureaucrats still allow fire stations to be built with the traditional poles in them.

Firefighters on the night shift spend their time in dormitories or rest rooms. When the call to action comes,they leap out of bed and dash to their engines. To get there from the upper floor of the station, sliding down a pole is quicker (and safer) than hurtling down stairs. But, either way, a bunch of half-asleep people trying to get down in a tearing hurry can still lead to a twisted ankle – which isn’t much use in an emergency.

The obvious solution is not to use poles
or
stairs, but to build the fire station entirely on the ground floor, and this is now standard practice. However, in built-up areas where land is scarce, new stations are still multilevel. In those, poles are generally installed and old stations have mostly retained their poles.

The ‘poles banned’ myth can be traced to a flurry of misleading newspaper reports published in the summer of 2006, about a refurbished, pole-free station that had opened in Plymouth. The
Daily Mail
began its shock exposé with the words: ‘Barmy fire chiefs came under a blaze of criticism today after they banned the traditional fireman’s pole – because it posed a “health and safety hazard”.’ Meanwhile, the
Mirror
found a ‘local pensioner’ eager to provide the voice of common sense: ‘It’s barmy. Can’t they just put a pile of cotton wool at the bottom of the pole?’ The truth was less sensational: the shape of the renovated building had simply made a pole impractical. The Devon Fire Brigade had not adopted a ‘no-pole’ policy.

Some basic safety measures arrived surprisingly late in firefighting history. The London Fire Brigade continued using brass helmets until 1936, when it occurred to someone that a non-conductive material might be less of a risk when electric cables were flailing around the firemen’s heads. (New York firemen, by contrast, had worn leather helmets for over a century.) Yellow helmets and trousers (for visibility) weren’t
issued in the UK until the 1970s, and fireproof jackets only replaced woollen ones in 1989.

You may have heard that the fire brigade – and fire insurance – was invented by the US founding father, Benjamin Franklin (1706–90). It’s not true: when he started Philadelphia’s first fire brigade in 1736 (and the first fire insurance scheme in 1751) such things had long existed in Britain and other countries, and were already established in several US cities. Nor did Franklin invent the fireman’s coat; when called to fires, his men wore whatever was to hand. They were well equipped, though: with leather buckets, hoses, fire hooks, ladders and water-pumping engines – all of them imported from Britain.

It was never illegal in Britain and it doesn’t send you mad.

Few drinks have attracted the hysteria that surrounded absinthe at the end of the nineteenth century. Known as the ‘Green Fairy’, it was supposed to have enslaved and then destroyed the minds of a whole generation of artists and writers. Vincent van Gogh, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Oscar Wilde and Aleister Crowley were all dedicated
absintheurs
and every kind of depravity was ascribed to its hallucinogenic effects. Alexander Dumas (1802–70) even claimed that absinthe had killed more French soldiers in North Africa than Arab bullets.

The high point of ‘absinthe madness’ came in 1905, when a Swiss alcoholic called Jean Lanfray shot his wife and two young daughters while drunk (he said he did it because his wife had refused to clean his shoes). He had drunk copious amounts of wine, cognac, brandy and crème de menthe that day, but it was the two glasses of absinthe he’d also had that got the blame. A storm of temperance-led moral outrage followed, which led to absinthe being banned in the United States and across most of Europe (though never in the UK). The prohibition has only recently been lifted.

The crack-cocaine of its day was (and is) made from daisies. Wormwood, or
Artemisia absinthium
, is a member of the daisy family and was prized as a medicinal herb from ancient times. Among many other things, it was used as a cure for intestinal worms, though this wasn’t the origin of the name ‘worm’ wood. It comes from the Old English
wermod
– literally ‘man-courage’ (it was once also used as an aphrodisiac). Before absinthe came along, wormwood was already a popular flavouring for alcoholic drinks. Vermouth, invented in Italy in the late eighteenth century, took its name from the German for wormwood (
wermut
) and many contemporary brands (Punt e Mes, Green Chartreuse, Bénédictine) still include wormwood in their recipes.

The active ingredient in wormwood is thujone (pronounced ‘thoo-shone’), so called because it was first found in the aromatic Thuja tree, a sort of cedar also known as Arborvitae (‘tree of life’). Similar in chemical structure to menthol,thujone can be dangerous in high doses and does have a mild psychoactive effect, but not at the 10 milligrams per litre concentration that most absinthe contains. Sage, tarragon and Vicks VapoRub all contain similar levels of thujone, but no one has yet linked them to depraved behaviour.

The legendary effects of absinthe are almost certainly due to its high alcohol content, which, at 50–75 per cent by
volume, comfortably exceeds most other spirits (usually 40 per cent). Preparing a glass of absinthe involved an elaborate ritual in which water was poured into the spirit through a special perforated spoon holding a sugar cube. This diluted it,and took the edge off any bitterness.

The clouding effect the water produces was known as the louche, It isn’t certain that it is connected to the Old French word
lousche
which originally meant ‘to squint’ and gave us the modern louche, meaning shady or disreputable. But whether used to mean squinting, cloudy or dubious, louche is the perfect adjective for a dedicated
absintheur
.

It’s not twenty, but it is The Answer.

The G20 group was created after the financial crises of the late 1990s, in an at tempt to bring stability to the global economy. Previously known as the G33 and, before that, the G22,
its formal title is ‘The Group of Twenty Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors’. The representatives are drawn from nineteen countries: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the UK and the USA.

The twentieth seat is held by the European Union.

There are currently twenty-seven members of the EU, but France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom are already in the original list of nineteen. So, adding the remaining twenty-three countries of the EU to the original nineteen members, gives us the total number of countries represented by the G20.

Rather pleasingly, it is forty-two.

According to Douglas Adams in
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the
Galaxy
, forty-two is The Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. Whether or not that is true, it’s definitely the answer to The Number of Countries in the G20.

And forty-two is also the number of dots on a single dice, the number of years winter lasts on Uranus and the length in inches of the penis of the Argentinian Lake duck.

Fully extended and relative to its size, this is the longest of any vertebrate.

Vatican City. You can legally have sex there with a twelve-year-old.

This bizarre situation goes back to the time when the Vatican was established as a sovereign state (separate from the papal diocese of the Holy See) under the Lateran Treaty of 1929.

Until 1930 the age of consent in the whole of Italy was twelve. The fact that it still is in the Vatican has more to do with death than sex. The death penalty had been abolished in Italy in 1889, but Mussolini reintroduced it in 1926. When the Vatican City State was born three years later – and had to choose a legal system – it decided against capital punishment and adopted the laws in force in Italy on 31 December 1924. From then on, as an independent country, the Vatican had no further connection with Italian law. When Italy raised its age of consent from twelve to fourteen in 1930, the Vatican saw no need to follow suit. Over half its population consisted of celibate Catholic priests and no children lived there at all, so it can’t have seemed particularly relevant.

Today, outside Europe, the age of consent in Angola is also twelve, as it is in parts of Mexico. In most Arab states sex is illegal outside marriage, but children can be married at younger than twelve. An exception to this is Tunisia, which has the world’s oldest age of consent (twenty). North Korea has no age of consent at all.

The Vatican has its own banking system, coinage, telephone network, post office and radio station. Banking operations are shrouded in secrecy. There is no income tax and no restriction on the export or import of money. Its small size results in several statistical anomalies. For example, it has the highest crime rate in the world: with a population of barely 800, more than 1,000 offences are recorded each year. (Fortunately, this is mostly pick-pocketing and purse-snatching rather than sex crimes.) The Vatican also has the highest number of helipads and TV stations per capita in the world, and also the most restricted voting system (you have to be a cardinal under eighty years of age). It is also the only country in the world that has no hotels.

English law first imposed a legal age of consent in 1275. It, too, was set at twelve, but the law was muddied by the
anti-witchcraft frenzy of the sixteenth century. Men accused of underage sex could plead ‘bewitchment’. The mere mention of the word was often enough for them to escape conviction. In 1875 the age of consent was raised to thirteen and it reached its present level of sixteen ten years later.

An age of consent for homosexual sex was first proposed in 1957, after a three-year inquiry headed by Sir John Wolfenden (1906–85). He suggested twenty-one as a suitable age but it took another decade before this was finally made law in 1967. In 1994 the age of same-sex consent was lowered to eighteen and it was reduced again in 2001 to sixteen, bringing it into line with the consensual age for everyone else.

The 1994 bill was also the first British legislation ever to mention lesbian sex, setting the age of consent between two women at sixteen.