Its name was "Dark They Were And Golden Eyed", the title of a Ray Bradbury short story.

I'd seen it advertised in the back of my "Conan The Barbarian" comics, black-and-white UK reprints of the US originals which came out on the same day - Thursday, I think - as a two-hour first period history lesson (9AM-11AM).

So I bought my weekly Conan on the way to school as a pleasant back-of-the-class distraction from such A-Level delights as "Metternich and the Congress of Vienna" or "Bismarck and the origins of the Franco-Prussian War" or "Causes and Consequences of the French Revolution".

I was getting into fantasy at that time because British publishers were bringing it out like there was no tomorrow - Robert E. Howard "Conan" stories from Sphere, Clark Ashton Smith "Zothique" stories from Panther, and the Michael Moorcock book-of-the-month club from Mayflower.

Dark They Were was a sort of holy grail, because London wasn’t exactly round the corner or even a mere long train ride away as Dublin might have been, and my parents weren't willing to let me make a trip like that all alone. (I also suspect Dad had checked a map and found that Dark They Were was in the heart of Soho, a place with Other Kinds Of Bookshop.)

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I finally went to London after getting A-levels good enough for Uni, despite my History result not being what it might have been (no idea how that happened). :-P

Dad was right about the Other Kinds Of Bookshop, a couple of which I duly investigated and found to be educational, although not in the way intended. Even though the places I ate and drank and the books and records I bought on that same trip are long forgotten, I can still remember it.

Despite having at least my usual allowance of critical-faculty-blunting late teen hormones, the shops outweighed it with their air of furtive sleaze, like the carpet in a seedy bar that sticks to your shoes - except this was an all-body experience. They certainly filled me with desire, but that desire was for a long, hot shower.

So much for the main attraction of late-'70s Soho...

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Far more attractive was my discovery, just a short walk round the corner from DTW, of 58 Dean Street Records, which specialised in soundtrack albums.

I'd been buying soundtrack LPs for years, so what with DTW and 58, I was well laden on my way home, and none of those purchases needed hidden from the parents, either... :->

Despite that, Forever People in Bristol was an even more important SF bookshop, at least to me. For one thing it was easier to reach, less than an hour away when visiting an old school friend who at that time lived in Cardiff.

For another thing, I'd become a keen fan of fantasy anthologies, which were like samplers or tasting menus for different writers - you could call them selection boxes,and Irish / UK readers will know what I mean by that.

FP was where I found imports like Offutt's "Swords Against Darkness" series and DAW's "Year's Best Fantasy" series. I'd already got the first two in Carter's "Flashing Swords" series as UK imprints...

...so the instant I saw the US-import Number 5 I nabbed it.

A bit later, back in Belfast, I found a novel by one of those writers in Queen’s University Bookshop.

It was set in the same world as the short story and though the cover was, er, a less than accurate summation of the contents, those contents made for a fascinating read.

I met that writer twice, at SF conventions in 1985.

Then at a couple more in 1986.

After that came Boskone in 1987...

And the rest is history.

(Pedantic writer note: this has two typos. There's no apostrophe on Authors' - unless it's short for Authors Have A Wedding and I doubt that - and there's an extra O where I don't need it, a first but far from last instance of having my name misspelled in print...)

Happy soon-to-be-38th Anniversary, loved!

(also, unrelated question: any particular small plants - like cherry tomatoes - that can grow relatively easily in flats in this climate?)

Have a great day!

I'm fond of Co. Wicklow, where @dduane and I have lived in various places for almost 40 years.

For other reasons, I'd vote for Co. Down near Newcastle, where I spent many happy summer holidays when I was a lot younger than I am now.

I still remember the long curve of beach below the dunes, and the mountains in the distance, and the green expanse of Tollymore Forest Park in the shadow of those mountains.

It didn't take much imagination, and I've always had plenty, for the Mournes to become Misty, and Tollymore Forest to become Old, Fangorn or Mirkwood...

...and - many years later - that sweep of beach, or a fantasy version of it, was where the ships slid to shore as my novel "Greylady" began.

Also this, because some special memories have their own special time and place. :->

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...despite this particular brand of sweets appearing in my childhood most often at Christmas, historic costumes worn by characters on the tins were NOT a part of the widespread "Dickensian Christmas" look which appeared so often on cards and packaging.

Instead it's because the characters and their Regency costumes were inspired by a play by "Peter Pan" author J. M. Barrie.

The play was called "Quality Street".

And the tins are collectibles.

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A Christmas-related appearance of the sweets was mostly coincidental, though the empty tin from one year did often appear at the next, full of home-made mince pies or even an entire Christmas cake.

Large, fairly airtight tins are useful that way, especially at trapping the spirituous exhalations of cakes made in mid-September and "fed" weekly thereafter with spoonfuls of brandy, or whiskey, or rum (sometimes all three, alternated) until it was time for the armour-plating of marzipan and royal icing to go on.

It used to be a common belief at home that opening the tin containing an un-iced cake near a naked flame at any time after mid-November was more than the opener's eyebrows were worth.

The eyebrow thing never happened, because it was one of those family fables, but I do remember bringing one such Quality Street tin down to Anne McCaffrey's house when I'd been invited to stay.

It contained not a Christmas cake but one of Mum's famed Chocolate Gateaux of Doom (my name for it, not hers), made specially for that visit and whose recipe, what with the plain-chocolate sponge cake and the apricot-cream filling and the double-chocolate ganache icing, required most of a bottle of cognac.

Since this cake didn't have the sealant-and-spackle cladding of marzipan and royal icing, it also required refrigeration to "keep it calm". My car didn't even have air conditioning, so in transit the cake got quite, er, excitable.

How excitable, we soon found out.

When Annie's stable manager sauntered over and popped the lid, expecting to find some nice Quality Street choccies, she was instead hit in the face by a near-visible cloud of booze vapour (a gin-ie, perhaps, even though no gin was involved) and reeled back with a cry of "Jaysuz, does yer mother own a feckin' distillery?"

Had she been smoking one of her habitual thin roll-ups at the time, our family fable might have been proved true after all...

Another of those mysteries lost to time, like "who was the first person to eat an oyster?"

The oyster one almost certainly originated in "if hungry enough, people will eat anything", so maybe the same experimentation-through-necessity thing applied to nettles?

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There could also be an element of petty vengeance following a day of getting thoroughly stung.

Like the time in summer 1976 when I was briefly stationed at RAF West Raynham, and on one particular day off went canoeing along a river in Norfolk.

Inevitably I tipped the canoe and the easiest way to right it - I know about turning it over and sloshing the water out, but this was EASIEST, right? - was to swim, pushing the inverted canoe ahead, to the river-bank.

Summer 1976 was incredibly hot, so...

I was wearing just Speedos, Ray-Bans, sun-block and a boonie hat...

Which meant that discovering the lush green of the river-bank was a chest-high thicket of nettles, on both sides, with no breaks in sight...

Was Not Fun.

By the time I was back in my canoe and paddling away from that river-bank I was NOT a happy camper, and would cheerfully have unloaded a bucket of instant sunshine over every nettle on the planet.

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I can well imagine some glowing, tingling, itching prehistoric hunter-gatherer chucking a huge armful into boiling water with a prehistoric cry of "See how YOU like it!" and discovering shortly afterwards that the nettles:

Smelled good;

Were no longer stingy;

Tasted good as well.

There are plenty of recipes on-line for nettle soup, from simple to elaborate. Come spring, when the greens are young and tender, put on a pair of gloves and inflict some culinary vengeance of your own.

:->

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How someone discovered that nettles could be treated the same way as hemp and flax in order to create a weaveable fibre is another question. More experimentation, probably.

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Dog policing, says @dduane​, and she doesn’t mean the K-9 division.

This reads like a spoof.

It may, however, be based on an anthropological study by Professor Doktor Hans-Otto Nixglaube, «Eigentümliche Ausländische Gewohnheiten Nr. 7: Die Sitten und Gebräuche der Wiener-Würstchen Handfressen im Nordamerikanische Art» (Salzkorn Verlag, Nürnberg, 1876)

Or maybe not...

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There was a memorable occasion many, many years ago when we both had more than our fill of hot dogs.

Our scene is set in Philadelphia, and the time is December 1986.

I had just flown in from Ireland after Christmas with my family, and DD was in the process of closing down her apartment before moving to Los Angeles and a story-editing gig on "DinoSaucers", so we decided to throw a party.

She invited all her friends from PSFS (Philadelphia Science Fiction Society), and then we went out to buy party foods. These foods included hot dogs.

There were A Lot Of Hot Dogs, indeed more of them than anything else, and I'm willing to accept blame here, having never before seen so many variations on one theme and being more than a bit inclined to sample the lot.

(Hormel, Oscar Meyer and sundry other companies must have rubbed their corporate hands.)

Then it began to snow, and the "sorry, can't make it" calls started coming in. In the end, a party meant for 30+ was a party of about 10, which resulted in - you're there already - A Lot Of Hot Dogs left uneaten.

The folks who made it to the party helped out by taking some of the food away, but that still left A Lot Of Hot Dogs still with us. And the apartment was being closed for up to 6 months (in the final event, permanently) with stuff in storage, power off, all the rest.

We couldn't just leave the doggies there, and I have an inbuilt aversion to throwing out food, so we ate them. At least it meant that for about five days we had no need to buy any other meat, and we had plenty of coleslaw and potato salad for necessary roughage.

However it was several years (until we got to Continental Europe with the Wurst effects long past) before any thought of hot dogs provoked more than a wince and a desire to eat something - anything - else...

Long ago, @dduane and I had a Whirlpool combi microwave - micro, grill, fan oven - and It Was Great, big enough to use as a proper oven when what needed cooked in a proper oven was small enough that powering up the big proper oven in the cooker was a bit much.

Still with me...?

IIRC it was one of those Christmas presents where Mum, ever-practical, told us; "get yourselves something really useful but not too expensive (I did say practical!) and I'll go halves."

In 2016, after something like 15 years of pretty-well daily use for one thing and another, the old thing expired by stages, micro first, grill second, oven last - it made great bread up until the end - and went to recycling heaven.

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We couldn't find a one-for-one replacement (we needed a free-standing counter-top appliance, everyone was selling built-in), so until once was available (optimism) we bought an ordinary microwave.

NB, this and its successors were only used for ordinary microwave things like reheating, defrosting and dealing with freeze-cook stuff. They got nothing like the amount of use of the old combi, mostly because of being incapable of doing a lot of it. As things turned out, this didn't help much.

About eighteen months later, we had to buy another. If a microwave's enamel interior develops a crack (to this day I don't know how), moisture gets in, rust begins and the enamel pulls off the bare metal. That's when you get "sparking".

This demo is deliberate; believe me, when it's unexpected it's even worse.

A private welder show or lightning storm at the end of the kitchen counter when all you want is a hot cuppa is distinctly unsettling. Also, it's only going to get worse, and we could imagine - boy, could we - what "Much Worse" might look like.

To the recycle dump!

(NB, micros with stainless steel interiors don't seem to do this, probably because they're already tuned to deal with the bare metal.)

The replacement, another ordinary micro, Just Up And Died after eighteen months and, guess what, the quote for a check-up and replacements-if-required was as much as the price of a new one.

(Inkjet printers seem to operate on this principal too.)

To the recycle dump again!

We got a third new one (which BTW is still running just fine, because it's been downgraded to Extra, read on), totalled up what we'd spent on ordinary microwaves, said a few well-chosen words about planned obsolescence and the "Vimes 'Boots' Theory of Economic Inequality" and got ourselves a pre-pay credit card whose top-ups were dedicated to Get A Combi Again.

We didn't bother with GACA baseball caps.

That would have been silly.

I don't know if these cards exist in the USA; we treat them as the modern version of a piggy-bank...

...except that to get at the money you need two people acting in accord.

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And in 2021 we got one.

Okay, this next bit is going to read like an ad.

It isn't, because the appliance is discontinued. (Whirlpool FINALLY do something similar but not identical.) It's just enthusiastic users discovering there's even more to a gadget than expected.

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The New One even bigger than the old one, which had 28 litres capacity; the new one was 33 L (was .99 ft³, is now 1.16 ft³). In non-tech terms, wow, More Room To Cook In.

Reading the figures was no help (to me, anyway) in visualising what a maw the thing had, but opening the door did that and no mistake.

I said something to DD about "bite radius"...

...and she instantly responded with "anyway, we delivered the bomb".

We're a quotesy household. ;->

BTW, The New One does a very good job on seafood, too...

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Since we got this, almost exactly two years ago, we've used it from reheating tea to roasting meat to making chilli / goulash / stew / curry (you can run the oven / grill separately or add simultaneous zaps of microwave for much less cooking time) to baking bread.

One of the best things about it is that when the set cooking time is done, the appliance switches off automatically. No risk of busyness, absent-mindedness or out-in-the-garden-ness ending in clouds of smoke, ruined food and possibly even worse.

As for breadmaking, it has a dough-rise setting which is a Time Machine, reducing a two-hour "doubled in size" rise time to about 35-45 minutes...

It also has the most reliable Defrost Butter setting either of us have ever encountered, turning a rock-solid butter brick from the freezer into something spreadable while never - to date - doing the "never mind a butter-knife, give me a spoon or a paintbrush" thing.

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However...

There's also a "Chef Setting" where there are some simple recipes. Here's the pastry page.

Basically, you assemble and mix the ingredients, input the correct settings and the machine does all the timing, heating and cooking.

We'd never used this until yesterday, when DD said, "Let's try the sponge cake..."

Yes, this post was entitled "Microwave Sponge Cake (eventually)..." and here we are...

We did all the measuring correctly and checked it by pouring the mixture into a baking container while on the scale, wondering betimes why the recipe says 900g, the ingredients total 925 and what actually poured into the container reads 906... Weird. Really weird.

Then we put the container into the oven, entered the correct code, and let things do what they were going to do.

A little later we discovered something else about the recipe besides a weight anomaly.

It didn't mention the required size of the container. Or or how much the mixture was likely to rise.

It rose...

Let's say more than we expected...

The fluted ceramic container used for baking this one makes it look like a Vesuvius cupcake; not quite a pyroclastic flow, but a lot of flow regardless.

Once it cooled we separated the sponge-cake from the escaped sponge in the same way as sculptors work with wood or marble - "Chip away everything that doesn't look like a cake" - and found that despite its misshapen looks, it tasted pretty good.

So today DD made another, this time using a larger container.

...and this time it stayed put until removed using the cunning base-and-lifting-straps of baking parchment.

It's not the loftiest or best-risen sponge cake either of us have ever seen (a smaller-diameter higher-sided container would probably deal with that) BUT if there's something needing sponge cake in a hurry - this went from cupboard ingredients to done and cooling in less than 55 minutes - that treatment seems to fit the bill.

We're now wondering what other secrets lurk in the simple recipe pages; falafel, quiche Lorraine, stuffed peppers, even Flammkuchen* from scratch.

(*Though I have my own views about Flammkuchen, mostly involving a plane flight...)

I first read this book when I was about ten years old - a senior cousin's copy - and finding a scan on the Comic Book Plus website let me refresh memories long ago consigned to the furthest recesses of the Mind Palace (or in my case, Untidy Mind Attic).

Its stories are fairly typical Ripping Yarns, but I'd forgotten just how Keen On Sport "The Champion" was. The title alone should have warned me, because there are six annuals on the website, all full of Hearty, Keen and Sporty goings-on.

I've posted more than once that Organised Sport was at the bottom of any list of Things I Liked To Do. In particular I detested the compulsory variety inflicted at Big School, which started happening when I was about eleven and made recollections of Jim's jolly-good-stuff annual increasingly sour.

A lot of the stories are pure sport, but several others have their sporting angle jammed into action-adventure yarns of completely non-sport-related genres, often with all the subtlety of a square peg put into a round hole with a sledgehammer.

For instance, "Rockfist Rogan of the RAF", hero of World War Two air-combat stories, was better known in his story universe as a boxer than as a fighter pilot.

Despite this, illustrations of aircraft were spot-on - as here, a Mosquito FB Mk VI with Dornier Do.217s overhead and a nosed-over Typhoon Ib in the background, or Spitfire Mk IXs defending B-24 Liberators against Messerschmitt Me.163 rocket fighters (though from the text description they should have been Me.262 jets. Oh well.)

If readers of "The Champion" were anything like readers of the war comics I used to read, the editor would have got a lot of disapproving letters if those illustrations weren't accurate. I might have sent one myself about the Messerschmitt error.

At least I might have done if I'd been of letter-writing age, rather than not yet born...

The Rogan stories aren't the only example of Sport In Unexpected Places. There's "Cap' Dan, the Sporting Pirate" (snrk), "The Racing Rajah", "The Sporting Mountie", "Johnny Fleetfoot the Redskin Winger" (rolleyes) and "Kog's Amazon Marathon", which reads like "Apocalypto" remade with a cast of Keen and Sporty English schoolboys.

And, thanks to how language and attitudes have changed, one story nearly sent a spray of tea across my monitor.

I don't think either the title or the plot would work very well today...

Associated with this post, here's an artefact, two anecdotes and an opinion.

The artefact is a slightly dented but still remarkably airtight "Charles Chips" tin.

It was bought, full, many years ago from the Vermont Country Store, from whom we subsequently bought reflll packs - given their size, "sacks" would be more accurate - which were shipped to Ireland in sturdy cardboard boxes.

VCS no longer carry Charles Chips in either tin or refill. I know. I checked. BUT...

The Charles Chips company, which per Wikipedia was doing just fine in 1990 then got sold and went bankrupt twice in less than three years (gosh!) is Back In Business, and note has been taken, with considerable interest - oh, you bet - that they do international shipping...

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Anecdote No. 1 is from when @dduane lived in Bala Cynwyd near Philadelphia, in what was known as "The House of Dangerously Single Women" (ahem). She tells me that the household used to get Charles Chips delivered to the door about twice a week, by the company's own vans.

Speaking as a long-time crisp fan, I found that both very neat and a source of mild envy. :->

Anecdote No. 2 is from 30-ish years ago, when we were in New York for something or other and, being rather jetlagged with our internal food clocks out of whack, did our usual thing and went out for a walk.

Curiously enough, this involved visiting several food stores and supermarkets where we bought a lot of Interesting Foreign or Much Missed (i.e. American, in both instances) junk food for grazing on back in our hotel room.

In one of them DD was about to lay claim to a huge bag of Wise potato chips (its bag would have been the design in the middle)...

...while nattering to one of the shop staff how much she missed them. He told her that a new delivery was expected in about 20 minutes and if she wanted to wait, she'd get much fresher chips.

And So It Came To Pass.

Well done, that guy!

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Finally, while Saratoga Springs may have been where potato crisps / chips were popularised, standardised, commercialised or whatever, it's definitely not where they were invented.

Even the oft-repeated "creation myth" frequently has its hard-to-please celebrity demanding to have his potatoes sliced and fried really thin "The Way I Had Them In France" - which kinda sorta suggests they were, um, being made there just like that well before the Saratoga thing happened.

Myths are okay, even marketing myths - so long as they're recognised as myths and not shilled as true by places with reputations like the Smithsonian.

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It's a bit like the still-current nonsense about spices being used in medieval kitchens to disguise bad meat. As far as I've been able to find out, this originated with a historian called J. C. Drummond in the late 1930s - yup, just before World War Two - simply because he didn't know his period terminology.

"Green" meant fresh - even nowadays, an inexperienced or immature person is "green" - so green cheese was newly made, and green meat was newly slaughtered, unaged and consequently tough and flavourless.

Just ask any steak fan the difference between a fresh steak and a 30-day dry aged one.

Drummond, in his overspecialised-scholarship wisdom, assumed that "green venison" meant meat which had gone off, and that a recipe to improve it with spices was to cover the bad smell and taste.

In fact it was somewhere between a marinade and a rub, meant to improve the tenderness and flavour of fresh meat as if it had aged for a while, thus shortening the waiting time between killing a beast and getting it to the table of a hungry court.

As I've said before, it's always easier for no-proofs-given pop history to dismiss medieval people as (insert derogatory observation here) than take the time needed to explain why and how they in their time were not that different to us in ours.

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PS: when looking for that previously posted stuff about green meat I found a post where, with even less evidence than Saratoga Springs inventing crisps, a Brit poster claimed Brits invented curry.

Snrk.