📝🎤 🎶🥎📚💥
It’s all a bit cuckoo around here this month from, how do you pronounce scone and what goes first, jam or cream? To overnight TikTok sensation David Kushner. There’s also a bit of lbw as we find out the origins of cricket, a recipe for scones and a mention of farts, see if you can find that one!
📝 Words
Scone
The last week of June is when, traditionally, National Cream Day takes place. Who doesn’t love a scone? But how do you pronounce it? For you does it rhyme with gone or with cone? This is a debate that has been going on for years along with the second debate, is it jam first or cream? Which one do you prefer?
If you are from Cornwall you will be adamant that it is jam first whereas Devonians will argue that is totally wrong and you should most definitely start with the cream.
As for pronunciation, the first record of ‘scone’ is from the sixteenth century, taken from the German Schoenbrot, ‘fine bread’. Five hundred years larter, and we’re still arguing how to say it properly.
Luckily for us, they are so much easier to make so here’s a BBC recipe for the classic scone however you pronounce it.
Source: Word Perfect by Susie Dent
Classic Scones with Jam & Clotted Cream
Photo by Craig Bradford on Unsplash
Ingredients
350g self-raising flour, plus more for dusting
1 tsp baking powder
85g butter, cut into cubes
3 tbsp caster sugar
175ml milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
squeeze lemon juice (see tips below)
beaten egg, to glaze
jam and clotted cream, to serve
Method
1. Heat the oven to 220C/200C fan/gas 7.
2. Tip the self-raising flour into a large bowl with ¼ tsp salt and the baking powder, then mix.
3. Add the butter, then rub in with your fingers until the mix looks like fine crumbs. Stir in the caster sugar.
4. Put the milk into a jug and heat in the microwave for about 30 secs until warm, but not hot. Add the vanilla extract and a squeeze of lemon juice, then set aside for a moment.
5. Put a baking tray in the oven. Make a well in the dry mix, then add the liquid and combine it quickly with a cutlery knife – it will seem pretty wet at first.
6. Scatter some flour onto the work surface and tip the dough out. Dredge the dough and your hands with a little more flour, then fold the dough over 2-3 times until it’s a little smoother. Pat into a round about 4cm deep. Take a 5cm cutter (smooth-edged cutters tend to cut more cleanly, giving a better rise) and dip it into some flour. Plunge into the dough, then repeat until you have four scones. You may need to press what’s left of the dough back into a round to cut out another four.
7. Brush the tops with a beaten egg, then carefully arrange on the hot baking tray. Bake for 10 mins until risen and golden on the top. Eat just warm or cold on the day of baking, generously topped with jam and clotted cream. If freezing, freeze once cool. Defrost, then put in a low oven (about 160C/140C fan/gas 3) for a few minutes to refresh.
Source: BBC Good Food
🎤 Poem
Sumer is icumen in
I chose this poem for a word that you will recognise that might make you chuckle. I didn’t realise we’ve been using it since the 13th century…
Illustration credit RSPB
Sumer is icumen in,
Loud sing cuckoo!
Groweth seen and bloweth mean
And springeth the wood now.
Sing cuckoo!
Ewe bleateth after lamb,
Cow loweth after calf,
Bullock starteth, buck farteth,
Merry sing cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo!
Well singest thou cuckoo,
Nor cease thou never now!
Sing cuckoo now, sing cuckoo!
ANON (13th century)
Source: Poems on the Underground, fifth edition
🎶 Music
David Kushner
David Kushner is currently (at the time of writing) number 2 of the UK Top Forty chart with Daylight. He shall be performing in London in early July at KOKO in Camden Town and is an overnight global success thanks to going viral on TikTok.
The American singer-songwriter was raised in the Chicago suburbs. Once he finished school, he started to write songs with his friend in Florida. He played the guitar and taught himself music but decided to use a vocal coach to perfect his singing.
In 2022, he released Miserable Man which went viral on TikTok and hit the charts in Norway, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and the UK.
Within a year, he had accumulated 556 million streams of his music.
Daylight was released in April this year and Kushner created a TikTok trend called "You look happier; what happened", to accompany it. People posted photos of themselves smiling, and then pointed the camera at their partner to show why.
Kushner is religious, and his music is influenced by his faith. He said, "My faith in God has been a foundational thing in my life. Although sometimes things can get challenging if I'm being completely honest, I have learned that it's okay. I embrace my faith and write music that I think will speak to people."
He is scheduled to open for Lewis Capaldi on the July 1, 2023, on the Broken by Desire to Be Heavenly Sent tour in Chepstow.
Source: wikipedia
🏏 Cricket
Many of you are learning to play cricket at this time of year and from 1 - 4 June England will be playing a Test match against Ireland at Lords Cricket Ground in London. Let’s find out more about cricket.
Experts say that the game was invented here in the south-east of England during the Saxon or Norman times by children living in the Weald, but it wasn’t until 1611 that a dictionary defined cricket as a boys game and references to men playing the game could be found too.
By the middle of the 17th century, villages were playing cricket and the first England county teams were formed with local ‘experts’ from the villages becoming team members.
By the first half of the 18th century, it was a leading sport in London and the south east. The Laws of Cricket were drawn up in 1744, amended in 1774 with lbw, a 3rd stump and a maximum bat width.
By 1760, instead of rolling the ball along the ground, players started to pitch it, so the old hockey stick style was replaced with the straight bat
There are three formats of cricket played at the international level – Test matches, One-Day Internationals and Twenty20 Internationals.
Test cricket is the traditional form of the game, which has been played since 1877 and now settled in a five-day format which comprises two innings each. It is considered the pinnacle form because it tests teams over a longer period of time. Teams need to exhibit endurance, technique and temperament in different conditions to do well in this format.
One Day Internationals, also known as ODIs, are a pacier format which started in 1971 but gained in popularity from the 1980s. These are one-innings matches of 50 overs per side, in which teams with a blend of technique, speed and skill are expected to do well. The ICC’s pinnacle event, the ICC Cricket World Cup, is contested every four years in this format.
Twenty20 Internationals are the newest, shortest and fastest form of the game. This format of 20 overs per side has brought in new audiences since its advent in 2005 and also triggered new skill sets and innovations. A Twenty20 International match is usually competed in three hours and with huge hitting, skillful bowling and amazing fielding it has been hugely popular with fans right around the world.
Source: International Cricket Council
The Cuckoo Clock
A cuckoo clock is a time-keeping instrument that is mechanical and musical and they have been around for a few hundred years.
Nobody knows for certain who invented the cuckoo clock, some say it was Franz Anton Ketterer, a clockmaker living in the Black Forest village of Schönwald in the 1730s, others say it was Michael Dilger & Matthäus Hummel who created the first ever cuckoo clock in 1742. Whoever it was, it is thought that 18th century farmers in the long winter months, spent their time making cuckoo clocks to sell whilst they weren’t working the land.
They would use logs of linden wood from the Black Forest which is excellent for carving. The wood is cut many years before the carving and clock-making process starts as it needs drying to make sure it doesn’t splinter or crack. Where in the past, the farmer would work alone, today whole teams of craftsmen work together - wood-workers, painters, carvers and mechanics.
Most cuckoo clockmakers today have gone into the family business learning the trade from their father’s and grandfathers.
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Source: Cuckoo Collections
📚 Book Talk
The Worlds We Leave Behind by A.F. Harrold, illustrated by Levi Pinfold ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Blurb
Hex never meant for the girl to follow him and his friend Tommo into the woods. He never meant for her to fall off the rope swing and break her arm. When the finger of blame is pointed at him, Hex runs deep into the woods and his fierce sense of injustice leads him to a strange clearing in the woods - a clearing that has never been there before - where an old lady in a cottage offers him a deal. She'll rid the world of those who wronged him and Hex can carry on his life with them all forgotten and as if nothing ever happened. But what Hex doesn't know is someone else has been offered the same deal. When Hex's best friend Tommo wakes up the next day, he is in a completely different world but he only has murmurs of memories of the world before. Moments of deja vu that feel like Tommo's lived this day before. Can Tommo put the world right again? Back to how it was?
My review
A very clever concept. We’ve all been hurt before by somebody and in a flash of anger and wished they didn’t exist. Hex got hurt and an old lady offers him the choice to eliminate that person. But taking someone out of this world, as if they had never existed, changes a lot more than just that person not being there. The world shifts around the gap and closes, changing things, changing history and of course, the future too. A really good read accompanied with some fantastic illustrations.
Click here to buy Waterstones
💥 Fun Fact of the Month
Cuckoo
Not everybody likes cuckoos, especially if you are a pipit, a dunnock or a reed warbler. Why? Well imagine coming home to your nest, a nest you have lovingly looked after, where you have laid your eggs which should be hatching soon, and you find someone has booted one of your eggs out and laid one of their own. What to do? You are still going to sit on your eggs and keep them warm, otherwise you won’t have any chicks but worse, you’re going to be looking after this other egg too. She has laid her egg and disappeared. Probably already on her way back to South Africa. What a cheek!
It’s not finished there.
The cuckoo hatches after 12 days and will be fed by his adoptive parents but, as he, or she gets bigger and stronger, they push the other eggs or birds out of the nest! And the adoptive parents continue to feed it.
And then, after all that care and devotion, once the cuckoo has grown, it spreads its wings without as much as a goodbye and heads back to South Africa leaving the host parents, empty nested and broken-hearted.
Fact File
Favourite food: hairy caterpillars (poisonous to other birds).
Favourite holiday destination: UK from March - September.
Famous accolade: there is a clock named after me.
Funniest thing you’ve ever heard: Humans believe that the number of my calls they hear is the number of years they will be single - imagine the fun I have with that. Cuckoo!
Cuckoo language
Cuckoo - crazy
To be in cuckoo land - to believe in nonsense.
Cuckoo in the nest - someone who is seen differently to everybody else.
Cloud cuckoo land - A non existent place of perfection, a utopia.
Words 2086
