The Shadow of Great Britain

Chapter 1799 - 102: No Need to Invite Gauss and Weber to London!

After the riot at the Tower of London, I regarded this crisis as the second major challenge in my life.

— Arthur Hastings, "Fifty Years of Life"

All over the world, people from different countries and cultures have some traditional folk remedies passed down through generations.

In China, it’s usually a bowl of ginger boiled with brown sugar water, or mung bean soup, or kudzu flower soup.

But in the Ottoman Empire, they prefer honey water soaked with mint. If they encounter a particularly severe drunkard, they might occasionally use dates with olive oil for an enema.

The usual method in Germany and Russia is sauerkraut soup, or crumbled black bread added to weak beer, boiled into a scalding hot rye bread hangover soup.

In Britain, if you were to ask which is the most representative hangover food, it would undoubtedly be beef tea.

Beef tea, in fact, is not a tea but a drink made by chopping lean beef into pieces and simmering it for hours to filter out the broth.

Beef tea has a mild taste, with a slight sweetness mixed with a bloody flavor, so the English often consider it an excellent refreshment, hangover cure, and tonic.

Of course, the English hangover methods are not limited to just one; beef tea is just one of the more elegant options.

Just as old Beijing has many customs, so does old London.

True old Londoners never disdain to drink beef tea after consuming alcohol; these old drunkards generally prefer the "hair of the dog" method.

The "hair of the dog" tale mainly comes from an ancient English folk remedy for dog bites, where a piece of dog fur is applied to the wound. The principle is similar to the old Chinese saying: where the venomous snake resides, within seven steps there’s an antidote.

And the "hair of the dog" hangover remedy involves using a small amount of alcohol to ease a hangover. If old Londoners have a hangover, they usually have a glass of wheat beer or gin in the morning, which they claim works quite well.

In Arthur’s early days patrolling at Scotland Yard, he saw many drunkards taking a cold bath in the Thames River early in the morning to sober up. After the bath, they would chew a small piece of charcoal. According to the drunkards, they did this because the magazine said charcoal could help absorb the "toxins" in their stomach. This method has become a new hangover remedy in recent decades.

Of course, if you were to push Eld and Great Dumas into the Thames River to sober up in the middle of the night, it would be too inhumane.

What’s more important is that it’s easy to push down, but retrieving them in the dark would be quite difficult.

Charcoal can be asked from the innkeeper for a freshly baked one, and beef tea is also a regular menu option, so it saves Arthur and his companions a lot of trouble.

Down with a large bowl of beef tea, accompanied by a charred, freshly removed from the furnace, still sparking charcoal stick, now that’s called eating with style, that’s called sophistication.

Eld leaned back on the chair, looking like a pelican just dragged out of the river, with half his hair steamed and stuck to his forehead, and also like a crab straight from the steamer, his entire face redder than red.

He held the already emptied beef tea bowl, his gaze sliding from the empty bowl to the charcoal stick on the table, then from the charcoal stick to the maid blowing the fire by the stove.

He paused and smacked his lips, looking as if he were savoring a fine Havana cigar.

As for the Great Dumas, this fat man’s situation was evidently worse than Eld’s.

This great French patriot initially refused to drink the Englishman’s bowl of beef tea, until his stomach attempted a revolution for the sixth time, aiming to capture the "Bastille" located at his throat. After persistent resistance failed, and before the internal organs put him on the "guillotine," Great Dumas finally resorted to the "foreign intervention" of this bowl.

Down with the bowl of beef tea, the remedy worked; Great Dumas lay on the tabletop snoring loudly, impossible to awaken.

Fortunately, his friends didn’t particularly mind this drunkard’s thunderous snoring; Arthur, Wheatstone, and Louis continued their conversation as if nothing had happened.

Wheatstone was most concerned about Leopold’s promise to build telegraph lines in Belgium. Ever since the England Electromagnetic Telegraph Company was established, this was their first official contract, and it was a government order worth tens of thousands of pounds.

Although the Belgian Government couldn’t pay the full cash amount for the order, they were willing to use Belgian public bonds and government-held railway company stocks as collateral, and to provide the England Electromagnetic Telegraph Company with certain government subsidies and tax reductions. For the Empire Publishing Group, which was still not capital-strong, this was not immediately liquid silver, but the turnaround on the books was enough to make the investors at the London Financial City, who had been in a wait-and-see attitude, sit up and take notice.

Moreover, considering the close relationship between Britain and Belgium, and Belgium’s future credibility and development prospects, both the Belgian public bonds and railway company stocks have long been considered high-quality financial assets and investment projects by the London Financial City.

Consequently, those British companies permitted to build railways in Belgium didn’t even require the Belgian Government to provide guarantees, contrasting sharply with the investments in India or South America.