MISSING DISCS FOR THE GOVERNMENT, SANDWICHES FOR ME

I was reminded this week, as scandal after scandal rocked the leaky boat of government, of a wonderful sketch written by Peter Cook and performed as part of the ‘Pete and Dud’ series. Peter is explaining, or trying to explain, acupuncture to his dirty rain-coated colleague. “Let’s say you’ve got a pain in your head,” says Peter. “Well this acupuncturist comes along and sticks a needle in your arm, so you forget about the pain in your head and worry instead about the pain in your arm. So the acupuncturist then sticks a needle in your bum – so you forget about the pain in your arm and concentrate on the new pain.

“In the bum,” says Dud. “In the bum,” says Peter – or words anyway to that effect. And with it he creates the splendid illusion of the acupuncturist breathlessly chasing all over the body sticking needles hither and thither to keep one step ahead of the developing pain.

This prompted my tongue to venture deep into my cheek and suggest that maybe the reason child benefit discs went missing was to take our minds of Northern Rock. Then the latest funding scandal arose to take our minds of the missing discs. The only problem is that sooner or later the acupuncturist is bound to run out of needles, leaving a bruised and battered patient unable to sit down behind him. Sooner or later the government equally will run out of scandals, too, I suppose.

As my connections with Northern Rock are limited to it being Younger Daughter’s mortgage provider of choice and as I have long given up claiming child benefit, I am reasonably well insulated from the chaos going on around me, though I am checking my bank account just in case someone has tried to use my name to donate thousands of pounds to the Labour party.

Al the same, I do find myself wanting to shout aaaahhhh! at the seeming incompetence of it all. I want to tear my hair and grind my teeth, particularly over the case of the missing discs, which just seems somehow typical of the culture of the bureaucratic institutions these days.

More and more it seems as though these institutions – like Revenue and Customs - that are meant to serve us, have become instead our masters. They make regulations for our lives, which somehow don’t quite seem to apply to them, but which make me feel like some inmate in an institution for the senile. Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

This week I fund myself in a government building, ‘assisting’ at a UN event, part of the run-up to World Aids Day on 1 December. As the timing of the event coincided with lunch, sandwiches had been provided. Very thoughtful, I thought.

However, we were downstairs and the sandwiches were upstairs. Can we not move the sandwiches downstairs, we ventured? No, came the equally inevitable answer. There seemed no good reason other than bloody mindedness unless it was a desire to increase the nation’s fitness by making everybody troop unnecessarily up and downstairs. Aaaaahhhh!

No doubt there was a reason, perhaps something to do with Health and Safety – a sandwich on the stairs could, after all, trigger a fall and the resulting compensation would need to be on the scale of a government grant.

But then I wondered if the sandwiches had perhaps not been provided from generosity and thoughtfulness, but had been themselves part of another Health and Safety in public offices decree? Could we all have sued otherwise for negligence of our rumbling stomachs?

Everything now seems regulated. People can no longer ‘do’ simple things that seem to them sensible at the time, everything has to be done according to the book, or according to advice. How often have you heard people say when turning down a request ‘there’s no precedent for that’ as if doing something for the first time was a sin against the Almighty.

When I grew up the quality most appreciated by those in authority over us was initiative, sometimes called resourcefulness or ‘nous.’ For the boys, I seem to remember, it was showing OLQs - ‘Officer Like Qualities,’ but whatever you called it, it always boiled down to the same thing, which was: if the unexpected happens, as it always does, can you cope?

Someone who can act on their own initiative doesn’t need regulation – they make their own regulations as they go along and the world moves rather faster as a result. That is anyway the world into which I grew up in which you coped as best you could and doing something differently was at least a sign that some grey matter was functioning. Which is not something that could be said in the case of the hapless individual who put the 25 million personal details unregistered into the post. It may have been novel, but it was not coping.

REFLECTIONS ON A MID-WALES DRIVE

I had a long drive to make last week - up to Caersws in Mid Wales - and on one of those perfect autumn mornings that seems to call you to make a start just as soon as it is light enough to tip jugs of warm water over the car’s frozen windows.

It was a simple drive, up the A470, the ‘spine’ road of Wales that runs supposedly from north to south, except that it is not a single road but a collection of bits and pieces, cobbled together on the map, no doubt, by some enterprising engineer sitting in a London office in the 1920s without much else to do. All the same it makes for easy navigating.

The route traverses magnificent scenery and on this morning of sharp frost and bright sunshine, the countryside white with ice crystals, the air still, the sky blue and almost cloudless, the light translucent and brittle, every feature was thrown into the sharp relief.

Passing Garnant lake in the Brecon Beacons National Park the black water shimmered smooth as glass. Away on the far side a patch of mist floated ethereally a foot or two above the surface in the crisp morning stillness. I reflected how timeless this scene looked, how it would have been instantly recognisable to our ancestors two thousand years before. Indeed how Celtic it appeared, with its themes of water, air, light, mountains.

So strong was this resonance that I half expected to see though that patch of mist an arm rising out of the lake holding a jeweled sword - beckoning to a future King - and an old man in a wizard’s hat sitting on the bank.

I progressed onwards - and as far as Wales was concerned - upwards towards the softer Montgomeryshire landscape. The temperature dropped steadily. Passing Cardiff it had been 2 degrees. At Merthyr Tydfil it had dropped to zero, was minus one at Becon and minus two at Builth, where the River Wye tumbles along among the boulders of the river bed.

Near Rhayader, with the temperature still falling, a large raptor, flapped lazily out of a wood and laboured slowly across the road in front of me with the unconcern of an elderly pedestrian oblivious to the traffic. For a second or two the bird was a few feet from my windscreen; I could see every detail of its markings and its long yellow legs that trailed behind it. I took it to be a honey buzzard, but my bird knowledge is scant and it may well have been something far more exotic. Anyway it seemed to know it was a protected species and I found myself braking hard to avoid it.

I was meeting UNESCO colleagues in a small country hotel - one of those interminable all day meetings that seem to characterize anything to do with government. To remain alert is an effort, so I was happy to be distracted by an urgent message on my mobile. I excused myself from the table and went to stand beside an eternal window to make a call.

Then I noticed a robin, hovering at the height of my nose, a foot away on the other side of the glass, its feathers puffed up against the cold. Some see robins as birds of ill omen - but the poor little beastie just seemed to me cold and thin - envious of the warmth and plenty inside. So I filched one of the hotel’s biscuits and went outside where the robin had been and left the biscuit broken up on an old flower pot. I hope the robin found it.

Eventually the meeting ended and I went out to the car park through the bar, which seemed strangely full for the late afternoon in those underpopulated parts. I first noticed the tipplers’ boots. Most sported those expensive and superior Wellingtons with straps and buckles of the sort favoured by shooting parties and similar folk. There was a press of male laughter, loud, slightly aggressive, which made me feel uncomfortable and on which I was happy to shut the door.

This was indeed a shooting party. Rows of bright autumn pheasants hung in braces over the car park railings beside the mud-spattered Landrovers and 4 x 4s, in the gathering twilight.

Shooting always induces a conflict in me. My head tells me that I would far rather be reincarnated as a pheasant and take my chance with the flying lead than to be a battery chicken. Still less a sow, tethered in a concrete stall. I know that shooting is an important source of countryside income and that the destruction it causes is balanced by a considerable amount of conservation. I know that the pheasants are raised and so in no danger of extinction.

But my heart always winces when I see a beautiful cock pheasant tumbled out of the sky and lying dead and bloodied on the ground while fat business men with more money than sense stand jesting around it.

HOW I FOUND FUN IN A TURBOT

While on the delicious subject of literary quotations I cannot let pass 'Vanity Fair' and the exclamation - was it from old Mr Sedley? - to the effect that he would 'bring home the very best Turbot in Billingsgate.' At the time I first read that I am not sure that I knew for certain what a Turbot was, still less how to cook it. Nevertheless it sounded very good.

We didn't live, of course, in Mr Sedley's century. Despite appearances to the contrary I assure you I am not that old. Nor did I grow up anywhere within striking distance of the old Billingsgate fish market. No worries: on every high street in those dim and far off days was a chain store selling fish of every description under some wavy blue and white lines, which, now that I ponder the matter, must have been there to represent sea.

This was MacFisheries - though I am not sure about the capital F in the middle. The idea of littering the middle of words with capital letters seems to have been an invention of the eighties by which time MacFisheries - along with the likes of the Home and Colonial and the daring International Stores - had long joined that register of dead brand names in the sky.

(Whence just possibly it has been reincarnated. In a curious mixture of Apple computers and recreational fishing, which you can view at Macfisheries.com, you can learn about Arkansas Fly Fishing while downloading MacScrabble. You couldn't make that up, could you?)

Now selling fish has always seemed to me a hazardous and horrible occupation - almost on a par with catching the beasties in the first place. Anything to do with fish is cold, damp and malodorous with the added threat of slicing your finger in two along with the fish guts. At least if you work in a fish store you are reasonably assured you will not die from drowning but then selling fish and preparing it for the table must be so singularly uninteresting that the occasional spot of drowning might almost be welcomed as light relief.

Nevertheless, selling fish, along with all those preparatory jobs involving ice and sharp knives, has to be done by someone - at least until they get a better offer. Then they can hang up their industrial brand of apron and rubber boots for the last time and look forward to smelling of something slightly sweeter than fish heads. But in the meantime, guys, welcome to the cold, damp and smelly version of hell.

Or not as the case may be - for Elder Daughter, who makes it her business to know about these things and could make even a plum pudding smile and sit up at the table with a positive attitude - tells me that by applying a few simple techniques the guys at the Seattle fish market turned it from hell to a kind of heaven on whose door members of the public were clamouring to get in.

They even wrote a book about it, apparently, which, though I do not know for certain, presumably provided its authors with a better offer and escape from filleting fish.
Called FISH it seems to reduce to some very simple principles for turning a nasty, boring, sniffy job, working among the smelly and the slimy - and that's just the people - into something of which Seattle residents dreamed so much that they became sleepless.

Four principles standout - these being first to 'Be Positive.' Well, that is hardly original, is it? We all know the power of being positive, of not complaining or being 'chippy.' Yet how many of us put it into effect? We whinge constantly. And what we don't realise is that one person's whinge may destroy the carefully cultivated positive thoughts of an entire team.

Second principle is 'Be There.' Give everything you do, everyone you speak to, your full and undivided attention. Don't try and do two things at once. It doesn't work. Especially with people that need your attention.

Third principle is: 'Make someone's day.' And what a nice warm and glowing principle that is. And how easy it is to 'make someone's day.' Some of us have such awful days that our day can be made by a smile, someone remembering our name. It doesn't have to be a big thing. What do I know about this person that I can do to make them feel special?

And the fourth principle is: 'Have fun.' Work does not have to be monotonous and boring. You can let your hair down. Even the dreariest activity can be made entertaining and fun so long as that activity involves people acting and interacting positively.

So there are the four principles of FISH and blogging about them is my way of making the job of remembering them fun. And who knows, if you like them to I may just, but only just, have made a contribution towards making your day as well.

HOW I ACQUIRED THE STATUS OF BLENKINTHROPE'S AUNT

Some of the hardier souls among us are beavering away over their keyboards, even as we speak, trying to write a novel in 50,000 words and within the confined space of the month of November - an impossible task, I would have thought, unless you are Georges Simenon, who used to write a novel in three weeks most months of the year. But then he was Belgian and for that nation, excellence seems to be distributed like lumpy custard. Very few have it but those that do have a surfeit.

Yet even the great Simenon might have found the task impossible had he also been faced with the daily round of autumnal tasks: stewing the last of the windfalls, raking the leaves from the lawn and securing the hollyhocks against the sou'westers now sweeping up the Channel.
Personally, I find it hard to write fiction at all, regardless of the season. I have no difficulty in inventing characters - it's just that my characters never seem to do anything much when they are invented. They don't go around murdering each other, or seeing visions, or even having salacious and torrid affairs with other characters no better than they ought to be.

So I can empathise with Blenkinthrope - a poor commuter of a character - who appears in 'The Seventh Pullet' - one of Saki's inimitable Edwardian stories. Blenkinthrope complains of lack of respect from his fellow commuters on the morning Waterloo-bound express. They are in the habit of recounting anecdotes, but little in Blenkinthrope's grey and dismal life comes anywhere near making story fodder. "Nothing of a remarkable nature ever happens to me," he wails.

"Invent something," says his friend Goworth, who, having won a prize for Scriptural knowledge, says Saki, is now licensed to be unscrupulous. Thus does Blenkinthrope begin his journey into the land of make-believe.

After a few tales in which he teases his companions' interest with stories of pullets mesmerised by snakes that have invaded the poultry run, he feels he has to up the ante. His next anecdote begins nonchalantly…….

"Curious thing happened to my aunt, the one who lives in Paris. She was sitting on a seat in the Bois, after lunching at the Romanian legation……….."

Of course, Saki comments, "whatever the story gained in picturesqueness from the dragging in of diplomatic 'atmosphere,' it ceased from that moment to command any acceptance as a record of current events." Romanian legations are the trade-mark of fictions and alas Blenkinthrope is relegated immediately to the status of a Munchausen - destined never to be believed again.

Ever since reading that tale I have longed to be able to retail a true story about how I lunched at the Romanian legation, even if I didn't afterwards sit digesting my fodder in the Bois de Boulogne. Well, this week I achieved my goal - or came as close to it as I expect I ever shall. You will forgive me if I mention no names. Internet spiders these days crawl over everything and I have no desire to embarrass my hostess.

Let us just say therefore that last night I dined at the legation of one of the newer arrivals to the European Union having been invited there by that country's acting Ambassador. Actually, that isn't quite true, for the event took place in Cardiff in a setting that couldn't exactly be called a legation. Neither did I exactly dine, for reasons that will become apparent in a moment. Even so, I feel that I have now acquired the proper status of a Blenkinthrope aunt.

The diplomatic event marked the induction of the country's honorary consul in Wales. Quite why so many people - there must have been 150 - had been invited I do not know. My own invitation came, I suppose, because I am known to do 'European' things and also perhaps because I have possibly the unique distinction of having taught the Ambassador Welsh.

I had met her last Christmas, again at a reception in Cardiff, to mark her country's accession to the European Union. She was a little nervous about having to make a speech, not quite sure of the protocols of Wales, and wondering how to be welcoming without being stuffy. Say something in Welsh, I said, much in the manner of Blenkinthrope's chum. "So, teach me!" she gamely replied.

I have to confess to a certain effrontery here. My knowledge of Welsh is sadly deficient. Though perhaps deficiency is an advantage when it comes to imparting a couple of useful phrases while holding a glass of wine in one hand, a plate in the other and trying to spell 'croeso' on a paper napkin at the same time. Whether your origins lie in Western Europe or in the east, it is impossible to do this without giggling.

Indeed so much did we giggle that I wondered afterwards whether I might have been guilty of the sin of lèse-majesté if not towards the Ambassador then certainly towards the Welsh language, which, of course is taken most seriously in these parts. But her speech was excellent and my Welsh phrases drew gasps of admiration from the guests. So when I arrived at the present reception, I was greeted like a long lost friend.

I suspect we would again have retreated into a corner to enjoy some of the Romanian wine while discussing autumnal fruit preservation and the leaf fall in Transylvania had her more formal diplomatic duties not intervened. For despite the wine the throng of guests was becoming impatient. Stretching out on long loaded tables, but taped off just in case, was a finger buffet that beckoned appetisingly to rumbling stomachs.

Unfortunately, as in most of these cases there can be no supper without the singing, or rather speeches, and where was the Minister who would open the proceedings? The Ambassador looked anxiously at the clock.

I had other duties in the shape of a dress rehearsal later that evening and so sadly had to cut rapidly away before the speeches finished. Nevertheless, I was pleased to see that my hostess' appetite for the Welsh language had not abated. I thus never got to 'dine' exactly at the legation, or even to offer my formal thanks, but I came as close as gazing on the food. And I think that counts. Don't you?

THE ANSWER TO FAST FOOD - SLOE GIN IN A SLOW TOWN

Last weekend was wet. I know this because last weekend was also the weekend of the Cowbridge Food Festival and it always rains then. Though always is perhaps pessimistic; the festival has only been running for three years.

Nevertheless, 18,000 visitors - 15 per cent of them apparently from the distant horizons of England or West Wales - braved the weather and turned up to shop in the marquees. And not only in the marquees for vendors who cannot find a place under the canvas take whatever space they can find around the town. Everywhere, from improbable corners and odd wheeled contraptions, the aroma of sweet Belgian waffles, oriental spice or sizzling Monmouthshire sausages floats out on the damp air.

I bought honey-coated Turkish sweetmeats with unpronounceable names, smoked pumpkin seeds and apricots dipped in dark chocolate. Others bought Sloe Gin or Potcheen to accompany vegetables grown to organic perfection and picked that morning. Outside the Town Hall friendly persons from the Vale Council handed out canvas bags for free, begging us all to recycle, in both English and Welsh.

Despite such unexpected largesse, the Festival is somewhat of a victim of its own success. One can only buy what one can carry, there being no room inside, or even outside for anything like a trolley. With your bags full and your shoulders aching, the desire to meander home becomes overwhelming. There are only so many sweet waffles, you can eat in one day.

Still to find 18,000 people these days with sufficient interest in food to invade our small town en masse is an encouraging sign. Confirmation that the fight back against the burger kings of fast food has begun and is growing stronger everyday. The idea of preparing meals from raw ingredients is being promoted again, while Nigella Lawson and her capable cookery clones are devising ever more ingenious ways of speeding the process.

Indeed, I recently discovered that a whole movement now exists devoted to reversing the principles of fast food. It is called with commendable plainness, 'Slow Food' and you can join the movement on their website http://www.slowfood.org.uk/ "Our defence should start at the table with Slow Food," they say. "Let us rediscover the flavours and savours of regional cooking and banish the degrading effect of Fast Food." Hear hear!

The Slow Food movement started in 1989 and now claims 80,000 members in 90 countries all over the world. In the UK the members are grouped geographically into 40 autonomous 'convivia,' the word being an ample description of the purpose of such groups - think of eating good food, drinking and conversing in the company of like minded people and you won't go far wrong. According to their website, members join with the purpose of caring about, enjoying and retaining our diverse heritage of regional food and drink, and protecting it from globalisation. They also try to show an awareness of the associated environmental issues.

The Slow Food Movement is closely allied to a rather bigger brother - something that might have been called 'Slow Towns' if its founder hadn't been Italian and chosen to call it Cittaslow instead.

Cittaslow began life in October 1999, during the food festival in Orvieto, Italy. While Slow Food is for individuals, membership of Cittaslow is for small towns with a population of less than 50,000. There are Cittaslow National Networks in England, Wales, Germany, Norway, Poland and Portugal. Other countries are working towards their own national networks. In the UK Cittaslow is 'led' by Ludlow, the first town in the UK to be admitted to a network, which now includes Alysham and Diss in Norfolk and Mold in Wales.

The organisers say that Cittaslow is a way of thinking. It is about caring for your town and the people who live and work in it or visit it. It is about protecting the environment, about promoting local goods and produce, and about avoiding the ‘sameness’ that afflicts too many towns in the modern world. To be a member of the network a town needs to sign-up to working towards a set of goals that aim to improve quality of life. It also has to pass a detailed assessment on some fifty criteria before being admitted as a member.

You can find more details of Cittaslow at http://www.cittaslow.org.uk/ but it strikes me that here is a movement that should be known about more widely. We all need to slow down, to get out more, to enjoy good food and good company. Hasn't that sense of slowness always been one of the main principles of country life?