Geese

My parents used to keep geese on the farm and later, when the children were small, we raised a family of goslings on our suburban lawn. They have always been one of my favourites. Both to look at and to eat, though I nevertheless feel guilty at the thought of killing such beautiful and soulful animals.

I’m even more guilty when I think of Foie Gras - fat liver - eaten by the bucketful in France at this time of year and in other places too. To make this, geese are force fed until their poor livers have expanded to twice their normal size. That eighteenth century cleric, Sidney Smith, said that his idea of heaven would be eating Foie Gras to the sound of trumpets. He didn’t say anything about Chateau Yquem - that lovely silky Sauternes made from grapes already rotting on the vine - which is held to be the very best accompaniment. Better than trumpets, certainly.

These days there is no need for cruelty. You can just take an ordinary goose liver and mix it with goose fat and there you go. Not quite the genuine article but sufficiently close to be an acceptable compromise.

Geese are intelligent creatures and one of very few that combine the ability to fly with the ability to swim, as well as to walk, of course. Like dogs, they also have tails that wag when they are happy. What they lack is any sense of humour. Yes, geese are the strait-laced brethren of the animal kingdom. And perhaps that is why they mate for life.

Such pairings are sometimes rough and ready - a tough gander seizing on a reluctant goose whether she likes him or not and guarding her jealously (and viciously) lest anyone try any funny business. But they can also show quite human tenderness.

On the farm we kept a family of ornamental Chinese geese. All geese carry their heads very high but Chinese geese are taller than most with long elegant necks. They are black (or dark brown) with white breasts and black beaks. Not all that unlike Canada geese in fact.

Emden geese, though, are what we think of as domestic geese. Presumably they originated in Emden in Germany. They are stumpy things, all white, with short thick necks and bright orange beaks. They were bred for their meat and because they are heavy I suspect they cannot fly once they are past the gosling stage. We kept a flock of Emden geese as well.

The Chinese geese didn’t fare well and eventually only one gander remained. The Emdens fared better. But the Chinese gander took a wife from among the Emdens and thereafter the couple were inseparable. They used to promenade together, side by side and he would always wait for her and be attentive. When they were fed, despite the competitive nature of feeding a rabble of miscellaneous poultry, household scraps mostly from a bucket with maybe a few handfuls of barley meal thrown in, he would always stand back and let her eat first and only then join the feeding fray. Never have I witnessed such altruism in the animal kingdom. Though maybe it was just self-preservation for how could we ever eat a Darby and Joan, never more than a couple of feet from each other day or night.

Having no sense of humour makes them vigourous complainers at the slightest provocation. This is why they make excellent guards. The Romans used them in this way around their camps. Better than dogs at warning of an enemy’s advance. People seem even more scared of geese than they do of dogs, though what a goose can do beyond giving you a nasty nip I don’t know. Our three half-grown geese, loose in our suburban garden, once saw off a policeman who came to call and who beat a hasty retreat in front of their lowered beaks.

As a child I was warned that a goose could break a man’s arm. But this is surely nonsense. Human arm bones are made for fighting, whereas a goose wing is made for flying, the bones, though strong, are light and hollow - there are even air sacs inside the bones. In any contest these must surely break first.

All you need do is to stand your ground and laugh at them (geese really don’t like this! and then when they are six feet away say ‘boo’ in a loud voice. They will cackle dreadfully and give you most hideous looks as if to say that they won’t do anything this time but let it be a lesson to you and then, still cackling, they will retreat, stiff-necked, and stiff-legged, with as much dignity as they can muster.

LAST DAY OF TERM

It’s odd, isn’t it, how many of us still think of our lives in school terms. In my case, forty-four years after leaving school - to the day almost - I am sitting here thinking this is the last day of proper work before the Christmas holiday. Except that it’s not a day of proper work otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this blog, nor later, going out to lunch. I am demob happy already.

What a term it has been! Never it seems have I been so busy. We have had a record autumn with our labels by some margin. Order after order has come in. Profitable orders from big companies too. Don’t they know that there’s a recession on? And even as we plan to put the dust sheets over the business for a week or two we know we have to find seventeen hours of time to number 150,000 tags for 5 January. I keep asking myself whether this is the storm before the calm.

That’s the labels - but to keep the grey cells alive - I still do a bit of Europe-based writing and consultancy. I became the UK co-ordinator for a communications project this autumn, was briefly on the management team even and paid in euros. There’s nothing more calculated to make you feel as though you are going up in the world than to be paid in euros with the pound falling in value every month.

But sadly on top of my weekly writing commitment and my voluntary work with UNESCO, the project was a step too far. Enjoyable it may have been but my blood pressure ws taking a hammering. Luckily for me the project was unexpectedly cancelled. I was sad to lose the income, but the extra work had been just too much.

There’s another consequence of being overly tied to a desk: I have bulged, shamefully. I am now three pounds over my ‘alarm-emergency’ weight which itself is a stone over what I consider my desirable weight which again is ten pounds or so over what those strict matronly books with their height to weight ratios, say that I should, primly and thinly, be.

In the rush I stupidly sacrificed my Canadian Airforce exercises - ten minutes of mixed aerobics involving a lot of running up and down the main corridor of the house, trying to compensate with a short-lived attempt to tackle the forty-five minute hill-climb up to the top of the Primrose Hill tump and back again every day before breakfast. It’s a wonderful walk in the early morning sunshine. But in the chilling wet darkness of a November morning it is purgatory.

Still from this evening I shall switch into Christmas mode: the house needs cleaning (and how) and decorating. We have to unblock the chimney and look out the logs, spray the fir cones, make confections (Nigella’s Christmas chocolate puddings look nicely adventurous), fetch the goose, ice the cake, build the little village (IKEA c. 1995) that consists of elves and snowmen and houses and snow laden trees with a little church and all of which lights up (hopefully) very agreeably as it nestles round, over and on top of the great snowdrifts of Royal icing I shall mount on the cake.

All these things have to be done. And the presents wrapped and piled around the tree. As a family we rather overdo presents. Forget the quality, our emphasis is on keeping the manufacturers of wrapping paper in business. A litter of glistening shapes and sizes, grows daily around the tree. Each of us will have half a dozen presents or so, including presents from and to any pets that may be lurking. When he was still alive, our Newfie, Sampson, would have been amazed at his perspicacity for buying useful snippets. A hussef, perhaps, or a pepper grinder. In return his present would be a splendid Savoy Cabbage, wrapped loosely in layers of newspaper and tied with a ribbon. This he would lie with, patiently tearing off the paper with his teeth, and then munching his way through the leaves. We would have given him champagne, too, had he shown any liking for it.

I myself am difficult to buy presents for. My Scottish ancestry makes me guilty about any significant largesse pointed in my direction. ‘Something from a charity shop will do nicely,’ I say in an attempt to head them off. This is not mere parsimony. For in truth charity shops always strike me as a modern day treasure trove. The concept of recycling appeals - as does the lack of choice. If we are talking about clothes that fit, there is one example, in one size and one colour - take it or leave it. I have never like decisions.

Last Christmas Younger Daughter bought me a padded plum-coloured gilet for £5. I have worn it almost every day since. It is an admirable garment, if not an admirable colour. Yet I would have never gone into a shop and bought a gilet new for the simple reason that I would have felt my arms would be cold. Only when one is presented to me do I find that by some mysterious process they aren’t. Surely that is something they could have taught me in school those 44 years ago?

More Restaurants

We were, I think, talking about restaurants. Leastways the Borscht ‘n’ Tears title of my last attendance in this spot was also the name of a Russian restaurant which I learn to my surprise is still going, despite various changes of regime in the Motherland, having been favoured with the custom of several Purple Cooers over the years. Maybe we can organise a grand reunion, should anyone fancy it.

Still the very survival of restaurants in these straightened times surprises me. Of course it is very agreeable to be taken out if someone else is footing the bill, especially when the atmosphere and the company is good. But if you are having to pay for yourself - worse, if you are having to pay for a string of random family - then I can’t help thinking to myself (at least in Britain) whether I really couldn’t have provided better food, better cooking, better wine and certainly a better atmosphere at home and still have enough dosh in hand at the end to buy something totally luxurious and unnecessary.

Of course there’s the washing up and clearing away, never to be underestimated, but even that can be rendered fun given a minimum of imagination. At a charity school I visited once in Norway, washing up for sixty people was accompanied by guitar playing and songs. As a visiting parent I was assigned to the drying up detail, as I recall. It made me feel that songs had a purpose beyond the iPod, not only to be listened to, but actually sung as well.

I suppose in truth I am a restaurateur manqué, which is why I feel mildly annoyed in most restaurants. It’s not only the cost: it’s all the missed opportunities to give people a memorable time. To go to a restaurant, certainly in the evening, should be to go (at least to have the chance of going) to a party. With the host providing a focus of mild entertainment that induces people to make contact with each other and for everybody to be warmed in the ambiance.

British practice is to ignore the folk around you even though the dining salon is so crowded that you are practically rubbing elbows. You keep your voice down and your thoughts to yourself, concentrating on your food if, that is, it is worth concentrating upon, which sadly it rarely is. We, as a nation, to not ‘do’ food. We lack appreciation of it. We value it only for the sustenance it brings and the opportunities it offers for snobbery - ‘sun-dried tomatoes! whee!’ or ‘My cookbook’s Marks and Spencer!’

I am not suggesting we go as far as that restaurant in Berlin known for the telephones on its tables; where you could dial up table 17 and make a secret proposition - though quite what proposition you might make I could never quite fathom. “Vould you like to eat a kipper vith me, Sweetie?” perhaps.

I believe that to be enjoyed a restaurant meal should be a party between like-minded friends and the restaurateur should hold the same relation to his guests as an attentive host at a party, smiling and encouraging all to relax.

Sadly attentiveness is these days interpreted as appearing in a rush out of nowhere every ten minutes to demand peremptorily and without any real interest whatsoever whether ‘everything is all right?’ That always seems to me to be an unforgivable sin simply for the lack of imagination that it betrays.

How can you possibly expand on variations in the subtle delights of dining to such an enquirer? In my restaurant the waiter would need only to lift a quizzical eyebrow to engage the diner in a conversation about the ageing of the beef, the digging of the potatoes or the
whether a coulis might or might not be appropriate. As indeed happens elsewhere.

I remember another little Russian restaurant in London - not a public restaurant at all. You were taken there as a guest. The salon was the front room of a house in a little terrace somewhere in the outer reaches of Kensington. It was run, if that you can apply that word in this case, by a little, white-haired emigrée from the Russian revolution.

You sat at tables. She came and talked to you in a strong Russian accent, sitting down at one of the chairs, moving candlesticks to see you better. There was no menu and no prices, but she told you what she had found in the market that morning and what was now cooking in her kitchen.

In singles and couples her diners drifted in until there were perhaps a dozen, she moved from table to table, a boy bustled round after her, placing breadsticks and cutlery on the table - glasses, napkins, bringing an occasional aperitif, usually vodka. Many talked in Russian.

Then the meal arrived. There was no choice. This was the meal she had cooked. You were her guest. She made you a present of this food. She was matriach, you were her children.

You ate and you drank and you talked and laughed. Most diners knew each other. It was like a family reunion. And after the meal, there were no bills. I never knew how it all worked. Money changed hands, certainly, but how much and when, seemed to be arbitrary. ‘From each according to his ability to each according to his need,’ sprang to mind.

BORSCHT AND TEARS

We are supposed to be in a recession, but last month we sold more than a million labels. To put this in context we normally sell about 400,000 labels, but last month it was more than a million and this month it may be as many. So really we should be happy bunnies, shouldn’t we? Well, yes. I mean ‘yes,’ no question yes. Except for the fact that all this selling of our little self-adhesive friends is hard work.

The labels long ago escaped from their normal confines of the two rooms that were the old garage and which we converted into a bedroom and sitting room for MIL in the days when she was still with us. Then they took over the dining room, whence they can be expelled on high days and holidays all apart from two large and growing stacks of heavy duty pallet labels in garish colours that lurk behind wicker screens bought for the purpose in IKEA.

But now as I write they have even over-spilled the dining room. There are boxes of labels, piled high, along the hall and in the sitting room neat rows of partly filled white mailing bags stand on their ends, their sheet-like corners waving at odd angles. They remind me of so many baby ghosts, lined up in some ghost orphanage.

We have an exceptionally large order to despatch to several hundred stores. What seemed like a great piece of business has turned into a nightmare of perplexity. Nothing is very difficult in quantities of ones and twos, but multiplied by several hundred the slightest difficulty or hitch requires hours of labour to remedy.

The labels we are selling are quite complicated - they are the labels used to certify films, 18, 15, PG and so on. We don’t print these ourselves, but we have nevertheless to ensure we have the right quantities and the right mix and to bag everything up and address it and stamp it and despatch. It all sounds easy enough until you have to cope with suppliers that are late and customers who are anxious, and, of course, all the continuing normal workload that goes on with the occasional deadline for an article on European Affairs thrown in.

We have been working, heavy eyed and limbed, from early morning until night, bringing in the offspring as required. Elder Daughter has missed her vocation as Superwoman. She works twice as fast as anyone else and has a capacity for organisation that puts us to shame. I wonder if ever this order ever will be complete and we able to reclaim our sanity and most of the house.

So as a diversion we entertained Di and her two aged mothers (one hers, one her husband’s) to lunch in the kitchen (into which the labels have not so far intruded). One aged mother is 87, the other 97. The 97 year old is deaf, but and so gives a standard response of ‘quite all right, thanks’ in a shaky voice to whatever is put to her. I sometimes think one could go though life on just a few of such standard responses. Alistair Cooke used to say that if a discussion had anything to do with politics, you could sound intelligent simply by saying ‘but not in the south, I think.’

As it happens we did not discuss politics, so I fell, between plate-warming and duck-carving operations, to reflecting how easy it was to form relationships these days through the internet and this led me to wonder whether one is ever too old for internet dating.

Could an 87 year old and British Passport holder to boot ‘want to meet’ a ninety year old Russian or Argentinian oligarch? It seems, I suppose, unlikely, but just imagine.....instead of contemplating a quiet winding down and a diet of painful knees and shuffling gait and generally having to be waited on hand and foot, think how one’s life could be transformed by falling in love at such an age.

With the endorphins released by the brain, the old would become instantly younger. Instead of ageing, one would de-age. And by at least ten years. Mobility would be restored and out of the window would go all those sad poisons prescribed by the gerontologists to hold body and soul together.

Anyway between mouthfuls of duck and roast potatoes I put this to her and she seemed much taken with the oligarch idea. I even taught her the Russian for ‘I love you.’ (When you are 87, it’s as well to work fast). ‘Ya vas loublou’ she said, very prettily. It remained only to set up the advertisement in Yahoo personals and perhaps, for good measure, the London Review of Books, a periodical much given to fostering eccentric relationships among those who feign a literary interest.

But sadly as I had then to break off to serve and sample the lemon tart, a snip from last week’s visit to IKEA, but still delicious with a spot of double cream, I found on my return that the conversation had drifted from visions of yachts and private jets and a dacha outside St Petersburg. I could see my chance of rubbing shoulders with Vladimir Putin in the hallowed portals of The Hermitage, awaiting my opportunity to slip ‘but not in the south I think’ into the conversation, slipping away with every mouthful.

I must try again, though. And next time I shall serve Borscht.

DRAMA AT THE FIREWORKS

L rang. “Come over for the fireworks on Sunday!

“Right. Thanks”

“We’re starting at 7 o’clock. Byee!”

And she was gone. As she usually goes leaving one, mouth open, on the point of saying something but not quite getting around to it.

So we trek over in the darkness at the appointed hour, walking self-consciously up the drive with a seventeen year old school chum of one of L’s daughters, dressed as a cat.

L divides her time between London, Wales and Las Vegas. There is a lot to fit in. Things have to be compressed. In this case Bonfire Night and Halloween. Inside the front door a job lot of witches hats lie strewn on the floor and life sized stocks hang on a grey chain from the newel post.

In the kitchen a chocolate fountain cascades merrily. Part of spell-making operations, no doubt. L’s husband barks exasperated orders, shooing us out again into the cold and damp. Flocks of seventeen-year olds, dressed as minor camp, more camp and extreme camp, waft in and out in various states of undress.

We grasp a tumbler of mulled wine - sweet and spicy and stand beside the bonfire, built with the old apple tree that collapsed under this year’s weight of fruit. Some still sits in my kitchen, waiting forlornly to be turned into something edible.

The adults huddle together eating the Shepherd’s Pie of which an exceedingly large quantity has been provided for the occasion. We hunch over paper plates, wrapped fast in our coats, gloves and scarves. We have done these fireworks parties before. It’s not the cold, it’s the damp, that gets to you. That and the drifting smoke from the bonfire. Across the court I note a baby in a pushchair, fast asleep, and with no obvious sign of belonging to anyone. I wonder if it is real or a piece of surrealist art.

I have stood on the decking of cousin’s David’s Alberta house, barefoot and wearing no more than a dressing gown, with the thermometer reading minus 22 degrees and not felt cold like I feel the cold here. I doubt that it is less than 7 degrees above freezing but my nether regions refuse to believe I am wearing any clothes at all.

The young, by contrast, appear to be running a competition for who can wear least, though as at the same time they are also running a competition as to who can appear most gothic it is clear there is a conflict. One enterprising lass, I note, solves the dilemma by wearing just one stocking beneath a school shirt in disarray. They, of course, are impervious to cold.

Somebody starts lighting fireworks which fizz, bang and whoosh into the night. We make the appropriate ‘ooh-ah’ noises. Someone thankfully has removed the baby. Clearly not a piece of surrealist art then.

I have to say that I stopped being hugely interested in fireworks at the age of nine. In great millennial displays that consume the annual budget of a small African country in ten minutes they are, I confess, quite pretty, provided you can watch them indoors. But the whoosh, bang, pop of the garden rocket is quite frankly pathetic. See one momentary starburst and you’ve seen them all.

In my boredom I start thinking about how fireworks could be ‘improved.’ The pretty fireworks are the ones that sit on the ground and spew out coloured sparks. ‘Golden Rain’ they used to be called. The more expensive ones even ran to a rainbow of rich primary colours.

In my mind I attached these to three or four rockets which carried them high in the sky whence they descended on some species of incombustible parachute, Golden Raining as they went. And why only one ‘whoosh’ to our rocket, I wondered? Much more interesting surely would be to couple three or four rockets together in one tube so that the first rocket then ignited the second high above the roof tops and then the third and finishing with three rockets worth of starburst.

By the time we could safely retreat indoors, I had come to the conclusion that I had somehow quite missed my calling in life. Had events taken a different turn, I might have become a famous pyro-technician, lighting up the sky from Llantwit to Llandudno.

Nobody else, needless to say, seemed impressed by this idea. But at least there were now the remains of the cake, tea and chocolate fountain or whatever was left by the time the Goths had ravaged it and retreated to the attics to do whatever seventeen- year old Goths do do in attics.

Host Goth continued to waft around for a bit like the Queen of the Night in faux furs, seeking inspiration from the adults for what she might do after A levels.

“Go to Drama School,” I suggested.

KNOCKING ON HEAVEN'S DOOR

Before we left the Mill, we drove over to Rocamadour, to which we had never been before. It’s a fairish distance from our corner of the Cantal - about and hour an a half - and feels longer cramped in the back of a car. It’s a religious site, a place of pilgrimage - a deep gorge on the side of whose vertiginous cliffs.....well, let me tell the story.

Saint Amadour is one of those obscure early saints that litter the Catholic calendar. I presume he was male, for I doubt a woman would have chosen to live her life, as he did, three quarters of the way up a towering rocky cliff, like some species of seabird. He began as a hermit making a cliff-side cave his hermitage and meditating on the view. Subsequently, he was joined by other hermits who took over other caves. Hermits indeed being social folk despite appearances to the contrary.

In due course Amadour died. Perhaps he had had enough of the view. Anyway, the other hermits carved a sarcophagus for him out of the soft rock, still some three hundred feet or so up this crag, and sealed him in, no doubt accompanied by the usual ceremonies that hermits engage in when one of their number departs for an even greater hermitage at a still more elevated altitude.

And that was that. Nothing much happened for five or six hundred years. But then, just after the turn of the millennium, (that’s the first millennium, not the one just gone) someone came across the Amadour tomb and decided - in true Halloween style - to open it up.

And in true Halloween style old Amadour did not disappoint. For there he was, presumably still fully clothed, and perfectly preserved. Which, when the Pope came to hear of it, was enough to have old Amadour beatified and for the cliff to be re-christened Roc-Amadour and for people to make pilgrimages there for the next thousand years.

Indeed, so well has the little community of Rocamadour done down the ages out of their perfectly preserved hermit that one is tempted to think that perhaps someone removed what remained of Amadour and popped a succession of recently deceased locals into the tomb when anyone came to inspect. But to think that would be to remove the magic.

For Rocamadour is magic - pure spiritual magic - carved in white stone. There’s the little town at the base of the cliff, full of hotels and restaurants and boutique-y shops selling tourist porn - the endless cheap (and not so cheap) souvenir tat, much of it made in Asia, that disfigure any site to which international tourists flock like so many seagulls on a rubbish tip.

But from this unenterprising beginning leads ‘Le Grand Escalier’ - a great staircase of 226 stone steps mounting towards (but never actually reaching) the cliff top. It is a staircase to heaven.

As one mounts, in a series of zig-zagging flights, interrupted by oases of elegant medieval piazzas, you feel you are leaving behind the material things of the world and approaching something pure and spiritual.

You leave behind the modern world with its cars and shops and ascend to the early middle ages. An ecclesiastical building blocks your way - you pass through a door - but then you see that the edifice has only one side. You pass through a wall but the far side is open and the stairway draws you on and ever upward.



Finally you reach the Church of the Black Madonna with its great stained glass window beside the tomb of Saint Amadour - or rather the bottom half of the sarcophagus carved into the rock. Above you - and worryingly over you - towers the rest of the cliff, which actually overhangs this religious ‘city.’ Worse still, the overhang is built on, which makes you feel that it is only the whim of the Almighty that prevents the entire cliff collapsing like the Twin Towers with each upper collapse taking out the floor beneath. No wonder pilgrims tremble.

I am not a religious person, but, as I stood within the walls of this beautiful, capacious church with its high vaulted roof, suspended as it were between earth and sky, accessible only by a staircase of 226 steps, it was easy to understand why it had for almost a thousand years become a pilgrimage for Kings and Christians.

Hamlet’s words “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” came to mind.

A row of candles burnt brightly in the dim religious gloom: votive offerings which I used to be encouraged by my old great aunt to make when she was alive. I feel her nagging at me still to 'put a candle on,' whenever I enter a Catholic church. Usually I resist.

This time, quite overcome, I dropped my two euros into the box and lit a flame. After a token prayer I turned around and descended the staircase again in bright sunshine.

THE MOURJOU CHESTNUT FESTIVAL

They roasted the chestnuts on iron grills two metres or more in length and perhaps a metre in width. Two of these monsters sat in the field with what looked like old wooden fencing posts burning beneath. After a time the chestnuts were raked off and tipped into giant bins, the sort that you might use for cattle feed, and then manhandled up the slope to the festival.

Eager hands then scooped the steaming mass into those little plastic trays that you find in take-away restaurants. An incongruous, if useful, blending of ancient and modern ways. We paid our two euros or whatever and tucked in: the chestnuts, hot, sweet and woody, the essence of autumn. In the background bagpipers wailed.

To wash down your chestnuts, the festival offered a choice. Apple juice or cider - sold in one or two litre bottles. Both looked identical, the thick smudgy, amber colour of freshly pressed apple. We chose the juice. The stock of bottles flew off the shelves as fast as the chestnuts. More bottles arrived. From where, we wondered.

At the back of the stall stood a large rectangular trailer. From the back extended two pipes, each with a tap. And from these ran the supply of juice and cider. A man sat on the towbar, filling the bottles. How practical! But enough, surely, to give apoplexy to those whose heart’s desire is to keep the population secure behind racks of regulations.



As we ate, the wailing bagpipers materialised and performed a little dance. Their pipes were medieval, the sort you see in early paintings of people enjoying themselves, by people like Brueghel.

The pipers were not trying to be medieval. It was just, I suppose, that in these Auverne recesses things have not changed much in 600 years. Apart from the plastic trays the chestnuts were then as they are now. The only thing that might have changed was the language.

Then the people in these parts spoke Occitan and by the attempts made to write things (the labels on the cider bottles for instance) in Occitan, it appears that it is due for a comeback. We even picked up a freesheet in English telling us how to pronounce Occitan words.

On a casual acquaintance the language seems to bear the same relation to French as Catalan does to Spanish, that is a sort of half-way house between the two, but leaning a little more to the one than the other. Once this language was spoken pretty much everywhere south of Bordeaux and Montlucon, except for the area round Perpignan, where presumably they spoke Catalan. Anyway it is an enormous area.

And in this little part, down at the bottom of the Auverne in the Departement of the Cantal (otherwise only famous for being the spot from which hailed Georges Pompidou, the French President who grandly let Britain join ‘Europe’ in 1972) they grow chestnuts. That is, you might say, their ‘raison d’etre.’ Or was.

Did you know that in 1920, La Chataignerie (The Chestnutery) produced half a million tons of chestnuts, which were consumed up and down the land? No doubt, after the First World War had eliminated much of the young farming workforce, there wasn’t much else to eat but half a million tons is a lot of chestnuts.

Eighty years later this has fallen to a mere 10,000 tons, a fifty- old decline. Most of the chestnuts today are simply left to rot or be eaten by wild boar.



Still, at Morjou the object is to make you consume chestnuts. I noted that the organising committee limited their stall holders to a maximum purchase of two tons. This seemed a triumph of optimism. However delicious they may be, there is a limit to the number of roast chestnuts one can eat.

I estimate it would take 16,000 people to eat their way through two tons. Mind you, you would be amazed at to just how many uses the chestnut can be put. Ground into flour it finds its way into all sorts of breads, cakes, pastries, pancakes. You find chestnut honey and chestnut jam and chestnut preserves of every kind. There are decorations made of chestnuts, candles, ornaments....there are cosmetics.

And after eating you can visit the chestnut museum and demonstrations of the superb qualities of chestnut wood (it is straight-grained and so splits evenly, comes with is own preservative to resist attack by wood boring insects and spiders; if you look at a chestnut roof you will find no cobwebs.)

Earlier we bumped into Nigel, an Englishman married to Susy Atkins an American potter who runs the superb Don pottery, now in a brand new exhibition centre high on a hill, just over the Cantal border. Until a couple of years ago the pottery inhabited an achingly beautiful eighteenth century mansion, all windows and turrets and covered with lovely scalloped blue grey slates, in a deep Auverngnat cleft. The house remained unsold, he said ruefully, though the price had come down.

I suggested he sought out a lingerie manufacturer.

“A lingerie manufacturer - why?”

“Thongs of the Auverne.”

Candles and Pink Sugar

We decided to celebrate Di’s birthday with a shopping trip. She came over and we set out en masse for Bath, losing ourselves in the recesses of the Charlotte Street long stay car park whence Elder Daughter appeared, glued to her mobile giving us Sat Nav instructions of which exit to take and where to cross the road. Where would we be without mobiles? Lost, clearly.

No matter, a marching band comes up the street, wearing strange uniforms reminiscent, it seems to me, of the IRA. They are playing all the usual brass instruments including xylophones arranged vertically, which look very pretty, but as they are tall I would have thought must rather obstruct the forward vision of the marcher.

When they get closer I see they all look about fourteen. This is confirmed when one stops and spends five minutes doing up his shoe lace. he is trying to figure out whether left goes under right or over it. Bless!

No sooner does this band disappear round the corner than another one hoves into view. Bath is obviously pulling out the stops for us. We hurry round the corner and out of the envelope of clashing sound.

First stop then, Marks and Spencers, for a mild, mid-morning, carbohydrate overdose washed down by cappuccino, or in the Di and Elder Daughter conspiracy, a frozen latte. Suitably fortified we embark on the serious business of clocking stores. M & S, certainly, then Gap, Monsoon, Country Casuals, Hampstead Bazaar, Rossiters pausing only to admire the new Bath spa.

Here you can swim, apparently, ‘sous les belles étoiles’ in water heated in the bowels of the earth. You lie on your back and float as the steam rises into the blackness of the night; the sensation being made even weirder by placing the pool on the third floor of the building so that the effect is, so says Elder Daughter, as if you are floating above the town like something out of Peter Pan. I must say it did seem excellent value for £20 the two hours.

A final flurry into Waitrose, buying a little bit of this and that so I can justify some cash back to replenish the reserves, sorely pressed on account of the past couple of hours. Actually I haven’t bought much - a Bridgewater cereal bowl, just to show willing, but then I found myself passing the tempting Julian Graves shop crammed with every kind of dried fruit and nut and ginger and chocolate that you can imagine. And all in sensible kilo or half-kilo bags. So I feared that I should be stranded on the wrong side of the Severn Bridge without a top-up.

They are always so nice in Waitrose about cash back that you feel positively embarrassed about asking. I wonder each time what is the most tactful way of approaching the subject. Should I go to pay with cash, pull out a battered fiver and exclaim, ‘Oh dear I thought I had more than that?’ How much can you ask for without seeming greedy?

Still we are now fully loaded and struggle to the car park where of course we have lost the car. It is starting to rain and we are hungry. Elder Daughter saves the day and she was not even there when we parked. We head southwards towards Frome, making a diversion on the outskirts to the Frome Farm Shop for even more stocking up with fresh organic comestibles and esoteric bread flour. Surreptitiously, I buy a Victoria Sponge Cake.

We arrive after taking the scenic route down the hill into Frome Town centre and the up the other side. Frome is a town where no-one has a heart condition. Those that did have one have long since been accounted for by those hills; the remainder are fitter than anyone else in the country. It’s the visitors like us I worry about.

Elder Daughter’s husband has made vegetable soup. We produce a bottle of wine. There is home-made bread and then cheese and fruit. It is time to produce the cake. “Find some candles, I tell ED, in my most parental manner.

“I haven’t any,” she says, returning empty handed.

“Have you a scented candle, I say becoming desperate, “or a even a night light?”

She rummages furiously among the kitchen drawers, finally finding what look like three night lights. They are a fetching blue, pink and green and without their aluminium holders.

They’ll do. We put them on the cake and light them. They burn at a great pace. Di takes a big breath and collapses with laughter. “I can’t remember the last time I had a cake with candles,” she pleads.

“Blow,” we command imperiously. “Then we shall sing.”

She blew, we sang Happy Birthday and then we all laughed. And then it as time to go and, yes, thanks to Waitrose, we even had money for the Severn Bridge.

Photo shows ED and Di

Ins and Outs of Football (and Norwegians)

“So why aren’t all football teams composed of 19-20 years olds?” I ask Elder Daughter on the way back from the Cheese Festival.

She and Web Wizard are home for the weekend, tempted by the great British Cheese Week Fair at Cardiff Castle. They have desperately been trying to recoup the £8 entry fee by eating large quantities of free samples. Web Wizard declares he has now got a ‘cheese headache.’ I as usual am on taxi-duty, dutiful parent that I am.

Elder Daughter is a bit of an Arsenal fan, this having been the only term in the pre-nuptial agreement with Web Wizard. In consequence we, in the wider family, are now also all conscripted Arsenal fans, even though we know next to nothing about football. I decided this needed rectifying.

I have this weird theory that, after a few years of kicking a ball about, surely a promising footballer should know how to play and what to do? Why then would you need a manager? Why then do you need ‘experience.’ Just what more is there to learn, I ask innocently?

Elder Daughter is patience personified. When she and her sister were little they used to sit one each side of me on the bed at night and we would have ‘interesting chats.’ They would ask naive questions - why does the light come on when we turn the switch? Why do countries go to war? What is the moon made off? Where does dust come from? And I would attempt a half-competent answer, usually boring them into early drowsiness.

Maybe however I am losing my touch. The other day, sitting in the garden of a friend’s house I tried the same thing with their four year old red-headed grandchild, who for some reason wanted to know where Americans came from. I started on Columbus and then Madoc and then - with one eye on the red hair - the Vikings.

“Where do Vikings come from?” came the inevitable question.

“Norway” I answered boldly, thinking on the spur of the moment that in terms of the countries she had heard about Norway might beat Denmark by a short head, while Scandinavia would trail in a poor third, if indeed it finished at all.

So I told her about Vikings and Longboats and the Beserkers and, carefully skating around the rape and pillage bit, told her that many Vikings had settled in Britain and that for all we knew we might both be descended from Vikings ourselves.

“Does that mean you are Norwegian?” I winced at her lack of inclusivity.

“Well, yes. I suppose it does. In a manner of speaking.” I waited eagerly for the next question. Instead there came an unexpected put down.....

“I’m bored with Norwegians,” she announced crushingly, and marched off to play tug of war with the dog.

As a result I have decided to give up (at least until Younger Daughter’s mite, Topaz, is toddling) giving random interesting chats to the rising generation. Instead, I am practicing, in preparation for my dotage, being on the receiving end of such pearls of wisdom. Hence this chat in the car about football and my suitably naive questions.

Elder Daughter explains that although 19 and 20 years olds can whiz about the pitch they don’t always run to the right places, nor to they always know what best to do with the ball should they find themselves in its way. Older players know better what they are doing.

“Theo Walcott was only 17 when he played for England,” I chirp up, desperate to show my knowledge of at least one Arsenal player.

“Walcott is exceptional,” came the somewhat lame reply.

This was, I felt, a knock-out blow. Convincing proof of my argument.

But then she went on to suggest that while the then seventeen year old Walcott might have taken the correct decision about playing the ball two times out of three, give him a few more years of careful attention to his betters and he would be taking the right decision all the time.

“But why then when you have got all these experienced players, who always take the right decision when the ball lands at their feet, do you need a manager? Can’t you just nominate a captain and a vice-captain (in case the captain is injured) and get them to pick a team and then let the team decide the best strategy according to their skills and their opponents’ weaknesses? Why pay some lantern-jawed Italian vast sums of money when our own lads could do the job themselves?"

This brought a long lecture about the skills of Arsene Wenger, the Arsenal Manager, which I shall not bore you with. Words like strategy, analysis, tactics, encouragement, discipline, selection and development, figured prominently. Had I been a mere 58 years younger I should have long since fallen asleep, as indeed despite his Cheese Headache had Web Wizard. Instead I had roundabouts to attend to. I listened attentively, as Elder Daughter's bullets of wisdom struck home

Should I ever be called upon to manage a football team, I shall know just what to do.

I NEED LUISA’S SPIRIT TO STOP A ROAD

A lovely story meandered across the meadows of the broadsheet newspapers this week and even found time to look in at the hallowed portals of the ‘Today’ programme on Radio 4.

It might, with reasonable accuracy, have been entitled ‘Plus ca Change, Plus c’est la Meme Chose,’ for it concerned a seventeenth century Spanish noblewoman - Luisa de Carvajal - whose observations of an enforced sojourn in London some three hundred years ago have turned up, faithfully recorded in 150 letters, in the attic of a Madrid convent.

Which only goes to show that nuns, holy though they may be, are, in the earthly respect of housekeeping, no better than the rest of us when it comes to de-cluttering the loft. No doubt convent attics are built especially large for this purpose, which makes me wonder what else might be up there, steeped in that institutionally religious smell of incense, floor polish and boiled cabbage.

For what Luisa de Carvajal wrote might have been written about Londoners at any time, I suppose, in the intervening centuries. At least what we have been told she wrote; for it seems that from the 150 letters dealing with every aspect of the capital’s ‘mode de vie,’ from lavatories to executions, we are being asked to judge her work from a single short paragraph which happens to deal with cooking. She damns viciously with faint praise, does Luisa.

“The food looks good,” she writes, “but has no smell and almost no taste.” Well, what did she expect? Isn’t our cuisine reputed the world over for its blandness? Is that not why those clever people from ‘Goodness Gracious Me’ were able to write a beautifully satirical sketch about a group of Indians going for ‘An English’ and demanding ‘the blandest dish on the menu?’

Poor Luisa! One wonders why she didn’t send out for a packet of salt. Instead she wrote long and elegant letters castigating the barbarity of the neighbours, the thin walled houses, the rowdiness (always worse on Fridays) and the twenty-five thieves regularly hanged every month. And while we ourselves may no longer hang miscreants, they themselves seem determined to ensure that the quantity violent death available on the capital’s streets remains at levels sufficient to aggravate modern day Luisas into writing any amount of minatory missives home.

Still, it is not everyone who is privileged to have a name that would sound respectable even when attached to a Persian cat. And like a Persian cat Luisa emerges as a most superior being: someone accustomed to the highest standards and who had no time for nonsense. Her writing also shows her to be a woman of action. She may have been a Mrs Tittlemouse figure, used to order and neatness, now plunged into a London cess pool populated by so many Mr Jackson’s, but she was determined to do something about it.

Writing was her escape from this dungeon as it has been for so many before and since. The sheer joy of having in front of one a blank page on which to marshal thoughts and sentences, words and phrases as though they were troops ready for battle.

Sadly, though it is a joy that is being heavily discounted. Fewer and fewer people these days take any joy in writing at all. Even what is written is ‘dumbed-down’ to the point where it no longer exercises the brain so much as sends it to sleep.

Besides, a good letter not only demands a certain elegance and power of observation, but in a library or vault or attic, it will survive for 300 years. More in fact, for hardly a week goes by without some new archeological dig turning up this fragment or that, telling us about who was doing what to whom in the days of some long forgotten empire and enjoining us to remember to pay Sextus three denarii for the dogfood. No amount of convent attics will I fear do anything to preserve our electronic scribblings.

But the joy of scribbling also brings burdens. The other day I found myself enjoined to attend a public meeting in a neighbouring village through which, or rather around which, our dear Assembly government may be building a new road for the purpose of arriving marginally more quickly at a very much under-used airport.

No sooner had I been introduced to the meeting’s beautiful and erudite secretary, who had been allocated the job of committing our thoughts to paper and preparing a report for the great and the good, than I found myself urgently propelled into her shoes, so to speak, as she herself has had precipitously to depart on rather sad family business on a distant continent.

Oh dear! I have until Monday to read and digest the consultant’s report and then try to rustle up a little of the Luisa spirit to explain, carefully and calmly, why it is somewhat less than a good idea - with predictions of environmental catastrophe as frequent as bland cooking - to spend a ridiculous amount of money to build a major road to get to a minor airport.

I need Luisa’s spirit for it is obvious that the powers that be take little account of rationality. The statistics on which the report is based are five years and a $100 dollars an oil barrel adrift for one thing. I fear that in their minds the decision to build a new road is already taken. We are now just going through the motions. Facts, in the minds of the proposers, only exist to be rebutted.

What is needed is a little spark, a key phrase, arrowed where the mind is vulnerable; a convenient ladder from which a minister may easily disengage himself from a petard and climb down from his hook; that will disarm this countryside despoiling time bomb. And I have until Monday evening.

WHENCE COMES THE BANKER'S BONUS?

The other day Matthew Parris was writing in the Spectator about the collapse of the market in llamas. If I remember rightly, he called the piece ‘First the housing market collapsed. Now I fear the trade in llamas will be next.’ Of course, as things have turned out it has been not so much the trade in llamas as the trade in merchant banks that has gone squiffy. All those people in the City making fortunes quite literally beyond the dreams of avarice who now find themselves discomfited, much the same as us ordinary folk who have to fetch our own coal.

Now I always thought that that colourful expression ‘beyond the dreams of avarice’ came from the Bible. It has a suitably chilling ring of satanic temptation about it. But, no, I find that its origins lie with that obscure eighteenth century English dramatist, Edward Moore, with whose works you are no doubt horribly familiar, if only because they include ‘Fables of the Female Sex,’ which he wrote in 1744. A few years later he wrote the play called ‘The Gamester’ and it is there that he penned his immortal line.

In fact he was quite a dab hand at immortal lines, For he also wrote the one about adding insult to injuries which is, I suppose, what he might have felt about the fact that dear old Samuel Johnson seems to have appropriated his avarice quip and is consequently credited with it in some publications despite Johnson writing - or rather in this case speaking - some 37 years later in 1781.

Johnson on that occasion was assisting at the sale of a Thrale’s brewery, for some reason, and quipped to Boswell (standing guard in much the same relationship as Baldrick had with Blackadder), that “we are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.” And, he might have added, making a tidy profit for the bankers, too, who have gone on buying and selling money long after the breweries have withered on the vine, if you don’t mind me mixing a metaphor along with the hops.

Because it is bankers and breweries that I want to write about - or rather why it is that bankers are able to make money when there are no longer any real breweries to sell.

Permit me to illustrate with a parable. Let us return to the glorious eighteenth century again and to the first races at Epsom. Two brothers - let’s call them Ed and Sam - owned a village brewery and one of them had the bright idea of sprucing up their local trade by brewing a barrel of special ale and taking it to the Epsom races there to slake the thirst of eager punters.

The barrel was duly brewed and Ed and Sam set out on their way. Evidently trade could not have been brilliant for they had no cart and so were obliged to roll the barrel along the high road. Not long after they had set out, Ed says to Sam. ‘I’s a thirst. Give me a pint o’ yon beer. I’ll pay ye threepence for it.’ And Sam duly pours him a glass of finest ale and receives the threepence. Then, a little further on, Sam says the same thing to Ed. Another pint of ale is poured and the threepence is transferred from the pocket of Sam to the pocket of Ed.

Well, what with the summers being considerable hotter in the 1780s, and the roads considerably more dusty, this trade between two brothers with its accompanying exchange of threepences occurred more than once on the long road to Epsom - so much so, in fact that long before the brothers came in sight of the race course the barrel had been emptied and its contents duly recycled along the hedgerows.

“We mustn’t worry” says Sam. “A’ter all, we paid for the beer.” And so, in a manner of speaking they had. But no matter how hard they searched their pockets they could not find more than a single threepenny bit.

And that strikes me as the problem with merchant banking. A whole lot of people in skyscrapers are exchanging their threepences, betting on things going up or going down, but no one is actually doing anything even as useful as brewing a barrel of beer, still less actually putting any new money into the system. Whence then do the bankers’ bonuses come?

It is no wonder that the whole shebang comes crashing about our ears like a 51 card house. Meanwhile, with bankers out of work, there is no money to buy llamas, which, according to Matthew Parris, do a much better job of keeping down the grass than do sheep. Young male llamas are worth so little now, I understand him to say, that llama owners are giving them away to good homes, though the girls (who breed once a year, punctually and without fuss) still command a respectable price.

But even this depends on people who reason that if they buy a female llama (or two as they are herd animals) they will be able to sell the offspring. And that depends on people with unmown paddocks and those people are (or were) the bankers. It’s enough to add insult to injury.

A KAFKAESQUE MOMENT

Do you ever have one of those moments when you find yourself asking suddenly ‘what am I doing here?’ as if you had just woken up and found yourself at the bottom of some very deep rabbit hole? You do? Well then, let me join you, for I experienced just such a surreal and Kafkaesque moment on Wednesday of this week, an inoffensive sort of a day otherwise, when normally I should have been sitting quietly at this desk bashing out invoices for the labels that had been ordered that day, or sticking stamps on parcels, or just possibly operating our little printer and reeling up labels for some last minute order.

Instead I found myself in seat 451 of the European Parliament in Brussels, part of a great hemi-cycle, and desperately trying to stay awake as I listened to a French Minister droning bravely on about immigration and asylum.

I was surrounded by MPs and MEPs of all nations - regrouped in this chamber for an inter-parliamentary session on just those subjects. It’s a chance for the European Parliament to make friends with members of national parliaments and this particular session was organised by the French Presidency of the European Union as part of its efforts in the direction of Inter-cultural dialogue. All very worthy. And useful, too, in its own way.

But of course I am neither an MP, nor an MEP, though I might indeed have been one at one time had the voters in various places and various times been rather less careless in the placing of their crosses. That is a story that I have yet to tell. So there I was, seated in a row marked ‘Press’ - which wasn’t really helpful either as although I do contribute articles to a European journal, to describe myself as ‘Press,’ seemed not so much as being economical as vastly extravagant with the truth.

Nevertheless, there I was, with a glossy white photographic badge to prove my entitlement while I listened to the slow buzz of amplified and oddly stressed voices coming over the headphones from the interpreters’ cubicles while with my eyes I counted the myriad down lighters recessed into the ceiling. And after becoming bored with counting the lights I started this blog, reasoning that I would at least look as if I were being attentive even if I still felt I had fallen down a rabbit hole into somebody else’s existence - and, like Alice, I started to wonder who might have been the previous occupant whose legislative posterior had warmed the cushions of seat 451.

Of course, I did have a proper reason to be there to do with the communications project that I am working on with a team in Brussels and on which I endeavour to play some small part for the United Kingdom, which being a Big Country in the scale of these things, gives me rather more clout than were I to be representing a Small Country like Malta or Cyprus. I had an hour or two before catching the Eurostar back home and as some colleagues whose speciality was immigration were attending this Parliamentary meeting, they suggested I join them. “Why not,” I replied reasoning that one never knows who one is going to meet at the European Parliament.

Indeed I prefer watching people rather than listening to them and looking at the body language. I like absorbing the atmosphere too. Mostly this is languid and dull, but it quickens every now and then when, occasionally, someone says something original or interesting or even rehearses some tired old cliché with a bit of passion.

Here there is an atmosphere very different indeed to our Parliament in Westminster. It has something to do with the melting pot of languages, something to do with the vast amount of space - you could fit a respectable size tennis court in some of the corridors - so that the place resembles the terminal of an international airport rather than a quiet corner of contemplative deliberation.

Anyway, I soon had to escape my rabbit hole and my counting of downlighters and the immigration and asylum concerns of the various members and sneak back across Brussels, first to the Belgian chocolate shop - an obligatory stop on the way home - and then to Eurostar and so back to London in two hours or so.

I was fortunate that not to be staying an extra day, for had I been twenty-four hours later I could have found myself delayed by the fire that broke out the following day in the Channel Tunnel and was still raging this morning, fortunately hurting no-one. For such small mercies we must be thankful.

NORMANDY SPIRIT

Last weekend I went to Normandy, again. I say again for I have been there before to stay with old friends who live just outside Le Havre and blogged about it in this space, as they say in the newspapers. Just a quick visit, there and back, but a welcome breath of fresh air and a chance to see new sights.

Normandy is often held to be a poor relation to French provinces further to the south or west. It is the place that one hurries through after disembarking from a rough Channel crossing and hurrying towards Paris or Nantes. Perhaps it is slightly more romantic than Picardy through which one hurries even faster unless one is homesick for grey skies and stops to look in at Amiens or Arras.

Indeed, from a tourist perspective, one could imagine Normandy as a kind of Middle Class province, looking down on Picardy to the north, but looking up to Brittany to its west, though perhaps the Bretons themselves would never understand the allusion as they labour firmly under the belief that they are looked down upon by the rest of France to whom they feel themselves attached only in the most fragile manner.

Normandy of course is a province of two halves - lower and upper divided by the Seine. My friend, Chantal, who so kindly put me up this weekend and who has lived in Normandy all her life, hisses that upper Normandy is not really Normandy at all despite boasting the birthplace of William the Conqueror and the town with the shortest name in France - Eu.

Only when you cross the Seine are you in what she would regard as Normandy proper - the Normandy of the picture postcard, all dappled cows and orchards full of apple laden trees at this time of year. Thatched farmhouses, abound - all pleasingly shaped to delight the eye and almost like the orchards themselves with their vertical timber framing springing at angles from the ground to bury itself under the thatch.

Their visual beauty lifts the spirit, particularly when the houses are covered in flowers as so many of them are and when there are no ugly visual intrusions - modern concrete structures, or garish advertising - that it seems we in Britain have no control over and which most people do not even seem to notice.

We stopped in Gatteville (Eure) - there is more than one - to look at the small remains of an eleventh century castle, built by one of the Normans who crossed the Channel with William but didn’t immediately take to the grey weather of Sussex. After doing his bit at Hastings, William sent him (I’m afraid I have forgotten his name) home with a grant of land on which to build a castle and here was its remains.

I would have taken its photograph had I remembered my camera, which sadly I didn’t, and I would have photographed, too the beautiful farmhouse that sat next to it, long and low with a great overhanging roof at one end that sheltered an overhanging staircase. I am told this is known as a ‘Jay’s Bottom’ - but why is another matter.

When I did recover my camera, it was only to show that the weather was no better there than here, as you can see from the ship.

RAIN OR SHINE: A WINTER'S TALE

Of course it should have been a balmy summer evening, the sun sinking slowly into a furnace of copper, chilled Pinot Grigio on the Castle terrace and a light zephyr breathing the warm balm of Sicilia over the assembled company. But that was asking too much.

We motored over last Saturday evening to Goodrich Castle, a lovely old pile in South Herefordshire, built of that peculiar purple-ish sandstone they go in for in those parts, for the specific purpose of getting a good soaking and incidentally to watch the Rain and Shine Theatre Company perform Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. As they say on the quiz shows: the clue is in the title.

Rain and Shine are an excellent troupe who perform Shakespeare and other classical plays in a rumbustious, burlesque, street theatre-ish style. Lots of noise, lots of clever and comic ‘business,’ deliberately hammy acting and audience involvement: on Saturday, the actors (well, two of them) fancying a drop of wine during the performance, simply helped themselves to the remains of someone’s picnic, for instance. Well worth seeing if you get the chance; more: well worth going an hour’s drive to see. Even in the rain. Even when the rain itself was over-acting, assisted by its fellow meteorological thesps: darkness and a half-gale.

I had never before seen The Winter's Tale, so this was a first for me, and, given the generally humid ambiance, not one I am likely to forget. I rather enjoyed it, I have to say - though it’s a curious piece, starting as it does as a serious tragedy all about how a man’s jealousy can ruin lives and marital harmony. But then, after King Leontes has caused his infant daughter (who he believes not to be his) to be abandoned far from the shores of his Kingdom of Sicilia, for which his faithful servant is then attacked by a bear so letting Shakespeare write his most famous stage direction ‘Exit pursued by a Bear,’ the play switches to comedy. Well, it has to really, otherwise the whole thing would become too silly, and the rest of the piece is a comedy with music, dance and song. Shakespeare as Lloyd Webber, you might say.

Leontes, even gets his beloved wife back whom, he cast into prison where she dies in the meantime of the false accusations hurled at her. Someone thoughtfully makes a life size statue of her, which then comes to life when Leontes takes responsibility for his terrible behaviour and she, dutifully and in a triumph of hope over experience, accepts him again as husband.

I did, I confess, as the rain started to descend in stair rods during the last half hour, wish that that final scene would quickly draw to a close so that we could all go home. "Yes, we know the statue is real!" I wanted to say, "so you can skip the gradual warming up bit." Warming up! Everyone was frozen. Hermione (the statue) I would have thought especially, standing stock still as she was in the rain soaked gale for half an hour with only a wispy tunic to protect her.

Camped on the wet grass I noticed we were sitting next to a seventeenth century mortar called Roaring Meg. A squat, tubby black thing resembling an iron toad. It had been cast locally when the Parliamentary commander besieging the Royalists of Goodrich in 1646 began to lose patience at their defiance. So with Meg’s helped he lobbed a few 200lb gunpowder filled shells into the castle and the walls, in true Biblical style, came tumbling down. Or so the notice said.

I couldn't help thinking, watching the droplets of rain swirling on the wind like snowflakes in the luminescence of the spotlights, that the play might even have been performed before, in this same castle courtyard or in the adjacent hall, in happier times, before Roaring Meg (why are cannons always female?) brought the great castle towers tumbling down.

I can't think of another country, other than Britain, where the company would be shown the same spirit - not only of 'The Show Must Go On' but also of 'The Show Must Be Watched.' Only when I started drying out did I discover how wet I was.

But as it ended and we stood to applaud the bravura of the cast and they applauded us in turn for our determination to stay to the end, and we packed up and waded back the long quarter mile in the muddy darkness to the car park, cold and soaked, I knew I was glad to have gone. There is more to theatre than ice cream in the warm trappings of the grand circle.

OH, THE POWER OF THE REMOTE CONTROL

A week or two back a card dropped through the letterbox. It came from BARB - the British Audience Research Bureau telling me that someone would come calling unless, that is, I minded terribly. And yesterday a big bushy bearded fellow arrived, with suitable identification and laptop to see whether our household might be one worthy of joining the great mysterious panel that so accurately reflects the nation that whatever they watch or listen to may be multiplied by some tens of thousands to tell us the total size of the audience for the ten o’clock news or whatever.

All fiendishly clever. What happens, apparently, if you join the panel is that some magic box of tricks is installed next to your TV. This monitors remotely whatever it is you are watching and then, come the end of the day, sends it down the telephone line or by wireless to some base station somewhere. I’m a bit vague about this bit as if we are accepted on the panel we shall be at first on some sort of reserve list and only be moved on to the proper thing when a vacancy (for the species of work-from-home, pensionable household that we are, presumably) arises. Only at that time will we therefore get to see the wizard box of tricks.

There is some compensation for this invasion of privacy, though it seems pretty trivial - a few vouchers for the house - so we shall have to wait and see whether the whole schemozzle turns out to be more trouble than it’s worth. Anyway, I shall now be rewarded by a feeling of great power, knowing that in making my decision about whether to watch Midsomer Murders while doing the ironing I may be speaking for ten thousand other households and therefore can, by my choices, help to keep a programme on air. Or alternatively, extinguish it altogether.

*****

August is normally a pretty quiet month chez nous. I have some free time to walk and potter in the garden. Not so this year, however. I was to have directed Peter Shaffer’s play ‘Lettice and Lovage’ for our little theatre company this autumn. Sadly, my leading lady has had to pull out and there is no one else available to take over the role. The play has already been postponed once. It has now been advertised. The only thing I could do therefore was to take on the part myself.

So my free time in August is going into learning the role of Lettice - a role originally crated for Maggie Smith. It is a quite brilliant virtuoso piece, which I shall enjoy playing, once the lines are learnt, that is. The story concerns an eccentric guide who embellishes history to make it more interesting for her tourists and from this starting point the play goes on to make a protest against modernism in all its forms, but particularly in architecture. Although a comedy, it is essentially a play about loss and about seeking refuge from a hateful present in the fantasy of the past.

People who are not actors often have strange ideas about lines. ‘Oh I could never, ever, possibly, learn all that, they say,’ when they contemplate the 53 pages of the play most of which is either Lettice on stage by herself or with one other person. But learning lines is not that difficult. We learn all lines everyday when we hear a song or listen to someone speaking. Once is often all it takes to be able to repeat a key phrase or punchline. We all know, I should think, almost enough lines from Dad’s army to put together a respectable paragraph of script. ‘We’re all doomed!’ ‘Don’t panic, Mr Mainwaring!’ ‘Don’t tell him, Pike!’ and so on. It’s surprising what we know that we don’t know we know - to use what has to be called now, I suppose, a Rumpsteadism.

So learning lines is not difficult. It is simply a matter of repetition and with each repetition a little more sticks in the memory. Of course, one is not learning unconnected words - as from a telephone directory - but sentiments, opinions, responses. When you really know a part you no longer had to remember lines because you come out with the words automatically in the right situations. The lines become a part of you as much as perhaps ‘Hello, how are you today?’ is a part of you when you meet a neighbour in the street.

Anyway it is time to go a-learning once more. A quick half hour before and during my morning tea break. Then back again to the office to chase recalcitrant label customers.

WHO AMONGST US IS A TROUT?

Why are robust and curmudgeonly older women called 'trouts?' This has always struck me as a very strange quirk of language, the trout being as near to a sexless beast as it is possible to come this side of the molluscs and one that is actually rather timid to boot. If one were looking for a female piscean, armed with stout hat and umbrella, intent on putting watery public officials in their place, surely Pike would be a better species to pick on than Trout? But nevertheless ‘trout’ wins by a mile. Whence comes this usage, I wonder?

But why should I be asking at all, I hear you murmuring from your comfortable position in the hammock, glass of Pimm’s beside you and a light novel open across your lap?
“Because,” says I, envying this mythical land of perpetual August sunshine with the hazy drone of lawn mowing only just audible above the birdsong, “that was the word used the other day in a Times review to describe the character played by the wonderful Eileen Atkins - the stalwart but decrepit Lady Tressilian - in Kevin Elyot's adaptation of one of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple stories on the television last Sunday. And that set me thinking.

Despite my asking, no-one seems to know from where this odd usage of the word trout comes. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable does not even mention ‘trout,’ and the Concise Oxford English Dictionary is no help either.

There is a deep crevasse between the animals to which at various times and in various places we have aspired to be and the reality of who we are. We all have our favourites - I see myself as a racing hare, wild and fancy free, bounding over ditches, ears laid back and a coat of hair groomed to perfection by the wind. You, on the other hand, may picture me as a tedious variety of beetle or even a cow with hatstand horns. Still, while some of us might choose to be that King of Fish, the salmon, racing up waterfalls with the same energy that lesser beings reserve for the New Year Sales, few, I think, would voluntarily choose to be labelled a ‘trout.’

Alec Guiness used, apparently, to imagine the character he was preparing as an animal and then play that animal. He once demonstrated this on a chat show by turning himself into an elephant. A half bend of the back, a slight shake of the shoulders, a look, the slow raising of a leg - and there, in motion, was an Indian teak elephant. But what animal, I am still asking, would he choose to represent a stalwart matron or, for that matter, the chronic churl or buffer? Or do we have no option but to accept ‘trout?’

Powerful and determined women may look like many members of the animal kingdom, but not surely fish? Even in old age fish are sleek and wrinkle free, which despite fortunes spent chez L’Oreal or Laboratoires Garnier, is something few of us can claim to be. Real trout also emit no sound, unlike their human namesakes, nor organise jumble sales for the Red Cross and pronounce on morals.

Perhaps the word is anyway now falling into desuetude; a consequence of the feminist advance. In childhood I remember the word being applied regularly by my step-mother to those who had offended her in some way. Thankfully women can stand up for themselves today without attracting negative comment, whether from men or indeed other women.

Certainly ‘trout’ has a Blandings Castle, 1930s, feel to it, which is probably why it was the Times critic's word of choice to describe Eileen Atkins’ arresting cameo performance of Laddy Tressilian - the dying old matriarch (who nevertheless contrives to get herself murdered - this being Miss Marple after all) lying abed all day, chain-smoking cheroots, while issuing quasi-military orders to the household and listening to the beguiling conversations among her guests that chanced conveniently to drift through her open window. “Oh what does it matter?” she croaks irritably. We shall all be dead come September.”

I suspect, though, that even in real life Eileen Atkins would not mind particularly if people thought she was a ‘trout.’ She is not afraid to say what she thinks, particular when it comes to the guidance of young girls. Earlier this summer she condemned in no uncertain terms the laddish behaviour of young women who believe feminism is about aping the heavy drinking and sexual habits of their male counterparts.

"My skin crawls when I see laddish women presenting television shows who almost slap their thighs as if they're in panto," she is reported to have said said. "I think, 'Stop. This isn't what we meant by feminism.' It's gone completely wrong.” At the price of becoming a trout myself I say amen to that.

THE STRANGE TALE OF PIGLING BLAND

I think all houses should have a window seat, preferably with a handy bookcase close by. To sit there, in the middle of a busy day, idly leafing through the pages of a book, is to find a cultural oasis in the sands of life’s desert. Even simply to look out of the window, watching the passers by, or the birds in the sky, is a haven of tranquility.

In fact, now that I come to think of it, one of my early memories is of sitting in the bow window of the spacious house in which I grew up, reading a book about the Channel Islands. I had picked it out of the bookcase attracted by its handsome blue binding and its title, racily picked out in gold blockwork, which suggested historical romance. So I was disappointed to find that it was only an upmarket travel guide, and quite devoid of musketeers. Still, I persevered in my moment of tranquility when in all probability I ought to have been feeding the pigs.

Had I known it then I could have pleaded efficiency. For I read somewhere that to remain maximally effective throughout a busy day requires periods of complete idleness. I was also in good company as Harold Macmillan, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, did the same thing. Or so I learned later.

He quotes an incident in his autobiography, where, in the midst of some crisis or other, he sat in the Downing Street cabinet room and read Jane Austen for half an hour. That, it seemed, showed a better sense of proportion than the gadarene rush of politicians today. And so it came about that in the middle of a busy day recently, I found myself sitting by the window re-reading Beatrix Potter’s ‘Tale of Pigling Bland.’

In our household Beatrix Potter is read and re-read until the little square books collapse with age and over use. We renew them, I suppose, each generation and the current volumes were bought for Elder and Younger Daughter when they first learned to read, or maybe even before. Their names written in shaky script with an eclectic variety of implements appear on the fly leaves.

Occasionally they would try their infant hands at copying a long word like ‘Tiggywinkle’ - the handwriting starting big and bold and optimistically level. But with the rapid encroachment of the edge of the page, the puffed line of writing would shrink like a deflated balloon, arching downwards in a waterfall of letters. Now Younger Daughter is (officially) pregant we shall have to contemplate buying another set.

You can tell the favourite stories by how well-thumbed they are and if I tell you that the ‘Tale of Pigling Bland’ could almost pass for pristine, it might suggest that it wasn’t as popular as the others. Partly this is because it is possibly the longest of the Potter stories and partly perhaps because it tells an adult and chilling tale.

At its simplest it concerns a family of large white piglets who are dispersed from the farm on which they are born. Two of the pigs, Alexander and the eponymous Pigling Bland are given licences and sent off, amid much tearfulness on the part of the mother pig, Aunt Pettitoes, to market in Lancashire. The two pigs carry provisions and ‘conversation peppermints.’

(Now you may reasonably ask exactly what quality a peppermint requires to make it a ‘conversation’ peppermint - indeed what quality makes for ‘conversation sweeties,’ another term that crops up in the book. I do not know, myself, and so am asking).

Inevitably the two pigs do not make it to market. Alexander, the improvident one, loses his licence and is escorted home by a policeman to be ‘disposed of’ in the neighbourhood. Pigling himself, having lost his way, is kidnapped by a farmer and about to be disposed in a culinary direction when he discovers a similarly aged black Berkshire girl pig (Pig-Wig) in much the same predicament. Together they escape and head for the Westmorland county boundary, which, by a ruse, they manage to cross, hand in hand, to live a life of freedom growing vegetables.

But sitting in the window there re-reading this children’s tale, I found myself asking more than just about ‘conversation peppermints’. For here, surely, are all the mementoes of slavery - of families being broken up - of slaves being prodded and poked and hired in the market. Of licences to travel, and of the tearful mother forced to say goodbye to children whom she will never see again.

Then there is the curious white pig-black pig combination and the escape over some arbitrary line to freedom. Is this not Huckleberry Finn and Jim heading (but not quite reaching) the Ohio river? By the time Beatrix Potter was writing, of course, slavery had been abolished - at least formally. Is this just an innocent children’s tale - or is she trying to say something more, than the usual fable of right and wrong amongst the rabbits and the lettuces? Is this not a plea, disguised as innocent anthropomorphism, in favour of the unity of the human race?

So much to ponder from such a small white square of a book. Yes, get a window seat.

The picture shows Pigling Bland and Pig-Wig contemplating the free hills of Westmoreland

THE PROMPTER'S NIGHTMARE

I am sitting in the prompter’s box with my feet perched up on the corner of the stage. I’ve a glass of red wine beside me for refreshment, my hand bag is tucked away under my legs and I have in my hand one of those miniature battery torches that usually sit on your key ring to help you find the keyhole in the darkness but on this occasion will serve to light up my script in the darkened passages of the play. The light on the prompter’s box has broken, you see, (for this is amateur theatre) and we have not yet sent someone on an errand to buy a new bulb.

Actually I am the director of this play but as the Bard says we all have to play many parts and as our usual prompter has duties at a wedding, it falls to me to snuggle myself into the box and prepare to watch Saturday’s entertainment at eye level to the stage. I will say this, though: you get a wonderful view of the shoes.

Our Chairman comes on, the audience hush. He makes the usual announcements, remembering to include the variant of that otherwise rather tedious mobile phone injunction. “We know that members of the audience lead busy lives on which live, death and junior members of the government may depend. We understand therefore your absolute need to keep your mobile phone switched on. All we ask is for a small contribution of £50 should you need to receive a call.”

I turn on my torch, noticing it has been provided by RIAS - insurance for the over 50s. Well that’s well-targeted, I think. In this place 50 is positively juvenile.

Or not quite: for on stage is a 15 year old, participating in her first play as a whiny, adenoidal youngster. Nevertheless, I have had to work hard on her. Why do teenagers think it only necessary to pronounce the first five syllables of a sentence, leaving the rest as a sort of swallowed gurgling? There isn’t a tax on articulation.

In fact none of my cast were regular actors. For reasons that needn’t detain us here I found myself directing Fumed Oak - a one act play by Noel Coward - a rather spiteful and misogynistic piece, not chosen by me I hasten to add. It’s about a bickering grandmother, mother and daughter from whom a hen-pecked husband walks out amid scenes of great calamity domestic upset.

Still, my cast were wonderful, bless them, even if they wouldn’t often do that which I asked of them - to look at the audience when they were speaking, rather than at each other. We have a natural compulsion to look at the person we are talking to. But if you do this on stage, all the audience sees is the back of a head. And all it hears, if it is lucky, is a bit of a mumble.

In the theatre as much information is conveyed by an actor’s face, by their eyes, by the unconscious set of their mouth and by subtle tones in the voice, as by the words themselves. If the audience cannot see the actor’s face then it sees only half the story. It’s a book without pictures. But to get inexperienced actors to speak out forcibly into the black void when saying something intimate and personal to someone behind them is a problem with which all directors have to struggle.

Never mind. If you are prompting, you need your head down in the script and to disregard where people are looking. It is only at rehearsals that you can make frantic hand gestures, like a football manager on the touchline. You have to follow the text like a hawk for if an actor dries up, you need instantly to know the line.

But actors don’t often dry up. What happens more frequently is that in the adrenalin stress of a live performance lines are often skipped. It’s quite surprising actually how little this matters and rarely does the audience notice.

The prompter’s nightmare is when an actor skips not just a line or two, but a whole page. Like a train jumping the tracks an actor can start a line on page thirty-one and follow this with something from page thirty-four - conveniently missing perhaps a vital ingredient of the plot.

No quiet hiss from the prompter then - you have to bellow above the actor’s voices, attract their attention and hope they have the nous to realise the mistake and ad lib their way back to page thirty-one again. Last Saturday, however, none of this happened. ‘Fumed Oak’ was followed by a happy rendition of the Frank Vickery comedy ‘A Night Out.’ None of the actors needed prompting. We had a happy show, a good audience, food and a wonderful atmosphere in the bar afterwards, and we all went home happy.

Picture shows our little theatre looking at the auditorium from the stage. The prompter's box is just out of sight in the bottom left hand corner of the picture.

ON MEDICAL HERBALISM

Last weekend Elder Daughter invited us over for the Frome Festival. Not that it was an auspicious weekend, weatherwise. In fact in rained almost continuously. I rather fear than global warming has been replaced by global wetting, at least so far as southern Britain is concerned. There were, nonetheless, interludes between the wind and rain, which was fortunate as we were booked to attend what the Festival advertised as a ‘Medical Herbal Walk along the East Mendip Trail.’

This turned out to be most excellent value for the £5 we each paid. Indeed so full of insight and information was Zoe Hawes’ perambulating seminar that my one criticism of the event was that we should have been pre-warned to bring pencil and paper in serious quantities, and perhaps a camera too for the photographing of unlikely specimens of greenery.

Zoe’s job was to occupy us for two hours on the subject of medical herbalism and she did that wonderfully. If you get a chance to attend one of her walks (listed on her website zoehawes.co.uk) then you won’t be disappointed. I shall attempt here to record some of the things she said. But as I speak from memory I am sure I shall omit much of importance and may get other matters quite wrong. Please take my apologies therefore in advance.

She had, she said, begun her professional life as a nurse, but progressively began to have doubts about orthodox medicine’s approach to complex medical problems. Of course, orthodox medicine would be the first port of call should you have an accident, but for many chronic conditions, she concluded, orthodox medicine tended to treat symptoms and ailments rather than asking the more difficult question of why the body is no longer at ease with itself (and so dis-eased). Many different causes might give rise to same symptoms, she said.

So she had switched from orthodox medicine, undertaking five years of training as a herbalist and now having her own practice in Frome. She believes, so far as possible, in using herbs that grow locally and gathering as many as she can herself.

The walk began. We didn’t go far before reaching a clump of nettles that conveniently sheltered a patch of white ‘dead’ nettles beside them. I won’t try to rehearse her catalogue of life-giving properties attaching to these two plants, though I do remember that she said nettle seeds, the tiny, dusty strings that hang from the plants at this time of the year, could restore adrenal glands that had become tired and battered by stress. A teaspoon of these (I hope I remember the quantity right) sprinkled on your morning cereal or yoghurt could work wonders.

We walked on to stop under a lime tree. Zoe explained the restorative potential of lime flowers on the circulatory system, relieving high blood pressure and inducing relaxation. You can buy packs of these flowers in France apparently, where people use them regularly and not just to make a relaxing tisane at the end of the day.

And so walk continued along the trail beside the River Frome. We saw Comfrey and St John’s Wort, Vervane, Plaintain, Burdock and Meadow Sweet. And probably others too that I have forgotten. For each one she described its properties and how it might be prepared - tinctures prepared with vodka or neat alcohol, or dried and infused or sprinkled on salads.

However, herbalism is not about seeing the forest as a kind of free pharmacy full of wonder drugs for self-prescription. This may be one element if you know what you are doing, though I would always rather buy my St John’s Wort from Healthspan rather than trying to make my own preparation from something I might, or might not, have identified correctly.

The basis of herbalism might be the chemicals produced by plants, some of which are very powerful. That’s why we don’t eat hemlock or deadly nightshade. But if this were all that herbalism were about then we should be back to orthodox medicine - treating headaches with willow bark, perhaps, rather than with aspirin produce in a factory. No, if I interpret Zoe correctly, that there are at least two other major aspects to the science.

First there’s the history. People have been using plants to fight disease since time immemorial. Moreover, for much of this time herbalism practitioners have been cut off from one another: by geographical distance for one thing, and by an absence of books at the level of the ordinary village practitioner. Now that communications barrier has been removed.

Remarkably, we find that the treatments that have evolved in different places, using particular types of plants in standardised ways, have a great deal in common. Trial and error in many different places and at many different times has yielded a broad corpus of agreement. This would not be the case if herbalism didn’t yield practical results.

Secondly, there is the emphasis on treating the whole person. Seeing a person’s symptoms and lifestyle and history as a connected whole and therefore seeking to move beyond the presenting aches and pains and tiredness or sickness to a variety of possible deeper causes.

As I say, this is my interpretation of the gist of what Zoe was talking about. I cannot claim to be definitive. But in my own experience I know two people on whom orthodox medicine had given up - or at least whom at the end of a substantial period orthodox medicine had had to conclude a lack of any improvement - who subsequently took themselves to herbalists and have found the cures that they had initially hoped orthodox medicine would provide. Of course such evidence is anecdotal, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is wrong. And there have been umpteen studies demonstrating the usefulness of certain herbal treatments.

At any rate as we all huddled around at the end of the walk and Zoe produced several flagons of elderflower cordial we judged it to have been an excellent and informative afternoon, on which even the rain had deigned not to pour.

Image is from Zoe's website.