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.