A BUSY WEEK

We’ve been exceptional busy with the labels these last few days. It’s as though a dam has burst and the slow flow of orders over the summer has been replaced by a monsoon. My writing has had to go to the wall and we’ve been working from first thing in the morning to late evening. Part of the problem has been an order for 50,000 labels to be reeled into rolls of 1,000 from big jumbo rolls. We’ve been saying for ages that we need a rewinding machine but we can’t really justify the investment. Instead we do it all by hand down the long central corridor of the house. At least it’s exercise.

It didn’t help that I had to lose half a day attending the launch of the ‘Size of Wales’ project at the National Botanic Centre near Carmarthen. This initiative, sponsored by the Prince of Wales, is part of the ‘Start’ programme and has as its object for Wales to take responsibility for an area of rainforest in Africa the ‘size of Wales’. ‘Start’ is all about sustainability and embraces a variety of projects designed - as the Prince said - to end the stage of talking about climate change and to start doing something about it.

The launch event took place in the Great Glasshouse designed by Norman Foster, the largest single span glasshouse in Britain, well worth a visit, though as a location to launch anything it has its drawbacks. The cavernous space, populated with plants, simply soaks up sound, so it was hard to hear any of the speakers despite the microphones. Then there were the sparrows. Whole flocks of sparrows that had got into the glasshouse and bred, presumably feeding on visitors’ crumbs and plant seeds. They were completely tame, flying inches from my nose and would have fed from my hand, I judged. But like all sparrows they chattered incessantly, whenever a speaker tried to raise his voice in competition.

While we were waiting for HRH to speak (he decided to avoid the sparrows and speak outside), I rehearsed my pet hobby horse: the Government should simply install solar panels here, there and everywhere, I suggested, knowing the energy generated would in the long run more than pay for the investment and therefore help reduce the deficit. An affable gentleman responded that this was already being done; if not by the government then by companies like his. He gave me his card.

If my roof was suitable he said, he would rent it and install solar panels, give me free electricity, and sell the remainder to the government at 49p a unit - which is the regulated price. It’s so high because it is underpinned by the renewables levy we all pay on our electricity bills. 'Where’s the catch?' I asked. 'There’s no catch,' he said. Everyone wins. I am eagerly awaiting his call.

I’ve been dipping in to the extracts from Tony Blair’s memoirs in the papers. At one point he talks of using alcohol as a prop: a stiff whisky or a gin and tonic and a couple of glasses of wine in the evening. John Reid, the bluff Glaswegian former Home Secretary, commented sourly that where he came from you wouldn’t give that to a budgie! I’m not impartial myself to an occasional whisky so taking a leaf from Tony’s book I helped myself to a stiff one to see me through another batch of reeling.

Sadly every now and then the effect of whisky is to cause a delayed gastric spasm. I don’t really feel the effect of this until the next day when I wake up feeling as though I haven’t been to bed. My sleep does me no good whatsoever. It’s not the alcohol (for the quantity was really quite modest) but the reaction it sets off.

Anyhow, the result was that last night I slept like the proverbial log, so deeply in fact that I managed to trap my arm which, too, ‘went to sleep.’ I must have tried to turn over but the arm, being useless, couldn’t support me and I fell out of bed with a thump, banging my ear on the dressing table. I sat on the floor laughing at myself and thinking that it must be fifty years since I last managed to fall out of bed.

Still the label feast is more likely to be a blip than a sustained season and I’ll be able to get back again to writing. I’m trying to assemble some of my stories into a text with a view to putting something on the Completely Novel website. I’m learning how to edit, paragraph and typeset so that the text looks professional. What is remarkable is how different words can look when they are set in the correct font, spacing and width. They’re somehow much easier to read, the eye skims through them easily, like a dancer gliding across a polished floor. No wonder Winston Churchill insisted on having his work typeset in draft before making final corrections.

Photograph shows Mr Tom Jones OBE, Vice President Wales Council Voluntary Action, welcoming the participants.

LEEKS AND MORE LEEKS

A couple of years ago, when I was going through one of my periodic and futile attempts to lose weight, I came across a little book which appeared to offer hope. It was ‘French Women Don’t Get Fat’ by Mireille Guilano, sub-titled even more beguilingly, ‘The Secret of Eating for Pleasure.’

It is one of those lovely composite books, part memoir, part recipe book, part a philosophy of all things French. The author is head of the Veuve Cliquot Company’s New York operation. She has lived many years in the United States and the book is the result of trying to teach American women the French way of eating and staying slim.

Sadly for anyone hoping to lose weight there isn’t anything here that any reasonably intelligent person cannot guess for themselves. Losing weight, she says, is all about eating sensibly, cutting out those fattening foods, like bread, that one eats to excess and eating half measures - half a glass of wine, half a banana. For the pleasure is always in the first half of something, she suggests, rather than in the second. Apart from that, if you want to weigh ten stone then just eat like someone who weighs ten stone and not like someone who weighs 28 pounds more.

So in all the book there is only one dish to which someone like myself who believes in Fairy Godmothers can possibly cling in the hope of some alchemical transformation. Mireille Guilano even qualifies it with the preface ‘magic.’ It is Magical Leek Soup. And there is a diet that goes with it - a 48 hour diet - which, she implies, will kick-start your life-changing regime and bring all manner of wonderful benefits to boot.

Now I’ve had a nagging temptation to try this diet ever since I bought the book. It’s very simple. You buy a kilo of leeks; trim off most of the green bits; slice the leeks into mouth-sized bites; cover these with water; and boil them for 25 minutes. After this you drain off the water into a jug.

You do this on a Friday evening and for the next 48 hours whenever you feel hungry you eat some of your boiled leeks - hot or cold according to taste - which you are allowed to drizzle with olive oil and flavour with salt and black pepper. When you are thirsty you drink the water you have poured off, which now brims with leek goodness.

And you watch the weight fall of your body, the toxins evaporate from your skin, your hair become sleek and your fingernails glossy, your muscles toned and your wrinkles smoothed. True, she doesn’t actually promise these benefits in so many words, but if you qualify a dish with the word ‘magic’ then surely expecting a few of these benefits isn’t asking too much, is it?

Well, last weekend I tried this diet. And I stuck to it even though I had a sore throat and felt quite awful.

My energy simply evaporated. All I could do was lie on a sofa and read or watch television. Having no energy means not only that you can’t move, but that you can’t think either. So writing is out, decision-making ditto. I found myself on the Saturday evening watching two back to back episodes of ‘Poirot’* (most appropriate I thought) and then half an episode of ‘Taggart.’

I ached on the inside. I’ve never had chemotherapy but, from the descriptions, the effects of 48 hours of leeks seem well on the way towards an approximation.

You wouldn’t believe what I would have given for a cup of tea, or how awful a tepid plate of leeks, even drizzled with oil, tastes at half-past seven in the morning. Despite my raging hunger I found them impossible to finish. I sat there like a child compelled to swallow some disgusting meal long after the family have departed. Then there was the abiding smell of leeks which seemed to exude from the very pores of my skin.

Determined to get to the bitter end all I could think of was the phrase that trips so happily off the tongue of my French neighbour. ‘Il faut souffrir un peu pour etre belle.’ (You have to suffer a little to be beautiful). It gave me little comfort.

And for this suffering what did I get? Well, certainly not beauty! But I did lose weight. Two and three-quarter pounds in fact. And my buoyant blood pressure fell by 15-20 points. Did I feel cleansed, de-toxed, raring to go when the whistle blew at 5 o’clock on Sunday evening and I could permit myself a cup of tea? Answer no, not really, and sadly in the few days since then my weight and blood pressure have reverted to what they were.

No magic then. But the tea did taste beautiful.

(*Poirot is the French word for Leek)