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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

HOW I ALMOST BECAME THE THIRD CHAMPION MUSHROOM OMELETTE MAKER OF FRANCE

We were in the ironmonger's, for some reason, in Maurs, buying something important for the Mill - light bulbs, I think it was, or it may have been something to do with the apple press bought a year ago at great expense -when it occurred to us that we had nothing planned for Sunday - and Sunday was tomorrow. "Let's go and look in the tourist office," said B, who is the most practical person I know. So we did.

The Cantal Departement is off the beaten track at the best of times. You wonder why they bother having a tourist office at all, but they do and its Maurs outpost is quite a handsome affair of wood and glass that squats on the pavement of the Place d'Europe among the speckled trunks of plane trees. The week's events are pasted on an A board outside, a bewildering array of activities to cater for every taste.

Unfortunately, when we had eliminated those events that were too far, or too expensive, or which ended yesterday, or which involved boats or large animals, there wasn't much left. "So it's the mushroom fair then," I concluded, trying to sound enthusiastic. "The mushroom fair at Prunet."

Now as you probably know the word mushroom in France covers the whole gamut of edible fungi, some of which are greatly prized by folk who appreciate their food. There would be stalls and sideshows, said the tourist bumpf and the event would begin with the induction of new fellows into the sacred mushroom brotherhood and end with a championship, the winner of which would be declared French national amateur mushroom omelette making champion.

So after Sunday breakfast we set off under a grey sky and spots of drizzle to see if we could find Prunet which, according to the map, lay about forty minutes drive to the north east. By the time we had arrived the spots had turned to a respectable drizzle, but there was music - of a strange Celtic kind - playing from a loudspeaker on every lamp post, lots of bunting and men walking about strangely clad in cloaks of yellow-green and tudor style squashy hats. As they looked eminently knowledgeable about mushrooms we presumed them to be the mushroom brotherhood and watched our step lest they deigned to turn us into a can of Campbells soup.

Now in case you are thinking that Prunet must be a fair size to host a national omelette championship, you would be wrong. Prunet turned out to be just about a small a place as you could find that qualified for a name on the map - a sort of French, Little Puddletown on the Marsh. It had a church, with an enormous belfry, a few houses, one or two farms and that was it. The much trumpeted mushroom fair seemed on the same scale.

A few stalls sold cheese, sausage, wine, vegetables, bread - but unaccountably no mushrooms. Elswhere, an earnest young man was trying to show a film about mushrooms in a tent, while another earnest young man with an encyclopaedic display of 'mushrooms' on a table, bent the ear of the few passers-by to explain the botantical differences between a bracket fungus and an oyster mushroom and that was about it.

The young farmer selling his Salers cheese also possessed an earnest looking air as he told us that it took 450 litres of milk, from his own Auverngnat herd, to make one 25 kilo truckle the size of a mill wheel. He was selling the cheese for a song - a kilo for 12 euros - so we took a great hunk and two bundles of little dried sausage to go with it.

Of course, no fair is complete without a beer tent, which in this case wasn't a tent at all but one of those round wooden contraptions favoured for fairground sideshows. One lot of young men were inside this contraption and another lot were outside. The men inside were dry and the men outside were wet, for by this time the drizzle had matured into common or garden rain. Yet the men outside seemed not to mind because they were knocking back something provided by the men inside. It was called 'Bolée du Satan.'

We tried one very small plastic cup of this and I have to say it was very good. Indeed, I was reflecting how a few of these might make one impervious to all sorts of precipitations, when our attention was diverted by the antics of two bullocks yoked to a bullock cart in a way that made it appear that this was something of a first time experience both for the bullocks and whoever was in charge of the yoking.

For whenever the cart encountered an obstacle the bullocks kicked and skipped causing the cart to swerve violently. Fortunately, it was empty. If it ever had a cargo that would have fallen out long before. Maybe that was why there were no mushrooms at the fair.

Not far away hummed an old field bake-oven, an enormous wheeled affair that looked as though it might have done service in World War One. From this came a number of different breads, samples of which were set before us in little bowls.

Some contained fungi, though whether it was this or whether it was the mobile bake-oven, none tasted appetising. Slightly more appealing were the bun shaped loaves, sliced in half, the middle scooped out and filled it with mushroom soup. These were selling for 2 euros, which seemed a bargain. Surprisingly, they didn't leak.

Sadly, we found that we had brought sandwiches and therefore decided to eschew the loaves filled with mushroom soup. Besides I had the feeling that the soup and the Bolée du Satan might not mix too well. So we decided that it was time to retreat to the dry safety of the car.

On our way we passed the omelette making championship tent, sadly deserted in the rain, but complete with a yellow podium on which the numbers 1, 2 and 3 were marked out in black.

To tell the truth I was rather attracted to the idea of becoming a mushroom omelette making champion of France, even if amateur. To judge by the number of people in Prunet who had not succumbed to the embrace of the Bolée du Satan, I reckoned that I must have been in with a very good chance of making at least one of the podium slots. What would being the third champion amateur mushroom omelette maker of France counted for at Purple Coo I wondered?

"Oh do stop dreaming, Fennie" came a voice from in front. Ahh - it was ever thus.

Posted by Fennie Somerville

Luciano Pavarotti

I was extremely sad to hear that Luciano Pavarotti had died at the age of 71. He was a giant of a man in more ways than one and his beautiful voice will be remembered, thanks to his recordings, long into the future. He was a great humanitarian, using his immense gifts to raise money to benefit others, especially the under-privileged.

Indeed so generous was he in giving benefit concerts that the United Nations awareded him the Nansen medal - its highest award - for raising more money than any other private individual.

He seems always to be portrayed as smiling and happy. Perhaps there is a reason in that singing is a joyful activity, with the power to raise the spirit just as music itself warms the soul.

May he rest in peace and long be remembered.

Posted by Peter Sain ley Berry

A Chinese Blog

Part of the attraction of writing a blog is to read the comments written by people who read it. There aren't so many comments on this EuropaWorld blog. Maybe not many people read it, or if they do read it, find something of note to comment about. Twenty or thirty comments is usually reckoned to be an excellent harvest for a personal blog, most people's blogs excite far fewer.

We are obviously playing in a minor and forgotten league, for China's top blogger, Xu Jinglei, apparently averages more than 1000 comments regularly on her blogs. Less than this figure suggests that she is having an off day. And she spends, apparently and according to The (London) Times that reported the story only 20 minutes each day on the keys of her laptop composing the blog.

Although Xu Jinglei is an actress and a film director with an international reputation it is her postings about everyday life her public really enjoy. She writes almost everyday, updating her accounts two or three times a day if necessary.

Figuring prominently on the blog are her cats whose names translate as Scarf and Apron. No blog, it seems, can be considered complete withouit its usual complement of furry animals.

See http://blog.sina.com.cn/xujinglei but as might be expected, it is in Chinese.

WASTE NOT, WANT NOT

When I was very young I treasured a beautiful and inventive book of black and white drawings of ancient railways in various states of cartoon dilapidation. If memory serves me right, which these days it does rarely, the book was called 'Heath Robinson's Railway Ribaldry' and on those dull, wet and otherwise empty afternoons that seem to be the endless lot of the only child, I spent happy hours pouring over its pages.

In due course I ceased to be an only child but not before one picture in particular had become deeply imprinted on my young brain. This showed an engine driver braving the displeasure of his passengers to halt his express for the purpose of retrieving an egg that just happened to have been left on the railway line.

The justification for this heinous offence against the railway timetable appeared in large letters at the bottom "Waste Not, Want Not" is the Driver's Motto."

Such sensible sentiments - the world would be a deal better off, I feel, if only we could be persuaded to adopt its precept en masse - are certainly not to be trifled with. Indeed they were drilled into me at every turn it by looming figures in authority. As I was then only four most authority figures seemed to loom, in particular my grandmother.

"What will the dustbin men say?" she used to entreat sternly when she noticed a few scrapings of unappetizing egg-white left behind in the shell of my boiled egg. She had a reason of course: this was the time of post-war austerity when eggs were rationed and treated as a precious resource. It was also the age before we taught hens the sensible feat of laying eggs in the winter months. If we wanted eggs in December they would come dubiously pickled in isinglass.

Quite what my grandmother would have made of the finding that apparently we throw away a quarter of all the food we purchase, I cannot think. She had never heard of the word sustainability and yet she begrudged throwing anything in the bin that could possibly be eaten, mended or used again in some way.

As a result I grew up believing that wasting anything was wrong and wasting food a kind of moral sin for which I would be found out (no doubt by those bogie dustbin men) and subjected to some long and humiliating chastisement.

I carry this mental baggage with me still almost sixty years later. I still hate throwing food away and go on wearing clothes far longer than practicality dictates. True, I have never quite reached the stage of turning my old carpets into hats - which is, so I learn, what we were urged to do in those austere times - but conjuring a decent meal from a few manky and improbable remnants left behind in the vegetable rack or refrigerator has become my speciality.

Last evening my skills in this useful compartment of human knowledge were again put to the test. I had purchased earlier in the day some splendid pork sausages made locally from free-range beasts that are actually allowed to wallow in the mud. But sausages demand accompaniment and accompaniment seemed in short supply.

For if Mother Hubbard's cupboard was not exactly bare, that was only because Mother Hubbard had been too lazy to clean it out. Indeed, it was a wonder that the contents had not walked out under their own steam in search of more congenial accommodation on the compost heap.

I counted one red onion of venerable vintage, one large courgette, going soft at one end, one large box of mushrooms, reduced for quick sale and bought a week ago with the optimistic idea of making soup; a half bottle of passata first opened goodness knows when, half a tub of cream ditto, and a small bowl of cooked rice of uncertain provenance.

Still, waste not, want not! Into a roasting dish went the sliced onion, courgette and some garlic. On these I laid the sausages, liberally sprinkled with olive oil, salt and a little tabasco, covered these with a deluge of mushrooms left whole, emptied the bottle of passata and the tub of cream over the mixture, dusted the whole liberally with oregano and added the rice as a species of improbable topping. Then into the hot oven it went for the best part of an hour.

Though I say it myself, this gastronomic cacophony turned out most remarkably well: the sausages lush, the vegetables wonderfully tasty. And though it might astonish the health and safety folk brimming with all those injunctions about sell by dates and what have you, we are still here to tell the tale.

Posted by Fennie Somerville

UNESCO Comes to Cardiff

Talking of UNESCO,(see last blog) the annual UK UNESCO conference was held in Cardiff at the weekend, graced by the presence of the Director-General, Koichiro Matsuura, who gave the keynote speech. The conference was preceded the evening before by a reception in the Welsh Senedd, or Parliament, building in Cardiff Bay and by a dinner at the National Museum of Wales. The latter proved not altogether propitious surroundings for a dinner - the vast echoing marble hall of the museum providing plenty of space but doing little for the acoustics - so that it became more than an effort to discern what your dinner companion was saying across the large round tables. Nevertheless both food and wine were excellent.

Indeed perhaps it was perhaps this excellence coupled with the poverty of the acoustics that made Sir Emyr Jones Parry, the UK's UN ambassador, who was giving the address, chide the audience that it was slow in picking up some of his intended jokes. On the other hand it could have been because he is a rather better ambassador than he is a comic. Or maybe again again it might have been that we were simply an earnest audience not given to easy frivolity.

In this we may be taking our lead from Mr Matsuura himself who in public at least gives the impression that red hot pokers would not persuade him to attempt a joke. His keynote speech was thus well reasoned and delivered in a deliberate and most earnest fashion. He argued carefully and thoughtfully, as indeed Sir Emyr had also done, the need for reform at the UN, while explaining the relevance of UNESCO to the wider world.

UNESCO is of course a catalyst. Its financial resources are minute but it serves to galvanise mostly voluntary efforts towards common goals throughout the 180 countries that it works in. Its goal is to construct the idea of peace in people's minds - as an alternative to conflict and war - and to do that through the intellectual processes of education, culture, the various sciences, communication and information.

What will the world look like in the future? Hopefully we shall be better educated, with technology used to more productive ends; we shall be better informed and by recognising and respecting each other's cultures we shall come closer together. The future is overpredicted and underimagined said Chris Jofeh, director of Arup's who sponsored the conference, quoting one of a team of Arup futurologists. He gave us a remarkable address on the 'drivers of change.' It is true, we can't predict the future, but we can imagine a better, more just and more peaceful world. And by working with and through UNESCO we can help to bring that about.

Reunion

I was back at my old college in Cambridge for a reunion dinner on Saturday. They hold them every year. Mostly it is the older people who come. It is over forty years now since I first set foot in the college, but the oldest person there had come up seventy years before.

It is surprisingly easy to chat to those who once were your fellow students - the years drop away. Most people do not change all that much. They retain the same personalities and eccentricities that you remember from way back. I happened to be sat next to someone who lived opposite me on the same staircase. He had spent his career with the UN and now was doing consultancy work for UNESCO. As I serve on the UNESCO Committee for Wales, we had a common point of contact.

The College doesn't change either; except perhaps in two regards - the gardens are even better kept than they were then, and it now admits women both as students and to serve in Hall.

I suppose for 700 years it has seemed natural that this should have been a male only college, just as other colleges were for women. Certainly the rather primitive bathroom arrangements - there were no lavatories in the building where I lived and you had to descend a staircase and cross a court to wash or take a shower - would not have suited women. Today, things have changed of course.

Now having women in the college just seems natural, though of course, there were none amongst our generation. I am sure that the move to co-education, to end this arbitrary gender divide should have been made far earlier. Times have changed and the college has changed too.

We might have been on the cusp of another change for this dinner was the very last at which it might have been permissible - by law - to smoke after the loyal toast. Today, I write of the 1 July, smoking is banned in all enclosed public spaces in England. It might be a moot point whether the College Hall constitutes a 'public space,' but as people have to work in it - serving dinner and clearing the plates - I suppose it is. Nevertheless the point is academic for there has been no smoking in the Hall for as long as I can remember.

What better way to work off the effects of a four course dinner then with a spot of rowing the following morning. I used to row a great deal when I was there and I still like to go out in a boat on occasions such as these. We are all a little rusty and of course unfit, but rowing is a little like riding a bicycle: you don't really forget how to do it.

This weekend I was in the baby in the boat. The combined ages of our four oarsmen and cox, must have totalled over three hundred and twenty years. The body is stiff and protesting at first, but gradually the old rhythm returns and provided you stop from time to time for the crew to catch its breath the experience is just like old times.

Posted by Peter Sain ley Berry

Scribbling in the Rain: Reflections on Umbrellas

EuropaWorld reports so often from dry and dusty parts of the world where water is short that we sometimes forget how lucky we are here in the UK to have plenty of it - most of the time at least. When school girls in Afghanistan are blown up as a result of terrorism or deliberate attempts to stop the education of women again we forget how lucky we are here to have the opportunities we do. So here is a little piece I wrote when it rained the other day and I happened to be looking out of the window.

It is pouring with rain and so dark that I've had to switch the light on. Not that there's much of that; the bulb is one of those energy efficient whats-its that take half an hour to come out of hibernation, so I'm writing this in semi-darkness. What ever happened to flaming June?

A girl has just walked past outside, oblivious to the rain. Even the girls these days are macho; coats being something created uniquely for old folk and wimps. They have no embarassment at turning up somewhere drenched to the skin, their garments transparent with wetness. Another example of our retreat from civilisation, I suppose.

Now the rain is driving, if not horizontally, then at 45 degrees. The girl, on her way to school presumably, stops and extracts a baby umbrella from somewhere about her person; she erects it above her head. It is so small that it looks like one of those creations that clowns carry when balancing on the high wire. Safe under its shelter she saunters out of sight.

What a curious thing is an umbrella, I reflect! A little roof that you unfold and carry above you on a stick to shade off the rain or the sun. When were umbrellas invented? I'd hazard a guess at the eighteenth century. And they still look quaint and old-fashioned even when machined from plastic and aluminium and upholstered in today's bright colours.

What other eighteenth century Heath Robinsonian inventions are left to us in daily use, I wonder? Cutlery, I suppose, and dinner plates; mirrors perhaps - but nothing surely as mechanical as an umbrella unless it be the cuckoo clock or the fan. But who uses a fan today? Whereas we would not hesitate to pull an umbrella from our handbags, to pull out a fan today at some social gathering is to invite knowing glances and sotto voce charges of eccentricity.

Unless we were showing off, of course, and pulled out one of those whirly electric contraptions whose blades spin round like a grasscutter. But how does one make eyes at someone from behind a battery operated mini-helicopter? Yet another example of technology killing
civilisation.

I see now that it has brightened up considerably. The electric light is fully charged and the sun has come out (ish). There's no longer an umbrella in sight. I shall leave my bah-humbug mood behind and get on with the work.

Posted by Fennie Somerville

A CALL TO PRESERVE TRADITIONAL LIVESTOCK

A warning this week from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) about the loss of genetic resources in agriculture. Basically because we are all consuming more livestock products, farmers and agri-businesses are turning to those breeds that produce the most meat, milk and eggs. This means that many traditional breeds are losing out and in some cases becoming extinct. Indeed 84 breeds of domestic farm animal have become extinct in the last seven years, say FAO - that is one every month, and 20 per cent of the world’s cattle, goat, pig, horse and poultry breeds are in danger of annihilation.

This matters of course because once a breed is lost the genetic resources are lost too. Quite apart from the matter of taste - many of the traditional breeds produce better quality products because of their slow growing nature - genetic diversity is needed for cross-breeding to meet new demands and circumstances that are now not foreseen.

I have always been a great fan of traditional or 'rare' breeds. We used to keep Norfolk Blue chickens that laid lovely brown eggs with bright orange yolks. Not quite in the industrial quantities that modern hybrid hens are bred to produce, but a lot better tasting. We find that the traditional breeds of pig - Tamworths, Saddlebacks, Gloucester Old Spots, for example - also taste better, especially if they have been slow-reared in outdoor conditions.

In Europe and North America the displacement of traditional breeds is now almost complete in mainstream agriculture. Since the mid-twentieth century, a few high-performance breeds, usually of European descent – including Holstein-Friesian (by far the most widespread breed, reported in at least 128 countries and in all regions of the world) and Jersey cattle; Large White, Duroc and Landrace pigs; Saanen goats; and Rhode Island Red and Leghorn chickens – have spread throughout the world.

But now, say FAO, they are crowding out traditional breed in many developing countries, even when conditions may not be fully suited to their rearing. In Vietnam, for example, the percentage of indigenous sows has declined from 72 percent of the total population in 1994 to only 26 percent in 2002. Of the 14 local Vietnamese breeds, five are vulnerable, two in a critical state and three are facing extinction. In Kenya, introduction of the Dorper sheep has caused the almost complete disappearance of pure-bred Red Maasai sheep.

The FAO is less sure of its ground when it comes to what should be done. It has called for improved conservation programmes and says that these statistics are a 'wake-up' call - as indeed they are. But merely stressing the need to bolster global food supply by maintaining and deploying a wide array of vital and irreplaceable genetic resources is not likely to persuade a hard-pressed farmer in the developing world not to sire his traditional dairy cows with a Friesian bull.

Still, if you have any better ideas, I am sure that the Rome based FAO will be very pleased to hear from you.

Posted by Fennie Somerville

No Easy Route from Iraq to Europe

Life continues to worsen for ordinary Iraqis. Indeed so bad has it become that more than 4 million have fled their homes, according to UN estimates - something like one in six of the population. Half of these are still in Iraq, sheltering where best they can but more than two million have sought refuge in neighbouring states which now face an overwhelming problem of providing for the new arrivals.

"The magnitude of the crisis is staggering," said Jennifer Pagonis, a spokeswoman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) recently. Jordan and Syria are carrying most of the burden but calls for increased international support for governments in the region have so far brought few results.

Beyond Iraq's immediate neighbours - particularly in Europe - recognition rates of Iraqis remain low, says UNHCR.

What this can mean is well illustrated by the plight of an Iraqi couple - Christians as it happens - who remain in a safe but unedifying limbo as two European countries dispute whose responsibility they are.

To protect them UNHCR has not released their names. They are currently being held in the Steenokkerzeel Detention Centre near Brussels Airport, unable to communicate with staff, confused about the reasons for their four-month detention and angry about their treatment as asylum seekers,” the agency said.

The agency has called on the Belgian authorities to allow the couple to remain in Belgian were their son is in the process of becoming a Belgian citizen. But their case reflects the problems that many asylum seekers face.

Under the provisions of the European Union's 2003 Dublin Regulations the country where a refugee arrives first has the responsibility for examining any claim for asylum. In practice, this can lead to people being held in detention in
one European member state prior to being sent back to another European country considered responsible for their claim.

In this case the Iraqi couple have been shuttled back and forth between Greece and Belgium. Originally from Zakho in northern Iraq, they lived for 30 years in Baghdad, running a grocery store and raising their four children. The family fled after armed men raided their home in December 2004 threatening to kill them if they
did not produce $50,000 within 10 days.

In Greece, they were detained for three months on the grounds of illegal entry. They applied for asylum during this time, but this was rejected. Nor could they appeal as Greece has suspended all decision-making on Iraqi cases at the appeal level since 2003.

In November 2005, the couple paid a human trafficker to bring them to Belgium, where their son is about to become a Belgian citizen. On arrival, they asked for asylum. Again, they were detained and then sent back to Greece, where they were held for two weeks at the airport.

Belgium argued that Greece was responsible for their asylum claim under the Dublin rule. But UNHCR point out that the regulation allows a member state to take over processing of a case for humanitarian reasons, particularly where there are family considerations.

The Greek authorities again issued an order for the couple to leave – on the grounds that their case had already been considered and was now closed. With the help of a local priest, they tried to apply for asylum again. They were told they had only been freed because of their age and must leave the country immediately, even though they had nowhere to go.

Earlier this year, they then paid another "agent" to get them back into Belgium and they were detained on arrival at Brussels Airport on 7 February. “They are now hoping that another hearing into their case will end their ordeal and reunite the family,” said UNHCR.

Posted by Peter Sain ley Berry

The Billion Tree Campaign is Going Well

Each morning I go to look at the little walnut sapling that I brought back from the Auverne last autumn. Having survived being uprooted from the old tin bath in which it had germinated, the journey back to Wales wrapped in sacking, and being over-wintered in some very acid compost, which rotted away its few remaining roots, I finally planted it on the lawn as part of the recent gardening operations, where it now stands like an accusing finger.

This week - we are in late May - it put out its first tentative shoot, low down on what one day may be called a trunk. Well, walnuts are not the earliest of birds.

What is curious is that the shoot - completely formed with leaves - is so small that you almost need a magnifying glass to see it. Even on my twig like tree it is disproportionately miniature - like those infant arms that bud out of the mighty chest of Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Moreover, despite my daily coaxing the shoot shows no sign of actually getting any bigger. Other buds are bursting now; I wait with anxiety to see whether they will produce anything bigger. I do hope it grows - for I have pledged it as part of the 'Plant a Billion Trees' campaign. My (very little) bit to help save the planet.

I am glad to say however that the campaign is doing rather better than my walnut tree. The UN campaign to plant billion trees in 2007 has hit its target seven months early after an unprecedented response including that of Senegal which this week unveiled a pledge today to plant 20 million trees. The campaign, under the auspices of the UN's Environment Programme (UNEP), has now to turn its attention to turning those pledges into one billion actual plantings by the end of 2007.

The idea for the campaign was inspired by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai, whose Green Belt Movement has planted more than 30 million trees in 12 countries in Africa since 1977. Clearly large organisations and nation states are likely to have the biggest impact but individuals planting trees in their own gardens can have an impact too. The campaign is open to all and individuals can pledge to plant just a single tree. See the website: www.unep.org/billiontreecampaign

In the latest move the UN's Refugee Agency, UNHCR, has pledged itself to plant 9 million trees a year in areas of human displacement where refugees cut and collect wood for cooking, to provide light, for construction and for natural medical ingredients and fodder, leading to rapid deforestation.

Posted by Fennie Somerville

FOOD FORCE - A VIDEO GAME FROM THE UNITED NATIONS

Need something to keep the children quiet on a wet Sunday that is also educational and may even help others? Well, how about a computer game that models getting humanitarian aid to victims of a country in crisis.

Produced by the United Nation's Food Agency - the World Food Programme - with assistance from companies such as Yahoo and Quicktime, the video game explores the problem of global hunger and the logistics of humanitarian aid work. It is designed to teach children something about the harsh reality of delivering aid in conflict zones such as Darfur in the Sudan, or Sri Lanka.

Called Food Force and targeted at children between the ages of 8 and 13, the game consists of six missions in which players join a crack team of emergency aid workers on a fictitious island called Sheylan.

Children are faced with a number of realistic challenges: piloting helicopters on reconnaissance missions, assembling nutritious ration packs on a tight budget, air-dropping food to remote villages, sourcing and purchasing food supplies, delivering truckloads of food through minefields and rebel-held territories, and using food to help people as they rebuild their lives.

Food Force was launched in 2005 and is available as a free internet download from www.food-force.com, from where it has been downloaded about 5 million times. There is an interesting mini-video trailer on the download site. The game file itself is quite large (227 MB - about 30 minutes on broadband they say) and there are versions for both PCs and Macs.

Posted by Fennie Somerville

More Songs From the Auverne

The auberge at the summit of the Col de Legal, 1231 metres says the signboard, has the largest fireplace that I have ever seen, surpassing even those of our stately tudor palaces. It must have been twelve feet from one side to the other and would have swallowed whole tree trunks; indeed a minor forest fire would be required I would have thought to have enabled the chimney to pull without smoking. But there wasn't a fire yesterday as we sat eating a sandwich of 'jambon du pays' finished greedily with a 'crepe au sucre'.

We had planned to take the route over the Col de Peyrol but long before we got there a helpful indicator board told us it was closed. Probably still by the heavy snow on the volanic peak of Puy Mary and which now lies white and crisp on the high sunlit slopes; though for all I know the cause of the closure could simply have been roadworks. Even on the much lower Col de Legal - the height of Ben Nevis or thereabouts - the last remnants of white winter lay mudded and melting in the gutters of the road.

Cantal's national Volcano Park, as it proudly announces itself, is quite magnificent. The scale of these extinct behemoths towering into the sky from the fertile green valleys below is breathtaking. It's as if the Brecon Beacons of home were a children's model while this was the real thing. From the ridge road you look out as from the window of an aeroplane at the tiny farms so far below. It is both a humbling and an enriching experience.

Yet overwhelmingly it is the emptiness that is eery - the lack of people, the lack of life even. Certainly there is agriculture, but there is little else except tourism and there are not many tourists in March. You could be on the steppes of Asia rather than in the middle of overcrowded, bustling Europe.

We stopped for a morning beer in the town of Salers extolled by the guidebooks as one whose beauty is unsurpassed. The population, said the book, was 410 - small you might have felt for a town with architecture enough to hold ten times that number.

The reason is clear. Every other house has become a restaurant; the whole place is nothing but a tourist honeytrap. The trouble was, as there were no tourists, none of the restaurants were open, nor for that matter was anything else. The place was deserted as if some invading army were imminently expected. For once the old air raid siren on the roof of the Town Hall seemed strictly purposeful.

So we sat in the windy sunshine before a statue of the extravagantly named Tissanier D'Escous, who had restored the town's fortunes 150 years ago. His bronze eyes gaze out over the town's high ramparts to the fertile volcanic plain below. And though every house, every street, every roof, every window is an achingly beautiful architectural gem, I felt most uncomfortable and was glad to scuttle away, the car labouring, onwards and upwards, in the direction of the snow covered peaks.

We returned via Aurillac where we stopped to buy provisions. Today is Sunday; Fennie is on cooking duty. What to cook when all the choice of a French hypermarket is to hand?

I picked out some lovely globe artichokes for starters that we shall eat with melted butter. And then on the fish counter I saw fillets of fresh Nile Perch - something I had never eaten before and so resolved instantly to try it.

But as an insurance (if it's so good why are the Tanzanians selling it to us?) I also bought trout fillets. I shall cook then side by side, maybe with a little white wine in a thin parsley sauce and serve them with a beautifully fresh cauliflower. (I had the idea of preparing this 'au gratin' but suspect this may be overambitious). All will be accompanied by some sautéed potatoes, washed down with some splendid Luberon Rosé and finished with fruit braised in a little mountain honey.

It will be a thank-you to J and B for yesterday's mammoth tour and for my own labours - three hours of clearing the 'Sleeping Beauty' garden at the Mill the day before. Thirty years of brambles and buddleias had taken hold, even an oak sapling, maybe twenty feet tall and as thick as a fencing post shot skywards from the herbaceous border.

Yet the tenacity of nature is amazing, still inside the thickets were iris and daffodils, little lilac primulas and overgrown roses. The garden is but a quarter cleared and already my arms are cut to pieces. But the tonic of sunshine and real fresh air exercise makes everything worthwhile.

Very sadly there is another point to this exercise. The Mill is now for sale. A long story. This may be our last visit.

A SPOT OF RAIN? - WELL IT'S BETTER THAN BEING BURNT AT THE STAKE

At last it's rained! It was beginning to feel as though global warming had got its feet well and truly under this end of the planetary table; that the Sahara was moving north as fast as it is moving south. Here in this part of South Wales we can't have seen rain for a month. That's why I am writing about it. I don't know when we'll see the next lot. Even so the garden looks merely dampened, not soaked; should the sun come out we'll soon be back to the half-inch gape between the sides of our great terracotta pots and the soil within.

For we haven't much gardening space. Our garden is what might best be described as 'patio' - or even, in that lovely, picturesque phrase so beloved of estate agents - 'compact and bijou,' though in this case the bijou description might be pushing things a bit, bijou after all meaning 'jewel.' Still, one can but aspire, can one not? And it is only April; the sweet peas are still, metaphorically, in short trousers.

But, unfortunately, the rain has entailed a certain depression of spirits. Instead of seeing from my window vapour trails across a bright blue sky in which a couple of buzzards wheel lazily on the thermals that rise on the valley side, I look out only on a cold greyness, reminiscent of the sea in winter. For the rain naturally brings dampness as well. So I sit here huddled over the laptop wearing a winter polo neck with the desk lights blazing as though it were 4.30 on a winter's afternoon.

Then one might reasonable look forward in expectation to tea and crumpets. But on this spring morning there can be no such anticipation. Instead I have had to resort - indeed have already resorted - to a chemical pick-me up in the shape of a tablet of St John's Wort.

I must say I find these work quite miraculously, transforming a leaden sullen perspective on the day into one of bright and carefree sunshine. Nature's Prosac they are sometimes called. Never having had to resort to proper Prosac, I can't say whether that is an apt description or not. I can only say they work for me - though they don't seem to have any effect on other people - and a few are not supposed to take them at all on account of their doing something or other to the heart, or is it the circulation?

This set me thinking for I often wonder whom it was - 'whom' being obviously a whole army of people down the generations - that discovered the physical properties of plants?

How would you discover, I wonder, that St John's Wort - not a very likely plant one would have thought - had the ability to cheer people up? The sheer impossibility of making such a finding - short of black magic - is demonstrated by our reaction to the humble lettuce, which is supposed to be mildly soporific. The saintly Beatrix Potter no less tells us so in 'The Tale of Peter Rabbit.'

Other, more scientific sources, inform us that lettuce is a source of opiates, though, of course, in minute quantities. Though if you are a rabbit…….? Maybe that is the origin of the phrase happy bunny. Not that rabbits get to eat much lettuce in these parts, at least not the wild ones. And if you are a poor caged rabbit, well, I would think you must need all the stimulation you can get.

But I digress. Though I like lettuce and salads generally I would never have connected lettuce with drowsiness in a thousand years. And if I were looking for a pick-me up I am sure I would have regained and lost, lost and regained my natural spirits ten times over before ever alighting on St John's Wort.

Moreover, this would be before you started with finding the right quantities. Even if were you told which plants did what, you would be unable to treat people without either having no effect whatsoever or, at the other extreme, poisoning them. No wonder then that countrywomen in past times were persecuted for witchcraft.

Which, with my Scottish roots makes me shudder. For nowhere were alleged witches (and it didn't take much alleging) persecuted more insanely than in bonnie (ha!) Scotland. Given my tendency of recommending herbal potions and my habit of addressing myself to animals, whether in my speak or theirs, I fear that I wouldn't have lasted very long at all in those dark sixteenth century days.

Fennie would have been lashed to the stake and fried to a cinder without the option. All of which does make me feel happy to be living in the present and really quite glad that all I have to worry about is a little grey sky.

Songs From the Auverne (1)

The feisty and erudite Jane Shilling who writes an elegantly crafted column every Friday in Times2, claimed the other day to ricochet out of bed each morning at 5.30am. That is not a word that could possibly be applied to me, I thought, as the alarm went off at the same barbaricly early hour. I like my bed, for all sorts of reasons, I have my best thoughts there and it is my favourite place for scribbling; I am always reluctant to leave it at any time.

Yet today the ricocheting thought is appropriate for we face a mad dash across England to Stansted and the plane to France. Nevertheless, as first one foot meets the floor and then the other I feel like some hibernating beetle awaken in the depths of winter - able to move only at a speed that would have a lazy sloth gauping with admiration.

I flounder downstairs for a restorative cup of tea and in true Scots tradition make the porridge to get us going. Then, cases piled into the car, I drive out on to the road and head for the sun, just breaking in the East, praying that today is not the day that a hay lorry catches fire on the M4 as it did last week, with calamitous results for anyone with a deadline.

But Fate is kind. We arrive ridiculously early and in a few hours alight deep in 'La France Profonde' - a tiny regional airport where even the 'douanier' smiles at you - a marked contrast to the press and surliness of Stansted. Our friends J and B wait to welcome us and we drive off in the sunshine.

The air is softer here, I reflect, the light more luminous, the temperature warmer. The poplar trees are heavy with mistletoe, the almonds in full blossom. Yellow forsythia abounds with the occasional pinky-red japonica just open.

The country here is very like mid-Wales, but on a grander scale. The hills are higher, the valleys longer, the rivers - our route took us alongside the Lot - broader. It has been similarly abandoned by its inhabitants with farming and tourism the only remaining economic lifestays.

We stop somewhere for a beer, sit in the sunshine, catch up on the news. I notice two buzzards over head. A dungareed man walks past smoking, a little round head on which sits a disproportionate nose, fleshy and hooked, so that he resembles a kind of parrot. Yet again I regretted my inability to draw, to capture in a few squiggly lines the essence of that typically eccentric face.

We arrive at the village and descend the steep road down to the Mill, granted its first licence more than two hundred years ago. Fifty acres of field and forest and disused buildings, full of machinery left as it was when work finished some fifty years ago. I hear again the rush and rustle of the millstream, see the calm of the millpond, cleaner and clearer than when we were last here in the autumn.

I walk with J up the old unmetalled road that climbs steeply up the valley. Who built it, I wonder, and why? It seems impassable to anything less powerful than a 4 x 4, yet, I supposed, at one time horses must have climbed it with carts behind them. Collecting timber in the woods and bringing in supplies to the Mill nestling below us, surrounded by walnut trees.

The Mill house has long been modernised and back there I join B in the kitchen as she prepares supper. Our conversation is always eclectic. Tonight we find ourselves discussing liberty bodices and by what supernatural mechanism do pillow cases always end up inside duvet covers when you wash them in a machine.

I go outside. Though we live at home in what the government defines as 'a rural area' it is so easy to forget what real countryside is like. Where the only sound you hear is natural, the rushing water, the tweet of birdsong, the gentle swaying of branches in the wind or the bark of an animal. Where there is no light outside apart from the sun or the stars and where in the night you cannot see your hand in front of your face.

An early bat wheels in the gathering darkness. I am beginning to feel tired. More tales from the Mill very soon.

Posted by Fennie Somerville

(This blog appeared first on the Country Living website www.countryliving.co.uk)

THE STARLINGS HAVE RETURNED

There's a comforting fragrance in the air these bright spring mornings: a crisp wafting of dampness and cherry blossom, of tangled buds bursting through their winter carapaces, the new horizon of infinite possibility that this time of year always seems to herald.

This morning two starlings sat optimistically on the telephone wire that enters the house above my bedroom window. For as long as we have lived here, a loose board has given access to the attic and the starlings (they can't always be the same pair surely?) take advantage. But who determines which pair gets this choice nesting site in the dry insulation of a centrally heated house? There never seems to be any competition.

I love the mimicry of starlings: the way they sit on the television aerial making mobile phone rings, though as our TNT driver has a phone programmed to mimic a cock crowing, one wonders who is imitating whom. But all birdsong is enriching even the harsh cries of jays and magpies.

The other day I heard one of these birds - or maybe several - in the hedge on the Roman road. I could not precisely identify the cry; but it was loud, near and insistent. Though I peered into the hedge, I saw no bird - surely it must be quite large, I thought - nor did anything take flight. As I walked on, whatever it was followed calling to me anew. Strange, eerie even.

"Whatever is that bird?" I asked someone passing, a dutiful black Labrador at heel. "It's the power cables," she replied, pointing upwards.

I looked and sure enough we were under the heavy power line that runs northwards from Aberthaw. The paired cables are being renewed at the moment and normally they are held by spacers some nine inches apart. Clearly this operation had not been completed for the light wind was causing the steel cables to oscillate, so that they swung together irregularly, clashing, whooping and clacking like an outraged crow.

So that was the answer. The cables came together and the 'bird' sang. The cables drifted apart and silence reigned. The 'bird' seemed to be always in the adjacent hedge because the 'bird' was overhead.

In the evening I went along to a dinner marking the 50th anniversary of the EU. A select gathering, held for some reason in a Chinese restaurant. The guests were two Parliamentarians. Both spoke positively and well.

Unexpectedly, I found myself called upon for the vote of thanks and as it had been an occasion to remember the events that led to the initial partnership of six countries, I touched upon the great famine in Continental Europe after the Second World War - an event that British histories tend to overlook - and also of the Berlin airlift - on which my own father served and from the rigours of which he escaped to the rather different rigour of pig farming.

In those days when pigs were fattened on swill on the 'waste not - want not' principle, I used to think we were farming starlings, for the swill attracted great flocks of them. So when a pair sit outside my window, preening their iridescent feathers and hygienically wiping their beaks as starlings are wont to do, I am instantly transported to those far off and unenlightened days half a century ago when even visitors from France were deemed aliens and required to register at the police station.

And not only that. Despite the pressures of the moment, I feel compelled to blog it, too.

Posted by Fennie Somerville

European Commission Keeps Member States Up to Scratch

Two articles attracted my eye this week, showing that the European Commission is keeping its beady eye on what is going on and ensuring that there's no backsliding by member states. For instance, in animal welfare, we learn that the Commission has decided to refer Greece to the European Court of Justice for failure to implement properly and to enforce EU legislation on animal welfare in transport and at slaughter.

This action against Greece follows persistent short-comings identified in the field of animal welfare over a number of years. The standard of animal welfare in Greece remains below par, says the Commission, and the necessary legislation to improve matters has not been adequately implemented.

Among the Commission's concerns is the failure of the Greek authorities to implement EU Directives on animals in transit and on welfare at the time of slaughter. There are no adequate facilities at or near the Greek ferry ports for animals that have undergone long journeys and Greek controls were found to be insufficient to ensure the correct application of the EU rules on slaughtering rules such as the appropriate stunning of animals. Full marks to the Commission!

In the second case, the European Commission is taking Poland to the European Court of Justice over the construction of the Augustow and Wasilkow road bypasses that cut through the Rospuda Valley, damaging important primeval woodland and other habitats of European importance. As construction work has already started the Commission is asking the Court to make Poland to suspend the works immediately.

Nice to know someone is standing up for the environment!

Posted by Peter Sain ley Berry

International Women's Day

Thursday was International Women's Day - the Day when the United Nations and many other organisations take especial notice of the problems faced by women all over the world, particularly in developing countries. Here, of course, there are frequently marked differences in the levels of literacy between men and women as well as other differences in health, employment, education and human rights.

Too often in Europe the need for International Women's Day is scoffed at by people who should really know better. "Why don't we also have an International Men's Day?" they ask superciliously. I once responded to such a person by asking how he (for as might be expected it was a man) would like to be a woman living in Afghanistan, possibly not allowed an education and a marriage arranged over your head. Maybe even not allowed to visit a male doctor (if anyway one is available) but instead told to let your husband tell the doctor about your symptoms.

Thankfully it is now generally acknowledged that women's education is one of the very best investments that can be made in a country to improve generally its wealth and well-being. The emancipation of women also brings with it advantages in terms of fewer children being born and so less pressure on the health and education systems in those countries.

When I was about ten I remember the song 'Que sera, sera' - Whatever will be, will be. It was meant to be encouraging and uplifting - to give you a sense of the possible. Opportunities for women are now greater than they have ever been but still there is a long way to go. Women are succeeding in high positions as never before, but very frequently they are also having to do so either at the expense of raising their children or of not having any. While men cannot biologically bear children a great deal of the business of family and domestic chores are still done, or still organised by, women. There is a gender gap here too. Again progress is being made but the proportion of fathers outside the school gates is almost as small as the proportion of women in the high boardrooms. Things are changing, but meanwhile we still need an International Women's Day.

Posted by Fennie Somerville

Natural Carbon Sequestration in the Sea

A report recently published in the Financial Times told of the unregulated nature of deep sea fishing. The American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in San Francisco was told that government fuel subsidies enable "fishing fleets to operate like roving bandits, using state-of-the-art technologies to plunder the depths" the paper's report said.

The conference also heard that fishing was virtually unregulated in international waters beyond countries' exclusive economic zones, with no agencies to monitor and control catches. Deep-water trawlers drag 15-tonne nets along the seabed, typically 500m-1km below the surface targetting fish such as the orange roughy and grenadiers that grow extremely slowly in the cold ocean depths.

Unlike my colleague Richard Laming who wrote about the topic in his Federal Union blog http://www.federalunion.org.uk/blog/ I personally am more interested in the reported side effects of this fishing than the fishing itself. Again, the Financial Times reports that the Conference was told that a side effect of bottom trawling is the destruction of deep-sea corals and sponge beds that have taken centuries or millennia to grow.

This is most significant and could have a major influence on climate change and the sequestering of carbon. One has only to look at the limestone crags on which this country is built to realise that over the ages a phenomenal amount of atmospheric carbon has been absorbed into the bodies and shells of sea creatures which when compressed have become limestone, chalk, calcite and the rest. Heat a piece of limestone and you drive off this carbon dioxide.

This process of sequestering carbon is on-going. Atmospheric carbon dissolves into the sea and creatures there use it to build their shells and skeletons. The flow of carbon from the atmosphere into the surface of the oceans is about five times that which flows into the atmosphere as a result of man's activities. A similar amount diffuses out of the sea.

It follows that any interference with this great sea engine of absorbtion is likely to result in an increase in atmospheric carbon, regardless of whether or not we burn fossil fuels.

The tragedy is that by not heeding our destruction of the sea's biodiversity we threaten to render all our emission cutting efforts quite useless.

Posted by Peter Sain ley Berry

Mother Language Day

This coming week, on 21st February, the UN will mark Mother Language Day with celebrations all over the world, and especially at the Paris Headquarters of UNESCO, of the benefits and satisfaction of preserving and valuing Mother Languages.

Mother Language Day is a plea to support the world's linguistic diversity. So many languages these days are under threat. But with determined action languages can be fostered and preserved. Here in Wales, for instance, the Welsh language which some might have predicted would by now have succumbed under the weight of English, is thriving with more learners and more speakers at every census.

In Ireland, thanks to government efforts, the ancient Irish language has been brought back from the brink of extinction. Irish is one of several Celtic languages that fall broadly into two families. In the Irish language family is Scots Gaelic, now in everyday use only among a few scattered Hebridean communities. Once it was widely spoken throughout the Highlands and Islands of Scotland.

Strangely the language of lowland Scotland was not English but Welsh - at least in the early days. The kingdom of Dalriada that extended as far as the Highland line as Welsh speaking and many place names in south west Scotland can trace a Welsh connection. Even Glasgow itself, most populous city in Scotland, has a Welsh name:
'glas cae' meaning 'blue meadow.'

Welsh belongs to the southern of the two great Celtic language families and shares a heritage with Breton (spoken in France), Cornish, which, as its name implies is (or used to be) spoken in Cornwall.

Women Leaders Face Sufficient Problems Without Being Superheroes

Being a contrary minded sort of person I often find myself challenging received wisdom of which there is a good deal these days in every breakfast newspaper. This week, my eye (and with it my questioning antennae), was caught by an article by Mary Ann Sieghart writing in the London Times. She is a great champion of women's causes and I have much sympathy with her viewpoints. In her column this week she invited her readers to engage in a flight of fancy - not a total fancy for there is a chance that it may happen - namely a G8 Summit in which three of the world leaders were women.

Angela Merkel has already become the first female Chancellor of Germany; Mary Ann Siegart now asked her readers to consider what might happen if Hillary Clinton secured the democratic nomination in the United States and later won the Presidency; while in France Ségolène Royal were to become Head of State after the elections there this spring. What a message this would send to women throughout the world.

Well, yes, but. Here the questioning antennae swing into action. Why would it be such a good thing? Yes, it would demonstrate that women can reach the highest echelons of power - but then this is already known. Women have been leading nations since time began. True, not in great numbers, but certainly in our modern age a girl growing up can aspire to lead her nation without difficulty. She might have to work hard but, as Dorothy Parker once quipped, "compared to men, women have to work twice as hard to be thought half as good. Fortunately this isn't difficult."

No, this isn't the real reason why the idea of more women in leadership positions is so seductive. It is something more, isn't it? Isn't it because we believe that women will bring a superior edge to government? That women will act in a softer, kinder more intuitive way, will be less confrontational and demanding, in short that feminine politics will be better politics?

This certainly is the received wisdom. But, really, ask yourselves, is this so? If it were the case wouldn't we women simply form ourselves into a political party? Certainly there are all kinds of specific issues in which women are mightily involved, and for understandable reasons, issues to do with health, children, the family and so on. But for the wider issues - do women take any different position on the Middle East, let's say, than men? For every woman who goes on a peace march there is another whose views are diametrically opposed. At the G8 would female leaders of Germany, the United States and France act any differently from their male rivals?

Does Mrs Merkel, or did Mrs Thatcher come to that, take decisions in any way noticeably different to that in which a man would have responded to the same challenges? Indeed there are considerable pressures on a woman to act in ways that prove she is not weak or soft or feminine and for this reason, perhaps, 'the female of the species is more deadly than the male,' as Rudyard Kipling wrote once.

Of course I welcome the fact that more women are reaching the highest circles of government, business and the professions, though the truth is that vast swathes of women in many countries remain locked by their gender into poverty, degradation and illiteracy. We must all work to improve the status of women everywhere. But let us not add to the challenges that women leaders already face by heaping expectations upon them and turning them into superheroes.

Posted by Fennie Somerville

Listening to the Radio

As a child I used to listen a great deal to the radio. I loved listening especially in bed when the light had been turned out. My pride and joy was an ancient machine, what we called in those days a wireless. It had four great knobs for controlling the stations, which were listed in three illuminated columns - towns and cities that I had never heard of - from a great part of my known world.

Being so ancient it was worked by valves, great lamps in which the filaments glowed red hot, suffusing my bedroom with a warm glow as I lay there in the dark. I knew that somehow they made the sounds that came out of the grill on the front.

When I was very young I thought that some person or homunculus must be living in the cabinet and this accounted for the instructions about not tampering with the interior. A miraculous person, I thought, able to survive without food or water for long periods, small enough to live in a radio cabinet and possessed of a thousand voices and a miniature orchestra. And all for my benefit!

Later of course I learned about loudspeakers but the voices booming out of the set and filling the darkened room always gave me an electric tingle. Some sounds even remain with me to this day and when they flit across my mind in an idle moment I am transported back to my early childhood. Music on a Friday Night, the signature tune to a detective story and a radio play about global cooling.

Global cooling is not something that we here about very often these days. But in its way it must have been as terrifying - indeed more so - even than today's warnings of the world heating up. The story I remember was set in Greenland, I think, at the end of that period in the early Middle Ages when, for a reason that never seems satisfactorily to be explained, the world became almost as warm as it now is.

But then of course it suddenly got colder again - a lot colder. So cold in fact that in the middle of the seventeenth century the Thames froze each winter and fairs were held on the ice - a period that is now referred to by some as the 'little ice-age.'

It seems that all sorts of folk had migrated to Greenland, for some reason, during this warm period when the balmy weather allowed the growing of every kind of northern crop. Even vines were thought to grow there.

But then the winters became colder and the summers too. The snow fell earlier and earlier and melted later and later - until - and this is the bit that I remember from the radio - the mother of the family began to predict when the end would come. Something I think she had discovered in some early writing - one of the Icelandic sagas perhaps.

This was when the snow would fall but wouldn't all melt away, even in midsummer. So that when the snow fell again the following autumn it would be falling already on last year's snow. This, she said, would be the end. It wouldn't matter that the patch of unmelted snow might be no bigger than a pocket hankerchief, next year the snow cover would be larger and it would go on growing until all their fields and all their homes were obliterated beneath its great white blanket.

For some reason that image, painted by the radio in my darkened room, has remained with me to this day. And now, of course, we face the reverse problem. Not the snow refusing to melt, but the snow refusing to fall and what snow and ice there is melting away at breakneck speed.

Mountain glaciers around the world, so the UN is telling us have been melting these last few years one and a half times faster than they were in the 1990's. These glaciers are the sources for many rivers upon which people depend for drinking water, agriculture and industrial purposes.

Rather than being smothered in water by way of a great blanket of snow, we shall all be smothered in a threadbare covering of dust.

Posted by Fennie Somerville

REFUGEES, TREES AND COAT HANGERS

Hallo, I'm Fennie Somerville - officially Assistant Editor of EuropaWorld, but really just general dogsbody. Or General Dogsbody if I'm feeling cross and bossy. Anyway it's my turn to write the blog this week. Our second entry as it were.

Looks like I'm going to have to live up to the General Dogsbody title - for I'm going to tell you you to make a dive for two websites that you'll pick up if you read Europaworld attentively (which I know you all do!) but which to save time I shall repeat here.

The first is just a search engine - http://click4thecause.live.com/ but every time you look something up Microsoft will give a donation to the UN's Refugee Agency, UNHCR, to provide sports and education facilities for refugee children around the world. Look something up now and you'll have the satisfaction of having made the world a (slightly) better place.

If you become bored with this and want some other stimulation you can turn to another website www.unep.org/billiontreecampaign. The United Nations Environment Programme are looking for people and organisations to pledge themselves to plant trees to help offset the damage done by fossil fuel carbon emissions. You can pledge yourself to plant any number of trees and of any sort. I visited their website and pledged to plant two - a walnut and a chestnut - which I rescued when on holiday.

They will go into my garden and will begin assimilating carbon dioxide, just as soon as their leaves open in Spring. It may only be a tiny step but if everybody that reads EuropaWorld pledged to plant just two trees a year, we'd have a sizeable forest before long.
But it won't be enough just to plant trees. We'll have to cut down on waste as well. This is not always easy as the following little story (well this is supposed to be a blog!) shows

Standing in the payment queue recently with a basket of trophies carefully won from the sale racks of our local Marks and Spencer store, I was beckoned forward by a delightful lady behind the desk who spoke in a deep, husky voice, heavy with Slavic drawl. I suspect she may have been Polish.

We could have talked about Poland. But no, we didn't talk about Poland, we talked about coat hangars. No, we didn't talk about coat hangers, we negotiated about coat hangers. I had three hangers in my basket and a legion of hangers surplus to requirements in my wardrobe. "Do you want the hangers," she intoned, fixing me with her dark and glowing eyes."No thanks, I've got plenty," I replied airily.

Those were the opening gambits on both sides. She was insistent that hangars were what was needed to stop the wardrobe filling up with clothes. I said there were charity shops, which were always glad of one's surplus vestments. She sighed. There followed a negotiation - she extolling the virtues of coat hangers and I desperately trying to get her to take them from me. These are hangers, I wanted to say, not orphan kittens.

Needless to say she won. Two one in fact. Fennie had to keep two hangers, while she sighed and sorrowfully agreed to keep one. Other people have arguments over the price of the goods or about whether there is a minute tear on the sleeve. I have arguments over clothes hangers. And all the time we are creating mountains of waste!

Posted by Fennie Somerville

Hallo and Welcome

Hallo and welcome to the EuropaWorld blog.

Everybody's writing one it seems. And here at EuropaWorld we shall take turns in thinking about the issues, both deep and trivial, and hopefully producing something entertaining at the end of it.

Even serious issues can have their amusing sides. Like the story of the Cairo sheep we carried a couple of years back in EuropaWorld. This was being fattened up for the Eid celebration and kept on a flat rooftop, as is common practice. However, when the appointed hour came for the sheep to meet its maker and for its carcass to meet the celebrants, the animal had other ideas and simply butted its poor owner over the edge of the roof, whereupon he fell to his death.

Quite tragic, of course, for the family - and indeed the sheep didn't survive long after that either - but amusing nonetheless.

I am a firm believer in triviality and facetiousness as an antidote to the unpleasant and boring seriousness of so much of the news. This does not mean that I underestimate the suffering that there is in the world, nor the injustice. But too much seriousness risks losing the human dimension; people can become statistics. Something that makes us smile can remind us that whether we are happy or sad is up to us. While clearly one has to show respect, the aftermath of a natural disaster is not mitigated by a long face or a ringing of hands. Indeed, the reverse is true - one may work better, write better, with a smile.

I still keep to this day a glorious press release from FAO, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation about hunting the rats in Tuvalu that climb the trees and attack the coconut crop. The problem was how to kill the rats without harming the Godzilla crabs, the size of small cats. The FAO answer, apparently, was to use recycled Australian pineapple cans strategically hung from wires. Crabs, I learnt, could do anything a rat could do, except jump.

That story needn't blind us to the fact that Tuvalu, whose highest point is a mere five metres above sea level, will not exist should sea levels rise as a consequence of global warming. Today is the feast of St Hilary, or so my radio tells me, supposedly the coldest day of the year in the Northern hemisphere. Yet I have already had to turn the heating down. Outside my windows the weather is wet and mild, a light breeze. Even my geraniums, which once would have been killed by frost and rotted away by January would still be blooming were it not for the gales that have blown away their flowers and many of their leaves as well.

The climate is certainly changing. If anybody has not yet viewed Al Gore's film 'An Inconvenient Truth' - now is the time to do so.

Peter Sain ley Berry, Editor