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