The King of Cheeses

My brother has helpfully reminded me that there are a number of issues I ought to post about on this blog.

This one is about Roquefort cheese, which, so they tell me, Diderot described as the King of Cheeses (despite the fact that it stinks and is made by leaving it to moulder in the caves of Roquefort sur Soulzon).

The problem here is that the Bush administration slapped a huge increase in tax onto various European imports in the last days before Barack Obama took over (apparently as a punishment for Europe refusing to import beef from America). Roquefort cheese has been targeted in particular, with a tax at 300 %.

Good for the French I say: they resisted the Iraq war, and they refuse to have any American beef brought into the country (that is the beef from cattle raised on denuded rainforest prairies and fed on hormones and served in macdonalds).

So let's keep the cheese in Europe! If we all eat lots more French cheese, we can save the planet, support the French in their stand for common sense and good eating, and let the Americans eat fast food if that's what they want!

Healthy and attractive human smells

Here are the scientists saying (roughly) some of the things I was saying in an earlier post about why we ought not to wash too much or take baths and showers too frequently, or use scented stuff in our laundry.

Things useful for bringing up children without a car

Here is the standard response when you tell someone that you don't own or run a car:

"But how do you do the shopping?"

Well, right now, with no children at home, there's so little shopping to do that it's almost never worth going shopping, least of all with a car. But with a family to feed, you'd certainly need to be able to source some supplies.

Here's how we do it/used to do it, and then some other suggestions.

1. Use the milkman for daily deliveries. In our case this means that we never have to go to the shops for milk, eggs, bottled water (not that we need that), orange juice, grapefruit juice. That deals with most of the heavy stuff. In the past we also used to have the milkman deliver a large sack of potatoes for the winter (or you can have smaller bags of potatoes more frequently).
2. Bake the bread at home, and have the bread flour delivered in a sack periodically by the local bakers.
3. Walk to the local butcher for meat, baker for yeast and walk or cycle to the market for fresh fruit and vegetables, fish, cheese. In Oxford we used to go to the local Asian shop for loose eggs and a few other things. At Christmas, fetch the turkey from the butcher using a trolley or cart, or a sledge if it's snowy.
   
4. Cycle to a local wholefood store, occasionally, or more often, depending, how far it is. That's for beans, rice, oatmeal, yeast extract, malt extract and other store cupboard stuff. In Oxford that was Uhuru. In Cambridge Daily Bread or Arjuna. In Norwich the Green Grocers.
   
5. Cycle to Newmarket Road or Cowley Road or wherever the nearest convenient small supermarket is, for the residue of basic needs. In our case this means once a week, to buy flour, butter, toilet rolls, yogurt, breakfast cereals, coffee. Go on a bike with a basket and a back carrier (take a bungie or two to fasten the toilet rolls and other sturdy items to the back carrier). If there's some special occasion and there's a lot to buy take a second person as the donkey, with another bike with a very large basket.
   
6. Grow some herbs in the garden.

Here are some other suggestions for how to make it even easier:

1. Order more things from the milkman: for instance, bread, yogurt, probiotics (yakult), potatoes in various sized bags, fizzy drinks, butter and so on can all be ordered as a regular or one off order. They also do organic vegetable boxes now.
2. Have a weekly organic fruit and vegetable box delivered from a local farm.
3. Grow vegetables and fruit in your garden or on an allotment.
4. Order from the supermarket online.

By my reckoning, this should mean that you only need to go two or three times a week with a small basket to the best local butcher, cheesemonger or fishmonger, and you'll eat like a king, never go hungry and never have to go very far, carry very much or buy any petrol.

My guilty secrets

I came home from Papa Westray on the Northlink ferry from Kirkwall to Aberdeen (very comfortable, overnight with a spacious cabin). That bit was fine.

But before that, I did something terrible.

I took the plane from Papa Westray to Kirkwall (not the two minute flight to Westray that is in the Guinness book of records, but still a little flight, fifteen minutes of it).

Now this was a bad idea for more than one reason.

One was the environment (though of course the thing was flying anyway, and better full than half empty I suppose).

Second, it nearly didn't fly at all, because the pilot was being iffy about how low the cloud base was and had to be chivvied into agreeing to come and get us, which he eventually did, but only after we'd hung about in the shed at the air strip for an hour or so ringing him and trying to persuade him that it was "brightening" a bit. So we came pretty close to having to resort to plan B, or even plan C which would have been to stay longer (which would have been an attractive solution but I'd run out of clean clothes).

The third reason why it was a bad idea to take the plane was that plan B—which was to take the boat to Pierowall at 4 pm, and then the minibus or taxi across to the other end of Westray, and then the boat to Kirkwall at 6, getting there at 7.30, in time for the meal I'd booked at the Kirkwall hotel at 8 pm—was actually a great deal shorter and more efficient, as well as more immune to the bad weather. Well, more immune to the kind of bad weather we were having on that particular day.

So why did I succumb to booking a flight in the first place?

Well, partly because it seemed at the time that the flight was likely to be a safer bet than the boat, since the boats had been cancelled in the storms a week before. And it's no good waiting to see, because there are only 8 seats on the plane and you won't get on at the last minute if the boats aren't sailing. So to be on the safe side I rang for a plane ticket a few days before I knew whether the weather would be bad. It was a remedy for ignorance, not a preference for flying.

So the real problem is humanity's desperate lack of foreknowledge. How easy it would be if we knew what was going to work best before we had to take the decisions and make the plans!

Where the Atlantic Ocean meets the North Sea

Today I reached the place where the Atlantic Ocean meets the North Sea.
This is how I got there:

First, I took a train from Cambridge to London.

Then, I took a sleeper train from London to Edinburgh and another train from Edinburgh to Aberdeen.

After staying for a while in Aberdeen, I took a bus to the Northlink ferry terminal.

Thence I took a ship from Aberdeen to Kirkwall, and stayed overnight in a B&B in Kirkwall.















The next day, I took the Orkney Ferries boat to Papa Westray.



























The walk to the north part of the island was this morning's expedition.

We reached the place where the oceans encounter one another at around 11 a.m. It was rather wet and grey and there was a lot of wind, but an impressive amount of surf and large waves.

Total journey time about 23 hours, not including the overnight stops. Probably it would have taken a little longer if we hadn't cheated by driving the car a couple of miles north before starting this morning's walk.

Gardening the hard way

As I sit in my study (being on research leave, I'm doing a bit more of this) I watch other lucky people (the gardeners employed to do the shared areas of our courtyard) come and spend their time doing energetic things in the fresh air and the sunshine. Today they have been shooing leaves about with a noisy machine that pretends to be the wind.
Now, what more stupid activity could you engage in on a very windy autumn day, than shooing leaves about with a blower? What a waste of fossil fuels! The mischievous leaves briefly go in the direction you intended, but then you turn your attention to the next leaf, and the one you just deposited gets up and goes somewhere else, assisted by the much more powerful Boreas, who knows a thing or two about how to scatter Autumn leaves. When, briefly, you do succeed in making a small and rather loose pile of leaves in some corner, out of the wind, then you come along with the next two or three leaves you've just collected with your blower, and as you approach your untidy pile of leaves, the blower helpfully blows away the ones you'd already got there, in its attempt to deposit the newcomers. Off they all go again, and you're back to square one.
I don't know what you call this stupid machine for blowing leaves, but I am quite certain that it is one of the most useless inventions known to mankind. What you need (Mr Gardener) is a large outdoor broom and a pair of boards. Someone long ago, many thousands of years ago, invented the idea of a broom, and really this is one of the best inventions known to mankind. You sweep up the leaves with the broom, and then you pick them up in piles with the pair of boards (holding one board in each hand and pulling them hard together with the leaves compressed between them) and load the leaves into the wheelbarrow like that. It's easy. In fact, I don't think it's any harder than lugging that ineffectual blower around. And it's good for you. And it's quiet. And it would be much more satisfying for me to watch from my window, though it would make me more envious of your job.

Apples

It's time for my annual post about English Apples. Alas, things seem to be still just as bad as last year. A week or so back I wandered briefly into M&S Simply Food at the railway station, and it made me so angry that I had to leave in a hurry and I was in a bad mood for the rest of the day. For there on the horrible chilly shelves (apart from anything else it's a very uncomfortable experience if you're in summer clothes and sandals) were apples of the following sorts: Coxs from New Zealand, Granny Smiths from Australia, and some kind of soggy red apples from France... I forget what. How fresh were these apples, do you suppose? The southern hemisphere ones were presumably picked under-ripe about five months ago, and the French ones were presumably fresh last October, 11 months ago. So the shop was selling stuff that was best-before some date months earlier.
Meanwhile Cambridge market stalls, not three minutes away, are laden with local apples, crips juicy, picked that morning. The trees in the gardens by the country roads are bending under the weight of lovely September fruits. There is nothing more delicious than a Worcester Pearmain (providing it hasn't got over ripe or been kept too long). So what was this decaying rubbish doing on the shelves of Marks and Spencers, which prides itself on the quality of its food? And how much had it cost the environment in refrigeration and oxygen-free storage to keep such old fruit so that it looked as if it was still fresh, besides the transport from the wrong side of the world? Once again I have vowed never again to go into that shop.
And then there was the British Academy lunch. Nice lunches they do, but two things annoyed me. One was the fruit: there we were in September but was there a single item of British fruit on the fruit platter? I doubt it, though it's conceivable that the strawberries were English. So, there were plums, but they were not the gorgeous victoria plums that we have. There were apples, but they were not the gorgeous September apples that we have, but some of those last-season Granny Smiths from South Africa or Chile whose skins are so caked with wax and chemicals that they taste bitter at every bite. There were Kiwi fruit. There were grapes (conceivably from Europe I suppose, but don't bet on it). There were bananas. There were oranges (from the southern hemisphere I presume). So if, like me, you were trying to eat local you were lucky to get anything: a strawberry was all I could stomach.
And why do they try and serve hot food for a sandwich lunch and fill the room with the fumes of those wretched spirit burners? It was most unappetising.
It's time the caterers who do business lunches started taking notice of what we actually want to eat and why... It isn't as if local food isn't nice: it's nicer than the stuff that's been stored and travelled.