The Bluebells of Suffolk

Bluebells in April at Arger Fen.

Cooking...

There is a serious argument that takes place every so often as to whether great cooking should be considered an art. I always take the view that it is the eye of the beholder, or in this case the mouth, that should decide the argument.

In my lifetime I have eaten at some of the best restaurants in London and one or two in Paris and New York and invariably I have been pleased and satisfied. I’m not over adventurous. For instance I’m not that keen on Game. Many years ago in London’s oldest restaurant, ‘Rules’ of Maiden Lane, my wife, more daring than me, ordered ‘Jugged’ Hare. She said she enjoyed it and she did seem to eat it with some relish but the smell was so repugnant I could not bring myself to taste even the small sample she offered me. Again I now love Oysters but it was years before I felt confident enough to swallow them, I was always fearful of choking while they were halfway down my gullet, I’ve never tried snails or tripe or Cods’ eyeballs so I can’t be considered a ‘gourmet’ much as I’d like to be. I did have sweetbreads once and thought they were delicious but made the mistake after eating of asking the chef what they were. The common belief is that they are lambs or calves testicles, this is not the case but they are the glands of young animals.

For many years I couldn’t cook. My wife, who I considered a cook par excellente, would ask me to watch her and at least learn the rudiments of cooking in case anything happened to her. I would laugh and tell her “don’t worry, I’ll be gone long before you”, sadly this wasn’t to be. When Shirley, my wife, became ill I would do my best, buying all those easy to cook dishes from Marks and Spencers that are such a boon to working wives and, as she wasn’t eating much we got by. When Shirley died I carried on in a desultory way but gradually I started to cook, one day I even made a complete roast dinner and over the years I have tried my hand at most things until now I’m reasonably competent. I know my wife would have been quite proud of me.

We can only read and wonder at the great cooks of the past, chefs like August Escoffier, Brillat-Savarin and Prosper Montague, they all created acclaimed and memorable dishes, banquets and extravaganzas to entertain the Kings and Queens, Presidents and Dictators, Poets, Playwrights, Actors and Divas of Europe and America All the great chefs seemed to be French and they were famed and feted throughout the world, mighty hotels in London, Paris, Rome and New York vied for their services.

As recently as the 1960s’ Internationally known chefs were French, Swiss, Austrian or Italian, the concept and the ability seemed beyond Britain. There were of course great restaurants run by great restaurateurs but the man in the street didn’t have a clue who the cook was, as long as the food was tasty and nicely presented in good surroundings that was it. There was a school of thought that decor or ‘ambience’ was just as important as the food, more so said some critics.

Things started to change when men like Nico Ladenis entered the restaurant trade, he ran ‘Nico’s’ in Battersea very successfully for many years and because of his success he opened a place in the lush countryside where his customers were mainly farming and fox-hunting types not in the least interested in ‘haute cuisine’ and he made headlines by refusing to put salt on the table or cook a steak well done. He regarded his customers as ‘barbarians’ and didn’t last very long. Robert Carrier also helped to change the scene opening ‘Carriers’ in Camden Passage and suddenly there was all these new restaurants and cuisine's all refreshing the taste buds. Then there was ‘nouvelle cuisine’ a very light way of cooking, using only the freshest possible ingredients this was supposed based on the cooking of Paul Bocuse though the term had been used before. At the same time another great chef, Michel Geurard thought up ‘cuisine minceur’ which was even more refined, using only natural ingredients cooking everything, even vegetables in their own juices, using no or oil fat at all but tasting delicious and being arranged on an outsize plate with the colourful ingredients arranged like an impressionist painting.

Of course we had TV chefs the first one I can remember was Phillip Harben, a mild mannered, bespectacled and bearded man with a striped apron who gave lessons in cooking in a straight forward manner, that was on black and white television and was not at all exciting, it was left to another English cook to inject some drama into cookery programmes this was Fanny Craddock a larger than life character, whose personal appearance, a cross between Marlene Dietrich and Danny La Rue, and her sometimes outrageous statements, caused more comment than her dishes which, though colourful, didn’t appear particularly nice, wholesome or tasty.

Nowadays we have wall to wall cookery programmes, Cooks ‘goings ons’ are given as much prominence in the tabloids as pop stars and footballers. Gordon Ramsey and even his in-laws make headlines. New restaurants which seem to have ‘gala’ openings every week are reviewed in all major newspapers. The higher the prices the better the reviews and the reviewers have become celebrities themselves, their descriptions of the food, the decor, the friendliness or otherwise of the staff try to outdo each other week by week. It’s a competition to see who can be most spiteful or fulsome in their praise. Some of it is so over the top they must be running out of adjectives, in fact sometimes I wonder if they are paryoding themselves.

If I could afford it I would be able more truthfully to assess the quality of the food and the truthfulness of the reviews. Even if one has plenty of money I’m told that some of these places as well as being particular about who they let in have waiting lists so long it could be months and in that time they would have changed owners or cooks.

Even pubs nowadays have become gastro pubs. Maybe the first gastro pub or maybe the first half a dozen were ‘gastro pubs’ but surely not now. Not now the pub companies do the pubs up the same battle ship grey, the same pine floors, the same garbed in black waiting staff, surely they are just pubs serving food, some times good and sometimes bad just like before.

Getting back to the question is cooking an art or a craft? I believe it can be art. If an individual can cook and present something which when you look at it makes your heart skip a beat and when you taste it your heart not only skips but your eyes fill with tears and your hand shakes as you lift the next morsel to your lips then it is art. Maybe your Mother was an artist or your wife or brother. Some people are born to cooking and I believe they can aspire so high that they can be classed as Artists.

Others will never riser above craftsmanship. They can go to catering college, be apprenticed to Gordon Ramsey, open their own restaurant and be sold out every night and still lack that greatness. I believe that is what a Michelin 3 star should be about but I also believe there are many unknown artists out there working in cafes, pubs and ordinary kitchens who only a few people will know about.

There is someone I know who works in a local pub as a chef, his food is pretty good but whenever I hear he is going to make a meat pudding I try to go there, it is simply sublime, the best one I’ve had since I was a small boy. I guess we all know people like that who can achieve greatness with one dish but the true artist is one who achieves it every time.

East Enders

My birth certificate says I was born in Limehouse in 1932. Until I joined the army at the age of 18 I lived most of the time in Old Ford, Bow, E.3.

The ‘East End’ has always been the poorest part of Britain, it’s been mythologised over the years as it has fascinated sociologists, criminologists, writers, missionaries, welfare workers and latterly film and TV makers. From Victorian times to the present day the world has been absorbed by the plight and the crimes of the people and the area.

In 1910 a famous American writer, Jack London ventured to London to find out for himself if the stories of poverty and appalling slums in the area were true. His account of his stay was published under the title ‘People of The Abyss’ it is a ghastly account of the lives of those that inhabited this miserable place. It described a world of human beings shuffling through their world like downtrodden ghosts, poor, starving and oppressed by their poverty.

What was especially shocking about this account was that London at that period was the capital city of the richest and biggest Empire that had ever been.

Conditions must have improved by the mid thirties because I had a very happy childhood even during the war despite being evacuated for a few short periods. There was still poverty, lots of kids never had a toothbrush or had seen a hankerchief. Shoes, or more likely boots, were rarely new and were often stuffed with cardboard as they wore out but most of us had a roof over our heads and never starved.

In my day the East end started at Aldgate and ended at Bow Bridge. It comprised, at the very heart, Hoxton, Bethnal Green, Mile- end, Bow, Poplar and Hackney, the rest were east Londoners, not ‘East-enders’, over Bow bridge was regarded as the suburbs. Nowadays they even count people from Dagenham as East enders this wasn’t true a few years ago. Even the speech was different, ‘Cockney’ as spoken by a true native was richer and much less harsh and whiney to that spoken on the fringes and what has now evolved through television and radio as ‘estuary english’ a very ugly version of London accented speech.

Even the clothes were different , we had all the best Jewish tailors in our areas from the well known Maxie Cohen of Aldgate and Myers of Hoxton to the expensive Les Miller in Whitechapel, Francks of New road and Charles Stevenson of Brick Lane, and the girls had all the best fashion shops as well. We frequented the ‘Lane’ on a Sunday morning gathering round ‘Solly’s’ the record stall in Wentworth street it was where anyone who had ‘style’ went.

Weekends we went to the Lyceum and danced to the sound of Oscar Rabin, we belonged to Youth clubs like the Repton and now and again went to pubs like the Hospital Tavern in Whitechapel or the Coach and Horses in Mile end or the Deuragan in Hackney.

In the mid sixties most of my London was still recognisable, still lots of shops, still lots of businesses run by the same people and families that had been there for years, same Jewish tailors, Jewish restaurants like `Blooms’ and ‘Goldwaters’ and Mr Marks still serving smoked salmon, beigels and latkas from his delicatessen in Wentworth street. Roman road was still a thriving family market with Butchers selling hot saveloys or faggots with pease pudding as a sideline along with all the different meats. The greengrocers, bakers, cook shops and pie, mash and eel shops and fish stalls whose families had been coster mongers for a 100 years they were still there the backbone of the area.

But if we know our history change is inevitable and when one reads Shelley’s great poem ‘Ozymandias’ it hammers home the message that nothing is forever and so it has proved with my ancestral home.

In the late 40’s we had lots of immigrants from the Caribbean, this was to fill a need, there was full employment and many jobs in transport and the hospitals were hard to fill so Railway, Bus and Hospital authorities advertised in the West Indies, but the newcomers, despite much racism and some resentment, fitted in well enough, taking to our institutions like the pub and the church so things didn’t alter that much. There were some ‘race’ riots in Notting Hill but not in our neck of the woods. The East-end have always had many people from different lands, there was a sizeable black population around the docks, always lots of seaman from the West Indies in the Cable street area and lots of what we called Lascars in their seamans dress of blue dungarees, as well as the Chinese in the original ‘Chinatown’ of Limehouse.

However in the 70’s Uganda’s President, Idi Amin, decided to throw all the Asians out of his country. Many of these were prosperous and well educated Indians, mainly Muslim, and though they were stripped of all their assets they came to this country with a wealth of knowledge, education, professionalism that other immigrants had lacked. People who emigrate do it to better themselves, in this case they were forced out of a country of which they were the main middle class. Many of these settled in London and started small businesses, there was also an influx of people from Bangladesh when that troubled land went through periods of disaster, floods and famine and also Pakistan was a major source of cheap labour, gradually Whitechapel in particular started to change, most Jewish businesses packed up and left their places being taken by Asian entrepreneurs who easily filled the vacancies in the garment trade and started their own shops and restaurants and opened Mosques to cater for the mainly Muslim element. Of course this alienated local populations far more than the Caribbean influx because fathers and mothers and even grandparents followed children to this land and they were seen, true or not, to be a drain on our already over stretched social services and hospitals. Many East enders at that time moved to places like Basildon, Harlow and Debden, lots of streets were knocked down and replaced with new dwellings that were mainly occupied by newcomers and so to people of my generation the East end was becoming a very different place.

In 1985 a series, ‘East enders’ started on BBC television. It proved very popular and is still going to this day although I watched a few episodes and snorted my derision in common with most people of my background we all thought it was so unreal and I have never watched it since. If I was to watch it nowadays it might reflect life in that part of London I only know that back in the 80s’ it bore very little relation to the life we lived. The Mitchell brothers two garage mechanics were ludicrous as so called gangsters and hard men. Dirty Den was just not believable, Angie the landlady was a more plausible figure, there were many glamourous landladies in pubs but the rest were not true to life.

However, life imitates Art and many of the actors in soaps are now full blown ‘celebrities’ and they are seen in fashionable night clubs and restaurants along with footballers and pop stars and lots of young people seem to aspire to their way of life and probably East end young people copy what they see on the soap and ape the actors dress and speech so it’s probably a fair representation of the area it tries to dramatise.

The ‘Essex’ boys and girls whose parents or grandparents were from East London no longer go ‘down the lane’ they’ll go to the new super shopping malls like Lakeside or Blue Water or night clubs in Epping, Gants Hill or Chigwell, some of the more ‘progressive’ will make a pilgrimage on Friday or Saturday night to Shoreditch which has an abundance of bars and pubs much to the annoyance of the long term residents and I doubt any of them go to ‘Tubby Isaac's’ for a bowl of jellied eels after their Friday night pint as we used to.

As an old East ender I still have much affection for the place and I still visit the area as one of my sons lives there and, thank goodness, they still have some pie and mash shops, but I don’t think I could live there anymore, many areas are alien to me, I quite enjoy the bustle and colour of places like Brick Lane and Green street near Upton Park, and, if I was younger, the liveliness of the bars, clubs and pubs would appeal to me, I also like the diversity that the multitude of races bring, there seems to be representatives of everywhere on earth living in East London, there are Arabs, Australians, Austrians, Belgians, Brazilians, Canadians, Chileans, Danish etc. etc., one could go through the alphabet, recently I asked a waitress in a restaurant in Shoreditch where she came from as I couldn’t place her accent I was quite surprised when she said Northampton.

It does no one good to see the future but in terms of the cosmos it wasn’t long ago when London’s population was numbered in thousands rather than millions, it is now one of the great cities of the world and still attracting migrants by the hundreds of thousands and a big percentage are drawn like magnets to the hub of East London, I remember it as being at it’s best fifty years ago I wonder what will it be like fifty years hence?

WINE.

“who loves not wine, women and song,
He is a fool his whole life long."



I can’t remember the first time I tasted wine. For my generation it was some exotic drink that the French and Italians drank or it was VP wine a fortified drink that was imported from South Africa and was sold in off-licenses to make working class alcoholics satisfyingly drunk for a small amount of money. I may have tasted it at weddings when everyone toasts the happy couple, although I believe it was very often Sherry when we all had to stand up and raise our glasses, on one occasion it was light ale for the men and Babycham for the ladies.

In the late fifties and early sixties wine started to get mentioned more often. I was an inveterate reader of the quality newspapers, mainly the Observer, and I loved reading the restaurant review. These were not yet common to all newspapers, even the venerable Fay Maschler was yet to write her famous column in the Evening Standard. As well as the food the reviewer would discuss and recommend or criticise the wine.

Raymond Postgate was then editor of the Good Food guide which I started to buy. He, despite his impeccable left wing credentials, was a connoisseur of wine as well as a noted gourmand and in my little £4.00 a week flat in Walthamstow while my wife cooked me economy meals of stuffed hearts one night, boiled bacon and pease pudding the next, I would read aloud to her the wonderful delicacies being served at Ecu du France in Jermyn Street, the Gay Hussar in Soho, the Savoy Grill , the superb fish at Sheekeys, the wonderful beef carved from the trolley at Simpsons, the Parisian fare at Madame Pruniers in St James, always accompanied by fine wines Chateau Latour, Mouton Rothschild, Chateau Petrus, Chablis, Pouilly Fuisse, Meursalt or Puligny Montrachet. We would then discuss what venue we would go to when, as we surely would, we had enough money.

The first time I did order wine it was in the sixties, our fortunes having improved somewhat I took my wife to a pub in the city, quite a posh place it was and we sat midst dark oak panelling and red upholstered chairs and we hurriedly ordered the only dishes we recognised, a prawn cocktail to start with and grilled plaice, new potatoes and petit poi's as a main course, being somewhat intimidated by the waiter a non-smiling beetle browed character with a strong french accent, who, though the place was only half full, seemed somewhat impatient, he also handed me a heavy leather bound book which was the wine list, I knew it was red wine with meat and white wine with fish so, after a cursory look at the list I could only spot one wine that looked vaguely familiar it was Sauterne, of which I ordered a bottle.

“Certainement M’sieur,” the waiter said one eyebrow slightly raised.

“Lovely wine” we said as we toasted each other, “bit sweet though” Shirley said. I agreed but never said anything, not realising till months’ later that it was a dessert wine.

As time went on and we went out more and more we, like everyone else we knew, would order a bottle Liebfraumilch called Blue Nun, making sure it was nice and cold. This was so easy, we ordered it with everything we ate, steak, fish whatever, Blue Nun was the choice of the common man.

Later when we became more discerning and started to talk to other wine enthusiasts, you were known as an enthusiast in those days, I started to realise the difference between Bordeaux and Burgundy; I used to state airily “you can’t beat a Bordeaux or Claret for red wine or Burgundy for a white” and I would name the valleys and the areas from where various growths came from, I would query a Chablis “is it Premier Cru” and if the waiter said no I would wave it away.
I thought I was an expert and as all of my friends knew less than me no one told me otherwise.

One year we went to Bulgaria for a holiday. It was a time when currency was restricted and we were only allowed to take so much money abroad. I become very friendly with a Scotsman called Geoffrey Hume, he was very proud that he shared the same surname as Sir Alec Douglas Hume who was the current prime minister, he was an amusing and very worldly man, he had a nice wife and five lovely children who kept our kids company throughout the holiday. We became very fond of them. Geoffrey suggested we go out one evening to a hotel that had a reputation for fine cuisine so, with another couple, six of us sat at a round table with spotless white linen, sparkling cutlery and wine glasses. Geoffrey suggested we try the Bulgarian wine, “I hear they’ produce some fine wine here” he said in his soft Scottish burr. “No, no Geoffrey,” I said, slightly patronising, “we’ll stick to the French wine, that is the best. You know Geoffrey” I went on, “I know a little about wine, it’s such a complex subject, do you know there’s only sixteen Masters of Wine in England?”

“Aye,” he answered, “as a matter of fact there’s only five of us in Scotland!”

Of course, rather deflated, I let Geoffrey order the wine and lovely it was too. It was the end of my days thinking I knew anything about wine.

The last couple of decades has seen wine consumption increase so enormously that there are very few families that don’t have a bottle or two with their meals on a regular basis. Pubs now sell it by the type, some of it quite good quality. From selling no wine, pubs made the leap about 20 years ago, selling red or white to encompass all taste buds, they were served in tiny glasses as if it was medicine and sometimes it tasted like it.

The growth of wine bars caused a big rethink for our beloved inns. Nowadays most places give a choice in a proper glass at the right temperature and we can all quite knowledgeably ask for a Chardonnay, a Merlot, a Pinot or Cabernet without causing consternation behind the bar; and thanks to Premier league football stars and their wives’ we all know the famous marcs of the champagne world, names like Krug, Dom Perignon, Laurent Perrier Rose, and Lous Roederer Crystal so beloved by Rappers, I doubt many of them can tell the difference between an ordinary champagne like Mumms or Moet or even a bottle of Lucozade but it’s their money, plus of course, we see it sprayed all over the place from the winners podiums when anybody wins a Grand Prix, and what a waste that is.

France was the acknowledged King of wine producers from champagne, to the finest white Burgundy and the unaffordable, sublime famous reds of Bordeaux. But modern growing technique, young marketeers, aggressive salesmanship and clever bottle design, has seen a growth, not only from the New World, Australia, Argentine, America, Chile and New Zealand but Spain and Portugal, Hungary and Bulgaria, nearly all countries with some warmth in the climate produce very drinkable stuff now. Even India is about to enter the fray.

But despite all the colourful language used to describe it, phrases such as ‘blackcurrent with a peachy undertone’ or a ‘tart and citronny, zest of lemon’ 'a hint of gooseberry and sour pears' Il have still not developed decent taste buds for wine. I still cannot tell the difference between a Beaujolais Nouveau and a Nuit St Georges, I have been to wine tastings galore, I know the correct face to pull, how to gurgle it round in the mouth before spitting it out and I still cannot tell the difference, but I pretend.

Now when I go to a reasonable restaurant I order a Dry white house, or a house red and, if the foods O.K I’m usually pretty satisfied. I wonder what my long gone old friend from Bulgaria days, Geoffrey Hume would say. Just an amused glint in his eye I would think. As for me much as I’m fond of it I try to remember my Shakespeare: “O God that men should put an enemy
in their mouths to steal away their brains!”
.

Going to the Pictures

In my life, as far as culture is concerned, I’ve got more out of the cinema than almost anything.

When I was a kid most people from my class went to the cinema two or three times a week. There was lots of ‘picture palaces’ as we quaintly called them, and the programmes changed midweek. The main film and a supporting ‘B’ feature would run from Monday through Wednesday and then a new programme would go from Thursday to Saturday . Sunday there’d be a new programme just for the day, normally including an old classic that one had missed first time around.

Considering there were three cinemas in short walking distance, imagine the choice to be had, dramatic love stories starring great intense film actresses like Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford. Historical dramas with Errol Flynn, Leslie Howard, Lawrence Oliver and the two sisters who seemed to dominate period drama, Olive de Havilland and Joan Fontaine. Cowboys and Indians with Randolph Scott, John Wayne, Joel McRea playing straight shooting, honest to goodness white men, while the poor old redskins as we called them in our less enlightened times were always wicked and ruthless to be shown no quarter at any time. Gangster movies with the laconic coin tossing George Raft, the quick fisted James Cagney and the sly Humphrey Bogart, while the gangster’s moll would be the ever dependable Claire Trevor who everyone could tell had a heart of gold, dark eyed temptress Marie Windsor or the crafty blonde Virginia Mayo who one knew was more interested in the money. Musicals with the big voiced Betty Hutton or sweet Vera Ellen and leading men like Gordon McCrae or Howard Keel and the dancer Fred Astaire. In comedy the choice seemed endless from Laurel & Hardy, the Marx brothers, Old Mother Riley, George Formby with his ukelele, Will Hay with his sidekicks Graham Moore and Moore Marriot and various school kids. In between films, there was newsreels, cartoons and shorts with the three Stooges or Edgar Buchanan. In intervals we would rush to the ice cream girl who would light her wares with a torch to tempt us with various ice creams and drinks that always sold out.

This picture-going experience coloured the lives of my generation. Karl Marx, not Groucho, once said that Religion is the Opium of the people, well the only time my class of person went to church was for weddings, christenings or funerals so I guess we were a pretty pagan lot; in times of stress when bombs were coming down I believe people would mutter under their breath and pray to god that the bomb wouldn’t fall on them, but I believe Hollywood was our teacher, Hollywood our religion, it served as our comfort and probably averted revolution. Even the names of these huge, warm palaces, Geisha, Splendide, Excelsior, Ritz and Paragon reflected a carpeted and velvet curtained cigarette smoke filled Paradise, showing us a way of life that was so far from reality and allowed us to dream such a variety of dreams that wives who hated their husbands wouldn’t leave them they preferred instead to spend their time at the sink or the oven dreaming of escape with Clark Gable after he had rejected Vivien Leigh, men who hated their jobs and the poor pay that went with it would not revolt just dream while on the assembly line or digging coal or loading ships that they were on the open range helping Gary Cooper take steers on the big cattle drive, school kids would put up with miserable and hard caning teachers knowing they soon would be able to escape and be like Harry Fowler in ‘Hue and Cry’’ spending his time tracking down crooks. We still loved our football and we played and went to see our teams but that was just Saturday, the cinemas were open every day and they were everywhere, the conversation at work and at school was very often about the film you’d seen the night before and if you had to queue. We had no Romeo and Juliet our young lovers were Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland.

I still go to the pictures and still enjoy them and regard them as an escape but they are big multi- plexes and have 7 or 8 screening rooms, are extremely comfortable but so nakedly commercial, the adverts are blared out with such intense noise, I try to time it that I get in my seat just as the film is starting, most of the offerings we get are so predictable, the big budget, glitzy production. The distribution companies dictate an agenda to film makers to a formula that will guarantee them their money. It does seem to work for the studios, they pour just as much money into promotion as they do in making the films and even if the film gets bad or shocking reviews it makes no difference the public will go and watch it. I expect the old Hollywood was just as commercially driven but it all seemed unspoiled then or perhaps we were too naive. All the good films now seem to be made by small independent film makers who quite often fail to get distribution and even if they do they are normally only shown in ‘Art’ cinemas that are sparse on the ground outside of London.

I had a rather different experience this week. My youngest son Gerard has just completed his first film, 'Tony', his directorial debut to put it grandly and he laid on a family showing at the Brixton ‘Ritzy.’

Advertised as a horror film its true genre is ‘Black Comedy’’. A thoughtful, sometimes violent piece, its wonderfully acted not only by Peter Ferdinando the leading man, but the ensemble cast, actors none of them famous but all serious and aware of their craft. It’s directed by someone with wonderful insight into the way a section of some of our country’s low earning and under privileged lead their lives.

The experience was made grander because so many family turned up. The family has dwindled somewhat in recent years but there was still enough of us to make a good crowd, we caught the tube train together, went and had a meal together and got the train back together and i was struck by how nice all my family was, the nieces, the cousins, brothers and sisters, in laws they all loved the film and they all seemed to enjoy the day. The usual things were said how we must meet more often but compared to some families we still see quite a lot of each other which in these days is a blessing.

As I’ve already said, I still go to the pictures, about once every two weeks in the winter. and its still a pleasant experience, but its just one leisure activity for today's folk. I suppose the biggest influence, and has been for years, is now television, that is why they bear a huge responsibility and I don't think they bear that burden very well. Maybe its because the people in charge are too young, that's an incorrect statement as far as politics nowadays are concerned but I do believe its true. Some of these kids have very little experience of the real world and they base their knowledge on what they’ve seen on TV. Modern day tv has nothing gentle or soothing about it. Its harsh, bad languaged, in your face raw. People in streets getting drunk and swearing and vomiting, people in houses living and hating together, celebrities on islands doing the same, celebrities, endless celebrities, like constant musak, or boring wallpaper they are identikit these celebrities, famous what for? No one quite knows but everyone aspires to be one or, failing that, to meet one.

So maybe its a good thing that TV seems to be losing its power, maybe in the future, and a lot already do, we will package our own entertainment, just buy it off the shelf and play it on our projectors, stuff that really suits us. Perhaps, unable to stand the sight of the inanely famous we will go back to the spoken word and listen to Radio 4 or console ourselves with Mozart and Schubert on Radio 3.

I was interested to read that a young black comedian, famous because he doesn’t tell rude jokes in case his Mother is watching, has just filled the O2 the biggest stadium in the country against all expectations. Most of us, and I include all ages, don’t like the gratuitous rude and brutal, the obsession with lavatory humour, the obscenities, but it seems the producers and powers that be just don't get it. Perhaps that young comedian if he carries on with his success just might be the harbinger of a more responsible less brutal age. It would be good if it were so.

Snow Memories

The weather recently has caused all the headlines with much harking back to previous winters with lots of a snow.

The years that are most invoked as the worse in living memory are 1947 and 1962/63, I remember them both.

In the winter of 1947 I was aged 14, in my last year at school. Rationing was in full swing, indeed I believe some things such as meat were in shorter supply than they had been during the war which hadn’t been over long. We, that's me, my Mum and Dad, brother Kenny and little sister Doreen lived in a little terraced house in Lamprell street, Old Ford, Bow, E.3. not far from Victoria Park. Another brother, Michael was yet unborn, he made his appearance in 1948.

They were tiny little dwellings, a little yard out the back with a toilet and a, as yet, undismantled Anderson shelter, my parents grew a few tomatoes and kept some hens and a cockerel. We had plenty of eggs even in the war, I remember my Mum making the fowls food with potato peelings and something called Karswoods, we hated the smell. When neighbours were ill my Mum would always give them some new laid eggs. The cockerel would generally disappear at Christmas, not for our table, my Dad would generally swop it with someone else’s, we couldn’t eat our own.


Me and Kenny slept in the same bed in a little room overlooking the yard, it was called the off-room, as I never saw it written down I always assumed it was called the Orphroom. There was no room for a fireplace, just room for our bed.

The other rooms had fireplaces in them, little tiny grates, they were never lit as coal wasn’t that easy to get. Our coal merchant was called Speller. My Mum liked him, he seemed kind and venerable with a white moustache and he seemed quite old but he must have been strong, him and his assistant would carry bag after bag of hundredweight's of coal on their backs into countless households. They would be pulled off a cart led by a faithful old horse that looked as venerable as Mr Speller himself.

The room we used as a living room was called the kitchen. It had a cooking range that was kept black-leaded by my Mum. The fire incorporated in the range was miniscule, it threw out very little heat and we boiled our kettles and did the cooking in the scullery an adjoining room with a boiler with a little fireplace in it to heat the water, a cold water sink with and a gas stove. So primitive but none of us had seen any better so we were happy enough. There was a tin bath hanging in the yard where the toilet was.

Even in a normal winter it was pretty cold in these households. I remember my Dad would get a flat iron and warm it on the hob and then go and iron our cold sheets before we got into bed. Hot water bottles were pre war luxuries, everything was short in those years including rubber. So in 1947 a labour government was trying to overcome the most horrendous shortages, Sir Stafford Cripps, the labour chancellor telling everyone that they would have to tighten their belts even further, the Coal fields in the midst of Nationalisation with Manny Shinwell the Minister of Fuel being determined that the mines would be the hub of our industry and then all this snow fell and divided the country into half. No lorries or trains could get through to the South with precious coal supplies, the National Grid not fully operational, and everyone told they could only use their electric fires three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon. That was all right if you had electric fires, we depended on coal and wood for our fires and plenty of blankets at night.

Even clothes we had to make do as best we could. I had an overcoat and Russian boots, as we called wellingtons, and a pair of mittens and what I thought of as a pilots helmet made of leather with ear muffs. I used to go to a yard somewhere near Roman road with Doreen's pram and fill it with Tarry logs. These were wooden bricks that had been used for roads and tarred over they made the most marvellous fuel.

What with lack of food, warmth, clothing how did we survive? From what I remember quite happily. We played snowballs and lots of games in the street and most people seemed very happy to me, grateful that the war was over and the future seemingly bright. How the grown ups felt I’m not sure but I don’t remember them grumbling much.

I also remember 1962/3. In October 1962 I took the ‘Two Puddings’ Pub. It was my first venture into business. It was a busy place a music house weekends and lots of food at lunchtimes. It was a big old place with a fire in both bars that I kept lit in winter, both fires attracted the customers who would hog them sitting or standing round them in cold weather, we had central heating of a kind that had been old in the thirties but it was inefficient, George my old Pot man would light it in the morning and pile it with coke, he was the only one who understood it and if he had a day off no one else could master it. Christmas 1962 it started to snow and never stopped till March 1963 and that was such a miserable time for me. The plumbing, the central heating, and the electric's were all ancient and needed redoing and that year I had eighteen burst pipes, flooding the pub and the next door shop completely one unforgettable day. The brewery would send me their builders to help and me and my wife and staff would spend days clearing up, that was in the days, fortunately, when the brewers would help you as much as they could at a drop of a hat and never charged anything for it.

Somehow, despite losing my cleaners who gave up in despair, that winter passed and even during that time not many people moaned, I even got better cleaners who delighted in getting stuck in, it did seem a cheerier more together world then, perhaps this recent reminder of what a winter should be like will make us all a little bit more understanding of hardships suffered in other places. I must say that in this world living with warm houses, too warm sometimes, warm cars, warm trains, warm shops we don’t ever get really cold, although I’m old now and would probably die of hypothermia I feel a little nostalgia for the days when getting inside in front of warm fire was a real luxury after being out in the cold all day.

SPIRIT OF THE ANDES

Behind a heavily beamed, rather crooked, wonderful old farmhouse known as the ‘Old Cottage’ at the bottom of Bull lane, Long Melford, there’s around 70 acres of lovely Suffolk countryside where Paul Rylott and his very pretty wife Judy started their Alpaca farm. The house was built in 1420 AD and when Paul first saw it and decided to buy, it looked disquietingly familiar. At first he thought it had appeared in his dreams as it fitted all the criteria he and Judy were looking for but he suddenly realised that when he was a tiny boy, living on a Lincolnshire farm, his Grandmother had a calendar that he much admired and the picture on it was of this house. ‘It was fate’ he told me, ‘I had to have this place’.

I’d called in to see Paul to ask if he’d put an advert in ‘Upbeat’ magazine, I’d interrupted his lunch but he said it didn’t matter and he invited me in for tea, I knew the farm had ‘open days’ and it occurred to me that perhaps our members would be interested in a tour, Paul said he’d be only too happy to show us round.

So it was that on the afternoon of Thursday the 13th of August a party of 13 ‘Upbeat’ members, gathered at the farm gate. The sun was shining, it was warm but a slight breeze tempered the heat making it an ideal English summers’ day.

First we went to the lean-to by the side of the house, a film screen was rigged up, comfortable chairs arranged and tables laden with cakes and home made biscuits, Judy, Paul's wife and business partner and Victoria, the young lady who helps them, served us with tea, it was all quite delicious five star treatment.

While we had tea Paul told us how he’d been head in the UK of a huge multinational corporation who had decided to close their operation in this country thus making him redundant. He was, of course, quite upset and not a little worried, his rosy future, all planned out till retirement, was in disarray. What to do? A great friend of his advised him not to be hasty “go away, do something you always wanted to do, forget about everything, go away and comeback with a clear head”. So he and Judy went to Peru, a place he always wanted to visit. They had a wonderful and exciting time, catching little trains that took them far up into the Andes. They both marvelled at the stunning scenery, the dramatic changes in climate, the friendliness and hospitality of the people and the animals, primarily the Alpaca but also the Llamas and the Vicuna, all members of the South American camelid family.

The Vicuna has the most valuable fleece, it is a rare animal only found at the highest altitudes of the Andes, to give an example of the value of it’s wool a Vicuna overcoat from Saville row would cost £50,000. As Paul said what would you buy instead of a Porsche? Alpacas whose wool is also soft are on the lower slopes and they congregate in herds of thousands but even they vary, Huacaya have a dense, spongy fleece that covers the body but the rarer Suri has lanky, silky long fibre coat that hangs in curly locks that is much sought after. Llamas, perhaps the best known of the camelids are a bit bigger and are more domesticated and used as pack animals in much of that region of South America.

When they came back from Peru, Paul's head was clear. Absolutely clear of any thoughts at all, he explained, and his money was running out.

Eventually after lots of agonising he and Judy bought the farm with the land and imported three of the finest Alpacas’ they could source, he was determined to be known for the quality of his animals. After being quarantined in Switzerland for 6 months they were allowed to come to Long Melford. That was 5 years ago, they now have one hundred and twenty and are known as one of the finest and most reliable breeders in the UK, hoping to export all over the world to places as diverse as Qatar, Germany, Russia and Portugal. The wool is also sold and is quite valuable, the best shearers in the world are New Zealanders and every year they come to the farm to shear the animals. Paul related all this and much more during his witty and well informed lecture which we all thoroughly enjoyed.

We were each given a little pot of food before strolling round the fields. To the nursery first where all the cute little babies, known as Cria, were kept, we were told not to feed them as they were rather shy at that early age, Victoria, or Vicky, the main help, knew all the Alpacas’ by their names, all the ladies are named after ‘Bond’ girls, there’s even a Miss Moneypenny and the main prize stud is named Sean, Vicky even knows the hens and cockerels who tear round the ground and they all recognise her. After the babies we saw the adolescents, a more frisky bunch. Then the older ones who needed no enticing. The colours of these charming animals range from black, blue-grey, grey, brown, mottled, cream to white.

As well as being great pets that can be trained for the lead they are also useful as fox deterrents, they protect the hens from the marauding foxes and have even been known to kill them.

To reach the older ones we had to pass over a little bridge that spanned the River Chad, apparently the Chad has more native freshwater crayfish than any other river. We never spotted any but I’m sure they were there lurking in the depths somewhere.

After our tour, during which many photos’ were taken it was back to the start for more tea and cake. Our visit finished about 4.30 but we all enjoyed the idyllic setting and the free and easy friendly manner in which Paul, Judy and Vicky welcomed us and though none of us bought any Alpacas I’m sure we all came away having high regard for the way in which the farm is run and with a lot of respect for Paul and his team.