AGONDA

Agonda beach started with just a few huts on the beach, then within a few years mushroomed into a mega hutoppoliss, groups of huts competing to see who could create the most luxurious environment for guests who pay top dollar to come and spend Christmas and the new year here. Each group of huts has its restaurant area, overlooking the sea, so that guests can sip their drinks as they watch the sun sink into the ocean every evening.

The other side of the road, where a few villagers live, has similarly grown, with each villager building rooms, houses, whatever they can fit into their piece of land. Narrow dirt paths lead between the houses, which are so near together that you can lean out of your window and almost touch the house next door. But this is where you can find the cheap rooms, if you get here early enough. I have a traditional old room, built with a gap between the wall and the ceiling. The wind blows all sort of things through the gap - leaves, grit, small feathers, so I have to keep sweeping the floor. But it's cheap and I have table and chair to work at my computer, and luxury of luxuries - a fridge!

Yesterday there was a funeral in Agonda. The coffin arrived in the back of an old red lorry, together with four priests, clad in long robes with white lace stoles, covered by short red satin stoles. They clambered down from the back of the lorry, their lace stoles fluttering about them. Men heaved the coffin down and carried it, accompanied by the priests, to the church. At the entrance they took the lid off the coffin and propped it up against the church wall. The coffin was full of flowers. Presumably there was a body under the flowers, but I was too far away to see.

A bus full of mourners drove right into the church precinct, followed by several people on motor bikes. Everyone converged on the church

The Film Festival has ended

After the last film, some of the young festival goers took me to "their bar" a marvelous labyrinth of rooms painted bright red up to waist height and brilliant yellow form there upwards. It's obviously a sleezy dive for middle aged men to drink alcohol (without their women folk and away from prying eyes) that had been adopted by young festival goers for the duration of the festival. Ranks of Kingfisher beer bottles lined up on the table around which a bevy of young men and one brave young woman were lounging. They had been carousing between films all day.

Jitidj, my half Namibian,  half Indian friend, dropped out of University because, he said, he was learning nothing. He told us at length three days ago, as we stood in the queue for one of the films, how he'd been walking the length and breadth of India, bare footed, sleeping in temples when he could, in his tent when he could, in the railway station when they would let him and how here, in Kerala, they wouldn't let him do any of those things, so he was trying to couch surf.

"It's not easy couch surfing in India if you are an Indian man," he said. "The hosts all want foreigners, preferably women, preferably young women, preferably blond young women. I have to beg and plead with them before they'll let me stay."

"I have exactly the opposite problem," I tell him. "Too many men want to host me, and too many for all the wrong reasons. I tend to delete their offers."

Our waiter, a skinny old man, is drunk, much to the amusement of my companions. He's still managing to take orders and carry the drinks, but cannot any longer control the expression on his face or the slurring of his speech. Jitidg told me he was going to the Jaipur Literature Festival.
"You can't get there in time if you keep on walking," I said sceptically.
"No. I'll catch a train." So much for walking the length and breadth of India!

After a while my companions headed to the courtyard at the back of the bar to smoke cigarettes. Drawn by the sound of singing, I went with them. We found a group of young men singing their hearts out, standing in the courtyard. An old man joined in. They were singing traditional songs, keeping in tune for verse after verse. It occurred to me that this musicality and memory, so common among Indian people, might go some way to explaining why they learn languages with such apparent ease.

We left around six, and I headed to the station to wait for my train at half past midnight: a long wait. I tried sitting in the first class lounge, but got so cold, for the air conditioning was set way too high, that I started snuffling and sneezing. So I went to sit in the booked tickets waiting room, where a fan was grinding and clattering like a steam roller and an old Sadhu was lying on the floor inconspicuously behind some seats, fast asleep, scratching his private parts vigorously without waking up. Young men dressed in black came in and sat down.

I went to the station food outlet and ordered a little vegetable pasty. It wasn't very nice but I ate it anyway. More of the young black clad men came in, so I got up to leave. No one brought me a bill, so I went to the cashier to pay.
"One veg pasty," I said
"Chappatti?" he asked me.
So I gave up and walked out onto the platform.
The station was full of black clad pilgrims. It seemed that any kind of black clothing would do: traditional floor length dhotis, black jeans, black lycra shorts, just so long as the clothes were black.
"Where are you going?" I asked a group of young pilgrims.
"Utta Pradesh," they answered, meaning that that was where they had come from.
"Four days walking. Padmanabharhti Swami temple near Charlor Harack" I think he said "One time eating a day." Just then there was a train announcement and the group took off, racing up the stairs to catch their train back to Utta Pradesh.

Behind a low wall on the platform pilgrims lay sleeping neatly in rows, lined up like sardines, tightly packed together. Jitidge had mentioned that he could have joined them if he'd found some black clothes to wear. These were very different from the pilgrims I saw in Amarkantak in February. Those were all wearing traditional Indian clothing, old and loose, draped about their bodies, carrying a little cloth bag, a thin blanket and a stick, while these black clad pilgrims were wearing shiny new clothes and carrying large rucksacks. They'd come for a big festival that'd been going on while we were all trotting from one cinema to another.

I sat on a seat on the platform beside a couple of young women carrying a sports rifle in a big plastic box.
"It weighs twenty kg," one of them told me.
"They let you take that on the train?"
"I have licence. You know Olympic games? I at Olympic games"
"Did you win anything?"
"Seven lakh. Oil company gifted me this gun. German made."
"So very expensive"
"Yes very expensive"
"Better take the lift up to the bridge."
"No. We strong."
And they galloped up the stairs carrying their luggage and the gun.

I boarded my train at midnight, unrolled my sleeping bag on the top bunk and slept like a baby until the morning.

Trivandrum Day 5

The communist party, who organise the international film festival in Trivandrum have red flags adorned with hammer and sickle lining the streets and posters like this. Marxism is alive and well in Trivandrum.

My firefly friend has flitted away, half way through the festival. No more lovely lunches at his club. No more drinks in the club bar. And there's nowhere else to drink in Trivandrum, a pretty dry town! The British built the club, so of course it had to have a bar.

I continue to enjoy wonderful films from Russia, Germany, Philippines, Cuba, Colombia, Chad, tending to focus on just a few directors. Of course the odd Indian classic too. 

Trivandrum day 2

I have been to Trivandrum several times years ago, but I never went beyond the station, which is situated in possibly the ugliest part of town. So I had a pretty poor impression of the place. In fact much of the city has traditional Keralan houses with pointed tiled roofs, surrounded by large, leafy trees.

My friend's enthusiasm for Kerala is boundless, but then he is Keralan. "The Communist state of Kerala is the most equal state in India. There is very little poverty. The roads are clean, public buildings are clean, hotels are clean and the food is cheap. There are fourteen cinemas in Trivandrum and the five biggest ones were all built by the communist party. They run this film festival and they make sure that it is big."

I have to agree with him about the cleanliness of the place, the cheapness of the food and wonder of wonders, the rikshaws all use metres. There's no arguing over the price of a ride. Just jump in and tell them to switch on the metre, if they haven't already. And if you want to walk they don't hassle you. 

We started early at nine o'clock in the morning with "A Season in France" by Chad director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun about African refugees seeking asylum in France, unsuccessfully, a very emotional film, moving but understated. Then we hopped in a rikshaw to go to a different cinema to see Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark, a tour de force all shot in one take in the Hermitage in St Petersburg. I'm left wanting to visit the Hermitage, just the Hermitage, nothing else in Russia.

We rushed back to the club for a nice lunch, then to a very old Iranian film directed by Bahram Beyzal, after which we both needed a rest so we went to the India Coffee House, a wonderful spiral building designed by a British architect called Laurie Baker in the 1950s. Laurie Baker met Ghandi, who told him to help the poor so he devoted the rest of his life to designing buildings in Trivandrum that were cheap to build, functional and pleasing to the eye. He used brick or stone, depending on what was available locally, but no concrete. The seating in the coffee house is stepped all the way up the outer side of the spiral, so that each little table overlooks the one below it. The coffee and food are cheap, as they are in all the Indian Coffee Houses. Every city in India has Indian coffee houses and together they form the largest cooperative workers union in the world.

Prime Minister Modi has decreed that everyone must stand for the Indian National Anthem at the start of every film. Last year some people were arrested for refusing to stand. The festival organisers managed to release them. This year there are several refuseniks at the start of each film. So far none of them have been arrested, well not as far as I know. You never know whether there might be some of Modi's spies in the audience taking sneaky photos of the refuseniks. I hope not. Keralans are fiercely independent of the Indian government. 

The crowds are predominantly young men, a few young women and very few older people. So few in fact that over sixty fives are exempt from queuing. But I queue because I'm with a friend. No one takes any notice of me except the press, who keep trying to photograph me without asking my permission, which I consider to be rude, so I cover my face.

My friend is threatening to abandon me and return to his vow of silence. He hasn't actually taken a vow of silence; in fact he's the chattiest person I know, a fund of information on literature, film, music, art, Indian history, but he says that he spends more and more time alone, meditating and that after he's been with a person for a day he wants to be on his own. I rather like having a companion in this sea of Indian people. It makes me feel less conspicuous, but I know people will be nice to me, maybe even chat with me. 

Trivandrum

I was sitting in the ticketing area of the Kerala film festival, a large space with a roof and no sides with rows of young people sitting behind computer screens on one side of the room when my friend walked in. He is one of those larger than life characters whose voice booms across the room, cutting through the desultory chatter of the people waiting for their cards to be processed. His long, curly black hair and big black eyes give him the look of an Indian guru, a term he would absolutely abhor. It was three o'clock in the afternoon and I'd been contending with crowds of pushing, shoving Indian people since ten thirty in the morning, trying to get a pass to the film festival.
"I'm mighty glad to see you" I said.
"What's happening? Why can't you get your pass?"
"I really don't know. I don't understand what's going on."
"Tell them you are a life long member of the British Communist Party!"
"Go on! You are a white woman. Push your way through," indicating a wall of people.
I pushed, and reached a desk where people were thrusting pieces of paper at a desperate young man. I held out my piece of paper. Bodies squashed against mine all round me in the stifling heat. Eventually the young man said something I didn't understand. My friend translated.
"There's a logistical problem with the printing press. They say come back tomorrow. Let's go to my club."

The club is an old colonial place, all polished teak, wide areas with old fashioned arm chairs, a super cooled restaurant where the food is very cheap.

After a snack we took a rikshaw through the winding leafy streets of Trivandrum in search of an alternative film festival, making repeated stops to ask directions, only to wind up back where we had started, right behind the club. The alternative film festival had a board to list the films showing over the next few days, no programme as such and a few alternative young people sporting beards and sitting behind a makeshift desk. No crowds. We registered and took our passes.

Much later that evening I got my pass to the main festival. So now I have two passes and because of my great age I can get into any film I want without having to queue.

Pettigrain reduces stress

Pettigrain essential oil is made by distilling the leaves and green twigs of the bitter orange tree (Citrus  x aurantium).

Recently scientists found that a small sample of healthy professional men and women performed computer tasks faster and better when they inhaled pettigrain essential oil which was infused into the atmosphere of the room where they performed the task. They remained calm and their heart rate was more steady than the heart rate of a similar group who performed the tasks without the pettigrain infusion.

This was only a small sample, so it would be a good idea to repeat the experiment with a larger number of people. But it's interesting that we may be able to add yet another essential oil to the list (lavender, rosemary, sage, vervain etc) of calming essential oils that improve performance, mood and relieve stress.

Huang L, Capdevila L. Aromatherpy improves work performance through balancing the autonomic nervous system. J Altern Complement Med. March 2017; 23(3); 214-221.

Grape Harvest

I have a grape vine in front of my house, which provides dappled shade during hot days in the summer, not that we had many of those this year, but whose leaves fall in the Autumn, letting the winter sun through to warm us on frosty days. Last year a blackbird sat on the grape vine, eating the grapes and dribbling grape juice down the window, leaving long, sticky trails. This year the blackbird is gone, killed by pesticides? died of old age? and the grapes hung blackly from the vine, inviting us to pick them. They were very high up, so Manuel climbed the step ladder and dropped the grapes into the big, plastic bowl that I held below him.

I began squeezing the grapes through a sieve into a bowl. After an hour I had a bottle full of juice. There seemed just as many grapes in the big white bowl. I'll have to think of another way to do this!

Opera

The Victoria and Albert Museum, London

I went to the Opera exhibition at the V and A museum, an exhibition that tries to cover the history of opera, far to large a subject for the time and space available. The museum has used clever techie stuff to beam the appropriate piece of music into the headphones of the person looking at a particular piece of information, picture or video, as they walk round. I was left desperately wanting to go to the opera to see something by Puccini, Verdi or Mozart's Magic Flute.

My first visit to the opera was in Paris, when my father took me to stay with his diamond merchant friends, who took us all to see Carmen. We walked into a warm, womb-like semi circular space, with plush red seats and red walls lined with boxes where the wealthy sat in glorious isolation. There was a low murmur of conversation and a rustle of programme pages turning as we walked to our seats. I was shivering with excitement, just listening to the orchestra in the pit tuning up and when the music began I was ecstatic. This was the beginning of a life long love of opera.

Later, when I was a music student, I used to hitch hike to London and go straight to Covent Garden to pick up a ticket to the opera from the box office, left there by my Uncle. I would sit in my scruffy student clothes in the back row, entranced by the music.

In my early twenties, when I went to live in Ferrara, Italy, some friends took me to the opera. Every town in Italy has an opera house and every opera house is full when they perform the well loved Italian operas. On this cold, foggy night the good people of Ferrara dressed up in their best clothes and glittering jewellery, then milled about in the foyer, chattering, the women inspecting each others dresses.

Once the orchestra struck up everyone quieted down until the first aria, when they sang along with the soloist. They burst into applause when it ended and demanded that the aria be repeated. This was nothing like the rapt silent concentration of the British audience in Covent Garden. Throughout that opera in Ferrara the audience sang along with the soloists, who frequently had to repeat their arias.

The last time I went to the opera was in Gran Canaria, where I could afford a restricted view ticket, four years ago. The performance was surprisingly good, with excellent soloists, fabulous costumes and scenery and even some wonderful dancers.

Autumn Harvest

It's time to harvest the pumpkins, before the first frost. Some of them were so big this year that I had to transport them in a wheelbarrow. It took two journeys. On the way to the allotment I met Jane
"Where on earth shall I put my pumpkins," I asked her.
"I keep mine on the stairs," she told me "because that's the coolest place in the house.
"Oh dear. My staircase leads up from the front door, which is glass and south facing."
In the end I cleaned all the mud off them and lined them up along the bottom of the patio door. My poor lodger now has to contend with pumpkins by the place where he sits to eat his evening meal and calendula, elecampane and bean seeds drying out on the kitchen table.

Maria Sibylla Merian 1647-1717 Botanical Artist

Musa Serapionis   Banana   

"It is used like an apple and has a pleasant taste, just as apples have in Holland."

Maria Sibylla Merian, born in Frankfurt, Germany, developed a fascination with the life cycles of insects as a child. By 1679 she had combined her talents as an artist with her interest in insect life in her first book - The Caterpillar's Wondrous Metamorphosis and Extraordinary Nourishment from Flowers, an ecological depiction of insect and plant life, centuries before the science of ecology was defined. 

When her marriage broke up in 1685 she went to join a protestant community in the Netherlands. When missionaries returned from the Dutch colony of Suriname, South America, she was captivated by the beautiful plants and insects they brought back with them. 

Pallisaden Boom  Palisade tree

Erythrina fusca ( Fabacae)  Coral bean

"When the flower has fallen off the branch rises upwards, the seed case becoming like a stable broom. The inhabitants also use them instead of brooms."

In 1691 Merian and her daughters moved to Amsterdam and made a living giving painting lessons and selling watercolours. The Dutch natural history community commissioned her to paint the specimens in their collections. In 1699 she took her youngest daughter with her on an expedition to Suriname to paint plant and insect life for two years. She had her Suriname paintings engraved  to form a book that was sold by subscription because of the immense cost to print it.  The first edition of 'Transformation of the Surinamese Insects' was completed in 1705 and contained 60 plates, hand coloured by Merian and her daughters. 

She was exceptionally independent for her time and produced important, ground breaking work.

The captions include the Dutch or Latin name used by Merian, the current Latin binomial and the standardised common name as well as an English translation of her description from the 2016 facsimile of the 1705 edition of Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium.

As a woman Merian could not join a painters' guild in Europe and therefore did not have access to oil paints, so she painted with water colours. 

The Healing Qualities of Beetroot

People have known for some time that raw beetroot is good for you, which is why it is often included in fruit juice mixtures. This is because raw beetroot contains a variety of compounds that improve your health, including betaines, resveratrol and quercetin.

Recently researchers have found that athletes running 1,500 metre trials performed better after drinking raw beetroot juice than athletes who drank raw beetroot juice that had had nitrates removed. The beetroot juice containing nitrates did not work for athletes running long distances.

But perhaps more interesting is the research carried out by Meredith Petrie of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolinas, in 2016, that demonstrates that beetroot juice is good for the brain. He gave beetroot juice (or placebo) to 26 older men (average age 65.4 years) for six weeks. All the men exercised every day during the six week trial. The scientists scanned the brains of the men before and after the trial. They found that the men who drank the beetroot juice had formed more new nerve cell connections than the men who drank the placebo. They formed these new nerve cell connections in an area of the brain that controls motor signals to the muscles.

The researchers concluded that the people taking beetroot juice with exercise had brain networks that were more like those of younger adults.

References

Larsen FJ, Weitzberg E et al. Effects of dietry nitrate on oxygen cost during exercise. Acta Physiol. 2007; 191 (1):59-66.
Petrie M et al. Beetroot juice: An ergongenic aid for exercise and the aging brain. J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci. 2016. doi: 10. 1093/gerona/glw219.

Mural in San Frediano, Florence

Piazza Tasso, San Frediano, Florence

Mural in Piazza Tasso

Bollo was a young man living in the San Frediano quarter of Florence, who died of an overdose. The local people painted a mural in his memory. Then one night a man came (apparently he was German and apparently someone took a photo of him) and painted grey paint over the mural with a roller on a long stick. He completely covered the whole mural.

A few days later the local people came back and and repainted the mural, following the lines of the original mural that showed faintly through the grey paint. Hundred of local people gathered in the piazza to watch the group of artists working on the mural, to encourage them and praise the finished work.

I asked one of them "Did everyone like Bollo?"

"Yes" he said, "very much." 

Visit to the Medici Park of Pratolino

In 1568 Francis de Medici, the grand Duke of Tuscany, asked Bernardo Buontalenti to design a villa and garden park for him on the hills north of Florence, where he could spend amorous time with his mistress. Buontalenti designed a fabulous palace, filled with grottoes, fountains, rivulets and pools, all supplied with water by an ingenious system of underground pipes and pumps. Buontalenti built grottoes and water features both inside the palace and throughout the park, statues spouting water, fish breeding in tanks, pools and streams. Francis held parties that were theatrical performances, all over the park, in amongst the trees and in the palace itself, with fire jugglers, fire sculptures intermingling with the water features and performers in outlandish costumes.

The very water features that made the palace and park enchanting ended up rotting the building so that it was eventually destroyed. Tantalising traces of the old water system still exist in the park, together with some of the old statues, now no longer sprouting water from fingers or toes.

The Appenine Colossus by Gianbologna

Buontalenti commissioned some of the best sculptors, such as Gianbologna, to create the many sculptures that adorned the park for Duke Francis. Over the centuries many of these sculptures were removed and transported to the Boboli gardens in Florence. But the Appenine Colossus, perhaps because it was too big to move, remained in the park. Originally Gianbologna sculpted it with a hollow interior filled with water features and surrounded by a fake mountain. In 1818 Joseph Frietsch was commissioned to redesign Pratolino. The park was turned into an English style garden. 

Statue of Jupiter holding lightning

La Maschera statue by the overgrown fish pond

In 1872 the Russian prince Paolo Demidoff bought the park and transformed the servants' quarters into villa Demidoff. He uncovered the Maschera statue, which had been covered in earth and dug out the pond. 

La Locanda, an old building from before Buontalenti's time.

This building was used as a carriage house and lodging for people travelling by carriage along the via Bolognese, the old road from Florence to Bologna. Later it was transformed into lodging for workers in the factories where sails and rope where manufactured. Today the ground floor is a restaurant and bar, while the first floor is used for meetings. 

Visit to Il Calicanto Florence

In the grounds of this wonderful restaurant, Chalet Fontana, in Florence, there is a vegetable garden where all the vegetables and fruit are grown biodynamically in raised beds.

There are flowers in among the vegetables and fruit and in another part of the green, sloping field flowers grow in pots for sale to the public. The Calicanto vegetable garden supplies the restaurant with fresh, healthy biodynamic vegetables. And no I didn't eat in the restaurant or even have a glass of wine in the bar - just a glass of water. But I did enjoy looking at the vegetable garden and talking to the gardeners.

Visit to the Herbarium at Kew Gardens

Wax model of an orchid

This weekend is Open London weekend, a time when all sorts of places not normally open to the public allow people to visit. I chose to visit the herbarium at Kew, a magnificent eighteenth century building with a high ceiling and a spiral staircase painted glossy red at one end that leads to the balconies stacked one above the other on either side of the room. These balconies house the upper layers of the collection in white painted floor to ceiling cupboards that jut out from the wall, forming internal walls which end abruptly just before the edge of the balconies. 

 Wax model of an orchid

When I visited the herbarium twenty five years ago I was taken up the staircase to meet some of the old retired botanists who devoted their free time to the classification of specimens in the collection. Each man (for they were all men) sat  at a table between the cupboards, busy with his magnifying glass, pencils and paper. The whole building was suffused with a quiet air of concentration. This time I was in the midst of a group of people led by a Kew Garden expert botanist, all eagerly asking questions. There was no question of ascending the spiral staircase or meeting the old retired botanists.

The people working in Kew are seriously concerned about the tragic loss of plant species, for their work is to name and classify the world's plants. In addition to this they are actively engaged in plant and ecosystem conservation. 

Botanists from Kew are constantly discovering new plant species. It's very important that they collect specimens of these new plants, which they preserve in a press, together with a detailed description of the exact place where they find them.

I'm afraid I didn't manage to get the whole title in. It says 

28,187 plant species are currently recorded as being of medicinal use. 

https://stateoftheworldsplants.com/2017/useful-plants.html

In many parts of the world, especially rural Africa and South America, people still rely on plant medicine. In 2016 the Chinese government, who recognise the importance of plant based medicine, 

announced that they intended to incorporate Traditional Chinese Medicine into their healthcare system by 2020. In 2003 the World Health Organisation estimated that the annual global market for herbal medicines is worth sixty billion dollars. In China 10,000-11,250 plant species are used as medicine but only 563 are listed in the Chinese Pharmacopeia. Botanists at Kew are involved with the conservation of medicinal plants.

Summer Fruit

In the summer when the farm was bursting with cherries, strawberries, raspberries, black currants, red currants and plums my father used to bring boxes of fruit into the kitchen, so my mother was obliged to do something with it. She made huge saucepans of jam, using the same jam jars over and over again. This was not jam that you would recognise, nice, thick, spreadable jam, but rather thin, runny, over sweet jam that soaked into the bread, as long as you hadn’t spread too much margarine or butter on it, in which case it slid off onto the plate.  

“I make the jam runny” she said “to stop your father eating half a pot full on one slice of bread.” 

Dreaming of Fruit

I've been dreaming of fruit ever since Autumn began, which was half way through August this year, the ripening fruit dropping from trees onto foot paths, gardens, lawns and fields; such a bountiful harvest and so early that it caught us unawares. Yes I've been foraging every day for weeks now, but that's not enough to keep up with the wonderful crop that nature has decided to bestow on us this year. Last week I met a friend who begged me to come and pick some of his fruit. "I've got apples, pears, peaches and figs" he said. "Just come and help yourself, whether we're in or not." And so I persuaded someone to take me there in a car, plastic bags stuffed in my pockets. We left with bagfuls of fruit, enormous figs, juicy and ripe, tiny peaches, not ripe at all but fallen from the tree, and beautiful red apples. The pear tree was too tall for us. There was a net hanging strategically under the pear tree but we couldn't reach the fruit that had fallen into it. 

Foraging

I love foraging, especially this time of the year, when the hedges are bursting with fruit: blackberries, elderberries, sloes and hazelnuts. Apples drop from unowned trees, even from trees that belong to people who forget to pick them. I'm out with my containers, collecting glistening piles of blackberries, bagfuls of bruised apples to make into blackberry and apple pies, puddings and tarts: sacks of elderberries to add to my blackberries and apples to make hedgerow puddings, or to stew down to make elderberry juice for its healing properties. Elderberry juice (well cooked) will prevent you getting colds, coughs and flu and help to alleviate stress.

Earlier in the year I was collecting fallen plums and stewing them to make jam, carefully sieving out the stones and skins. Later in the year I will collect rose hips when they are soft and ripe and gently sweat them in a pan on a low heat, then sieve out the hairy pips through muslin and make a syrup for the winter when we need all the vitamin C we can get. Rosehips also have healing properties, helping arthritic joints become more flexible.

When we lived in Italy we went foraging for mushrooms: the yellow finferli, the wonderful porcini that the professional mushroom hunters almost always found first, getting up before dawn to climb the mountain slopes through the forests to the places where they knew they would find them. But we found many others that we knew were edible, carrying them home to clean off the pine needles and earth carefully with a soft cloth, before cooking them, each different type in a different way, some dipped in batter and fried, some fried in butter with parsley and garlic, some stewed slowly in olive oil and salt. But here in England I don't find them so often. Maybe I don't live near to the best places to find them and my foraging is all strictly within walking distance of my house. It's something I do almost on a daily basis this time of the year. There is something infinitely satisfying about finding and cooking wild food and sharing it with appreciative guests and neighbours.

Blesle

Blesle, ancient, mediaeval French town in the Auvergne holds a free music festival every year
http://www.les-plus-beaux-villages-de-france.org/en/blesle

We drove to Blesle on a beautiful sunny day on the 11th August. Half the inhabitants of the town volunteer to organise the festival and the whole town donates money to cover the expenses. All the musicians perform free, in the squares, courtyards, by the riverside, in gardens and in the twelfth century church. We heard heavenly singing by three women in the church, whose voices intertwined along ancient traditional melodies that transported me back to the time when the city walls round the town were intact, when beautiful women wore long, trailing dresses and men galloped into the town on horses. We lay on the grass in a garden while musicians played softly without amplifiers, we danced in the market square to traditional music played by hurdy-gurdy, violin and guitar. Some of the dances involved much stamping, twirling and circling round each other. Everyone knew the dances.

The young people were slim, burnt brown by the sun and beautiful. No one was drunk or abusive. Half timbered houses jutted out into the narrow streets which led to small squares, courtyards and the occasional garden. The houses were built of mottled grey stone. The twelfth century church was large, light and brightly decorated, with brilliantly coloured stained glass windows and a blue ceiling covered in golden fleur de lys. People sat in the pews, on the steps at the back of the church, on the edge of the font, in the choir behind the performing musicians, listening silently to the music.

We left the festival early, to drive all the way back to my daughter's house, up on the high Auvergne plateau, but we returned the following day. 

Calendula

It stopped raining today long enough for the calendula flowers to dry off so that I could pick some to dry and make into calendula oil.

Last year I just used the petals, but this year I decided to try using the whole flowers since there are medicinal compounds in the waxes that coat the sepals. But before I left my allotment I pulled up all the yellow calendula flowers, so that only the orange ones would go to seed. There are more medicinal properties in the orange flowers, the more orange the better.

Calendula flowers ready laid out to dry

These calendula flowers have been drying for a few days. They made a better oil if they have been dried before immersing them into sunflower oil.

A Wet WOMAD

I've been going to WOMAD ever since it began, often to sell programmes, tramping round the campsite, taking the programmes to the happy campers having breakfast, or an evening aperitif. Until one day, two years ago, when the management changed and we all lost our programme selling jobs. But I still go, whatever the weather. But this year I found myself alone at the last minute. Friends were ill, exhausted, stuck at home with people to look after etc.

On Friday Shye Ben Tzur, Israeli composer, performer, poet played with the Rajasthan Express in the Siam tent. He composes instrumental and devotional music in Hebrew, Urdu and Hindi, wonderful fusions of traditional Indian Sufi music, jazz and Rajasthani brass band sounds. I first saw him perform in the Mehrangar fort in Jodhpur, during the sacred music festival last year, with Jonny Greenwood and all sorts of Rajasthani musicians from different musical traditions, all jamming together. For a while I was transported back to the hot, dry Rajasthani desert, away from the wet, muddy English countryside. 

Nomade Orquestra from Brazil played a wonderfully jazzy set in the big red tent on Saturday.Then everyone rushed to the Siam tent as the rain began to fall, where a rapper was entertaining the crowd - not my favourite kind of music, but it was far too wet to go anywhere else. Leaving the tent after the set was not an appetising prospect, so most of us were trapped, waiting for Seu Jorge, who surreally sang David Bowie songs in Portuguese. The audience joined in and sang in English. A very strange set.

Rain stopped just long enough for us to leave the tent and stand in the mud, or dance in the mud to Toots and the Maytals. Half way through his set the rain started again in earnest. People put their umbrellas up and stayed to watch, but I joined the throng of fleeing festival goers as we tramped and skidded through the slippery mud to the car park.

The hawthorn berries are starting to ripen up. Hawthorn, Crataegus monogyna, is used to stimulate the peripheral circulation. 

How did you come to your path?

It was a slow process; a very slow process. It took the best part of half a century. The writing was always there. I wrote voluminous letters to all sorts of people. I kept diaries. I scribbled all sorts of stuff, but it never occurred to me to put it together in the form of a book. Until, that is, I finished my PhD at the grand age of fifty, and began to research the medicinal plants that grew where I had chosen to live, on the borders of Wales in a wild and watery place in the Golden Valley. I began to be aware of the ancient Celtic traditions that permeated every layer of life in these Welsh borderlands. I became interested in the traditional medicinal plants that the ancient Celts were using and I started to collect and grow them, foraging in the countryside around my house for wild berries, leaves, roots and all things useful to an ancient wise woman, someone who might call herself a hedgewitch today, who would just have been the local healer once. I discovered that the plants that were used for medicine were surrounded by myth, mystery and symbolic meaning that was once as important at their physical healing properties.  

Betony, very sacred Celtic plant, grows in old meadows. I have been trying to grow betony, without success. I ordered some seeds and sowed them in my allotment, but nothing happened.
Maybe they will surprise me and sprout up next year.

Betony increases circulation to the brain, thus improving memory. It is a mild tonic and helps the body to heal itself, slowly. Betony is one of those herbs that you should take every day for a long period in order to benefit from its gradual uplifting effects. Take an infusion of the dried herb when you have a headache, feel anxious or depressed. It will gradually improve these symptoms.