'Summer ' 2008

As you may have read the skies here are dark with pinstripe-suited gentlemen leaping from investment banks as we apparently (and inevitably) enter the crash of the century. Our children are out at dawn every morning foraging in the fields by the river for blackberries, windfall apples and wild mushrooms so that we can maintain the necessary calories to remain alive. I am frantically engaged in boiling jars and filling the garage with preserves of every variety and enough home brewed beer and cider to see us through to 2018. I’ve calculated that the last Depression lasted ten years so I’m making sure we’re stocked up on a decades worth of James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart videos from Oxfam to watch while we stuff ourselves with raspberry coulis. The foraging has its risks mind. In August in France we were very proud of ourselves when we gathered a carrier bag full of girolles mushrooms in the forest one morning for breakfast. We checked that the peculiar looking, curly, yellow mushrooms were as edible as our guidebook said with the pharmacy before frying them in butter and wolfing the lot.

The next morning we went out and gathered another bag full of the evil looking girolles and made a large omelette with grated goats cheese. It was absolutely delicious – even Isobel ate two giant slices of it - and we proudly took over a smaller bag full of them to the neighbour as a gift. She took one sniffy look at them and said ‘No they are not girolles.’ With a gulp with asked if they were edible and she replied, ‘I don’t know, but we don’t eat them’. This quickly wiped the greasy, self-satisfied grin off our faces.

With the pharmacy closed and alert to the possibility of immediate kidney failure we went home and waited for the end (thinking of the story linked here). Fortunately, when we woke up alive the next day we were able to discover from the pharmacy that they were lactarius deliosus and quite edible. This hasn't stopped us from feasting on giant puffballs the size of sheep, Ceps and other delicacies from the wilds of Westwood or Paillange, but there's now a dialysis machine on standby.

If you made the mistake of returning to the UK this summer you will know it was even more of a washout than last year. Deluges, floods and hurricanoes have marked August out as most dreadful British summers of all time. It rained a fair bit in France too, but we had enough sun for it to feel like summer, even swim a bit, except in the evening when a woodfire was necessary to prevent the chattering of teeth.

Back home it seems like only a few weeks since I put the winter jumpers up in the attic and here I am huddled in the kitchen in my letterbox red and most unflattering fleece. Tom has started secondary school and is enjoying it. Sarah is now on a 0.6 post at Wiltshire College so there’s a bit more stability. I am really behind schedule but still enjoying being the oldest student in Britain. The Emirates seem like a distant hallucination – a good regular income, a large house with no storage issues, a social life at weekends, a giant and almost empty swimming pool, guaranteed barbeque weather and ahem, childcare. It’s just impossible here for two people to work and to send your kids to school without them going feral, or taking out a second mortgage and working twelve hours a day.

We still love it here, but it isn’t easy and the Lilliputian dimensions of English homes can quickly lead to ugly territorial disputes and cabin fever. I was up in Glasgow last week and was reminded how much more space the Scots have. No wonder Edward Longshanks sent in the infantry. The Merchant City has got to be one of the best square miles in Europe. Okay, so you can still be knifed in Govan but in Glasgow City Centre you can get a sensational glass of Shiraz and enjoy it beneath glorious twelve foot ceilings, candlelight and fine Nordic design. It makes Bristol look like the shabby wreck of a city it is. Between a succession of useless British governments and the Luftwaffe the south of England is mostly a shambles, except way out in the sticks where town planners and Heinkel bombers couldn’t reach.

Right, its late and time to watch Sexcetera or whatever hard core porn passes for television these days at this hour on British television. The ‘watershed’ is no joke in 2008.

Write soon with the news,

Yours in moral outrage.

David

PS: I include a pic of Portsmouth's 'Burj al Arab' - hilariously diddy and budget version of Dubai's beachfront hotel.