Languedoc-Roussillon, or how socialism CAN work*

The French have a few quirky foibles that I can ascertain. One is that the indicator stick in their cars is either completely malfunctional from the assembly line, or that the average French driver regards it as somewhere to drape his or her lover’s underwear. Either that or the idea of signalling that one is going to turn left or right is so anathematic to the Gallic sense of propriety that it simply cannot be countenanced. Which may account for their hilarious sense of politics.

Another is their entirely civilised approach to food and the way it applies to family. It’s something that’s disappeared from our culture, and that is a tragedy for us. The ritual of the meal – breakfast, lunch and dinner – is quite sacrosanct to many French. Children at school stop for lunch and eat a proper four-course meal, albeit in small portions. And we witnessed this during our stay in the Languedoc-Roussillon with Olivier and Anne-Karin.

Olivier and Anne-Karin run a small B&B in the town of Gattigues-Aiguliers, about 10km from Uzès in this region. It’s called Les Sardines aux Yeux Bleus and it’s one of the most peaceful and relaxed places I’ve enjoyed. They have restored this C17 farmhouse from a ruin over 10 years, and it puts my efforts at home to shame. But we’re not here to compare renovations, or wonder why we don’t have a swimming pool like theirs. We’re here to look at the place and to eat, and the meal of choice was a modern French plat du jour on a Saturday night at a restaurant called Le Tracteur. Which translates as The Tractor. Why?

A red Ferguson 35 - in Sanhilac, France...

Now getting to Sanhilac meant driving through Sagries, and driving to Sagries meant our TomTom GPS thought it might be funny if we went down the smallest road in the western world. Not so much a road as a goat-track, with a huge wall on one side and a creek on the other. People, we were driving a FIAT 500 and we struggled to get through. (I hope the nice people at Europcar aren’t reading this) Fiats, god love them, are excellent small vehicles for the city. We kinda fell in love with ours. But offroad is NOT their forté, and this was seriously offroad, even for France. And you know there’s trouble when, at the end of the road, where the plants are coming in through the windows and water is underneath you, your GPS actually says “ummmm – hang on… I might have made a mistake…”

Anyway, after negotiating through Sagries, another town with millimetre clearances in the streets, we arrive in Sanhilac. Too early for dinner, despite having driven across a golf-course, we walk for an hour to and from the Gorges du Gardon.

View of the Gorges du gardon from Sanhilac

That was always going to stimulate the appetite, and we were first in the door at Le Tracteur at 7.30pm. Cassis to start, then the meal…

A red Ferguson 35 – in Sanhilac, France…

View of the Gorges du gardon from Sanhilac

And worth the wait. Tiff had the lamb, and I had coalfish, something I hadn’t really heard of to any extent before. These were really great meals, modern rather than traditional. Three courses for 28 euros, and a glass of Chateauneuf du Papes to boot . Most of the produce is local, it’s absolutely fresh, and it’s inspiring. Tiff’s dessert of chocolate and coriander was an amazing burst of flavour. And while I was sporting a rather slowly receding sore head due to meeting our new friends (happy honeymoons Catherine and Mark) and Alain and Francoise, this hit the spot. A word of warning – if a Brittany chef offers you his homemade prune liquor after a few wines, do not drink more than one small glass. That stuff is serious rocket fuel.

So – here’s to the wonderful South of France, to the city of Uzes and its never-ending markets and wonderful toasted sandwiches of kebab – a small meal, but perfect – we had it twice; our other friends Richard and Nicola who fed us and gave us even more food to take to Spain, but above all our hosts Anne-Karin and Olivier, who were kinder and more helpful than anyone ever needs to be. And to their home, which is beyond beautiful.

Onwards to Barcelona!

* just kidding. The Languedoc-Roussillon region has a Socialist mayor. He’s as useless as the next politician.

After Avignon

Firstly – apologies for the delay in writing. There’s a reasonable excuse. It’s here.

Gattigues

This is Olivier and Anna-Karin’s house in Gattigues-Aigaliers near Uzes in the Languedoc-Roussilon. It’s almost summer here, and it’s as near to as perfect a place to be as you could imagine. And it was not conducive to doing anything much except enjoying the local wine, the local company and the pool and sun. Oh, and Uzes, the town that seems to have a market each day of the week.

But first, Avignon.

After a rather shaky start, which we put down eventually to the youthfulness of the staff in the bistro, Avignon gave us some real pleasures – the Palace of the Popes, the Cathedral, and the architecture generally. It’s a wonderful place to wander around, except in the Carrefours (French version of an IGA or Franklins), where the trick is for a young punter to try and slip his goods into your purchases and get you to pay for them – and to protest loudly when you spoil his plans. But such is life.

We attempted to reach Villeneuve des Avignon (“New Village of Avignon”, as in being built somewhere around 1500) for a meal, as Chamberlain suggested, but were thwarted by the vagaries of the bus system and a pretty tricky system of signage that left us up a lane contemplating the Rhône on one side of us and a wheat field on the other. After the midday sun started to make a mess of us, we decided to retreat to the ramparts of the old town and spend the evening doing some washing and having wine and saucisson, pate, cheese and bread in the local square  - and to give the girls at the bistro from the night before another chance. Sadly, they were as incompetent as the previous night, but friendly, and the food and a bottle of incomparable Chateauneuf de Papes – a wine at least recommended by Chamberlain – made for a pretty good night. Moreso as we were never more than 300 yards from our room.

Gattigues

Avignon

Still life with hare by Manet

Avignon is astonishing – the walls have been pulled own and put up again a few times, and it’s within a three-iron of the Rhône river… which is a serious body of water. But its winning aspect is the park next to the Cathedral du Notre Dame, which has views which are breath-taking.

Avignon

Having said that, there is also a fantastic gallery that has work by Degas, Van Gogh, Picasso, Vuillard, Manet and a bunch of other artists… amazing. It’s a former private collection. And it’s rare indeed to see a Manet sitting on its own, on a wall, no real security, so close you could touch it. And it’s a good Manet, too.

Still life with hare by Manet

Sorry about that, Joelle.

Enough of Avignon. Onto the Languedoc!

Avignon – first impressions

Do not approach the locals in the afternoon. It is hot here, sticky, and unless your French is good, they tend to either snap at you or ignore you. Understandably. It’s a town that is plagued by mosquitoes when it’s still, or not when it is windy.

OK. Here’s the Chamberlain quote: “

AVIGNON—The famed walled city of the popes is one of the prime attractions of Provence. Famed for its gigantic Palace of the Popes and its nursery rhyme Pont St. Bénézet, Avignon is a gay city, filled with theaters and openair cafés, and makes very agreeable headquarters for the traveler. There are three or four acceptable hotels. The ancient town of narrow streets has been bisected by one modern avenue, the classic rue de la République. At either end of this animated thoroughfare are several restaurants where you can get along. After a considerable stay, however, this weary explorer can’t recommend one above the other. Avignon must have its food-conscious citizens among those who scribble on public walls, however. On a gray plaster surface near the Préfecture the printed inscription “Vive le roi” has been deftly transformed by the addition of one horizontal and one vertical line to “Vive le rôti.”

VILLENEUVE-LÈS-AVIGNON—Across the river in this picturesque town facing the battlements of Avignon, the outlook is better. Here, behind the church, is a Provençal inn, established in an aged priory, which will delight antiquarians and voluptuaries alike. You may dine either in a sheltered courtyard or in a large paneled dining hall in the Hôtel le Prieuré, and in either case the experience should be memorable. We tried all of the specialties listed on the prix fixe dinner and found them delectable, especially the crêpes de Prieur. These were thin, squared pancakes folded over diced ham, covered with a sauce béchamel and grated cheese and then browned in the oven—a regal entree. Monsieur Mille, the cordial proprietor, is capable of arranging a truly fine dinner party, if you feel in the mood for one.”

So Villeneuve Les Avignon it must be. More later… bientot!

Dijon Tonight, Paralytic Tomorrow

The French have liberated themselves from many things – the English, aristocracy, fascism. colonialism. But they cannot seem to defeat their addiction to shit music.

We’re in Dijon, first of the regional capitals in which the search for the food that Samuel Chamberlain wrote about will be undertaken. However, we’ve also arrived on the summer solstice, which coincides with the Fete de la Musique. This seems, in Dijon, to be an excuse to get together the usual suspects of crusty white reggae poonseekers, superannuated pubrockers, thrash metal Patti Smith wannabes, jazz bores, kids playing Radiohead covers, radio stations and stoners playing dance beats, some Christian jazz (!!), some actually quite good gypsy folk/rap enthusiastic “c’est Bonne!”, and – I kid you not – on the main stage in the Place de la Liberation, some fat blues hack from the US who thinks a great joke is to break into the opening bars of ‘La Bamba’ constantly (for fuck’s sake, either play it or don’t) and finishes his set with a cover of Portishead’s ‘Glory Box’. Yep, you heard it, ‘Glory Box’.

But then, this is a country that, despite having marched itself out of feudal bondage on the back of the Marsellaise, and giving us Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, still regards the execrable Johnny Hallyday as a pop star and Serge Gainsbourg as something greater than a lecherous drunk with an occasional turn of phrase.

Having said that, there are thousands and thousands in the crowd here, and they seem to be enjoying themselves, so maybe be it’s me. No – someone is covering Toto outside my window. It’s definitely the French.

Anywhere, here’s a pic of just about the only good thing we saw, some young French boys giving it their all acoustically, two guitars, bass, drums, playing some gypsy/rap/funk stuff quite well…

The best thing we saw at the Musique fete in Dijon. Check out the cat in the window.

Now – the food. Chamberlain didn’t really recommend a restaurant as such in Dijon, other than the dining room at the Dijon Railway Station (long gone), so I asked in our local cafe this morning and was told that the old hotel/restaraunts really disappeared here in the 60s and 70s as the chains bought up the hotels and turfed the owners. One that remains is the Restaurant Hostellerie du Chapeau Rouge, run by William Franchot, but sadly our budget didn’t stretch to the degustation. After further consultation (really burnishing the old Francáis here) we settled on L’Escargot – simple really, as snails are a Burgundian specialty. I mean, so is beef Bourguinon, but we had that last night here. It was quite good, but we were really setting ourselves up for tonight – we walked from one end of Dijon to the other, fuelled by cheese, pate and fruit brought from the excellent Dijon market, which was open today.

The best thing we saw at the Musique fete in Dijon. Check out the cat in the window.

Needless to say, this meal was another fine affair, the jambon was a little more subtle than in Paris… but how wonderful is parsley when it’s used well? And the wine – a local chablis chosen for us – was just fabulous. We had a 500ml bottle but could have easily had 750ml, it married so well. I chose the salmon d’Aligote, which is a mustard sauce; Tiff the poulet a’la Gaston Gerard – again, a mustard sauce. This being Dijon, you could expect little different. You’d never see mustard used so daringly or well elsewhere though – not creamy or watery, but somewhere in-between, sharpish and piquant. And the desserts – which we’ve avoided so far, but tonight we were eating the formulé or set menu – were brilliant too: Tiff’s tiramisu would have blown twice the legal limit if it were driving, while I had la poire au vin de cannelle et son sorbet cassis, pear in wine and cinnamon with a raspberry cassis sorbet. Deadly.

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How to do Paris in a day (or, Fun with Fab and Jane)

This is it. The end of the kiddy section. No more mucking about. Heads down. We’re getting off the boat. And a word of warning – this blog contains pictures of some very serious food.

I mean what I say. This really is the Cité in a day, no reservations or exclusions, up to and including a full-blown street demonstration by motorcyclistes, Mass at Notre Dame; an exhibition at the Grand Palais; the Champs Elysees; being abused by both a Metro ticket machine and a Left bank bookseller for trying to use legal tender; Montmartre; restaurants, wine, coffee, beer; history from the start of Paris – hell, let’s just do it.

Firstly, arrive in the city the night before, and go to your hotel which your brilliant and beautiful wife has booked in the Rue Cujas, behind the Sorbonne and on the site of the ancient Roman forum, the oldest streets in Paris. Weep at the beauty of the Cite from your balcony, then, armed with sturdy footwear, a map and a ridiculously overblown confidence in your grasp of the language, head down through St Germain and around the Seine. Walk towards a couple of searchlights in the sky, past the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the police guards in their kepis, until your are suddenly under the Tour Eiffel. Stand directly underneath it and look up. Then go and buy a crepe. Don’t bother climbing it unless you enjoy queues and loud Americans. Walk back through St Germain and collapse into your bed, for tomorrow you must seize Paris.

In order to do this, (and I suppose this is cheating, but hey, it’s my blog) you need a guide. And in our case the indescribably lovely Fabrice Bigot and his wife Jane Burton met us at the Champs Elysee station at 10am to begin. This was after I attempted to pay for our train tickets with a handful of 5 Eurocents and was told by the billet-machine, literally, “Take back your money”. Apparently it doesn’t like change, and has a very Gallic posture towards the customer.

Fabrice is a native Parisien, a lecturer in French history, and a very funny man. Immediately we go to the Grand Palais for the Odilon Redon retrospective, a fabulous and exhaustive exhibition of the great Symbolist. I get a lesson in French efficiency – when the spring rains burst over the queues, the staff of the museum instantly ignore the security protocols a little, open another door and usher people in. It’s terribly civilised.

From the exhibition we walk the Champs Elysee to the Louvre. it’s before midday, yet the queues are thousands long. We’re not here for the Louvre proper though – it’s a history of the city and its centuries of rebuilding. Fabrice shows us where the old city walls were, how Louis XIV built his new Paris and Haussman built it again. We walk the Seine on the Right Bank and see the remains, on the Isle de la Cité, of the towers of old Paris, saved by Victor Hugo and others when Haussman was sweeping away centuries of history.

The Seine itself is a major harbour, and moorings are still in the walls all its length. It’s much cleaner than it used to be, like the Thames, and I’m told leaves the Yarra to shame. The tacky tourboats are no better though.

Fab leads us along past the book and postersellers, who I suppose have to deal with thousands of tourists each week. But seriously, we were just trying to help him by giving him the right change in Euros for a postcard, and for the second time in a day were are on the end of a spray about money and not wanting small change.

I think this is indicative of a deeper malaise. I don’t think the French are happy in the EU, in the demands made upon the Republic to bail out the sicker men of Europe constantly. And the French are as pround as any of the currency. The franc had a certain cache, even if it was, what, a thousand francs to the dollar? Anyway, Fab says there are rumblings about abandoning the union. And on the face of what is happening here, one wouldn’t be surprised.

Lunch, and the venue is Le Trumilou, a proper and established French bistro on the banks of the Seine. It’s 30, 40, maybe 50 years old? Fab knows the waiter from his time in Paris years before.

A note about waitstaff in France. It’s a proper job here – they’re not out-of-work actors or students. They are professionals, respected and paid well, and they do an amazing job. They are incredibly swift, helpful and discreet, they KNOW the food and they don’t fawn over you or worse, demean you. They expect that you will know what you want, and if you don’t, that you will ask them.

So – the meal. We order a half-bottle of merlot cabernet-franc, Chateau Tertre de Calon- it’s only lunchtime, after all – and scout the cartes. Escargot immediately; Tiff orders a gratin of endive and Auvergne blue cheese for starters and sauté d’agneau a la tomate (lamb in tomato); Jane the canard au pruneaux (duck with prunes, a house specialty), Fab the rognon de veau al a moutarde (kidneys cooked to melting in mustard); I go for the magret de canard au miel (duck breast with honey). Fries and pomme de terre sautees are standard.

The wine….

What a meal to start in Paris with! Everything is cooked to perfection: subtle, traced with garlic. The meats are soft, the kidneys tender and moist and not gritty at all.

The bill for four, with wine, is 96 Euros, so around $130 Australian. $42.50 each. It should make you weep at home. A meal like this in Australia is nigh unobtainable, except at the most expensive restaurants. It’s standard fare here. Criminal.

OK – that’s half the day. More later, mes amis…

Some thoughts from Luton Airport

One – avoid Luton Airport if you can. It’s hell.

I think that the number of gardens in this country apparently designed by Lancelot “Capability” Brown is much like the number of people who claim to have been at the 1972 Carlton-Collingwood grand final; that is, greatly exaggerated.

Everywhere we have walked, the garden, no matter how grand or small, was  supposedly designed and installed by Capability Brown, who was the C17 version of Alan Seale, Jamie Durie, Peter Cundall and Paul Bangay combined, topped with a perfumed wig and unlimited amounts of aristocratic moolah to do whatever he wanted.

We’ve visited two gardens – one designed by Brown, and one designed by the man who influenced him.

One that was definitely designed by Mr Brown is Blenheim Palace. Let’s put the ridiculous before the sublime and talk about Blenheim. Inevitably, as with so many things in England, this means talking about Churchill again, or rather THE Churchills, as it’s the family seat. Churchill in this country is like Bradman in Australia, a brand mercilessly used by anyone attempting a cheap idea of the national psyche or to play a sales pitch, and largely having nothing to do with the real human being. Also, as far as I know, Churchill did not play cricket. Which is all that Bradman did, apart from mistrust Catholics. I think they had that in common.

Blenheim is almost too grand to be imagined. And it is too grand. It’s just too much. It’s a vast exaggeration of the pride of the first Duke of Marlborough, John Churchill, son of the first Sir Winston Churchill. Queen Anne gave him Crown land in exchange for winning the Battle of Blenheim against the French Louis XIV in the Spanish wars of succession. Which, as Tiff pointed out, is really all the aristocratic families of Europe have ever done, up to and including the Great War – piss away soldier’s lives in the pursuit of their own glory, a glory which is largely about possessing land that’s not historically or culturally theirs, and marrying themselves into chinless, long-nosed genetic oblivion.

Blenheim Palace is vast. Enormous. I don’t think that just winning a mere battle could justify such a gift. Churchill must have had some dirt on the Royals to be paid off like this. And a lot of it is gauche. There’s a lot of apricot and pink, a lot of quite appalling china, some pretty dire portraits and huge amounts of empty space. It reminds you not so much of any kind of home (which, it must be said, was not the point of these places) as a training run for any modern shopping centre that’s trying to achieve that piss-elegant look. Chadstone, are you listening?

Anyway, Churchill got all this for – get this – the rent of ONE FLAG a year. That’s right. Each year the Duke of Marlborough (currently the 11th I think: some 85-year-old, 6’5″ bloke courtesy of his grandmother Consuela, who was 6’4″ herself but dumped the family for some French equivalent) has to front up to Buckingham Palace with a 18″x18″ bit of fabric embroidered with a few fleur de lys, deliver it, and go home again. Man but these people have the gig sewn up in this place.

Churchill’s son died early, so there was no second duke, but rather a Duchess of Marlborough, who promptly married a Spencer (sound familiar? It will.) and churned out the kids. By the time of the fourth Duke, we are looking at the Spencer-Churchills and they are seriously, seriously rich, big-time soldiers and players. He employs Brown to pretty much bulldoze the acreage – hundreds of acres – and rebuild it according to an idea of what nature should be. Which is vistas, views, large trees, paths, ponds, lakes, ha-has, temples in the Greek style, cascades, secret gardens – everything we associate with colonial botanic gardens up to very near the present, and with our ideas of English parks. And golf courses. It’s the “English Countryside”, which of course is something that’s been largely man-made since the Romans planted their sandals here, if not before.

So the Spencers and the Churchills have been English top-of-the-food-chainers for a very long time. Which is why I think Charles was made to marry Diana – to try and hook up those interlopers the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Mountbattens, aka Windsors, into some decent English bloodstock, so to speak. Which is all pretty self-evident and explanatory, so I don’t need to add my opinions any further, other than the average Englishman and woman seem to love their royals/country, and forbear their forays into half-wittedness. I couldn’t.

Rousham House has been owned by the Dormer family since 1635. It costs you £5 to wander the grounds all day – no shop, no cafe, no spruikers, no dicky miniature steam train. Just staff quietly maintaining what Monty Don described as one of the finest gardens in England. And it is. It’s by William Kent. It has the requisite vista across the river to a fake crumbling abbey called the eye-catcher, temples, reconstituted statuary, ponds and so on, and a very, very gorgeous walled vegetable garden. It’s quiet, the people who go there tend to be there for this quiet, and the wildlife is abundant. We loved it. I had not one but two quick snoozes on the lawns in the grounds, trying to defeat this rotten lurgy. It’s a restorative place. Not quite enough sadly, but it’s what you want if you are looking for stereotypical English loveliness – newts in the ponds, the river Cherwell running through it, buildings still being used for the purpose they were built for. Of course, you can’t help but notice the long row of staff houses and wonder how it all was managed, how the tenant system ensured no one got out of place, above their station.

But it’s pointless of me to rail about this. It’s what it is, or rather rapidly was, as the class system disintegrates. No help, I must say, to the appalling English newspapers, of which Mr Murdoch is the proprietor of most, which perpetuate class and regional stereotypes and celebrate mundanity. It at once champions and lampoons the badly-tattooed, chain-smoking, shaven-headed sub-culture of ignorance that sadly many Britons (mostly male) find a happy home in. By the way, smoking is really big in the UK, still. It’s banned almost everywhere, so the streets are peopled by those who have been banished from the pubs and so on, puffing away.

But the English are the best drivers – so much better than Australians. Polite – you never hear a horn – patient, able to grasp the idea of keeping to the left, able to drive fast – really fast – without being a dickhead, and the roads are so clearly marked you have to make a pretty huge effort to get lost. Of course the streets are tiny, but there’s a protocol strictly observed of pulling over to let others through. And there seem to be no police on the roads. Everyone just drives – normally. It doesn’t mean that you don’t drive quickly – the left lane is where you live unless you are overtaking, and by overtaking I mean at some rather hair-raising speeds – but it is by no way a place you should have an accident in. Unless you are a dickhead.

Allons a Paree!

If it’s Wednesday night, it must be Hampshire.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single couple in possession of a Kia Picante, must be in Alton.

For those ignorant of the history of Hampshire, they pretty much dine out here on the fact that Jane Austen was a native. Jane Austen invented the Austin motor car. Austen is the Old English spelling. I think I’ve got that right.

It’s been a busy few days since we left the Crown and Cushion, which, as I promised to tell you about, was once owned by Keith Moon. Keith Moon was not, as has been suggested, the English stepbrother of the Rev Sun Myung Moon, but rather some sort of rock AND roll musician who played the drums and blew up toilets. I don’t know a lot about him either . Do you? He was in band that used a relative pronoun as a noun. Who does that? Anyway, the Crown and Cushion has about 40 rooms, concealed in a labyrinth it appears from the time it took to find ours. And it was the scene of some pretty wild parties. I reckon the carpet in our room dated from then. I was tempted to try and snort it. It’s big, but rabbit-warrenish. The toilet in our room was intact, unlike the sense of humour of the stereotypical English middle-aged couple we shared the breakfast room with. “No PLATES!” the wife screeched at the rather lovely but hapless French waiter. “Now, I’ll TELL you what we want… NO  NO LISTEN…” etc. It was all very pleasing.

So – since leaving Adderbury, we have been to Chipping Norton, Cheltenham, Fulbrook, Stow On The Wold (my vote for name of the year) , Warwick via Banbury, back to Deddington (by which time I was really unwell) , Bloxham, Rousham, Oxford, Alton, Sissinghurst and Chartwell. In the space of three days. I had to ask Tiff where we actually are right now in writing this, as I’ve spent a lot of the time in some kind of stupor induced by the cold in my head.

I like the English for sticking with the imperial system of measurement. Miles per hour is so much more satisfying. And the way they manage to cram SO many people into a tiny island and manage to maintain farms only 35 miles from London. If it were Australia, that would all be second-rate housing development now. In fact, it is. So, in the spirit of showing what they’ve maintained – this is Sissinghurst. Oh -and Chartwell – Winston Churchill’s pad. Both damnably close to London. Vita Sackville-West and Churchill were both genius – fully-fledged. That Churchill helped design the house AND personally built the walls in his garden is astonishing. How did he find time? He was a pretty average painter – but then he wasn’t alone in that. At least he loved democracy. Let’s not mention the Dardanelles. And Singapore. And Greece…

I’ll publish some more pics – of which there are many – when I work out an easy way to batch resize so I can find them on Tiff’s computer.

Tonight’s meal  - at Monty’s Bistro in Altona – Alton, I mean – was a warm lamb salad followed by a fillet of sea bass with chorizo, new potatoes, tomatoes and rocket. The lamb was DOA. Not good at all. The sea bass was excellent, picked up by the chef in the morning from Poole Harbour, we were assured. Might as well be Pearl Harbour for what I know about fish, to be honest, but it wasn’t overcooked, it wasn’t oily and it went tremendously well with a day’s walking and a bottle of Louis Latour Macon-Villages chardonnay, 2009. Tiff has done some sketches – I’ll add those too – and a big cheer to our waitress Georgie, who, despite being in her FIRST night on the job, put up with the Australian wanker asking all the questions about  the food. Finished with local Stilton, Leicester and Cheddar. Actually, the Stilton was either not local, or not a Stilton, as that can be produced from only three counties, but hell, it was a long day. To steal from the aforementioned Ms Austen, ‘My sore throats are always worse than anyone’s.’