Anything grows

In Lebanon, a sun that’s shining

Is looked on as nothing striking,

Here heaven knows, anything grows

.

Tomatoes red in great abundance

And yellow bananas there

beside the road, anything grows

.

We all need five a day

Of some fruit today,

Veggies too today

That’s just right today,

When nearly all today,

Of our food today,

Could be organic if we chose

.

A chef I’m not nor good cook either

I know that you’re none the wiser

As heaven knows, food here just grows

With apologies to Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes”.

We spent the weekend in Zahlé, about an hour or so’s drive inland from Beirut. It’s an old picturesque town climbing rapidly up the side of a mountain rising from the floor of the Bekaa valley – hence the town’s nickname, the bride of the Bekaa. Climb the path running beside the little river and you come to an area where restaurants are situated, many of which span the river, providing a sound back drop of bubbling water to eat by. The restaurants all offer variations on the traditional Lebanese celebration meal.

Said meal consists of three parts, the first is known as the mesa. During this phase, which can last a good hour, dish after dish is brought, until the table is pretty well completely covered, after which, dishes are just piled over one another. The staples are hummus (based on a very fine purée of chick peas), mtabal (an aubergine dip), fatouche (a salad with croutons made of unleavened bread that look the cousins of potato crisps) and tabouleh (based on chopped parsley and eaten with lettuce or cabbage leaves). The dips were all eaten, not with knives and forks, but with wonderfully thin, hot, unleavened bread that looked like very fine pancakes. Alongside the staples came marinated beetroot, a dish of spiced green leaves (rocket, thyme and fizzy, crisp, little ones), sliced grapefruit-sized tomatoes with black pepper, small whole onions in lemon juice, various cheeses and a huge bowl of salad ingredients (lettuce, spring onions, tomatoes, lemons and white cabbage) in case you felt imaginative enough to create your own extra dishes.

No problem with five a day (the long running campaign to get us Brits to eat more fruit and veg) here then, five a meal is downright abstemious.

But we haven’t finished the mesé yet, there are hot dishes too – cheese rolls, chicken livers and other inside bits (not much gets wasted), chicken wings and thick cut double fried chips. And for the brave there’s kibbi nehyi; it’s “lamburger on the hoof”, finely ground uncooked lamb mixed with cracked wheat and eaten with lots of olive oil and the thin bread mentioned above, oh! and just in case, take arak, whisky or other strong liquor with it – the alcohol will ensure the demise of the risks associated with eating raw meat, or at least that’s the hope/excuse.

Excellent meal, lots of variety, no embarrassing moments when presented with something you don’t like, there’s so much to choose from, just move on to another dish. It’s balanced, with a good mixture of protein, carbohydrates and vegetable matter and contains all the vitamins and minerals known to science, as well, no doubt, as some that aren’t.

And then came phase II - the Barbecue. Arrive skewers of finely minced, spiced meat; skewers of marinated, diced lamb; skewers of spiced chicken; barbecued onions and tomatoes. Traditional inland fare, no sign of fish here: well, the river is very shallow.

How does one finish off such a meal? Phase III which is fruit, fruit and more fruit. We were expected to move to another table for this, where, laid out were bowls of apples, strawberries, sliced melons (honeydew and water), peaches, cherries, apricots and kiwi fruit.

Kiwi fruit! Err, not normally associated with the Levant aren’t kiwi fruit, but Lebanese agriculture has been trying to diversify and, surprise, surprise, kiwi fruit do very nicely thank you in the Bekaa, where anything, anything grows!

The King is dead, long live the King

Watching on CNN the change of British Prime minister a couple of days ago reminded me of the traditional statement made at Royal changeovers, “The King is dead, long live the King”. We Brits really are brutal to our leaders. As PM, Mr. Brown had the traffic stopped for him on his short journey from Downing Street to Buckingham Palace, on leaving, his car was confronted by early evening London traffic and was even overtaken by a cyclist, albeit jumping a red light. It was not, you will have noticed, a return trip, as his right to go back to what had been home for some three years had been forfeited with his resignation.

We celebrate centenaries of literary, scientific and artistic figures (the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, the three hundredth anniversary of J.S.Bach’s) but rarely that of politicians and still less past Kings and Queens, so last week saw the much unmarked hundredth anniversary of the death of King Edward VII. What, you might ask, is the connection with Lebanon? Well, he was the last British Monarch to visit Beirut, albeit over thirty years before accession to the throne.

By one of those odd trains of thought this nugget of pub-quiz trivia brought back vivid memories of the coronation. There had been a succession of them, after the record reign of Queen Victoria, the one of Edward VII infamous for having his assorted mistresses gathered together in one part of the viewing gallery in an area nicknamed “the King’s loose box”. But they were all London affairs, photographed for and reported in newspapers the following day for the rest of the population. By contrast, the coronation of the present Queen was televised live, something that boosted sales of TV sets dramatically, back in 1953. My dad bought one – a state of the art, up to the minute, twelve inch screen affair with a black and white image which it was virtually impossible to see without the curtains closed. About twenty five assorted family and neighbours packed our front room for the spectacle, both the event itself and the introduction to a television. The day after, my school, like all schools I suppose, gave a party for the pupils, OUTSIDE, in Sheffield, in glorious sunshine. All present were given a mug decorated with pictures of the coronation – this device, aptly called a coronation mug, which would by now be a collector’s item, has long since been lost or broken or recycled or all three.

Now what connects these two events with a gap of over fifty years? The unwritten constitution in action? That’s a factor certainly, but for me, it’s the effect of the media in making me an active observer of what is happening as it happens, so that although, obviously, I’m not part of it, the feeling of involvement is real.

Ex-Smoker's Foot

Smoking is not exactly compulsory in the Arab world, but it is strongly encouraged. Pretty well everywhere actually. Whether eating, shopping or visiting friends, smoking tends to oil the wheels of social and other occasions. The only exception is the cinema where I suppose it would pose too much of a fire hazard.

My local pharmacy has an ash-tray on the counter, in case you need something to do while having a prescription filled. A heart doctor of my acquaintance (cardiologist for the technically minded) not only smokes himself but has a large ash-tray on the patient’s side of the desk in his consulting rooms; not all that unreasonable, I suppose, as presumably being told there was something a bit wrong with number one pump would probably trigger the need for a fag! Go into some houses, and there’ll be a large bowl with many different brands of cigarettes and you’ll be encouraged to help yourself.

A packet of cigarettes costs about eighty pence so smoking is both cheap and culturally acceptable.

Downright perverse then it was that I became an ex-smoker, for the second time in my life, about four years ago. Congratulations abounded, British smoking friends drooled over the savings, calculated at UK prices of course. People told me how much better I’d feel – eventually – and how good it would be for my health.

What no-one really warns you about are the down-sides of becoming an ex-smoker, the most obvious of which being that unwanted extra pounds appear. By my calculations, given that we are ninety per cent water, said pounds arrive at the rate of about an extra digestive biscuit and an extra mug of tea per month – yes one of each a month – and I defy anyone to be that accurate about diet. And those extra pounds have an effect on waist-line and collar size, so all the financial savings have gone on shirts, trousers, belts and tailors’ bills, not to mention a bigger gym subscription.

Gym sub.? Well, the received wisdom is that the counter to increased weight is increased exercise to burn off the calories, so off I trot to the gym club more often than at any time since school days, and there it was compulsory.

I am not a natural athlete, galling then that I am plagued with athlete’s foot, seeming only to have to drive past a swimming pool to be re-afflicted. Perhaps in a former life I was one of those trees that sport wonderfully yellow fungus sprinting up the trunk, or maybe my remains are destined to fertilize mushrooms when I quit this one, for certainly fungi (for that is what athlete’s foot is, a fungus) seem to like me, and regularly followed me home from the gym. Hence the title of this little piece.

Down the years I have tried powders, creams, going barefoot and using a hair-dryer on my toes. I have been to Dr. Scholl’s, pharmacies, skin specialists and a hypnotist. Finally a friend gave me a tip that I am now going to share with you – Head and Shoulders shampoo. “What?!”, I hear you say, “a shampoo!” Well, yes, at the first sign of the nasties, I just rub the stuff in neat a couple of times a day and wow, my feet become magically unathletic again, and so return to matching the rest of me.

For those smokers who are thinking of quitting but worry about the adverse consequences, here’s my piece of advice, stock up on Head & Shoulders shampoo, you’re feet are probably going to need it.

Global cooling

My sun is having a mid-life crisis.

No, that’s not a spelling mistake, I really do mean the bright shiny yellow thing that the ancient Norsemen believed to be driven round the sky each day in its golden chariot to escape a hungry wolf. Mind you they also believed that a giant cow, Audumla by name, and some ice blocks were created out of nothing and gods and man came into being as a result of the thirsty cow licking the ice blocks. It is not clear how the giant cow came into being. Nor the ice blocks.

Modern physics has exposed such bunkum. It believes that everything, including time, was created in an enormous explosion that lasted no time at all. It is not clear how the thing that exploded came into being. And that’s how we got stars. Some of which exploded. And we eventually got cows from the bits that came out of the exploding stars. Oh, and we got ice blocks the same way. And the ancient Norsemen too, which is (almost) where we came in.

Back to the sun. Today it is five billion years old. (Do I hear the strains of “Happy Birthday to you” from somewhere – ah, yes it’s my daughter’s Birthday – the sun’s age is approximate). At the rate it’s consuming fuel, that’s about half of its productive life. Now as human’s age, they slow down but stars like ours do the opposite, they heat up. Thanks to that, our earth will become too hot for life in about half a billion years, a comparatively short time when you think about the sun’s age, but not enough for you to think about changing your will. In fact, if we go back the same distance in time, there wasn't much more than single-celled creatures here on earth.

So what does a mid-life crisis for the Sun actually mean? One of the measures of its activity is the number of sun-spots in evidence, these are regions of turmoil on the Sun’s surface. There were virtually none for a couple of hundred years until 1850, when sun-spot activity suddenly restarted. During those two hundred years, earth cooled. The famous “Frost Fairs” were held annually on the frozen River Thames. During the 1990s sun spot activity began reducing again. What do you know, the earth has been getting cooler since its high of 1998 and even that was cooler apparently than in the time when Julius Caesar invaded Britain; supposedly one of the motivations for the invasion was for the great Caesar to get at Britain’s wine, something that wasn’t able to be made there after the early Middle Ages until the 1960s.

We’re in pretty vague territory here, but a number of mechanisms are believed to depend on sun-spot activity. Less activity means less energy leaving the sun in our direction and some believe that an indirect process causes more clouds to form which reflects some of the energy back out to space. Another mechanism that has increased cloud formation in the past has been, guess what, volcanic ash in the upper atmosphere and we’ve just had an incident that pumped tons of the stuff up there.

So where am I going with all this? Well, just perhaps, nature, in her infinite kindness and wisdom, has thrown us a lifeline or two to help counter the adverse consequences of our headlong rush to swamp our little home (recognize the planet Earth?) with energy.

If that is indeed the case, we should say a gracious “Thank You” and seek to make the best possible use of what may be nothing but a very brief respite. By definition a crisis is temporary and gets resolved, so we can expect the Sun to resume increasing its energy output soon.

Interlude on General Elections

If you’re a politician, don’t come anywhere near me.

There is absolutely nothing personal about that. It’s just sound advice based on track record. Let me explain.

I had the opportunity of meeting two of Britain's Ministers of State over the last five years – Bill Rammell and Shahid Malik. They both seemed energetic, capable chaps with a bit of charisma thrown in. And they both lost their seats last night. Not even MP’s anymore.

In the general election that heralded in Harold Wilson’s first administration, I worked to get the then standing MP for Coventry South re-elected. It was a Tory marginal and, sadly, Philip Hocking was swept aside in the general swing to Labour.

In the same election, a friend of mine was very proud to have been selected as the Conservative candidate for a safe seat. “It’ll need a bit of work doing” he said. He lost his deposit. To be fair, it was the safe Labour seat of Rhondda West. The only other Tory candidate to share that dubious distinction was, I believe, in the Rhondda East constituency.

So the net is that if you want or already have a career in politics, then knowing me doesn’t bring you much luck.

I checked to see what happened last night in the Welsh valleys and it seems that the Tory candidate for Rhondda (they’ve combined East and West now) got enough votes to be able to retain his deposit this time round. Understandable - I’ve never met him.

BLBG meeting, "Regenerating Beirut"

Coventry after WWII, Sheffield after the steel industry collapsed and Glasgow because it needed to, all become models of urban regeneration with what modern marketing men would call a brand image – anyone remember the campaign “Glasgow smiles better”?

Nearly twenty years ago, a team of architects, engineering consultants and town planners conceived a master plan for Beirut. One of the leaders of that team was a gentleman by the name of Angus Gavin, now head of Urban Development with Solidere, the company responsible for implementing that plan and managing the real estate created.

About forty members of the BLBG (British Lebanese Business Group), together with HMA to the Lebanon, Frances Guy, had the good fortune to be addressed by Angus about the past, present and future for urban Beirut (known as Down Town). He knows his stuff and used over sixty slides with more than two hundred images in total to support his address on the current status of and the future plans for regenerating Beirut.

Green spaces, pedestrian walkways, buildings restored with local skills that many had thought lost, like stone masonry, modern sky-scrapers and a restored water front are all blended together to create an integrated living, shopping, working and recreational space for locals and tourists alike.

Well, that’s the theory.

And practice is getting close. OK there are issues with parking (not enough), security (too intrusive), a few basic needs (“I can’t buy a bottle of milk”, someone complained) and Solidere’s share price (it stubbornly refusing to budge despite the nearly doubling of real estate values in the last three years). Some of those natural market forces will fix, others need a change of habit, lifestyle and the focusing of political will. Old photos of Beirut show tramcars, taxis and a railway station. Only the service system of taxi sharing survives, but Angus believes that the not too distant future will see dramatic improvements in public transport in line with trends in other major world cities and the increasing urgency of finding greener methods of travel.

From the work done to date, Beirut is now a recognized brand in the field of Mediterranean urban planning, with the concepts being exported to Cairo, Jeddah and Montenegro. All it needs now is a tag line: pity, but “Beirut smiles better” has been done before.

Please note that any errors of fact in this are entirely mine

Take less water with it

Thirty-six millions in Britain drink regularly, according to a recent survey.

Hmm, that means there are about two London’s worth that don’t, allowing rather arbitrarily for the under sixteens. For those who like the numbers, that’s fifteen million adults that are not regularly drinkers: apart from a few recovering alcoholics, I think I know only a couple of them. And my children said much the same thing. So where are they all? Closeted in odd places like Kendal or Norwich or Truro? Nope, I’ve been to all three, and the pubs do a roaring trade. Glasgow? You must be joking! One of that couple of near abstainers I mentioned decided to end speculation and ordered a glass of white wine recently. A group of well meaning friends tried to stop her as they had always interpreted her reluctance for anything stronger than Perrier as meaning she must be an alcoholics anonymous member! You’ll be glad to know that the friends were finally persuaded that she just did not drink a lot and said glass of white was allowed to find its proper home.

Lebanon is different. Not drinking is an active pursuit, indeed I’ve been to three weddings where, forewarned, I had to smuggle in a couple of hip flasks as the strongest beverage on offer was mulberry juice, which, I have to say, makes a splendid accompaniment to Vodka. Mind you, those hip flasks meant that I was very popular, at least until the social lubricants ran dry.

Yet, this is a country famous for its wine. The Bekaa valley, setting of so many odd activities by novelists who’ve probably never been to the place, is home to thousands of vines and has been famous for its viniculture since Biblical times. Château Musar has the UK as its biggest export market, and if you haven’t tried it, have a look in Waitrose or a specialist wine merchant. I will be taken to task, quite rightly, if I don’t point out others, so here are those from Lebanon’s thirty or so wineries and châteaux that I have often drunk, Kefraya, Ksara, and Massaya, who make very good tipples in the usual red, white and rosé varieties.

And then there is arak. Arak is a Middle Eastern drink, similar to pastis (like Ricard, Pernod and Absinthe) and it goes very nicely, thank you, with the local mezza and Mediterranean fish, Sea Bass, Swordfish, Mullet and King Prawns for example. But don’t plan anything terribly serious for the rest of the afternoon.

Let’s go back to cultural attitudes. It is a well known fact that a glass or two of red wine a day is good for just about everything and everyone. Lowers cholesterol, improves blood quality, makes sleep easy yet restores a man exhausted, in general prolongs life and hey, it tastes pretty good and improves food – “a meal without wine is like a day without sun-shine” (Jean-Antheleme Brillat-Savarin). But I think we Northern Europeans are better designed to absorb alcoholic beverages than some other ethnic groups. Why? Once again, I have a theory, well an untested hypothesis actually. Here’s how my ideas run.

Northern Europe was the first to experience, suffer, undergo or whatever verb you fancy, the Industrial Revolution. That had as a consequence, mass migration to towns and cities with subsequent overcrowding and difficult living conditions. Cholera, typhoid, dysentery and other nasties were rife and, although our forebears didn’t know it, water borne. But if you tipped a fair amount of strong liquor in the water, those bacterial nightmares were killed. Hence the best way to survive the adverse consequences of the industrial revolution was to reverse the usual advice of “take plenty of water with it” and make it “take plenty of alcohol with your water”. Obviously if you could hold your liquor, you were less prone to accidents with heavy machinery, note that the elfin safety mob did not exist in those days. As late as the sixties, Sheffield steel workers were entitled to six pints of beer per shift, that’s twelve units for heaven’s sake and that was before repairing to the pub on the way home! So those who could not take or did not like the booze were weeded out by Darwin’s natural selection process with a bit of help from typhoid and such like.

Which still leaves the question, where are those fifteen million non-drinkers? Well, I recently asked a friend how much he got through in a day. “Not much really, not now I’m retired” he said, “maybe a couple of glasses of wine at lunch, a beer in the afternoon, a whiskey with my wife when she comes home, maybe a bottle of red between us at dinner and I’ll probably have a brandy as a night-cap”.

It’s becoming clearer where those non-drinkers are, they just got surveyed before the pubs opened!

A trip to the dentist

There’s a joke going round the internet about a toothache stricken patient going to the dentist.
“Open wide,” says the dentist. After a few moments poking the patient hears the dentist announce “you have a truly enormous cavity” – “you have a truly enormous cavity”.
“Did you have to say it twice? I’m scared enough of coming to see you already!”
“Now you know what I’m talking about” came the response, “I only said it once, the second time was an echo!”

Mildly amusing you might think, except my dentist told it to me. After he’d used enough Novocain to freeze my earlobe as well as most of the right side of my mouth. There’d followed a whole load of drilling with his child-sized, high speed Black & Decker, stuffed into my mouth for what had seemed like forever. The hole he’d thus created in one of my teeth had clearly jogged his memory. “Hmmm, yes, I was thinking this is going to take a lot of time to fill” he added by way of explanation.

Now this is Lebanon where there is not enough electricity to go round, so it is cut off in Beirut, district by district, for at least three hours, once a day. And so it was that half way through the aforementioned drilling, the lights dimmed, the water suction stopped, the drill went silent and the other bits of assorted electronics fell fast asleep. Pragmatic soul is my dentist: “please rinse well and take a short break while I activate plan ‘B’” he intoned, while nipping smartly onto the balcony. With memories of the treadle driven drills of my youth powered by the dentist’s assistant’s feet, I wondered what was coming, and then heard the reassuring sound of his own generator being started. Sure enough everything came back to life after a few seconds.

Things have come a long way since mercury, tin, silver and copper were mixed into an amalgam on site in a mortar and pestle before being skillfully molded in the mouth to form the filling. These days, stuff comes out of a tube and is then coloured to match the receiving tooth. The airports' metal detectors have less and less work to do on me as the years unfold. But no less time and skill are needed to rebuild the drilled tooth so an hour after sitting down, I was finally and gratefully released.

Down the years, I have had a bank manager called Mr. Cash, a school teacher called Mr. Wise, a plumber by the name of Mr. Sockett and my local car-repair man here is called Mr. Saab, so I wish I could relate that my dentist is called Mr. Pullem or something like that. He isn’t, but I think he’ll be referred to as “The Joker” after today.

An evening with Min-Jung Kym

Unless you have the musical appreciation of C. S. Forester’s fictional hero Horatio Hornblower may I respectfully submit that you find http://www.minjungkym.co.uk/index.php
The name suggests her origin, Korea, but not her home, London, and her British nationality. I am sitting typing with her playing of a Mozart piano concerto coming out of the speakers.
Last night I had the double pleasure of attending her recital at the Al-Bustan Hotel, up in the hills about half an hours drive from Beirut, and then meeting the young lady in person afterwards.
I could go on about her music’s power and delicacy, her playing of passion balanced with grace and her use of astounding technique to create tidal waves of emotion but then I’d sound like a hyperbolistic music critic with a severe dictionary problem. A music critic I am not, and I’m trying to cut down on the dictionary.
Just give her a listen but be prepared to be made to laugh, as she chooses pieces which contain jokes and humour; but have the tissues ready too as she has made a specialty out of understanding her chosen composers’ emotional state at the time they wrote and seems to be able to convey that through the music.
And then a party happened – which could be almost a tag line for Lebanon – at the beautiful apartment of the lady who had born the brunt of organizing the event. Seven of us sat while champagne and conversation flowed.
When she had walked onto the stage, Ms Kym had filled it. Musicians have almost a personal, physical relationship with their chosen instrument, some appearing to have to wrestle with them to get the desired tone and volume, while with others, it’s the instrument that appears to be in charge; but for this lady, she leads and the piano willingly follows. I was surprised, then, to find that in person, she is petite and of delicate appearance, with no obvious hint of the power she can generate. Oh and she’s fun, intelligent and well, err, normal without being at all ordinary is the closest I can get to it, for example being just as happy chatting about Elton as Schumann.
Today’s light reading is going to have to come from one of Patrick O’Brien’s novels – his Captain Jack Aubrey was a musician as well as a frigate captain!