Breakfast Culture.

As noted elsewhere in this blog, similarities between the two countries, Lebanon and Britain, abound. Amy Winehouse is well enough known to be impersonated, sellers of Liverpool and Manchester United football shirts do a roaring trade and I get silly calls on my mobile from people trying to flog me stuff I don’t want.

But breakfast is where the differences show. Perhaps people need the truly familiar first thing in the morning.

I have two personal favourites when visiting England. Orange juice, prunes, a buttered kipper, then finish up with brown toast and marmalade, all washed down with English Breakfast Tea: that makes up one of them. The other starts and finishes in much the same way but has rashers of back bacon, egg and sausage with a few sautéed mushrooms in the middle and that cholesterol nightmare, fried bread: it’s accompanied by strong, percolated coffee. There is no particular order in those two, it depends on mood and inclination; and either fuels me up for the whole day.

Both are improved, in my opinion, by having a copy of the Telegraph to hand. I know it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea (pretty obvious how that metaphor came about now, isn’t it), but it’s been my morning read of choice since a teenager and especially since the Times moved its classified ads off the front page. Once, in desperate need of a Sudoku puzzle, all I could get was a Guardian, so I bought a copy of Playboy to hide it in. I do realize, though, that morning newspapers are very much a matter of personal taste, so, as long you get the food right, be my guest.

So what does a full Lebanese breakfast look like?

There’s a plate of greengrocery, which includes huge tomatoes that look more like painted melons, radishes and sprigs of mint. There’s a bowl of dried thyme eaten either with lebneh (like strained Greek yoghurt) or spread with olive oil on unleven bread. Choose from plates of beans stewed with garlic, again in olive oil, and plates of chick peas, both whole and made into a paste with Tahini, the mix better known as hummus. There’s more, some Olives, both black and green, with olive oil, oh, and peeled boiled eggs. A bowl of whatever fruit is in season and fruit juices are on the table, and of course, jam and butter and white cheese to go with more or that pita type bread. It’s all washed down with tea, without milk added, or stand-your-spoon-up-in-it viscous black Arabic coffee.

Whereas English breakfasts, mine anyway, tend to be solitary and silent, the spread listed above is expected to be a group affair with loads of chatter and gossip. Reading material isn’t needed, although Lebanon is rich in Daily Newspapers, in three languages to boot.

There’s a question posed on an earlier page “where can I get a good kipper in Beirut?” The answer, I’m afraid, is still “I don’t know.” Ideas anyone?

The eco-village

Green, organic, recycle, bio-degradable and eco are all new-speak for good: disposable, packaging and synthetic are by extension new-speak for not so good any more.

One way of being environmentally friendly was the back drop to a highly successful British Sit-com of the seventies, “The Good Life”. A middle-aged couple turned their Surrey stock-broker belt house into an organic small-holding complete with pigs, chickens and herb garden. Everything was apparently being re-cycled to make gas for cooking, generate electricity for light and the need for water and drainage removed. The comedy came from the reactions of the upper-middle class neighbours juxtaposed with the stoicism and determination, one might almost say pig-headedness, of the “back to the land” couple.

Another way is to use technology and design. Apparently part of Britain’s M1 motorway is de-iced in winter from heat stored up from, wait for it, the previous summer. The system is called Inter-seasonal Heat Transfer or IHT for short. Solar panels for providing hot-water have been around for years, but advancements in solar-cells have led to a pleasure boat on London’s Serpentine being powered that way entirely. Add triple glazing and the clever use of courtyards and cloisters and you can begin to see how technology can be brought to bear to run a building without external energy input.

So I was very interested in our proposed trip to Lebanon’s eco-village http://www.ecoecovillage.com . Which would it be, looking toward the future or the past? Actually it combines both; a water-wheel in the local river generates electricity to power modern light bulbs. The cafeteria serves a variety of tasty dishes with all the vegetables organically grown on the eco-village’s land, which also supports free-range chickens and larger livestock. Re-cycling points are frequent and unobtrusive. And then there are swimming holes in the unpolluted, crystal waters of that local river, as well as the tree houses. There are a few small buildings, made of bamboo, which grows a-plenty, wood from local trees and walls made wattle and daub style using the clay rich earth. The organic cafeteria, by the way, is a very large tent, insulated with traditional rugs and in spite of the heat, there was a cooling flow of air which was both gentle and effective.

Only trouble is that to get to it, a long drive down a rutted road is needed that is really only practical on horseback (but I didn’t see any of them) or in an SUV (of which I saw a lot). That’s because it sits in a remote valley surrounded by tree clad mountains of the Chouf.

A model for future living, I’m afraid not; it’s a real back to the land approach and I’ll wait for the design and technology led solutions, thank you. As a demonstration of how to use land to produce additive free food with real taste, yes. And as a day out? Once you’re there it’s great.

I have doubts about the carbon footprint, but it’s certainly green, organic and with a focus on re-cycling. If left, the site would bio-degrade to nothing in months, so it can truly claim to have the right to use its “eco” appellate.

The woman who "does"

My sister has a largish family house to run, somewhere in the West of England. She is not well at the moment, so, to lighten the household chores, has acquired a cleaner.
I should say that my sister has had a life long passion for helping the unfortunate and the disposessed. That passion usually manifests itself in terms of dogs from the shelter, taking in an unwanted guinea pig and the like. Two legged animals are not immune though.
The cleaning woman comes for a couple of hours, two or three times a week. My sister described her most recent visit thus:
“There’s a routine. When she gets here, the first thing she does is to put the kettle on and wait for it to boil, then she makes a cup of coffee for us both.
“Over the coffee there’s a discussion about what she’s going to do. Agreement having been reached, she says
“‘I don’t want to light up in front of you in your condition’ but she has a cigarette anyway, in spite of herself.
“After doing whatever it was we agreed, she has another break complete with cigarette, then we chat for a bit and after that I drive her to the bus-stop.
“I think it’s doing her good, though, coming to me!”
I wondered aloud who paid whom and for what service.
“Oh, I pay her, but it nearly all goes on bus fares now she’s moved to the next town.
“Mind you her brother’s even worse, never worked at all and just came out of prison.”
I asked her what he’d been in prison for.
“A failed armed robbery, he tried to hold up a post office with a toy gun” she said. “I was thinking of getting him to come round and do something here, but I’m not going to bother: I haven’t the strength to pick up any more waifs and strays at the moment.”
Good decision.

Thoughts on seeing a new moon

Some years ago we took a vacation in mid-June in the Scottish Highlands. To be accurate we rented a cottage not far from Fort William close by Loch Ness, the deepest lake in the British Isles and near Ben Nevis, the highest peak in Scotland. A miracle occurred in that it forgot to rain for the whole week, so the evenings were beautiful and very, very long. As I recall, darkness was never complete, but what passed for it lasted from just after eleven until about half past two.

Digging even further back into the mists of time, I remember as a child, living in South Yorkshire, going to bed and falling asleep before it got properly dark.

Now that doesn’t happen here. On the longest day, dusk passes into night not long after eight in the evening. I have never really got used to the idea of night falling so early in summer, but tonight one of the advantages showed as I drove back home across Beirut. It’s the first day of the lunar month and that means a new moon; the tiniest sliver of golden (not silver, whatever the songs might say) crescent showed just above the horizon at dusk. It is one of the narrowest new moon crescents I recall seeing and it became more distinct by the second as the daylight rapidly faded, possibly because it was only occasionally visible through the infrequent gaps between buildings. By the time I got home, night had properly fallen and the new moon had chased the sun down below the horizon, leaving Venus as the brightest object in the evening sky.

The magic of the heavens still has the power to engender awe and wonder. So do we plan our next vacation where we can see more of the night sky? No, because it is quite literally everywhere, all we have to do is to look up and we too can have our senses and imaginations fired just like the ancient Greeks and Romans, the thinkers like Einstein and Newton and the inspirational dreamers like JFK setting the target of putting a man on the moon.

Short and partial as that night-time in Scotland was, I remember us all going outside one night to watch a shower, not of rain, but of shooting stars.

Two weddings, no funeral

What’s a wedding for? A right of passage? A public commitment? An excuse for a party? Affirmation of a contract? A union of two houses? Please tick all that apply.

Perhaps it’s just as well that I wasn’t blogging last year when my daughter got married, I would have written a lot. In summary though there was a white dress, a Spanish bridegroom, a ceremony in Battersea park, a signing of the register, Big Red Buses to take us across London to where the bride, groom and families received us all, a super meal, speeches in two languages, dancing, a bag of favours for everyone, two best men, a big cake and a lot of champagne. It was a really great “do” enjoyed by close to a hundred people, an average sort of size for a British wedding. My darling daughter announced afterwards with pride that she’d come in on budget: you can see why she chose to become a chartered accountant. A success in every way it was.

Over the weekend we went to a Muslim wedding celebration here. A small wedding by Lebanese standards, about two-hundred and forty were catered for. The guests were greeted by the families of the couple, then headed off to be seated. When the assembly was complete there was a beating of drums to herald the groom’s arrival accompanied by an all male entourage (rather more than two best men) drawn from friends and family. Next the bride entered (in a white dress) with her Dad and waited for the groom’s group to progress across the floor to "claim" her, after which the finally united couple, accompanied by singers and dancers mixed with the original group of supporters went to sit side by side at a raised table by themselves. Later there was dancing and a big cake.

Most of the weddings I’ve been to here follow much the same pattern. It’s noisy and boisterous and fun to watch, and my guess (no research done to prove it) is that it echoes rituals from pastoral and even nomadic ways of life, the groom’s accompanied procession across the floor being the equivalent of a trip across the village or perhaps even to a neighbouring yurt. The ceremony and contract signing was essentially an all male affair in private and done earlier.

When I started this, the idea in my mind was to show how different things were, but what comes through are the similarities too. OK, so there was no champagne, indeed it was dry, but forewarned, a couple of hip flasks made rather a dent in that. And there were no speeches, so no public gaffs as popularized by Four Weddings and a Funeral. But the meal, the dancing, the cake, the walk, the public union, the white dress and the groom’s supporters are all elements in common.

It should come as no surprise then that I’d give both weddings ticks in all five of the boxes suggested above.

Solar power anyone?

What would the Wright brothers have made of the solar powered aero plane?

It’s just started a test flight that is supposed to last for 24 hours. One objective of the flight is to check out how well it flies at night. Err a solar powered ’plane flying at night? Has Graham finally lost his marbles, I hear you say? Actually I have mislaid a couple of very pretty multi-coloured glass giants, but that’s a digression. If you don’t believe me (about the solar ’plane, not the marbles) have a look at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science_and_environment/10534960.stm.

It is a truly amazing machine, made using some very clever light-weight materials: presumably that’s why it looks ever so like the balsa wood constructions of my boyhood; however, it’s on a much larger scale and with four engines attached. Going back to the night flying test, the idea is that the photo-electric cells built into the wings not only provide power but recharge batteries which provide the juice to operate the controls at night. The aircraft gains height during the day, and then gives back that height (potential energy for the technical) at night using a bit of battery power only when necessary.

Now that machine makes me wonder about the potential solar power going begging in Lebanon. Go to Greece, Turkey or Cyprus for example, and all buildings have solar panels for heating water. Even in the comparatively sunless UK, more and more electricity bills are being lowered by tapping into the ultimate energy source – the Sun. So why not here? Try to eat into the gap between supply of generated electricity and the significantly greater demand. Ah, well, solar heating doesn’t work with apartment blocks, according to some. Actually it does. Technology has evolved to be able to cope with any block up to eleven floors high and the majority has eight or ten. Does Lebanon have a surfeit of Oil and Gas reserves? No, it has to import the lot. Do the mountain peaks attract enough winter snow to create lakes and waterfalls that drive hydro-electric power? Well there’s a grand scheme for some twenty-seven artificial lakes to be created by dams, but they are to meet the demand for water, any power creation would be seasonal and supplementary at best. And after twenty years, one has been completed (actually the only one to be started), because everyone is quite happy about the others being built, but not the one that takes their valley, stream or orchard – the classic NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) syndrome. Solar power would eat into the electricity company’s profits? It makes a loss.

So it remains an unanswered mystery, just like the question at the start of this little piece.

And then a party happened

And then a party happened.

That could almost be a tag line for Lebanon. Let me state the obvious, the Lebanese like to party. Birthdays, feast days and public holidays will provide an excuse, but it isn’t really necessary to have a reason any more persuasive than “It’s Tuesday” or even “There isn’t a reason”.

They can be pretty spontaneous, or so it seems to the casual observer. A Friday evening gathering for about twenty friends had been a little more arranged than some, but, as we were leaving at around one in the morning, our hostess addressed us with “you haven’t eaten enough, it’ll all go to waste – come again tomorrow and we’ll finish what we started!” So we did: this time until two in the morning.

Last night we were guests in a Beirut night club and supper bar - Le Grey. One of the owners felt like having a gathering of again, just over twenty people. Now I’ve been to small dinner parties where the givers spend all their time in the kitchen, opening and sampling bottles, changing CDs and attempting to orchestrate a particular mood. They don’t seem to have any time left for guests, let alone being able to enjoy it themselves, oh! perish the thought. Owning a night club takes away a number of those awful possibilities, so we all, including host and hostess, enjoyed ourselves.

Never mind anything else, it was a joy to be confronted by a TV screen with something other than twenty-two sweaty young blokes, dressed in garish colours chasing a ball about, and being chased in their turn by an older bloke. Even more of one to listen to real music instead of badly played vuvuzelas. I know, you wouldn’t think it possible to play an instrument badly that only has one note, but it is.

A video clip was showing of J. Lo doing something erotic with a well-muscled chap, they both wore a lot of oil as well. After that Beyoncé and Shakira did a rather amazing double act. Then the four tenors came on and the ladies of the party rather outdid the men with suggestive comments that brought on much giggling. A live singer did a brilliant impression of Amy Winehouse; salmon and wine and jokes and calamari and whiskey and cake came and went and everything was punctuated by dancing.

At about one in the morning, we headed back home. A bit lily-livered of us to pack it in so early? Maybe, but we’ve got a wedding to go to tonight! So another party’s happening.