Mike Gerrard
The following articles are copyright to Mike Gerrard, and may not be reproduced in any form without his consent in writing.
- Ravioli Remedials
- Walking in Memphis
- An Englishman in Paris
- Armenia Revisited
- Ancient Convent, Modern World
- Jiving Over Lemons
- Mile-High City
- Maroon'd in Jamaica
- A Loo with a View in York
Published in Intermezzo, the American food, wine and travel magazine.
'Hey Steve, you've got two remedials together over here,' Dede shouted.
Dede Pittman, a travel agent from Florida, and I had paired up randomly in the cookery class, and realised that we were perfectly suited. I think it was the way we looked at each other with expressions that said: 'What now?'
For this was no ordinary cookery class. This was the École de Cuisine at Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons near Oxford in England, a country house and restaurant that has two Michelin stars. The Michelin stars have been criticised by some, but they still remain the Oscars of gourmet cooking in Europe. The owner of Le Manoir, Raymond Blanc, is a legendary figure to British gourmets. Born in southeast France in 1949, he came to Oxford in 1972 to learn English and got a job as a waiter to help support his studies. When a vacancy came up in the kitchen, he took it.
'I entered a kitchen disguised as a chef,' he told me. 'I was self-taught. I never had a master. I tried reading books but they assumed you already knew what you were doing.'
It wasn't long before Blanc had his own tiny restaurant in Oxford, Les Quat' Saisons (the Four Seasons), tucked between a ladies lingerie shop and a charity store: 'It was not a smart location. A small kitchen, very small, 12 red and white check tablecloths, very humble.'
Humble it may have been, but within 12 months he had his first Michelin star and was obviously going places. However, it's a long journey from a 12-seater restaurant to running a hotel/restaurant with a staff of 230 people, and I ask Raymond Blanc why he bought Le Manoir.
'I started to dream about a bigger place,' he says. 'I had decided to look for my "home sweet home", somewhere I loved where I could have a small herb garden, maybe 3-4 bedrooms for friends to stay. But life is not like that. You may say that your ideal woman is tall and dark and intelligent and this and that... and then you fall in love with a small blonde. I fell in love with this house. I realised that commercially a small house didn't make sense. We needed more bedrooms. Lots of renovations were needed. It had dry rot, wet rot, you name it. The garden was like a zoo for creatures I'd never seen before. It took about £2 million for the refit, and this was in 1984. Then more things need doing and you need more bedrooms to pay for that.'
Today the 15th-century Manoir is the only country house hotel in Britain that has had two Michelin stars for a total of 16 years. As if that wasn't enough, in 1991 he opened his École de Cuisine, a cookery school for professional chefs and enthusiastic amateurs alike. At first it took place in the actual kitchen restaurants, which proved not to be ideal, especially with the notoriously colourful language of chefs in a busy kitchen. The school soon moved to a purpose-built kitchen attached to the real kitchen.
Monday morning, 9am, and I'm nervously waiting in reception in my natty Manoir kitchen whites, which every student receives along with Raymond Blanc's latest cookbook. I ask one student, Jean, how she came to be doing the course. 'My husband bought it for me as a present,' she tells me. 'I love cooking, and it was a real treat to be able to learn something a bit special. I enjoyed Week One so here I am on Week Two.'
Week One? It turned out that all five of my fellow students had previously done Week One of a twoweek course. My heart sank flatter than one of my own soufflés. I went across to the Cookery School as if marching to the gallows. The previous night I had sampled the Manoir's Gourmand Menu, seven sublime courses. I was especially interested in the Starters, the subject of the first day's course, and I adored the quail egg ravioli with spinach, parmesan, Périgord truffles and poultry jus. I laughed to myself. Never in a million years could I hope to produce that kind of dish. It was superb, and when I tasted it I immediately wanted to eat another.
Students are resident at Le Manoir for the duration of the course, and normally eat together from the à la carte menu, with one Gourmand meal included. Partners are welcome to share the student's room (rooms normally cost from about £250 per night), but must pay for their own food and drink.
The Cookery School kitchen is equipped with several gas stoves, fridges, equipment and the much-needed working surfaces. The Cookery School Director, Steve Bulmer, welcomes us in. Steve began his career at the Michelin-starred Box Tree Inn in Ilkley, near his home in the north of England, and has worked in several other Michelin-rated kitchens, not least at Le Manoir itself. Two years ago Raymond Blanc invited him to take charge of the Cookery School, where Steve takes all the courses except a special Nutrition course taught by Raymond Blanc himself.
I had interviewed RB, as his staff call him, a few months earlier, and was totally won over by his Gallic charm, his humour and his total passion about the importance of good food, and indeed all the other good things in life. 'I learned everything from my mother,' he told me then. 'Cooking for her was an act of love, a mother's love, the act of giving. The joy of food is about a sensuality. That's where it starts, to look for the very best. Take a simple thing like a pear. You buy any old pear, and it has no flavour, it is hard and terrible. But then you look at pears on a tree. You see the right pear. It stands out because of its beautiful colour, its shine, its ripeness. You begin to think about this pear, how it will taste, your gastric juices start flowing. Then you pick this pear, you touch it and smell it, it is sweet and sexy.'
Blanc fires you with a passion for food, and all the good things in life, but alongside the passion must come the hard work, just as in any relationship. Steve hands out the course notes, a chunky 51-page folder filled with recipes and colour photos of all the stages. I glance down the Schedule for Day 1, Hot and Cold Starters, and there it is: Ravioli of Quail Eggs. I remembered the melting mix of fresh pasta, spinach, mushroom, parmesan, truffle and a perfectly cooked little quail's egg in the centre. I'm doomed, I thought.
'This morning,' says Steve, 'we're going to be cooking the ravioli of quail eggs.' I look at the recipe, and apart from the ingredients it is just 11 short sentences long. 'This is a very popular dish at the restaurant,' Steve continues. 'It's on the gourmand menu as well as the à la carte. I like to teach it because it includes several different elements, starting with making the pasta.'
Making pasta? I have never made pasta in my life. Steve, on the other hand, worked for a year at Zafferano's, one of the best Italian restaurants in London, with Michelin-starred chef and TV cook Giorgio Locatelli. 'I learned to make every kind of pasta there is with Giorgio, and the best way to learn is making it by hand. Now you might see Jamie Oliver using a machine on TV, but Jamie has already learned how to make pasta and he knows exactly what he is putting into that machine.'
Steve goes on to explain something that reassures me: why does a dish not always turn out exactly the same every time? Everything makes a difference, we learn. Some kinds of flour are more prone to absorbing moisture than others, and will react differently according to the amount of moisture in the atmosphere, or just in different parts of the kitchen. Every egg is different too, and not just between small, medium and large.
'We get lovely free-range eggs from a farm down the road,' Steve says. 'They taste wonderful, but the yolks are all different sizes. And that makes a difference to the pasta. This is why you make it by hand, as it's the feel of the pasta you have to learn.'
Steve shows us how to mix the flour and eggs, and passes the mix round at different stages so that we all get to feel what it's like. I soon relax, with his matter-of-fact approach, and the way he demonstrates everything more than once before sending us off to our work stations to do it for ourselves.
We work in pairs, and I team up with Dede, the travel agent who is keen to persuade more Americans to come to the Manoir. 'It's hard to get Americans to travel out of London,' Dede tells me, 'but here is this glorious old manor house, one of the finest hotels in the world, and you can learn how to cook some of the finest food you'll ever eat, and just a few miles outside Oxford. This is my second visit, and I adore it even though I'm hopeless in the kitchen.'
I later asked Steve what kind of people come on his courses. 'On a typical course,' he told me, 'I'll get someone like my mother, two people who knock things over, one foodie who thinks he knows it all but soon learns that he doesn't, one or two who want to learn something a bit special for their dinner parties, and three men who don't even know how to turn on the stove.'
His two remedials produce a decent pasta dough eventually, with a little additional help from the chef. 'If you're doing this for a dinner party,' he tells the group, 'then you can make the pasta the night before and leave it in the fridge. Then you make your shapes in the morning and eat it that night. But it needs a minimum of 20 minutes resting time, so just pop yours into the fridge while we get on with the rest of the dish. Next I'm going to show you how to make the perfect poached egg.'
And he does, again adding little tips that they use in the kitchens and can help you at home, like preparing things ahead of time, and which elements of a dish you can part-cook and then safely leave till you're ready to assemble the final result. We learn to take the top off the delicate quail's egg with a knife, at which point I look round to find Raymond Blanc himself inspecting my progress. It's like meeting God at the Pearly Gates. On the other hand I look forward to being able to say one day: 'Here's a little trick I learned from Raymond Blanc.'
We poach the eggs to perfection, as promised, and pop them into the fridge in a bowl of ice-water while we set about rolling out the pasta. This done, it goes back in the fridge while we build the little nest of spinach and mushroom on which the quail's egg will sit. The mix has been pre-prepared for us, rather than waste time on straightforward tasks. We fill the mould, then lift it gently off, leaving a miniature tower on which we now pop the eggs.
Next lesson is how to wrap the nest in ravioli and seal it, before we're all on standby to cook the raviolis simultaneously. This is the only time we're cooking against the clock, as we also have to prepare the garnish of mushrooms, spinach, celery and parmesan while the ravioli are cooking, to be able to pop everything onto the plate at the same time and take it to the table. In this case, our own table.
To my amazement, it all comes together and the proud students march through the real kitchen to two tables set aside in the restaurant, where I tuck into my own three ravioli of quail eggs alongside Steve and Dede. I enjoy every mouthful. Not bad for a remedial, I think.
Published in the Thomas Cook Magazine
It began at Heathrow. After a sleepless night and a 5am start, my sagging spirits were lifted as I walked through the security check to hear someone somewhere playing Chuck Berry's version of Route 66. 'Well it winds from Chicago, to LA...' I wasn't actually going to Route 66 but it was close enough for me.
On the plane I tuned in eagerly to the channel that had a programme about songwriters Leiber and Stoller. I listed to how they wrote Hound Dog and Jailhouse Rock. On arrival the Immigration Officer asked me where I was staying, and smiled when I told her that night I'd be at the Heartbreak Hotel in Memphis. 'Don't you go breaking any hearts now,' she warned me.
At Heartbreak Hotel the desk clerks are of course dressed in black. And there's a heart-shaped swimming pool out back. I tune into the Elvis Channel and catch the end of the movie, Jailhouse Rock. In the morning I walk next door to Graceland. One side of the street is commercial, I know, but I revel in the souvenir stores, the 16-piece Elvis dinner sets, the little pink Cadillac whose bonnet reveals calculator. I buy a few books and wait for my number to be called to take the bus over to Graceland itself.
No amount of rampant commerce can take away from the achievements of Elvis. His taste in décor may have been more Hilda Ogden than House and Garden, but see the endless corridor lined with gold and silver discs, and see the separate wall where they keep the platinum discs, and you remember just how big Elvis was. Despite the conveyor belt of visitors, you still get a feel for Elvis the person, the shy and polite young southern man who looked after his maw and paw. And it takes a tougher man than I am to avoid a tear at the end when you gaze down on Elvis's grave, lying next to his maw and paw, a poor boy for whom the kiss of success was also the kiss of death.
Across town at Sun Studios you can still see the microphone which Elvis used for his early hits, in the one-room tour where you hear again the voices of Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Roy Orbison. You hear too the story of how Elvis went along to record his own voice and cut his first disc, allegedly a birthday present for his mother, but in truth a ruse to get his voice heard - his mother's birthday was three months earlier, and the Presleys were so poor they didn't have a record player.
Memphis is music. There's no escape. When Elvis was a teenager he would often be the only white face on Beale Street, where the black blues and jazz clubs were. Today Beale Street is a tourist attraction, lined by clubs like the B.B.King Club, where I sink a few beers and listen to an hour of powerful blues. With a rock 'n' roll museum, the Gibson Guitar Factory and an aboutto- open Stax Museum, Memphis is music heaven.
Only 200 miles away (next door on the American scale) is Nashville, where the soundtrack switches from rock to country. There really are people in the street wearing Stetsons the size of umbrellas, and songs on the radio with lyrics like: 'He took 50 dollars and my yodel, when he took my tonsils out'. My own favourite was: 'Why did you wear that negligée/Made it so hard to walk away.'
But there's better stuff than that, and some of it was sung and written in Tootsie's Orchid Lounge. This honky-tonk bar has music blaring from breakfast till it closes. Roger Miller wrote Dang Me in Tootsie's. Willie Nelson, Patsy Cline, Kris Kristofferson, they've all played or drunk here, or both. And the greatest of them all, Hank Williams. The Hillbilly Shakespeare, as he was dubbed, played the Grand Ol' Opry when it was broadcast from Ryman's Theatre, just up the street, and would slip out between shows for a few glasses of something strong at Tootsie's.
You can tour Ryman's Theatre, and see the stage where Hank and others performed, names like Johnny Cash, Marty Robbins, Loretta Lynn, Chet Atkins, Hank Snow and Tammy Wynette. The full story of country music is told just along the street in the Country Music Hall of Fame, a vast collection of artefacts, the British Museum of Country Music. You can see everything from Dolly Parton's plectrum to the hand-written lyrics to King of the Road, which Roger Miller scribbled down on the back of a credit card application form.
I'm reluctant to leave Nashville, but the graceful Southern towns of the Mississippi beckon. That night in Natchez I sipped a mint julep on the hotel patio and watched the 'big river', as the Algonquian Indians named it, roll by as the sun went down. When it came up again I was ready to tour the antebellum homes that Natchez is famous for. I didn't have to go far for the first tour: I was staying in it. Weymouth Hall is an 1855 Greek revival mansion which, like several of these grand 19th century homes, is partly in use as a guesthouse.
The oldest and one of the best right in town is the House on Ellicott's Hill, a modest but graceful two-storey home that was built in 1799. The Melrose Plantation is another must-see, open all year round, and it shows off the style of the main house, without shirking from showing the other side of the story, with displays on slavery in the slave's quarters.
Touring the south is a whole cultural experience, and the visitor realises the region does have a distinct identity. As one guy told me at breakfast one morning: 'You know what we say round here 'bout the Civil War? 'Taint but half-time.' Mind you, that southern accent can cause problems, as can the English accent in return. I asked for a glass of red wine with dinner one night. 'Beg pardon?' the waitress said. 'Red wine?' I repeated. 'Sorry?' she said again. In despair I pointed at the menu. 'Oh,' she smiled, 'you mean raid whan!'
For food and drink, though, the highlight for me was New Orleans. From gourmet French to down-home Cajun, from honkytonk bars to the House of Blues, the Big Easy has it all. Tujague's is pronounced Two Jacks and has been there dispensing food and liquor for 150 years, except during Prohibition when the bar had three bartenders but no booze. I dine on shrimp étouffe, beef in a horseradish sauce and chicken Creole with sliced squash. At Mike Anderson's Seafood Restaurant it's alligator tail and crabmeat au gratin.
I go browsing at Faulkner House Books, where William Faulkner once lived - and southern literature is of course a whole other piece of the jigsaw. Someone asks how much a first edition of A Streetcar Named Desire is worth. 'About a thousand,' the assistant replies. Seeing streetcars with Desire on the front is just one of the little pleasures I get in New Orleans. Another is eating my first dish of jambalaya, washed down with a bottle of Dixie Beer at the Napoleon House, which the guy in the bookshop recommended to me.
New Orleans is, of course, still on the Mississippi River, where it twists around and slithers like a snake-trail towards the sea. I could have taken a daytime cruise to the site of the Battle of New Orleans, or a night-time cruise to dine and dance to a jazz band, getting a feel for being a Mississippi gambler. Instead I opted for a wildlife swamp tour on a small flat-bottomed motor- boat, into the delta. We saw herons and ospreys, eagles and egrets, and threw some food to a few 'gators. 'You from England?' someone asked me as we left the boat. When I said that I was, he said: 'Y'all have a good time now in L'isiana.'
We did, because New Orleans is where the good times roll, but all too soon it was time to roll on out and head for one more southern state: Georgia. Sadly this was where the airport was, in Atlanta, the 'Capital of the New South'. One of America's fastest-growing cities, Atlanta is everything that's simultaneously both awful and awesome about the United States: towerblocks, freeways, traffic, shopping malls and an overwhelming sense of energy.
Beyond that, two names in particular attract the visitors, one looking back to the past and the other who pointed the way to the South's bright future. Fans of Gone with the Wind will want to visit the Margaret Mitchell House. Mitchell was a reporter on the Atlanta Journal before spending ten years writing one of the most famous books - and films - ever produced. Don't go expecting a grand southern mansion, though, as the author lived in a fairly modest apartment inside a larger house as she penned her classic tale about the Civil War.
Even more modest is the birthplace of Martin Luther King Jnr, so small that only a handful of people can tour at one time. A nearby Visitor Centre elaborates on the story of this remarkable man, who was drawn reluctantly into the Civil Rights fight in Montgomery, when he was recruited as a spokesman during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. His eloquence as a preacher had been noted, but that eloquence was cut short just 13 years later at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, now the National Civil Rights Museum.
King is laid to rest in Atlanta, at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he, his father and his grandfather had all been pastors. King showed the way forward, and brought my journey to a close, just as another King - Elvis - had been a prime reason for going. I'd shed a tear at Elvis's grave, and another at the Lorraine Motel at the spot where Martin Luther King's body had fallen to the ground. The journey had made me cry, laugh, dance and sing, and taught me more than I could have ever imagined it would. I wanted to head back to Heartbreak Hotel and do it all straight over again.
First published in Boom magazine
David Ridgway spends a million pounds a year on wine. But then David Ridgway is an exceptional man. He is the Englishman who’s in charge of the best cellar of French wine in the world. Deep beneath the Michelin-starred Tour d’Argent restaurant, on the Left Bank of the Seine in Paris, are two basement floors containing 500,000 bottles of wine. The most valuable (anything over 300 euros) are kept in a locked vault, lined with battleship steel, where no employee – not even chef sommelier David Ridgway – is allowed in alone.
‘It’s not that we don’t trust the staff,’ Ridgway tells me, ‘but when you’re dealing with wines like this, you cannot take any chances.’ Indeed, the special cellar only came into being a few years ago when a junior sommelier had an accident with a stepladder and broke the oldest bottle in the cellar, an 1811 Château Lafite.
The oldest remaining wine is a Château Léoville Barton Bordeaux dating from 1845. ‘We also,’ says Ridgway as I follow him through the narrow passageways in the dark cellar, ‘have things like the last Royal Cognac ever made, in 1788. The following year, of course, they had a revolution here.’
Ridgway has a quiet sense of humour, and a self-deprecating modesty, beneath his urbane and businesslike exterior. And yet his story is a remarkable one. He came to the Tour d’Argent (the oldest restaurant in Paris, dating back to 1582) as a very junior employee in 1981. ‘I was basically a washer-up and cleaner-up,’ he says. And yet within twelve months he had become the chef sommelier in charge of this historic wine collection, at the age of just 26. And an Englishman at that. ‘How did it happen? I don’t know, really. Maybe I just worked harder than anyone else, maybe I wanted the job more, maybe there was a bit of luck involved too. When I was given the job, we didn’t hush it up that I was an Englishman, but then we didn’t exactly shout it from the rooftops either. Today it might make good publicity, but in those days…’
Ridgway’s background was a very ordinary English upbringing. ‘I probably had my first taste of wine one Christmas, and it was probably pretty dreadful stuff. My family were certainly Francophiles, but growing up in England in the late 50s and early 60s, even people who were interested in wine weren’t drinking very good stuff. It just wasn’t part of the English culture then.’
He went to Hotel School in London (‘they used to pick up the dregs of those who were unsuccessful in examinations’), and admits that like any student he enjoyed drinking, especially the end-of-term parties. Jobs as a barman followed, before he was taken on by the Roux Brothers, working at both the Waterside Inn and La Gavroche. At the Waterside Inn he first started to take an interest in wine, and became a sommelier, and after moving to La Gavroche he became the Head Waiter.
‘I started to learn more about wine at that time, and discovered that the more you know, the more you get interested. The Roux Brothers let me go to the Wine and Spirit Trust, which was very helpful.’
Wanting some experience in Europe, he left the Roux Brothers after 5 years and travelled and worked in Germany, before moving to Paris. His humble job at the Tour d’Argent came up, and he has been there ever since.
‘For me,’ he says, ‘it was like a child coming into a candy store. I was able to spend time visiting vineyards, which I had only previously done very occasionally. Suddenly there was all this fine wine to taste. I have now stayed here for 20 years. It’s a job I enjoy. Maybe I’m just not very ambitious! But I couldn’t imagine working anywhere else. It’s a wonderful place. I have had offers, to work elsewhere or to do things like being a consultant for supermarkets, but although I could earn more money, I just don’t see the point. As I spend longer here I am able to see the wines maturing, I see how different wines have turned out, which broadens my knowledge and helps me plan for the future.’
So, does the Tour d’Argent have the best wine cellar in the world? ‘Well, I wouldn’t like to make that claim. But I think it is probably the best cellar of French wine.’ Even with half a million bottles – and Ridgway has tasted every wine in the racks – the cellar is far from comprehensive. ‘We’re only just starting to explore the wines of the Languedoc,’ he says.
There are also, as yet, no wines from any other country, the sole exceptions being port and sherry. Ridgway feels that New World wines are not yet ready for ageing, and also the Tour d’Argent specialises in traditional French cuisine, with both the menus and the customers demanding traditional French wines as the right accompaniment.
‘If we were a different type of restaurant,’ he says, ‘then we would have different wines. But we are what we are, and the cellar is a part of that. We buy about 25,000 bottles a year, which is roughly what we sell. So we have enough wine in the cellar to last us twenty years, if you look at it that way. But it is not just about numbers and economics. There is tradition and history here, and it is part of my job to maintain that tradition.’
Yet that serious outlook goes alongside an unadulterated pleasure in wine. ‘I do worry these days about some of the younger sommeliers,’ he says. ‘They visit vineyards and refuse some of the wines because they’re on diets or training for a marathon! Some of them today have an overly intellectual and pompous approach to wine. They forget about the pleasure side of it.’
That is not something Ridgway could ever be accused of, as he admits that one of the joys of his job is advising customers and seeing them enjoy their wine. ‘The giving of pleasure is what good food and wine ought to be about,’ he says, and adds with a twinkle in his eye: ‘I think I only became a sommelier to avoid becoming an alcoholic!’
First published in The Times
I awoke and wiped the condensation from the window. A fine mist hung over the valley like a net curtain. From somewhere came the sound of a saw, and a shovel scraping against gravel. I had woken up earlier to the sound of roosters. I was in a cock-a-doodle-doo capital. Stepanakert is the capital of Nagorno-Karabagh, a country which doesn’t exist.
I’d arrived a few days earlier in Armenia, the only country which does recognise Nagorno-Karabagh, its neighbour. I’d been to Armenia before, four years earlier, and was fascinated by this poverty-stricken place, the first of the former Soviet republics to have demanded its independence. The world is full of rich Armenians, yet in the 1990s this new nation on the very edge of Europe had no electricity for two years. Even in the capital, Yerevan, intellectuals were working as taxi drivers during the day to make ends meet, and reading by candles at night.
Driving in from the airport, I noticed one startling change. In 1998 the roads were lined with men selling petrol in bottles, in cans, or from the back of small toytown tankers. Today, chrome and neon petrol stations glare in the 4am darkness, like spaceships, from the Planet Prosperity perhaps, every mile or so a new one flared up out of the gloom.
‘Everyone in Armenia seems to have plans to open a petrol station,’ a local man later told me. With unemployment at 35% and an average salary of 19,000 drams per month (£22), most people do need a plan, or a dream. But other than petrol stations, not much had changed, I noticed, as I went to the vast weekend outdoor market, Vernissage. A tram lumbered by plastered with the red-and-white Kit-Kat logo. There were the inevitable internet cafés, and a few more beggars on the streets.
You learn a lot about a place from its markets, including how little you know. At one end were bookstalls galore, with the Oxford Book of English Verse and the Collected Plays and Poems of TS Eliot next to The Complete Armenian Course. There were army hats, hip flasks, flowering cacti, bakelite telephones. An entire stall sold dental equipment. Several more had huge displays of scientific instruments and specimen bottles. Hundreds of Russian cameras lined up alongside telescopes and microscopes. People sold puppies. An accordionist played Besame Mucho. On one stall I saw one of the most bizarre offerings of all: two iguanas had been stuffed and placed in a tableau, sitting in chairs playing backgammon against each other. A boy of about 13 walked by with a huge crucifix over his shoulder, like Jesus on his way to Calvary.
Armenia was the first country to adopt Christianity as its state religion, in 301AD or thereabouts. Religious pilgrims, students of architecture, ornithologists, exiled Armenians and the plain curious make up most of Armenian’s tourist trade. The country is covered in simply beautiful, and beautifully simple, old churches and monasteries. Most of these can be visited from Yerevan on day trips… indeed, there is little tourist infrastructure outside of the city, requiring a nightly return to the comfort of the capital where there are several smart hotels. Marriott recently acquired the Armenia 1 and Armenia 2 hotels, right on the main Republic Square.
On Sunday I went to Echmiadzin, 20km west of Yerevan and the holiest place in the country. A church was built here in 309AD when St Gregory the Illuminator saw a vision of the Holy Ghost descend to earth. The church is on the site of a 5th century BC pagan temple, some of which can still be seen in the crypt. Little chance of that today, as a service is taking place and I stand at the back, transported to my Catholic childhood by the powerful smell of incense. No chance either of visiting the small museum behind the altar, which contains a piece of the true cross, the lance which pierced Christ’s side when he died on the cross, and a piece of Noah’s Ark.
The Ark is said to have finally landed on Mount Ararat, the symbol of Armenia and visible from most parts of the country. It is, of course, now in Turkey, or Western Armenia as the Armenians describe it. This area is a geo-political minefield. The Armenia-Turkey border is closed, and Armenians wanting to go into Turkey must do it via neighbouring Georgia. There is a part of Azerbaijan which is separated from the rest of the country, and surrounded by Armenia on one side and Iran on the other. And then there is Nagorno-Karabagh.
In 1923 Stalin carved up the Caucasus and decided that the region known as Nagorno-Karabagh should be part of Azerbaijan, despite the fact that its population was 95% Armenian. In 1987 the Karabaghs began demanding unity with Armenia again. Gorbachev refused. The Karabaghs declared themselves part of Armenia anyway. The Russian parliament said this act was illegal. The Karabaghs held a referendum and afterwards announced themselves independent of Azerbaijan, and the war between Azerbaijan on one side and the Karabaghs and Armenians on the other, began. Meanwhile, Armenia and Azerbaijan both claimed their independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. The Karabagh war continued into 1993, with Armenia winning out and taking the disputed territory. A cease-fire was declared in 1994, and there the matter has rested, awaiting a diplomatic solution. The two sides are still negotiating.
Visitors to Armenia have for the last two years been taking side trips into Nagorno-Karabagh, this being the only way to get in there. The Armenians control the Lachin Corridor, through which they drove a highway funded by the Armenian diaspora. It was to here our small group of curious travellers headed, abandoned by her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State who was not prepared to request and require in the name of Her Majesty to allow us to pass freely without let or hindrance. In other words, you’re on your own, matey. If anything happens to you, the Foreign Office will not come to your aid as you are technically visiting disputed territory.
Boosted by this frisson of excitement that you don’t normally get when travelling, we set off on the 220 mile coach journey which was to take us all day. This was partly due to diversions to see more monasteries, and partly to the fact that the road climbs to almost 8000 feet as it traverses the most mountainous part of the Trans-Caucasus region. Nagorno is the Russian word for Mountainous, while Karabagh is a partly Turkish word meaning Kingdom or Fertile Earth, depending who you believe.
Either way, you can see how it would be a land worth fighting for. Imagine the Alps with a hard edge, the Scottish Highlands at twice the size. It is an enchanted land of mountain peaks and narrow passes with streams flowing through them. The road weaves snakelike along one side of a rippling valley, perhaps half a mile wide and whose sides are a thousand feet deep. The slopes shine green in the sun, although we had driven through a snowstorm at the peak of the pass before descending the zig-zag highway to Stepanakert.
In truth it is better to travel there than to arrive, as Stepanakert, the capital of 60,000 people, does not yet have much for the visitor. The streets are drab, save for the occasional cheerful flower shop or vivid independence mural. The architecture is Soviet functional… and only just functional at that. The city museum has sincerity to offer, and a keen curator, and I feel guilty for being bored by the dusty displays of rocks, costumes and old photographs. The enthusiasm of the city’s inhabitants for their new nation is unbounded and touching, however, and they simply want the world to know of their existence.
It is outside Stepanakert when I feel my journey justified at last, and I’m hit by an impact I’ve not felt since visiting Auschwitz. We drive to the Azeri town of Aghdam. Or rather, the former town of Aghdam. Before the war this had roughly the same population as Stepanakert and its market was rich with figs, apples, pomegranates, apricots and cherries. Today there is no market. Today there is no Aghdam, as the Armenians destroyed the city. About 20,000 people, one-third of the population, were killed, and the rest given 24 hours to leave before the Armenian tanks and foot soldiers rumbled in and razed it. We drive past the cemetery. A solitary magpie sits on a gravestone.
Aghdam means ‘white covered roofs’, but there are few roofs to be seen. Only the skeletons of buildings remain. It is like visiting the remnants of a vast Greek or Roman city, spreading across the valley floor, except that these ruins are modern. A fig tree grows in an untended garden, the fruit starting to show through. In the autumn this must be a Garden of Eden, but with no-one left to pick the fruit. It is a sad and sobering experience, but one worth having.
The Armenians have had a troubled history, conquered by the Persians, the Romans, the Mongols, the Arabs, the Turks and most recently the Russians. Yet still the nation bounces back, and plods resolutely onwards. Still they look to Mount Ararat, or to the prospect of opening a petrol station. And on the road back to Yerevan, away from the airport, still men stand at the side of the road selling petrol in bottles, in cans, or from the back of small toytown tankers. Still dreaming.
First published in ViaMichelin website
‘Now here we have a book called Anecdotes at the Bar,’ Sister Gregory tells me, ‘but it’s nothing racy. The official name of the Bar Convent is St Mary’s, but it has always been known as the Bar Convent because we are next to Micklegate Bar. What you have to remember in York is that the gates are called bars and the streets are called gates. The bars are the four great entrances to the city.’
At the time of the convent’s opening in 1686, Catholics were persecuted throughout England. Nuns had to enter the order abroad, usually in Germany, before coming to the convent in plain clothes. Anyone wearing a habit was promptly thrown into jail.
Adding to the challenges was the fact that the order had been founded by Mary Ward, a pioneering Yorkshirewoman. She believed in the rights of women, in particular their right to be educated, and that nuns should be out in the world, helping people. ‘The conservative people at that time thought it was really shocking,’ says Sister Gregory, a fellow Yorkshirewoman. ‘The nuns were called all kinds of derogatory things. The place for nuns was behind convent walls, not out in the community.’
It was a life of the utmost secrecy, no better illustrated than by the secret chapel. Under the convent roof a glorious chapel can be visited, with a magnificent dome. From the outside this is hidden by a regular slate roof, giving no hint of what lies beneath. Sister Gregory lifts up a trap-door to show us the Priest’s Hiding Hole, and points out the several doors through which the congregation could escape if an informer told the magistrates that a Mass was being heard.
There could be no better guide to the Bar Convent than Sister Gregory, a sprightly 92-year-old who is also the archivist and librarian. She writes pamphlets too, on sale in the convent shop, and her talents as a maker of doll’s houses can be seen in the convent museum which tells the history of Christianity in the north of England. The Bar Convent also has an award-winning café and conference facilities, bed and breakfast accommodation, a website and has even held fashion shows. All are necessary to survive financially and to allow the nuns to continue their work of hospital visits, prison visits and caring for the elderly and the unfortunate.
‘”Spent above ye income” is often the bottom line,’ Sister Gregory says, mixing medieval and modern language. She is showing me one of the archive’s treasures, a collection of account books that date back to 1660, after the order was founded but before the present convent was built.
‘Some of the bills are for things like a chimney sweep, which in those days would have been little boys, and the hire of a sedan chair for a special occasion. They didn’t have a great deal of money, and almost invariably spent more than they received, but every month there were donations to the poor as well as feeding them of course. The nuns never forgot their duties.’
Nor do they forget them today, with five nuns still resident at the convent, their good deeds supported by anyone who calls in to see the museum, stay in their accommodation or just indulge in a home-made cake in the café. And with nuns like Sister Gregory still active, the Anecdotes at the Bar will long continue.
First published in The Times
Down on La Rambla, the street that pulses through the heart of Barcelona, the tourists are sitting with cold beers in the 80-degree heat, or watching the performance artists, or buying postcards, or heading for the market or the beach. Up above them, on the fifth floor of a gym, I am being taught how to peck like a chicken.
‘Pecking is an art form,’ insists our tutor, Simon Selmon. ‘It’s a dance that originated at the Cotton Club in Harlem.’ Simon knows all about the Cotton Club, as he recently choreographed the West End musical, The Cotton Club, not to mention choreographing and appearing in movies such as Swing with Lisa Stansfield, and the forthcoming War Brides starring Anna Friel. He’s one of the best lindy hop dancers in Britain, the founder of the London Swing Dance Society and the author of Let’s Lindy, a beginner’s guide to dancing the lindy hop.
‘The lindy hop is a lot older than people think,’ he had told us at the start of our dancing holiday week, before we knew we would end up mimicking chickens. ‘It dates back to 1927 when Lindbergh was hopping across the Atlantic, and not just to the 1950s. It’s related to the jive, and the way I describe it is that lindy hop is like a big pie, and the jive is one slice of that pie. From the lindy other dances developed, like the jitterbug, which only became rock ‘n’ roll when the film Rock Around the Clock was released in 1954. I’ve met some of the original dancers from the film, and they said they didn’t know they were doing rock ‘n’ roll till after it came out. They thought they were jitterbugging.’
Jive, jitterbug or lindy, I haven’t done a step of any of them when we start our informal introductory lesson on the Saturday night. Soon we were stepping forward and back, forward and back, and side to side, side to side, picking up some simple footwork. ‘Don’t keep looking at your feet,’ Simon warns us. ‘You know where they are, at the ends of your legs where they’ve always been, so you don’t need to keep looking down at them.’
Simon says that on Monday morning he’ll be dividing the twenty or so people up into two groups, beginners and intermediate, for separate two-hour classes. ‘Are you a beginner,’ I ask the young woman standing next to me. ‘Oh yes,’ she says, ‘I’ve only been learning the lindy for six months.’ I gulp. ‘What about you,’ she asks. ‘Er... I’ve never had a dance lesson in my life.’
I wasn’t alone, though, as the group was made up of three roughly equal sets of people: absolute beginners, like me; those who were keen dancers already but had never tried the lindy hop; and those who had been learning lindy for a while, and couldn’t resist the thought of a week in Barcelona, attending classes during the day, and sampling the Barcelona dance scene at night, with other keen dancers.
Our first look at a different side of Barcelona was on Sunday lunchtime. This was when I’d been told by knowledgeable friends that I must go to the Cathedral, to see people dressed up in traditional costume dancing the old Catalan round dance, the sardana. Just the thing for a dance holiday, you’d think, but our local guide Monica had other ideas. ‘You could go to the Cathedral,’ she told us, ‘but that’s just for tourists. Instead I recommend the Plaza Rius y Taulet in the Grácia district, where they have a jazz hour each Sunday lunchtime. This week they have two live bands and a performance by the local lindy hoppers.’
So off we trooped, the local lindy hoppers wowing the crowd with an energetic performance before jiving and lindy hopping in the street with some of the best of our group of dancers. We beginners could only stand by and watch with a mix of admiration and trepidation. Would we be doing this by the end of the week, twirling our partners round and bopping enthusiastically?
Monday came and we lined up in the Frontón Colón fitness centre on La Rambla, alongside the Wax Museum. I was dripping like a melting statue before we’d finished our warm-up routine, a little number called the Electric Slide. ‘Well you shuffle to the right,’ says Simon, ‘and you shuffle to the left. Step-back-two-three, a-step, a-back, a-step, a-back, a kick and you shuffle to the right....’ Except this time we’d turned through 90-degrees and were about to be introduced to the pecking routine for a bit of variety. ‘And you peck to the right and you peck to the left. Just move your head back and forward, keep the shoulders very still.’ Simon was such a charming and encouraging tutor, that had he asked us to lay an egg we’d have probably had a damn good try.
As we learned a few basic lindy steps, it was the unexpected exercise I was getting that surprised me. It didn’t surprise one of my fellow students, however. Diane Stott runs a transport café on the A12 near Chelmsford and was having her first holiday in three years. ‘I used to go to the gym,’ she told me ‘but it was too boring. I enjoyed the exercise but your mind just keeps doing these repetitive tasks. So I took up dancing instead and that’s much better. You get the same workout but you’re learning something too. Then there’s the social aspect of it. I go out dancing 3-4 times a week and a holiday like this is great for a woman on her own. I went out to a salsa club last night and didn’t get back till two in the morning, which is not something I would have done if I’d come to Barcelona by myself.’
For me, one of the hardest aspects of learning to lindy was having to become a leader. Not a leader of men but a leader of women. When you've done nothing more than bop around at the disco, everyone doing their own thing to the music, this came as a bit of a shock. Not only did I have to learn my own footwork but I had to let me partner know what I was doing as well, about half a beat in advance, so that she could respond. This was tricky, not least because I often had no idea what I was about to do myself. Sometimes my mind would go blank and I felt I could spend the rest of my days doing lindy turns in Barcelona, because I had absolutely no idea how to get out of one and into something else.
‘Gentlemen,’ warned Simon. ‘It is very likely that most of the ladies you dance with will not be psychic. They need little signals about what you intend to do, so they can follow. If you push forward with your left arm, they know to step back with their right foot.’ And in my case, I thought, know to step back very quickly, lest they get crushed with a size 12 shoe.
After both classes had done their two-hour morning sessions, it was time to meet up for what was usually at least a two-hour lunch. It turned out to be a very convivial bunch of people, although you were free to opt in and out of the planned activities as you wished. Some never attended a class, spent their days sunbathing and shopping, and only turned out at night. In the evenings were optional introductory sessions for other dances: salsa, merengue, tango and cha-cha. At a fiver for an hour, they proved popular, even if like me you discovered you had all the natural salsa ability of a dalek. We could all shuffle our way to the nearest tapas bar, however, and the more experienced dancers went on to clubs for a few hours more, crawling back, it seemed, just in time to get up for breakfast.
‘We’ve been to Barcelona several times before,’ said John Taylor, a company director from Amersham, who was out dancing every night with his wife Sheri, a reflexologist. ‘But we’ve never been to some of the clubs we’ve discovered on this trip.’
By Tuesday, according to Simon, we’d learned some of the harder steps. By Wednesday we were feeling confident, and then on Thursday several of us felt we were losing it all again, as what we had learned all started to unravel. But on Friday in a much more relaxed final lesson, Simon gives us our first chance to dance freestyle. The only condition, he says, is that we have to incorporate our latest routine somewhere before the end of the music. This is a jaunty Charleston kicking routine – Charleston being a small part of lindy hop too – followed by a twirl from the woman and a change of places. My partner and I lose the move completely, but undaunted, and with Simon down at the far end of the room, we say ‘what the hell’ and do a little jiving of our own invention. It feels good. ‘Hey,’ she says, smiling: ‘We’re dancing!’
First published in Wanderlust
‘I wouldn’t exactly want to drink watermelon beer,’ I heard a woman say, and I had to agree with her. I was at the Great American Beer Festival, where a ticket lets you sample any of 1900 different beers from over 300 breweries in every part of the USA. Of course with 1900 to choose from, there are bound to be some clunkers.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever had a more foul-tasting thing in my mouth,’ my Denver friend said, of a beer called Beam Me Up Scotty. On the other hand, there were delights like a honey and raspberry ale, a gorgeous cherry wheat beer from the Sam Adams Brewery in Boston and dozens of others that showed there is a lot more to American beer than the insipid light lagers that are all we can buy in Britain.
Denver calls itself the Napa Valley of beer, and as well as the Great American Beer Festival every October, it is home to the biggest brewery in the world (Coor’s) and the biggest brew-pub in the world, the Wynkoop. Next day I chatted to the Wynkoop’s owner, John Hickenlooper, as I drank my way through the tasting tray of ten small beers, from Boxcar Kolsch to Patty’s Chili Beer. Much of the conversation has gone to that repository in the sky where most of our wonderful alcohol-fuelled conversations go, but I do remember one remark John made about the secrets of good brewing: ‘What people don’t realise when you start fermentation is that you’re starting a giant orgy. And just like an orgy, the only people you want there are the ones you’ve invited – or so I’m told.’
Denver sits exactly a mile high on the edge of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, and the city’s first permanent building was a saloon, but there’s much more to the city than beer as a visit to the impressive History Museum reveals. One of a series of huge dioramas shows Denver as it was in the summer of 1864. Wagon trains are parked in a circle on the edge of the city, and there is also an Indian camp by Cherry Creek where a big shopping mall now stands. You can see how quickly the wild west here was turning into a modern city, as only twenty years later they were starting work on the huge Colorado State Capitol, whose golden dome still gleams on Capitol Hill. By 1892 the Brown Palace Hotel, where I stayed, was opened.
As well as downing beer, Denver is a great place for exploring and exploding some of the myths about the old west. Watch the movies, for instance, and you’d be waiting a long time before you saw a black cowboy. Even in Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles, in 1974, the notion of a black cowboy was part of the joke.
‘There were no black cowboys,’ Paul Stewart was told as a child, ‘so you’ve got to be an Indian.’ When Stewart grew up and became a barber in Denver, he met a black cowboy who had led cattle drives at the turn of the century. Then some of his customers began telling him about their ancestors, and their lives in the west, as cowboys, settlers and troops. Stewart began collecting the stories and exploring the subject, discovering that about one-third of cowboys were black. In 1971 he opened the Black American West Museum, to put the material he’d collected on display.
The museum is a funky little place, in contrast to Denver’s several other stunning state-of-the-art museums. This is more a state-of-the-heart museum, just a few rooms in the home of a Dr Justina Ford, the first licensed black female doctor in the country. Being black she wasn’t allowed to work in a hospital, so had to practice from home. Her examination room where she worked from 1902-52 is one of the exhibits, while other rooms have displays on black homesteaders, ranchers and farmers. One of the most interesting is on the black troops, who became known as the Buffalo Soldiers. The Indians they fought against gave them the name, due to their strength, ferocity and their curly hair that looked like the manes of the buffalo which the Indians had so much respect for.
Indians is not the approved term these days, but who grew up playing cowboys and native Americans? One of the most surprising things I learned on my visit to Denver was who first started referring to the Indians as native Americans. Buffalo Bill, that’s who, back in the late 19th century. The man who was said to have helped almost wipe out the buffalo (another myth) was an early champion of the rights of the Indian people. He said they were the original inhabitants of the land, and the least they deserved was equal rights and equal treatment.
Buffalo Bill is buried just outside Denver, and I thought a visit to his grave and the nearby museum would be a very quick affair. In the end I spent an hour browsing the museum, which as well as telling the fascinating story of Buffalo Bill, reveals some of the truth about the characters of the wild west. As a notice on the wall points out: Sometimes heroism and villainy are a matter of perspective.
Buffalo Bill only killed a few thousand buffalo, for food and their hides, which can hardly be the reason that numbers dropped from an estimated 70 million down to 1500. Partly it was the settlement of the west, which drove the buffalo back as man took over their habitat, but it was also due to a disturbing and little-acknowledged fact. The American government was not having much success in defeating the Indians, who were much too smart and at home in the land. So instead the government decided to wipe out the Indians by wiping out the buffalo on which they depended for survival.
They almost succeeded, but when the buffalo were on the brink of extinction with just 1500 living in Colorado, efforts were at last made to protect them. The final herd was split, in case disease struck, with half in Yellowstone and half in Denver. Their descendants are still there, roaming by the freeway that separates them from Buffalo Bill’s grave. Watching them being fed, I meet the man who has looked after them for the last 28 years, Marty Homola.
‘The herd’s now managed,’ Marty told me, ‘but they are still wild animals and I take care when I go in with them. Some days they let me be, other days they’ll chase me. We’ve got 25 adults here, mostly cows, on 1000 acres that they share with about 52 elk. It’s the maximum number of animals such an area can support.
‘In the USA today there are probably about 115,000 bison,’ said Marty, referring to them by their correct name – American bison, not buffalo. ‘And there are a similar number in Canada.’
Marty tells me he doesn’t like the idea of bison being raised for meat, although the popularity of the meat is one reason for the animals’ survival. It is leaner than chicken, with fewer calories than some fish.
‘I don’t like it when people raise bison for meat,’ Marty tells me. ‘They’re a part of me. When I was young I used to hunt, like any guy, but I don’t do that any more. When you get older you respect life a lot more. I don’t eat much beef. I prefer seafood.’
But there was only one place I could possibly eat that night back in Denver: the Buckhorn Exchange. Founded in 1893 by a former scout of Buffalo Bill’s, it is Denver’s oldest restaurant. Buffalo Bill used to eat here, and Sitting Bull would come in and sit. The Buckhorn is a museum too, with Annie Oakley’s rifle, Sitting Bull’s daughter’s wedding dress, and a few hundred stuffed animal heads looking down at you. Apparently they moved the two-headed calf to a less obvious place, as it was putting some people off their food. The manager points out what he delicately refers to as an elk’s ‘unit’. But for me, there was only one meat I could eat. Sorry, Marty. And it was delicious. The Buffalo Gold beer tasted pretty damn good, too.
First published in CNN Traveller
The Colonel doesn’t have a telephone. In fact there are no phones in Moore Town, because there are no phone lines high up in the lush forests that cover the northern slopes of the Blue Mountains in Jamaica. There are no mobiles either, because there are no signals. So arranging to meet the Colonel was a little bit hit and miss. At the first attempt, after we drove for an hour to travel the ten miles up the slowly winding and pot-holed road high into the steamy hills, the Colonel wasn’t at home. We left a message that we would be back in two days time, and hoped for the best.
Two days later I returned with my local contact, Charn Brown, a young farmer who also leads walking tours with a company called Valley Hikes. Based in Port Antonio, they take the more adventurous tourists on hiking trips into the John Crow Mountains and the Rio Grande Valley, to go bird-watching or to visit hidden waterfalls a world away from the more touristy side of Jamaica.
Charn seemed to see my request to meet the Colonel as a challenge, and he was rising to it. I’d long wanted to learn more about the Maroons, the descendants of runaway slaves who live in two autonomous regions, one in the west and one in the east of the island. Visitors are very welcome, the only problem being getting to and from these remote settlements. But Jamaica is the land of ‘no problem’, and Charn bumped us back up the mountain to Moore Town. Even Jamaica’s major roads were described to me scornfully by one taxi driver as ‘a national disgrace’, so it’s easy to imagine what they’re like where even the telephone poles don’t go.
Moore Town is a sprawling village, a mix of wooden and concrete homes. On the wall outside one building is written: ‘No smoking inside this shop.’ It’s a pleasant rural village, not prosperous-looking but far from poverty-stricken, a village where people make a living by growing yams, bananas, mangos, grapefruit, cacao and whatever else will grow in the warm and wet earth. It is a village like any other in the hills of Jamaica, except for the people who live in it.
As we arrived for the second time outside the house of Colonel Wallace Sterling, four huge Rastas were leaving. It is hard not to be intimidated by these fearsome-looking men with their dreadlocks, till they break into charming smiles and say hello. They’re followed by the Colonel himself, younger than I’d expected from the title. He’s in his early forties, perhaps, with close-cropped hair and wearing a t-shirt and shorts. It is a courtesy to call in on the Colonel when arriving in Moore Town, to be given permission to visit the village.
Wallace Sterling became the Colonel in 1995. ‘To become the Colonel… it wasn't necessarily my desire but I was asked. I used to work on a cruise ship, and taking this position meant coming back to be here on almost a 24-hour basis. It's not a paying job. Once I took up the challenge there are moments you enjoy and moments when you think you could do a lot better.’
The position of Colonel goes back to the days when the Maroons finally made a peace settlement with Jamaica’s British rulers. When the Spanish had left Jamaica in 1660, they freed their slaves and provided them with weapons, not to be generous but knowing the slaves would cause problems for future rulers. This they did, their numbers increased by runaways from the later slaves who had been brought to Jamaica in their tens of thousands by the British.
The Maroons lived in remote parts of the island’s mountainous interior, a wild wilderness that many of today’s visitors, going there only for the beaches, are unaware still exists. The very name of the Maroons comes from a British corruption of the Spanish word cimarones, or savages. These tribes fought the British fiercely, carrying out raids and often escaping thanks to their knowledge of the mountainous terrain. A peace treaty was eventually signed in 1739, providing the Maroons with the land which they still live on today.
‘The treaty with the British,’ the Colonel explains, ‘said that as a people we were an autonomous region within Jamaica and that still applies today. But over the years laws change to keep in tune with society. A 200-year-old constitution is not necessarily best for today. If someone commits a crime then we have the right to try people in our own court, but in practice we seldom do this. You have to be practical. We have no facilities, no prison, so what we always do in practice is to hand the trial over to the local magistrate. Perhaps domestic disputes we would deal with within the community but if there was a major crime like for instance a murder, we would allow the police to deal with it.
‘A number of people still speak the old Cromante language. When our fore-parents were fighting in the mountains they would have used this language which was a mixture of the various African languages that they spoke. Because the Ashanti were dominant, most of their language was in there. But when you settle down there is a matter of survival, of commerce, of education. English is the language of education. In the churches they see the old language as the language of devil-worship. Anything that wasn't Christian was regarded as heathen, whether it was right or wrong. But the essence of communication is understanding, no matter what the language you use.’
The Colonel shows a commendable understanding of the need to live in the modern world, while remaining true to traditions. He is about to go to Kingston to argue the case for a Maroon MP, separate from the MP that represents the whole of the local region. How many Maroons remain today? ‘Well, we have never done a census,’ he says, ‘but we could sit down on the porch and count the people if we wanted to do that. I would say it is in the region of 2000. Two thousand and change, let us say. And approximately the same amount who live outside the community.’
In order to keep more of the Maroons within the community, the Colonel knows there has to be employment: ‘If there is employment then people would stay. That is why in the 40s and 50s people migrated to the UK and USA. Agriculture is the main source of employment. Not too long ago, bananas were selling well, also yams, cacao, potatoes. But all that has changed. The farmer who has 2-3 acres of land on the hillside doesn't have good access roads for vehicles. He is still reliant on manual labour to get his produce to the roads, to get it to the market. His costs are going to be higher. He cannot compete with, say, the US farmers.
‘We are also looking into producing craft items. It comes back to needing seed money to start these things going. We're offered the money but always the terms are so hard that it becomes impossible. You wonder if they really want to help you or not. The conditions are so stringent, it really is axing a lot of little communities.’
The Colonel wants to promote eco-tourism too, through companies like Valley Hikes, and to open a museum displaying Maroon culture. But there is a long way to go yet, as he knows.
‘We are now in the 21st century,’ he says, ‘and the school has a computer but it cannot be connected to the internet because we don't have a telephone line. And no mobile phones.’
Whether that is a good thing or not is a matter of perspective.
First published in The Express
‘Now the Vikings were a messy lot,’ Julian Cripps tells us. We’re in York, renowned for its Viking past, though I was learning rather more about them than I’d expected. ‘Yes,’ says Julian, who leads Historic Toilet Tours of York: ‘The Vikings used holes in the ground and cleaned themselves afterwards with moss and stones, which sounds a bit painful to me.’
I notice one or two passers-by giving us strange looks. It’s hard not to overhear in York’s narrow old streets. Locals are used to walking tours, which criss-cross the city all year round, but it’s usually ghosts and architecture rather than the intimate toilet habits of their ancestors.
Julian soon found out, though, how curious people were about water closets: 37 people signed up for the first Toilet Tour, last year. ‘One woman,’ he tells us, ‘asked me why we saw no toilets for women. I said that was because women, like royalty, don’t go to the toilet. When she said she really wanted to know, I told her that if women were going out, they made sure they went before they left home because there simply were no facilities for women.
‘Anyway, this woman persisted and asked what they did if they absolutely had to go. I explained that they wore knickers with a hole in, so they’d find a quiet spot and crouch down. “You mean they just stood up and walked away?” Look, I told her, you really don’t want to know any more about it than that!’
Julian has told us from the start that we will have to use our imaginations on this walk, as not too many toilets survive. We walk along Davygate and reach the Roman Bath pub, where you pay £1 at the bar to descend to the cellar and see what remains of Roman York. ‘The men sat in a long line, talking politics and telling jokes,’ Julian explains, making it sound not dissimilar to the bar above. Though perhaps not: ‘They used sponges on sticks to clean themselves afterwards,’ explains Julian, ‘dipping them into clean water that flowed down the middle of the room.’
We flow along Goodramgate, another of York’s intriguingly-named narrow streets. At the end it passes under the city walls through Monk Bar. This is the tallest and strongest of the several gates guarding York, and houses (appropriately, given the theme of our tour) the Richard III Museum.
‘This tower is interesting,’ we learn, ‘because it isn’t like most towers where a winding stone staircase goes all the way to the top, with little rooms leading off it. Here you have a short stair which goes into a large room, with the staircase continuing on the far side. This made for better defences as the attackers first had to break into the room and then get across to reach the stairs to the next level.’
The tower was also a prison, and one turret houses a solitary cell, not big enough to lie down or stand upright in. But it does, of course, have a toilet. Or at least a hole somewhere above the tower entrance. Well, it might help deter the attackers. In the opposite and much larger turret is the guard’s quarters. And his toilet. ‘You can just imagine him sitting there having a break from his guard duties,’ says Julian. ‘At least, I can, but then I’ve always had a vivid imagination.’
Past the guard’s room, stone steps lead onto the city walls. These are the longest and best preserved city walls in England, at three miles. We go about fifty yards and stop, looking down a grassy slope to a Medieval building.
‘This,’ says Julian, ‘is the Mercer’s or Merchant Tailor’s Hall. They didn’t have a toilet so they would come out of the back door there and climb this bank to one of the two toilets here on the city wall.’
He points to two holes side by side in a recess sticking out from the wall itself. Apparently you just reversed in, and did what you had to do, which then fell outside the city walls.
‘I find it amazing,’ says Julian, ‘that people would do it like that, in full view of anyone who happened to be passing by. I can’t help but think there must have been occasions when someone was strolling by, carrying a bow and arrow, and looked up and saw this bum poking out of the walls. What a target!’
As we return along the walls and return to the city streets, Julian finishes his, as it were, potted history of toilets in York. ‘By the time we get to the 18th and 19th centuries,’ he says, ‘they were putting up little prefab buildings in the streets. These were built where the coaches and cabs stopped, mainly for the convenience of the drivers.’
At the end of the fascinating tour, which I’m amazed to find has lasted two hours thanks to Julian’s anecdotes (not all of them repeatable), one of our group inevitably needs to pay a visit. Is there a convenient convenience, she asks. ‘Oh,’ Julian says, ‘I always use the ones in Brown’s, the department store.’ Well, it sure beats a hole in the ground.