Taking one final week in Italy before returning to the parliamentary fray next week. One delightful consequence of this blog was I was contacted by Charles Young, the author of ‘Impunity’ the new book about Berlusconi, after he saw my blog reference a few weeks ago http://lordsoftheblog.net/2010/08/03o. It turns out he and his wife have a house quite near us in the hills near Lucca and we were here in Italy at the same time. We had a delightful dinner together with his daughter, also an economist. I practised my ravioli ignudi on them. I don’t think we quite solved Italy’s political problems but we had a good grumble about the Italian economy.
The olive harvest isn’t looking good this year; the olives are of good quality but in small numbers. The quantity always goes in cycles like any other fruit tree and the last two years have been spectacularly good, so we can’t grumble. There’ll be just enough for friends and family and it does keep for at least two years. But who cares when the wooded hillsides are covered in wild cyclamen, the roses are still in full bloom and the grapes are ripe and delicious.
I’ve been reading Chris Mullin’s wonderful diary ‘A View from the Foothills’ which I suddenly realised I’d better finish before starting his sequel ‘Decline and Fall’, now published. Rarely have I read a memoir so touching, amusing and achingly accurate about the life of a junior minister. While the government style of Blair’s government may have been particularly irksome I have to say that I have never seen any Government behave significantly better; all become obsessed with the message, descend into factional groupings, mistrust their civil servants and turn over junior ministers so fast they never have time to take root and flourish. I am still praying the coalition will do things differently. But anyone who wants to understand how a good MP deals with his lot should read Chris Mullin’s books. It also makes you realise how difficult it is to achieve anything worthwhile from the shifting sand at the bottom of the political sea.
http://lordsoftheblog.net/2010/08/03o.
I have just last night started on Volume 1 of Tony Benn’s diaries, “Out of the Wilderness,” covering 1963-70. I did think of Lords of the Blog when I read: “”One…interesting conversation…was with Oscar Langer, who is the Polish economic expert and is on their Central Committee…..Langer…said he could see a strong case for having a House of Lords (non-hereditary, of course) in Poland. The problem of what to do with older politicians is a serious one in Poland and an appointed second chamber where they would have status and influence without power offered many advantages. Undoubtedly if you don’t shoot them or send them to Siberia there is a lot to be said for some Marxist way of kicking them upstairs….”
Hmmm. The foothills of Lucca sound a lot more tempting.
I really hope they will keep ministers in place for longer to. People seem obsessed with trying to stop ministers “going native”, but then that never happened to dear Gordon, who was in the same department for 10 years and hardly appeared to listen to his civil servants, let alone be dominated by them. I was at the Lib Dem conference last weekend and saw many junior ministers ho showed a real interest in and passion for their departments. Here’s hoping they will be allowed to pursue it and not be shunted around in 6 months time.
This is especially important if they are in graveyard departments like housing!
“The olive harvest isn’t looking good this year”
Ah! Ah! Ah! But then I don’t share Chris Mullins view of the way parliament is run, also having watched his own activities in it, and apart from it in the 1990s.
Our Cider apple crop has been amazing for about the nth year running, but then we do Wassail every 12th night.
I should get about 1 ton or more from 2 trees. One Bramley and one Wrocester, about 40 gallons of excellent cider and some grapes
too.
I am still looking at the prospects for olives in Portugal where there is always a grove or two for sale.
I then looked at the market for the sale of
Olive products and as always, (as with my own product, honey) if you don’t retail your own crop, then you do not make anything from it.
The Baroness is certainly only concerned with the ‘quiet enjoyment’ of the property, and its liquid assets!
The price of cider disappears like magic through the floor, when there is a good crop to be had. £4/pint is reasonable this year.
This “noble” topic appears to be roughly two-pronged:
1. The olive crop and the luxuries of Italy are of good quality, even delicious, to a UK House of Lords lady preferring life in Italy to that in Britain.
2. The Lords, Ladies and High-ish-up establishment rulers, especially of Italy;
and especially in Baroness Murphy’s ‘world’ of certain politically-correct authors such as Young and Mullins (whoever the hell they might be to the British Peoples’ real and prssing needs, hows and affordable-costs);
(but not at all necessarily of the UK parliamentary “fray”; nor of the “irksome – obsessed – factional – mistrustful-of-the-British-Civil-Service – and super-fast culling of junior-ministers” British Labour Party);
are “delightful” company, good at grumbling, provide enough olives for BM’s friends and family, and grapes that are ripe and delicious (eaten in the Lucca foothills of Italy), and especially at “understanding how a good MP deals with his lot” (oxymoron)
and at the same time “makes you realise how difficult it is to achieve anything worthwhile” (yes, we certainly look forward to this author achieving something worthwhile for Britain’s many peoples)
and making that difficult worthwhile achievement not from Democratic two-way discussion with various Peoples, nor from good-governance within the British Parliamentary establishment, but “from the shifting sand at the bottom of the politicial sea” (no map-reference given, for this hidden bottom, where Baroness Murphy intimates she is residing, attempting to achieve something – (anything!) – or simply attempting to represent our Peoples’ needs, hows and affordable-costs).
(to be concluded)
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JSDM1424T28Sep10 235 words.
What amazes me is the different ways in which Olives are sold to increase their retail value.
Look at the 0lives ‘dressed'(?) with almonds, or a little piece of pepper.
Quite apart from wondering who on earth goes to so much trouble to pit them, and then fill them by hand(it can surely be done no other way), taking the trouble to stone them presumably increases the amount of stone which can be decorticated for oil.
Thus the whole of the olive is used, both the ‘meat’ for eating and then the stone for oil.
As always the retailing aspect of the business is the only one that pays, and any professional producer has a hard life indeed, unless he is prepared to push manual workers noses to the grind stone, making bottles of stuffed olives!
What probably happens is that some species of olive are used for decortication (and oil production) only and some are used only for the meat. That must be as obvious as the difference between Cider apples and cooking apples, although if you add sugar to the excellent juice of Bramley cookers you still get a good alcohol drink. The value is less because you are not producing all your own sucrose, but buying caster sugar to improve it.
Quiet enjoyment is the best policy!
“good alcohol drink”
Yes Minister’s Civil-Servant Bernard sez:
“oxymoron”.
The wine harvest in Lanzarote is down 13% this year although they had a bumper 2009.
http://www.lanzarotemagazine.co.uk/
So are crops in India…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11418033
Is something is happening to insect populations generally; could it be microwave radiation from mobile phones or perhaps chemical agents in the environment?
Senex,
You have gotta laugh sometimes!
Now I am laughing at your post!
Bound to be mobile phones!
On the subject of the highest of the species
Homo Sapiens Sapientia, I contribute to the theory of Entomologists, that in fact “Order”
“Insect” is far less likely to be eradicated first than Homo sapiens, and that they are in fact for that reason and their prolixity of genus, themselves the highest species; not the entomologists but the “order Insect”!
Ok, Honey!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/7778401/Mobile-phones-responsible-for-disappearance-of-honey-bee.html
Or it could bee the Milliband effect of millimetre wavelengths or it could bee
http://www.hese-project.org/hese-uk/en/issues/nature.php
What banking crises; a collective failure of imagination by some very clever people? The silly bees must have missed something.
Senex, or Geneticially-Modified lifesupports ?
GH looks ‘sober’, and could have his fact right that Insects will out-survive Humans;
(But so will many other lifeforms, and the living-Earth itself: according to Prof Stone’s Reading in “Australian Environmental Studies” and Dr Iaian _ _ _ ‘s TV documentary about life-survival, on this ‘human-plagued’ Earth).
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JSDM0430Sn03Oct
Civilisations answer: I get my food from a supermarket. Its their problem not mine.