Food should be fun and taken out of the hands of foodies… and chefs.
I’m writing this while eating my Swedish ‘vacuum cleaners’ or dammsugare for fika. These are named after the tube-shaped vacuum cleaners of the Fifties.
I had been given them in my godispase, or goody bag.
Clean sweep
The godispase had come courtesy of the Stena Estrid, Swedish ferry cruise company‘s http://www.stenaline.ie and www.stenaline.co.uk maiden journey between Holyhead and Dublin.
It is, in truth, the closest I will get to a vacuum cleaner but it shows the Swedes’ sense of fun.
The Swedish dammsugare
To name this sweet after a common household gadget.
And it’s good to see that the world has been watching because it’s not for nothing that Jim Henson looked to Scandinavia for his madcap Swedish Chef.
A little big woman: Fannie Lou Hamer in Mississippi
Sometimes it’s the design that catches you and stops you in your tracks.
And so it is with this remarkable little woman,
The President of the USA, Lydon Baines, Johnson took extraordinary measures in stopping her saying her piece at the Democratic Convention by having television change its schedule.
Fannie Lou Hamer’s life was extraordinary, born into a sharecropping family and picking cotton from the age of six, she was later forced out of her home, threatened with her very life and beaten.
All because she wanted to sign on on the voting register.
She summed up her struggle in the Civil Rights Movement thus, and of course nobody could say it better: ‘I got sick and tired of being sick and tired.’
Us journalists like to think of ourselves as hard-bitten but I had to choke back the tears walking through the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam…. http://www.annefrank.org.
The audio narrative dwelt on a passage in her diary where she mentions that she wants to become a journalist when she’s older.
And what a journalist she would have been… ethical (yes, some of us are), prying and fearless.
Amsterdam is one of the world’s great cities and Anne one of history’s greatest figures… http://www.iamsterdam.com.
Statues should be provocative and the Czechs have this one down to a T.
‘Piss’ is the good people of Prague’s commentary on the politicians who have urinated all over their country.
You’ll not see it here but once the water gets flowing they pee all over the map of the country.
The Czechs as well as being the world’s biggest lager drinkers, per population, with some of the world’s best beers, are wonderfully anti-establishmentarian.
There are statues to musical giants all over the world but while former Thin Lizzy lead singer Phil Lynott isn’t the best or most famous singer of them all, try telling that to Dubliners.
It is a tradition now for visitors to Dublin to have their photo taken outside Philo’s statue off the main Grafton Street shopping thoroughfare.
That other statue, the Tart with the Cart, Molly Malone? Well you can leave that to the uninitiated.
He’s obviously not the only Horatio or the biggest, and as I’ve alluded to already some not too far from here even blew him up.
But he was a survivor, except when he was killed obvs, and he lost an eye and an arm.
Death might even have been a better gig too as he was transported home in a vat of rum… a good way to go and one that the Bajans would have approved of.
Until, of course, his old shipmates drilled a hole in the vat and drunk the rum!
Statues are a controversial subject but my Bajan hosts were keen to tell me that Nelson was part of their story too.
And so ignore the white liberals who like to speak for black people, they’re glad to have him keeping his one eye open on what’s going on in Bim.
Martin Luther stood as a defiant symbol of Dresdeners refusal to see their city disappear after the Allies’ firebombing at the end of the Second World War.
The Dresdeners rebuilt the obliterated Frauenkirche sixty years later, after they had got rid of the Communists, using as the plans photographs they had asked the public to send in from their weddings.
Dresden was known as the Florence of the Elbe and it is one of the great architectural stories of our age, or any age, to see how the Dresdeners have rebuilt their city to the same grandeur of its renaissance days.
Yes, the Little Mermaid is more visited, but personally I prefer the top-hatted Hans in the heart of Copenhagen.
Hans was an eccentric all right and once decamped on Charles Dickens, walked around the house in the starkers, and made it difficult for Charlie to show him the door.
Nelson Mandela Voting Line, Port Elizabeth, South Africa
March to Freedom: In Port Elizabeth
Statues shouldn’t just stand there. No, really. And this is a moving symbolic Voting Line which sums up South African democracy.
This is our host Sisseko and beside him a kid as he would have been back in 1995 when South Africa had its historic vote.
It is also immersive and you don’t have to climb up a plinth to get next to it as they do in Glasgow when they put police cones on the Duke of Wellington.
It is the way I should imagine that Nelson, a native of the Eastern Cape, would have wanted it.
Where I played cricket, of sorts, and football (chased shadows).
And, of course tucked into their food which comes from everywhere.
Although I might arrange for them to get some Irn-Bru shipped in.
And now that we’re well into the Christmas drinking… here, by popular demand, Jocktails, your favourite Cocktail column by your Scottish cocktail guru.
Like the time I played the late, great Eric ‘The Crafty Cockney’ Bristow.
And he beat me, kneeling down and with his back away from the board.
But I won’t.
And will only leave you with my memory of an even earlier sports interview with the heroic Sid Waddell when I was in Aberdeen… www.visitscotland.com
Who repeated his praise of Bristow: ‘When Alexander of Macedonia was 33 he cried salt tears because there were no more worlds to conquer… Bristow’s only 27.’
Now I try the whiskies of the world wherever I find them and have become particularly partial to bourbon and rye from visiting Washington http://Easy DC and my cousin’s husband (he hails from Kentucky).
It can feel positively Arctic in Scotland so it should come as little surprise that Scotland is being billed as part of an Arctic cruise… with our old friends G Adventures.
G Adventures http://www.gadventures.com will be hosting us tonight in Dublin to reveal more of their wares as part of their G Stock Live road trip.
Of course they cover the Seven Seas too and their Galapagos Islands and Cambodia packages from their current sale randomly jumped out at me.
My fjord escort: My own wee Troll
As did their 16-day Cruise the Norwegian Fjords with Scottish Highlands package for May 17.
Which is reduced from €4899 to €4164.
Starting in Tromso, the gateway to the Arctic you’ll travel as far north as Nordkopp where the Atlantic and the Arctic Seas meet before hopping your way down the fjords.
Light up, light up. Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
You’ll pop in Shetland Islands, the most northerly point in the UK, whose nearest train station is Bergen in Norway, before finishing off in Edinburgh.
Heck, the Shetland Islands used to be Norwegian before being given to Scotland in a dowry in 1472.
Every day’s a school day on Cruiseday Tuesday!
Tenerife… I’ll be back
The beautiful Garachico. On Tenerife
The sharp Norwegian winter air is bracing but if you prefer a winter warmer…
Then TUI has seven nights on January 17 in an inside cabin on the Marella Explorer from €879pps.
For more on the Canarian Flavours package visit https://www.tuiholidays.ie. Call 1850 45 35 45 or visit a TUI Store / travel agent.
A toast to the Canaries
Unless you’ve been hiding under a stone you’ll know that I’ve been in Tenerife this autumn.
It is usual to promote Edinburgh ahead of Glasgow, my home city, but both should have equal billing in my mind.
Which reminds me of the two Glaswegians who had a poke at their Edinburgh ‘friends’ when they turned up in the Scottish capital’s main street, Princes Street, in 1990.
They were wearing sandwich boards with arrows saying: ‘You are only 46 miles from the European City of Culture’.
Iconic sight: Yes, the Duke of Wellington statue, but mostly Mum and I
Glasgow and Edinburgh are €9.99 one-way. I guess you have to do the math for the overall package otherwise they’d be literally paying you to travel!
It was one of the mainstays of my childhood, so much so that I made a career out of writing about it… the Glasgow Old Firm football match.
Between Celtic and Rangers… just for those who don’t know.
The two tribes go to war on Sunday, and unfortunately that is not a euphemism.
On average one person gets killed, actually killed, not Glasgow slang, surrounding this match every time the two teams meet.
As a cub reporter training with Reading
Which they have been doing since 1888.
Being of the Catholic variety I grew up supporting Celtic.
And that despite my Dear Old Dad’s efforts to guide me away from them.
Not because he had not been a supporter. How could he not?
He was born within spitting distance of Celtic Park.
No, it’s a Sporting Lisbon top
And his great-uncles had helped build the original stadium.
It was just that he knew the religious problems associated with Celtic, the club created by Irish monks for the poor immigrants of the East End of Glasgow.
And the Establishment Scottish Protestant club, Rangers.
Neutral stance
And so I remember there being three football tops in the sports room of our house, Clyde, Kilmarnock and Hibernian.
Alas, going to a Catholic school (yes, only in Scotland, and Northern Ireland are kids separated by their same religion) pushed me towards Celtic.
And being raised in a Catholic bubble I never met a Rangers supporter until my life took a different turn.
It’s only a game
When I had a disagreement with my school and ended up going to the local Protestant school.
And kudos to my Dad for doing what was best for me educationally.
I have mentioned it before but the tolerance and welcome I had there was an education… in life.
And so to this weekend’s big game.
A football disease
The Old Firm is the tag given to Celtic and Rangers on account that the bigotry was seen as being in the financial interests of both.
Things have changed, and for the better, over the years.
With Rangers’ unofficial policy of not signing Catholics now 31 years in the past.
And yet, both Rangers and Celtic fans cling to their ‘traditions’ of support for the Protestant and Catholic sides of the Northern Ireland and Scottish divide.
They manifest this with flags, symbols, songs and antagonism and violence to the opposite side.
Yet it is seen as an unpalatable truism that it can never be changed.
While there have been great efforts and successes in England against racism, it is considered impossible by some that we weed out the bigots in Scotland.
An impossible problem?
There are just too many of them, we are told.
And every time these two monsters of the Scottish game meet the morbid fascination for them is raised to fever pitch.
And the commentariat wax lyrical about it being the ‘greatest derby of them all.’
My pal Billy, and Fenella
I’ve been to enough of them to say categorically that it is not, for spectacle, skill or fervour.
But there will be plenty who disagree. And I welcome that.
Just maybe not mention my religion, though, and I won’t mention yours.
And Julie didn’t care about the football scarf
Because there are, in fact, people who support both sides who don’t.
