It's that time of year... When a few friends feel it necessary to regale ALL the people they think are their friends about how wonderful and nuclear and solvent and academic their families are. All this festive syrup is contained on a cheap, thin piece of inkjet-printed A4 paper, stuffed into their Christmas card - with, of course, a second class stamp stuck on the envelope and 'posted in good time'. These are organized people...

You know the sort of thing. The letter follows a familiar form:

"Happy Christmas to one and all!!

Husband Bob has been terribly busy, which makes him very tired. But was promoted again this year and we are looking forward to his bonus :-)))))). I am keeping out of trouble with tennis lessons, the WI and a part time job at the local solicitors' office. Son Tarquin looks like he will get a double first from OXFORD. All he does is work, it seems, poor lad! Daughter Annabel is lovely and has such a wonderful social life."

When actually the letter should say something along the lines of:

"Bob farts incessantly, never shaves at the weekend, is a brief and inadequate lover and he's really getting on my tits. If it wasn't for the fat pay cheque - or for the fact that the tennis coach is married (and in love, would you believe???!!!) - I would leave the fat, farting bastard tomorrow.

Tarquin is a lazy little long-haired bugger. We had to fight like hell to stop him being thrown out of that third-rate shit-hole "Oxford Brooks" - a place that has the nerve to call itself a university. Ha ha. :-(. God knows - Tarquas hardly seems employable at the moment; smacked out of his tree, or drunk, or both - most of the time. And NEVER bothers to call home, even though we pay his extortionate mobile phone bill for him. Ungrateful waster.

Annabel is a slut and shags anything that moves. Men have stopped looking at me in the street and just drool at her. Little tart. And we suspect she is running the amphetamine and vice business in Croydon. At least she shows some evidence of a blossoming business acumen, bless her.

Happy Christmas? Probably not."

I am thinking of doing my own round-robin this year - so watch this space....

And sorry if you are someone who does write these letters, but hopefully you will now think twice about embarking on your odious annual holier-than-thou epistles to the unwashed no-hopers who you like to call friends. We could all do without them from now on. If you want to write something, write it - to each person - and ask them how they are, rather than be 100% on transmit. For me, this year. No cards, no cheap pieces of A4. Instead, I shall be buying some goats for families in Ethiopia via a dodgy website. Hopefully, the recipients will have some tasty recipes for cooking the pesky critters.

They can be tough when they get a little old.

And so can the goats.

Happy festiveness.

Pigging-out at swine Eat-a-thon

Wednesday was pig and sausage day - well some of it was...

The Neu Hausli (pronounced 'Noy Hoosley') Restaurant in Waedenswil offers a 'Metzger Menu' (butcher's menu) which consists entirely of pork dishes. And I do feel a bit guilty, having written at length about fat Americans, to now be writing in praise of an eating event that encourages excess.

There are 14 dishes to choose from - which, if nothing else - proves that you can eat every bit of a pig, except its squeak.

The six course 'menu' seemed to be a good idea and course one was a bean soup with leaks, followed by blood sausage, flavoured with cinnamon. Sounds odd, tastes great. Course three was a sausage (another one) containing mashed (pig) liver. It was a strange grey colour and looked like something you might 'rod' out of a blocked drain. However it tasted much better than it looked - flavoured with herbs and accompanied by sauerkraut.

A quick swig of ice-cold vodka followed - apparently as a 'digestif' - to you and me this means it is designed to cut through the fat you'd just jammed down your gullet.

Onwards and upwards - a plate of very thinly-sliced liver arrived - I think it was fried in butter, but I am told it was cooked in oil.

Then into the smoked pig - first 'speck', which is a thick slice of back bacon served with re-hydrated green string beans, followed by 'rippli' which is ham, served warm, with two slices of apple that seemed to have been sitting in some sort of liqueur.

And finally 'gnaggi' which apparently is the lower end of the pig's foreleg. Quite fatty, but the meat near the bone was so succulent it melted in your mouth.

By this point I was full. Strange, I know. So full that I refused the deep-fried, battered apple slices with vanilla sauce. And the numerate will have noticed that the six-course menu ended up being eight courses, even though I refused the last fence for fear of exploding.

All of this should be accompanied by beer, but we decided to polish-off a few bottles of Rioja - seemed to work as well as beer for me...

Then pfluemli - a plum-based liqueur served in hot water with sugar. Dangerous thing a 'pfluemli' because it doesn't really taste like it contains alcohol. And finally coffee.

Thanks to Markus and Eva Baumann, my fantastic neighbours, for inviting me - it was a great evening.

America is fascinating, flabtastic

Raleigh, North Carolina, USA


I have just finished breakfast of one omlette, two pieces of toast, some sort of flat-bread-pattie-thingy and two cups of repulsive coffee. In the process of scoffing this lot, I was fascinated that I had amassed 16 separate pieces of packaging waste.

This is bad - not least because I hate eating anything out of plastic.

And then I looked around the restaurant and saw the mass of flabby humanity tucking into huge plates, piled high with: bacon (3x thickness of Swiss bacon), sausages, grits, eggs, toast, muffins, ketchup, cheese, bagels brimming with cream cheese, sugar-sprinkled waffles the size of truck tyres, pancakes swimming in maple syrup and cubes of roasted potatoes. Some of these good folk were so fat, they got their backsides wedged into their chairs. You could have got two of me sitting side-by-side in one chair - and my arse is not so small.

Some of the men's bellies were so large and round that they had to belt their jeans up under their armpits - any lower and the belt would have been on the downward slope and their trousers would have fallen down. And one woman's flab started just below her ears and gently sloped out and down for several feet before coming back up and in just above the top of her legs, which were clad in a fetching pair of bright pink trackie bottoms.

And after breakfast I wanted to take a stroll, but was warned not to by the friendly receptionist. She told me: [1] There are no sidewalks, [2] the traffic is heavy and dangerous so i should not walk along the pavement (road to you and me) and [3] - don't go into the woods without a dayglow orange baseball cap because it's huntin' season and there will be guys out there blasting away at anything that looks like a deer... Apparently my salt and pepper grey hair is the same colour as the species of deer around here and some of the guys only need a hint of movement in the undergrowth before they unleash several rounds of rifled shotgun slugs into a bush. Holy crap.

So, lots of fatty food and no chance of a spot of light exercise for fear of being run-over or shot. Not healthy. Surely there should be a law against shooting people who are not morbidly obese - or at least a defined season for hunting the overweight. A 'Fat Hunt', of sorts...

This phenomenon - of fatness and the aggressively anti-exercise environment I found myself in, so fascinated me that I looked up the Center for Disease Control website, the US medical authority, to see if they had any pearls of wisdom. But apart from stats and maps of obesity in the country and learned papers on fatness in the US, they failed to mention in plain English that the reason people here are fat is because they eat too much of the wrong foods and don't exercise. The nearest the CDC gets to this is, and I quote:

"Whether you want to lose weight or maintain a healthy weight, it’s important to understand the connection between the calories your body takes in (through the foods you eat and the beverages you drink) and the calories your body uses (through normal body functions, daily activities, and physical activity)".

Still awake? Normal bodily functions - does this mean we should all consciously remember to go for a dump; set it up as a daily reminder on our mobiles? Daily activities - can you lose more weight watching baseball or American football on TV? We should be told.

I fear for this country - and not just because of its all-pervading, rabid religious extremism and neo-conservatism. Nor because of its interesting foreign policy. Obesity will do this nation in...it is the threat within.

Its been a funny old day. The weather is crap and clouds obscure the sun I know is there... But there was brilliant sunshine today - beautiful, pure, Swiss sunshine. And I hope those shafts of light continue to illuminate my life.

That's all for today...no pictures, no wit. But this is today.

India 3

The horn is more important than the brakes.

A few beers on Friday night didn't set me up too well for the 06.00 start for Mysore on Saturday.

The intention of the driver, Raghu, (pictured looking bemused at having to chase across the paddy fields, through coconut glades and around market stalls at Mach 2 on the way to the tourist trap that is Mysore) was that I visit the palace in Mysore. Other pictures can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/adamroscoe/sets/72157602230328682

I was far more interested in catching the local colour on the way, than tramping round some gold-encrusted palace in bare feet having had my camera confiscated at the entrance gate. But Raghu insisted. So after a 5.5 hour journey (because of photo stops) - instead of a 3 hour journey from Bangalore - I did tramp around the palace.

But this blog is more of a road movie than a tourism briefing...

En route we stopped at Restaurant Kamat in Lokaruchia (same as the one we had eaten lunch at earlier in the week) and had the same meal - 'Idli' (pronounced to rhyme with Diddly and spelt with an 'i' at the end and not a 'y') which is mashed rice, steamed in banana leaves, served on banana leaves with a selection of curry, chutney and yogurt on the side. The curry was a sambar and contains onions, turmeric, chili power and 'nine or ten other ingredients'.

The yogurt consisted of coconut and peanuts mashed together, chili and cardamom leaves. So, this was a meal for two, including mineral water, coffee and a persistent fly that danced on most of the food I was about to put into my mouth.

Worryingly, there was a cow-shed within 5 meters of the restaurant, so I only hope the fly had the decency to dance on my food as a main course, prior to wallowing in the cowshit round the corner for dessert. Cost of the meal: 87 rupees - less than a quid, about 2 francs.

Back on the road, I asked Raghu about the constant sounding of horns on the road - coupled with a total lack of aggression on the part of the honkers and honkees. He said it was easy to explain: "If you don't use your horn a lot, you have to slow down." Brakes are important, but the horn is indispensable. Work that one out...

There were women working in paddy fields and a couple of labourers having lunch of rice out of newspaper leaning up against their ancient bicycles. I was so pleased that they didn't mind me taking their photos as they were a couple of real characters. Raghu interpreted for us.

Then, as I was about to leave, the extortion began. I ended up paying them 100 rupees for them being my models and Raghu said that was maybe a little on the high side (about 2.5 francs - or a quid to the Brits). He said they had told him that now they had enough money to go for a drink. Good, I thought - they can have a couple of pints of Kingfisher down the pub after work, shoot the breeze and relax for a while. I was pleased to have been able to help them enjoy a little light relief. Raghu then went on to tell me that I really needed to be briefed about what 'having a drink' meant in certain echelons of Indian society.

Apparently these guys will go and buy 180ml each of highly distilled sugarcane-based alcohol and neck the lot in about 5 minutes. No chat, no quiet cigarette and a leaf through the Times of India - just hardcore drinking to get drunk. I wonder if they are distantly related to the Finns?

Raghu explained that some of the cane alcohol distilled in the countryside was dangerous stuff. Not infrequently a number of the men in a village get blind-drunk. Literally. Sometimes the impurities in the alcohol cause permanent blindness - some even die.

Then on to a market near the Tipu Sultan's summer palace at Srirangapattana. Tipu Sultan suffered a defeat at the hands of the British (surprise, surprise) in the late 1700's. Apparently the East India Company wanted to get a grip of the agricultural and mineral resources, so they teamed up with the British Army, under one Colonel Arthur Wellesley (later the Duke of Wellington), beat the crap out of the local army and paved the way for another bout of enlightened and sensitive colonisation (nicking gold, the Sultan's clothes, furniture and weapons - most of which are in safe-keeping in British museums).

Funny how the army fought so the commercial enterprises could succeed then - unlike now, when firms like Blackwater do the fighting for the armed forces in Iraq.

But I suspect the market was probably open for business as the battle for the palace and surroundings was in full-swing. A market guy selling cuts from a recently-slaughtered goat really thought he had a chance to sell me a leg. But when i made it clear that I could not possibly buy it - he went on to offer me the goat's absolute culinary peak - it's head, which lay on the floor with a slightly surprised expression on its face. This was less difficult to refuse.

The market sold mainly fresh fruit and veg, literally tons of onions, spices like turmeric, flower blooms and blocks of sugar. And just outside the market a guy was collecting silkworm cocoons from sundry blokes on bicycles who turned up with the produce neatly packed in patterned silk sheets.

Leaving the town, I noticed a refreshingly frank and direct sign on a scruffy-looking roadside doctor's surgery - "Treatment for Piles and Fistulas". One wonders why this speciality has sprung up here. With lowest winter temperatures of 18 degrees C, I cannot imagine that anyone finds it necessary to sit for long periods on radiators.

On the way back to the hotel there was a bus in a field - somehow it had veered off the main highway. This is so surprising because most buses have at least 60% bald tyres - so why were there not more buses veering off the road and into the local countryside? Just approaching Bangalore at 18.00 hours, I noticed a huge increase in lorry traffic - the rule there is that freight travels at night - starting at 6pm sharp. And the lorries are worse than the buses - at least half of them have no tail lights and nearly all their tyres are bald. And the stats are bad - 80,000 killed, 1.2 million injured and 300,000 permanently disabled annually on roads in the country.

As was explained to me - the horn is more important than the brakes because otherwise you would have to slow down. Seems some poor buggers get to slow down on a more permanent basis than they bargained for. Shame.

India 2

The Dog is Mightier than the Monkey


Bangalore still


Writing Friday, September 28, 2007, but reporting matters of Thursday...

I was visiting schools and a clinic that my company is supporting for (very) poor children in India.

The workshop project we are involved in is making cable assemblies and low voltage switches which we use in our products in a factory a few km down the road. More India photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/adamroscoe/sets/72157602230328682

The girls are all orphans and disabled and are looked after in a hostel and do paid work for us. They have a 100 percent quality record and we pay them the going rate for the work! A real win-win and a proper good sustainability project, in my view - giving people wages and self-respect.

The pic of the guy and the dog is amusing - mainly because the minute i saw the dog on the roof of the school i started to back away as I had been told to avoid dogs because of rabies...(Please see: Pink Panther, Peter Sellers scene: Does your dog bite? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXn2QVipK2o) I checked my jabs...and it was a good job I avoided the dog.

Anyway - the guy in the pic is the school principal and explained that they liked this dog, because as long as he was lounging around under the tree, it stopped the monkeys coming into the school...

Never a problem at my school - there again, 50 to a class and having to take lessons sitting on the floor wasn't a problem there either. :-(

Doctor Anand Jain (pictured) works for free, but has a clinic in the hotel where i am (you can get a facelift or eye-bags eliminated here in a full operating theatre) and also works in one of the city hospitals. Top guy. He had just diagnosed one woman with TB and arranged for her to go to hospital.... I checked my jabs.

India

Greetings from Bangalore

Let's just say, I am just trying to get used to the idea that I will never get used to India...
I flew to Mimbai Friday morning, arriving here 10pm, then off for Vadodara by plane Saturday morning, overnight in Vadodara, then flights to Mumbai Sunday morning and then immediately off to Bangalore for lunch with my host's family.

So here I am in a proper nice 'otel and on the route here there were families living under blue plastic sheeting and begging in the street, cows in the street chewing on cardboard boxes; dirt and filth everywhere. Difficult for me really – but not 1% as difficult as it is for them. I cannot believe we live on the same planet as these poor, poor souls.

My company is supporting some schools in Vadodara; some of the pics show the school and kids - only about one in 10 had shoes... :-(

The kids’s parents are day labourers and if they weren’t at school, these children would be begging on the street - the older girls of about 12 or 13 may well be prostitutes by now.

The school is the one place they can get one decent meal a day, so it was really moving to be there. I was asked to inaugurate their renovated building (that we had funded) on Saturday and I did a traditional ‘ribbon-cutting’ and they sang and danced for the ‘honoured guests’ – apparently I was one of them. And they gave me a little gift of Genasha on a tin plate that they had painted. Was there a tear in my eye? I leave you to wonder... On a lighter note, there was a fantastic collection of bats in the rafters of the school which i noticed swaying to the rhythm of the kids' singing during the ceremony

Monday:

I left Bangalore in rush hour today - normally i should report 'near misses' in terms of health and safety...but after 255 near misses in the first hour on the road, I gave up. The driving here is horrendous, but luckily, moving so slowly that accidents seem to be just 'bumps'....even with pedestrians.

I visited two sites today - one a substation, which was replacing one built during the rule of the Prince in 1932 and the other a rural electrification scheme where the guys are stringing new wires. They get GBPounds2 a day as a labourer and GBPounds3 a day if they are skilled.

This is a living wage here. The women's hats have flat tops to allow them to carry baskets of stone on their heads for making up the roads and paths on the site.

I was also honoured (constantly) with fresh coconut juice, but my host told me not to drink too much as it will turn my stomach. (I think he meant it will give me the shits, but was too polite to say).

Lunch was served off banana leaves at a roadside cafe was absolutely wonderful. Rice steamed in banana leaves and superb chutneys and relishes.

And everyone is so fascinated to see a white person in the middle of nowhere in a funny white safety hat. I was also asked to give away some prizes to those who were showing 'safety leadership' in their teams.