Celebrating in Indian style

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. We do this in a bid to be less polluting and tackle climate change while at the same time keeping a global outlook. Here is a nice way to celebrate a university landmark with an Indian sweet. Words from Nicola Baird (see www.nicolabaird.com for more info about my books and blogs).

Gulabjam to celebrate the completion of the first draft of Kapil's PhD. Good luck with the next stage.

Just been around to a friend's house in London and her lodger was in celebration mood. He's just finished the first draft of his PhD - a staggering 95,000 words, plus years of research.

To celebrate he warmed up some gulabjam for the three of us to eat with a cup of builders' tea. It was great - and yes, one of those super sweet treats is enough!

Gulabjam are very sweet - almost like condensed milk dumplings, and they taste gorgeous.

Gulabjam is also popular in Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh. It's a proper party food - expect to see it at Diwali celebrations too.

Back in India his wife is celebrating this massive step forward - a first draft finished - by baking an English-style cake.

I like this confectionery mix-up!

Over to you
What food do you eat to celebrate rites of passage, triumphs or just the end of the week? My family now holds a pizza friday, every friday (thank you Italy) but we aren't quite so confident about what to choose when we want to celebrate something that doesn't fall on Friday!

Where do apricots grow?

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. Impossible? No. Here I have a look at how to grow exotic fruits in the UK - and consider a fruit tour.... Words from Nicola Baird (see www.nicolabaird.com for more info about my books and blogs). I also publish an interview every week with people who live or work in Islington at islingtonfacesblog.com - there's a prize for the 100th follower.

Can you grow exotic fruits in the UK? What would a fruit tour be like?

Peach tree in my garden - not looking too bad,
but it has struggles with peach tree curl and
in the winter when I cover it for frost protection
the fleece gets regularly blown off.

Apricot jam sounds English doesn't it? But years ago, after a trip to the north west corner of Pakistan I learnt that the best apricots are actually from Hunza orchards. This info remained unchallenged for two decades until I discovered that in certain cantons of Switzerland apricots are sold on roadside stalls and home brewed apricot liqueurs are popular. These two countries seem so far away that they'd be unlikely to have a reputation for the same fruit - although admittedly both specialise in super peaks.

Now I've discovered that there is an apricot capital in the UK, well a place in the flat lands of Northamptonshire called Aynho but known as "Apricot Village". I'm told you can spot an apricot tree growing up cottage walls or free-standing in most of the village's front gardens ... and the fruit grows beautifully thanks to the stony, sandy soil. Aynho isn't too far from Banbury, Oxon - or the amazing Aynhoe Park which can be hired for expensive weddings.

Over to you
Next time you buy some apricots will you be reading the small print to find out where they come from?

Finding Persian rugs at auction

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. Impossible? No. This post takes a look at how an auction can let you carpet bag, possibly via  a trip to Uzbekistan, or maybe Pakistan....  Words from Nicola Baird (see www.nicolabaird.com for more info about my books and blogs).

Nell, Lola and our friend Marie pose at the auction.

It's been a mini-ambition of mine to introduce the kids to an auction. I love auctions - livestock or antiques. But I rarely go despite it being such a great way to learn, find bargains, understand money, lose money, make money etc. The research has been lengthy and included complex planning to take them to Criterion Auction Rooms in Islington. First I interviewed an auctioneer, see this link to islingtonfacesblog.com, Peter Ball: auctioneer. Then they had to save up pocket money to bid (this will take them years!). Then I took my daughters to look around the items on view, twice.  They instantly began to like finding chairs to sit on and make attempts to spot bargains.

At last the Monday 3pm sale coincided with us all being around - and my increasing desire for a Persian carpet to stop my office chair sliding across the floor.  The rugs go on sale as early lot numbers, though a few are much later. This sale had: "A hand knotted Bokhara rug the red field with bold repeated geometric decoration" with an estimate of £80-£150.

So I bid - actually I failed to bid for two earlier lot numbers through not really understanding how to make myself known or wave a paddle. Eventual result: carpet under the hammer to the scruffy mother on the sofa with three children (they didn't say this) for £70. Of course you spend more than this as there is an auction house mark up but for £84 I'm the happy owner of a fabulously worn out garnet-red coloured rug. What I don't know yet is if it is a central Asian rug from Uzbekistan, see Bokhara, or a Pakistani Bukhara rug. Either way it's fabulous.

The info at this website (which stocks Persian, Bokhara, Tribal and Kilim styles) reckons a 9x12 foot Bokhara rug - which is the size of mine - could take 9-10 months to make by a small group, because the knots are hand tied. What an astonishing craftsmanship made my rug. I just hope a fair wage was paid by somebody, somewhere for it. I'm certainly not it's first owner!

The dog and I are very happy with the new surface.

Over to you
Are there items in your home, that you use all the time, but actually have a strong link to somewhere else in the world? I guess "made in china' counts too.

Street grazing

Pete, Nicola, Lola and Nell love to travel. Here are ways they keep their carbon footprint light simply by exploring as they stay put. Post by Nicola


Years ago in Zanzibar Town when I was new to travel, I went to the famous Stone Town night market where loads of stalls serve supper - or bitings - with the most basic of equipment. Fingers for forks, stars for parafin lights.



It was magic picking the best things to eat in the blue-black, super-scented dark. Perhaps because night markets lead to sensory overload - try the salt tang of the Indian ocean, bright Southern Hemisphere stars, crash of surf on reef, charcoal fires, the spit of grilling chilli fish, sweet taint of rubbish piles, ladies' perfume, sweat, mosquito buzz - the food at the original spice island tasted delicious. Just remembering has got my mouth watering.



Fast forward 23 years and I've just raided my own neighbourhood for food. Near my home the street trees that produce fruit (eg, rowans, crab apple, plums, elderberry, pear, sweet chestnut) are dropping their load. Inspired by Finsbury Park Transition Town's fair/fete (where I bought a jar of N4 crab apple and greengage jelly for £2), I decided to harvest what was left of the non-stomped on crab apples in my nearest street.



My first attempt - a half pound of mushy mini apples mixed with my homegrown redcurrants - produced two delicious jars of jelly. Later in the day I zipped around on my bike to pick up the very last of the edible fruit starting to rot along the pavement. Whilst doing this - bike parked by the side of the road, fruit popped into my upturned bike helmet - I had the strangest sensation of what it's like to know food poverty. Two guys in shalwar kameez walked past, oblivious to the rubbish picker (me). One woman plugged into an i-pod attempted to turn off my flashing back bike light (to save money she said!), a dog walker crossed the road. And then a friendly man, Rex, came out with his young son to hand me an orange plastic bag.


"It's alright, " I said quickly, "I know there's a shop just round the corner, but I want to pick these apples to make some really local jam." Rex did his best to humour the mad woman outside his house, promising me empty jam jars next time he saw me...



Really it's me who should feel smug. I now have five lovely pots of old-fashioned crab apple jam sourced spitting distance from my home.



But I'm still disturbed by that out of 21st century experience. It feels very rural - even in a city - to sort through and reject fallen fruit. Secondly I had a taste of what it is like to be absolutely invisible, how I guess a refugee might feel. People tried as hard as they could to ignore a street gleaner. Most looked faintly disgusted as if my parsimony might force them to drop to their knees and fill their own Tesco bags with unpackaged food.



The obvious third thought was how lucky we all are here in the UK with this profligate glut of food that no one fights over. If this was the flooded parts of Pakistan how different our approach to food would be.



The shocking media quiet about how our climate is changing - as highlighted by Bill McKibben who set up http://www.350.org/ - makes chilling reading about the speed our planet is warming, see here. For example Russia, Iraq, Saudia Arabia, Sudan and Pakistan have all set their all-time temperature records during 2010. Big changes like this change how things grow.







I won't be setting up a food stall outside my house yet. Which is lucky as goodness knows what health and safety would make of run over, chewing gum flecked, dog poo avoided fruit jams? But I still think these experiences are going to inspire me to make more produce I can store. What I hope this means is that if climate changes mean I actually have to do foraging for real I won't be an absolute beginner...

Out of Africa

Pete, Nicola, Lola, now 11, and Nell, a just-turned-nine, spent summer 2007 travelling around Britian. They're back home now (not so far from Tower Bridge) but still trying to find ways to see the world without racking up their carbon footprint. This post is by Nicola.

Thanks to my friend Nicky, who I met at university, I've been to many places in the world I would have thought weren't for me - starting with Chitral in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, which borders Afghanistan. This was back in 1987 and my first trip to Asia. I really enjoyed it thanks mostly to Nicky who was living with her family there. Another summer we trained it around Europe (1984) - eurorailing was a belated right of passage for us both.

Nicky is a menace with the air miles (although I get to benefit and stay in touch as she comes by London Heathrow frequently as does 10-year-old Xander, see pic below with Lola and Nell). But last year, after nearly 10 years based in Zimbabwe, she and husband Robert (another uni friend) took their kids out of school and on to the dirt roads of Africa so that they could drive north-south from Cairo to the Cape and back again to Zim - a 25,000 mile road trip.

Robert is a fabulous photographer (that pic of Tower Bridge is his), films anything, and a good writer too so the blog entries on his trip, enlivened by the kids' entries, have been great. I loved popping to their blog between cups of tea and dull tasks, and now their route and adventures have also been poured over by Saturday Guardian readers - see here.

Six months cost their family £12,500, which sounds a hideous amount, but for an adventure fo a lifetime in which their children learnt so much - and not just how to use sand ladders to escape out of sand dunes and a combination of GPS and stars to navigate - it seems to me money well spent. Here at Baird Towers it would have gone on wine, bike services and energy efficiency which is nothing to write about... except that I do, see here.

If all of us could just take longer to get to places, perhaps we'd reduce the amount of mini trips made. Robert says there's a Swahili* word for this - mahali - the place that becomes a journey. That's exactly what this blog attempts to do as we wander around the world without ever needing to leave Britain.

*Swahili is spoken throughout east africa, including Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.

Wales at easter

Pete with pretend-to-be cossacks Nicola, Lola and Nell love to travel but stay off planes to keep their carbon footprint down. Here's how they satisfy their passion for travel, this time using one of the oldest ways of getting around - on a horse
Wales used to be the UK’s best kept secret. It’s got the most gorgeous scenery, rolling hills that are steep enough to make you puff just looking at them; castles; activities, coastline and those green, green valleys. It’s got great poets, Taliesin(s) and lyrical Dylan Thomas to heroes such as Glyndwr and that girl from the Mumbles (no, I'm not thinking of Charlotte Church).

It’s also wooed and won a lot of my friends so in order to make a visit to Llanidloes we were happy to housesit a combination of geese, hens, cats, horses and seedlings while our hosts took a mini break in their camper van from housesitting her mum’s place while she’s off working in Lesotho. A complicated bit of house swapping to organise (as a friend of our hostess also moved into our house in London), but five horsy days for me and the kids doing country stuff.
For Lola the highlight was bareback rounding up of sheep (!). Nell was delighted to go on her first hacks, have the big dog lick her hand and watch her mum treat geese as nervously as if they were a herd of rhinos. There scarier in fact.

A real treat was to saddle up the horses – grey Herbie and liver chestnut Rosie who was born on the farm – and take the girls for a ride up over the hills. It was hot and the last few lambs were popping out in one field which inspired lengthy discussion about why sheep don’t eat their placentas (much), how many placentas twin lambs create and human connected fact of life questions.

And then it was time to trot to the moor and Lola lent forward, clutching the mane, imagining herself as Laura Ingalls Wilder (of Little House on the Prairie fame) galloping bareback On the Shores of Silver Creek. While Nell was being a Nellie – find out which you are at the cute quiz site Are you a Nellie (spunky) or a good natured Laura, http://www.littlehousebooks.com/fun/nelliequiz.cfm

Content as I was, riding out with my two girls – who I’ve taught to ride despite their London address (a miracle really but it may come in handy come the fossil fuel cutbacks as this is the original renewable way of getting around until the bike was introduced) - I couldn’t resist dreaming of other horse nations where the mum would stick the kids on the GGs to make getting around more fun, and a great deal quicker. And within seconds the beautiful 360 degree skyline of wind farms and bleatingly busy ewes disappeared so Lola, Nell and I could cross the old soviet steppes Cossack style on our way to summer grazing. And as we looked for finger posts taking us along the National Trail my imagination was ticking off the horse-lovers Stans – Uzbekistan, Kazakstan, Afghanistan and Pakistan. It's a bit like TV Alexandra Tolstoy's rides with horse people of the word (see what the Guardian makes of her show here).

But less posh - because back in 1985 visiting a uni friend, Nicky, whose family were based in Islamabad, Pakistan I went to the North West Frontier Province, after a bumpy flight from Peshawar up to Chitral, which is very close to the Afghan border. I remember being aghast at the number of kalashnikovs slung over men’s shoulders, and stunned by how many Afghani refugees were forced to make new lives in an area that looked so bad for crop growing – although maybe I visited in the wrong season as this part of the silk road is famous for apricot orchards.

Dressed up in shalwar kameez (and sun glasses which rather ruined the common touch) Nicky and I looked at the sites, ate the delicious apricots and debated maternal health until we were invited to watch from the Prince’s dias (well he said he was) the amazing game of buzkashi played (in Uzbekistan it’s called uloq). Buzkashi is a kind of polo with a goat carcass used as the ball.. It’s very fast, only men do it (I think only men watch it but I guess Nicky and I were treated as honorary man) and at that particular contest a clarinet and drum band beat out a rider’s signature tune whenever they were on the ball.
It was a surreal afternoon – English polo has never seemed so exciting again, even when it’s injected with Argentinian verve and skill.

Now even the simple pleasure of a morning ride with my daughters surprises me. It's not just that we live in central London, or that Nell's asthma is made worse by the beasts, or the cost (although all are relevant) it's the surprise of having got to be old enough to hack out with my own children. The Welsh views may distract eco-bunny me - we counted enough wind turbines to provide energy for nearly 7,000 households but I'll have to check this - but when I'm around horses I feel just as I did as an eight year old out for a ride: happy, ready to canter and in touch with the place I am.
Horsiculture is maligned for being elitist, pricey and a little bit obsessional - so as a part time riding coach I'm delighted to see that a few environmental writers, specifically Mark Lynas and Sharon Astyk, have suggested horse transport may be the way to go. I don't for a moment think they were serious, but it's a good reminder that everyone used to be able to get around without using any fuel save grass, hay and oats.