This chickpea curry will serve four people if other curries are on the table.
Ingredients
1 jar or tin of chickpeas, drained (my favourites are El Navarrico)
1 tomato, deseeded and chopped
3 tbs plain yogurt
1 onion, chopped
1 tbs garlic and ginger paste
1 tbs garam masala
1 red chilli, deseeded and finely chopped
2 tbs fresh coriander, chopped
Juice of half a lemon
Salt
Vegetable oil for frying
Equipment
Chopping board
Sharp knife
Lidded saucepan
Spoon for stirring
1 ring cooker
Method
Heat the oil in the pan, add the onion, garlic and ginger paste and fry until soft. Add the chilli, garam masala and fry for a minute or two. Add the chickpeas, tomato and a little water. Simmer for ten minutes or until the chickpeas are nice and soft. Stir in the yogurt, squeeze in the lemon and turn in the coriander. Add the salt at the last minute, taste and serve with bread and another veggie curry dish.
I woke up this morning on the floor of a Hackney flat overlooking London Fields. As I lay there, mind churning to restart, I considered the question of where to pitch a tent. Keswick, 1968
On level ground free of stones or roots, with soil that is not so boggy as to indicate risk of flooding. Neither on top of a hill nor directly at the bottom and certainly not half-way up. Do not pitch directly under large leafy trees, as a steady run-off of rainfall and greenery can damage the outer tent, but stay proximate to any shade they may offer. Take advantage of natural cover from the wind such as hedgerows. So far, so obvious.
The sensible pitcher, having taken account of nature, then considers human needs. Close to water and ablutions but not too close. Plan out in your mind where you are going to cook and whether the smoke will blow into your tent or that of your neighbour’s. Leave a sufficient distance between yourself and other tents to perpetuate the illusion of privacy. When I prepare to pitch, my senses buzz with the awareness of territory already claimed; the temporary ownership rights of others, the fine line between joining a group and infringing upon it.
We pitch our tents far apart so that our hearts may stay closer together
Back in the Hackney flat, I rose and dressed, and took the liberty of making myself a cup of tea. The previous evening I had broken the cardinal rule of pitching – I had set my bed in the dark. The arrangement of sofa cushions, bust sleeping bag and empty cans of lager did not represent best practise. My host remained in bed. On the balcony I drank a brew and watched the school run. Three children in yellow safety helmets rode bikes of descending size behind their mother. A brother and sister hurried to make the bell but still did not let go of one another’s hands.
In my mind, I addressed these youngsters with the self-satisfaction of experience:
Don’t pitch your tent within sight of the pyramid stage, I thought. You’ll regret it.
Don’t pitch your tent next to the bonfire, unless you like to fall asleep to the sound of bongos and conspiracy theories concerning contrails.
Don’t pitch your tent right next door to your friends.
There is a Bedouin proverb: we pitch our tents far apart so that our hearts may stay closer together. Far apart so that the sound of their snoring will not disturb. Far apart so that the first thing you see in the morning is not their battered hungover face as it emerges from the tent to verify suspicions about the weather. And, most crucially, far apart so that we are spared the hell of one another domestic routines. No-one should have to listen to me harrying the children into line. No-one should have to listen to Cath and I debate breakfast, the constant exchange of banal information required to keep the family on target. Let us get our shit together before we are expected to be social. Let me at least wash my face.
We are both currently off the treadmill of regular paid employment, as is the fashion this season
I often cite this Bedouin proverb when friends suggest renting a cottage together. Regardless of everyone’s good intentions, such holidays have an undertone of passive aggressive negotiation about differing domestic standards. Families can’t share kitchens. Camping is better – let us come together around the ancient brotherhood of a campfire, rather than around a dining table, with its baggage of bourgeois food performance anxiety and over-familiar topics of conversation.
Nine o’clock came and went. My host remained in bed. We are both currently off the treadmill of regular paid employment, as is the fashion this season. Still, I had an appointment to keep with a job I once had. A job that I meet now and again for coffee: the final negotiations in the break-up of a long-term relationship. I called up the stairs to thank my host for his hospitality but he was asleep. So I packed up the sleeping bag, restored the sofa cushions to their place, and crushed up the empty cans and placed them in the recycling. How you strike camp is as important as how you pitch it. One simple rule applies. Leave No Trace. I opened the windows to air the room and thus I left it just as I had found it.
The rule that there is always another island first struck me on the isle of Arran, which is further south than the Western Isles, directly west from Glasgow in Argyll. View of the retreat on Holy Island from the mainland
While staying in the southernmost pincer of Lamlash Bay on Arran, I looked out at the enormous hump of Holy Island, (not to be confused with the more famous Holy Island of Lindisfarne) and plotted a trip there. It was a few days before the boat resumed its run to the island. In Lamlash’s Co-Op, the alpaca wool of my hat attracted the interest of a Buddhist monk. He too was keen to get back to Holy Island. His partner had recently died. Together they were responsible for the striking rock paintings that dot the path around the island.
He pointed to my hat and asked me if I had been to Tibet. I hadn’t.
“Tibet is not an island,” I replied.
He looked confused.
“I only go to islands,” I explained.
One of numerous striking rock paintings on Holy Island
In order to become a Buddhist monk, one must undertake the long retreat of three years and three months. Certainly this man, I think his name was Christopher, had the spacey air of a man who had spent a lot of time on a remote island. Watching him navigate a supermarket, I coined the simile of “looking as pained as a Buddhist in the Co-op, trying to chose between Flora and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.” The aisles enforced bathos on this remote islander. He was sullied with his earthly concern. Yet he needed it. He needed it for his toast.
For three days, Holy Island remained coy under a habit of cloud. I sat on the beach, angry with lust for it. At moon rise, its silhouette was that of a narrow waist and voluptuous hips. The wing beats of gulls ricocheted across the bay and at dusk, the seals lolled in the shallows, turned their tails up and watched me sulk. The world turned within me, moved onto the next tooth of the cog. Finally, the skirt of cloud was hitched up, inviting us in, and we were able to take the boat across the bay.
The Holy Island project began in 1992 when the island was purchased by the Rokpa Trust. The peace centre on the North of the island is open to people of all faiths, but you must follow the five golden rules; while on the island, you are requested not to kill, steal, lie, intoxicate or fornicate, at least until you are back on Arran. The peace centre is on the retreat circuit, a path followed by people whose sense of well-being requires that the world be kept at arm’s length. On arrival at Holy Island, I had barely traversed the mandala garden before I overheard two self-examiners discussing the inevitable politics of communes as they had arisen in the various retreats they had embarked upon. Nothing I heard made me change my opinion that all communes are doomed to acrimony over lentil allocation.
The condition of contemporary life – its incessant chatter, its deprived public space – turns our faces once again out to sea, in search of peace
Just to walk around the island was retreat enough for me. A path takes you from North to South, where there is an International Women’s Buddhist retreat, then turns over the low hump of the peak and back down the other side. Along the walk, there is a grove of young trees planted for the lost children of Dunblane, a hermit’s cave, and Christopher’s striking, colourful rock paintings of Buddhist icons.
Retreat is a possibility modern man worries about on a daily basis, the way you tongue a cavity and consider the dentist. No one wants to be suburban. You want to live extremes. Either be the junction box through which all the currents of the metropolis flow, or live in a dark cave on an island a few miles out from another island. The condition of contemporary life – its incessant chatter, its deprived public space – turns our faces once again out to sea, in search of peace.
Against such romantic idealisations, there are the realities of island life. As Samuel Johnson wrote of Talisker on the isle of Skye; “Talisker is the place beyond all that I have seen, from which the gay and the jovial seem utterly excluded; and where the hermit might expect to grow old in meditation, without possibility of disturbance or interruption.”
In For The Islands I Sing, a fragmentary autobiography by the Orkney writer George Mackay Brown, he considers the sea valley of Rackwick on the isle of Hoy – “a green bowl gently tilted between the hills and the ocean”. “We must always be on our guard not to romanticise: life in a place like Rackwick must always have been stark and dangerous and uncomfortable.”
That kind of life is more meaningful by far than the lives of people who set out each morning for an office by train
Islands have been used as prisons. Consider Alcatraz or its forebear, the prison isle of Chateau D’If off the coast of Marseilles. It was on the Chateau D’If that Dumas imprisoned The Count Of Monte Cristo (even in Dumas’ lifetime, sightseers journeyed to the isle to see the cell in which the Count was held, and so one was constructed, along with a hole from which the character supposedly escaped). The prison is a forbidding construction. The boat drops you at the base of a rock staircase zig-zagging up the side of the stark fortress. The sun hammers away at the anvil of your skull. You get off the boat and immediately want to get back on again.
Still, we are people of extremes. Could we not cope with the privations of island life, especially as we would now have a few tricks of modern technology up our sleeve? Let Mackay Brown spell out our case for becoming an islander:
“Yet I believe that their closeness to the elements, their pursuit of whale and herring and their anxious tending of the corn all summer, the winter flame on the hearth that their own hands had dug from the moor, while – if the harvest of sea and land had yielded an adequate bounty – the cupboard was well stocked till spring; that kind of life is more meaningful by far than the lives of people who set out each morning for an office by train with The Times to read; a holiday in Spain with wine and sun the only oasis in their desert.”
The vision of an island, coming out of the fog as you approach it by boat, or surveyed from a beach on the mainland, is alluring. The cliff at Foula as featured in The Edge Of The World (1937)
What is the promise of an island? Isolation? Certainly contemporary fears stoke in all our hearts a secret desire to hide away, with a good few miles of water between us and them. An island promises untapped resources. Fantasy Island. Treasure Island. Stand on the cliff and look out at the promise of an island, and you understand some of the urges that drove the ancient peoples to make perilous sea journeys to them.
The myth of a Great Flood appears in many cultures, not just in the story of Noah in the Old Testament. The Aborigines of central Australia say that in the Great Flood, man retreated to the mountain tops. Hawaiian legend tells of a time when the sea entirely overcame the land, aside from one peak on Maunakea, where two people were spared. In the Great Flood, mountain tops become islands. The peak of Ararat where the Ark tottered is the Ur-island, the point from which Man started all over again.
As soon as you land on one island, you are hunting on the horizon for another. There is always another island. This is an ancient rule. When hopping between the islands of the Western Isles and Outer Hebrides, I read of an axe-head discovered in the moorland of Lewis, dating from somewhere between 3500 and 3000BC, the late Neolithic Age. The material it was made of – porcellanite – is found in Northern Ireland, suggesting that there was trade between the Lewis and Ireland. Trade across two hundred miles of Atlantic Ocean, with no map, no lighthouse, no lifejackets! Was the prospect of a barter solely what drove the ancient peoples to make such a trip, or was it the irresistible prospect of landing on another isle.
The island is a grave, opening into the great void of the Atlantic
Admittedly in 3000BC, the climate of the Western Isles was warmer and drier than it is today. This was before the climate change of 1500BC, when higher rainfall waterlogged the soil, turning it into recalcitrant peat. The islands were more bucolic. Treacherous prehistoric journeys from isle to isle make more sense if you reckon in a more hospitable climate, a more fertile soil. Isn’t that a prospect? A fecund virgin isle (for some reason, islands stoke my libido – we’ll consider that question in more depth later, unless you prefer to draw a discrete veil over it now). Once the Western Isles became clad with peat, it was harder for the crofters to scratch a living. As Dr Samuel Johnson remarked in his A Journey To The Western Islands Of Scotland, the islands of the Hebrides have little to recommend them unless one is a “mere lover of naked nature”. (There – you see – his sexual turn of phrase shows that even Dr Johnson felt the stirrings of isle lust somewhere below his enormous gut.)
Perhaps an adolescent viewing of The Wicker Man, set on the fictional Summerisle, where every young lad was obliged to lose their virginity to Britt Ekland, is the crucial influence here
The endpoint of Dr Johnson’s journey was the spiritual island of Iona. Boswell, his traveling companion, was very keen to visit the isle, supposed burial place of the Kings Of Scotland and the point from which St Columba spread Christianity to the wild highlanders. Iona is a mere kerb of land off the coast of Mull, reached today by a small ferry from Fionnphort. It is an island just beyond an island, a hop and a skip from the mainland. This makes traveling to Iona feel even more like an adventure.
When I visited, on 11 September 2001, the beach at Fionnphort was riddled with jellyfish, a dozen flesh Frisbees. Down in the narrow sound, fishing boats meditated at anchor. The silence was prehistoric. The ferry to Iona is full of Catholic pilgrims to the sacred isle. It pulls up by a line of whitewashed cottages and the island’s fine hotel, The Argyll. The stone of Iona is rich in iron, and at sundown the Argyll looks like it is constructed out of chunks of steak, with the mortar resembling the marbling of fat. Take the rainslick Street Of The Dead through the ruined nunnery and you come to the grounds of the Abbey. Sitting out as the last of the light lurks above the distant hills of Mull, one feels negligible. A bystander in the eternal war between the sea, the sky and the rock, that red rock, stained with the blood of Oran, a pictish convert buried alive in the foundations of the Abbey by his friend St Columba. When the burial was done, Columba decided he wanted to see the face of his friend one last time. Heaving the earth aside, he found Oran still alive and uttering such blasphemous descriptions of heaven and hell that he was briskly buried once again. There is a lot of flesh in the rock. The Kings of Ireland, Scotland and Norway were buried here. The island is a grave, opening into the great void of the Atlantic.
"There is a lot of flesh in the rock"
There is always another island, another stepping stone. At Iona, just as I was smugly downing malts in the bar of Argyll, enjoying that edge-of-the-world frisson, I learnt of the remotest inhabited island in the British Isles; the isle of Foula, separated from the Shetland Isles by fourteen miles of ocean. A place so remote that its people still observe the Julian Calendar, celebrating Old Yule on January 6th with the New Year not beginning until January 13, and so storm-tossed that the ferry has to be winched out of the water in case it is dashed against the harbour. One of its sea cliffs rises to over 1200 feet, topped by a rock platform that hangs over the abyss, a natural diving board. It is this cliff that features at the opening of Michael Powell’s film The Edge Of The World about the evacuation of St Kilda (Powell wanted to film on St Kilda but it proved impossible so Foula stood in for it). Two young virile men race to the top of the peak to decide whether they will abandon the island or not. But one of them, taking a short cut, doesn’t make it and falls to his death.
The loss of a young man is catastrophic to the community, unleashing the forces that will lead them to abandon the isle. At its peak, St Kilda supported two hundred people. By the time of its evacuation on 29 August 1930, the population was down to thirty (after an outbreak of smallpox in 1720, Foula’s population was down to three). In Powell’s film, the modern world in the form of trawlers provide too much of a lure to the young people. Also, they lack the medical resources to care for a young baby. In Powell’s fiction, the islanders leave the place “where life as our fathers knew it is no longer possible”.
St Kilda had been inhabited for 4000 years. Go and find a map. Look how far out it is! One hundred and twelve miles west of the mainland, forty one miles west of the Outer Hebrides. Sea storms would isolate it for nine months of the year. How far out could you go there? Mentally, that is. And socially. Is that the libidinous appeal of the island? Being cut off from normal propriety? Perhaps an adolescent viewing of The Wicker Man, set on the fictional Summerisle, where every young lad was obliged to lose their virginity to Britt Ekland, is the crucial influence here. Yet, with their low populations, on these islands you were obliged to breed. Urgently breed. And young men are wanted, needed, for survival. Teenagers are useless in cities but on islands, they are the ones who can climb down the steep cliffs to fetch the puffin’s eggs for breakfast.
"There is always another island"
In my imagination, Foula is a terrifying place, a mist-shrouded rock with Atlantic winds speeding you over its sheer cliffs. As Samuel Johnson noted, the monks had a habit of building their retreats in the most beautiful of spots, and they never really bothered Foula. That there is one further island than Foula, the abandoned St Kilda, the two bound together by Michael Powell’s film, makes me shiver.
Yesterday I met up with the neighbours for drinks. Talk turned to summer plans and I mentioned our intention to spend the whole season camping.
Cath and Alice at Caherdaniel campsite in Ring of Kerry
The recession has introduced a natural break into my working life. I will seize the chance to live more freely, at least until the leaves turn in Autumn. On hearing our plans to camp, the neighbours all chipped in with suggestions for places to go, but then withdrew those suggestions when it became clear that I intended to include them on this website. “But they are secret,” they pleaded. No, I will have no secrets. Slapton Sands in Devon was mentioned, the scene of a terrible disaster in the Second World War, when Exercise Tiger – a rehearsal for D-day – was attacked by German motor torpedo boats. The tragedy was kept secret lest it damage morale.
My neighbour clammed up before revealing precisely which site they had stayed on, but I reckon this one looks a likely candidate. No secrets around here.
Cooking with kids doesn’t have to be all fairy cakes and chocolate rice krispies. Cath discovers that, with the right tools, pasta making lends itself to little nimble fingers. Read the full article at 4Food.
Serves 4
Sausage stew was the first meal we cooked when camping, made with red table wine from a plastic bottle and a Mattesson’s sausage that Math’s Mum had pushed into his rucksack. Things have moved on since then but the principle remains the same: a warming and easy dish that does not require finesse. Here the sausages should be sturdy bangers and sufficiently dense to withstand boiling without turning into mush. A string of fat cooking chorizo is ideal. If you don’t want a particularly spicy flavour then omit the chilli. The dish could be made with Toulouse sausages, chives and parsley.
Ingredients
250g puy lentils
8 sturdy spicy sausages, such as cooking chorizo. Brindisa make some good ones
1 small or 1/2 large onion, chopped
1 long red chilli, spliced length ways
2 garlic cloves, peeled but left whole
1 red pepper, deseeded and diced
Juice of ½ lemon
1 carrot, peeled and diced
1 stick of celery, diced
8 baby tomatoes (or 4 standard tomatoes quartered, the important thing is they are the tastiest you can get)
2 tbs olive oil
Salt and pepper
3 tbs fresh herbs, flat leaf parsley and/or coriander, chopped
Equipment
Chopping board
Sharp knife
Sieve
Large bowl
Large lidded pan
Wooden spoon
Method
Rinse the puy lentils and put in the bowl, cover with cold water and soak while you get the other ingredients ready. Heat the oil in a pan and gently fry the onion, carrot, red pepper and celery until soft. Drain the soaked lentils and add to the pan, add the whole garlic cloves, pepper, the split chilli and sausages. Cover with water and bring to the boil. Once boiling, turn down the heat to a simmer and cover. Stir regularly, but carefully, making sure the lentils don’t stick to the pan. You want enough liquid to make a soupy sauce, but not so much that the dish is watery. After ten minutes, add the tomatoes. Once the sausages are cooked through (should take about twenty minutes in total) and the lentils are soft, but still whole, then you’re ready to serve. Turn off the heat, squash the garlic cloves, against the side of the pan and throw them in, along with the herbs, season with salt, stir and serve with chunks of bread and olive oil.
Serves 4
You can buy an outdoor paella pan but that would too extravagant for us. But you will need a large frying pan with deep sides to cook this dish. Paella can accommodate different seafood and meat – such as rabbit – but this is a basic recipe with chicken and prawns. The dish doesn’t need constant stirring like risotto, but just make sure it doesn’t stick. The rice should be served moist, not wet.
Ingredients
1 red pepper, finely sliced
1 onion, finely sliced
2 cloves of garlic, finely sliced
100g green beans, topped, tailed and chopped into 1cm lengths
1 x 250g tin or jar of butter beans
200g paella rice
2 x chicken breasts, sliced
200g raw prawns, de-veined
1 lemon, quartered
½ tsp of paprika, plus more for sprinkling
Pinch of saffron
1 ltr vegetable or chicken stock, made with either a stock cube, concentrate or fresh from the supermarket fridge
2 tbs olive oil
1 tbs parsley, chopped
Salt and pepper
Equipment
Large frying pan
Single ring stove
Chopping board
Sharp knife
Spoon
Bowl or jug
Method
Heat the olive oil in the pan and gently cook the red pepper, onion and garlic for ten minutes until soft. Add the chicken and cook until it starts to colour, then add the rice and saffron. Stir for a couple of minutes and add enough stock to cover all the ingredients. Season with pepper and cook for ten minutes. Top up with stock as it cooks, making sure it isn’t sticking to the pan. Throw in the butter beans, green beans and parsley. Cook for five more minutes. Check the rice. When it is nearly cooked add the prawns and paprika and cook for a few minutes until the prawns are pink all over.
Check the seasoning and serve with lemon wedges and extra paprika if you want a spicier kick.
This is a nod to the bouillabaisse I ate on the balcony of the Peron restaurant in Marseilles, which hangs over the sea. Perfect if you are staying near a market and can pick up a variety of fresh white fish.
Ask the fishmonger to skin and bone your fish if necessary, as this is an effort at home, let alone in a field. Use one or more varieties of fish, whatever is available. You can add more kick with a sprinkling of paprika.
Ingredients
1kg of firm white fish such as monkfish, haddock or conger eel, cut into 2cm chunks
8 new potatoes, scrubbed and thickly sliced
1 small onion or the equivalent in shallots, diced
1 leek, white part only, finely sliced
1 fennel bulb, peeled off its tough outer layers and remove the heart before dicing
1/2 tin of tomatoes or 4 decent sized fresh tomatoes, deseeded and diced
1 carrot, diced
1 clove garlic, finely sliced
½ tsp paprika
Pinch of saffron
1 lemon, wedged
1 tsp fennel seeds
1 clove garlic, finely sliced
1 small glass of white wine
1 tbs flat leaf parsley or chives, oregano, chopped
Olive oil for frying
Equipment
Chopping board
Sharp knife
One-ring stove
Large saucepan
Method
Heat the oil and gently fry the carrot, onion, leek, fennel and garlic until soft. Mix in the saffron and fennel seeds. Add the wine and cook off the alcohol for a few minutes. Add the tomatoes, paprika, herbs, salt and pepper. Stir well and adjust your seasoning if necessary. Layer the potatoes in the pan, you may need to add some water to just cover them, but not drown them. Cover the pan and cook until the potatoes still hold their form, but are just cooked. Add your fish. Cover and cook for a further two minutes, check and cook for longer if necessary. Serve with lemon and chunks of bread to mop up the gravy.
Paella can accommodate different seafood and meat – such as rabbit – but this is a basic recipe with chicken and prawns. The dish doesn’t need constant stirring like risotto, but just make sure it doesn’t stick. The rice should be served moist, not wet.