Yesterday I spent the afternoon at the Victorian AgriBiosciences Centre in Bundoora, Melbourne.  I saw some excellent research going on into plant breeding and plant genetics and met some enthusiastic and motivated people.  But one thing in particular will stick in my mind... the signs on the toilet doors - XX and XY.   

I recently bought a spice called golpar, which I had heard of, but never tasted.  This spice is Persian in origin, and is the ground seeds of the angelica plant.  It is often sprinkled on dishes of beans, lentils and potatoes.  It doesn't smell particularly appetising - somewhere between damp sawdust and white pepper, -but I gave it a try none the less and was pleasantly surprised.   We had lentil soup made from half and half split red lentils and Puy lentils with just a couple of cloves of garlic.  A teaspoon of golpar and a dash of lemon juice were added and the result tasted excellent - even if it looked like mud (easy on the Puy next time...).  

Apparently golpar is traditionally used to prevent flatulence - only time will tell...

Friday evenings sometimes involve trying to concoct something interesting to eat from what is left in the fridge.  Tonight's offering was a sweet potato, pea and spinach curry.  Adding a couple of black cardamom and plenty of ground turmeric early in the cooking gave a warm background flavour, and a dash of coconut milk balanced the heat of one whole dried chilli.  A good handful of fresh coriander finished it off nicely.  Excellent!

To go with it I cooked a Persian rice dish passed on to me by a friend.  Part-cooked basmati rice is mixed with cooked brown lentils, black eye beans and zereshk (dried barberry fruit).  Then put some oil in a pan, add a layer of sliced potatoes and layer the rice mix on top.  Cook for ten to fifteen minutes to steam the rice before turning the whole lot out of the pan onto a plate.  If you are lucky the potatoes will be nice and crispy too and can be served as a side dish.  You can include raisins with the rice and beans... but I was out of them tonight.

While in the UK last week I spent a day with my parents visiting a few architectural and artistic landmarks of England's North West.

I got back from Germany yesterday to find most of my carefully nurtured seedlings had become snail food. I transplanted about twenty five tomato seedlings just before leaving - San Marzano plum tomato and a heritage variety Victory. Only two survived the cull. I also lost all my yarrow which was being grown for tea - I guess it must have been tasty! They didn't touch the borage though... I was probably presuming too much on a benign Australian spring and had left them all outside while I was away. I didn't count on the rain bringing the gastropod army out in force. In the UK I was used to having to raise them in a heated propagator before moving them carefully to my greenhouse. Still it's not too late. We moved to Australia a year ago next week, and as a result last year I didn't sow until mid October and we still picked tomatoes by the bucket load.

Germany never used to appeal to me as a holiday destination. Childhood memories of that country do not stretch much beyond the Rhine Valley as most holidays were spent in France. This continued in later years with camping trips to various corners of France interspersed with ventures to Australia. But a few years ago, penned in by a rain storm in Alsace, we headed to Germany for the day, ending up in Freiburg. This turned out to be a pretty and welcoming town, and subsequent visits have taken me to Karlsruhe, Berlin and the Elbe valley in the east. The people I’ve met have always been friendly, the towns steeped in history and the food and beer hearty and tasty.

This time I’m in Karlsruhe which is one of the most cycle friendly places I’ve visited. It also has an excellent tram system which is not just run for the tourists, and around half of the population here uses the tram to get to work. This morning in the space of 20 minutes I counted a dozen bikes with child trailers; I think I have seen maybe one bike trailer in Melbourne in the last year. Here it all seems to be part of a self sustaining system – the trams are fast and cheap and work well, so fewer people drive, so it is both more safe and more attractive to cycle, so there are even fewer cars, so the trams can operate more efficiently… and so on.

Last night I explored the town centre and ended up eating outside in the warm late summer air at the Lehner restaurant. No cars could be heard, only groups chatting, people cycling past, and the occasional tram running by. This place has a good feel to it.

I always thought the trains ran on time in Germany; that you could set your watch by them. In fact I did once reset my watch by the train as it pulled out of Dresden Bahnhof. But today, the train from Franfurt Flughafen to Karlsruhe is nearly an hour late. People on the platform are looking uneasily at one another as if this is a sign of impending doom – something bad is about to happen. That something is a train so packed there are more people standing than sitting, and I end up propped against my luggage by the train door all the way to Karlsruhe. A guy wearing really bad sunglasses pushes past, knocking my magazine, and stands uncomfortably close. I’m always suspicious of people who wear sunglasses indoors, so when he decides to lean back against the toilet door I decide not to tell him there is somebody inside. He doesn’t look quite so cool when the door opens, but I manage a quiet smile.

The journey from Melbourne to the UK can’t help but be a tiring experience, but having undertaken this for the third time this year, it’s definitely becoming less of a burden. Once you accept that you are going to be in the same seat for the best part of 24 hours, you may as well make the best of it. So equipped with a stack of CDs, a new set of noise canceling headphones and plenty to read, the time seems to slip by. There are two additional steps that I also find are helpful.

Firstly, a couple of late nights and early mornings just before flying ensures that I’m tired enough to sleep on the plane. As I am usually traveling for work, the late nights tend to happen as a matter of course as I never have time to finish off everything I need before leaving. This time I slept for about half of the two legs to Singapore and to Dubai, and I once managed to fall asleep before the plane left the gate.

The second recommendation came from a chiropractor I went to in the UK. After a bad back injury a few years ago I was unable to sit for long periods due to sciatica. This lasted over a year and was eventually relieved by a combination of chiropractic and physio. When I had pretty much recovered I discussed a flight to Australia that I was due to make, and asked my chiropractor for some advice. She suggested some pre-flight and in-flight exercises, as I had expected, but her tip for muscle relaxation was more unexpected – I was perhaps expecting some thoughts on deep breathing or meditation, but… “as soon as the trolley comes round, get a couple of glasses of red wine down your neck. It will relax you and it’s what I do!” At least I can now say it was on doctor’s orders.

Traveling back to the UK I’m always struck by how lush and green the landscape appears. Even after a particularly dry summer this year the trees are still in full leaf and the fields and hedgerows where I’m staying in Cheshire look more like part of a well tended show garden than an agricultural necessity. I arrived into Manchester airport on Wednesday to stop over with my parents on the Wirral peninsula, a rectangle of low lying land between Liverpool and north Wales, bounded by the rivers Mersey and Dee and by the Irish Sea. Taking a tour of the area we called in at an excellent organic farm shop in Thurstaston village. The farm runs a “pick your own” vegetable scheme where on certain days of the week a tractor will take you out to the fields to pick what ever is in season. The sign in the café indicated that leeks, kale and potatoes were currently a good bet! The farm shop sells a mixture of produce including local vegetables and cheese and I noted that the meat available, while frozen was all locally reared and the pork and leek sausages from an award winning butchers in near by New Ferry were superb. Next stop was the beach by the local sailing club. The view of the Dee estuary in evening sunshine, empty but for a few treacherous gullies, hinted at the sheer power of the tidal ebb and flow. It was hard to believe that this huge expanse had filled and emptied twice a day since the end of the last ice age, the evidence of which was strewn along the shore in the form of eratic boulders. On the way back home we stopped at a favourite pub of mine from years ago, the Irby Mill in Greasby. I settled for a pint of Timothy Taylor’s Landlord, a hoppy pale ale I know well, from Keighley in Yorkshire, and was not disappointed. It was probably the best beer I’d tasted in nearly a year. Don’t get me wrong, there are some excellent craft brewed beers coming out of Australia (Little Creatures, Mountain Goat, Holgate to name but a few), and a long list of classics from the likes of Germany and Belgium. But for sheer quaffability on a warm late-summer afternoon, and simple satisfaction there’s nothing in my book to match a good British cask ale served cool, as it should be, not warm as everybody else seems to think.

Well I've been meaning to get round to this for ages... I suppose this first entry is where I'm supposed to announce that this journal has been bursting to get out into the light of day and will bring together a carefully distilled selection of witty anecdotes, deeper thoughts, and helpful tips reflecting the rich charivari that is my life... but why pretend! It's actually just to see if I've worked out how to use Livejournal...

I'm currently in Melbourne, trying to finish off a pile of work before heading off to Europe tomorrow evening for about 10 days. I had set myself a target of starting this journal before I left so at least that's one thing I can tick off the list.