Quasi il Paradiso

The weather in Bavaria in July ended much as it has been in the UK this summer until last weekend. However, we are still at the enjoyment stage and it looks like we may also get the odd thunderstorm by the weekend to stop a drought here.
 
 
Otherwise, in most of Germany it is identical to the UK and today the Farmers Union have started their campaign for €1billion of compensation for the harvest shortfalls. I am not too sure that we taxpayers should be stepping in to aid this section of business nor for that matter any particular section. Yes, loans, deferrals on tax payments, and the like but not simply straight cash payments.
 
 
Do the farmers give us back money when they have record harvests? Why don't the ice cream, beach sunchair renters, air conditioning manufacturers, beer garden owners, beer garden waiters and waitresses, breweries, Coca-Cola, fruit farmers, wine growers, wine selling conglomerates, auction houses that will make huge money on selling the vintage year stocks ..... etc, etc,  donate some of their extra global warming "profits" to the beleaguered dairy and cereal farmers struggling to pay back the interest on the yard full of new, gleaming, expensive, tractors and implements?  For the same reason that the farmers don't compensate the part-time waitresses who in a wet summer don't get to earn the minimum wages and tips that they as single parents rely on so as to take their children away for a weeks camping holiday. Will the southern Bavarian farmers sinking in full silage pits, hay barns donate to the northern German farmers?
 
 
Most of our lives are spent fighting to make a living. The "simple" office worker in the big city has to contend with crumbling and constantly more expensive public transport, the 48-week, 5-day, 9-5 routine, the constant threat of their jobs being merged/made redundant. They can't write off the cost of a car to get them to the railway station, the car parking fees, the season ticket nor do they get compensation when someone commits suicide on the rails in front of their 6:15 pm Waterloo to Winchester packed train and get home late to a poor dog with crossed hind legs, yowling to have his evening walk and then trying to scratch together a meal before bed and the 5:00 am alarm.
 
 
As most will know, I am a great supporter of the farm community in general as I believe they have a public role that is essential to maintaining the structures that exist in rural areas, custodians of the countryside in general and in large part to our health through their produce. For this, they should be paid fair prices for their produce. And at the same time, they must grow foodstuffs that the public want and here organisations like the EU with its agricultural policy can do far more to stop the senseless subsidies that encourage the ridiculous monoculture, quantity before quality mentality that been ruining our fields and meadows for decades. Any modern farmer remember his grandfather “mulching” to avoid the ground drying up? Or perhaps crop rotation sowing something like lupins for one year so as to improve the soil? Or perhaps growing crops that are of use as foodstuffs and that don’t cause soil erosion and need tons of fertilizer and highly toxic chemicals such as maize used to fuel organic gas production.
 
Farmers just like us all need to be forced to think about how we want to deal with global warming which we have been warned about for decades and have had enough time to react to. We need to treat the earth we tread on with respect, something out grandparents knew more about than we do. You can't keep taking without giving something back and as one local farmer in the village who sells the occasional egg from the few hens he has running around on the farmyard - "If there aren't any eggs today, then there aren't any and we have to eat something else".  Having everything 24/7/365 is stupidity and kills our ability to be flexible and creative.
 
 
Talking of which, I was rather pleased with my creativity today. Well this evening more like, the day being another official government warning day for us OAPs to stay indoors or in the pool during the day.
 
 
In the evening I ventured to the vegetable plot to at least think about a plan of action for the peas and beans. Took a look in the greenhouse first and was shocked at the number of tomatoes and cucumbers that needed picking. I didn't weigh what I picked but it was a 20-litre full bucket, mainly tomatoes. Two trays of tomatoes were prepared for drying tomorrow in the oven and the rest are waiting for me to skin and de-seed for freezing as pizza or pasta sauce. The pickling cucumbers were put in a bucket of salt water overnight and I think I may take them to the village Milk filling station and ask the farmer if I can leave them there and hope someone will pay a cent or two which can be donated to the village kindergarten. Perhaps the peas and beans could go the same way?
 
 
It was now getting close to 10:00 pm22:00 and feeling hungry, I was about to warm up some "hamburgers" I had made yesterday. Not flamed dark brown/black semi-burnt hamburgers but traditional Upper Bavarian soft, juicy, slightly browned "Fleischpflanzerl" - which many may think is translated as Fleisch= Meat, Pflanz-=Plant, -erl=little. It isn't though and the Pflanzerl stem from an old Germanic word "Pfannzelte" for flat cake. The Bavarian-Swabians where I live, use the more appropriate word "Fleischküchla" meaning small meat cake.
 
 
The idea of warmed up hamburgers on a dried up piece of bread or some thin hard frozen horrible chips from the freezer didn't appeal. Luckily I had a thunderbolt of inspiration and created a dish. Set a pot of Penne pasta to boil. Picked a handful of basil leaves from the self-grown plants on the terrace and together with a few cloves of garlic and a large portion of chopped almonds and topped off with olive oil, whizzed it up to a paste and then added a few of the larger tomatoes that I had popped in boiling water and de-skinned and de-seeded.
 
 
Oh boy did the pesto taste good. Ripped up a few hamburgers into mouth size pieces, heated in the microwave and then together with the penne, pesto and a well-filled glass of wine, set down for a nearly exquisite meal - almost heaven.
 
 
Felt so good that I actually watched an English language film on TV from start to finish. I don't remember having achieved that in the last near 30 years of living in Bavaria. I can't stand dubbed English language films, they make me cringe. The Germans really do try their best and you will find that most of the dubbing actors stay with the original language actor throughout their career. So a Sean Connery growling "Shaken, not stirred" in Germanis just as set in the memory of a German as it is in Scottish for me. I shudder when I hear the German version.
 
 
The film which I had never heard of (I think my last film was Dr Zhivago the year after it was released) was called "Picnic with Bears" in German and the trailer showed it was with the aged Robert Redford and Nick Nolte taking a walking adventure along the Appalachian Trail. Checking the next day on Wiki, I understand it was a 2015 film with the original title “A Walk in the Woods”. As I have never watched one of my all-time favourites “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” in German, I have no idea how Robert Redford’s German voice sounded but see that his almost lifelong dubber, Rolf Shult, died in 2013 and thus there is a new one. You can probably empathise with my problem when you know Shult also dubbed  Anthony Hopkins, Patrick Stewart, Marlon Brando, Gene Hackmann, Donald Sutherland and several others. Here a German-language trailer for the film.

 
I persevered and managed to stay awake from 22:45 until 00:30. Towards the end, I stopped having uncontrolled shakes when they spoke and it was an OK film but hardly a Redford classic.
 
At about 3:00 am, I was woken by Flash for the second nightly “lift a leg” excursion in the garden and on returning looked in the fridge for a snack. There to my horror, I saw the large block of Parmesan cheese starring at me! Damn!
 
So it was only “Almost Heaven” and instead of an Italian O Sole Mio and “Pesto alla trapanese”, I had crushed herbs and tomatoes “West Virginia Appalachian Trail” style. Luckily there wasn’t a Budweiser in the fridge. I could though go back to bed with a peaceful mind as I had filled two small jars with the pesto before I sat down to dinner and put them in near boiling water and hope that they will one day form the basis for a wonderful heavenly dish including a good portion of freshly grated parmesan.