wine – Chris Collins

What’s Up in Manjimup

I have been languishing under the virility of my first Australian cold which has left me the time (although less the acumen) to ponder on the hedonism that has led to this recent drop in immunity.

Following the onset of a glorious spring where all was right and glittering with the world, we went to Western Australia. People told me it was lovely; not least Helen Waterhouse who used to live and work there (shout out) but I was unprepared for how devastatingly different it was from here. Ya know, I shouldn’t have been; it’s a five hour flight so about the distance from Stansted to Istanbul (oh, is it different here?) but then there is also the ubiquitous eucalyptus that homogenises Australian landscapes to some extent. I was also unprepared for the sort of emotional connection I had. Bear with me.

I have grown up with the knowledge that ‘Grandma was born in Australia.’ But I have never mythologised this. I have never felt drawn by the intrepid adventure of my ancestors to follow their pioneering footsteps. In fact, I’d never have bloody come here if Yates hadn’t got the job. And I don’t think Perth was high on my list beyond bagging all the capitals.

‘Grandma was born in Australia and left when she was two. She lived in a place called Manjimup.’ I have always known these things like you learn your family’s birthdays and how they have their tea. But I did not romanticise them. However, we were thinking, well, New Zealand’s still cold in spring, so we’ll go to Perth and I might as well get to Manjimup – Canberra Conversations: there’s a great truffle and wine place down there so while I’m at it, let’s look up second cousin Laurie…

So I wrote to this chap mam had met years ago on her own Australian trip and he sent me a couple of pictures I’d seen before of my great grandparents. And bugger me, there they were, surrounded by eucalyptus trees (and not a lot else), grinning and squinting in the sunlight and suddenly a dry flash of lightening threaded through the years between them, turning up and thinking ‘faaack, it’s hot – and look at them trees!’ all new and hopeful; and me, doing just the same ninety years later. And it suddenly did make me feel connected to a woman I’d never met who I heard made great cakes, and an old man I barely remember who used to give Beck and me rides on his mobility scooter.

So misty eyed (and thoroughly grumpy – I do not recommend getting a Murray’s bus to Sydney at midnight to get a 7am flight, that’s a shit idea), we landed in Western Australia, hired a car and began hurtling south. If you look at Western Australia on a map, there’s (implausibly) a really really green bit. We drove through miles and miles of orchards. Banished was the brown red landscape with stones and scraggy grass – we drove past apple orchards, hazelnut orchards, pears, cherries, peaches…espaliers, olives…it was glorious. My eyes were fixed to the window drunk on green and wide open space. Pretty little towns celebrating their apples, had bright (and slightly tacky) apple shades on the streetlights, and consisted of nothing more than a row of shops (keeping to the traditional frontier chic – corrugated metal roofs, large verandas….yet still the tragic absence of saucy women in red petticoats) on one side of the street and some sort of memorial garden; and the all important loos, on the other, all surrounded by orchard. This may not be the place to slip into rhapsodies about Australia’s enlightened attitude to public conveniences with which the U.K. has thoroughly dispensed and still insists it has no money, despite the obvious fortunes recouped from their upkeep…but we’ll let that spasm pass.

Manjimup has a very grand entrance…comically so. The town itself did not inspire me terrifically, but the little outdoor museum was marvellous; merging play areas with picnic park space, event space, lakes and strolls with old buildings gathered from around the area and erected there to rest. Here I found the real actual police station (about a room and a half big) where my great uncle William was Chief of Police and thwarted a bank robbery back in the 30s. This enlivened that legendary story for me, which mam had brought back from Australia eight odd years ago.

We then headed to Pemberton, which I am told is actually where Grandma was born. There is a hospital there; didn’t look like the original building grandma was born in (although I’ve rather skipped over the existence of this modern convenience in a recent piece of fiction for dramatic effect) – and as my pop pop apparently had farmland, I assume their little homestead wotsit was a bit further out of that. ‘Pemby’ was even smaller. Again, row of shops on one side of the street; loos and memorial garden on the other. Streets of houses criss-crossing behind up the hill. We stayed in the Pemberton Hotel and I had a fabulous supper of locally cooked trout. Then bed at 8, as we’d pretty much been up 38 hours, and later woke to our first Western Australian morning.

WA doesn’t get behind daylight savings. Eastern Australians have strident opinions on this, but I kind of liked it at the time. It starts getting light around 04.30 (not dissimilar from the U.K. in June), so you wake up a little after that, all refreshed and adjusted because the sun’s been gently whispering in your eyelids for quite a while. And it’s 6am. So you get on with the day nice and early, and are back in bed before 21.00. I’d say that keeps the wholesome population of WA out of trouble! I awoke to the sound of a kookaburra gleefully ecstatic at the morning and sat on the balcony while it rained softly (rain!! Blessed rain! Imagine an Englishwoman welcoming rain!) to engender all that voluptuous verdance around us. Later we strolled down to the little tram; Pemby’s main tourist attraction, which takes you on an hour and a half little ride through the immense forest which it used to be instrumental to managing, and er, cutting down. We bloody loved it. The deal about that part of WA is its forest of giants; Karri trees (a type of eucalypt) are the third tallest trees in the world, after the American Redwood, and Mountain Ash (predominantly found in Victoria and Tasmania) and grow up to 95meters. Thus it was great to actually get in it, properly. This little tram was for transporting logs to Pemberton’s sawmill and forest had been cleared up to 40m either side of the track. Now in 2019, the forest has a fight with the passengers through the open sides of the tram. It was great, you’re brought up in the U.K. being told by headshaking, grieved looking men that you must never lean out the window of a train, followed by horrific legends of decapitation (to which the noxious verb ‘bounced’ is often applied) and here we just merrily leaned out and dodged branches. The forest was carpeted in beautiful flowers, tall bells that rise sort of like fresia or foxglove…dunno what they’re called though, in pink, white, dark pink, orange, and then purple tree hovea that has little flowers a little like bleeding heart, there was native wisteria and even some wattle still, in a softer cream yellow than that in the east. I was in Wordsworthian rhapsodies. You only had to stare at the sky patiently for a little while before great black Carnaby cockatoos flapped across the canopy, or green ring-necks flitted like powered leaves from branch to branch. We stopped at the cascades; a beautiful clear river tumbling over rocks, we admired the white blossoms on the thin leafed peppermint eucalypts, slowed down over perilously high and rickety looking bridges to admire river after river, trying to spot trout or marron in them, and the driver provided such a hysterical commentary that Yates and I laughed the whole way through. Oh it was the best thing ever. And it was great seeing that landscape – here, in this green, British/Irish like green and rain, where my great grandparents had lived, working that forest, struck by that landscape, perhaps with the same wonder as me. I hope so. I hope they loved it.

After that, we drove to the outskirts of Manjimup to the Truffle and Wine company, where we had a splendid lunch of poncey things like salmon mousse, cheese with truffle oil, prosciutto and so forth. Bought some truffle oil. Then whizzed north to Margaret River.

I loved this place too. Again, green as … fuck; cool, sea, hippy little shops, lovely birds, I ate more fish and we booked ourselves, at the expense of $115 each, onto a wine tour. This was bloody amazing, and worth every penny. For this sum, we were driven around all day to four different vineyards, a chocolate place, an Italian sauces place, a brewery, given lunch, tried about 35 different wines, did a fun little science thing of mixing cabernet with shiraz to make personalised blends for lunch, and got dropped off at a bar where we were given shots. Fecking amazing. We were on the fun bus with two Danish sisters, a couple from Switzerland, a couple from Sydney and another British couple. Who after 35 wines and a pallet of beer, still couldn’t crack a smile. Bloody hell. But everyone else was fascinating and wonderful and I dizzied around blurrily loving everything. Beautiful vineyards in green fields stretching off towards the sentinel wall of eucalypts, smiling ironically at this European imposition. But who doesn’t like wine, right?

Apparently I was hard work on the way home. I can neither confirm nor deny. The next day we drove to Perth and met second-cousin-once-removed, Laurie – grandson of the bank robbery thwarting policeman who was older brother to my great grandfather. And even though this sorta long lost relative thing is very much not Yates’ bag, and I didn’t really think it was mine either, I loved it. Cousin Laurie is an incredibly cheerful fellow, upbeat, feisty, full of jokes, and his wife Lorraine just the same. I felt faint shadows of regret that we didn’t grow up part of those lives. Again, would grandma have been as irrepressibly cheerful and open hearted as her cousins if she’d run around barefoot with rosellas in her eyes in a place where remoteness deregulates so many of the social rules of 1940s London? If she hadn’t come back? She was a great woman in a crisis – would the struggles presented by that landscape have developed her better? Well, they say the unpopularly irritable women accused of witchcraft in the old days were often suffering pain from what are now preventable afflictions, and grandma suffered arthritis all her life. Not that grandma was a witch. But I reckon the pain she lived with would corrupt a lesser woman to warped misery, never mind the capacity for the huge expanse of love she gave us as children. So I don’t know how differently grandma’s life would have turned out, but I did feel a marvellous and uncanny affinity with these people who shared genetic material with me; particularly as I have never met or knew any other members of grandma’s family.

Then we went to a fancy restaurant in the Nedlands suburb of Perth where we drank a fabulous bottle of SSB and I ate a Balmain bug. The next day we hit the beach at the amusingly named Cottesloe…got nuclear burned but at least England won the rugby. The last day we took the ferry to Rottnest to see the quokkas; look up pictures if you’ve never seen them; but Rottnest seems to base its whole tourism strategy on instagraming selfies with quokkas. And they’re little and cute and stupidly brazen, so when you arrive on the settlement, they’re everywhere. You’re not supposed to touch them as multiple signage instructs you, but sometimes they fair rub against your legs like cats trying to pick up crumbs. There were kids stroking them like puppies, and everyone shoving things in their faces; bits of food, leaves, cameras. So yeah nah, decided to just watch them from a respectful distance. But if you’re hovering by a bush, another family strolling by realises you must be looking at a quokka and come running up with their phones and there goes respectful distance.

So I’m looking forward to the first quokka-ravages-a-toddler story in the news.

Full list of recommendations: McHenry Hohnen cellar door (in Margaret River, Steve’s restaurant in Nedlands, Perth), Hay Shed Hill, Brookwood Estate, The Truffle and Wine Company Manjimup.

If Food be the Music of love…Eat on…

I have already written in passing of the beautiful food in Canberra. That was in the summer and the brightly coloured, sharply felt descriptions make me smile now as I nestle by a fire in the middle of winter. Banish thoughts, dear chaps, of cosy small stoves and feet on the hearth. This is Canberra, and my fire is a somewhat peculiar pile of stones in the middle of the room three metres away circled by a chaise longue style of cushioned stone bench in a swanky hotel.

I ain’t complaining.

I have always judged the sophistication of an eating establishment by the prevalence of nouns or adjectives in the description of a dish that I don’t understand. Back in 2009, I was impressed by the promise of initiation into the secret, sensual world evoked by ‘jus.’

So when I sat down for breakfast last month at Industry Beans in Melbourne, I had to re-evaluate. Contemplating between avocado smash with beetroot dust, or juniper berry sous vide salmon with Japanese (please) seaweed, edible sand and sea foam, it was clear that cuisine poncery had aggressively ratcheted up a notch.

To date, I still have no idea what most of that means. But I can tell you that it, and surprisingly, toasted black beans and puffed quinoa (what?), are bloody lovely.

There is a book by Richard Glover; The Land Before Avocado that explores Australia in the seventies; debunking some of those nostalgia myths about ‘the good old days’ (poverty and inequality are always shit, even when you’re young), and tracking the country’s modernisation in culture, transport, leisure and style. And as the name suggests; starting with a reflection on the ubiquity of iceberg lettuce (there was no other kind – sound familiar, countrymen?), it charts Australia’s education and debutante ball into the world of flavour appreciation. But if there indeed is a bad cooking skeleton in Australia’s closet, it’s more repressed than whatever Aunt Ada Doom saw in the woodshed. Australian food has had its therapy and has sprung into the world fully adjusted, and open armed to wonder.

I don’t know if it’s the company I am lucky enough to keep. Let’s not forget Brook who freestyles Ottolenghi; chums who genuinely fight over Swedish moss in world class Danish restaurants, and creative Morris friends who make their own sauerkraut and kimchee. But there is a real appreciation of ingredients, of cultivation and origin that I’ve not seen since Italy. But with a real love of multiculturalism that is treated as a specialisation. In Britain, I think of our multicultural cuisine. Where your Thai is a plate of beige fried stuff, outdone in colour and vibrance by the blue and white crockery it’s served on. Your Indian has been sanitized; new dishes like Tikka Masala invented to appease the bland British palate. And any restaurant you go to, you know exactly what you’re going to get.

In Rice Paper Scissors (huh!), a charming Vietnamese restaurant on Melbourne’s Brunswick street, I got food that blew my mind and changed my life. From now on, all I ever want to taste is lime, coconut, chilli and coriander. I have found perfection – why go back? And paired with beautiful white wines. Wine pairing is a fancy unreachable thing in Britain; only comes on taster menus that are £100 a head and you’ve been meaning to do it for your birthday for years, but never got round to it. Here, it’s standard, and your young, trendy waiter will be able to tell you which will go best with what. A far cry from being asked what a courgette is by your checkout kid in Tesco. They’ll also accurately memorise the entire order from a table of five, while I twitch and reach for my notebook, imploring them to write it down. Young people here snack on rice paper rolls for lunch, dosas and banh mi (it’s a filled roll, it’s a fucken roll) in the way that the average teenager back home clings to Gregs for comfort and familiarity. I’m not saying Australian kids are better than British ones. Just that they have better palates. Sweepingly. In Canberra. Probably.

Yates and I have eaten in Taco Taco. These are also amazing. It is now the year of the Taco in London (I know because Daily Mash told me), but I agree with the satire of the article, that being three months ahead of the food-fashion curve don’t justify the house prices, and I reckon it’s better here anyway. And it’s cheap. We’ve also had a wonderful evening at Terra (which is very helpfully next door to Taco Taco), with the help of its ‘taster’ menu. Yeah, I dig that. I’ll pay you, and you just keep bringing me out dishes of your choice and I’ll trust you. Because you can here! Yates loved that. Great charcoal cooked meats, eggplant salad, roasted cauliflower, seared greens. And a charming shiraz to wash it all down. We also had a less successful, but very delicious, meal at the unpronounceable Mocan and Green Grout, which prides itself on having local artisans hand make the plates they serve ya food on and that sort of shit. It’s beautiful; all wood structures, snuggly little corners and fun metal coat hooks in the shape of little hands. We ate miso eggplant; crisp, fresh zucchini with pickles, cous cous and tahini yoghurt dressing, pork belly, roast quail. I had an oyster. It was wonderful. In my birthday joy, I turned smiling to Yates, lyricising on the flavour of fresh, sea air. He looked at me sardonically and sighed a rabbit sigh. Yes Chris, that’s exactly what I don’t want from my food. For it to taste of fresh air.

Which is what pretty much summed up the evening, because despite five eye-wateringly expensive tapas plates of delight, we left feeling a bit peckish and Yates got up to eat Weetabix at four in the morning. We grimly reflected on the part of Good Omens where Famine gleefully watches a fabulously wealthy (and hungry) model enjoy a first course of lavender scented air. Was a bit like that. There are plenty of places about that will serve you Yates-insufficient quantities of very delicious food.

Then there’s the other side of it all. Maybe this is a throwback from the pre-avocado times. Surprisingly, Australia is the country of pies. Everyone raves about ‘little bakeries’ in ‘little country towns’ where people queue out the door to buy pies for lunch. I have literally seen this. I waited in that queue. It was a really good pie! These country towns are fucken weird; they remind you of pioneer frontier shit out of wild west films; square buildings with corrugated iron roofs and a rickety veranda that surely ought to be filled with red petticoated prostitutes or something. And in the local bakery (it’s not glamorous or anything), you can get hearty, no nonsense little pies of pretty much any meat and combination. And they’re bloody good! I’ve never been a pie fan, really, but as a sort of developed-and-more-nutritious-sausage-roll, they’re pretty damn sufficient. I mean, Australians gotta do weird shit like eat it with ketchup and argue over the best way of applying it, but you know, they got good hearts.

Adoption of European words for food is also as interesting as it is utterly random. Rejecting the Italian term ‘Milanese,’ any breaded food product is ubiquitously a schnitzel, or ‘schnitty.’ Which is charming. But in an obscure reversion to Italian, there is your pub grub classic; the ‘Parma.’ Its full name is ‘Parmagiana’ but there is not a fecking melanzane in sight. Imagine my dismay when spotting it on the menu and thinking ‘oh, how lovely,’ to be warned by an Italian heritage friend; ‘oh no, Chris, it’s not what you think.’ So what is this? Well if you’re used to a charming lasagne style layering of sugo, melanzane and mozzarella, get to destination fucked because this is an abomination. It’s a chicken schnitzel (see above), with a layer of tomato sauce, then a slice of ham (what now?) and cheese.

Right.

Why it persists in being called a parmigiana is utterly mysterious. And apparently, your choice of abbreviation to either parmA or parmI says a lot about ya. Quite what, I don’t know. It doesn’t come up because I don’t eat the fecking thing. But you must understand that’s only because I was expecting the delicious construction that Raffa makes me, not chicken and ham. But if that actually sounds delicious to you, then you won’t be disappointed because there’s always a lot of it. So go forth!

So if you’re a poncey eater, like me, or you dig the more bog-standard no nonsense of meat and chips, you can get it all here in Canberra. But what unites us all is wine.

I’ve been lucky enough to go on two wine tours. They are glorious heady trips of joy, unmatched anywhere. I know Piemonte advertises itself as a wine region, but I just don’t think you can jolly about it drinking in the same way. There were some fantastic tax laws in wine making which may have led to the prevalence of purpose built ‘cellar doors,’ where the wine maker is always on hand (who the hell is harvesting or making the stuff then, remains a mystery) to pour out dribbles of wine to half drunk, smiling enthusiasts who then part with huge sums of money to take it all home. But a day out wine tasting is wonderful. The first time, dear Ed drove and I always go back to the charming vision through the window of ‘Helm’ wines; Ed and Paul striding purposely through the vine bowered garden to set out a glorious picnic with deliberation. We ate smoked trout, pate, breads and cheeses, stuffed peppers, tempura. The second time, lovely Amy drove the fun bus (put your seatbelt on Yates, it’s not that fun) and we drank wine all day, finishing for food in a cosy old restaurant with roaring open fires. All day, drinking wine and smiling and talking about the soils and the climate, and the grapes and the flavours.

So if you want to get on any of this shit, come and visit.

Halgrim and Binky in Macondo

It was a charming summer evening and the day’s blue sky, blue hills, forests and fields had transformed to a bar of gold, almost violent in intensity. The boat was quiet; its inhabitants on cushions on the roof swilling gin and staring dreamily at the sunset, preferring – philistines – each other’s company and to watch the carp dive and splash rather than read their books.

Halgrim the book guardian, being an Icelandic troll, naturally disliked summer. He found the whole affair sticky and disagreeable, not least perturbed by his voluminous and capricious mass of hair which, curling down his back to his knees and even onto his toes, naturally, was ill suited to the temperate season. A hat (the obligatory uniform of a book guardian) was inappropriate. He much preferred the quiet closing in of winter; the fire crackling and bathing the spines in a warm red glow, the book owners ensconced on chairs facing each other with books on their laps, the table and the shelves. Secured safely behind doors shutting out the wind; not flung wide at three entrance points and open every which way to any ill breeze or thief. It unnerved him. It frustrated him.

‘How can we PROTECT books if they leave the damn doors open Binky?’ he exploded irritably, mopping his forehead on the tail of his hat.

Binky was a rabbit, his war bunny and faithful defender of books. Being an animal, carefully evolved to endure outside weathers, he was generally unperturbed by the heat and retained his tranquil demeanour. He twitched his nose at Halgrim in indulgent sympathy.

Outside, the curlews began to cry. Halgrim stiffened.

‘What was that?’ he demanded. Binky’s twitch reassured him it was indeed but a curlew.

‘Binky, we don’t have curlews in Buckinghamshire!’

Alarm in the twitch of Binky’s nose.

‘Quick Binky!’ Halgrim shouted, ‘the doors! The hatch!’

Both troll and rabbit scrambled, grappling for handholds down the bookcase; across the brown plane of the floor, mountaineering up the ladder; fumbling with the catches – but it was too late. A black haired magician on a flying carpet flew in and landed on the book case.

Binky snarled and lunged, clearing the afore-scrambled space in one leap with Halgrim clinging to his ears.

‘Sir – I must insist you step away from those books!’ spluttered Halgrim when he regained his breath. Binky twitched his nose imperiously, kicking Halgrim with his back leg. ‘I am, I am,’ panted Halgrim. ‘Who are you? What are you doing here? What do you want with these books?’

The stranger’s green eyes twinkled. ‘My friends!’ he cried in a strangely accented voice, ‘do not fear! I am but a traveller –‘

‘From an antique land?’ interrupted Halgrim.

I don’t think it’s that book, Binky’s twitch indicated.

‘-Some have called me a magician. I come to show you my wares – to enlighten you to the mysteries of magic! Come, join me on my magic rug for refreshment.’ His green eyes and snake like curls were hypnotic. Binky bounded onto the rug with surprising enthusiasm, tipping the cautiously balanced Halgrim on before him.

The magician laid out two glasses and a bowl and poured out cool, dry, white wine from a stoppered bottle previously tucked in a mysterious fold of the carpet. The wine was cold and lovely and much refreshed the hot and bothered Halgrim. While he disliked heat, he disliked running about in it defending attacks even more.

‘Behold!’ spoke the magician. ‘the wonder of ice!’ He revealed glass like white blocks that had kept the wine cold. Binky’s eyes widened at the wonder. Halgrim looked unimpressed.

‘You know I…I’ve seen ice before. Not least because I’m Icelandic.’

‘Oh really?’ The magician was taken aback. ‘It’s a really big deal where I come from.’

‘Where do you come from?’ inquired Halgrim.

‘South America. Would you like to buy these tiny, hand crafted silver fishes?’

‘No thank you,’ Halgrim replied politely.

‘More wine then, for you and your friend?’ The magician leaned forward with the bottle and something of a leer in his voice.

‘I will, thank you – it’s very refreshing, although Binky isn’t much of a – ‘

Halgrim stopped in surprise. Binky had not only lapped his bowl clean but was now fast asleep sprawled out on the rug.

‘Oh my!’ exclaimed Halgrim. ‘Well it is very hot. It makes one feel very strange. And say such strange things. Bananas.’

‘Ah,’ said the magician, ‘let me tell you a story about a banana company and a revolution and a very singular Colonel…’

Oh dear Gods no! thought Halgrim desperately before sliding into a heady and strange sleep.

Above, the book owners moved in the stifling heat, first like worms, then like rabbits.

* * * *

Hours later, in the sticky black night, Halgrim woke from strange dreams.

‘Ye gods!’ he exclaimed, ‘what dreams! Something about a shroud twenty years long, an old dying doctor everyone hated, seventeen different ways of eating aubergine, a ghost tied to a tree…it was like several things mixed into one!’

He looked over at Binky. Binky was combing and plaiting his ears. Halgrim lowered himself down the bookcase to check the books. The mysterious stranger and his carpet (and the sweet white wine) had vanished. With rising panic at this exposure, he counted.

‘BINKY!!!’ sobbed Halgrim, heaving himself up to the top shelf, ‘that bastard! That utter utter bastard!! He’s stolen FOUR!! He drugged us and stole four!!’

Binky twitched his nose. His rabbit face conveyed little emotion either way.

‘How can you just SIT there plaiting your ears at a time like this?!’ shrieked Halgrim, near hysterical. ‘You can’t even plait with only two bloody ears!!’

Binky twitched contemptuously and turned his back.

Halgrim’s eyes dewed. He fished in his pocked for a reviving nip of his Aquae Vite. He sighed a patient sigh.

‘No hard feelings old chap. I can see this has affected you badly and you won’t be much help. I shall recover these books – don’t fear.’

He stepped back and nearly fell off the edge.

‘Hello, what’s this?’

A scroll was rolled up on the shelf. Large. Coded. Old.

* * * *

Halgrim spent days trying to decode the scroll. He poured over it. He dribbled over it. He gushed over it so much that Binky had to hang it out the side hatch every morning in an attempt to dry it out. The heat waxed on, brutal, stifling and deadening; mirage like over the green water in the heat. Halgrim sweated over it while an old toothless man played accordion nearby with increasing fretful haste; maddening energy for the deadening hotness.

‘Ye gods damn it to hel – shut up!!’ Halgrim shrieked eventually. ‘Madre de Dios. It’s enough to drive a troll mad!’

The twitch of Binky enquired why Halgrim had suddenly come over all Spanish.

‘It’s the heat I say!’ continued the maddened, glistening troll, ‘sweat’s dripping in front of my eyes, Loki damn it, I can’t SEE! It’s all mixed up!’

Binky hopped up and peered over the side of the boat, faintly unconcerned. It would’ve been wrong to say he was unruffled. Because he had no feathers. He was unfluffed.

‘Look!!’ screamed the heat-struck Halgrim, ‘bananas!!’

And just like that, the world was changed. The boat was encharnted after all.

A whimpering Halgrim dragged himself and the scroll to the muddy water’s edge. Lizards rained from vines in the sky while agitated butterflies flung themselves at walls in suicide pacts. The bubbling of birds flitted lazily in the intense sun and a maddening hum and rustling from the arid bushes and chewed begonias thickened the heat. He stared out at the burningly bright landscape.

‘Well Binky,’ said Halgrim, straightening up determinedly to his full, yet diminutive height, ‘I hear the 12.15 train call. Let’s go into town and find some lunch and maybe some help translating this scroll.’ He made off down the street; Binky with plaited ears trailing after him.

Some time later they were sat at a table in a cool room with fourteen other people who had been on the train. The table, oak, beautiful and antique, was presided over by the Colonel.

‘So it was in the revolution you became – oh yes, I will have some more aubergine, thank you – a colonel then?’

‘Si,’ came the reply. He was a quiet man, not tall, but austere, somehow metallic as if even the most spirited among the diners couldn’t beat him in a fight despite their strength. He stroked his black, thin moustache and sighed at his hat beside him. ‘De fight against capitalism continues. Will your rabbit friend hab more creamed aubergine?’

Binky lowered his eyelashes modestly in acquiescence.

‘I must say,’ mused the colonel, taking out his pipe, ‘that is one damn fine looking rabbit.’

Binky was re-plaiting his ears, oblivious to the admiring looks the other diners were indeed giving him.

‘Indeed,’ continued the Colonel, stuffing his pipe with quite an aggressively rhythmic gesture, ‘you’ve dined at our table now, you are part of us. We will christen your rabbit Binky Buendios the Beautiful.’

Halgrim chewed aubergine sceptically and decided to leave that comment.

‘Excuse me, but what’s that noise?’ he enquired.

‘The knocking?’ replied the Colonel blowing out smoke, ‘fear not. It’s a bag of bones somewhere around here that knocks – bones of an ancestor.’

‘Oh,’ said Halgrim.

The days wore on. In the hot nights, Halgrim noticed no one slept. The inhabitants of the town were also forever writing little notes to themselves and fixing them to things. Now apart from the scroll there was this mystery to solve. He questioned the local townspeople as they passed, pens forever ready.

‘The town is gripped by an insomnia plague. We have not slept for months. We write notes because insomnia makes you forget things.’

Halgrim regarded the woman carefully.

‘No it doesn’t.’

Halgrim huffed off, frustrated and consumed with doubt. Well what if it did? He’d never had insomnia for months. Troubling. As he continued up the town’s main drag between the dusty plane trees, he espied a girl sat on the earth on the other side of the fence. He legs were spread apart and she scooped at the mud between them and ate it.

Halgrim gipped and jogged on. He entered a cool courtyard with an explosion of roses in red and fuchsia and yellow against the wall. A small fountain attracted mosquitos and on the veranda sat beautiful women at their sewing. A brightly coloured bird sat in the courtyard’s central tree that had a rope tied around the trunk; seemingly suspended. An ancient woman was curled up on a camp bed in the shade. She winked at Halgrim knowingly. He approached softly on his soundless, hairy feet.

‘I wonder, Signora, if you could help me translate this scroll? Four of my books have been stolen and this left in its place. You see I…’ Halgrim became overwhelmed. The heat, the strangeness, Binky, the books, it was all too much and he wept like a child troll.

The old woman heaved herself up on her bed and brought Halgrim’s hairy head to her lap. She stroked it while his body trembled.

‘My child, tranquillo. The answers will become clear. Go down to the market place at the river’s edge. There is a man of letters there, perhaps he could help.’ She gave him a banana for luck and clear directions, which was more helpful, and Halgrim went off alone.

The mosquitoes were worse than ever by the river and the sharp mountains on the other side seemed to block the heat passing overhead and pour it all down in the valley. Among the insufficiently canopied stalls and sweating market goers, Halgrim found the man of letters. He was dressed head to foot in black, so much so that Halgrim went into a spasm of winces and pants to see a man so attired in such heat. He himself had undone the top part of his dungarees and stuffed his hat in his pocket. The man of letters, with feverish eyes and nervous long hands, took the scroll with interest.

‘Well…’ he mused, turning the scroll this way and that, bringing out various eye glasses and books. ‘Well this is in ancient language. I think I recognise this word here.’ He pointed and Halgrim peered closely. ‘It’s something agricultural. Fertilizer? Something like that. Of a …cow? No bull. Or horse? But it’s not a technical term I don’t think.’ He turned the scroll upside down. ‘Bullshit?’ he read. ‘Well. That may be all I can help you with. My speciality is poetic prose. Are you in love? I’m very good at love letters. I’m responsible for most of the marriages round here for the last three years!’ He sighed, a faraway look coming to his eyes. ‘Except my own dear unrequited. But I’m prepared to wait! Until we’re eighty if necessary! And I still have sex with everyone else.’

Halgrim scuffed his feet and cleared his throat. The man of letters came to, somewhat.

‘Your famous rabbit friend? I’ve already written him letters from twenty three separate admirers! Such a beautiful rabbit. We had a real beauty here some years ago who drove everyone mad. Eventually she ascended to heaven. Such beauty is not for this world. I expect Binky Buendios the Beautiful will do the same,’ he mused.

‘You WHAT now?’ spluttered Halgrim. An ice giant’s fist clutched his heart. ‘Good Odin protect him, I’ve got to get back to the Buendios house!’

Halgrim’s hairy feet were a blur as he ran. Above, a dry wind began to blow in layers of hot and cold air.

* * * *

Halgrim searched all over the house to no avail. He stopped, breathing hard, to think. Somewhere outside in the thick heat, a church bell rang four times.

‘Four o clock. Where would Binky be at four?’ Then Halgrim snapped his fingers and leapt up again. ‘The bathroom! He’ll be washing and plaiting his ears again!’

Halgrim burst into the bathroom at precisely the moment a rabbit admirer, attempting to watch him bathe, had leant too eagerly and too far forward and fell through the weak part of the roof, landing broken and screaming on the concrete floor in front of him. Binky peered dreamily over the edge of the bath, then hopped out over the body to Halgrim’s side, ringing out his ears.

‘I feel strongly we should leave, Binky,’ declared Halgrim. ‘Maybe if I take this scroll somewhere cool, I’ll be able to think better and decipher it.’

They walked together down the dark corridor, trying doors to find the way back to the courtyard. On opening one, they found a tall, beautiful woman of late thirties with her teenaged nephew. She was…bathing him. Well, she probably had been to start with. Troll and rabbit backed out of the bathroom, blushing furiously and arrived in the dining room where the rest of the family had assembled.

Halgrim pointed to the bathroom door down the hall. ‘Er…did you know about this?’ No one answered him. They looked mildly around. Somewhere outside, carried by the hot and cold wind from a different direction, came the sound of a church bell striking four. Halgrim blinked away his confusion and tried again.

‘Look, it’s not alright that she’s sleeping with her nephew, ok?’

An odd sensation submerged his hairy feet. Halgrim looked down and saw he was stood in a pool of blood that was trickling from the door several feet away. He followed it suspiciously.

He returned after a few minutes with a thunderous expression, having seen how the blood had trickled inexplicably round three separate corners, arrived under the middle of the front door and was coming, in a poker straight line, from up the street.

‘And look!!’ he stormed, ‘blood just doesn’t MOVE like that!! That’s enough of all this nonsense.’ His fury reached volcanic pitch. ‘What’s with the mud eating girl? And the insomnia. And the knocking bones? And how old even IS that woman? And if you founded a town because you were lost and it was too far to get back, how come a train makes it??’ Above, somewhere, the echo of a church bell rang four times like God running a finger around a wine glass.

‘And WHAT TIME IS IT?! Why has it rung four, three times?’

Halgrim was shaking with incandescent rage. The colonel shuffled forward rather sheepishly.

‘It’s the heat,’ he complained, ‘it slows time down. We cannot agree and so time stops. Meanwhile the heat’s madness takes over. Everything has stopped here since the banana company left.’

‘Well what are you DOING about it? Why do you sit here waiting? Suffocating and dying? You’ve got the railroad and the bananas. Export them yourself. And clean up some of the rubbish they left behind. Don’t just sit here for hundreds of years alone, waiting, nostalgically dreaming!’

The family shuffled about and exchanged glances and frowns. A man with long dark hair and green eyes, a familiar man, stepped forward smiling. Binky shook his plaited ears free and snarled a rabbit snarl.

‘I’ve been trying to tell them this for years.’ He opened his arms. ‘I even used that scroll to try and trick them into discovering it, I’ve been brewing a storm in the stratosphere to clear this whole damn mess away forever.’

The ancient and wizened woman hurriedly got up, cleared her throat and held herself proudly.

‘That won’t be necessary,’ she insisted in a firm, rich voice. ‘We’ll invest in some air-conditioning immediately.’

‘Gracias dulce madre de Dios,’ muttered the magician. ‘Halgrim and Binky; forgive me my theft, but you were my last hope. Here are your books and thank you for your help.

The people of the town built new restaurants and hotels and a good few swimming pools where families played and kept cool and sane in the hottest months. They cleared away the rubbish and cleared out the bordellos; expressed forthrightly and honestly their love for one another and in their air conditioned kitchens, they ate aubergines in moderation. A joyous Halgrim and restored Binky caught the 12.15 train home.

* * * *

It took nearly six months to get there because it’s a bally long way from central America to England, particularly when weighed down by four books twice your size and you are but a troll on a rabbit’s back. When they were north enough, an ecstatic Halgrim nicked a sleigh, and now in his element and glugging Acquae Vite, they made it home in less than a week.

Without their favourite books, the book owners had to start watching X-Files again from series one, so Binky and Halgrim snuck in easily behind them and replaced the books and took up position. The fire was on, the boat was warm, and they were cozy. A uniquely Northern Hemisphere sensation.