A Life of Contrasts - Part One

Polly writes about the Food Festival experience.

(Please note, I wrote this a couple of weeks ago - more contrasts have appeared since then.)

As I’m sure many of you already know I grew up in Shropshire, on what I now call ‘the other side of Clee Hill. I left home for university when I was eighteen and didn’t really come back until my eldest child started primary school. I moved with my now-husband and our two children into a house in Ludlow, a town I had dreamed of living in ever since… Well, ever since I attended Mr Wickers the dentist on Broad Street as a small girl, where we would be rewarded for our excellent teeth with a trip to the late, much lamented De Grey tea rooms.

So, here we were back in 2011, two children under five and an enormous moving van that we parked one of the main routes into Ludlow on a sunny Saturday in September. As ourselves and our East London removal guys ferried all our wordly possessions into the new house, we were assailed by queues of buses from the Park and Ride and irate locals trying to get to and then later leave the Ludlow Food Festival. It was an awkward experience, but showed us what an important event this was.

I have attended the Food Festival several times since living in Ludlow, and sometimes it has given us wonderful inspiration, like the time my ten-year-old made pancakes every day for a week having seen a demonstration. Sometimes I just sat outside in the sun, saw everyone I knew in town and sometimes I just hung around the market and observed the sausage trails. Sometimes we decided it was just too expensive and too full of flavoured gin to be of interest to us any more.

This year I got to see it from the other side. I returned from two weeks lying in the sun to find Rachel had emailed what seemed to be every publisher in the UK, and some in North America. Over the next two weeks we received acres of cookbooks, they stacked around us. They were on spreadsheets on order, in the warehouse, left in other people’s doorways (thank you certain couriers..) and spent time in our car boots between Brampton Bryan and Ludlow. They also lived in our halls and living rooms.

We set up on Thursday night opposite the Slow Food area and it was the best place to be, a great atmosphere, that we rarely appreciated as we raced to and from stages  with boxes of books and pens and card machines that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. I packed what Rachel called a ‘mum bag’ containing a first aid kit, suncream and rain macs. All three got used, as the weather was changeable.

In the weeks preceding this year’s festival there was a newspaper article saying that this would be the last one, and everyone in Ludlow was talking about this. Lots of chat about the high cost of the tickets.

We finished the experience with an impressive looking spreadsheet and highly developed forearms. And a new found appreciation for what it takes to organise such an event. The volunteers, the exhibitors, the people who run the stages and the speakers. Wow, the speakers. They have world-class chefs and food experts speaking every day. Demonstrating every day. We met such thoughtful, funny, clever, interesting writers and cooks there. If you timed it right, in one day you could see a Malaysian chef, a Fire cooking demo, an expert in food security and a TV presenter. That line-up, even if you don’t get food samples or attend any workshops, that line-up is worth the ticket cost.

I hope we get to do it all again next year.

Polly