Odyssey lacking in taste
AS A kid I spent several summers in Switzerland, without ever setting foot on a mountain. Nor did I eat the chocolate, hear the cuckoo clocks, sample the cheese or experience the ancient art of yodelling.
My dad had decided that our holidays there would be a chance to see the ‘real Switzerland’, industrial zones, banking hubs, immigrant hostels and all.
The wisdom of this decision is up for debate (my mum certainly had an opinion or two on the matter) but I was reminded of these peculiar trips to the other Switzerland as I watched THE HAIRY BIKERS’ MEDITERRANEAN ADVENTURE (BBC2). I am a zealous convert to Dave and Si and to see them taking a gastronomic tour of Corsica, an island I’ve grown to love, felt like a treat.
The Greeks, first of many seafarers to visit, called the place Kalliste, the most beautiful, and the beauty of the island certainly wasn’t overlooked by the bikers either.
It was obvious as well, alongside the guys’ trademark enthusiasm (comparable with a pair of shaggy dogs discovering a muddy wood) that they’d been here before and loved all it had to offer, especially figatellu, its famous liver sausage.
If you’d set out, though, to do an hour on Corsica without mentioning most of the edible things it’s famous for, you couldn’t have done much better than Dave and Si did last night.
How can you spend all that time noshing the local produce without once mentioning the maquis, the herb-scented scrubland that feeds all the animals, scents the air you breathe as you get off the boat and gave its name to the French Resistance? How can you do an hour on Corsican grub without eating one morsel of wild boar?
How can you bang on about the importance of chestnuts without trying one of the island’s various, powerful and complex chestnut beers? How you can you say there’s no seafood, then end your journey in Bastia, the island’s main fishing port and not eat any?
Tune in next week to see Dave and Si do Italy, without swallowing a single olive.
I once stayed in a little village on the Mekong river, whose name translated roughly as Big Jetty. On the opposite bank was another village called Little Jetty, which was odd because its jetty was actually very long and Big Jetty’s jetty was almost non-existent.
History and floods just about made sense of things, unlike the BIG CATS (BBC1), many of whom are perplexingly little. Their size makes them difficult to film, so the glimpses we got last night of exotic moggies, ranging from the Margay to the webbed-footed Fishing Cat were especially precious.
Top tabby, in our household at least, was the Pallas’ Cat, named after an 18th century German naturalist who also, generously, bestowed his name on a type of tube-nosed bat, a leaf warbler, a glass lizard and a meteorite.
This boxy, flat-headed, distant cousin of the leopard is no pussycat (even if it looks like a rather badly-made one). It hunts and stalks on the empty plains of Central Asia, deploying its peculiar shape to disguise itself as a rock.
It’s so good at hiding that, in many countries, the first images of Pallas’ Cats were only captured in the last few years. To film so close to this little Big Cat and for such an extended period of time represents a mighty achievement for the BBC’s Natural History Unit.