London International Wine Fair in May - and Lord's in July

18-May-10 - I'm going to stop complaining about Ex-Hell. No, it hasn't got any better, there is still no direct train from central London, there are still too many stairs to the loos and it's still a half-kilometre walk from the station to gate 8, where the presentation theatre is situated - and they've just added on another chunk to make it even further. But I've gone into this all before so, enough said.  I was there for a couple of days meeting old chums at the LIWF and also visiting the bodegas from Rioja Alavesa. I was to do a presentation on the Wednesday, similar to the one I did last year, but with different participants, and organised by the lovely Lucia Artaza Ibañez from the Bilbao Chamber of Commerce. I won't go into too much detail now, as the tastings will feature in a later post, after the event at Lord's (see below), but the standard was extremely high, especially a wine made from 100-year-old pre-Phylloxera vines, about which more later.

In addition, and advance notice: I shall be presenting (again for the Basque government) a tasting of Rioja Alavesa plus the other three wines from the Basque Country: Getariako Txakolina (Chacolí de Guetaria - Gipuzkoa/Guipúzcoa), Bizkaiko Txakolina (Chacolí de Vizcaya - Bizkaia/Vizcaya) and Arabako Txakolina (Chacolí de Álava - Araba/Álava) on Wednesday 07-Jul-10 at Lord's - more info from Claire Felstead. As an aside, I can't say 'Getariako Txakolina' without hearing the music of Carioca from the 1933 Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers film Flying down to Rio (showing your age! Ed).

2010 General Election

07-May-10 - This is not a political blog but, as a journalist and an observer of politics over many years, the 2010 general election seemed to throw up a number of anomalies which I found difficult to understand. On a personal level, I have no truck with politics (except to say that we are all politicians with a small 'p' insofar as we promote our own agendas) and have never supported or belonged to any political party. Indeed, I smile when I meet people who genuinely seem to believe that any one politician is any different from any other politician, regardless of party, but this is a digression.

Nationally, I found it hard to understand that the Labour party could lose the national election whilst making gains in the local elections. Locally - in Sussex - there were further things that didn't seem to make sense. When I was with the BBC in Sussex, before I was brutally stabbed (yes, yes, we've heard it all before. Get on with it, Ed.) I got to know nearly all our local MPs and their constituencies, and there were some surprises. Labour MP Michael Foster losing his seat in Hastings and Rye was not so much of a surprise, as the Borough Council went Conservative at the last local elections, but I was surprised that Eastbourne, a Conservative bastion since, well, since 1992 anyway, could go Lib-Dem, especially as Nigel Waterson seemed to be a very good constituency MP, and the Conservatives nationally were doing so well.

Biggest surprise of all was Brighton, where Caroline Lucas took Brighton Pavilion for the Green party, pulling in some 16,000 votes when other Green Party candidates up and down the country got a few hundred and the odd thousand. What is that all about? I don't begrudge any of them their wins, of course, but the whole election thing seemed to be a bit acey-deucey, all over the country. I suppose we've become accustomed to landslides over the last three elections, and maybe this coalition lot really will achieve something: new ideas, fresh faces, pragmatic policies... But that's what we said about Tony Blair.

Still, at least we got rid of the fringe nutters. Or did we?

To sponsor a weblink or picture for any post, please contact john@johnradford.com