A friend from France has brought me some oysters, said Mauri on the telephone, why don't you come around and we'll have a chat about Vinitaly and how you can help me sell my wines in Inghilterra. I went round like a shot. I thought there might be a dozen oysters in the frame but the Froggie had bought a barrel full. Now I am not one for original thoughts but one of the few I have had is that the Mediterranean is, frankly, a filthy, stinking, open sewer. I mean, it is effectively the repository for all the, er, waste products spewed out by (clockwise) Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Turkey etc etc. My host country chucks whatever it can get away with into the Med, so just imagine all those charming discharges from some of the north African countries. And the water never changes, it just sort of swills around as if in a gentle pre-wash cycle. Hardly any tides either (interestingly, Italian school children can't quite understand High Tides and Low Tides, just as they cannot understand how Britain can exist without identity cards, but that's for another post). Anyway, these oysters were from the Cote d'Azur and if the Ron Combo School of Maritime Hygiene were to be correct I should still be in hospital. However, they were quite excellent. We knocked 'em off with a good bottle of Prosecco, an extremely disappointing magnum of NV Laurent Perrier and a superb De Ferrari fizzer from Trento. My zinc levels went through the roof. Yum yum.
