What a difference a week makes

Three elections in a week is quite a lot you know, and I didn’t even have any crisps. Irish music on the port, political horse trading, and a summer vegetable recipe.

I wore red on election day, for luck.

Three elections in a week is a lot for a news junkie like me. Two rounds of French elections, with the United Kingdom’s general election sandwiched in between like Branston pickle in a baguette, means lots of reading, scrolling, tv watching, trying to keep up and, in the case of the general election, no sleep at all on Thursday night.

I always promise myself I’ll go to bed for a few hours after the exit poll is released and I never do. In an attempt to be healthy, I made some roast chicken and a really good, un-gloopy coleslaw to eat during the evening, but of course, by 2am I was jonesing for crisps and feeling intensely jealous of Nigella’s cauldron of Monster Munch, Twiglets, Mini Cheddars and every imaginable flavour of Walkers.

Just at that point when the big results started to come in -  Andrea Jenkyns, Thérèse Coffey, Grant Shapps, Jacob Rees-Mogg, gone, gone, gone, gone – the sun started to come up over the port on a brand new day.

A brand new day on the port.

Despite all of the polls, you never know until you know, do you? At 10am, I went to bed but I was too excited and happy to sleep, so I just scrolled social media and listened to Times Radio.

But then of course there were the French elections too.

I love where I live, but like many rural areas it traditionally votes for the right, and sure enough in the first round last Sunday 56 per cent of people in our commune voted Rassemblement National (RN), which meant that there would be no second vote for us this weekend. The RN poster by the theatre car park had been vandalised to give Marine le Pen and SS lightning bolt across her forehead and Jordan Bardella’s bland, fresh face had been besmirched with a tiny Hitler moustache, but it was scant comfort. And it’s no comfort either – in fact it is utterly enraging – when you express concern about your own immigrant status in the face of the rising right and some say blithely: “Oh, they don’t mean you”.

RN poster in the village, with embellishments.

To distract myself last Sunday night when the first polls closed, I walked out onto the port to listen to some music. There’d been an Irish music festival over three days and this was the last night. They drew good crowds all weekend. People danced and sang along where they could. As it was happening just in front of our house, I think I heard Wild Rover about ten times.

That last night, there was a young singer, a red-headed boy of about 19 or so called Pearse Larkin, singing with the Blackwater Ceílí band from County Tyrone. In the warm evening air as the sun went down, he began to sing the Christy Moore song, Viva la Quinta Brigada. Women in summer dresses and men in shorts clapped along. The song is about the Irish men who left to fight against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War with the Fifteenth International Brigade.

Viva la Quinta Brigada
“No Passeran” the pledge that made them fight
“Adelante” is the cry around the hillside
Let us all remember them tonight.

Christy Moore singing Viva la Quinta Brigada, Recorded in 2006 at The Point Theatre, Dublin.

And that night, the results of the first round of the French elections came in with an overwhelming vote for the far right. Even though French friends say the first round is often a protest vote and people vote with their serious heads in the second round, it seemed too much to hope for, looking at the map of France dominated by the RN and listening to Marine le Pen’s triumphalist speeches.

But then, on Thursday in The United Kingdom we voted in a new government and on Sunday in France, the RN came third, after the hastily assembled alliance of left-wing parties, and Macron’s coalition. The news was full of images of young people celebrating the surprise result on the Place de la République in Paris while at the RN headquarters, supporters looked on in shock as they watched the results go up on the screen. (Click to play the time-synced Instagram reel).

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What happens next? Horse trading, uncomfortable alliances, chaos, a hung parliament (oh, and in the middle of all of this, the Paris Olympics). Even in defeat, the RN has still achieved far more seats in the Assemblée Nationale than they have ever had before. In her speech, Marine le Pen said: “The tide is rising. It did not rise high enough this time.” The threat is not gone. But for now, at least, it is at bay.

Summer vegetable tian with feta and mint

A tian is one of those recipes where the name of the dish it’s cooked in gives the name to the dish itself, like tielle Sétoise, the octopus pie from Sète, just across the water from here, or casserole, from, well, everywhere.  A tian is a shallow, earthenware dish from Provence – usually round, though I am using an oval dish here – and it’s filled with summer vegetables such as tomatoes, courgettes and aubergines arranged in overlapping circles, or upright as I do here.

The recipe I use here is based on an Ina Garten recipe from her book, Barefoot in Parisi, which I’ve made a lot over the years. Ina, if I may be so familiar, finishes her tian off with some Gruyère cheese melted on top, but it’s been stinking hot and steamy humid here this week and that feels a bit too toasty. Instead, I served the tian at room temperature with some crumbled feta and torn mint over the top.  

To make your tian as elegant as possible, choose vegetables that are roughly the same diameter so they will fit together neatly. I don’t specify an exact weight for the vegetables in the list of ingredients, as the exact amount will depend on the size of your dish.

Serves 4 as a light main course with salad, more as a side dish