Food for thought as the Ilkley Literature Festival draws to a close

He invited the audience to consider what values to live by to achieve a life that is worth living. This involves taking responsibility for our own lives and thoughts, not relying on what others tell us.

Helen Rebanks (Image: submitted)

Helen Rebanks clearly puts this into practice. In The Farmer’s Wife, she refutes the idea that the “traditional” model is second best and describes her life choices as working well for her and her family. Her talents and her husband’s are different, but mesh together to create a strong unit. She pulls no punches as to the challenges of farming, just develops her own coping strategies. Writing about her own life helps her also to understand her mother and make sense of their relationship. Food plays an important part in the book and there are many recipes to bring memories to life. These feature home-cooked, simple dishes made from home-grown, quality ingredients.

Kimberley Wilson (Image: submitted)

Kimberley Wilson would wholeheartedly approve; she brought her latest book, Unprocessed, setting out her case against the ultra-processed foods constituting an alarming proportion of our national diet. She sees these as responsible for the current drop in IQ levels and a major factor in mental health issues. Fats, vitamins and minerals essential to brain development and maintenance disappear during processing, with serious consequences. Nourishing free school meals would be a cost-effective antidote. Politicians take note.

Food again with Sabrina Ghayour’s Flavour, a joyous compilation of Middle-Eastern recipes and philosophy: all flavour, no fuss, use what you have in the cupboard, adapt as you see fit, simple dishes for all to enjoy. Recommended!

Economic responsibility is at the heart of Claer Barrett’s What They Don’t Teach You About Money, which I for one have promptly despatched to my teenage grandchildren. Good habits picked up early can pay dividends – literally – in later life. Maths is helpful, obviously, but so is English for understanding the small print. In conversation with Andrew Hebden (presenting Can’t We Just Print More Money?), there was lots of good advice about mortgages, pensions and assessing lifestyle benefits as well as pay when considering job prospects.

Helen Czerski is another crusading voice, this time for the ocean. In Blue Machine, she describes the ocean as the beating heart of planetary civilisation; we interfere with it at our peril. She has no time for Jacques Cousteau and his approach on environmental grounds and demonstrates the economic cost of over-fishing. Plans to engage in deep-sea mining for minerals have no justification and risk destroying an ecosystem we simply do not understand.

James Naughtie (Image: submitted)

Also looking at the wider world were Luke Harding and James Naughtie, at Kings Hall on Saturday and Sunday respectively. Harding spent five years in Moscow before being deported for, as Naughtie remarked, telling the truth about the brutal regime. Now deeply involved in Ukraine, he presented Invasion, front-line reporting of that tragic rolling horror show. Waiting for Putin to die is not, he said, a strategy. Containment is the key and Ukraine will not crack: too much is and has been invested in its defence, and our support should not waver. Naughtie was presenting The Spy Across the Water, the third in a thriller series, about spy-turned-diplomat Will Flemyng’s dangerous journey into his clandestine past. Set in real time in1985, it draws on Naughtie’s journalistic experience but is distinctly fiction. Inevitably the conversation turned to world affairs – the awfulness of Trump – and Scottish politics – the SNP on the slide, the future of nationalism – and was rich in wit and anecdotes.

Tom Lonsdale (Image: submitted)

Last, but very much not least, was a truly heart-warming event at Ilkley Playhouse on Sunday. Tom Lonsdale, landscape architect, worked with poet Simon Armitage and stone-carver Pip Hall, to create the Stanza Stones. Six stones at key points of the 47-mile watershed between Marsden (where Armitage grew up) and Ilkley, form a trail commissioned by the Literature Festival in 2012, when Rachel Feldberg was director. Part of the Cultural Olympiad, designed to get the nation out of doors, it was a truly collaborative project, as Tom Lonsdale told the IP audience – and proceeded to demonstrate with a beautiful set of slides. Somewhere, there is a seventh stone, tumbled along by the river, waiting to be found – or not – in the future. A great note of hope to end on.

Congratulations to the Festival organisers, volunteers and speakers, for another wonderful series of events – a worthy 50th anniversary. And full marks for the live-streamed events: they open events to a wider audience, allow clashes to be negotiated and the less mobile and the vulnerable to be involved.