National Laver Day

I was passing Passmores fish shop the other morning when I saw a poster advertising Laver Day down at Appledore this coming Tuesday. This not only pricked my attention but also my appetite so I stopped by and purchased a couple of dollops of the green stuff. I bleddy love the stuff and probably don't eat as much of it as I should. Glass of Guinness and a slather of fatty bacon and a gloop of fried laver on brown bread truly proven to take the edge of everything and set you up for the day. Adds real iron to the girdering of your loins.

Laver to North Devonians what caviar is to Russians

They all have these things nowadays, these events celebrating some sort of piscatorial commemoration. Locally, Clovelly has two! They've got Herring Day and Lobster Day. Funny thing is, the only port with a couple of deep water trawlers, Ilfracombe, doesn't feel the need to pander to such diversions. However I was tickled by the idea of Laver Day.


Over in the Marhsals at the Thursday Lunch Club I told 'em about the plans they've got laid out for laver day. They're going to have an all day laver breakfast, laver cookery classes and of course the obligatory seaweed foraging lecture. Bleddy foraging. Cor, there was a time when we all foraged to supplement our meagre diets and some of us still do. It now it appears to be a quasi religious life affirming activity complete with it's own gurus, TV programmes and articles in the Guardian.
(I do have to add here that this sniping is a bit hypocritical as just the other week some mates of Jonty from Tarka Taw Film and Video Services came down for a stag weekend and I for a small fee took them cockling down at Crow and digging bait for a spot of "artisan fishing", rod and line to you and me, off of Baggy. Turns out one of them's wife is the executive producer of Great British Larder and he suggested we pitch an idea at them about estuarine foraging since it's all the rage at the present time and what better place on earth to film it than the Taw and Torridge Estuary. He seemed very enthusiastic, mind you this was after a few pints in The Reform, Barum Brewery being the final stop off on our stag weekend adventure)

The nation's chief forager complete with ceremonial M&S panama hat

Anyway, Wes Twardo whose family lives out Appie way and has done for generations reckons he knows the bloke who holds these sort of masterclasses and devotes his life to all things seaweed. Apparently, so Wes was saying, he has a garage by the council houses where he concocts all sorts of potions and has caused quite a stir in the village, only the other day John Craven and Countryfile came down and interviewed him. He calls himself Commander but he isn't really one as it turns out. Upon scant investigation, someone asked his wife as she propped up the bar in the Royal George,  his previous connection with the sea lay in the fact that he had been a marine lawyer negotiating yacht sales to Russian oligarchs, Saudi arms dealers and Colombian businessmen all around the Med. However, he didn't quite manage to dot the I's and cross the T's as was supposed to and was hauled in front of the authorities in Malta having been implicated in a global money laundering operation. He was able to plead ignorance, just, and having been once bitten he decided to give it all up for a quieter life and come down to Appledore where he has reinvented himself as a boat builder and seaweed healer. All sorts of odd sods end up down that part of the world.  Wes went on to say that he also builds coracles or at least he has built one which he drags out into the shallows off the lifeboat station and bobs about grappling kelp from the rocks with a couple of foraging students or hapless lifestyle journalists aboard. I take my hat off to him as I know all too well from experience that this can be bleddy hard work and hand numbingly cold at this time of year. Well, I suppose it beats getting on the wrong side of the Russian Mafia.
Annie Cawood pointed out that Appledore folk have be doing this without need of instruction or coracles for generations and recipes for the best preparation of laver are treasured secrets, passed down within local families since time immemorial. It's all in the vinegar, rinsing and boiling times. A critical combination. as an outsider you can only really guess at the correct procedures used in this alchemical preparation to make the green gold. Myself I've tried gathering it once or twice but I soon learnt to leave it to the experts and to be honest unless you have the sense of vocation to the calling it's a not particularly cost-effective enterprise as it's dirt cheap to buy.

Welshmen setting out for the North Devon coast

Of course, it goes almost without saying a lengthy debate ensued, ezactly like the time worn Pasty Debate, as to how we all preferred our laver.  I recall a time when I was working down at Richmond Dock breaking up an old motor torpedo boat, that was so knackered even the Ecuadorian Navy had turned it down, with my thermic lance and every morning we'd send one of the lads out to go along to Heards and get laver, bacon scrag ends and hogs pudding and we'd fry the whole lot up on a stove fashioned from an old torpedo tube. Now that Heards has become an antique shop and I doubt very much that Johns sells it, that toady purveyor of fine goods to the weekend crowd, Sylvesters is probably the only place to buy it these days. John's customers, much like the Squire, wouldn't call it laver as in Rod the tennis player but larva as in stuff that spews from volcanoes. This is the Welsh way of saying it,  I believe it comes from Laarfa, and I do admit it is the more common pronunciation but it's not how we say it in these parts. Mind you Appledore and the wider Taw and Torridge area does have a bit in common with the Welsh and as we used to say they are all a bit Welsh down there anyway. Recently, The Welsh link comes from workers in the shipyards but it goes back longer, way into the mists of time to the ancient two way trade in minerals like lime and copper which was taken over to Swansea for smelting and lime over here for burning in the kilns dotted along our shore. This trade can be traced back to the Phoenecians giving North Devon a link to the Med and the known word 3000 years ago! Little known fact the Barnstaple and Swansea shared a name Abertaw. Mouth of the Taw I recently discovered this in my research into the Celtic saints who, of course, migrated up and down the West of Briton in coracles! What goes round comes around.
Later in the day I went up to Mothers for me tea and me and Father got to burbling on about all things laver, I know he likes to add his to a cod steak poached in milk. Delicious. Mother pointed out that we have a family connection with the seaweed industry as back in the twenties a few years or so before she got married granny Furse would be down at Lee Bay come hell or highwater loading up seaweed onto a donkey cart which she would take up top to the side of the road and sell as ferilizer. She'd sit there with a mound of seaweed on one side and dung on the other. Due to her looks, charms and nature of her wares she became quite a fixture. They'd come from miles around to get a bag or two for their gardens and this was when Granfer caught her eye as he came by to pick up some seaweed for Colonel Trefussis's garden. After that he'd always be the first to offer to make the back breaking trip throgh the lanes with his little barrow and dog cart minus the dog and in due course he was rewarded for his herculean efforts as after many months Granny allowed herself to swept her off her feet and carted back to West Down.
After, a few jars  of the Lidl-scrumpy cider blend me and father swore that we'd have a trip out down to Appie to join in with the Laver day celebrations, he's going to take along his recipe and we'll soon tell 'em what's what.