Champagne Reception for Foraging Books

On Friday evening there were several events for the Independence celebrations.
I went to the earliest of them, the Champagne Reception at Booths Bookshop where Adele Nozedar and Lizzie Harper were talking about the books they have worked on together - The Hedgerow Handbook, The Garden Forager, and Foraging with Kids.
First, though, Oliver Balch read a section of his book Under The Tump, about the vote for Hay Independence, with interjections from Anne Brichto, speaking her own lines from the book.
This was followed by Tom Bullough reading from Addlands, his novel which is set locally. He managed to find a passage that at least mentioned Hay. He couldn't stay too long, because he was the guest of honour at this month's Desert Island Picks at the Globe at 8pm.
But this was, as Oliver said, just the warm up act. The main attraction was Adele and Lizzie talking together. They were sitting on the stairs, in impressively sparkly dresses, and couldn't move around too much because it was all being captured for a live feed to Facebook.
The conversation ranged over many topics, including a creepy survivalist who thought he could poison people with honeysuckle (which is actually edible), roaches in a Washington ice cream parlour (Lizzie's first job - Adele's was as window dresser and bingo caller!), the problem of plastic pollution, and sugar. Adele said that old recipes often have a lot more sugar than they need because it was being used as a preservative, in the absence of refrigerators - but also that the average ten year old now will have eaten as much sugar as their grandparents ate in their entire lives. This led to pondering on why Medieval people's teeth were so bad if they didn't eat much sugar. This was something I could answer, as I used to be an archaeologist - it was the flour, which often had grit in it from the millstones that ground it, and which wore the teeth down.
And then there was the glorious story of a recipe for walnut and cherry tablet, which was claimed to be a traditional sweet somewhere in Scotland. This was taken up with such enthusiasm that the local forestry people actually planted a walnut and cherry forest. When someone asked the person who had first written down the recipe, they said they had made it all up! But it's quite wonderful that there is now a real cherry and walnut forest because of an invented recipe.
They also said that they had a bit of trouble getting Foraging with Kids published, because the publishers kept asking: "But what if a child tries something and dies?" Adele and Lizzie pointed out that the plants in the book were all easily recognisable, and none of them were deadly, but it still took them three tries to get it into print. Adele said that she had tried to make the books global rather than just UK-centric, naming plants in seven different languages, and including plants that grow in many different parts of the world.
Adele had also brought along an experimental bottle of wild garlic vodka, which a brave member of the audience tried. He said it was very garlicky. It was also very green.
There was a raffle, too, for a mugly mug with a picture of hops on it, drawn by Lizzie - and won by Elizabeth of Booth Books! The mugs are available from Beer Revolution, and also from the website https://mugly.love/ and there are two other floral designs to choose from.