Food glorious food...

Time was when, round here, all you could eat was a piece of stinking haddock. Yet all that changed on Thursday, with the inaugural Hull Global Food Fest, a gathering of marquees and restaurateurs and chefs. Now, for three days, you can buy olives and waffles and all manner of salami and sniff and sample stuff cooked on the main stage. It is, despite this whole venture being repeated in other cities in the country in an effort to make every place a facsimile of everywhere else, a very good event and the combination of hot weather and the chance to mutter abuse at James Martin has certainly brought out the crowds. Naturally, this wouldn't be a blog post from me if I didn't express a couple of caveats. The event is being broadcast on Hull's oft-lambasted big screen. Which would be fine if the actual main stage goings on were not happening immediately beneath the big screen, thus rendering such an exercise utterly pointless. Now food and hygiene go hand in hand and I can see a reason for the council wanting the streets around and about the Global Food Fest to be clean enough to eat off. But it struck me as a trifle odd that, when the biggest gathering of folk to have hit the city centre since Christmas was strolling up and down, purchasing jerk chicken and Ostrich meat, a street-sweeping truck arrived to force everyone out of the way.