April 2020

At the beginning of this week the incumbent Home Secretary announced that from January 2021 new legislation would restrict immigration into the UK, as the government had promised in the run up to the 2019 General Election.

In brief the aim of the Conservative administration is to limit the amount of poorer, less well educated, and ‘low skilled’ migrants to Britain whilst at the same time allowing (encouraging perhaps) those with much-needed skills to come to the UK to work, regardless of where they come from.

Immigrants will only qualify for a visa if they have 70 points under the new system and meet the three essential characteristics, which are:

An ‘approved’  job offer, at an ‘appropriate skill level, and a good command of English.

Those three would give you 50 points so in addition migrants need to coming to work in a job where we have a shortage (20 points); to a job which pays a salary in excess of £25,600; or a PhD in a STEM subject relevant to the job they are taking.

Journalists were quick to point out that this would have excluded the Home Secretary’s own family from entering Britain in the 1960s (something she denied was relevant) and opponents have loudly condemned the move, saying that it will undermine Social Care provision and the hospitality industry.

However, the move is likely to be popular amongst those that supported Brexit, particularly in the constituencies that ‘lent’ the Conservatives their (previously Labour) vote in the last election. PM Johnson’s promise to ‘get Brexit done’ chimed with very many people who believe (like one member of the audience on the BBC’s Question Time last night) that Britain is being ‘flooded’ with immigrants.

Immigrants, it has long been suggested, who take jobs away from locals, depress wages (via their willingness to work for low pay), and who are a drain on the benefit system, housing, and the NHS.

A very similar situation existed in the closing decades of the nineteenth century when after several years of large scale immigration of mainly Jewish migrants from Eastern and Central Europe precipitated racial tension and calls for law to restrict such migration. In 1905 this culminated in the very first restrictive immigration legislation – the Aliens Act.

This act was aimed squarely at poor foreign Jews, just as the modern act is aimed at those who are deemed to contribute little to our society.  In the late 1800s some contemporaries argued that the huge numbers of Jews fleeing persecution and poverty in the Russian Empire were overcrowding areas like East London and ‘swamping’ communities. Cheap Jewish labour – especially in clothing manufacture – was ‘working the Englishman out’. Since immigrants were prepared to work for a lot less in cramped (‘sweated’) conditions the local ‘English’ workforce were either left unemployed or forced to accept reduced wages to compete.

Following the 1905 act ships arriving in Britain were inspected and ‘steerage’ passengers (those arriving with little or no money) were assessed to see if they were ‘undesirable’. Anyone unable to support himself or his dependents (unless they were political refugees) was undesirable.

In practice this meant they had to have at least £5 plus £2 for every defendant that accompanied them. In 1905 this was quite a considerable amount of cash to bring with you, especially after paying for travel and (probably) having to bribe a series of officials on the way our of Russia. In addition anyone deemed to be ‘a lunatic’, those previous expelled, and criminals were all rejected and turned away.

This was a calculated effort on behalf of the then Conservative government (a weak administration which fell shortly afterwards) to respond to the ‘dog whistles’ of right wing populist politicians like Arnold White and newly elected MPs in the East End who advocated restrictions on immigration.

It fed on the entrenched prejudice towards Jews and ‘foreigners’  that had surfaced during the late 1880s in the wake of the ‘sweating scandal’ and the unprecedented influx of poor Ashkenazi Jews fleeing the Pale of Settlement.

In 1888 when an unknown serial killer murdered at least five defenseless women in Whitechapel many were quick to point the finger of blame at the Jewish community. Indeed, many are still keen to pin the murders on a local Jew even though there is scant evidence that a member of the Jewish community was responsible.

The 1905 Aliens Act fed on popular fears and prejudices just as the legislation announced this week does. That is not say that immigration should not be restricted at all but people should be presented with the facts and not be misled or manipulated for political ends.

Priti Patel (pictured right with Nick Ferage from LBC) claimed that her parents would have been allowed into Britain as they were fleeing persecution in Uganda under the dictatorship of Idi Amin. But her knowledge of history is sadly lacking.

The Patels came to England in the 1960s, working hard and establishing themselves as the vast majority of immigrants have done and continue to do, and Mrs Patel has benefitted from their hard work and the education she received since her birth here in 1972.

Idi Amin rose to power in the 1970s, well after the Patels left Uganda. When Amin started expelling Asians from Uganda in 1972 Priti Patel’s family had been over here for several years.

Perhaps she might reflect that her parents – like so many migrants to the UK – came for a variety of reasons and with a variety of skills (‘high’ and ‘low’ by her own definitions). Not all – very far from ‘all’ in fact – came with a job or with sufficient money to support themselves (for very long at least) but they came and they worked and they enriched the communities they joined.

Immigration has been a success for Britain and attempts to restrict it have largely been shown to fail. Better perhaps to educate those who believe they are being ‘flooded’ than to pander to their fears and prejudices.

Drew Gray, History at Northampton

Since 22 February 2019 Algerians have been protesting in the streets. As usual there has been very little coverage of events in the British, indeed Western, media. This is, however, one of the most impressive pro-democracy movements the world has seen. It was triggered by President Bouteflika’s decision to stand for a fifth term of office. This flew in the face of the Algerian Constitution, and would have meant that he would have added an extra five year term to the twenty he had already served as Algeria’s longest-serving present. To further breach constitutional matters, Bouteflika had rarely been seen in public since 2013 when he suffered a stroke, and article 102 of the Constitution states that an incapacitated president must stand down. Since his stroke in 2013, perception grew across Algeria that Bouteflika had been a puppet president, with figures from within Bouteflika’s entourage calling the shots.

On 10 February 2019, a press release signed by the long-ailing Bouteflika announcing he would seek a fifth consecutive term provoked widespread discontent. After Friday prayers on 22 February  Algerians took to the streets. This effectively shattered a longstanding fear of protest in Algeria after the Black Decade of the Civil War of the 1990s. Millions of men, women and children took part in peaceful rallies across Algeria, and have been protesting ever since.

The protests, which have been dubbed Algeria’s Hirak, which is Arabic for ‘movement’, took on a broader focus when Bouteflika finally ceded to pressure and resigned in April 2019. Protestors then called for action against the failures of the privileged elite who had supported him, and in doing so had failed public services in Algeria. The protestors  called for widespread reform, and for corruption charges to be brought against the regime’s generals and oligarchs.

Bouteflika’s  long regime had  effectively crushed political dissent and oversaw a proliferation of corruption throughout the state, with oligarchs and the party elite owing their position to the monopoly on oil and other key energy industries. Algeria is one of Africa’s major oil and gas producers, the endemic corruption has led to an overreliance on oil revenues at the expense of the agricultural potential of the country, further adding to discontent on the domestic front. Additional factors including high unemployment, lack of job opportunities, economic stagnation following the decline of oil and gas export revenues in 2014, social inequalities, have led the Algerian population to protest against ‘le pouvoir’ (the people in power. Although forcing Bouteflika’s resignation in April 2019 as a result of the mass protests was a major achievement, the momentum was with the protestors, and the Hirak forced further concessions.

The strength of this Hirak, also known as the ‘Revolution of Smiles’, is that the protestors seem to have learned the lessons of the Arab Spring. Millions of people, both men and women, who mostly young, are participating in the weekly marches, occupying public spaces and peacefully demanding the regime to change. The fact that this is a movement with no official leader, but which is seeking dramatic change through entirely peaceful means, appears to have prevented the emergence of extremist groups, as occurred in Libya and Syria. The movement also has a significant cultural component, and has witnessed the proliferation of creative endeavours: songs, slogans, cartoons, the occupation and collective clean-up of public places, spontaneous dialogues and debates, and very active social media. The abiding cry has been: ‘Yetnahaw Gaa’ / ‘Get them out!’

When finally a new election was called for December 2019, this was largely rejected by the movement, who instead called for a complete overhaul of the political system. As the protests grew louder, the response of the government was to clamp down severely on detractors, and the number of arrests increased significantly.  Protestors are recording increasing internet censorship, and political cartoonists have been arrested and imprisoned. Amnesty International’s ‘Algeria Watch’ reports of around 500 arrested, some arbitrarily, as a result of a sweeping government action against the Hirak. (see https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2019/12/algeria-hirak-protests/)

The election went ahead on 12 December 2019, and the result was controversial.  Abdelmadjid Tebboune, a Bouteflika loyalist was elected as President. Protestors chanted ‘The vote is rigged. Your elections are of no concern to us and your president will not govern us.’ One protestor stated: ‘Tebboune is worse than Bouteflika, We did not vote and we will not back down.’ Little news has emerged in the West since the election and the protests which followed. Has the Revolution of Smiles turned sour?

I recently paid my first visit to the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle. Doing research there is a wonderful experience, so I thought it would be useful to blog about it here.

I work on eighteenth-century British history and the Royal Archives is a key repository for this period, since it houses the records of George III’s court, as well as every royal family that followed. During the nineteenth century, the growing royal papers were not housed very systematically, but following the death of Queen Victoria the decision was made to archive them in the Round Tower at Windsor Castle, where they remain to this day.

I was lucky enough to be awarded a fellowship by the Georgian Papers Programme, for my project on ‘Shoes and buckles at the Georgian court’. This fellowship helped me to get to the archive, since Windsor is a 3 hour trip from Northampton so required an overnight stay, and my project will require several visits.

Working at the Royal Archives requires more prior planning than most archives. Space for researchers is limited so you are advised to book well in advance, and security at the site is tight so researchers have to apply for clearance in advance. The castle is a functioning royal seat and a major tourist attraction: the archive is part of this bigger operation and has to work within these considerations.

I had never been to Windsor before and it is striking how the castle dominates the town – it is right in front of you as you leave the railway station. On arrival, I walked past the long queue of tourists and made my way to the Pass Office. I located the small door and made my way up a narrow flight of stairs to collect my visitor’s pass. (If like me, you enjoy the Hogwarts-like experience of gaining access to archives in magnificent old buildings, you are in for a treat.)

The Round Tower, Windsor Castle (source: Wikimedia Commons)

At the gate I showed my pass for inspection and made my way through the castle grounds to the Side Door, where I was buzzed into the door at the foot of the Round Tower. At the top of another long flight of steps I was greeted by Oliver Walton, the curator and co-ordinator of the Georgian Papers Programme, who introduced me to the archive and its workings.

As with any archive, on your first visit you have to learn the archive’s rules and how to order material. There is currently no searchable catalogue for most of the papers, but there are finding aids and a card catalogue. I immediately got lucky with the card catalogue, which gave me the reference to some petitions lodged by bucklemakers in Birmingham and Wolverhampton, who were imploring the royal family to continue wearing buckles after they went out of fashion in the 1790s.

It is advisable to order material in advance of the visit, so I had requested the correspondence of Prince Frederick, Duke of York. This was fascinating material, and it was exciting to leaf through a box of letters from the likes of George III, the Duchess of Devonshire and the Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Finding references to a specific item like shoe buckles was more challenging, but I was able to cross reference from names in the card catalogue and from references in a published edition of some of the correspondence.

Photography of the sources isn’t permitted (indeed cameras and phones are not allowed in that part of the castle) so researchers take notes by hand or on a laptop. It is possible to request scans of items, however, and digital images are gradually being made available as the papers are digitised.

Which brings me back to the Georgian Papers Programme. This is a huge project which aims to digitise the Georgian court papers and make them freely available online. It also involves a range of research projects, including a growing community of Fellows who are interpreting the material and helping the digitisation project. It may be clear from this blog that the Royal Archives is not the most accessible of archives, so making the material available online will open this rich material up to many more scholars – and, crucially, will make it more easily searchable.

On the other hand, I am a big fan of consulting originals rather than digital copies, and visiting the Royal Archives is a unique an enjoyable experience. So even when all the papers are online, I would heartily recommend paying a visit.

Matthew McCormack

Recently lecturer in history Dr Rachel Moss was invited to speak at Times Higher Education’s LIVE event, a major conference celebrating UK Higher Education and addressing the problems it faces. This is the text of her talk (with a few modifications for online clarity), given in a session titled Educating Generation Z. Part of this text is based on an article published in THE. 

Sessions at THE Live 2019 

After many years of haranguing millennials like me for being self-indulgent consumerist snowflakes, it seems that media outlets suddenly realised that many millennials are actually in their mid-to-late thirties, many of us reaching mid-career stage as we start families and acquire mortgages, and that we have the expanding waistlines and thinning hairlines to show for it. It was easy for them to transfer their bilious op eds to Generation Z, and so I have a lot of sympathy for my students – we were criticised for exactly the same reasons that they receive public condemnation. We’re apparently all over-sensitive slackers who buy too many coffees and avocado toast.

According to research, however, Generation Z are even worse off than their millennial counterparts. A study in International Journal of Epidemiology earlier this year reported that depressive symptoms are two-thirds higher in zeds than in millennials, and the former are also more likely to self-harm. Zeds are also more likely to be critical of themselves and others, scoring higher on perfectionism tests than previous generations, as found through a study by the University of Bath and University of York St John.

Why are Generation Z so miserable? The media has zoomed in on the impact of social media and its encouragement of negative body image and relentless self-scrutiny, but many of their concerns are less inwardly reflective and more practical than such op eds would suggest. My generation was the first in the UK to pay tuition fees, but in the two decades since fees were introduced, the cost has risen to a breathtaking £9,250 a year. I am still paying back my undergraduate maintenance loan a decade post-PhD, but, with the cost of student accommodation having risen by 23 per cent in the past six years, it is likely to take my students much longer still to repay their mounting debts. Especially since, while official unemployment statistics show a record low, a rise in zero-hour contracts and gig work, as well as the increased cost of living, mean that 4 million working Britons live in poverty.

How do we teach students who are, as The Economist recently put it in a rather unsympathetic headline, “stressed, depressed and exam-obsessed”? Perhaps part of the solution lies in hiring more millennial academics, who may be up to two decades older than their students but who share many of the same anxieties.

Like many other millennial academics, I have experienced the sharp end of these bleak statistics, having been among the 53 per cent of academics in the UK on fixed-term contracts. It was only this year, a decade after my viva, that I got a permanent post. I was luckier than many, having had long-term postdocs for part of that time; many other academics are working on short-term or even hourly contracts. Many of us have been in the strange situation of guiding students towards graduation and life beyond university while feverishly job-searching ourselves. While the media regularly publish pieces lambasting students for poor attendance or sneering at them for requesting trigger warnings, I understand where zeds are coming from. When your daily life is increasingly stressful, through anxieties about money, work and your long-term prospects, it’s very easy for daily life and academic studies to feel overwhelming. This isn’t because zeds are less resilient – it’s that many of them are not only under increased pressures, but also feel that they have less reason to be hopeful about their future prosperity.

One way of dealing with this is to think about how to help students harness their academic skills in the job market. It’s very easy for academic staff at Russell Group universities to be dismissive of History courses that provide employability training; for those of us teaching at institutions where the demographics offer more diverse representation, our students don’t have the luxury of not worrying about how to pay their bills – during their course as well as after it. It can help keep them engaged in their studies more generally if they can also see how their degree will help them find a job – hopefully a job they enjoy and that uses their talents.

A good example is the research and employability skills module that I am currently teaching, which has as a major component a work-based learning placement. Students go into local heritage providers, as you might expect, but also work with media and government offices, on projects that we develop alongside the provider so both students and providers benefit from their collaboration. The module aims to equip history students to leverage their skills – writing essays, giving presentations, teamwork – to both prepare for their dissertations and think about the job market. Of course, universities have careers services that provide a lot of this type of training, but integrating it into the degree programme helps students see why the academic work they are doing is directly relevant to their future careers.

Another key element in helping Generation Z stay engaged with their studies is ensuring that students feel seen: they must be represented in the history curriculum, and they must also feel like their teachers understand their struggles. I try to make my classroom and my office hours safe spaces. A lot of people have scoffed at the idea of “safe spaces”, and every year there’s a renewed spate of articles criticising “trigger warnings”, followed by the expected slew of articles rebutting said criticism. In my experience, students are not necessarily having different problems than in the past, but they are perhaps more willing to discuss them. I see this as a positive – being willing to share their anxieties can mean retaining students who at another time might have dropped out. As journalist Jeet Heer wrote in The New Republic, use of therapeutic models in social and political discourse can allow ‘marginalized groups a new way to organize and give voice to their complaints and their needs’. Trigger warnings, then, can be better understood not as a means of stifling debate, but rather as a small part of a larger toolbox used to make students from marginalised groups feel part of the university community. Government policy and university outreach alike make it clear that at least on paper university is meant to be for everybody – and this latest generation is more diverse than the ones that preceded it. So far many universities are not living up to that paper-promise.

I have been listening to debates about decolonisation vs diversification over the past few years, and want very much for my teaching to fully represent the diverse range of students I encounter. So when I launched Northampton’s first medieval history module this year, I have attempted to harness recent trends in global history to provide a course that rolls back elision of “Middle Ages” with western white Christianity and instead offers more diverse content in geographical, ethnic, religious and gendered terms. It’s vital that history curricula model content that emphasise the historical importance of minorities – women, LGBT people, BME communities, the working class – to demonstrate to marginalised undergraduates not only that history was made by people like them, but also that they can make history, too – both as students and in their lives after university. That surely is vital for work across all our disciplines, in all our institutions, in terms of both the content we teach and in how we teach it.

As this week’s strike action makes clear, however, there is only so much individual lecturers can do, however. If universities on the institutional level treat students as consumers and education as a mere commodity, it will of course encourage students to treat their university education like an Amazon transaction. If universities want their staff to create welcoming, intellectually challenging and inclusive classrooms, they must treat them with dignity, ensuring contractual security, fair wages and opportunities for professional development and advancement. Investing in staff is investing in the future of the university.

Senior Lecturer in History Mark Rothery writes on emotional economies: 

Emojis – tiny pictures representing emotions. Picture via British Library. 

As we leave Christmas and a very divisive general election behind ‘Emotional Economies’ seems an appropriate choice for this blog – it’s the subject of a paper I’ll be giving on the subject at the bi-annual European Social Science History Conference this year in Leiden, Netherlands.

‘Emotional economies’ is a term used by both economists and historians. Let’s start with the economists.

Classical economics assumes that consumers and, indeed, all agents in the market, behave rationally. Under certain conditions, in terms of price and levels of supply, their behaviour (particularly in relation to demand) should be predictable. Repeated historic collapses of financial markets (most recently in 2007-8) have illustrated the folly of this idea as investors and consumers continually fail to behave ‘rationally’ when faced with choice.

Emotional economics is a new frontier in marketing and economics. It attempts to engage with some of these problems and achieve better access to and persuasion of consumers. Rather than assuming that consumers behave ‘rationally’ emotional economics recognises that people often make choices based on how they ‘feel’ about a product, the company that produces the product, the state of the world, Brexit and a host of other contexts for feeling. So consumers need to ‘feel’ positive about a product, need to feel emotionally uplifted by it in some way or feel that it is aligned to their emotional as well as cognitive well being, rather than be persuaded that it is in their best interests as rational agents to purchase it.

This all sounds quite acceptable – people sell things in a market economy so why not find out how we feel about their products? But what if our feelings about things were being measured and recorded on a grand scale? What is our feelings were being manipulated?

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook recently appeared at a congressional hearing to answer questions about the use of data harvested from Facebook. He was also invited to appear in front of a parliamentary committee but refused the request.

He faced questions regarding the data on 87 million Facebook users used by Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 Trump Presidency campaign, amid claims of Russian interference and wider concerns surrounding political processes in western democracies (many of which relate to various British Elections and the Leave campaign during Brexit). Recent analysis has shown just how widespread the Cambridge Analytica scandal is.

A protest following the Cambridge Analytics and Facebook data scandal with Christopher Wylie and Shahmir Sanni. Available under Creative Commons licence.

Seen from a certain perspective, Facebook is a listening device for people’s emotions, on a very large scale. The ‘like-dislike’ function of the platform allows users express their emotional responses to stimuli on a regular and (perhaps) increasingly predictable basis. The sheer scale of commercial and personal interactions on the site and the shadows these leave behind are the bigger picture. There has been a certain amount of ‘bond villainism’ about the way Zuckerberg has been perceived but there’s no doubt that there are questions to be answered, particularly if we can’t trust the results of major democratic processes anymore.

The picture is more complex than all this may suggest and histories and theories of emotions are useful here in a number of ways. The distinction between ‘emotional’ and ‘rational’ that underlies emotional economies has been proven to be a construct and a conceit of post-enlightenment Europe.

One challenge that economists and businessmen such as Zuckerberg face in a global economy is the global cultural variance found to exist in emotions and experiences of emotions. For instance, love is a melancholic emotion in the Chinese culture, but is experienced as a more positive and exhilarating emotion in western culture – how might this be accounted for in global marketing?

Historians grapple with just these types of questions with a much clearer view of social and cultural constructions of concepts such as ‘emotions’, indeed with these constructions as their targets. If emotions vary across cultures in the contemporary world then, by definition, there was cultural variance across time, this gives historians an advantage. But reading the emotions of people in the past is just as complex as it is for economists today.

Historians, too, have adopted the term ‘emotional economies’ in an attempt to resolve some of these issues and whilst they generally mean something quite different from economists there is some overlap. ‘Emotional economies’ refers to the way that emotions did things, did work, in the material world. It is a method that historians use to study emotions as material reality and get beyond the purely cognitive nature of them.

Emotions could be expressed and used by people to manipulate others, to persuade others of a person’s virtue, to encourage emotional or material support, to foster or maintain familial or romantic relationships, and a range of other human needs. In my research I use family correspondence to trace and analyse these efforts. We are increasingly finding that emotions did lots of work in the past and were a very important medium for historical change.

One of the aims of my research, which I will discuss in my conference paper, is to more closely examine the way that emotions and emotional agents in the past can be mapped onto the way an ‘economy’ works. Like many other historians I am keen to better link thoughts, feelings and mentalities to material conditions and interactions.

An early modern letter. LUNA: Folger Digital Image Collection, L.a.67.

The family correspondence I’m using has thrown up some interesting early results. Credit was very important in terms of earning social and gender status as we know – the history of emotions shows how people expressed emotions in a way that earned them credit. There were middlemen – people who reported on the emotional states of others (often guardians or senior family members). Emotions were used in family transactions to shape and guide those processes. The value of people and relationships was influenced by the emotional currency attached to them.

Like other historians of emotions, and indeed most other historians at any point in history, I am working in a field that seems to be part of a much broader cultural movement at the moment and that makes my research all the more fascinating to me and, hopefully, others.

Hello everyone.

As we struggle with the uncertainty and disruption to normal life that the Coronavirus pandemic has brought I thought it might be nice to share some basic ways to cope with isolation and a reduction in social interactions.

I am staying at home as much as possible but have stocked up (sensibly, not by panic buying) on the basics for everyday life. I love to cook and have been cooking since my teens but I recognise that quite a few of my students either don’t cook or can’t cook. When you are relying on takeaways and ready meals a crisis like this can look even more daunting.

So, starting today I thought I’d post a series of simple meals that anyone can make (so long as they’ve access to a kitchen that is!). If anyone else from the History team at Northampton wants to get involved and post their own recipes, the more the merrier! Who knows by the end of the crisis we might have enough for our own recipe book 🙂

Today’s is one of the simplest soups know to mankind – leek and potato. It is tasty, healthy, and super easy to make. It will take you 30-45 minutes so within an hour you’ve got a great healthy (and very cheap) lunch or light supper.

Drew’s Leek and potato soup 

You will need: 

One gas or electric hob ring.

A largish saucepan.

a chopping board and sharp knife.

A blender if possible (stick blenders like this one are ideal). NB don’t worry if you can’t blend your soup, it’s lovely as it is.

1 large leek

1 medium sized onion

1 large or 2 medium sized potatoes

About 1 litre of vegetable stock (made by adding boiling water to a veggie stock cube) – you can use chicken stock if you prefer but it won’t be vegan or veggie.

About a tablespoon of olive oil (you can use sunflower or vegetable oil just as well) and/or a large knob of butter. (Butter will make this richer but its not vegan).

Salt and pepper and (if possible) a bay leaf or two (these are easy to get from the shops and last for ages so they won’t go off).

Wash your hands !!!

Ok, to start with peel and roughly chop your onion . It doesn’t have to be too fine. Then slice the leek lengthways and separate the layers. You can now wash it under the tap holding on to the end where the root is. Make sure you get all the dirt out.

Now chop the leek in to slices about 1cm think. Again, don’t be too worried about perfection here!

Finally peel and chop the potato (above) into 1-2cm sized pieces.

You’re now ready to cook. 

Hate the oil and/or butter in the saucepan and quickly add your onion. Don’t have the heat too high, you want to gently soften the onion not burn it. When it is beginning to look a little translucent add the leeks. Cook for about 5-10 minutes until the leeks look nice and soft and have reduced down in the pan. Stir them from time to time so they don’t burn.

Now add the chopped potatoes, stir so everything gets nicely mixed together and pour in the stock.

Add some salt (a large pinch should do it), a grind of black pepper, and a bay leaf or two.

Bring to a gentle boil, turn the hurt down and simmer for about 20-25 minutes.

The idea is to make sure everything is cooked, the leeks and onion are soft, and the potato is beginning to break up. Test it with a spoon (right).

The soup is now pretty much ready to eat. You can taste it (be careful it will be very hot – potato really retains its heat – so wait a few minutes) and add some more salt and pepper if you think it needs it.

Take out the bay leaf (you can eat them but they aren’t nice to eat!)

At this point you can ladle it in bowls and eat but I prefer it blended so take it away from the heat, let it cool for five more minutes and attack it with a stick blender.

Be careful that the head of the blender is always under the liquid or you will pebbledash your kitchen (and yourself) with hot soup!

Once you’ve blended it for a few minutes it will be mostly smooth but check for escaped potato cubes. If you want to be really fancy you can pass it through a large sieve for super smoothness.

Now all you need is a bowl (or two or three if you are feeding others), a spoon, and perhaps some bread. This recipe will make enough for 3-4 hungry people so you can either eat seconds or let it cool, cover, and keep it in the fridge and have for lunch tomorrow or the next day.

Enjoy!

Drew

oh, and when you’ve done…wash your hands again.