I also wrote some of it!

It’s a good book to have on the shelf to inspire long weekends. I’m already thinking of where I can go to take photos before the next edition comes out (Reykjavik, perhaps?)

Now available from all good bookshops…

We stayed in a great cottage overlooking the length of Ullswater and though the weather curtailed some plans, we still managed to find an excellent pub I hadn’t been to before (the Tower Bank Arms) and had good trips to Kendal and Cockermouth. And many spectacular drives through icy wastelands, punctuated with regular photo-stops.

The temperature went down to minus 17C and some of the Lakes (Bassenthwaite, Grasmere, Rydal) were frozen over. I stood on the edge of the ice on Grasmere so that I could say that I had, without actually venturing out too far.

The book is due out in the Autumn: “the definitive guide to the best tunes ever recorded”, according to the blurb.

A snippet to whet your appetites (and a cracking song to boot):

The Walkmen / ‘The Rat’

2004 / 4:28

Rocking and intense, Washington DC’s Walkmen released their debut album, the wonderfully titled ‘Everyone Who Pretended To Like Me Is Gone’ in 2002. Inspired but occasionally rambling, comparisons were made with U2.

Noticeably tighter, 2004’s follow-up, ‘Bows + Arrows’, sounded like a band who’d found their feet. First single from the album, and standout track, ‘The Rat’ deals with an ex-friend or girlfriend: ‘You’ve got a nerve to be asking a favour, you’ve got a nerve to be calling my number’ growls Hamilton Leithauser. Behind him, the drumming and guitars are extraordinarily fast but also immaculately sharp. Leithauser has said that the song was written in less than an hour, after drummer Matt Barrick started messing around in a jamming session. An electric organ adds a background of menacing atmosphere to the memorable intensity.

The band formed from the remnants of two split groups in 1998, one of which was the much feted Jonathon Fire*Eater. They set up a recording studio in New York City and added tweaks such as antique piano into the garage rock mix. Inventive and evolving, the band have since done a track-by-track cover of Harry Nilsson and John Lennon’s 1974 album Pussy Cats; their acclaimed 2008 album ‘You & Me’ is softer, Dylan-tinged Americana.

Self-critical and refreshingly modest, The Walkmen have spoken proudly about how David Letterman asked to have ‘The Rat’ added to his morning jogging tape after they appeared on his show.

According to both Pitchfork and NME, ‘The Rat’ was one of the 20 best singles of the first decade of the 21^st century. A wound-up, bristling, knot of tight aggression, the song remains hard to follow. Anger seldom punched this hard or sounded this slick.

Sheep slaughter, food and festivities in Fes’s medina – my column in today’s Independent looks at life in Morocco’s religious heart in the build up to Eid al-Adha, the Muslim festival of sacrifice.

Photo also by yours truly. For more on food in Fes, and some of the photos that will feature in the new Cafe Clock cookery book, see my last post: Fine Fes Food.

Full text below.

On the road: Butchery and beauty in a Moroccan medina

By Julius Honnor in Fez

Saturday, 12 December 2009

On the journey to Bab Boujeloud, Fez, the taxi driver proudly points out McDonald’s to me. But I’m here to take photos for Café Clock’s new cookery book: camel burgers rather than Big Macs. It is suggested that I might want to go to the abattoir to take pictures of the last camel slaughter before Eid al-Adha, the Muslim festival of sacrifice. I turn down the opportunity.

It’s hard, however, to escape a rather visceral connection to slaughter in Fez’s beautiful medina. It is traditional that every family should have a sheep for the festival, kept at home and then butchered. There are sheep in carts, sheep being dragged by their horns, sheep on people’s backs, a sheep that emerges from the boot of a Mercedes. This is Morocco’s most religious city, and they commemorate Abraham’s willingness to kill his son with gusto.

Excited kids skip down the road in front of their very temporary pet, and straw sellers set up shop on the side of the road.

I am taken to see the sheep market, where sad-looking, bedraggled creatures huddle at the back of dirty pens, their heads hung low. This is a world without freezer cabinets and shrink-wrapping, where meat comes on things that bleat or flap. The connection to the live creature is inescapable: chickens have their necks wrung while you wait, and a dull-eyed camel’s head hangs outside the butcher. Halfway down Talaa Kebira, another sheep is parked, tied to a breezeblock while its new owner gets a haircut.

On the roof terrace of the café, stars shine bright, largely untroubled by light pollution. Roast-chestnut fug drifts up from the street below and the low murmur from the café is pinpricked by the plaintive bleats of sheep. At 8.45pm, it is still warm enough to sit outside. Someone is playing Bobby McFerrin on their phone: “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”. A message to the sheep, perhaps. I order the vegetable soup.

Footprint’s Morocco Handbook is available now (£14.99)

I stayed in some amazing places too, as well as doing the obligatory camel ride, dawn swim in the Atlantic and shoe haggling. Unfortunately my balloon ride was cancelled, but I did get to the Gnaoua Festival and up into the mountains to an ancient ruined mosque and several spectacular kasbahs.

As well as the selection below, I’ve added a web album of some of my photos.

UPDATE: Marrakech has finally gone to press. Using almost exclusively my photos it will be out by the end of the year – you can pre-order it in the shop.

My new book – now out!

For four months in summer and autumn 2008 I explored the piazzas, museums, bars, Roman remains and cookery schools of Umbria and Marche, in central Italy, photographing and writing a new guidebook for Footprint, which is now available – buy it from this website or any good bookshop. If you are outside the UK and want to buy a copy, you might want to consider the Book Depository, which has good prices and free worldwide postage.

There is a web album of my photos, and I also kept a blog while I was there. I went back for a brief visit in May/June 2009 – there are also photos of that trip.

Click on the thumbnails below for some close-up images of the book, or on the image above for more information, reviews and the chance to purchase a copy.

The piece looks at Umbria’s relation to landscape, religion and (a certain disrespect for) authority. My book on Umbria and the Marche is due out sometime in May 2009 now out, and available from all good bookshops.

There’s a web album of pictures from my two months there, as well as the blog I kept at the time, with lots more photos.

Living in the middle of Trastevere, I covered the ancient Roman areas, Ostia Antica, Tivoli and Trastevere itself. I also wrote several of the introduction sections.

The book is now out. My most recent guidebook for Footprint, it’s a part of the new Footprint Italia series, and comes with a popout map. Available from all good bookshops. You can currently get it from this website for just £8.65, with free P&P in the UK.

Introduction to Footprint Rome

The past seems more recent in Rome. With history oozing out of every deep-fried rice ball, the world’s one-time caput mundi, the capital of the world, still lives among its ancient stones and their accompanying ghosts.

Rome’s Baroque splendours and over-thetop ornamentation give it romantic cinematic backdrops. Anita Ekberg striking dripping fountain poses might seem like silliness in another city but here the weighty seriousness of centuries of importance gives Rome an unmatchable substance; an operatic sense of glamour.

Whether you are walking Roman roads, worshipping at the shrines of the Renaissance, spending euro millions in fashion palaces or sipping aperitivi on pretty piazzas, it is a city that wears its history proudly on its flaking sleeve. And though many of its extraordinary ruins are worryingly dilapidated, the openness of its stones to the weather, the traffic fumes and the tourists is also democratizing, bringing the ancient world to the door of every cafe, bar and cheese shop.

Cleaned and opened up for the millennium, and daring to be new, Rome has shaken off some of its conservative skin and increasingly rivals Milan for stylishness. But while the city’s bars, hotels and restaurants become slowly hip, the city’s inward-looking traditions mean that local identities are retained, and chain stores and corporations largely resisted. Among the gleaming new museums and arts showcases there are still places closed for stagnant ‘renovation’. There is a sense that Rome is a city beginning to look to the future, while, of course, living with the past.

When the CRE became a part of the new Equality and Human Rights Commission the magazine ceased to exist, though a snapshot of the website is still online.

Catalyst was at the forefront of new thinking on race relations and racial equality, both in Britain and abroad. We chose the name to reflect the magazine’s role: to kick-start debates, discussions, new ideas and arguments – about where we are now, and where we might be going in the future.

The magazine dealt with issues of identity, citizenship, culture and community, and how these concepts are continually evolving and re-shaping the society we live in.

The Commission for Racial Equality’s contribution to a global debate, it was not a house magazine to promote CRE viewpoints or activities. It encouraged frank and open discussion and engaged with views across the political spectrum, and covered a broad range of topics, from policy and the law, to economics, politics, sport, science, culture and the arts.

The website provided an online version of each issue as well as additional content, supplementing and responding to material in the print version of the magazine, plus interactive features to allow a wider audience to join the debate. In turn the material and comments from the website fed back into the print version of Catalyst.

Among the pieces I wrote were a review of the Tate’s photography retrospective, How We Are; a look at truth commissions around the world and an assessment of the claims of modern slavery. I went to the highly charged launch of a short Russian film, interviewed people about Cornishness and reviewed exhibitions in London and Poland.

I was part of the small team that put together the book, and as well as taking many of the photographs and interviewing Brendon Batson, the first black footballer to play for Arsenal, I designed and made the website.