"Good food should be available at any level, it shouldn't be out of anybody's reach, whether it's just a sandwich, a jar of jam, or a full meal," says John Leach, owner of the Design House Restaurant in Halifax. We use more pasta, rediscover pulses and, if all else fails, eat a bit less at lunch time. What we emphatically do not need to do when money is tight is to compromise on quality. Instead of boiling and straining sauces for three days, we moisten the food with a little oil and lemon juice. Instead of plain grilled fillet steak, we resort to stir-fried insides and casser-oled extremities, with a concomi-tant hike in flavour; instead of turbot or sea bass, we use herring or Scarborough woof. Escoffier's 17th Law of the Kitchen states that the greater the decline in economic circumstances, the more inventive cooking must become. Tel: 0206 298215 (South); 0532 304600 (North Wales); 031-226 6722 (Scotland). A complete listing of work camps for 1995 (in Britain and overseas) will be available in April..
If there has been a silver lining to the recessionary cloud, it must be that many restaurants have discovered good food need not be expensive. At the end of the evening we just sat downand talked."Relationships on work camps can be a problem, he agrees "It's something that always comes up in training sessions. The main thing about a work camp is how the group relate to each other, so if two people find they are very wrapped up in each other, thatcan detract from the group feeling."A work camp can be a very intense experience, he adds."You get very close to people, whether or not a romance starts."n Applications for most overseas work camps are made through IVS. "I was very busy organising the camp - driving the minibus, marshalling everyone, making sure they had enough tools, and so on. But after about two or three days, we both knew we were quite keen on each other. The main thing I noticed was how comfortable I felt with her. They liked each other immediately, but didn't begin their relationship until after the camp had finished.
They stayed in a local Scout headquarters and camp site, surrounded by a triangle of woodland.The volunteers included Athena, a teacher from Athens, who later became his girlfriend. He believed that, in a small way, this kind of international contact and co-operation could help overcome the ignorance and suspicion between nations that had led to the war.The idea soon spread: the first British work camp was held in Brynmawr in South Wales in 1931, and International Voluntary Service (IVS), the British branch of SCI, was founded soon afterwards Similar organisations sprang up in many countries. Morocco now has more than a dozen work camp and volunteer organisations: Mouvement Twiza, to which Ali belongs, was founded in 1985 in Khemisset, a small town not far from the capital Rabat."Twiza" is a traditional word in the Berber language which describes the kind of mutual help that villagers would give each other, for example working together without pay on each other's harvest until all was gathered in. As well as organising international camps, the group carries out regular conservation and repair work in the town.In Britain several local IVS groups do similar regular work in the community. For several years, Jeremy Davis has been involved with his local group in Croydon, which does gardening or decorating for pensioners and people referred by social services.He felt that such projects would also make a good work camp, so he organised one for 12 international volunteers in August 1993. SCI was founded in 1920 by a Swiss pacifist, Pierre Ceresole, who organised international work camps to help rebuild villages devastated by the First World War.
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