Aunty's been showing a bit of interest in truffles recently. Aunty BBC, that is. I don't quite know how they got hold of the idea, but the Charlie Crocker Show on BBC Radio Kent decided they wanted to talk to someone about truffles in New Zealand, and they picked on me. Charlie invited me on to her sofa (virtual, in this case) on Monday evening, Kent time - 7-15am, sunrise in NZ, and we chatted merrily for half an hour. You can listen to the show on the web, at least for a week. It's a fair while since I've been on the BBC. Back in the early 80s, when I was being a video guru, I used to claim that the only BBC station I'd never been on was Radio Three (the classical music station).
Meanwhile, over on Radio Four, their correspondent has been truffling his way round Bill & Pat de Corsie's truffiere south of Sydney, where 500 five year-old trees have produced six kilos of truffles this winter. On the way they've encountered one or two uniquely Aussie problems...
"The bloody wombats were getting in over the fence," Bill tells me. "We had no idea they could climb." Installing an electric wire has solved that problem, but it is still no deterrent to the local kangaroos, which simply hop over.
You can probably ferret around on the BBC and find the audio. From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday 26 August, 2006 at 1130 BST on BBC Radio 4.
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