More Details of the Wine and Cheese Evening

Plans are really coming together for the Wine and Cheese Tasting evening for Fairtrade Fortnight. A wine buyer from the Co-operative will be coming to talk about the different wines, and the cheeses will be coming from Neal's Yard Creamery in Dorstone, with owner Charlie Westhead providing a Q&A session about the cheeses and cheesemaking. There will be ten different wines to try; red, white and sparkling, all Fairtrade, and four different cheeses. Any profits from the evening will be invested with Shared Interest, an ethical investment co-operative and the world's only 100% Fair Trade lender.

Fairtrade Wine and Cheese Evening

Tickets are now on sale at Eighteen Rabbit, up at Hay Castle, for the Fairtrade Fortnight Wine and Cheese Evening. Nine Fairtrade wines, a selection of local cheeses, with a short talk by the cheese maker and someone who knows about the wine, all at Tomatito's Tapas Bar, in the back room. Numbers are limited because of space, and tickets cost £10. The event starts at 7pm on the 26th February.

Fairtrade Christmas Fair

I'm a bit late with this one, but I only just thought to check out Hay TV to see what videos they are showing at the moment. There's a five minute video of the Fairtrade fair, with interviews with many of the stall holders, including Chris, who has taken the lion's share of organising the Fair up to now. Here's the link to the video (I can't manage workable links on this blog - I'm afraid it's a case of cut and paste): http://www.hayontv.com/musicvideo.php?vid=038f2a4f8

How the Christmas Fair Went

Normally, I'd be able to write a first hand report, complete with pictures, but I had a migraine on the morning of the fair, so couldn't do anything. Our nice shiny new display board stayed in my front room, but there was a Fairtrade table with mulled apple juice and cakes and leaflets - and all the apple juice was sold. Barbara and Reg set everything up, after James had delivered the table and all the rest of the equipment, and Barbara manned the stall until Julia took over in the afternoon. Jan organised the apple juice, cakes were made by Jo and Lesley and several other people. And of course, Chris organised all the stalls with all the wonderful Fairtrade goods. We couldn't manage without him! Jump4Timbuktu were there, of course, and so were Tools For Self Reliance, and a lot of the favourites from previous years, as well as new faces.

Find Us on Facebook

Someone in the comments below our Christmas poster has pointed out that the poster says "Find us on Facebook" - but up until now we had neglected to make it easy for people to do that - a bit technical, I thought, until I had a go. Now we have the link in the side bar so you can go straight to the Fairtrade Hay Facebook page!

Fairtrade Christmas Fair

Eighteen Rabbits

The "Purveyor of Finest Junk" has moved out of the premises at Hay Castle, and the space has just been taken over by Hay's newest pop-up shop. Eighteen Rabbit sells Fairtrade gifts from all over the world. When I went up there earlier today I saw pottery and sparkly mirrors from Mexico, gourd lamps from Thailand, knitted hats and wrist warmers and scarves from Nepal, and all sorts of other interesting things, at quite reasonable prices. The shop is run by Louise Davies and Andrew Williams, who already run a sustainable event management agency called Seventeen Events, and it will be open until the end of December. They also trade online, at www.eighteenrabbit.co.uk (and even their free bookmarks are printed on recycled paper). They are also on Twitter, which is probably the easiest way to find the website. When I went looking for it (it's still very new) I found it under www.eighteen-rabbit.myshopify.com So, why Eighteen Rabbit? When they were in Honduras, they came across monuments in honour of a Mayan king with that name, and he was associated with arts and creativity.