SOUP LINES INTERNATIONAL

7 May 2005

On the early morning bus from Tartu to Tallin. From Estonia’s second city to it’s first. It’s a 200 kilometre drive along a long straight road across a flat flat country. Fine morning in early May, back home spring is raging but here in this northerly Baltic State there is not a bud that has burst. Outside, mile after mile of prime forest, all slender tall and straight silver birches and dark mysterious pines. Sporadically there are also the large open fields ploughed and waiting. Every kilometre or so are signs warning us of elks crossing. Sadly I see no elks
That’s all outside. What’s going on inside my head is a seething mess of unfocussed plans for countless Soup Lines stretching around the globe. Times like this, as in the seething mess of whatever in my head, I get out my notebook and try and nail some of the mess to the blank page. In an attempt to stop the seething and sort things out.
The notebook open on my knees, a pen borrowed from a fellow passenger and I’m off.
The why’s, where fore’s and poetry of the original Soup Line I have written about elsewhere most in a story called Soup Is The Medium. If you have read that you know what and why the Soup Line is. If you haven’t all that you need to know for the purpose of this bus ride story is that in late 2002 I decided there was such a thing called the Soup Line that stretched across the British Isles intersecting Belfast and Nottingham. It is a perfectly straight line and if you live on that line you are perfectly within your rights to invite me to your house to make soup for you, your family and your close friends. There is no apparent logic to doing this, I’m not looking for one. I don’t know if it is poetry, art or just something to get me out the house. As yet I am unaware of any way I can exploit the Soup Line for financial gain. Putting bread on the table and clothes on my children’s back it doesn’t. That said I have found doing it one of the most exciting and creatively rewarding things I have done. I have only done it 17 times to date, limiting myself to no more than one soup run in any one calendar month. I am hoping to carry on doing this as long as my health holds and I’m not incarcerated by the Law.
Last year I had been invited to do one of these soup things at the Belfast City Hall as part of an arts festival. Those that were there to sup the soup were not the family and close friends of whoever was the resident of the City Hall but a gaggle of British Council directors from the newly seceded countries of the EU. All those Eastern European ones, and various cultural promoters that they had brought with them. As far as the British Council was concerned I think the idea was the cultural promoters might be interested in some of the talent from Northern Ireland at the festival, new cross border cultural links and all that.
It was a strange and strained event, it had none of the intimacy or magic of the other soup home visits. I had done it as a favour for one of the city councillors who was responsible for the arts and had charmed me with that Irish twinkle in his eye.
As well as making and serving the soup I got up and gave a spiel about what the Soup Line was and how it came about and where it may be going, using my Make Soup text painting and the framed soup-related posters as props. And I also handed out make soup badges. This spiel of mine seemed to go down well and that was that. I washed up my pots and pans and, like Elvis before me, left the building.
Eleven months later, as in four weeks ago, I got an email from the director of the British Council in Estonia wanting to know if I would come over there and make soup at a literature festival they were having in Tartu, Estonia’s second city, (remember) and their premier university town.
It made no sense. She must have known the Soup Line went nowhere near Estonia. That it was a strictly British Isle thing. And even if you stretched the line right around the globe as I did do once to see where it went, it still didn’t go anywhere near Estonia. But hey, I was being invited to go to Estonia and I’ve always had a thing about the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania ever since I did a collecting-milk-money round when I was a teenager in Corby. I won’t go into my full-on Corby thing here it is enough for the purpose of just now to say that after the Scots fraction of the population (86.5%) the next biggest fraction of ethnic other was Latvians (6.3%). So a number of doors that I knocked on, on a Friday evening were answered by these middle aged women dressed in pre war eastern European peasant gear, who couldn’t speak a word of English so had to get their children to translate the fact that they only got two pints an a Thursday morning and not four and they weren’t going to pay for the two they didn’t get. I knew they were lying, they knew that I knew there was nothing I could do. These Latvian ladies have held a special place in my imagination ever since. Estonia might not be Latvia but it was close enough.
Then I had an idea, but before I tell you what the idea was there is something else I want to tell you. Over the past few years I have found myself trying to remove myself as the focus of my work, obviously not the written stuff like this, that is all about me, but the rest of the work is not about me, my angst, my ego and all that other stuff. Even if what I do starts from my angst and ego by the time I let whatever it is slide out there into the public domain for people to react to and respond with, my involvement with whatever it is, is irrelevant to their consumption or not of it. With most of the other jobs I have been working on this has been possible, with the Soup Line as it has stood to date, it is completely impossible. It, the Soup Line, is all about me, that bloke that used to be in a pop group then burnt some money, turning up at your house to make you soup. Almost as if I’m part of some minor league celebrity thing. There seemed no way around it.
Now back to the idea that I had. Maybe there is more than one Soup Line. Maybe there are hundreds of them. At least one for each country in the world. And each of these Soup Lines could be manned by a citizen of the country that the Soup Line was in. the title Soup Lines International sprang to mind. Then I got to work on the text for another poster. If you are reading this you may have already read the text on this poster. If you haven’t already read it, this is it.

Construct a Soup Line.

Take a map of your country
Draw a straight line across the map
That intersects two places
Where you have enjoyed the company of others
While breaking bread and supping soup.

This line will be your nations Soup Line.
Register it at penkilnburn.com/soup

Arrange to visit
Homes along this line
In order to make one vat of soup
For the inhabitants,
Their family and close friends.

The poster was printed up and framed in time for me to take out here to Estonia with me. Right now it is in the luggage compartment of the bus that I’m on along with my regular Soup Line poster and the Recipe one.
After doing radio and press interviews yesterday morning at the British Council, I was driven over to a large open air market, on the edge of Tallin, where I loaded up with enough local vegetables for the evening soup making. The only thing I was hoping to get, but they didn’t have was parsnips. I love to use parsnips in these soups that I do. They give it a richness bordering on the sweet. What they did have, that I got, was a Kilo of Jerusalem artichokes. Not to be confused with the globe artichokes used in Mediterranean recipes. The Jerusalem is a small knobbly root vegetable. Very hard to peel but very full of flavour. Warning: they have a tendency to cause gross flatulence if used too liberally in a dish.
Gimpo and I were then driven the 200 kilometres to Tartu by the director of the Estonian British Council. We talked about how things had changed for the Soviet Union. She alluded to some job she used to do for the Soviet Government. I asked her if it was the KGB. She didn’t answer. I then asked her that if in her role as the director of the Estonian British Council, did she have to handle spies. She didn’t answer that either. She did let me know she is a personal friend of the Estonian prime Minister and he should be up at tonight’s event. We stopped of at a hypermarket on the edge of Tartu to get the ingredients I couldn’t get at the market.
I love hypermarkets or superstores or whatever you call them. I especially love them in foreign countries. There was nothing eastern European, as in empty shelves, about this one, it had everything, the shelves groaned. With the help of the director the trolley got piled high.
The performance, if that’s what it can be called, was to take place in a restaurant/bar of the University. We arrived, I was shown the kitchens. I was to make the soup amongst the professional chefs preparing proper smart food. I was shit scared about being found out to be the charlatan that I am by them. The thing is, I can’t chop like a professional chef. Being able to properly chop is the first thing that has to be mastered on the road to being a proper chef. My chopping is ham fisted. The head chef was having the day off. The deputy chef was a welcoming sort. He sorted me out with knives, chopping boards and a massive pan. A pan big enough to make soup for the 50 or 60 punters I was told to expect.
I got chopping it was almost 5pm. I had to allow at least three hours between chopping the first onion to dipping the ladle in to serve the first customer.
This is the bit that I love the most, the pressure of getting the soup done in the right time, the right amount and without burning it.
A TV crew turned up. They were from a weekly arts programme, the only programme on Estonian TV that covers the arts. The presenter of the show was a wild looking poet with a strange beard. He also has a food column in one of the local broadsheets. An interview was carried out there and then while I was chopping celery and carrots and swede and tomatoes and shovelling them all into the giant pan. He seemed to be very taken by what I was doing and the launch of the Soup Lines International. He wanted to discuss food and maps and poetry and all the other things I am interested in. his producer stopped our flow of conversation and asked him to ask me something about money burning. Why does it always have to come back to fuckin’ money burning? I thought. I was as polite and as charming as I could be while I declined to be drawn too far on the money burning question.
Eight o’clock rolled around. The director was getting impatient. There was a full house out there waiting for me to come out and do whatever it was they thought I was here to do. I had learnt in the past couple of hours that the punters had no idea what I was going to do, they knew nothing about the soup. I was told some were expecting me to do a reading of KLF lyrics, others thought it was going to be spoken word extracts from Bad Wisdom (a big hit in former Warsaw Pact countries).
I turned the heat right down on the pan, asked the deputy chef to keep an eye on it, and went out to meet my audience.
I walked into the restaurant. The place was packed.
‘Good Evening. My name is Bill Drummond. I’m here to make soup and…’
And I spent the next thirty minutes telling them about Belfast and Nottingham and sitting in my kitchen at 2am when the idea of the Soup Line first hit. I think I spoke too fast for them to catch every word. I used the framed posters as props and unrolled a map of the British Isles to show them the first Soup Line. Then I got to the bit about Soup Lines International and how I was here to launch them. Now came the moment of truth. Would any one of this packed throng take the bait and volunteer to take on the responsibility of creating and then manning the Estonian Soup Line. I implied it didn’t have to be a lifetime commitment, that one might be able to hand the baton on to anyone who could be found willing to carrying it.
But then instead of asking there and then if there were any volunteers I decided to play for time.
‘Okay, I will let you have time to think about it. In the mean time I will go and get the vat of soup and start serving. I will want you to form an orderly cue and those that want can use my wooden spoon to give the soup a stir and make a wish.’
Carrying the vat was more difficult than I thought it would be. It weighed a ton and I was convinced I was going to trip on the numerous steps between the kitchen and the restaurant.
The queue was orderly. At least they haven’t forgotten those lessons their Russian masters had taught them.
Plenty of wishes were made and it turned out I had made enough soup to go round and enough for those that wanted seconds.
After all the soup ladling is done I took to the floor again, and called order.
‘So does anybody here want to be the keeper of the Estonian Soup Line?’ I scan the crowd. Not a raised arm. I’ve fucked it. I should’ve known who in their right mind would volunteer for such an undertaking. What would they get out of it? I get something out, but that’s ‘cause it’s my idea. Then I notice a bloke in the corner of the room with an arm raised.
‘You wanna do it?’
‘Sure.’
Then the poet geezer who presents the TV programme and writes about food is straight in. he is volunteering to do it with him. It seems there is a catch; he wants to cover it over the year for his TV programme. Do I step in and tell them this is out of order? Soup Lines aren’t about being comodified for TV.
Soup is the medium. Nothing else. Someone from BBC2 had contacted me last year wanting to talk with me about turning it into some sort of reality TV cum cookery cum arts programme. TV cameras in someone’s house would have destroyed the whole thing for me. I never had the meeting with the folk from BBC2.
So what to do with the situation I was being confronted with last night. Instinct almost had me wading in and saying ‘No way is one of my soup lines going to be turned into TV fodder.’ But then I thought, ‘Fuck it. It’s not mine now. It’s theirs, they can do what ever they like with it.’
I had a map of Estonia with me. We folded it out on one of the tables; they chose two towns where it seems they had both enjoyed the company of others while breaking bread and supping soup. They were Kardla, on an island called Hiiumaa, off the west coast, and a place called Rapina in the far east of Estonia. We found a plank of wood to draw a straight line across the map.
And that was that. The first of what I hope will be numerous Soup Lines International. I told them I would be back in a years time to see how it was going and asked them if they could provide text in Estonian for an Estonian Soup Line poster and maybe even a recipe for whatever their soup was going to be. We shake hands, I hand out some of the Make Soup badges, then disappear back into the kitchen to get on with the washing up.
The bus is pulling into Tallin airport. Its time for me to hand this pen back to my fellow passenger and head on out.