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Manchester International Festival: Day 5

• Richard Fair
• 2 Jul 07, 01:12 PM

You can have too much of a good thing, so I decided to take a day off from the Festival yesterday and ended up chasing a small crab along a beach in North Wales. I'm told the Festival managed to carry on without me.

spent some time getting to grips with the small wooden spoons they were using at Manchester Dines. I think they're all part of the Festival's sustainability commitment. I say this because on Saturday I met a guy from the who's at the Festival setting up a new British Standard for events like this. Apparently it's the world鈥檚 first national standard on sustainable event management and Manchester, not for the first time, is the testing ground.

Basically what it will mean is that if you organise anything from a Garden party to the Olympic Games - and let's face it we've all done that, in the future you'll be able to show off the British Standard logo saying that you are sustainable.

I bet there are people out there who collect BSI numbers like trains. Stood in the pouring rain outside a marquee with a notebook writing down .

Another Manchester First
Also on Saturday I met the daughter of the man who introduced kebabs to this country. No, I didn't believe it either, but apparently the first shop was on Oxford Street in Manchester opposite what was once the Odeon Cinema. Loulla Astin is from Kosmos Greek Restaurant and her father, Solomon, had this crazy idea to sell Greek food from a cafe he bought. His friends told him he was mad, but forty years later those slabs of minced lamb can been seen revolving in windows on every high street in the country, the same high streets that are lined with discarded green chillies on a Sunday morning. This Festival is an education.

Tonight
All being well I'm off to the Contact tonight to see For All the Wrong Reasons. A new play by Lies Pauwels from Victoria theatre company in Ghent, Belgium. I'm sure it'll be more entertaining than, say, chasing crabs.