The ante has been upped in the food world recently. It used to be enough to arrive at a dinner party with some staggeringly good wine or an obscure cheese, but now, with the return to traditional foods and a bubbling subculture of fashionable self-sufficiency, it’s de rigueur to bring something you have made yourself: a jar of chutney, a pot of recherche preserve or, to really get the other guests hissing with thwarted envy, a jar of home-made marmalade. So this year I resolved to knock up a few jars.

The Seville orange season is short - from December to late February - so it is now or never for 2008. The thick-skinned fruit are unbelievably fragrant, but inedibly bitter. They have no real use in the UK except for making marmalade - so greengrocers don’t often stock them and, when they do, they disappear quickly as word spreads through the marmalade underground. I get a tip-off that Waitrose has some, but the three branches I visit are out of stock by the time I arrive.

I finally unearth a wholesale fruiterer in south London who promises to keep some for me - as long as I buy a 12kg (26lb) case.

Twelve kilos doesn’t sound too much. A dozen jars maybe. It all seems manageable - until I load the damn things on to the kitchen table. I phone Fi Kirkpatrick, author of Debrett’s New Guide to Easy Entertaining, who is to marmalade, what Howard Marks is to marijuana. “I’ll be right over,” she says.

Kirkpatrick explains that the sugar balances the bitterness, so quantities are adjusted for either proper, punishing, lip-shrivelling posh marmalade or a softer, less challenging breakfast spread for the weak-minded. Little room is allowed for debate. With her innate preserving skill, Kirkpatrick surveys my fruit and calculates that we will need 9kg of sugar.

She has brought along the family preserving pan, “the Behemoth”, which we half-fill with whole oranges and top up with enough water to cover them. The oranges are poached for half an hour then allowed to stand until cool enough to handle.

The idea is to separate the thinnest outer layer of the skin from the pith, pulp, pips and juice. Boiling the oranges makes them wonderfully soft, so you can chop them in half and scoop out the entire contents in one sweep of a melon-baller - at least Kirkpatrick can. The guts of the oranges, pips, pith and pulp go back into the reserved poaching water for another hour’s simmering. These gungy bits are important because they contain the pectin that eventually sets the marmalade.

While the pulp is simmering, we cut up the skins, a moronic yet convivial process that gives Kirkpatrick time to explain the important quality signifiers in marmalade production. Thin shreds of peel are indicative of machine preparation or unseemly “faffiness”, so only hefty artisanal chunks are allowed. An oversweet marmalade will mark you as a ghastly parvenu and, though competition marmaladers go for a clear, light jelly, true connoisseurs know that long cooking creates a darker preserve with a richer, more complex flavour.

I glibly suggest the addition of whisky or ginger to the mixture but Kirkpatrick extinguishes my attempt at innovation with a look of wounded disappointment.

With the skins chopped to Kirkpatrick’s satisfaction, we ladle the pulp into a jelly bag - a muslin sack the size of a small pillowcase, which is rigged between two chair backs. The liquid elements of the fruit pulp drain slowly through, back into the Behemoth, which is balanced on four volumes of Delia Smith and the bathroom scales. Wringing out the hot jelly bag feels like trying to juice a piglet, but finally the last dribbles are collected and weighed. We dissolve a socially impeccable three-quarters of the weight of sugar into the juice.

This syrup, brought to a rolling boil, must be watched, stirred and nurtured constantly. Depending on the size of your pot, this can take 20 minutes or several hours but under no circumstances can you walk away. If it boils over, at worst you will be badly burned, or at best you will still be scraping orange toffee off your kitchen floor at Christmas.

Proper cooks who worry about this sort of thing recommend a “cold-plate test” to check how the marmalade is gelling. You’re supposed to keep a stack of saucers in the fridge on to which the hot jelly is dropped: when a decent layer sticks rather than runs, then it is ready.

Kirkpatrick scorns this as yet another instance of faffiness and, sure enough, after about 45 minutes, there is a subtle but noticeable change in the bubbling surface of the marmalade. The plopping sound becomes more of an angry hissing. We quickly stir in the chopped skins and Kirkpatrick, sounding like an 18th-century ironmaster, announces that we’re “ready to pour”.

In 10 minutes the jars are closed, cooling and beginning to set. After a couple of gins we crank up the toaster to produce test slices of wholemeal toast. The set is perfect - big soft chunks of peel in a rich mahogany gel - and its deep flavour will mature beautifully over the coming year. The whole process was achieved in a little more than five hours.

Kirkpatrick congratulates me. Her work here is done and she is required on the other side of town where someone is having trouble folding napkins. Picking up her two-jar fee, she heads to her car. I turn back to the oddly undiminished crate of Sevilles and start on the next batch.

… It’s now 2am and I’ve just got the lids on to the fourth batch and scraped the last marmalade off the kitchen surfaces. My body feels as if I’ve been stirring molten pig iron, my eyes are red with citrus steam and there’s orange peel in my ear. My larder shelves are straining under the 48 jars I have produced. No one will escape the gift of marmalade this year. I shall be dishing it out instead of business cards, handing jars to buskers and leaving it as tips in restaurants. One thing I won’t be doing, however, is eating it for a while. I swear, if I see another bloody orange I will scream.

When he was awaiting execution in 1980, Kim Dae-jung cannot have imagined that he would not only survive, but go on to transform his country so dramatically that his opponents would one day adopt the very policies for which he was sentenced to death.

Yet that is what looks likely today as South Koreans go to the polls to elect a new president in a political landscape that has been turned on its head since Kim took power 10 years ago.

The elder statesman’s controversial “sunshine” policy of engaging North Korea, which was carried on by his successor as president, Roh Moo-hyun, will face its biggest domestic challenge after this election.

Polls suggest that the conservative opposition, the Grand National party (GNP), will win by a landslide. Its candidate, Lee Myung-bak, a former Hyundai executive and Seoul mayor, is more than 20 percentage points ahead of his nearest rival, Chun Dong-young, of the United New Democratic party, the leading party in parliament.

But Kim believes the policy of dialogue with North Korea, which he started and which he says is one of the reasons he was sentenced to death in 1980, will continue even if there is a change of government.

He said the prospects for peace on the peninsula had never been better thanks to a U-turn by the Bush administration, breakthroughs in denuclearisation talks and continued rapprochement between North and South Korea, evident this month in the resumption of cross-border rail services after more than 50 years.

“This is the best chance since the establishment of the North Korean regime,” the 84-year-old statesman said in an interview with the Guardian on the eve of the election.

Kim lost three elections and “retired” from politics in 1993 to study in Cambridge, before winning the presidency in 1997 in the first change of government in South Korean history. Three years later, he visited Pyongyang for the first north-south summit, for which he won the Nobel peace prize.

A stand-off since then between the US and North Korea appears to have ended with a shift towards engagement by George Bush. Last month, the US president wrote his first “Dear Chairman” letter to Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader he once denounced as a tyrant.

It has prompted speculation that the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, will visit Pyongyang next year as part of moves towards normalising diplomatic relations. Kim said this was a possibility. “The US is experiencing failures in the Middle East so it needs to gain success on the Korean peninsula regarding the nuclear issue.”

Kim believes the momentum towards success in the six-party nuclear talks - between the Koreas, the US, Japan, China and Russia - is unstoppable. Once the US and North Korea have normalised relations, he expects Pyongyang to shift away from its military-first policy and towards economic growth, which would prompt it to reach out to the South. In a best case scenario, he says reunification could come within 10 to 20 years.

Today’s election is unlikely to make that process easier.

Lee has been criticised within his own party for his pragmatic approach. He has said he can more than double the average income of North Koreans to $3,000 (1,490) a year. Such a policy would have been unthinkable 20 years ago, when the GNP portrayed the North as a sinister enemy. Party officials said attitudes have changed.

“Even if the GNP becomes the ruling party, we don’t believe there will be tension like in the 1970s and 1980s,” said Kim Heon-jin, a party official. “Most people believe our country should have good relations with North Korea.”

Lee has said he will maintain dialogue, but will review the sunshine policy of engagement with the North and decide which parts to keep and discard. Rather than give aid unconditionally - as has been the case for most of the past 10 years - the former businessmen says it should be provided only after Pyongyang has given up its nuclear programme.

“If Lee Myung-bak wins, the engagement policy will not make the smooth progress it has made in the past,” warns Kim. But he does not expect a fundamental change. “As long as there is progress in the six-party negotiations, and in talks between the US and North Korea, then South Korea cannot be the only one to go against those bigger trends.”

But it would be a different story if there were a change of heart in the US. Lee has positioned himself closer to Washington than his liberal predecessors. It is not known whether he would block calls for sanctions and other punitive actions against North Korea as Kim claims to have done.

Fifteen years ago, South Korean voters were frightened of North Korea. Ten years ago, they were sympathetic. Now, they are more concerned about themselves. Polls suggest North Korea is a priority for only 5% of the electorate, far below the economy, jobs and housing.

The discovery that Kim had irregularly funnelled hundreds of millions of dollars to the North ahead of the summit, apparently to buy off his host, tarnished not only his Nobel peace prize, but also trust in the aid programme for Pyongyang. In Seoul, many people say the government should focus on its own people rather than those across the border. They want reunification, but not if it means a drop in living standards.

Lee has capitalised on the disillusionment with the liberal experiment initiated by Kim and his unpopular successor, Roh. He promises to increase economic growth to 7% through ambitious infrastructure schemes, and make South Korea the world’s seventh-largest economy.

He too has been tarnished by corruption allegations, which led to scuffles in parliament this week and the launch of an inquiry. But the campaigns are far more subdued than in 2002, when anti-US demonstrations, internet activism and the nationalist spillover from hosting the World Cup seemed to portend a dynamic era in South Korean politics.

This time, a conservative mood prevails. The generational and ideological split that electrified the last election has been replaced by a return to regionalism and self-interest.

“People want to take care of North Koreans, but only after we take care of ourselves,” said Beckhee Cho of the UNDP, whose candidate Chun has suffered from a split in the liberal camp. “That is why they don’t like our candidate. They think he only wants to make North Koreans happy.”

(03-12) 06:09 PDT PARIS, France (AP) —

French prosecutors have asked a judge to put Continental Airlines and four people on trial for manslaughter in connection with the 2000 crash of a Concorde jet that killed 113 people, officials said Wednesday.

The prosecutor’s office in the Paris suburb of Pontoise said it submitted the recommendation for trial in late February. The court is not bound to follow the prosecutors’ suggestion, and it was unclear Wednesday when the judge would respond to the request.

The Air France Concorde crashed shortly after takeoff from Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport in July 2000, killing all 109 people on board Д mostly German tourists Д and four on the ground.

French investigators blamed a titanium strip left on the runway by a Continental Airlines DC-10.

The metal strip caused one of the Concorde’s tires to burst, which sent debris flying that punctured the jet’s fuel tanks. The French judicial inquiry also determined the tanks lacked sufficient protection from shock Д and that Concorde’s makers had been aware of the weakness since 1979.

The prosecutor recommended trying Continental and two employees who allegedly installed the defective strip, John Taylor and maintenance chief Stanley Ford.

The prosecutor also wants two French officials to go on trial: Claude Frantzen, former head of training at the French civil aviation authority, and Henri Perrier, ex-chief of the Concorde program.