Sometimes a French word or phrase just grabs me and I just want to make it my own, words like quincaillerie, which means hardware because of the sound pots and pans make clanking off each other.

But my phrase for this week, the one which keeps circling the Dwyer brain, is Le Temps des Cerises.

Literally this means The Time of Cherries, which evokes nothing particular- especially to an Irishman who never saw a fresh cherry until in his forties. To the people of France of course it means a whole lot more. For one thing it is the title of a Yves Montand hit of which most French people, at a pinch, would remember some of the words.

Because the word Temps means weather as well as time or season in France, Le Temps des Cerises means that time of the year when cherries are for sale in the market- usually late May and June, those wonderful days of early summer in France when nature starts to be bountiful. Of course this has extended naturally in France to mean the days of our youth, the Halcyon Days, the Days of Wine and Roses- but none of these really translate the phrase properly.

This is why the phrase is buzzing around my head for the last few days as I think of phrases to use as an English translation.
Here are a few:
Cherry Times, Cherry Days, The Time of Cherries, The Cherry Season.
But none seem to work, I guess I will just have to leave it in French and sound like a nerd, and an affected one at that.

When I opened my own restaurant in Waterford in 1989 it was buried in a back street in Waterford, on Mary Street, whose main claim to fame was that it had been the home of Cherries Brewrey, then owned by Guinness, but still universally known as Cherries in Waterford.
I had a notion that, in order to help Waterford people to find me, I should include some reference to the brewery in the title of the restaurant. The best one I could think of (and one which I really liked) was “Cherry Stones” ( because it was only a stone’s throw from Cherries) However it turned out that I was the only person who fancied that title so the restaurant ended being called, rather prosaically I felt : Dwyers.

I suppose this means that translating “Cherries” either for a title of a restaurant or from French still eludes me but still doesn’t stop it buzzing around my head.