Being an obsessive collector has its advantages.
The things you collect often act as little aide memoires reminding one of the time and place where they were collected.

I was sitting down admiring my glasses last night (as I often do) when the Green Gustavsberg plate caught my eye.
It has only been given its proud place with the glasses for a couple of weeks and looks its best ever against the black wall.

It has a great history.

It spent the first 20 years of its life in my mother and father’s bathroom in Tree Tops in Cork.
I remember it always dusted with my mother’s talcum powder.

In the fifties there was a Marian Year and she and my Father had decided to go to Rome.
This was way before cheap flights and they decided to go from Cobh on a Cruise Liner.
They behaved on this liner as all passengers did at the time (I always think that going on a cruise must be a little like going to Butlins ) and played organised games for prizes.
Mum and Dad won at Deck Quoits (I have no idea how this was played) and were presented with The Green Plate.

After they sold Tree Tops it came with them to Knockeen where it rested in some splendour in the downstairs loo.

Now here I must diverge a little.

My Mother had a total horror of there being any fighting in the family over her possessions after she died.
Therefore she allocated every last cup, picture, every piece of furniture to individual children and grandchildren.
This was all listed and kept in the “secret” drawer in the bureau in the sittingroom in Knockeen.
My sister D, the eldest of the siblings, was instructed to read out this list to all the family on the day after my mother’s funeral.

And that is exactly what happened.
And there was no squabbling on the day, quite a lot of swapping, I remember swapping a mahogany table for a mahogany bookcase.

When everyone had cleared out the house my brother David and I went to say the last good byes.
We discovered that my mother hadn’t allocated the ham pot, the large 50’s alluminium boiler used always for the ham at Christmas and then I discovered the green plate in the downstairs loo.
Forgotten by my Mother and everyone else.
David insisted I took it too.

When I brought it home to Waterford I looked at it afresh.
It was really quite beautiful.
It had a name on the back, Gustavsberg Argenta and a quick Google search revealed that it was a nineteen thirties Swedish piece and quite valuable.
Why Argenta though ?
Then I took the Silvo to the black fish inlaid in the plate and then discovered that it is in fact silver.
This I think was something that my Mother had never discovered and anyway it very soon reverted to its previous patinated black.
And that is the way I have left it.
But now at last it has been given a rather more proud position and has managed to leave the bathrooms behind.

The good brother-in-law Padraic de Bhaldraithe , who like myself (and him with some genetic justification) has a bit of a passion for words, sent me the following.
Read them carefully, it is easy to miss the changed letter.

Here is the Washington Post’s Mensa Invitational which once again asked
readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding,
subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.

Here are the winners:

1. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the
subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.

2. Ignoranus : A person who’s both stupid and an asshole.

3. Intaxicaton : Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you
realize it was your money to start with.

4. Reintarnation : Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

5. Bozone ( n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops
bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little
sign of breaking down in the near future.

6. Foreploy : Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of
getting laid.

7. Giraffiti : Vandalism spray-painted very, very high

8. Sarchasm : The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the
person who doesn’t get it.

9. Inoculatte : To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

10. Osteopornosis : A degenerate disease. This one got extra credit.

11. Karmageddon : It’s like, when everybody is sending off all these
really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it’s
like, a serious bummer.

12. Decafalon (n.): The gruelling event of getting through the day
consuming only things that are good for you.

13. Glibido : All talk and no action.

14. Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when
they come at you rapidly.

15. Arachnoleptic Fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after
you’ve accidentally walked through a spider web.

16. Beelzebug (n.) : Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into
your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

17. Caterpallor ( n.): The color you turn after finding half a worm in
the fruit you’re eating.

The Washington Post has also published the winning submissions to its yearly
contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common
words.

And the winners are:

1. Coffee , n. The person upon whom one coughs.

2. Flabbergasted , adj. Appalled by discovering how much weight one has
gained.

3. Abdicate , v. To give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.

4 Esplanade , v. To attempt an explanation while drunk.

5. Willy-nilly , adj. Impotent.

6. Negligent , adj. Absentmindedly answering the door when wearing only a
nightgown.

7. Lymph , v. To walk with a lisp.(my personal favourite)

8. Gargoyle , n. Olive-flavored mouthwash.

9. Flatulence , n. Emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been run
over by a steamroller.

10. Balderdash , n. A rapidly receding hairline..

11. Testicle , n. A humorous question on an exam.

12. Rectitude , n. The formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.

13. Pokemon , n.. A Rastafarian proctologist.

14. Oyster , n. A person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms. .

15. Frisbeetarianism , n. The belief that, after death, the soul flies
up onto the roof and gets stuck there.

16. Circumvent , n. An opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by
Jewish men

The only one I can remember from former competitions is the excellent-

Testiculation:,
To wave your hands about in the air while talking bollix.

In about 1957 or ’58 my sister D was working as an au-pair in the south of France and she wrote home about this amazing yellow flowering tree which was blooming all over the coast near Frejus , and in the month of February.
With the letter she included a spray of the strange ball like flowers.
I remember that I thought at the time that this was incredibly exotic, a piece of moon stone to a boy to whom the South of France was as far away as the moon.

Perhaps certain seeds were sown with that spray of Mimosa.

Knowing that the the Jardin Méditerranéen in Roquebrun has a particularly good selection of Mimosa we headed there yesterday for a view.

The garden is high over the village but you could see the band of bright yellow from the bridge.

The River Orb through the blossoms

The red tiles of Roquebrun from the garden.

Welcome to Nell Mary Mc Mahon, born yesterday to my niece Oonagh and her husband Rossa .
A first grandchild for my brother Ted and his wife Mary.

Happy days ahead for all.

I will send them a spray of Mimosa for Nell, who knows what seeds it will sow.

For some strange reason I am enormously tickled by the piece I blogged earlier about confused cliches, particularly the one about not upsetting the apple tart.
Our friend Petra (a onetime German) who is staying with us at the moment suggested a game she used to play in Germany where she would try to make a -reasonably coherent- saying out of two or three proverbs.

I fairly quickly got that message and (fresh from yesterdays blog) suggested
“You can put the horse in front of the apple tart but you cannot make it drink ”

Anyone out there think of any others?

As I now have been blogging for about five years ( in fact I have just checked and my very first blog went out on February 26th 2005, just five years and one day ago) every so often I permit myself to repeat an old blog piece which I feel is worth remembering.
This one was originally put out in January 2006 under the title of :

Another Wedding Story.

Since I hauled out the photograph of Sile and myself in the last entry
I have been reminded of the strange coincidence we unearthed around the time it was taken.

Sile and I had met in Sion Hill teacher training college in 1971 and had started to go out together in Connemara in the Easter of 1972.
Of course Sile had to come to Cork as soon as possible to meet all the family and friends, she was from Skerries and had beem born and reared in Westmeath, so would never have met these people before.
We went to see my friends Siobhan and Sue Curtis who lived on the Magazine Road in Cork at that time (the last entry photograph of the two of us must have been taken then by one of them in their back garden)
As soon as we were in the sitting room of their house Sile spotted this photograph of Sue and Siobhan’s parents wedding on the mantlepiece over the fire.

Something about it obviously intrigued her as she stood up for a closer look. She had recognised her mother in the photograph!

Sile was quite correct , her mother was not just at the wedding but had acted as chief bridesmaid.
Sile’s parents and the Curtis parents had been friends in the forties but had lost touch over the years.
Madge Curtis (better known to the people of Cork as “Maeve” the woman’s editor of the Cork Examiner) had been on holiday in Glengarrif with Sile’s mother when she had met Tony Curtis, the groom in the wedding photo.
The two ladies had taken photographs of each other on their bikes on that holiday and we found these recently when looking through old photos in Sile’s parents house in Skerries.
This is the one of Sile’s Mum

And this of Madge Curtis

Small world isn’t it!

I don’t know the word (if their is one) for some one who gets expressions just slightly wrong, malaprops surely refer just to someone who gets a word wrong.
Samuel Goldwyn was famous for several (which the charitable put down to his lack of command of the English language) such as “Include me out ” and “You’ve got to take the bitter with the sour.”.

I remember the mother of a friend of ours who decided to adopt the language of her teenage children but had the ability to get it slightly wrong.
To express her lack of enthusiasm for a project she was apt to grunt “Great Deal” under the mistaken impression that she was saying “Big Deal”.

Just recently a friend who works in a radio station told me of a boss who, when afraid that she was going too far, used to tell her “Now don’t go upsetting the apple tart ”
That one took me several moments to work out.

About twenty years ago my cousin Kevin Dwyer put together a rather magnificent family tree. It is a huge roll of paper, eight foot long by about two foot high.
My brother Ted has had a copy framed and it hangs in all its glory in his (very large) office in City Life in Cork.
I always had plans to do something similar but haven’t ever had the space.

All that is of course changed now since the acquisition of Le Presbytere.

I mentioned to Clive that as he was coming out to France with me he might bang together a few pieces of skirting or something to make a frame for the tree.

Clive then got The Kiwi to make something really lovely in Cherry wood, we fitted it into the van with some difficulty and brought it to France, with the intention of acquiring the huge piece of glass necessary here.

Sile and I were responsible for ordering the glass in Beziers, handing over the piece of paper on which Clive had written the measurements to do so and the following day Clive and I collected it.

It was 600ml too short, we were caught with a cruel trick as the French Glaziers had interpreted the 7 in the measurement for a 1 as it had not been crossed in the French fashion.

Clive then heroically agreed to cut down the frame to fit the glass, which he did, but wishes the resulting frame to come with a disclaimer from him because the corners no longer fit as snugly as they did.
Disclaimer delivered.
To me it looks absolutely perfect and now hangs triumphantly in the hallway.

So now for the first time I can get to have a look at it, it was never something easy to read when in its roll.

We recently met some other ex-patriots in Thezan , Hakan and Gunilla Lundberg who are from Goteborg in Sweden, Hakan is a town planner with a keen interest in old buildings.
They visited our house in Thezan just before Christmas and while we were showing them around Hakan was much taken by one of the cupboards where we keep some of my glass collection.
Why, he wanted to know was it such an unusual shape ?

It is set in the wall totally off-set at an oblique angle.

We were able to tell him that when the builder was renovating the building for us he had come across the strange doorway at the back of the larders in the old kitchen.
It must have been hidden from view for hundreds of years.

We were delighted with it quirky shape and decided that it would make a wonderful cupboard for glass in-set in the wall.
Clive Nunn designed the shelves and got them made with much difficulty.

Hakan was immediatly fascinated, the oblique angle of the doorway was, he explained, very unusual and proved that the building was extremely early.
It was not understood why they were so shaped but thought that it might have a significance in either defence or even as a sign of welcome.
He said that he had come across examples of these in the nearby town of Pezenas on buildings thought to be extremely early.

We were delighted, further proof of the great age of the house in which we had already found vestiges of the original town walls (possibly 12th century.)

We then realised that the door to our cellar had the same oblique shape.

This morning we found this (rather more elaborate) example of an early off-set doorway in Pezenas just by the entrance to the old Jewish Ghetto.

Amazing to think that our rather simpler examples might be of a similar age.

The area around the table in our Dining/Living/Kitchen here in Thézan seems to have become the natural repository for our collect of original paintings.

I have already written about some of them but now they have been joined by three more , one by Ken Kiersey, who was married to my cousin Veronika, of his house in Glenageary, another Giles Baily, this time of a farm house in the Dordogne and a terrific painting by Maeve Doherty of the strand in Dunmore East (showing clearly The Strand Inn where I ran the restaurant for two years.) This was presented to Síle by her colleagues in Scoil Lorcáin when she retired last year.

Caitríona can see that the cushions she gave us for Christmas have found their natural place.
And as today is her birthday- Many Happy returns to Daughter Dee.