As we arrived back to Waterford so close to Christmas we made neither cake nor pudding so I have to nod to tradition only by making some Christmas biscuits.
Daughter D was kind enough to decorate them for me this afternoon.

Happy Christmas to All and to All a Good Night !

Síle and I had come home from England in 1977 with the infant Caitriona and no jobs to go to.
It was in one of Irelands many eras of recession but we were determined, in our innocence, to try and start up a business on our own and to that end, just before Christmas, we had rented a little farm cottage in Bishops Demesne about two miles outside Kilkenny with an eye to see if we could find a premises in that town to rent to start up a small restaurant.

We were of course totally broke, our only income was the dole which, after we had paid our rent didn’t leave a whole lot over for luxuries.
Strangely I don’t remember being in the least depressed about that as we headed into that Christmas. This was mainly because, having spent the previous months staying with various relations, we were at last on our own in our very first house.

Our only method of transport was Síle’s bike, preserved from her schooldays ,and I clearly remember riding the bike into Kilkenny to hire a set of chimney brushes to clear out the flue in the little parlour of the cottage which was totally blocked with nests.
Having swept the chimney I was able to carry the brushes back strapped to the bike like a proper sweep.

About three days before Christmas we had an amazing windfall.
A card arrived from my mother and inside it was £100 in cash.

In the card she told that it was not from her (she wouldn’t have had it to give anyway) but that she was sworn to secrecy as to the donor but her instructions were that we were to be told to spend it on Christmas.

This was a huge sum of money at the time, and (as we were properly sensible of our shaky finances) we headed off into Kilkenny immediately with the bike and the child in the buggy determined to spend as much of it as we could.
I can still clearly remember the journey back from town, we had a case of red wine (called, as I remember it, Le Pot de Patron) balanced on the handlebars of the bike and somewhere on the carrier we had a small wooden rocking horse for Caitriona.
We had also managed to buy and carry a turkey and all the trimmings and these were laden in the buggy with Caitriona.
We were monarchs of all we saw and I don’t believe I have ever since felt as affluent.

I can still remember that Christmas as one of great happiness.

About three months later my mother came to visit and told us where our Christmas windfall had come from.

My mother’s best friend since childhood was a lady called Mickey O Keeffe, she and Mum had played hockey and tennis together and then had both been involved together in the Girl Guides.
That Christmas Mickey was in hospital very ill with cancer and my mother used to visit her every day.
As I was always the apple of my mother’s eye she obviously whiled away a lot of the time telling Mickey about me and Síle.

According to my mother about a week before Christmas Mickey gave my mother a cheque for £100 with instructions to send it on to us to spend it on Christmas.
The only condition was that my mother was sworn to silence on the identity of the donor.

The only reason that my mother thought herself free at this later stage to name her was that Mickey had died shortly after Christmas.

Her birthday was at the end of October but I promised her I would make her a cake when we got back to Ireland.

In Christmas 1978 Síle and I were living in Kilkenny and broke.
We only had the one child, Caitríona, then about 15 months, and I was on the dole and making a precarious living teaching cookery at night classes and doing catering for parties and delicatessens.

Inspired by the French love of selling good things to eat in pretty containers I approached Nicky Mosse in Bennetsbridge and asked him would he do a special Christmas pot for me which I could then fill with Chicken Liver Pate and sell for Christmas presents.

Nicky produced this, a variation of his spongewear bowls, changing the birds into holly leaves, and produced 100 of these for me for a couple of pounds each.
I filled these with the pate and stuck a little ad in the “Kilkenny People” offering them for sale for a fiver each and held my breath.

Well they sold like hot cakes and at the end of the day we had only one left for ourselves.

And we made enough out of the proceedings to have a slap up Christmas.

In the Seventies while I was working in Kent I used to play Terry Wogan on BBC’s Light Programme every morning on the radio before I went to work.
I will always remember one morning he introduced a song, without explanation, as a tune from the Camán Dearg – Camán is as all Irish people know the Irish for the hurley stick used in that game and Dearg is the Irish for the colour red.
He was therefore, I instantly knew playing a song from Irish singer Red Hurley.
I also knew that at least 99% of his audience had a no notion what he was saying.
This gave me a hell of a glow, and made me feel much less a stranger in a strange land.

I now see that he has this week resigned from his morning slot on what is now Radio Two.
His last words on air were to say “Thank you for being my friend “ to his listeners.

Thanks for being my friend Terry.

Thanks to Jill (see comments on last post) my niece Nora can be presented with a more elegant eponymous song .
This song has an interesting little history of its own; Sean O Casey, looking for a suitable love song for his hero Jack Clitheroe to sing to his young wife Nora in The Plough and the Stars purloined the existing parlour song Maggie and just changed the name. ( He is, as a consequence credited most places with writing it)

Folksinger Johnny Mc Evoy had a hit with the Nora version in Ireland in the late sixties.

So. for Nora, celebratng that she is now a pharmacist (and one with a job) ;

Nora
Sean O’Casey

Oh the violets were scenting the woods, Nora
Displaying their charm to the bee
When I first said I loved only you, Nora
And you said you loved only me

The chestnut blooms gleamed through the glade, Nora
A robin sang loud from a tree
When I first said I loved only you, Nora
And you said you loved only me

The golden-robed daffodils shone, Nora
And danced in the breeze on the Lea
When I first said I loved only you, Nora
And you said you loved only me

The trees, birds and bees sang a song, Nora
Of happier transports to be
When I first said I loved only you, Nora
And you said you loved only me

Our dreams they have never come true, Nora
Our hopes they were never to be
Since I first said I loved only you, Nora
And you said you loved only me
Since I first said I loved only you, Nora
And you said you loved only me

It is happening to me more and more as I progress through my sixties that the silliest line from a song will enter the brain and then lodge there repeating itself like a record stuck in a groove until I can find some way of placing it.

There is no doubt that if it were not for the internet I would now be possessed entirely by a combination of G and S lyrics, words from Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, and various hit songs from the fifties.

Once exorcised by discovering the other lyrics these depart, then leaving room for the next intruder.

The latest line was one that went

Number 1234- Don’t forget the number when you slumber

So off I went, into the internet and so came up with Nora Malone.
To my great luck I discovered that there was on Youtube actually a recording of the original (or so I thought ) from Ruby Murray in the late fifties.
You can hear it here

I couldn’t find a copy of the lyrics but never fear I managed to transpose them from Ruby’s excellent singing;

Nora Malone
Call me by phone
Number 1 2 3 4
(Central)
Don’t forget the number
while you slumber
Open your eyes
When you arise
Hear all the blarney
of your Barney
(Kearney from Kilarney)

Cailins are few
There’s none like you
In the old town of Athlone
(Wisha worra worra worra worra )
Old Erin’s Isle
Would not make me smile
Without Nora Malone

The song is truly addictive and someone must reissue it
(Remember that De Dannan had a great hit with Irish Molly !)

But begosh and begorra did you ever come across such paddy whackery !

I mean a chorus line going
Wisha worra worra worra worra

It is just amazing by could this possibly be from the fifties.
Surely we were a little more sophisticated then?

Further research proved this indeed to be the case.

The original version was recorded by the American Quartet in 1912
and incredibly that also exists on Youtube here

This has far more verses and makes much more sense and comes complete with the proper background scratches.

Listen to it, enjoy it, in fact play it anytime over the Christmas when you feel down.
It is pop music at its finest.

In celebration of my two thousand blog entries I decided to re-run this one of a moment in my life when I hit a fairly decisive turning.
I originally wrote it in February of 2005 and it was my second entry in my blog.

An Epiphany

James Joyce refers to an Epiphany as a “sudden spiritual manifestation”
I relate the moment when I decided to cook instead of teach as one such.

My epiphany happened on the number 17 bus as it went from Blackrock to Rathfarnham.
I had decided that with a bog standard degree in English and History teaching was the only suitable career choice.
I had just finished a years post graduate course in teaching for primary schools. I was a very poor teacher and had loathed nearly all of it but had convinced myself that now at 21 was the time I just had to adopt that life of “quiet desperation” which I saw as my lot if I became a teacher.

At the moment of salvation I had no idea that I was being saved mind you.
I had been summoned to the office of the principal of Sion Hill Teacher Training College in the middle of the summer shortly before the results of the exams were due.
In my innocence I don’t remember having any premonition of the news I was going to receive. The moment of salvation was delivered by the principal, a kindly and intelligent nun , breaking the news to me that I had failed the exams, failed so gloriously that she wouldn’t recommend me to repeat. In retrospect I realise that this was an extremely humane decision to keep unfortunate children from yet another unhappy teacher.
Initially I was devastated. I had a job as a teacher all lined up. I had met the girl I intended to marry. I was thinking of houses to live and long summer holidays. I was assuming that the acute feelings of misery, which my inadequacies as a teacher filled me with, would get better with time.
I was feeling fairly shell shocked as I got on the bus. I sat upstairs and I could see the two towers of the generators in Poolbeg when suddenly,from nowhere, I was filled with a wonderful glow of happiness.

This was my epiphany.
The decision had been taken from me.

I no longer had to teach.
I could do what ever I liked .
No more the terror of facing 45 savage (to me!) 10 year old boys, all well conversant with my various Achilles heels.
No more the guilt of feeling that, far from educating the children , I wasn’t even keeping them in control.

I decided there and then that whatever career I choose was going to be one I enjoyed.
The question was what did I enjoy doing?
I was living with my , recently widowed , sister D at that time and I seemed to have become come the house cook and discovered that not only did I enjoy it but I also seemed to have a natural aptitude (possibly allied to my natural aptitude for eating.)

Obvious answer, I decided to give cooking a career try.

Within a week I had got a job as a general dogs body in Snaffles, one of the best restaurants in Dublin at that time. (The perception of cheffing as a sexy trendy career choice was about 20 years away.)

Within two weeks I was cooking lunch there on my own and, almost 35 years later, that is what I have been doing ever since.

The funny thing is that I can never look at those stripey towers in Poolbeg since without getting a little lift.

Just noticed this morning that I have now put 1215 blogs up on my site since I started in February in 2005.
That is an average of about five blogs a week in that five years.
I also stick up recipes, usually posting the ones I do on the radio piece on WLR, these are going back a bit further, to some time in 2004 and there are 785 of them.

So, between the two, I have now clogged the ether 2000 times.

Wow.