I love the New Yorker, one reason why I do is that they always get their facts right.
To do this they employ a stringent fact checking department.
There is an excellent article by John Mc Phee on this very subject in their latest issue.

He tells about a piece he wrote about a canoing trip in which he wrote the following sentence;
“Penn’s daughter Margaret fished in the Delaware”.
The question the fact checker wanted answered was whether or not there should be commas around Margaret.
The presence or absence of commas would, in effect, indicate whether Penn had one daughter or more than one.
Therefore the commas in this instance became facts.

(You may, like me have to read this sentence aloud with, and without the commas to verify this)

These fact checkers are determined to move heaven and earth to insure that every word is accurate , one of the most dilligent of the New Yorkers fact checkers was one Sara Lippincott.

She told a delightful story to John Mc Phee about a time when the magazine made one of its rare errors in fact: A reader who was in a nursing home and alive was very irate to see himself referred to as “the late”.
He wrote demanding a correction. The New Yorker in its next issue of course complied, inadvertently doubling the error, because the reader died over the weekend while the magazine was being printed.

It was in August of 1961 and the decision had been made to seal off East Berlin to stop the haemorrhaging of people into the West.
This was before the wall was built and the boundry was guarded by barbed wire and manned by soldiers.
Corporal Conrad Schumann, just nineteen years old and fresh up to Berlin from his village in Saxony, stood guard on the Eastern side.
There he was booed and jeered by the West Berliners who taunted him saying “Come on, Jump over”.

A young photographer who had trained in sport and knew how to take a photograph of a horse in mid flight over a fence, got a hunch that he just might jump and kept his lens fixed on Conrad for an hour.

The Corporal at last decided to move, threw away his cigarette and leaped into the West casting aside his gun as he jumped.
This became one of the most iconic photographas of the Berlin Wall.

The confused young corporal was treated as a hero in the West and thrived there.
He married a western German girl and moved to Bavaria where he raised a family and worked for twenty years in the Audi factory there.

Then in 1989 the wall came down and Conrad decided to return for the first time to Saxony and to the village there where he was raised.
He discovered there, to his horror, that the iconic hero in the West was the iconic traitor in the East where his photograph had been displayed with him depicted as a tool of the imperialists.

Conrad returned to Bavaria and hung himself in his back garden.
A small sad footnote to the Berlin Wall.

Of course it is not just the French who are fascinated with food (although it certainly does open doors in that country where Taste is regularly voted in as the top sense, and the Liver the most popular organ)

I remember a long time ago a highly sophisticated business man, who worked in advertising, who would have spent a lot of his life entertaining and being entertained, telling me that one of the best conversation makers was to turn to your fellow guest and ask “How do you heat your water ?”
This, he guaranteed, gave you at least thirty minutes to pontificate on the subject of immersion heaters, thermostats, electricity, solid fuel (with subsections coal, anthracite, wood and turf) gas, both town and bottled not to mention the various types of oil, insulation, and nowadays indeed the various alternatives, solar and wind powered etcetera.

I have discovered that it is as nearly as effective as a conversation flower (in the river sense) to confess that I am a chef and have run a restaurant.

Deep down inside every stock broker, teacher, priest, and psychiatrist is a yearning to run a restaurant.
Furthermore they actually know how they, the first in the world, will manage to run a truly successful one.

Their wife/husband/partner can make an amazing Beef Casserole, Chicken Curry or even Stir Fried Vegetarian Satay, and they also know full well that the reason restaurants go to the wall so quickly in Ireland is because thy are “Too Bloody Dear”

“How can they possibly defend charging €20 for a piece of fish which I can buy for €2.50 in the supermarket”

My answer should be -but rarely is, I usually just nod sagely and shut up- that reason that restaurants in Ireland go to the wall so soon is that they are “too bloody cheap”.
This is not a popular notion I know, particularly in these recessionary times.

I am deterred when I enter a restaurant and see that the prices are very cheap.
Somebody somewhere is paying for this if not me.
Usually the person paying for our cheap meal will be a long way away.
Let us take a chicken dish selling in a restaurant for €4.

Trace the chicken and you will find that it comes from a country where they exploit their workers, they are paying for your treat.
I no longer have to spell out the cruelty of intensively reared chickens, that has been well documented, these lads are also paying for your treat.

Just last summer we were approached by an English ex-pat who lives in our village in France who looked into our trolley and said that we must be potty to buy our (free range) chickens here when we could get the buy chickens -and “fully cooked” in a shop in the village for half the price.
Easy known he had been out of the ambit of Hugh and Jamie for a few years.

So all of that stuff does not go for making good dinner party conversation.
This is why I have now adopted a ploy.
If I am placed next to a stranger at a social occasion and they start to ask what I do/did for a living I quickly counter with a quick ; “Tell me, How do you heat your water ?”

The good news is that Caitriona (the daughter) has come back from her maternity leave complete with Fionn and has started blogging again.
So far just photos of the most beautiful child in the world, but then with a subject like that who can blame her.
Catch her here

with Cherries and Walnuts

There was a copy of this in the London Independent this morning but it was a disaster, something had gone wrong in the printing so I had to go and find it on the internet.
It is a gem, really delicious plums, cherries and white currants.
Dieting gives me an appetite for edible art

And the wall comes a tumbling down.

Next week we go to Berlin for the first time, this is very exciting for me.

I have been fascinated by Berlin for a long time now.
In the Sixties, presumably as an American propaganda excercise, there was a vast exhibition about the wall which travelled to Cork and filled the City Hall there.
I was enthralled and horrified by the photos of people scrambling to safety out of windows and of young men left to die in no-mans land.

I read two books about Berlin later, one The Gift Horse by Hildegard Kneff told of her scramble from the Russian soldiers through the cellars after the war, gave a personal view of the terrors Berliners underwent and the other, Berlin, the Downfall by Anthony Beevor gave an overall view of the same war in that town.

At the moment I am deep (thanks Donal for the loan) into Fredrick Taylors’ The Berlin Wall, another fascinating insight into Berlin and , as I read it I remember that of course the collapse of the wall was not without it’s effect on my own life in Ireland.

It was at the end of October in 1989 that I finally was putting the last touches on what was then my lifelong ambition.
I was opening a restaurant.
To achieve the finances for this I needed to sell my house, a bungalow half way between Dunmore East and Tramore.

The estate agents had not been encouraging so we had decided to sell it on our own and thereby avoid paying their fees.
We had done well, a charming middle European couple had come to look at the house and loved it, accepted our price and said they would be back the next week to finalise the sale. First, they explained they had to go back to the States to organise their finances, they had lived there since getting out of East Germany about twenty years before.

No bother, we thought.

Then just a week later, just before they were due back to finalise , down came the wall in Berlin.

Our couple obviously decided to invest in their homeland instead of Ireland and we never saw them again.

We did succeed in selling the house a few weeks later but not at such a good price.
I suppose it would be churlish to wish the wall had held for just another week…….

My long suffering doctor got a little tetchy with me when I last went to see him a few weeks ago.
All my bad graphs were on the ascendent and he informed me that it was again time to go on a diet.

Dread Words.

Like Mark Twain, and giving up tobacco I must love diets, I start into them all the time. I have now done all the various types.
Atkins, Conley, Weight Watchers, I have tried them all.
If only, I could give up food as easily as I relinquished cigarettes.

That in its turn led me to the question;
How, in the name of all that’s Holy, did weak willed me manage to give up the fags?
Well I had crutches, quite a few.

Nicotine Patches- to keep the heart beating.
Extra-Strong Mints- to keep the mouth and throat in pain as was their wont.
Extra- Strong Coffee, by the bucketful, to keep the heart thumping and the hands occupied.

After some time with these various crutches I was eventually able to walk unaided.
All that took place in 1991 and I have been Nicotine free since then.
Not even one pull, (except in my dreams, when I am forever going back on the buggers)

No real regrets either except an unfortunate thickening of the waist.

About five years ago my Doctor (who is a good friend) told me it was time to lose this weight.
I was heading fast towards stroke, diabetes,heart disease.
For a year I was very good.
I lost one and a half stone.

Then gradually I started to slide.
After Christmas this year I was right back where I started.

Time for a new start.

Examining my past success with giving up the fags I decided that this time I needed a crutch.
Well I have found one, and from a most unexpected quarter.

Here.

Everytime I feel myself unable to survive without a cheese and cracker or toast and jam or even to gorge ravenously on the cold mashed potato in the fridge I make myself a cup of hot Marmite and (as they used to say in the ads for PLJ) my longing for fatty foods just fades, fades away………..

The proof of the pudding (me) is as ever in the eating (or lack of)
I am now about three weeks into my Marmite Diet and can report the loss of 9 Pounds, or 4 Kilograms or a little over a half a stone.

I will keep you all informed.

Probably the greatest cultural difference between us and the French is the attitude to food.
Let me illustrate this with a quick anecdote.

In September of last year I took a ramble on the Pech which is the little wooded hill across the valley from our house, in the company of Sile and the brother-in law Colm.
We were gathering the herbs which grow profusely there, wild fennel. thyme and rosemary;- I am after all a cook and would do exactly the same in Ireland.

Ahead of us near the summit we noticed a man, dressed in a suit but with a scarf, carring a bag and bending down frequently to pick something from the ground.
There is a brotherhood between scavangers so when we got near him I asked Monsieur what he was collecting.

Escargots said M., and also fennel and thyme to feed them on.
We introduced ourselves and I told Monsieur that I was interested in the Escargots as we had hundreds in our garden.
I explained to him that I was a Chef de Cuisine.
Pouf ! Pouf ! said monsieur and he blew on his nails and polished them on his lapel- obviously impressed with meeting someone with such an exalted calling.
Since then we are greeting brothers.
I call him M. Les Escargots and he calls me Le Chef Irlandais.

There is a brotherhood of food in France.

Shelly; “If winter comes can spring be far behind ?”
Martin; “Hm… Good question Percy, I’d go for it being Autumn behind rather than Spring though…”

or

Wordsworth ; “O Cuckoo! shall I call thee Bird,
Or but a wandering Voice?”
Martin ; “I’d prefer “Wandering Voice” Willie, bird is so common”

or indeed

Shakespeare; “Who is Sylvia. What is she?”
Martin ; “Sylvia Bill! Goodness ! Of course I knew him as Jack.”

I fully intend to come back to this as soon as I can think of some more.

Anyone out there think of any?……

just thought of another (oral) one

Shakespeare; “Where Oh Where is fancy bred?”
Martin ; “Jeez Shakes I dunno, Have you tried the new Patisserie?.”

I am delighted to see that the Alan Bennett play “Enjoy” (starring Alison Steadman)which we saw in Cardiff in October has opened in London to rave reviews.

As a bit of a drama fan I frequently read reviews of plays being performed in London which I would love to see but never will.
It’s great to be ahead of the posse for once.