Here is a little heart warming story from my past, 38 years ago.
“Christmas 1977
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 just 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 Donoghue, 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.”

When I was in The Wife of Bath in Wye in Kent, forty odd years ago the local gent- I can no longer remember his name but I think he was a Lord- used to hold a shoot in his estate for London business men every Saturday in the winter. There his beaters would ensure that these people(who paid a fortune for the privilage) all would shoot an enormous amount of his (basically tame) game birds. They then came to lunch in the restaurant, all smelly and muddy- we fed them in the staff dining room which they loved- and they were always fed basically English Nursery food, Steak and Kidney Pudding, Shepherds Pie and always with a pudding afterwards, Bread and Butter and Sussex Pond Pudding I remember. However to regain their strength after their shooting ordeal they always started with copious amounts of Mulled Claret. Now Michael Waterfield’s Mulled Claret, which was what they were served was simply the best hot wine I have ever had and is the recipe I use to this day. In “The Wife” we always made it from Claret which we got from Avery’s of Bristol but I have made it with rougher brands since.
Here is the very precise recipe:

Wife of Bath Mulled Claret.

Dissolve 225g brown sugar in 575 mls of water.
Add the slivered zest of 1 Seville Orange and the juice of two.
12 Cloves, two broken sticks of Cinnamon and 1 whole freshly grated Nutmeg.
Add 4 Bottles of Claret.
Bring this back to hot but do not boil and then let it infuse for one hour.
Again re-heat (not boil) and serve in glasses.

Originally posted ten years ago today.

For many years now on our annual and sometimes twice annual trips to France we have chosen to travel by car.
Not only to travel by car but, instead of taking a direct ferry to France from Ireland, to take the ferry from Rosslare to Wales, then drive across England before taking the ferry from one of the many ferry ports to France.
Initially, and while the children were travelling with us, and indeed before the days of cheap flights, this was done because it was the cheapest way of getting to our goal.
Nowadays, being creatures of habit, we often follow the same route
And, with the current problems in Irish Ferries, we may well be doing it again in the future.
As a traveller I am always terrified of missing my connection and always want to be within spitting distance of the ferry port before I like to stop.
Quite close to the Welsh ferry ports of Pembroke and Fishguard, inevitably our goals on our return journey, is the village of Laugharne.

As well as its proximity to the Welsh ferry ports,there are several good reasons to stop in Laugharne.

It is a very pretty Welsh seaside village.

It houses Dylan Thomas house, now a museum, which is beautifully sited on the estuary, and, on the path above, the shed where he used to write his books.
In fact Laugharne is the model for Llareggub, where he set “Under Milk Wood”.
We all know what Llareggub spells backwards.

The other excellent reason for stopping off in Laugharne is that it houses Corrans bookstore.
This is the largest and most intelligently catalogued second hand bookshop I know and always yields jewels.
(For one thing it always has shelves full of Dornford Yates novels.)

It was here a few years ago that I picked up a book which I find constantly charming, and which I keep by my bed as something to dip into whenever I want to sip rather than quaff.
It is “Christmas Crackers” by John Julius Norwich.
This, although published in 1980, is still available in Amazon, and, while researching for this piece I have discovered that he has since put together two more Crackers, viz; More Christmas Crackers and Still More Christmas Crackers both of which are now down on my wish list.

He tells the story in the introduction to my volume of how these compendiums started.
Apparently his mother sent him a blank leather bound volume as a present in the fifties and, lacking any other use for it, he decided to turn it into a commonplace books where he would write down anything he read or otherwise came across which tickled his fancy.
I will give you just two tiny excerpts;

The late Sir Compton Mackenzie, invited to name the ten most beautiful words in the English Language picked twenty:

Damask and damson, doom and harlequin and fire,
Autumn, vanity, flame, nectarine, desire.

And this one from Dorothy Parker:

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong,
And I am Marie of Roumania.

It is indeed a wonderful book to dip into to.

But to get back to the title of this piece.

John Julius Norwich (who also wrote a most enjoyable book about Venice: Paradise of Cities, Venice and its Nineteenth Century Visitors)

was the father of Artemis Cooper who has written the best biography of my heroine, Elizabeth David; Writing at the Kitchen Table

She is married to Anthony Beevor who has written the excellent modern histories of Berlin and Stalingrad.

He is the son of Kinta Beevor who has written that wonderful story of growing up in Italy in the early 20th century: A Tuscan Childhood

She is in turn the Aunt of Michael Waterfield, Editor of his great Aunt,Janet Ross’s classic cookbook “Leaves from a Tuscan Kitchen”

And he is the chef for whom I worked for many years in the village of Wye in Kent and my daughter Caitriona’s godfather.

There you have it
You have heard of six degrees of separation.
There are just five (ok six if you count both of Anthony Beevor’s) books of separation between myself and Christmas Crackers.
A good omen for the season.

Reversed Sunset over Murviel tonight

I love the letters.

My old friend from UCC Seán Courtney who has lived in the States since the early seventies and who now lives in Wisconsin sent me the following yesterday.

It kinda fits in with all the Dwyers I know.

“Was visiting a large cemetery in the city yesterday and saw a large headstone dedicated to the “DWYER” clan. Amazingly, It was the ONLY stone, among many hundreds that I could see, that had a Motto/Axiom carved on it vs. names fo the deceased. The motto read: “There is no penalty for overachieving.” Wonderful!”

Old Citroens never die
They only fade away.

Resting in state in St Johns Cathedral in Perpignan

It is a funny old thing how the past can sometimes creep up behind you and catch you unawares.
In about ’64, when I was 15, a group of my friends, masterminded by one Michael Healy, and inspired by Radio Caroline set up, for a week or so, and from the back of a Honda 50, Cork’s first Pirate Radio Station called Radio Juliet. While I was not involved directly I was hugely supportive (they borrowed most of my 45’s to play).
I was, as it turned out very much more involved with Michael’s second Piratical adventure “Saor Radio Chonnemara” of which more can be discovered here
http://martindwyer.com/m/archives/archive.php?f=004253.html.
Because I was the one who has written about this ,a couple of years ago a young UCG student, who was doing a thesis on Irish Language Radio, contacted me, and interviewed me extensively on this.
Now apparently a book about pirate radio in Cork has been written ” The Jolly Roger” and I may,it seems, have been mentioned in this. At any rate I have just been approached by another student, this time writing about Radio Juliet, in this case I was able to field her on to the genius himself : My old friend Michael, still alive and well and living in Spain (and still a friend after 50 years- a subject surely worthy of a thesis on its own. )
It would have been, I imagine, a most unbelievable thought in those careless days of the 60’s to have imagined that our exploits would be worthy of theses a few decades later !