I have been counting the amount of visitors to my site since the good daughter installed Statcounter at the end of February 2006.

Today I have just passed the 100,000th hit to my site.
Champage may well be in order
(but next week, in France where it is way cheaper!)

This is one I have been intending to write, and put off writing , for years.
The account of my brain haemorrhage in 1991.
I have been intending to write it down as a catharsis for myself, a purging of a memory which is very painful, also as perhaps a help for people who have gone through a similar episode and who would be helped by discovering that it is possible to get out the other side.
I have been putting it off for some of the reasons above but also because it is much more difficult to write about a painful experience than it is about a joyful one.
I have been spurred to put this together by knowing that there is a friend of a friend out there going through much the same experiences as I did, after a brain trauma, in the hope that it might help, and indicate that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

On the 12th of March 1991, easy to remember the date, the day before my birthday, I got a headache.
I am a person fairly used to headaches having had a history of occasional migraines, often, but not always, post red wine, which would lock me in bed, in the dark, a bit of a gibbering wreck for a few hours until I regained humanity.
I knew fairly immediately that this was not one of those.
It was of an intensity that instantly let me know that this is no migraine.
If anyone of you has ever experienced that sharp intense but quickly transient pain when ice hits a nerve which lights up in the brain for a few seconds, that’s it but in my case there was no let up.
After some time (I have absolutely no idea how long, it felt like days) I rang my doctor, he heard my terror and promised to get to me as soon as he could.
Then Sile came home from school and the next thing I can remember I was being wheeled in a wheel chair into A&E in the hospital.
(The remembrance thing is important, from that moment for the next about three months there are large parts of my life which I have totally forgotten and have never come back, total amnesia in fact)
I can remember being wheeled into the hospital because of the relief I could feel, even through the pain, that I was at last going to be properly taken care of.

The next about four days are a complete blank.
Apparently I was rushed by ambulance to the University Hospital in Cork, a nurse (who has since become a friend) had to accompany me to Cork in the ambulance, she was supposed to talk to me, to keep me out of unconsciousness on the way down , she has since told me that from my condition she was sure I wouldn’t last to Cork.

My next memories are of being in the hospital, being out of pain, of being aware that people who saw me and talked to me were having difficulty holding back tears.
I had no understanding really of what happened.

But then in a very quick time I started to give an impression of being (nearly) normal.

A brief medical word.
What I had had was in fact an aneurysm, this meant that the bleed went into another blood vessel rather than into the brain itself (I think)
This meant that despite two brain scans they couldn’t find the source of the bleed and so they were not able to repair the damage with an operation-not necessarily a bad thing, the operation often produced more trauma than the original bleed.

I need hardly tell you that brain haemorrhages are often fatal, I was one of the lucky ones.

After about a week in Cork the surgeon took me and Sile aside, told us we could go home , that I would be fine, and then gave me my entire post traumatic counselling in one sentence “I wouldn’t take up squash!”

Two weeks later I was cooking in the restaurant, and doing this, apparently, in just the same way as I did before.

My memories of the time, and they are very few, was that I was tired all the time and depressed but life wasn’t too bad.

Sile was incredible.

Let me give you a couple of examples.

About a year after I found some mouthwash in the bathroom cabinet, I asked her what this was for, told me that that was to counteract the effects of the medication I was on to stop me having Epileptic fits.
Apparently I had suffered from one of these after the haemorrhage
but as it hadn’t recurred I had, after a while, been taken off the medication.
I have no memory of any of this.
On another evening apparently I got extremely agitated about the way the books were arranged in the bookcase and Sile had to spent the evening re-arranging them to soothe me.
(She called the doctor after this and he told her this was “par for the course”)

About a month after I came out of the hospital I was organised to bring my daughter Deirdre to the hospital in Cork for a minor dental procedure. It speaks volumes for my appearance of normality that no one doubted my ability to do this. (I discovered much later that I was certainly not insured in the car, nor would be until six months after the episode-ignorance in this case was bliss!)
On the way back in the car I had one of my scariest moments.
I suddenly totally forgot how to drive.
I knew intellectually exactly how to do it, but all my automatic pilot skills were gone.
I was about twenty miles from home when this happened and totally rational.
I crawled home on back roads, crunching gears and rarely going over twenty miles an hour.
The next time I got back into the car, just as mysteriously my skills had returned.

We shut the restaurant for a fortnight at Easter and went to stay with my brother in his new house in Schull.
All of this holiday has been completely forgotten.
A few years later I made a pilgrimage to Schull to see if seeing the house would bring it back to me, but no, it was as if I was seeing it for the first time.
At around this time I had another incident which upset me, and this one I can remember perfectly.
I always have done crosswords and so I sat down one Sunday morning and decided to do one of my favourites the cryptic, but not too difficult, Everyman in the Observer.
I ended up, about twenty minutes later, in tears.
The crossword was totally Greek to me, for the first time I began to harbour the thought that I was losing my intellect, that this illness was going to reduce me to a brainless idiot.

But then something told me that this just wasn’t the case.
I knew that my brain felt as agile, if more easily tired, than before.
I had a memory of reading an article about Roald Dahl and his work with his wife the actress Patricia Neil.
He had absolutely refused to believe that she was permanently disabled by a stroke and, knowing that we only ever exercise a small part of our brain, that she could relearn her skills all over just by working on them.
For over a year he worked on her constantly, teaching her to relearn her lost skills in a different part of her brain.
He was proved right and she made a marvellous recovery.

So every week I kept the solution from the crossword and then meticulously worked the solution back with the previous weeks clues.

Bingo!
Within about three months I was doing the crossword with as much ease as before.

(I was afterwards told by a London based brain consultant that I had fallen exactly on an exercise they used there for post traumatic brain recovery, they even used crosswords!)
I was consequently able to relearn some forgotten skills by this method but mainly, things just returned to normal slowly in their own time.

Within about six months I could operate more or less as normal.
I still felt that I was living with a severe handicap, rather like a race horse carrying weights.
I could do what I used to do before but it was certainly more effort.
I found this very depressing because it didn’t seem to be getting any easier.
Then I had a very lucky encounter.

A customer, a friend in the restaurant, told me that their companion had also had a haemorrhage years before.
I fell upon this woman and said “When did you feel totally back to normal again ?”
Her answer was, for me, enormously reassuring, she said that, whereas thing got slowly better all the time she reckoned it too five years to get totally back to normal.
To me that meant another four years of healing and improvement to look foreword to.
I can still remember the relief and joy I felt at that moment.

And yes, she was absolutely correct.
Five years later I was strong and recovered again.

Around that time I was at a parent teacher meeting at my daughters secondary school.
I found myself sitting next to an acquaintance, a parent of a friend of my daughter.
She looked at me quizzically and said,
“You were sick there a while ago weren’t you, are you the full shilling yet? ”

She shocked me a bit I must confess, by the directness of her question but then she had asked me no more than I ask myself.

The answer is that yes I suppose I am the full shilling but there are some differences.

My reading and watching of TV habits have changed, I can no longer bear to waste time reading or watching stuff that doesn’t strike me as believable.
In fact I am much happier with non-fiction and documentaries.

I now panic, yes full panic, hyperventilation and pounding heart, sometimes when I get a headache.
The strangest of these happened exactly ten years after the first attack, practically to the minute.
I already wrote about this here.
The twentieth anniversary will be in just three years time but I intend to be ready for it.

I think I get less upset about stuff, all minor incidents of annoyance remain minor, once you have experienced major trauma .
The fact is that it has now become a part of my life history, it is one of those things that has made me what I am today and I no longer resent it.

I have a feeling that my life would have been much easier if someone had explained to me that recovery was both possible and slow.
This is the main reason why I have written this piece.

A venerable old vine in the tiny hill top village of La Vaulte.
It was pictured in August so the grapes had another couple of weeks to go before vendange.

As St. Chinian is just down the road I guess these grapes may well be made into wine of that Appelation.

Post Script

!4th March
I was looking again at this picture and suddenly I spotted in the middle of the vine, a rabbit.

Well I think it looks like a rabbit anyway.

This is a shot I took last summer of the sun highlighting the little medieval village of Roquebrun which is about four kilometers to the north of Thezan. It is totally sheltered by the Monts d’Espinousse from the north and has its own micro climate with oranges and lemons growing on the streets.
The Orb also flows through it and they have a clever weir which makes a great swimming pool in the summer.
There are so many pretty villages around here that Roquebrun doesn’t even make it into the guide books so is totally unspoilt.
It hasn’t gone unnoticed though, the makers of the movie Chocolat used the village for their external shots.

Right, that is the travelogue over.
I have suddenly realised that if I am going to fill my chambre d’hote in Thezan with Irish punters fron June of 2009 its about time I started telling everyone how beautiful this undiscovered part of France is.

It is amazing the amount of people who carry a candle, maybe somewhere in the back of their brain, that they would achieve true happiness only when they ran their own restaurant.
I could name two successful authors (and will; Julian Barnes and Adam Gopnik) who nurture this flame and also think of the many people who, when the have discovered that I had a restaurant, used to say “You know, my wife and I have often thought……..

The rewards are there and obvious.
No rat race, no commute, no boss, no power meetings, no more hours spent on “optional” overtime, no more suits and stiff white collars, no more shaving every morning.

Oh the bliss of it, to be ones own boss. Let us sell up, move to the provinces and buy a house big enough to put a restaurant downstairs and then we can live happily ever after.

Well I did it, I loved it, but by God it was hard work.
Here are a few of the qualities it needs to run a restaurant.

One has to be primarily a chef, preparing and serving the food in the restaurant (but also keeping an eye on what food trends are coming up).
This is not just about swanning about in a kitchen creating masterpieces from prawns brandy and cream. The most important of the chef side of things is the sourcing and acquiring of everything that will eventually sit on a plate in the restaurant.
This involves one in trudging through fields pleading with farmers to try to grow Jerusalem Artichokes, or Purple Sprouting Broccoli, begging butchers to hang meat until it became tender(or as he thinks nearly off) but principally building up a relationship of trust with all your suppliers who then could realise that they could risk buying or growing something of quality because you would buy it-and then being prepared to damn the relationship to hell by haggling over the price..
Then you have to be an employer and general father figure for your staff and try and insure that they are all happy, I think they call this role Human Resource Manager.
Next you have to be the great all rounder because if anyone can’t make it in to work the buck stops firmly in your lap, everything from wash up to wine waiting.

You have to be a self publicist par excellence, be prepared to attend any function which might get your face onto the paper, without having to pay for advertising. In my case this also involved me in doing a weekly recipe slot on the local radio.
You reap the dubious rewards of this by becoming a PRESENCE, even on one of my nights off I used to trudge into the restaurant and do the rounds of the tables or be greeted, on the street, with a chorus of ; “It isn’t the same when you aren’t there Martin!”

The person I had to be which I loathed most was accountant, even a mention of the letters VAT make my eyes glaze over. A restaurant is Gods revenge for people who were not good at maths in school. You have to wade through two different Vat rates, PAYE, PRSI, monthly figures, projections in a usually vain attempt to keep ones accountant and bank manager off ones back.

The customer base is fragile, the truism “You are only as good as your last meal” does apply.
You can also serve a perfect meal to someone in bad form who will then blame you and the meal and bad mouth you through the town.

You can also be unlucky, I was lost the custom of a whole section of the local hospital because a nurse found a caterpillar curled up within the flower of her (organic) broccoli.
(“I nearly fainted with the shock” she told hushed attentive wards full of people)

At times you will have to deal with foul, bad mannered customers to whom you will have to be polite. (You know who you are)

But it does have its rewards.

The real joy of people who have dined well saying “I never knew carrots could taste like this”

The satisfaction of telling the foul bad mannered customer that you are sorry, you are full (and knowing that he knew you weren’t)

Working for a boss who understands you and doesn’t push you too much (yourself)

Exercising your artistic flair by producing exquisite, if transitory, masterpieces every evening.

Now I am facing into another challenge, a B&B in France.
No problem I think, just a maximum of Eight dinners, no choices, what could go wrong?

I can see him already, the exhausted proprietor of a French Chambre d’Hote, reading this and thinking;
“It is amazing the amount of people who carry a candle, maybe somewhere in the back of their brain, that they would achieve true happiness only when they ran their own bed and breakfast….”

It is a privilage of the elderly, or at least the middle aged to spend a portion of their day doing crosswords, not something one would associate with anything in the least racy.
One of the reasons I enjoy the (English) Independent, and get it every morning is that they have a good crossword, one that I don’t always get out.
One of this morning’s clues caused my eyebrows to raise a little in alarm.

I will quote you the whole of 19 across:

Bit of nookie in broken down motor-car – a shag, maybe? (9)

Not at all the sort of clue a respectable crossword doer of a certain age wants to read.
But then a line of a poem, learned about fifty years ago in school came back to me;

And, as into the tiny creek
We stole beneath the hanging crag,
We saw three queer, black, ugly birds–
Too big, by far, in my belief,
For cormorant or shag–
Like seamen sitting bold upright
Upon a half-tide reef:
But, as we near’d, they plunged from sight,
Without a sound, or spurt of white.

The poem was Flannan Isle, written by one Wilfred Gibson and the mention of shag in the poem inevitably reduced the entire class to helpless laughter, despite having been patiently explained to us that in this case it meant cormorant.

That was it of course that gave me the answer to the clue; Cormorant

As any cryptic crossword doer will now instantly see this is composed of an anagram of the words motor-car (clue; broken down) with the letter n (clue; bit of nookie).
I also acknowledge that Morph, the compiler of the crossword was having a little fun.

It is now over four months since we have been in our house in Thézan-lès-Béziers and I am begining to fret a little.

I went back through some shots I took of the village during the summer and decided they were interesting enough to be posted.

This is the village taken from the Pech – Languedoc for little hill- across from the house.It was taken in the evening when the sun had left the village but was still shining on the hills behind.
It gives a good idea of the siting of the town, on its own pech, and its delightful setting sheltered from the north by the mountains of the Parc National de Languedoc.

This one is taken from just under the village.
If you look closely you can follow the line of the old walls of the village surrounding the church which are now all being occupied as houses.

Ours being on the extreme left, complete with tree in the garden.
Looked at from here it looks like (and probably once was) two houses
built back to back, one being part of the original town wall.
Delightful to think we will be there in less than two weeks.

Having let my recipe for Moussaka and its provenance sit for a few days (during which time lots of friends told me that they tried it out!)I decided to root around in the internet to see if there could be a trace of Perry-Smith’s original recipe still available.
What I discovered was even more surprising.
His step-son is none other than Tom Jaine, one time editor of the Good Food Guide (of which more anon*) writer of an extraordinarily good book on bread making, one time chef of The Carved Angel in Devon and now the director of Prospect Books, which was founded by Alan Davidson.
Always someone who was prepared to take bulls by horns I emailed the man himself and asked for the authentic recipe.

Here is my mail to him;

“Dear Mr. Jaine

I had a restaurant for many years in Waterford and, even though I had never met him, always recognised my debt to George Perry-Smith and his legacy.

I recently remembered references to the Moussaka he used to serve in The Hole in the Wall and mocked one up in my blog.

If anyone knows whether I have got near the original it would have to be you.
You will find the blog entry here I would be reassured to think that it is not too far from the original.

I only discovered your connection with the Maestro when I went googling his name having written my piece.
I have read(and borrowed recipes from) your Bread Book and think you may well have been the editor of the GFG in the early ninties which managed to discover my restaurant before any other reviewer-if so belated thanks!

Yours

Martin Dwyer”

To my delight within an hour I recieved the following reply;

“What a delightful e-mail and what an interesting blog. Michael
Waterfield was down visiting my stepmother, Heather Perry-Smith, only
two weeks ago.

I rushed to our recipe files to get the moussaka details, only to find
that the recipe did not survive (you know how restaurant recipe files
get renewed by a rolling change as fashions develop over the years –
and moussaka was definitely something was stopped cooking from about
1976/7. Then I recalled that it was, as you say, a recipe in E. David’s
Mediterranean Food and that was indeed both the master method, but not,
as you again rightly say, the batter topping. Her method we followed
quite closely and I think from your blog you have abbreviated. In other
words, we would fry the mince with garlic and herbs, set aside; fry
sliced onion til brown, set aside; slice, drain aubergines and fry, set
aside; make up a batch of provencal sauce (and here we would omit the
addition of stock that David suggests). These elements we would then
layer in an individual dish ready to take the topping. Providentially,
my dear wife has a note of the topping, which we would make in a batch
and just pour onto each individual dish as ordered. The batch was half
a pint of milk, four eggs, grated cheese, salt and pepper, all whisked
up and off you go.

I found your blog most enjoyable and also the reference to your
cousin’s memories. If you have any memory of them yourself, please let
me know. I do compile files and notes so as to write a Hole in the Wall
recipe book, but never seem to have time to do it properly.

I am glad the GFG got to you. If you want to see more of our great
enterprise, have a look at our web here
All the best,

Tom Jaine”

What more could you want ?
Could it be have come from any closer to the horse’s mouth ?

*My previous reference to Tom Jaine and the Good Food Guide happened in a blog I did
here in January 2007.
I emailed him the reference and he mailed me back to say he was delighted.
It is delightful, and surprising, to be at last able to relay my gratitude to him 17 years later.

I once got asked what was my favourite piece of cooking equipment.
A difficult question for someone to whom “cooking equipment” are the tools of ones trade.
The answer is that I have lots of things that I love to use in the kitchen but right up there in the top ten is my old black pan.

I can remember the time I bought it very clearly, it was about thirty years ago in the mid seventies, we were living in Kilkenny, broke, with me out of full time work but doing the odd outside catering job.
We did a wedding for a charming farming family outside Kilkenny (it turned out to be the first of three, God Bless Them!)
When we got paid I announced (with, I am sure, huge self importance) that it was time to put some money back into the business, so, on our next trip to Dublin, I bought this large Le Creuset black cast iron pan- this cost about £30 as far as I remember, extremely dear at that time.

It spent the first few years of its life being just a frying pan, it produced huge quantities of bacon and sausages in those heady days when the fat police allowed them.
But as it has gotten old and pock marked its role in our kitchen has changed somewhat.
Now it had become our roaster extraordinary and as such it is used far more frequently than you would expect.
It is made from extremely heavy cast iron and, consequently it is the most wonderful diffuser of heat. It has acquired a certain patina in among its pock marks with age so, although I would no longer trust fish to its venerable surface, it still does a good job with frying a piece of meat.
As a chef working in restaurants where dishes are cooked to order, one constantly needs a cooking pan where you can brown the piece of flesh or fowl all over on the top of the stove and then slap it into an oven to finish cooking before, quite likely finishing it in the same pan with its sauce before serving.
This is probably the major difference between home cooking and restaurant cooking.

My old and trusted black pan allows me to cook restaurant style at home.
Not only will it work as a pan but also, its tiny black handle allows me to pop it into the oven to continue cooking.

It is also the most perfect container in which to cook roast potatoes or parsnips or any root vegetables, likewise browning them in the pan before roasting.
It is a total joy to joint a chicken for the family, add the sauce and seasonings and then let it finish itself off quietly in the oven.

You can also put a whole chicken on it , or a joint of meat, and you can brown and roast in it then take it off the pan to rest while you use the same pan and its wonderful bits of caramelized drippings, to make the gravy.
So much easier I promise than fiddling about with a roasting tin on top of the stove.

But how, I hear you ask, are you going to survive out in France without this old and trusted friend?
Good Question.

I am not going to risk life and limb carrying this old friend backwards and forewards on Ryan Air for the future.

I have already started to train in a successor.

It comes from Ikea and is called

Favorit.

And it comes in at just under €40.
Now its handle is too long but it is oven proof, it isn’t cast iron but does have a heavy solid base. At the moment it still retains its non-stick lining.
Towards the end of the 2030’s I should be able to judge whether it is a worthy successor.

Gordon Brown is visiting an Edinburgh hospital. He enters a ward full of
patients with no obvious sign of injury or illness and greets one. The
patient replies:

“Fair fa your honest sonsie face,
Great chieftain o the puddin race,
Aboon them a ye take yer place,
Painch, tripe or thairm,
As langs my airm.”

Brown is confused, so he just grins and moves on to the next patient.
The patient responds:

“Some hae meat an canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it,
But we hae meat an we can eat,
So let the Lord be thankit.”

Even more confused, and his grin now rictus-like, the PM moves on to
the next patient, who immediately begins to chant:

“Wee sleekit, cowerin, timrous beasty,
O the panic in thy breasty,
Thou needna start awa sae hastie,
Wi bickering brattle.”

Now seriously troubled, Brown turns to the accompanying doctor and asks “Is this a psychiatric ward?”

“No,” replies the doctor, “this is the serious Burns unit.”

Thanks to Isabel who sent this to me.