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We had a few hours to kill in Dublin last weekend so I decided to make some recompense to history, and the efforts of my ancestor William Martin Murphy, and go a visit the exhibition he tried to stop happening and at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Parnell Square.
It is a stunning gallery and the impressionists on view at the moment are a joy, the Bacon studio reproduction is quite incredible, the whole thing well worth a detour.
It was on our way back to the car when we fell upon Chapters Bookshop on Parnell Street. I had passed the one on Abbey Street and imagined it was just the usual collection of remaindered books, but no, upstairs I found the greatest collection of second-hand books, all properly catalogued, that I have ever come across in Ireland.
As well as the second hand section they had some “Hurt” books for sale cheaply, these were mainly coffee table books with some damage.
I could have happily spent several hours and several hundred Euros there.
As it was I left with five , mainly travel, books and still had change from €25.
Another worth a detour.

For those of you, like myself, who were impressed by his photography in Atonement, I am reminded by my sister-in-law Beth that there is an opportunity to see an earlier work of this man from Armagh, The Hours, on RTE2 tonight.

In this weeks New Yorker there is an excellent article about Sarkozy by my favourite commenter on French affairs; Adam Gopnik.

It is a surprise to the world, but especially to the French that the president is parading his affair with Carla Bruni so publicly.
It seems that :
“Sarkozy wants people to think about his sex life, in the way that Bill Clinton didn’t want people thinking about his.”

This hasn’t always been the French habit.
There they long for the days when:
“President Mitterrand would go on long walks alone to old bookstores, and then make love to his mistress on the way home to his wife, patting his love children on the head while making sonorous pronouncements about life and destiny”

The more unkind are saying that this is less prompted by Sarkozy’s efforts to rid France of its discreet sexual hypocrisy than Sarkozy involving himself in a bit of ostentatious sexual swagger.

Gopnik says:

“People in Paris who know the President well, though, think that he is a man at the mercy of his impulses and appetites, who is landing willy-nilly where they lead him—and that what is particularly pathetic is his delusion that Bruni is a notch on his belt, when he is so obviously a notch on hers.”

Gopnik finishes the piece with a telling phrase which proves that his (Gopnik’s) years spent in Paris were not without their effect:
(The Bruni/Sarkozy affair shows us a)..”deep and permanent truth, which the French once knew better than anyone: there are worse things in this world than a little organized hypocrisy.”

For once I agree with at least one of the Oscar nominations.
Picking out Atonement for its cinematography agrees exactly with my own rating of the film when I went to it, and reviewed it on the blog, last October.
I quote myself:

I went to see Joe Wright’s Atonement last night, it is an amazing film.
I haven’t seen a film with such a sense of pictorial style since Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.
The shots and set pieces were just so wonderfully arranged, the swimming scene down by the lake could have been painted by Lavery, the tableau at the front door when Robbie returns with the twins was a visual delight with the young Bryony spiralling up the stairs in behind her sister.
The incredible panorama of Dunkirk beach was another beauty, unfortunately in this case one that went on too long.
It was probably just as well it was visually thrilling because the performances were singularly unengaging, Knightly’s particularly so.

It was only when my sister-in-law, Beth Cassidy from Armagh, made a comment that I discovered that the man responsible for the camera work was a neighbour of hers ; Seamus Mc Garvey, and one of our own.
Good luck with the Oscar Seamus.

(Thanks to PDB)

Scene; An Office

Man One, at computer:
Wow! It seems engines can run on vegetable oil.

Man Two, passing by:
Well Sure, You can burn almost anything organic ; corn. leaves, herbs…

Man One:
Herbs? Really?

Man Two:
Sure, Mussolini made the trains run on thyme……..

(Thanks to Peter and Teresina for sharing that one with me.)

(In Ode to a Nightingale)

“O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;

That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:”

Last summer we visited the Chateau de Raissac which is just a few miles from our village in Thezan on the road to Beziers.

It is a house of many parts.
It is owned by an eccentric and glamorous couple Jean and Christine Viennet.
Christine, who is a potter by trade, specialising in Trompe l’Oeil plates of fruit and vegetables also runs a Musée de Faïence in her stables where she shows her eclectic, but also fairly comprehensive collection of European ceramics.
Jean, an artist, also has a vineyard on the estate and both of them also run the house as a Relais de Campagne, renting out both bedrooms and function rooms as desired.
We were taken on a tour of the museum by Christine, a very elegant blonde Norwegian lady, and then taken around the house proper, the walls there covered by family portraits painted by her husband.
The interesting things about these were that the family members were inevitably pictured as if posing underwater, always naked and always with two sets of eyes, one above the other.

Christine painted by Jean

Yes well, I did say they were eccentric.
Scattered among the paintings were photographs from various illustrious friends of theirs.
I spotted Prince Rainier of Monaco and Jackie Kennedy.
If you want to see more of the family they have a comprehensive web site here.

It was a terrific trip, totally fascinating and we found the whole set up completely riveting.
Well worth a detour.

Last Saturday as Sile and I were again house bound by the sleety rain of January in Waterford we got the mistaken notion that a walk into town here might be entertaining.
On the way home I decided to drop into the local SuperValue supermarket on the off chance that they might have a bottle of cheap white wine of sufficient quality to console me both for the weather and that I had just finished my last bottle of Picpoul de Pinet, carried over from the Languedoc last August.
They had just one bottle that fitted my wants.
It was French, white, it came in at €9.99, reckoned cheap for drinkable wine here, but the thing that cheered me, and parted the gray skies was that it was a wine of Domaine de Raissac made by Jean Viennet.
The Lord only knows how it had made the journey to Waterford but for me it became a beaker full of the warm south.

The River Orb flowing through Béziers, photographed last summer
from the top of St. Nazaire Cathedral.
The village of Thézan-lès-Béziers, under which the Orb flows before
Béziers, is hidden in the mists in the background.