This took place when I was a seventeen year old student, which means it was hundreds of years ago, and hitch hiking (who remembers that mode of transport?)up to Newgrange in County Meath.

My goal would have been to view the passage grave there and my hitching must have gone somewhat agley because I was off the main road and stuck on back roads between Dundalk and Slane when a car came towards me but heading in the opposite direction.
It was being driven by a large Indian gentleman who stopped the car and politely asked did I know the way to Dlendalough(sic)
Immediately and cleverly appreciating that the gentleman had a difficulty with the letted G and anxious to show how kind and welcoming we Irish could I gave him minute instructions on how to get to Dublin, through the city and then south, via the scenic Sally Gap, to Glendalough.
He wrote it all down, thanked my profusely and headed off into Dublin.
The next car that came my way picked me up and I was in Newgrange before too long.
It was the following day, on my way home, again while hitching that I happened to glance at a local signpost thet the penny dropped.
Far from having trouble with the letter G the gentleman had in fact made an excellent phonetic shot at pronouncing the name of the town he was trying to get to, and, which I could now see was written on a sign over my head about two miles from where I had met him.
Dundalk.
I do hope he enjoyed the round tower, and Kevin’s bed.

I haven’t done much television, compared to radio I’ve done very little, but everything I have done up to now I have had the luxury of putting myself completely into someone else’s capable hands.

My most high profile moment was about ten years ago when I did a series called Pot Luck for RTE. This was a straight cadge of the English Ready Steady Cook with precisely the same formula. I was approached and asked to do just one. On the day I arrived, before the shoot I was sent into the canteen to be fed, there I saw my old friend Margaret Brown from Ballymakeigh House in Killagh.My immediate reaction (as one Cork person to another) was to shout across at her something about how they must be scraping the bottom of the barrel in Chefs if they were putting her on the box. She replied in a similar scurrilous vein and then we settled down together amicably to eat our lunch. Unbeknownst to us the producer of the series had overheard our exchange and came over and asked if we knew each other! He then said that he had to put us on together, which he did, and Margaret and I had great crack, I distinctly remember running across the set and pinching some of her ingredients to the horror of the cameramen and the delight of the producer!
I ended up actually doing four of the shows and was particularly delighted that they used my hands filleting red mullet as the shot over the introductory music for the whole series.
I wish I could remember the name of the girl who was the presenter of the series, she was a lovely girl from Northern Ireland, the first day I met her she said “ You are Martin? I’m the hairdo.
That, I discovered, was the depreciating way that presenters were wont to present them selves.

My television pieces since then have been fairly sparse, a bit of local channel stuff, a strange breakfast cooked, live on TV3, from the warship Eithne in Waterford dock and, most recently a most satisfying moment when Corrigan Knows his Food awarded my recipe for Fisherman’s Pie the best in house.

Just last week I was most surprised then to hear from the City Channel, the people who relay, through the cable, local television in this country.
They said the Jimmy Greeley was too busy to keep up the busy schedule of filming the “On The Menu” series all over the country and would I take over the Waterford part of the series. They also promised to pay me if I would.
On discovering that this would not involve my critical faculties, I would merely be acting as a presenter (ie a hairdo), I immediately accepted.

Today saw my first day’s work On The Menu and I must say I thoroughly enjoyed it.

We had two restaurants to do , one Toscana was a little Italian Trattoria in the middle of Waterford which had only just opened its doors and the other was the rather more established Arlington Lodge, a Country House Hotel in the suburbs of Waterford.

Both were fun in their own ways, Toscana was fun with two voluble Italians and one man from Bangladesh all madly enthusiastic about their project and passionate about Italian pasta .
Arlington Lodge was definitely posher, a lovely restored Georgian house, redolent of silver and glass with a French Chef totally committed to making a marriage between Irish ingredients and French cuisine.
I think I managed the whole lot reasonably well.
The camera man, Kevin, who really did all the work, professed himself pleased and the very fact that we finished a couple of hours ahead of schedule meant that I wasn’t slowing up the process with too many retakes.

And so, at the age of 58, and virtually bald, I finally became a hairdo!

I read in some newspaper lately that an excellent way of practically saving the planet is to make plenty of Banana Bread. Not quite as goofy as it sounds as the following will show. Yesterday I went into my local paper/general store to get my paper and noticed a display of bright green under ripe bananas on a shelf. I said to the boss, “What have you done with the old black ones ?”
“I still have them” says he, “Do you want them?” and he headed out the back to return with a bag full of brown bananas. Knowing me as a half mad chef he refused all payment “You saved me taking them to the dump” and furthermore promised to keep all the soft ones for me in the future.
I went home and made two large (1 kg) loaves of banana bread.
It is (even though I say it myself) delicious and so worthy that it can be eaten without any guilt, despite the incidemce of butter and sugar.
I mean how often can one indulge in such delicious food and save the planet at the same time?

Here is the recipe I use normally, as I was out of walnuts I used a combination of pinenuts and chopped hazelnuts. Not having self raising I added two teaspoons of baking powder to the plain flour and as I was also out of caster sugar I processed some brown sugar until fine and used that.

As you can see it is a very forgiving recipe and doesn’t mind in the least being mucked about.

Babana Bread

225g (8oz.) Self-raising Flour
½ teaspoon of salt
110g (4 oz.) Butter
175g (6 oz.) Castor Sugar
60g (2 oz.) Stem Ginger
60g (2 oz.) Walnuts
2 Eggs
450g (1 lb.) Very ripe Bananas.

Mix the flour with the salt and sugar. Cut the butter into small dice and rub into the flour.
Beat the eggs and then mash up thoroughly with the bananas.
Stir this into the flour mixture.
Dice the stem ginger and roughly chop the walnuts.
Fold these into the mixture.
Line a 1kg loaf tin with some non-stick paper and spoon in the mixture.
Cook at Gas 4 180C 360F for one hour.
When cooked it should be brown on top and moist but not raw in the centre.
.

I met two more grandnieces over the week end, both carrying Irish names;
Fiadh is a Deer and Féile a festival.
Fiadh is a few months old, Féile has been here for nearly four years and I had seen her before but only when she was so small I could have slipped her in my pocket.
She is living in Letterfrack which takes longer to get to from Waterford than our house in Languedoc.

Fiadh with her Grand Aunt, Síle.

Féile, who when I had taken this picture wanted to have a go herself.

She took this great picture of her Grandma Fifi and Grand Aunt Síle.
I think she might have a future in photography.

My mother had seven children.
These children in turn produced thirty grand children for her.
She spoiled and loved all of her children, she adored and spoiled all of her grandchildren, they all in turn adored her.
They all used every opportunity to visit her and on certain nights of the week she used to hold a Racing Demon card school in her house where you could always find ten or twelve of her grandchildren battling it out with her on the dining room table.
She was no mean player herself and all kindness in her personality disappeared when she played cards. You began to realise that the ruthlessness of a successful captain of the Irish Ladies Hocky team was still a part of her personality.
Now this never showed in her dealings with her various offspring away from the card table. I remember once when my three daughters were staying with her as my mother went to put them on the bus back to Waterford the youngest burst into tears.
Granny,when she discovered that she was nervous of going all the way to Waterford on a convyence without a loo, immediately packed the three of them into the car and drove them to Waterford, about four hours there and back.
This was when she was in her eighties!
She used to rule us all but without ever a cross word, using a subtle mix of velvet glove and emotional blackmail to keep us all in order.
She died ten years ago about this time of the year and three or four years ago her loyal grandchildren, now mostly established in their lives, in their twenties and thirties, decided that they should hold an annual dinner in memory of Granny.
They knew that Granny, who had a huge sense of the importance of family, would love this get together in her honour, and would think it her best memorial.
Last year for the first time the grandchildren decided that they should ask the “oldies” that is my generation, their parents, uncles and aunts to the same memorial dinner.
It was a great success, they decided to repeat the same this year which happened last night.
So about 28 of us, of extremely mixed generations, met for dinner in The Corn Store in Cork’s Coal Quay last night .
It was a terrific night out, the restaurant did us very well and the company was mighty good. I couldn’t help looking with some pride at this great generation, a lot of whom I would have babysat for, burped and changed as infants who are now not only capable of getting on togther with great good humour but are also prepared to get along just as easily with the older generation to which I belong.
Granny would have been delighted!
Well done to Peter and Tara for organising a great night.

I just love this image I took on Tramore Beach last week.
It was such a moment of serendipity.
I was trying to photograph the sunset,which had just disappeared behind the metal man, when two things happened; a pair of speed boat boy racers came in from stage left just as a perfect couple with dog decided to enter stage right.

The couple and dog posed, looking at the boats, legs beautifully synchronised like a chorus line while the sun spotlit everyone in its afterglow.
All I had to do was press the shutter.

It worked so well I just wondered how it would look cropped;

That worked too, so I cropped it again:

This one I also liked.
Any comments? Anyone got a preference?

When I was about 12 years old I was an incredibly long and thin child.
It was decided that I should play the double bass in the school orchestra as I was the only person in the junior school who could reach the top of the instrument to stop the strings.
As if that wasn’t enough I had decided that I was a cut above the average child of that age and so eschewed all interest in pop music but fostered a passion for classical music, particularly the ballet music of Tchaikovsky.
It was as if I had decided my bizarre appearance (the words long, string and misery could be appropriate here) was not sufficient to mark me out from the crowd.
I had been saving hard after my birthday and had finally got together the money to buy Le Lac des Cygnes by my composer of choice in Corks best record shop, Piggott’s in Patrick Street.
So, money firmly in pocket (I’m fairly sure it was a pound and some pence)and encumbered by a vast school bag which weighed in at least 20 lbs,I headed in to make my purchase.
I had at this time developed a strategy for dealing with the appalling embarrassment which was part of making any purchase (particularly when it involved a pre adolescent boy buying ballet music.)
This strategy was to imagine the proceedings before purchase, this made me flush scarlet all the way to my toes, this way I had a notion that they –the terrifying people behind the counters, might imagine that I just had a florid complexion and was not being horrendously embarrassed by my temerity.
So armed with the money and the school bag and the head of a tomato I made my way up to the counter and asked for the record.
Looking slightly shocked the assistant got it for me.
I then discovered that to get the money out of my pocket and accept the record I would have to put my school bag on the counter, which I did.
Then I made my mistake, and dropped some of the hot and sweaty money on the ground.
As I bent over to retrieve it I nudged the schoolbag which promptly overbalanced and landed firmly but delicately balanced on my back.
I thus had put myself in a position of some difficulty.
Imagine please a skinny, long, short panted , geeky boy bent double next to a counter in a shop with a heavy bag balanced precariously on his back.
(The complexion had now moved from red to a startling purple)
A crowd began to gather and I froze in this position for what seemed like several minutes.
I eventually made a decision that if I could do a sort of rising shimmy I could persuade the bag to fall sufficiently slowly so I could swing about and catch it before it hit the ground.
Gathering all my strength I did just that and caught the bag just before it hit the floor.

I think I heard a faint smattering of applause from the crowd at that moment.

That was it really, someone handed me the coins that I had dropped so I handed it to the assistant and holding my head as high as I could I left the store. I distinctly remember my audience making a path for me.
It was at least three years before I had the courage to re-enter Piggott’s.
I think that was also the moment when I decided to develop and interest in pop music.

It all started with this photograph.

You can read my earlier piece about it here

This was found in my Mothers documents after her death and was was a cause of some confusion to my siblings as it was new to them. It had not been a picture my mother had been particularly pleased with and thereby hangs a tale.

It is a picture taken sometime around 1914 of the wedding of Agnes Harding to Billy Dwyer. The reason for my mothers pique is that she was the five year old flower girl but was not allowed pose for the slow exposure of the picture in case she would fidget. Her first public appearance was thus not recorded.
I had come across the picture sometime as a boy and my mother had told me the story.

The reason for its extradorinary relevance in our family is that it was the marriage of two old significant Cork families, The Dwyers and the Hardings, which was to be duplicated 28 years later when my mother, niece of the bride and my father nephew of the groom themselves got married.

In the picture are my maternal great grandmother (daughter of John Francis Maguire) my maternal grandmother and grandfather, my paternal great grand father (a nephew of the notorious William Martin Murphy) and my paternal grandfather and grandmother. It is virtually a family tree all in a photograph. It turned out that I was the only one to whom my mother had explained the full signigicance of the picture and, as I had at that stage just started my blog, Words, I, of course, blogged it and tried to attach names to the people, who were all relatives on one side or the other.
My brother Ted read the blog, was fascinated, and called together a family meeting.
Ted had decided that it was time that the history of our family in Cork was written down.
Ted himself had already written a book on himself and the family Don’t be afraid to Dream which had been published in 1996. This had touched on the history of the Dwyers in Cork but Ted now felt that it was time the whole story was told.

The Dwyers had been one of Cork’s so called Merchant Prince families, in the fifties in Cork their various commercial interests would have employed 6,000 people in Cork city, making them the biggest employers in Munster at that time and indeed one of the biggest in Ireland.

The Hardings and Dalys were were likewise involved in trade, but to a lesser extent. My mother’s Grandfather was John Francis Maguire, MP and lord Mayor of Cork, Papal Count and founder of the Cork Examiner.

The family soon realised the enormity of the task ahead and that we needed expert help to achieve the book, to all of our great delight we managed to persuade Mary Leland, one of Irelands best writers, to write it for us .
The agreement from the begining with Mary was that she would be given a free hand and produce the history “warts and all” (and there are plenty of warts in the family tree)

So the book has been in the manufacture since then and now the moment is approaching , sometime in 2008, when it will be published.
A moment I look forward to with great anticipation.

I see in this morning’s Irish Times that John MacKenna is telling us that the cure for our dietary ills is that we should start to eat more raw foods.
I am quite sure he is right, it is on record that the health of the (non-fighting) Englishman improved immensely during the second world war when they had to revert to non imported, traditional native foods to survive and children were scouring the ditches for Rose Hips to compensate for the lack of vitamins normally provided by oranges.
I am just reading Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France and he makes the point that there always was a mystery as to why the French peasant always managed to grow so tall and strong.
He quotes an example on peasants in the Franche-Comté whose diet is on record as consisting of gaudes (roasted cornmeal) potatoes and vegetable soup who seemed to thrive on such poor fare. On examination he discovered that these people spent a lot of their lives grazing on the raw fruits, nuts and roots which were available free from nature.
I am just back from a week in France in early winter and can confirm that in the Languedoc an untutored eye and palate could have still have had their fill from nature’s supply of Quinces, Pomegranates,Crab Apples, Chestnuts, Almonds, Mushrooms and loads of other fruit and nuts which I was far too timorous to try.
In summer the French bounty is even more benign, we have seen carloads of canny French people gathering basketfuls of ripe figs in August just outside our village in Languedoc and gathering, and selling wild Hazelnuts by the roadside.

I still possess a very battered copy of Richard Mabey’s Food for free which I have since the early seventies. This makes it clear that, with a little homework, the same bounty is available here.
We still have the tradition, if not the reality of gathering Blackberries for jam and Crab Apples for jelly and, more recently, Sloes for Sloe Gin (that latter mind you probably won’t do much for our health)

In France all chemists are obliged by law to vet one’s cache of wild mushrooms and tell which are edible, maybe we should provide a similar service here and have the government print up lists and descriptions of the food which are available from the countryside.
It must be cheaper than providing hospital beds.

This happened just before we left the house in Thezan to head for home on Friday last.
We hadn’t gotten round to depositing the bottles from the latter part of the summer, plus the ones from the last week, so I headed off for a trip to the bottle bank with two large crates of bottles.
I was popping these in the bins when a lady on a similar errand pulled up next to me.
She smiled at me and then, to my total confusion, said something to me in Spanish. My mind at that stage was in a bit of a lather between French, English and the fact that Sile’s Irish speaking sister and brother in law had just spent a few days with us.
To be addressed in Spanish was too much for my brain and I just looked at her dumb struck.
Then she said to me in French;”Are you not Spanish?” and the penny dropped. As we had flown into Girona, just over the Spanish border we had rented our car there and it had a large E for Espana on the back.
“No, no” I said “I am just on holiday”, I rented the car in Spain because it was cheaper”
At that stage I saw her looking at my huge supply of bottles so I decided to blurble on so she wouldn’t think me a total alcoholic “But I own a house here” I said;”I’m Irish”
I could see that I wasn’t getting through to her, why, if I lived here did I hire a Spanish car? So I just got rid of my bottles and hopped back in the car to make my getaway.
That was when I made my fatal error.
The car being, of course a left hand drive I had hopped like an idiot into the front passenger seat. At this stage Madame stopped all pretence of depositing bottles and stared open mouthed at this fool who was trying to drive the car from the wrong seat.
Scarlet in the face I crawled out of the car and croaked to Madame in bad French something about “In Ireland the wheel is on the right” To my amazement her face immediately cleared and she said “D’accord!, One drives on the left in Ireland” and burst into peals of laughter.
Mollified, and just about saved from looking a total idiot, I drove off.