Near our house in Thezan

My heartiest congratulations to my friend Ross Lewis for at long last getting a Michelin Star in Chapter One.
Well deserved and long overdue.

I was in my first year of what was to be a very long college career when the Beatles produced Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, to my mind their best LP ever.
It was played every where, everyone loved it, I don’t remember any dissenters. We all had our favourite tracks, mine was “When I’m Sixty Four”, my friend Noel Browne loved “ I’ll get by with a little help from my friends” and he did an amazing take off of Joe Cocker’s cover, air guitar and all, and as Noel was tall and skinny with a great afro of red hair he looked better than Cocker doing it too.

It was in one of those unexpectedly pleasant mornings, a Sunday after a much anticipated party where we had stayed all night.
This Sunday morning we were lazy and hung over and, because it had not struck our young heads that there might be life after the party, we had absolutely no plans.
I remember being there with Noel and my friend Michael, still friend (god love him) forty years later, lounging around, listening to Sergeant Peppers, boredom setting in, when I decided that I would teach the two of them a dance routine to go with the very danceable “Sixty Four”
I knew my pupils, there was not going to be anything flash performed here, this was going to be a very simple soft shoe shuffle.
And very simple it turned out to be.
I discovered fairly early on that where as Noel was a natural dancer, Michael’s only experience of any type of synchronized movement was being trained in marching by the local territorial army, the FCA.
Consequently he found it impossible, for instance, to put his left hand forward at the same time as his left leg (this was not how they had trained him to march). This led to a fairly limited palette of choreographic moves.
However, at the end of the morning we had a routine together, unbelievably I can still remember some of it, it comes back, along with loads of other sadder memories, whenever I hear the song.

I don’t think we performed it much, maybe, for craic, at a night club once ? I can’t remember, but the morning became a great bonding experience and we three became great friends.

So much so that we decided to go together to California together on student visas during the summer.

I remember making plans together for this adventure, this was the end of the Sixties after all, and San Francisco was the centre of the world.

The schemes however were not to be.
The only one heading to the states at the end was Michael, Noel’s parents, ironically as it turned out, decided it would be too dangerous for him. I failed my exams and had to spend the summer swotting for my repeats.

Noel went to London, worked there for a few months and in September he rang me, he was heading off to Yugoslavia, hitching around for a few weeks, would I like to join him?
Unfortunately I hadn’t any cash so I settled for a few weeks staying with my sister in Dublin instead.

A few days before college recommenced I headed back to Cork.
This I did in the time honoured fashion of the sixties.
I got a bus out to Newlands Cross , at the start of the road to Cork, and proceeded to hitch a ride home.

I wasn’t hitching long when I noticed something familiar about a fellow hitcher, struggling awkwardly with a large suitcase, a little down the road from me.
Something about his movements made me realise that it was my old friend Michael, just back from the States and making his way home.
This was a glorious moment of serendipity, made even more so when a fellow in a huge truck stopped and offered to bring us all the way to Cork.

Something about our feeling of celebration must have communicated to the driver because we all became great friends for the journey.
So much so that we decided to stop and eat together in Portlaoise,
And to have a drink in a bar afterwards, and to stop again in Cashel and have some more.

It was just outside Cahir when the inevitable happened and the by now quite drunken driver, took a corner too fast and ploughed through a stone wall into a field.
We were all shook, but OK.

The truck couldn’t go any further though.
I remember struggling out on to the road and practically immediately getting picked up by another truck and eventually landing home.

An incredibly lucky escape for us.

Noel hadn’t been so lucky.

On the same day when were hitching through Ireland he had been hitching back through Yugoslavia and had been killed in a road accident.

Forty years later I can still see the three of us learning the routine together.
In another six years, if I’m spared I will be sixty four.

Sile was rootling through old pictures last night and she said
“That’s a really nice shot you took in Kilmore last year.”

So this one is Sile’s Choice

Kilmore Quay October 2005

Starting up a restaurant is never fun, well I will qualify that, it can be tremendously exciting and one does, when it is going well, spend a lot of time on an adrenalin high.
But ,it is a lot of hard work and it can be extremely scary to realise for the first time that there are no safety nets, that when you are running your own business there is no-one between you and disaster.
Within the first six months of “Dwyers” I got hepatitis.
First disaster.
Because this is a communicable disease I was out of the kitchen for six weeks.
Somehow we survived, my assistant at the time muddled through and, as we were still very new, it wasn’t that busy.
In the spring of the following year, when the business was still just 15 months old disaster struck again.
This time it was more serious.
I had a brain haemorrhage.
But by this time we had excellent staff in place.
I had as assistant in the kitchen young Eoin Wall from the Nire Valley (he now runs his own place Hanorah’s Cottage there) and he stepped into my shoes with great skill.
The waiting staff were excellent and the whole incident passed without any disasters.
I made a remarkably quick recovery, and was back cooking within a month.
It was tough though, tough on my family and staff probably even more than me.
By the time we had got through a busy summer we were all ready for a holiday.
We headed to Dingle for a week with the children.
On the way we stopped in Waterstones in Cork to get some holiday reading and there I noticed that the new, 1992, Good Food Guide was out.
This guide, produced by the Consumer Association in England, the people who produce Which magazine was the only truly independent guide of that time and the one I had most respect for.
It would have had only about 50 entries for the whole of Ireland and, up to this time, none for Waterford.
I picked it up and found the following write up of Dwyers.
It truly made my heart sing.
This was not just a good review but a kindly and most encouraging shot in the arm.

I think it kept me buoyant for about a year.
You can never thank guides. There is always the fear that you are trying to bribe these impartial mentors of taste into favourable reviews.
Now it doesn’t matter any more.
The restaurant has been closed for nearly three years.

So thank you Good Food Guide and editor Tom Jaine for providing me with great encouragement just when it was most needed.

The Washington Posts Style Invitational also asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting or changing one letter, and supply a new definition:

Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the reader who doesn’t get it.

Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of
obtaining sex.

Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously.

Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease.

Karmageddon: End of the world due to a build up of bad-vibes.

Glibido: All talk and no action.

Dopeler effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

Intaxication: Euphoria at receiving a tax refund, which lasts until you realise it was your money to start with.

Ignoranus: A person who’s both stupid and an asshole.

Many thanks to my friend Finola who has sent this excellent series of definitions from The Washington Post’s annual compitition in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words.

This years winners are;

1. Coffee (n.), the person upon whom one coughs.
2. Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have gained
3. Abdicate (v.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach
4. Esplanade (v.), to attempt an explanation whilst drunk.
5. Willy-nilly (adj.), impotent.
6. Negligent (adj.), describes a condition in which you absent-mindedly
answer the door in your nightgown.
7. Lymph (v.), to walk with a lisp.
8. Gargoyle (n.), olive-flavored mouthwash.
9. Flatulence (n.) emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are run
over by a steamroller.
10. Balderdash (n.), a rapidly receding hairline.
11. Testicle (n.), a humorous question on an exam.
12. Rectitude (n), the formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.
13. Pokemon (n), a Rastafarian proctologist.
14. Circumvent (n.), an opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish
men

Sile and I have never found it particularly easy to name things, or people come to that.
When our first born Caitriona arrived we could not agree on what to call her. After days of quite heated discussion and as our preferences were polar opposites we decided that we would have to make this an entirely democratic decision.
We voted on the naming using a primitive version of PR.

We shortlisted about 8 names and then took pencil and paper into two corners of our room and marked each name out of ten, the victor to be the name which won most points.
I remember my number one was Maeve, Sile’s I think was Brid.
We both placed Caitriona somewhere about the middle and, to both of our surprise, it won.
Now, of course it seems to have been the perfect decision.
The idea of any other name for the same child seems ridiculous.

When we were naming the restaurant the decision was easier.
I had worked for some years in a restaurant in Waterford owned by George and Susie Gossip.
That this was officially called Ballinakill House mattered not a whit to the people of Waterford.
It was universally called Gossips.
The logic therefore was to cut to the chase with our own place and call it Dwyers as that was what it would be called anyway.
(Mind you over the years, as people got more used to me, I heard the place quite often called “Martins”!)

This leads me to our current problem.
What to call the new Chambre d’Hote in France.
Le Presbytere is obvious but as every second B&B in France goes by that name it is hardly memorable.
I have suggested Les Trois Soeurs for various reasons which I have outlined here.
Sile doesn’t like it.
She also says that it doesn’t roll easily off the tongue, she is right there, too many Rs and too many diphthongs for ease.

We then are back at square one.
Here are some of the suggestions to date.

Una, Sile’s sister suggested Thez Les Bez, catchy but hardly respectful to the locals, likewise friend Donal’s suggestion of Maison Thezan, both do however roll off the tongue easily.

Sile suggested Le Jardin de Curé, a lovely name but, we both agreed not appropiate as we hope eventually to turn the whole garden into a swimming pool. Le Piscene de Curé doesn’t have the same ring.
I have thought of Les Oies Sauvage after the early Irish migration to France after the Battle of Kinsale but it is a tad pretentious.
As the O Dwyers (O Duibhir in Irish)who fled Tipperary on that flight became Haudaoires or Audaoires I have toyed with Chez Audoire but think the point would be a little arcane.

We are trying to put together a name that has relevance to the place it is in and also carries resonance of the place we have come from.
We will eventually get there.
In the meantime any person out there who manages to suggest a title which we then adopt can have a weekend for two in the same place in Thezan, free gratis and for nothing as soon as we are up and running, which at the moment looks like being sometime in 2008.

Thinking cap anyone?

When one gets a new passport (after 10 years of successfully passing off as the young fellow pictured on the old one) the Passport Office courteously sends the old one back so you can see how much you have aged in the last ten years.

1997

2007

I’m changing my car today (about time I hear my friends say, the present one we have had for 7 years).
I rang the insurance people to organise the change of cover.
I was asked “What time do you want the change made?”
I said about twelve clock.-“but does that mean I am not insured in the new car at five to twelve or in the old one at five past?”
“That is correct”, she told me.
“But surely, my open comprehensive policy will cover me in the new car?”
“That” she informed me “only applies when the car belongs to someone else, since it would then be yours, you would not be covered”

Thanks for your help Hibernian.