Sometime in the fifties,when I was quite a young child, my father decided that as a family we were spending more than he was earning, and he took the step of taking us all to one side, there were seven of us, ranging in age from about fourteen to me, at five, and announced that we were going to have to go on an economy drive.
I remember clearly feeling quite excited, convinced that this drive, given the portentous method it was being delivered, would be rather more exciting than a Sunday afternoon drive.
When it was explained that this particular drive was not a pleasure trip I then succeeded (in a particularly pious, and uncharicteristic, moment of insufferable priggishness) in endearing my self to my father by offering to take a 50% drop in pocket money, that is go from a shilling to six pence, to help in the same drive.
History doesn’t tell whether the offer was accepted or not, but my father always remembered and would recall it fondly in his cups.
It marked, I have no doubt, a high point in our relationship.
Another moment of childhood miscomprehension happened at much the same time in Cork.
We lived in a house up over the Lee and over the main road to Dublin and the East known as the Lower Glanmire Road, this was where we took our constitutional walks.
The future arrived in Cork in the fifties and it was decided that this main artery should be upgraded.
They decided to make a dual carriageway of the first few miles of its length out of Cork. That this was a moment of much importance was obvious by the way the grown ups bandied the new term around knowledgeably.
I of course completely misunderstood.
I remember being very disappointed the first time we were brought down the new road.
I then realised that a Dual Carriageway just meant a road with a hedge down the middle and not a glorious road strewn with emeralds and rubies which was what I had imagined a Jewel Carriageway to be.

When my sister D was an Au Pair in France in the sixties she worked for a family who lived by the Mediterranean on the Cote d’Azure.
When she arrived at the house Madame was there with her children but without her husband, he was away in the army in which he served as a professional soldier, evidently in a position of some command.
As the time came for him to return Madame took my sister aside and told her that she wasn’t to worry too much about her husband’s attitude towards the children; “You see he suffers from “Deformation Professionelle”
D was of course mystified but when the husband did arrive home and started to try and run the household as if it were a military barracks she began to understand the meaning of the phrase.

In Wikipedia they define it as:

Déformation professionelle is a French phrase, meaning a tendency to look at things from the point of view of one’s own profession and forget a broader perspective.

In this case it refers to somene who tries to tries to order his life at home as if it was his workplace.

When D told us this story during the holidays this year it struck me as a singularly apt observation and I began to think of instances where the profession flowed over into the home.
I suppose the first finger should be pointed at oneself.

All the years when I ran the restaurant I was accustomed to leave a trail of dirty dishes in my wake as I cooked my way through the day. There would have always been someone there to clean up after me. To my wife’s chagrin I used to attempt to behave the same way when I cooked at home, I also had a tendency to make sauces and dishes in quantities far too large for the family. The rallying call to try and get me back to reality was “You are not in the restaurant now!”
Sile being a teacher of course practiced her own version of Deformation Professionelle.
When she would arrive in to the wrecked kitchen after I had produced my masterpiece she had a tendency to taste the dish, pronounce it delicious and then clap her hands and say;” Right! Now it’s tidy up time”

I tended to obey, no one my age likes to be given lines.

This of course makes one speculate how other careers behave at home.

Are the children of bankers given referral notices if they over spend their pocket money?
Do barristers constantly interrupt the family at table searching for points of order?

I once watched a man sitting at a table near me at a restaurant, who was waiting for his food to arrive, gravely crumble his bread roll into his glass of wine.
I discovered afterwards that he had been a priest.

The French, as usual have a word for it.

As this is going to be the first of many pages about the new house in France, I am going to call it Presbytery 1.

I was there again last week, this time with my friend Clive Nunn who is working out the design of the conversion for me. We spent the whole of Saturday in the house, he measuring a house which never heard of a right angle or indeed a straight line.
As a typical and I am fairly sure very early, house built into the circle of the Village Circulade the back of the house is much wider than the front, the house is therefore pretty much wedged shaped.
The more we studied the house the more it began to yield up it’s secrets.
It has obviously been there quite some time and has had various incarnations.
The advent of its being a presbytery is comparatively recent.
This I know for two reasons.
We got an excellent “Guide De Visite” for Thezan in the tourist office. In this they tell us that no 2 on Rue Rene Lentheric was the original Presbytery until 1914 when it was turned into a Girls School. It must have been at this time that the Priest moved his goods and chattels down the street to no 14 (Chez Dwyer) which had been a Maison de Vigneron, or winemakers house.
Our friend Petra Carter who lives nearby had recognised the house as this from the bootscrapers outside the front door, these would not have been needed for the clergy!

This is the church, a truly ancient building which goes
back at least to the 12th century, photographed from
a bedroom window. It’s bells can be heard all day, one
can only hope not all night too.

This is the view to the south out the other side of the
house.The long plain of the Orb Valley all the way down
to the Pyrenees.
It is amazing to live right in the centre of a village and
still have such a view.

This is a corridor of the attic, all plainly converted for the
maids or nuns who attended the priests.

In the unconverted half of the attic we found this strange box.
It must have been designed to carry something like a crucifix.
Possibly something to do with the processions which happened
in the past.

Also in the attic, on a broken piece of Terrazzo, possibly part
of a washstand, I found this piece of newspaper stuck on the back.
This is a detail.It is about the Prince; Le Duc d’Orleans and his
travels to London.
The question of course is which Duc d’Orleans .
I’m working on it.

Thezan Les Beziers, where we have just paid the deposit on our house, is a “Village Circulade” these date from Roman times and were built on hills, for defensive purposes, and the road spirals like a snails shell to the apex, usually the church.
The picture is a (fairly poor) arial shot of Thezan, if you look at the apex of the hill carefully you will see the church, with trees around it. This is the car park of the church and our presbytery is just opposite these trees.
It can all be seen very clearly on Google Earth.

or better still thanks to the help of daughter Caitriona here is the Google Earth view.
If you look very carefully at this picture the presbytery is at six o clock on the circle directly around the church at the centre.
It is the only house with a dark blob (the tree) in the back yard.

It was Dean Martin who said that the most depressing thing about giving up alcohol was waking up in the morning,and knowing that’s as good as you are going to feel all day.

Quoted by Simon Carr in this mornings Independent.

On Sile’s suggestion our book club has picked to read Flann O Brien’s Third Policeman this month.
I read this when I was in college, remember vaguely enjoying it , but really it was only his theory of atomic transferrance between man and bicycle that remained with me over the thirty six or so years since I read it first.

I am delighted to report that I am loving it this time.
His just slightly off the wall way of laterally looking at simple things is constantly refreshing.
Yesterday I came across a very simple passage of countryside discription to which he, just by turning things slightly off kilter, gives the most amazing edge.

I quote exactly:

“I looked carefully around me. Brown bogs and black bogs were arranged neatly on each side of the road with rectangular boxes carved out of them here and there, each with a filling of yellow-brown brown- yellow water. Far away near the sky tiny people were stooped at their turf work, cutting out precisely- shaped sods with their patent spades and building them into a tall memorial twice the height of a horse and cart. Sounds came from them to the Sergeant and myself, delivered to our ears without charge by the west wind, sounds of laughing and whistling and verses from the old bog- songs. Nearer, a house stood attended by three trees and surrounded by the happiness of a coterie of fowls, all of them picking and rooting and disputating loudly in the unrelenting manufacture of their eggs. The house was quiet in itself and silent but a canopy of lazy smoke had been erected over the chimney to indicate that people were within engaged on tasks. Ahead of us went the road, running swiftly across the flat land and pausing slightly to climb slowly up a hill that was waiting for it in a place where there was tall grass, grey boulders and rank stunted trees. The whole overhead was occupied by the sky, serene, impenetrable, ineffable and incomparable, with a fine island of clouds anchored in the calm two yards to the right of Mr Jarvis’s outhouse.”

A couple of years ago in Nimes I saw a shoe shop which convinced me that the French Academy are totally correct to insist in banning all forms of Franglais.
This shop, which specialised in sports shoes, had decided to give themselves a sexy modern image by using an English title for their shop.
Obviously unaware of what this harmless sounding phrase actually meant they had printed over their door in large capitals; Athletes Foot

This was a fair example of the difficulties of translating between languages, sometimes even worse can happen between two nations who purport to share the same one.

It was about 25 years ago that we first met our American friends Roxanne and Joe.
They were working for a firm in Waterford and came in to Ballinakill House, where I was chef, nearly every Friday night with their small daughter Jenny (now herself proud mother to Libby)
Roxanne and Joe were very active people and used to jog and cycle for health and enjoyment.
They had solved the problem of what to do with Jenny while they cycled by the simple expedient of bringing her with them.
This was made possible by an ingenious American baby transporter which attached to one of their bicycles and which they had brought over with them.
This they proudly showed us, even offered to lend it to us for our own daughter Caitriona who was much of an age with Jenny.
When we saw this we were first delighted, then shocked and finally amused.
Its brand name, which I am sure carried none of the connotations which the word carried here, was a “Baby Bugger”.

Post Script:
Believe it our not I just Googled “Baby Bugger” into the internet and they are still available in the States and under that name.

It was in November 2003, just three years ago when I had a second epiphany.
By this I mean a moment when my thoughts clarified, and I found a way out of my problems of the time.
James Joyce defines an epiphany as “A sudden spiritual manifestation”, the OED gives as it ‘s meaning, after the religious definitions, : “a sudden and important realisation”, and that description will do me fine.
My previous mention of an epiphany was in my very second blog, in February of 2004, when I realised that I wasn’t going to be a teacher and decided, a decision I have never regretted, that I would do what I enjoyed most and become a cook.
That was in 1972, thirty one years prior to 2003.

In 2003 I had been chef and proprietor of my restaurant, “Dwyers”, in Waterford for fourteen years. It was a successful restaurant but as time went on running it was becoming more and more stressful..
Running a restaurant takes an enormous amount of time.
Not only does one have to be an expert chef (or at least employ one) but also a skilful bookkeeper, be well versed in employee relations, have an ability to charm customers, be a skilled self publicist, and an expert hygienist. One must have an ability to do all the jobs in the restaurant at a moments notice and must always realise that every night off and every holiday has to be paid for from ones own pocket.
Of course it has its rewards, it is creative, lively and stimulating and it is always satisfying to be ones own employer.
That last factor is of course also the most dangerous.
Having been ones own employer it is extremely difficult to imagine working for someone else.

I once read a restaurant critic state that restaurants were such a transient business that he thought that ,like cats, restaurants should be given credit for seven years existence for every year they managed to survive.
At that reckoning Dwyers was 91 years old, a respectable age to retire.
More importantly I was 54 years old myself and I was beginning to feel that running restaurants was a young mans game.
I can’t say I reached this decision lightly.
Running ones own business becomes a bit like rearing a child.
It can become very difficult to let go at the appropriate time.
In November of 2003 Sile and I had just come back from a few days in St. David’s in Wales.
During most of my time there I had been worried and phoning the restaurant because we were having problems with blocked sewage pipes
(not a pleasant thing for a restaurant)
The thought was striking me that the business was running my life even when I was away.
It was also dawning on me (it had dawned on my wife some time previously) that the moment to sell the restaurant was at hand.
I was still being faced with the problem with what to do with my life afterwards.
This was the moment of the epiphany.
I decided that I should ask myself the same question I had asked myself thirty one years before.
What would I really enjoy doing?

Since the early years of our marriage we had been going to France on our annual summer holidays.
Initially we had gone with Sile’s sister Una and her family, four adults and six children, latterly we had also gone with a group of contemporaries, relations and friends.
On all of these holidays, and by my own personal choice, I was the designated chef. I discovered that to cook for a mere eight to ten people was a pleasure and relaxation from the stresses of cooking and running a restaurant. It was a reminder of why I took up cooking in the first place.
Couple that with the delights of shopping in the markets, shops and even supermarkets of France and I was in my element for the holiday.

It was from this that I found the answer to my question.
This was the moment when I suddenly saw the future.
Instead of going into a sudden boring retirement, or facing employment by someone else (on the unlikely event of it being offered to a man in his middle fifties) I could do what I loved.
Cook for small numbers of people in France.
We could buy and operate a Chambres d’Hote in France.

There is a difference between the Irish concept of B&B and the French Chambres d’Hote.
The French concept is very much more that of visiting the home of the host and to this end the proprietor usually eats with the guests at the same table.
We had used the French lodgings on our travels and enjoyed the experience very much.

This I suddenly saw would be a way to live my life in the future.

That was in November in 2003, amazingly by June of 2004 we had cooked the last meal in the restaurant and we had successfully sold it on.
By late September the deal was signed sealed and delivered and we were living in our present house in Griffith Place here in Waterford.

Since the restaurant life hasn’t exactly comprised of lolling around in boredom. I do have certain jobs which I have maintained, as consultant chef and even doing some local culinary journalism. Not to mention flying about the country and the continent of behalf of Euro-Toques.

We have however found time to start looking for a place to set up our Chambres d’Hote.
This was at last realised in August of this year.
We found our ideal house.

As we looked we began to realise the various essentials we needed for our house in France.

It had to be:

Big enough to have four bedrooms each with its own bathroom.
This would give us three to let (or give to visiting daughters) and one for ourselves.

It had to be within a very limited budget.

It must be far enough South to have a noticeably better climate than Ireland.
The sun was certainly going to be a factor.

We were sure that it had to be in a village.
We had stayed in too many houses in the country, owned by non residents, which had Fort Knox type fortifications against robbery. We knew that in villages neighbours looked after each other.
And we also wanted to be able to nip down the village for the morning croissants and even for a pichet in the café.

It had to have a small garden, (rare this in the centre of a village) but this had to be big enough to take a swimming pool.

It must have a certain age and character, we found that modern French villas were as soulless as the their Irish equivalents.

Lastly, we both had to fall for it.

La Presbytere in Thezan les Beziers has pressed all the buttons.
For me it was love at first sight, for Sile it had to wait until the second viewing.
You can see some pictures of the presbytery in its full tattiness here.
As I write the contracts for sale are before me and we are going out to the house next week , with designer and friend Clive Nunn, to put together our plans for its eventual restoration.

God knows what hoops we will have to jump through with French builders and French Mairies, with new neighbours and the constant problems of translation but now we have certainly opened a door in to another phase of our life, the final phase of the epiphany in November of three years ago.
It shows all the signs of being as much fun and as scary as our previous existences.
Roll on!

Sile walks towards the Presbytery in Thezan.

Basket of Glasses by Sebastien Stoskopff 1641

Continuing my recent theme of glasses in art,
I have been collecting Absinthe, and other French
cafe glasses, for the last 16 or 17 years now.

These are just a cross section of the many
shapes and sizes in my collection.

Over the years I have discovered the large
number of artists who liked to paint these glasses.
I have picked out the glass of Absinthe from some
of these paintings.

Manet’s Absinthe Drinker is perhaps the best known.

He also managed to include an unmistakable
Absinthe Glass (cunningly disguised as a rose vase)
in the painting; The Bar at the Folies Bergere.

I particularly like this one by Gustave Bourgain because
its a glass I have in my collection.

This is a rather more stylised glass by
Toulouse- Lautrec in Monsieur Boileau au Cafe

This is Van Gogh’s variation.
The painting is called l’Absinthe

And this one is by Henri Bouvet from
L’Absinthe au bord de l’eau

Picasso of course painted lots of Absinthe Glasses
here in La Buveuse d’absinthe

He even sculpted some
( Verre d’Absinthe)

My very favourite, chipped and cracked glass
is by Swiss artist Ihly
Le Buveur d’absinthe

Our own Orpen put one into his painting
The Cafe Royal in London

I coulden’t resist photographing a glass of Absinthe
myself this morning, I have a bottle of Absinthe which
I bought in Alsace a few years ago. I don’t think I am
as strong as the French artists though, I hadn’t the courage
to start the day on an Absinthe so I, wimpishly, poured it
down the sink after the shot.