Just ten years ago Sile and I made our (so far)only trip to America.
We went to my nephew David’s wedding in New Jersey.
We were there for about a week and, as we were only about an hour from Manhattan by train, we decided to spend a day in the big apple.
Our eldest daughter had been working in the states and had left her last wages in a bank there, so one of our jobs was to collect these from a hole in the wall. (Not an experience we were altogether familiar with at the time.)

We eventually plucked up the courage and started (or at least Sile did with me hovering protectively behind) punching the buttons on an ATM machine.

A rather large black man came up behind me and said
“Is this a line?”

I went into major frozen boggle.
What in Gods name did he want?
Was this something to do with drugs?
“Mainlining” and “lines of coke” sprang to mind as I wondered what this clearly drug crazed maniac (who looked anything but) was going to do to me.
Fortunately sanity and the sudden remembrance of past TV cop shows saved the situation.
I realised that the man was merely asking was I part of a queue.
I managed to stutter out a “no” and move out of the way.

Later that night in Jersey we were telling this story to John, the American friend we were staying with.
Now John was taking the photos of the wedding the following day.
As all the guests, mainly Irish, milled around after the ceremony
John started to try to get them in order.
“Get into a line” said John, to no avail to the milling chatting Paddies.
Suddenly John got inspiration and, with a triumphant look at me, thoroughly confused the guests by bellowing;
“Get into a queue!”

So the old reprobate is gone at last.
A blackguard with an amazing ability to win friends and influence people.
Mind you he worked hard at it!
In the seventies when I was working in a then very chic restaurant called Snaffles in Dublin the same Charles was an extremely regular patron .
Always before he left he would stick his head into the kitchen and say “How’s Martin ? Still cooking well” or something in a similar style.
The fact that I really knew in my heart that he had just acquired my name from the maitre’d didn’t stop me feeling a million dollars.
Yes, he had charm to burn, but it was well studied.

I love to eat eel, particularly smoked eel but never cook it, not since the first time when I had A Bad Experience.
I was working in Ballinakill House in Waterford at this time so it must have been some time in the early eighties.
I arrived in to work one evening to find that my boss, George Gossip, had a little treat for me; a bucket of eels.
It seemed that a local river fisherman had offered them to George and he thought we should give them a try.
I had never cooked eel before, so a quick shifty into a fish cook book was the first priority.
This way I gathered that the first essential with nearly all recipes was to skin them.The advice seemed to be to cut off the heads then pull off the skin, which was described as rather like taking off ones socks.
One piece of advice was that a little salt on the fingers helped to get a grip on this slippery fish’s skin.
I started off easily enough, chop off the heads, but then came the hard bit. It took a lot of hauling and pulling and much resource to the salt box before their extremely close fitting skin came off, about as easily as a superglued sock would.
After the first half hour I had skinned about four eels and realised that I was going to have to speed up.
This was when I made my fatal error.
I decided that one of the factors which was slowing me down was the constant dipping in and out of the salt box.
Solution?
I decided to empty most of the salt into the bucket of eels and then each one would come out ready salted and fit to be skinned.
As soon as the salt hit the eels this bucketful of what I had assumed were dead eels changed totally in character.
They started to coil around in a frenzy of what was obviously extreme pain, they coiled and churned and made every attempt to leave the bucket by doing fair imitations of the Indian rope trick.
I was devastated with guilt.
My one thought was to try and get these eels out of their agony as fast as I could.
I tried everything, running them under copious amounts of running water, immersing them in a sink of clean fresh water, but to no avail.
I decided that the only solution was to take them out of their agony by killing them by chopping off their heads.

This was as it turned out not a solution.
Even headless the eels kept up their coiling dance of torment.
I just had to proceed and skin them as they jerked and coiled in my hands.
Once skinned the movement stopped .
This added wings to my hands and eventually I was finished.

The eels had still another trick up their sleeves for me.
As soon as I got an order to cook one and it hit the hot pan it managed to my total horror to perform a further dance of death there in the pan.
(How was I to know that this is merely a post mortem contraction of muscles)

This is why I have since then adamantly refused to cook eels.

I was up early this morning.
In time to catch the dawn as it snuck over our hedge onto the washing.

What could be more refreshing on a hot summer’s day than the sight of a bowl of lemons, just about to be turned into some fresh lemonade maybe?
These are by Giovanna Garzone and were painted sometime in the 1650’s

This evening, and in this heat , Sile and I set ourselves a particularly onerous task.
We needed a wardrobe in the spare room and , having discovered the price of anything built in, decided to go the Argos route.
The advantage with buying flat pack furniture is that it can fit up the stairs in our tiny house.
The disadvantage is the work you have to do to put it together.
The, particularly large, wardrobe arrived this morning.`
If I have learnt anything about the assembly of flat pack furniture it is that it requires at least two people to put it together.
I delayed the assembly accordingly until Sile came home from school.

It was a bastard to put together.
We had to stop for out tea in the middle but it was still near to ten before we had the brute up.

It must be said that it looks particularly good.
(And if it standing tomorrow it will look even better,)

I had had the foresight, while we were eating the tea, to put a bottle of white wine in to the freezer to chill.

Oh what a pleasure it was to come downstairs,hot and cranky on a wonderful balmy evening, to be greeted by a truly well chilled glass of white wine.
(In this instance a fine Picpul de Pinet)
On these occasions I am always reminded of a moment in Elizabeth David’s anthology; An Omelette and a Glass of Wine..
Ms David describes a visit to a restaurant in the outskirts of Lyon in which the chef was the illustrious Mme Brazier.

The calm confidence, the certitude that all here would be as it should which one felt on entering the establishment was communicated to her customers by Mme Brazier herself, invisible though she was in the kitchen, by her front of house staff.
Her maitre d’hotel was a charming young woman- her daughter-in- law I believe- whose reassuring welcome to two English travellers arriving on a scorching summer day, hot flustered, extremely late and despairing of lunch after a prolonged tangle with the Lyon motorway, was beautiful to hear.
“But sit down. You have plenty of time. Relax.
Shall I bring you some cool white wine?
When you are a little rested you can order”.
What an impeccable welcome.
There is nothing more refreshing to a hot and flustered palate than a glass of cool white wine.
Again Elizabeth David had described a moment which lives with me for ever.

While Sile was putting in some plants in the back garden tonight she found this button.
This is a very bad shot of it (I will substitute it with a better when the daughter Caitriona comes down next) but you can read that it says George V and Royal Engineers.
This makes it a button from an army uniform of at least pre 1936. (George V ruled between 1910 and 1936)
This is just exactly about the time the house was built, so is unlilely to be contempory, that leaves one with two alternatives.
Either it was carried into the house, as a souvenier, as it was built.
Alternatively it had been lost on the land before the house was built at all.

Either way I feel at least one short story coming on me.
Watch this space!

Todays date always rings a certain haunting bell for me.
It was in August in 1967 at the peak of the “Summer of Love” that Bobby Gentry released what must be the most mysterious and intriguing pop song of all time.
Called “Ode to Billy Joe” it is a ballad, in the classic sense of a song that tells a story, which uses many of the techniques of the short story.
From the first line it captures your interest
“It was the third of June, another sleepy dusty Delta day…”
There had obviously been something clandestine happening between the narrator and Billy Joe Mac Allister, who we discover at the same time as the narrator, has just committed suicide.
Various hints are given about her and Billy Joe and that they were seen;“Throwing something off the Tallachie Bridge”

What makes it most interesting is that except for the hints no questions are answered, you remain intrigued.

At the time it became a great talking point between my friends and I, various theories of aborted babies, murdered rivals even incriminating evidence being that which was thrown off the bridge.

It haunts me, in the gentlest possible way, to today.
I don’t think a third of June has passed since then that hasn’t reminded me of the song.

Here are the words:

It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day
I was out choppin’ cotton and my brother was balin’ hay
And at dinner time we stopped and walked back to the house to eat
And Mama hollered out the back door “y’all remember to wipe your feet”
And then she said “I got some news this mornin’ from Choctaw Ridge”
“Today Billy Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge”

And Papa said to Mama as he passed around the blackeyed peas
“Well, Billy Joe never had a lick of sense, pass the biscuits, please”
“There’s five more acres in the lower forty I’ve got to plow”
And Mama said it was shame about Billy Joe, anyhow
Seems like nothin’ ever comes to no good up on Choctaw Ridge
And now Billy Joe MacAllister’s jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge

And Brother said he recollected when he and Tom and Billie Joe
Put a frog down my back at the Carroll County picture show
And wasn’t I talkin’ to him after church last Sunday night?
“I’ll have another piece of apple pie, you know it don’t seem right”
“I saw him at the sawmill yesterday on Choctaw Ridge”
“And now you tell me Billie Joe’s jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge”

And Mama said to me “Child, what’s happened to your appetite?”
“I’ve been cookin’ all morning and you haven’t touched a single bite”
“That nice young preacher, Brother Taylor, dropped by today”
“Said he’d be pleased to have dinner on Sunday, oh, by the way”
“He said he saw a girl that looked a lot like you up on Choctaw Ridge”
“And she and Billy Joe was throwing somethin’ off the Tallahatchie Bridge”

A year has come ‘n’ gone since we heard the news ’bout Billy Joe
And Brother married Becky Thompson, they bought a store in Tupelo
There was a virus going ’round, Papa caught it and he died last Spring
And now Mama doesn’t seem to wanna do much of anything
And me, I spend a lot of time pickin’ flowers up on Choctaw Ridge

And drop them into the muddy water off the Tallahatchie Bridge

The weather here is absolutely glorious today so I have no intention of slaving over a dark and hot computer.
I will be out in the sun.
Everytime we get the first indications of winter losing its grip it fills me with surprise and with delight.

I remember in Easter of 1988 we decided that the time had come to brave a holiday in the north of Ireland.
We rented a cottage in Blaney which was just north of Enniskillen on the shores of Lough Erne.
On that occassion the weather surprised and rewarded us.
We had a beautiful, and unseasonal, warm week of constant sunshine.
There was a boat which came with the cottage so we spent most of the time rowing around the lake exploring the hundreds of islands there.

This is a photograph taken of the three daughters in a tree on one of the islands.
As it was 1988 Caitriona must have been 11, Eileen 8 and Deirdre 5

Growing up in Catholic Ireland of the fifties I got used to seeing “Holy Mary”-which is what we used to call her- constantly portrayed as this totally sexless blue and white young virgin.
This formed a deep imprint on me and was the picture always brought to mind of the Virgin, as if it were a contemporary photograph.

It was a bit of a shock then as I travelled abroad that I began to see a quite different image.
Last summer we saw this depiction of Mary in a little wayside church in Languedoc.
An entirely different lady with curves and clothed in clinging gold lamé instead of her usual blue and white.

Then in Le Puy en Velay we saw her again depicted in the more Irish puritanical fashion but well covered up.
The fact that she had had a child was shown by a peculiar marsupial device which has the infant poking out of a fold in her dress like a kangeroo from a pouch.

At Easter we were in a church in Morlaix, in Brittany, in which the original breast-feeding statue of Mary has been given a mastectomy by a nineteenth centuary puritan priest.

And then there is my favourite portrait of Mary of all time.
This is in Assisi and is by Piero de la Francesca.

It is most unusual in that it portrays her as pregnant, this was something that was very much glossed over in our perceptions of the virgin birth.

Not only is she pregnant but her amazing expression (eat your heart out Mona Lisa, this is enigmatic) shows her nervous,and reflective but still proud of her condition.

Amazing to think that Piero painted this in 1460.