An Ent at Mount Usher.

Yesterday, with our friend Finola , we went, to see Mount Usher Gardens in Wicklow.
They are absolutely magnificent at the moment with Azaleas in full bloom and some of the Rhododendrons still out.
I took loads of photos but none seemed to do justice to the flowers.
Much better go and see them yourself.
Finola took this shot of Sile and I there-Thanks Fin.
We certainly look as if we were enjoying ourselves!

I opened my restaurant, Dwyers in Mary Street in Waterford, in October of 1989, and it was a few months after it opened, in the Spring of 1990 that my running skills were put to the test.
I had become involved with a local restaurant association and the decision was made to have a meeting at 6.00, on a Monday evening, a time when most restaurants would be either closed or at least extremely quiet.
I left the kitchen in the hands of my very young assistant chef and headed to the meeting which was being held in the foyer of the Granville hotel on Waterford’s quayside.
We had hardly begun the meeting when I noticed Hugh Leonard come across the reception to the foyer.
Not only was Hugh Leonard probably Irelands most successful playwright at the time, he had won a Tony a few years previously with his play “Da”, but he also wrote a weekly column in the Sunday Independent, our best selling newspaper, which he liberally peppered with remarks about restaurants which he enjoyed.
Thinking “Lucky Granville-they are sure to get a mention next Sunday” I shamelessly eavesdropped to his conversation with the receptionist, it turned to be just as well I did.
“Would you mind ” said Mr Leonard “Booking me a table for two in Dwyers Restaurant , Tell them I want to dine straight away as I have to be out to go to a play at 8.00”
“Fine I’ll do that Mr Leonard” said the receptionist, and Hugh Leonard headed out to his car to drive the half mile to my restaurant.
He was no sooner out the door than he was followed by an extremely agitated chef/restaurateur who proceeded to run at his very top speed to Dwyers Restaurant.
It is a tribute to my then fitness, to say that I arrived in the back door (to face a pale and petrified assistant!) at just the same time as Mr. Leonard rang the front door bell.

The race was worth it though.
I got an extremely flattering review of the restaurant from Hugh Leonard in the following Sunday’s paper and he remained a great fan and loyal customer of Dwyers until his wife died some years later.

The night before last I heard a bit of rowdyism on the street followed by a few bangs, and some laughter.
Not enough to drag me out of bed and, anyway ours is a very peaceful neighbourhood-not like our last one.

On our last street a local (and extremely anti-social) squat was raided by the guards one night and we were riveted as all the inhabitants escaped out the back onto the roofs of neighbouring houses, and were chased there too by the guards. We had front row seats as the arrests were made,and were running madly between our front and back windows as the drama unfolded.
We rather thought that a few of the most acrobatic managed to escape.

But I digress….
Yesterday morning when we came outdoors we discovered the source of the previous nights shenanigans; our three bins and those of most of our neighbours had been turned over on the pavement.
As it happens our bins were so tightly packed with rubbish that nothing had spilled out, that was not the case with some of the neighbours who had a big clean up to do.
I spent the rest of the day muttering about what I would like to do to them if I caught them etc.
In the afternoon, to add to my woes, I discovered that because of the extreme unseasonability of the weather we had run out of fuel and we needed a fire.
I went down to the local shop for a couple of bales of briquettes.
In the shop, chatting to the young blonde assistant, were 4 typical local teenage boys.
As I passed them sniggering and drinking coke it struck me that these were probably the very crowd who had had the bin-tipping spree on the previous night.
I put on my best glowering, grumpy old man expression as I struggled past them with the briquettes to the door.
As I struggled to open the door a little miracle happened.
One of the youths leapt over and, with a smile, opened it for me.
Pathetically grateful, and guilty of terrible mental miscarriages of justice I smiled back and thanked him effusively.
I was still grinning broadly as I got back home.
Sometimes its great to be wrong.

I must have seen this fabulous painting hundreds of times before I started to wonder at what the wierd white baton on the carpet was.

If you bend down to the left and look up at the painting obliquely it becomes a skull.

(For anyone who might be interested this distortion is called an anamorphosis )

What was he at?
I know several doctrinal theses have been written to explain the symbols in this painting but I remain unsure of his intentions.

Maybe that is just what he intended.

Drinkers T Shirt

Makes you think doesn’t it ?

It was just about this time, two years ago when they really got us.

The restaurant in Mary Street had been sold but we were filling out our time there for the last few weeks before finally shutting up the shop.

I got a phone call from a lecturer I knew in the college wanting to book forty Finns, a delegation to the Art Department, for the first Saturday in June.
This would fill the restaurant but have been a fairly normal booking from the college, they often booked in large parties, and as it was to be one of our last Saturdays ,I was quite happy to get it out of the way with a large anonymous crowd.
(Things were getting fairly tearful at this stage and we had had to console several customers, not all ladies, who had started to weep into their desserts remembering the good times over the last fifteen years)

Nothing had happened during the day to make me suspicious, the college had confirmed that there would be forty Finns, the staff had insisted that there must be rather a superfluity of staff in the kitchen but, as we were so near the end, I no longer minded.
Eileen and Deirdre, dolled up to the nines, had headed off to a session in a pub (they told me) at 7.30 ish and we all were anticipating the Finns with some trepidation.
Large block bookings are always harder to manage in a small restaurant like ours.
I heard the sound of voices out in the street by the kitchen and so I snuck out the back door to have a sneak preview of the Finns.

Along the street in a laughing excited procession were coming not the Finns but a choice selection of 40 of my brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces and friends.

I was lost for words, as they all hollered “Surprise!” at me.
I jabbed at the door intercom and said to Sile
“I think you had better come down”
She was equally shocked.
Part of the procession were Eileen and Deirdre, co-conspirators of the event, then out of the kitchen came my (dis) loyal staff, also in the know.
(As also was the college lecturer who had made the “Finnish” booking)

It was magical.
I cannot imagine a more successful party than we had in the restaurant that night.
Not only had these lying friends brought themselves (form all over Ireland) but also a wonderful cake in “Dwyers” image and a book of remembrances of the restaurant full of their words, images, poems and even crosswords relating to their times spent in the place.
(This still sits on our shelf virtually unopened, it still is too full of emotion for me to read it without disgracing myself.)

And (in case you are wondering) the answer is Yes.
Every last one of them paid for their meal.

A suitable Grande Finale for a great 15 years.

Here are a few photos of the event;

When I was a child my father used to tell me this story about his young days.
Apparently as a young man he courted for some time a young lady from county Cork called Anne(Nancy) Sullivan.
She afterwards married the Duke of Westminster, and became the very proud owner of Arkle, one of the finest racehorses of all time.

My father used to tell me earnestly, that if he had married Nancy Sullivan, instead of my mother, that I would have grown up to be a Duke.
In my innocence I of course believed him, and saw myself, but for a tiny accident of birth, clothed in Ermine.

A long time afterwards my brother Ted’s horse won a race in Fairyhouse. He was presented with the cup by none other than the Duchess herself.
When Ted probed her gently to find out if my Father’s stories were true, her reply was;
“Ah John Dwyer, of course I remember him well”

So my Father spoke the truth, I could have been a Duke after all.

Brother Ted gets his cup from the Duchess

Post Scriptum on 25th May 2006

I just got a letter from my brother Ted gently telling me that I got this story quite wrong.
The truth however, as is often the case, is even better than the fiction.
Ted in fact made no connection with the Duchess on that day in Fairyhouse.
(My Father obviously had not told him the same story!)
When he got home our Mother told him that he had just been given a cup by an old flame of Dad’s.
Now Ted, like myself, is not one to let an oppurtunity for contact slip past him.
My father has a set of handwritten hunting reminiscences which he put together shortly before he died.In these he talks about all of his old hunting friends including Nancy Sullivan, as the Duchess was known then.
Ted sent a copy of these on to her with a note as to how he and she had met in Fairyhouse.
The Duchess sent a charming hand written reply. I will quote a few lines from it
“Dear Ted,
I cannot thank you enough for sending me those reminiscences of your Fathers-best present I’ve had for years. How I wish I’d known that day at Fairyhouse that it was John’s son that had beaten us , I’d have been almost pleased!
…..your Uncles Dick and Jack were two of my dearest friends, as indeed was your father-even more so!” (her exclamation mark!)

Doesn’t she come across as a charmer! I don’t blame the Da or indeed the Duke for being smitten.
But she does establish byond all doubt that my father and herself did indeed have a wee tangle in the twenties.
I don’t know how you feel about it Ted but I am polishing up my Coronet!
.

Over the last week Sile and I have been trying to book some hotel rooms in Provence during the summer.
We were looking for a small pretty hotel anywhere between Marseille and the Gard. What was making it difficult was that we needed five rooms and the two days we were looking for were the 13th and 14th of July, right on top of Bastille day.
The Michelin Guide was well thumbed, and we had been told that there was no room in the Inn many times before I spotted a Michelin “Blue Pillow” awarded hotel in the town of Sommières.

We were in luck, they had the space and Madam kindly took our booking.
Now Sommières is a small town , just north of Ales, of just three and a half thousand inhabitants and one which I had never heard of before.

In the meantime I was devouring with much joy Lawrence Durrell’s Bitter Lemons, so much so that I decided to order his book on Corfu which was published in the forties; Prospero’s Cell.
Prospero’s Cell arrived this morning, the brief biography which prefaces this edition of the book ends with these words:
Durrell died in 1990 in Provence in the village of Sommières.

Minitel reciever.

Why are the French so internet unfriendly?
Why do so few of them have up and running web sites?
If they do have an internet address why do so few of them reply to an enquiry?

In an attempt to book a hotel for a few days in July in the south of France Sile sent off about four queries about availability last week.
Two days later not one single reply.
So she rang them all.
Did you get my email?
Ah, No, they answered, it mustn’t have got to us….

At the moment, to further try to understand the French I am reading John Ardagh’s excellent book “France in the New Century”
In a throwaway line in the book all was revealed.

Before the general acceptance of the internet the French, in an attempt to abolish telephone directories, brought in the Minetel.
This is the strange black box one often sees in the corner of rented properties in France.
This was a sort of telephonic search engine and, as it was a French invention, they decided that it could be their Internet.

Consequently, at the beginning of the year two thousand, only a half million French households were connected to the Internet, this compared with four million in Britain.

Now the situation has improved but , in internet terms they are still some years behind.

So if you want to communicate urgently with a Frenchman, use the phone.