If anyone has been reading the letters to the Irish Times over the last year they will have come an unusual controversy aired from time to time.
It appears that every time Karl Jenkins’ Armed Man (subtitled A Mass for Peace) is produced that there is a rush to the letters pages to declare a side.
It is not be expected that a modern choral and orchestral work would arouse such strong emotions.
Only last week a correspondent to the Times called it the “musical equivalent of the Da Vinci Code” (and this was not intended as praise!).

Jenkins wrote the piece in 2000 on commission from the Royal Armories and since it was first performed it has had both its strong attackers and defenders.
Last night I went to its first performance in Waterford.

Here I must declare an interest.
The performance was given by Madrigallery, a choir of which my wife is a member, and of which I have been a fan for their fifteen year existence.
To further declare an interest I was acting as master of ceremonies for the evening myself.

I wasn’t at all sure I was going to enjoy it.
I have been hearing Sile practicing the alto line of all of the songs sung around out house pretty incessantly for the last six months.
I have also been hearing the more popular bits , the Sanctus and the Agnus Dei, played a fair bit on Lyric FM.
There is no doubting its accessibility.
Jenkins, God Bless Him, writes tunes.
Lovely hummible tunes.
(So did Rossini by the way)
There was still the fear that it was going to sound a little too Hollywood, perhaps even a little more like a musical than a serious choral work.
I needn’t have worried.
The piece , as performed last night, is a triumph.

There is no doubting that Jenkins is a very clever man.
He plays with our emotions and by throwing various styles of music at us, from the simplest of monkish Gregorian chants to the most lavish of numbers in which the choir and orchestra are at full, drum laden, pitch, he carries the whole audience with him right through the work.
Being in the middle of 400 odd Waterfordians all totally at one with the conductor is totally exhilarating.

A mosh pit would not have been out of the question.

Congratulations to Kevin O Carroll, the conductor and to the choir and orchestra.
Ye played a blinder.

It was down by the banks of a clear flowing stream
That first I accosted that comely young game
And in great confusion I asked her her name
Are you Ora or Flora or the famed Queen of Tyre
She answered I’m neither, I’m Síle Dwyer

Go rhyming rogue, let your flocks roam in peace
You won’t find among them that famed golden fleece
The tresses of Helen, that Goddess of Greece
Have harked round your heart in a web of desire
Be off to your Speir-Bhean, said Síle Dwyer

May the sufferings of Sisyphus fall to my share
And may I the sufferings of Tantalus fear
To the dark land of Hades may my soul fall in air
Without linnet in song or an ode on the lyre
If I ever prove false to you Síle Dwyer

Oh had I the wealth of the Orient store
All the gems of Peru and the Mexican Ore
Or the hand of a Midas to mould o’er and o’er
Bright bracelets of gold and of flaming sapphire
I would robe you in splendour, my Síle Dwyer

And yes, this is a genuine old ballad that coincidentally shares my wife’s name.
I came across it just a few days ago.
I now am starting a trust fund to save for the bracelets of flaming sapphire.

Scenario; 2.30 flight, Dublin to Amsterdam.

Firstly, as I live in Waterford I have to discover how to get to the Airport on time.

Flight is at 2.30.
To struggle through the various check-in formalities I need at least 1 ½ hours.
Another hour to get to the airport from Dublin
Therefore I have to be in Dublin at 12.00.
That is leave Waterford either by the 7.30 Red Eye Train
Or
The 8.30, toiletless, hernia inducing, bus.

I opt for the bus and do without either coffee or breakfast.
( I am now at the age when I like to give my bladder no chance to knock off points for bad behaviour)
I arrive at the airport at 12.30 and reach the sanctuary of the first toilet without mishap.

Next queue is for Check-in.
As I queue for this I recite the mantra
Ticket
Passport
Wallet
Patting (unobtrusively in case of airport muggers) the relevant pockets.(Panic Number 1)
Then you notice that everyone else in the queue is doing the exact same touchy feely dance.
As you get closer to the check-in girl the luggage panic (Number 2 )starts.
Is my hand luggage too heavy ? Too wide ? The wrong colour?
Will she let me take it on board?

She looks dispassionately at your passport and at the silly print-out you took from the computer and asks:
“Did you pack this luggage yourself ?”
This always takes me by surprise.
Who does she think I am?
Do I look like someone who would have a valet at home to pack for me?
But this morning my luck is in.
She doesn’t ask me to risk a dislocated shoulder by lifting my suitcase over my head to prove how light it is.
She allows me to check-in.
The first hurdle is over.
Then it is into the interminable slow shuffling queue to get through security.
Panic number three starts in.
Put everything metal into the pockets of the overcoat.
Biro, now would a biro have enough metal to set off the alarm?
Should I take off my shoes ? my belt ? my jacket?
Do I need my passport again or can I put it on the pocket of my coat?
Did I put anything life threatening into the bag?
Toothpicks ! Jesus maybe I could knock the captain out with a toothpick pressed against his jugular.
In the end I take off everything, shoes, belt, jacket.
Anything rather than set off the alarm and have all my fellow passengers backing away from me as I get searched.

So now I am through, in that wonderful area known as the departure area, where there are huge shops selling useless, non-metallic, rubbish, weird leprechaun caps too vulgar even to be worn by Americans, vast quantities of perfume at Brown Thomas prices and even vaster quantities of enormous Toblerones. (Now why would anyone want to carry one of those on holiday with them?)
So its off to gate number B 78.
This is of course only about 3 miles along a scenic passageway dotted with dead flat elevators. (They don’t like to throw them out when carrying people up stairs gets too much for them, so they lay them out to die, flat, in the airport)

So there you are, an hour before your flight time , at gate B 78.
Despite that there is plenty of places to sit everyone is standing queuing by the desk.

So Queuing panic number 4 starts.
If you don’t get on to the plane fairly niftily after they blow the whistle you will either have to
(a) Share a seat with the huge and smelly man still sitting by you.
(b) Sit over the wing and worry all the way about the strange pieces of wire sticking out brokenly from its back.
(c) Only get in when all the luggage racks are full and have your only bag confiscated for storage in the hold (from whence it will spend the next 12 years touring the airports of northern Europe, blissfully careless of your lack of both deodorant and clean underpant)
So you queue, foolishly, with the others.
After your hour of standing martyrdom the flight is called and the scrum to get on starts.
No matter how hard you have tried the majority of other passengers will have boarded before you and by the time you get on the plane they will be sitting, as if for ever, on all the best seats.
Before you board. Panic Number 5.
Where did you put the boarding card/passport without which you will not be let on board.

You board.
Then panic number 6 starts.
You are being pushed from behind and embarrassed from the front to get rid of your, case, and coat into several separated luggage racks.
Now where is your book, bought for the journey?
Where is your newspaper ditto?
And where are your reading glasses.
By the time you have located all these the cross looking woman at the end of your row has become incandescent and you know won’t let you out to go to the toilet unless shouted at.

The next panic (No.7) is trying to get the seat belt fastened.
Has the day come when, (Oh Shame!) when you will have to put up with the smirks of the hostess when you ask for an extension!

If you can subdue your fear of flying the rest of the flight goes quite well.
That is if you ignore the fact that you alone are too afraid to unglue your eyes from the “safety demonstration” because you were once publicly humiliated by an Air France hostess who stopped, in the middle of pretending to inflate her life jacket, to harangue you for not paying attention.

And of course that you also ignore the fact that the large man has settled in front of you and, as soon as he is seated, he puts his seat back into recline thereby jamming your knees into instant and immobile thrombosis against it.
In fact it can often be as long as an hour or two before panic number 8 sets in.(This depends on the duration of the voyage)
This is when you stop, and everyone , including the people sitting inside you, stand up, in some pain , twisted by the seat and reach across to retrieve their luggage from the rack several rows down.
This of course makes you want to do it too.
You all remain, immobile and in a bizarre body rictus for about 15 minutes until the hostesses have had their laugh and they open the door.
You disembark.
Than panic Number 9.
What is it I need for emigration (or is it immigration?)
Do I need my passport ? My boarding card ? Both ?
Why do I always pick the queue behind an obvious illegal immigrant who takes for ever to be taken away for interrogation?

The last panic (number 10) hardly deserves to be called a panic at all.
I mean when is the last time a customs official went through anyone’s bags ?
But then…., maybe this time……

Or again, maybe next time I’ll go by boat.

I remember that Sile and I were particularly fond
of a Watersons song which we came across in the
early seventies.
At this stage I have forgotten most of it.

I think it was called;
When Spring Comes In
and the start was something like this;

When Spring comes in
The birds do sing……

Leading on to the chorus:

Oh the Primroses and the Cowslips too
The Roses in their neat attire
Are sweetly blooming in the Briar
And the Daffydowndillies that we admire
Will die and fade away

I was very strongly reminded of this when I made a pilgrammage out to our garden this morning.
Bar the rose, because our climber has decided to go into shock after the last cold spell, and that having bloomed beautifully all winter, we have the full compliment in the garden.
We have a lovely Rose coloured Camellia which I have taken poetic license to put in the place of the Rose in the Briar.

Primroses

Cowslips too

Rose (Camellias) in their neat attire

And the Daffydowndillies that we admire.

Welcome Spring !

And I want a special commendation for the cowslip photo.
I had to lie down flat in in the wet grass to take it.
Thereby certainly sure to
“catch my death”
Ah Well!
All in a good cause.

This is a difficult one, one that I have been avoiding, but, with Mothers day coming up next Sunday, it seems a good time to talk about her.
Mind you, her attitude to Mothers Day itself was a little contradictory, when ever I gave her a card or a present for the day that was in it she always pooh poohed the “American invention” of the day, but still if it was forgotten I’m sure there would have been some resentment.

Frances Daly was born on October Sixth 1909, just three years short of a hundred years ago.
She was born into the Daly/ Harding/Maguire family, well off Cork merchant princes and lived in some style in a large house in Blackrock in Cork.
She was sent to Mount Anville in Dublin to boarding school, a real sign of affluence, and was particularly proficient there at games, classroom stuff would not have been her metier.
Her skills in sports were however very impressive.
She has entered the record books as having captained the Irish ladies hockey team nine times, was also very impressive at tennis, representing Munster in the twenties, and in her maturity she played a fair game of golf, at one brief time from a scratch handicap.
If this makes her sound like a sporty type, then I suppose she must have been,though it never stopped her having an excellent relationship with her youngest son to whom sport was always an anathema.

She was one of seven children, the second from the top, and with her four younger sisters, Rosemary, Mary, Felicity and Margaret was one of the “Beautiful Daly Sisters” heart breakers in Cork in the twenties and thirties.
(This on no less an authority than Tom Crosbie of “The Examiner”)

In June of 1939, at the age of thirty, she married my 26 year old father.
He definitely would have been seen as a good catch, one of the “Dwyers of Cork” and furthermore actually a director of that vast family firm.

Just a year later they produced their first child, a daughter, Mary Deirdre, and produced seven more over the next nine years, finishing with myself in March of 1949.
Had my father not contracted mumps at that stage the lord alone knows how large the family might have been.

At some stage during this time the realisation began to sink in that my father might have a problem with the drink.
Now Dad had been raised in a fairly abstemious household, the legend goes that on his wedding day the champagne had to be secretly decanted into lemonade bottles so that his mother wouldn’t realise he was taking alcohol.

This problem of Dad’s didn’t go away and was to colour everything for the rest of their married life.
I think that she never ceased to love him, even when he was at his worst. She would shamelessly use every trick in the book to keep him from going out, or indeed to try and get him home .
This included using the children, whom she knew he adored, as either lures or chaperones.
We all remember those situations with horror.

But my mother never let this huge dark cloud dominate her life.

She always maintained a life of her own.
She was as I have said a very keen golfer and neither children nor war shortages were allowed to come between her and her golf.

It was during the war, in 1945 when the twins, Felicity and David, were born, this was termed “the emergency” in Cork, and was noted chiefly for the various wartime shortages.
Petrol was one of the commodites in short supply.
Mum, so she claimed, used to drink a glass of sherry in the morning before she breast fed the twins, then get on her bike, cycle the six odd miles to the Little Island golf course, play her eighteen holes, then back on the bike and would be home before they woke up again.
Her gynaecologist, Billy Kearney, also lectured on that subject in University College in Cork and, to Mum’s delight, always told that story to his students.

Her other great love and interest was in The Irish Girl Guide Association.
She had always loved the Guides and had represented them at a conference in Poland in the 1930’s.
She went back to the guides again in the fifties and was eventually made Chief Commissioner in the seventies.
She had a great career with the guides, building up a fond relationship with the founder, Lady Baden-Powell, who actually came to lunch in our house once.
(My memory of that day was being asked by this rather terrifying woman if I was a Cub.
“No”, I answered, “a little boy!”)
She travelled extensively with the Guides, to Tokyo for a conference at one stage which involved side trips to Hong Kong and Angkor Wat.
The highlight of her guiding career was when she was elected to the “Hall of Fame” of the Guides in a ceremony in Chicago,
a huge honour of which she was very proud.
The whole Guide thing I must admit left me fairly cold as a boy.
I can remember having to set trails all around the garden in Tree Tops so the girls could get their Path Finder badge.
There was a moment though when her Chief Commissioner status came in handy.

When I was in my late teens with various friends we took to having al fresco parties in what we called “The Haunted House” close to our own house in Tivoli.
This deserted and burnt out ruin had belonged to John Philpot Curran, father of Robert Emmet’s sweetheart Sarah Curran.
Parts of the cellar were still intact and we used to light fires and have what we called barbecues there.
On one particular night we started to be overrun by rival gangs determined to either join in the fun or to disrupt ours.
It speaks volumes for my relationship with my mother that I instantly decided it would be OK to bring the party up to Tree Tops and continue the fun in our large empty billiard room.
As soon as we got to the door, and with the gate crashers in hot pursuit, I explained the problem to my mother.
She welcomed me and my friends with open arms and then offered to go and put on her Chief Commissioners uniform to act as bouncer at the door.
She did and it worked !
I seem to remember her heading out to the kitchen to make soup for my friends as soon as the last of the undesirables had been shown off.

This of course was another very important aspect of my mothers attitude to life.
She was a born hostess and liked nothing better than to have people coming to the house.
Somehow the “Tea” could always be stretched to include whoever we brought home with us, a fact which consistently astonished my friends.

Every Sunday she played hostess to huge members of cousins, uncles and aunts for tea in the breakfast room.
She was incredibly proficient at producing endless quantities of scones, almond cakes, chocolate and coffee cakes, and éclairs for these parties.

Right up to her death in 1998 she was still having weekly “Racing Demon” parties for her many grandchildren at which the same lorry loads of scones and cakes were produced.

She loved providing food for people,
( it is only while I write this that I realise how much I have inherited this!)
and she also I think saw herself in some ways as the Lady of the Manor.
Christmas time in the 50’s was the time when her giving was at its most prolific.
I remember lists of hundreds of presents to staff in various establishments, restaurants where Daddy and she would have gone, staff at the golf club, staff who worked in various friends households… the lists were endless.
She never quite lost this Lady Bountifulness.
Right up to her death she still brought cakes to the girls in the bank where she cashed her cheques, and to the boys in the garage where she bought petrol.

Money was a problem in the last years of her life but as a return for her own boundless generosity I am delighted to say that she never knew this.
My brother Ted organised us brothers and sisters and also the better off of the grandchildren to put some regular contributions into a fund for her.
This Ted explained to Mum was money she had “from Shares” and anytime she was short on her pension she happily, and blissfully ignorant of its source, dipped into this, (often to buy presents for the contributors).
In this way she was allowed to keep her dignity right to the end.

Mum absolutely loved the restaurant I had in Waterford.
At the drop of a hat she would come down to a meal there.
She was loved by the staff and I think in perfect agreement with the idea of feeding people being a wonderful way to make your living.

Two things happened to her in the last year of her life.
One was that her replaced hip was causing her so much trouble that they decided to replace the replacement.
The other was that she had a minor prang in her car, which meant, we discovered, that she would not be reinsured the following year.
None of us had the courage to tell her this.
Without her independence my mothers life would not have been worth living.
In the end, she never knew, her stay in hospital proved to be her undoing, she succumbed to the hospital bug and died without ever going home.
She is hugely missed.

Just after she died I wrote a poem in her memory.

Once Frances

Once Frances
Once Mum
Once Granny.

I have been doing crosswords almost since I learned to read and write.
They have always been a feature in our house.
My father spent every evening he was at home sitting on one side of the fire doing the crossword in the Daily Telegraph with my mother on the other side of the fire with a tatty and dilapidated Chambers dictionary looking through this for the solutions with which he was stuck.
(My mother I now see acted exactly as the modern electronic “Crossword Solver” does.)
These were the most peaceful and happy times in the Dwyer household and the times of the best memories.
Dad by the fire and doing crosswords was not on one of his frequent benders.

Underneath the cryptic crossword in the Telegraph was a simple one, pretty soon Dad would pass this on to me, very likely to shut me up, and as time went on I began to get some of the clues out.
I have a very strong memory of one of the first ones I solved.
The solution was for a 10 letter word, the clue a cryptic:
B-O-U-N-D.. I remember looking at it in total mystification, why on earth would they want me to spell bound?
It was of course as I said it to myself that the penny dropped.
The solution was spellbound.
I remember I laughed out loud, captivated by the compiler’s visual pun.
I was hooked.
I have been doing crosswords all the time since then.
All the way through college I used to buy the Irish Times, and I am ashamed to say open it first at the back page to do the Simplex and then as my technique improved, the more difficult Crosaire.
A particular favourite soon emerged, Everyman in the Observer, this I have done with amazing regularity for about the last thirty years.

As someone who spends times doing crosswords I have had to search to find some justification for this really fairly time wasting activity.
I regard Crosswords as mental gymnastics.
They are push ups and mental callisthenics for our sluggish and under-utilised brains.
This was just a theory of mine until lightning, in the form of a brain haemorrhage struck me.
After a few weeks of drama when I was very ill, life began to get back into its natural rhythms and I headed off to get the Observer again.
I picked up the crossword only to discover that I was totally unable to work out a single clue.
I was horrified, I suddenly began to realise that I was not the person I had been before, in fact the illness had destroyed so much of my brain that I was not at all as bright as I used to be.
After much initial upset I decided to come back fighting.

I had a strong memory of reading a long article about Patricia Neal, an actress very much in her prime being struck down by a stroke.
Her husband, the author Roald Dahl, being faced with a woman little better than a vegetable, decided to do something about it.
He was aware that we only use about 10% of our brains in our ordinary life, after brain injury we need to employ some of that unused capacity to compensate for the parts damaged in a stroke.
He consequently set up a very intense programme to retrain Patricia , as far as I remember this even meant re-teaching her how to walk, and to everyone’s amazement he was largely successful.

So there was I with only one skill, and that a fairly minor one lost during my illness. Surely I told myself I could get this back.
So I continued to buy the Observer each Sunday.
I would keep the untouched crossword until the following week and then try to work the crossword out backwards from the solution.
After some weeks the clues began to get possible and after about six months I was back where I was before, managing to get the whole crossword out most weeks.
This was a huge relief and a very important factor in my eventual complete recovery.

A couple of years later I was doing some voluntary work with “Headway” a society which offered help to those who had suffered brain injury.
We had a brain consultant over from London to talk to us and she asked us about our own experiences.
Somewhat shamefacedly, because it seemed so trivial, I told her my crossword story.

Her reaction amazed me.
My technique of retraining my brain was exactly being used, even down to using crosswords as the tool for this training, in her clinic in London.
My exercise was textbook perfect in recapturing my lost skill, and very likely in the process I relearned many skills that had been lost while I was suffering the initial brain trauma.

Some years after this I remember reading an article by Nuala O Faoilean in which she said that of all activities she thought that doing crosswords was the greatest, and most unproductive time waster.

Ah Nuala, You’re wrong, where would I be without them!

The first problem with Eileen is one of job description.
She had started off her life with us as a nanny, stayed on when us children got bigger to be a sort of child minder then even with us all grown up and most of us gone she was still in Tree Tops as a sort of housekeeper.
To all of us she was a sort of second mother, and often in fact a first mother should the truth be known.
She came to us first at the age of fourteen when my brother George was a baby, it must have been in the early ninteen forties, she was purloined from a neighbours, the O Flynns, but she can’t have been there long.
Her home was in north county Cork.
Glen Collins, Ballydesmond, Mallow Co. Cork.
The address mantra still slips easily off my pen because Eileen used to talk about her home so much.
She was one of six children, Dan the eldest had gone to the states, had his own life and family over there and worked as a prison warder.
Sheila was sent for a nun and despite escaping over the wall home several times, and then sent back, she had eventually stuck in the convent and was then in Australia.
The two other brothers Sean and Dennis, ran the farm in Ballydesmond and Kathleen, younger but closest to Eileen was in service in America.

By the time I came along Eileen’s place in the family was altogether established.
She ruled the kitchen area, often being the commander of two or three parlour maids, a transient breed who came and went rapidly, most of them country girls who “lived in” in the “back room”, the only room in our narrow house which was lit by a north facing window.
Her domain was the kitchen, there even my mother had to play second fiddle when she entered Eileen’s territory to make jams or cakes.
She also usually ate with us, in what we called “the breakfast room” as distinct from “the dining room” where my mother and father ate in rather more style.
When my mother was away she was in total charge, ruled the whole roost, including the various gardeners, whom she fed, and especially of the seven of us whom she adored to a man.
To me Eileen’s love was as unstinting and as unequivocal as any mother’s. I was without doubt the favourite,( then the youngest often is,) the best tease line was when I had been victor of what my siblings saw as yet another miscarriage of justice.
Then was chanted;

Eileen’s ball of fluff
He never has enough
Except when he’s stuffed up
He’s Eileen’s ball of fluff !

Not exactly Shakespeare but it usually did the job to enrage me, and to bring further punishment down on the heads of the chanters should Eileen hear it.
Despite this partisanship I think that all of the family returned Eileen’s love.
That the devotion was that of a mother was plain for us all to see.

When I started school I was petrified of getting the bus home on my own.
There was perfectly sane reason to this, I was extremely short sighted and couldn’t read the numbers of the bus, but this wasn’t discovered until many years later.
On an early attempt I had got the Mayfield bus instead of the Tivoli one and can still feel the cold grip of terror as the bus started up Summerhill to places unknown and I had to leave the bus, sobbing and frightened to walk the two miles home, the fare given to the wrong conductor.
(Being a “ball of fluff” did make me 100% wimp!)
Eileen’s solution to this new terror in my life was simple.
Every day she came in to town on an earlier bus and was waiting at the bus stop at the Coliseum when I came out of school to escort me home.
Eventually as I began to recognise other boys getting the same bus I was prepared to risk getting the right one home but even then for a long time she used to walk the half mile down the hill to meet me and walk me the last bit home.
I was, as they used to say in Cork; “Rooned”

Eileen used to talk about her home a lot and about “the boys” as the two brothers were known.
She was still the official woman of the house there, so had responsibility for the décor when “The Stations” hit the house every couple of years.
Then there was pure panic as Eileen used to get extra leave to head down to Ballydesmond and repaint the whole house, scour and clear out the dirt of the brothers , put up new curtains and generally put on the best face for the neighbours.

Eileen’s young sister Kathleen was doing well in America, service was obviously far better paid over there.
She had always been a bit more flighty and indeed glamorous than Eileen.
I remember Eileen telling me how Kathleen used to hide close to the neighbours house on May day and then rush out before her to wash her face in the dew, the tradition being that the first to do so would achieve beauty.
When I was about nine I came out of school one day and there with Eileen was a woman of incredible glamour.
She was, I remember, dressed all in powder blue with a hat and veil exactly the same colour as her costume and a short fur coat flung casually over her shoulders.
Kathleen had come on a visit.
She turned out to be just as kind as her sisters and from that day there was always individual parcels for me in the larger “parcel from America” when it arrived just before Christmas.

Tragically Kathleen was to arrive home again a couple of years later, this time dying of cancer, she stayed in Tree Tops for some time, weak and feeble but still cheerful, before her death.
This turned out to be an exact dress rehearsal for Eileen’s own death some years later.
As we all grew up and started to bring boyfriends and girlfriends home they would have to be passed fit by Eileen before any continuation was assured.
My first serious girl friend, Noreen, was so loved by Eileen that when I eventually broke it off with her she cried for three days in the kitchen.
That was in fact the measure of the woman.
Just as she became a second mother to us she loved us as her own.
We became her family.

She died exactly the same way as her sister in 1973.
I remember my now brother in law telling me that there was a phone call from home to say Eileen had died.
I remember his horror as I burst into tears in his face.

We called our second daughter after Eileen.
I’m sorry she isn’t here to watch my children grow up.
She would have loved them like her own.

OK this is an unashmed plug.
Furthermore I have to declare an interest.
This concert will be performed by Sile’s choir Madrigallery on Saturday April 1st in the Good Shepherd Chapel in Waterford.
Not only will you be granted the privilage of hearing Sile’s stunning choir singing but also the unusual sight of me on stage with them.
Not singing I am delighted to report, but acting as master of ceremonies.
Try and get there if you can.

The good daughter has organised to have me receiving statistics from www.statcounter.com.
This gives me all sorts of information of who is reading my words.
It also is quite specific on where my readers are and what individual recipes they are downloading from my recipe pages.

It gives me quite a thrill to know that someone in Brighton could be eating “Aonghus’s Falafels ” tonight , while someone in Barcelona is contemplating making my “Orange and Almond Cake” tomorrow, and even now (it is day there after all) someone in New South Wales may be putting my “Pippin Tart” into the oven.

Bon Appetit to you all.

Oh The Joys of the Global Village!!

A friend of ours, Maura, was in Belfast getting her hair done in a hairdresser..
She would be of a ( rough ) age as myself, call it early fifties.
When she emerged from the dryer the hairdresser said; (in Full Belfast )
My God, you look just like Ma Gran!

Maura was not pleased.
This girl was in her twenties,
her Gran would be at least 10 years older than Maura.
That was not the effect one wanted to achieve in a hairdressers.

At this the girl went to call over her assistant and said;
“Doesn’t she look just like Ma Gran!”

“She does !” enthused the assistant and looked at Maura for approval.

“You are the living image of Meg Ryan ! “