One year and two days and 151 entries ago, with huge help from my daughter Caitriona, on the 26th February 2005 I started writing these pieces.
(They are all here, if you click on “Words Archives” at the top of the page.)
It was intended at the begining to be mainly a foodie piece with recipes and stuff, but by about the third entry it had totally lost its way, this was further compounded by my getting a digital camera and since then my so called words piece has been a rag bag of pieces about my past, photographs of my travels, a handy and occasional soap-box, and a chance for me to pontificate (without the interference of any editor) on my favourite topics ; Family, Food, France, Glass and Words.

It is terrific fun.
My work in the kitchen for the previous 34 years of my life while certainly involving the brain did not involve me in any literary efforts.

One positive aspect has been that my ever loyal brothers and sisters have started to read my stuff, and have themselves been spurred on by my efforts to lift their own pens.
A book is now on the way of a history of our family in Cork.

Who knows, maybe I have awakened a sleeping dragon.

Go mbeirimid beo ar an am seo arís.

For the last three or four months I have been given an additional (honorary) job by WLR as well as my cookery piece.
This is a book review, once a fortnight I am asked to review some current work of (usually Irish) non-fiction which we then discuss in the studio.
Up to this the books haven’t been exactly mind blowing, I found Colin Farrell’s biography a little underwhelming, The Mind Gym, a load of old cobblers, Sharon Osborne’s life was perhaps the most interesting because she is totally dishonest and a little careful examination of her attempts to show herself always the victim proved her to have been anything but.
Another interesting book I had to review was called Does Anything Eat Wasps, this taken from the correspondence of the New Scientist , related some of the fascinating questions asked of their readers over the years.
Unfortunately whereas most of the questions were riveting, most of the answers, to a layman like myself, were dull as stock market listings.

This weeks effort was without doubt the best so far.

This is a real attempt by one of Irelands up and coming media Gurus to give some explanation of the amazing changes which have happened in Ireland in the last 15 to 20 years, or as he would have it, since the advent of the arrival of John Paul in Ireland and today.

He rightly points that as we left our third world economies behind most of us saw our progress as towards a sound socialist template rather like Denmark.
However he demonstrates that it is not Denmark but Denver that we have arrived at in the beginning of the 21st century.

Mc Williams makes his points well, he talks of the Wonderbra effect as we are all being lifted upwards and closer together, He talks of our new emerging middle class as Kells Angels living in Deckland, and of our new intelligentsia as being Hi-Cos or Hibernian Cosmopolitans.
It is with these very cutsie nicknames that he loses me.

Bright and all as Mc Williams is (and there is no doubting his economic training) his Peter York(responsible for inventing the Sloane Ranger) style of nomenclature grates very quickly.

He also, I think gets a little carried away with his own cleverness and ends up satirising all of modern Ireland without permitting even himself a ditch to sit on.
Satire without some positive pointers becomes self defeating.

It is still an important book, the first of an attempt to discover why and from where came our new found rating as one of the wealthiest nations in the world, and the effect which this is having on us.

David Mc Williams

The next day of our trip we designated as a day free from looking at houses
and we went up to Mirepeisset to see our frient Petra Carter who moved out, lock and stock from Mount Pleasant in Dublin about a year ago.
Petra is hoping to set up a cookery and art school there and was just ready, all reconstruction done when she discovered the dread termites were eating their way through all her woodwork.
Fortunately in French law this is a problem for the vendor rather than the purchaser but it has certainly set Petra and her plans back by a year or so.

Our way down to Mirepeisset was along the Canal de Midi, a most glorious tree lined stretch of water.
We stopped briefly at the Oppidum d’Enserune, a pre Roman and Roman Site.
Again you cn see here, as you can in the Pont de Gard in Provence, the amazing engineering skills of the Romans.

This is the old site of the Montady lake, a reservoir
which they meticulously constructed using radiating
canals to drain in the centre and then feed by acquaduct
under the hill to the Capestang Lake to water the whole area.

The Canal de Midi passes under the Oppidum on its way.

It’s tree lined sides and meandering course make it a
fabulous way of slowly exploring this part of France, as
Rick Stein discovered on television last summer.

After we met Petra we went walking down the
canal, its bridges and buildings really conspire
to make it the lovliest one I have seen.

The following day was back to house hunting

This house in l’Herault was too near the road.

This one in Tressan had a good Chemineé

And a wonderful view, just had too much of its
space given over to an unconvertable wine cave.

This one in Montagnac was, in fact, the best house
we saw, huge and full of late 18th century features.
But at this stage we had decided that we definitely
wanted a place in the country.

So no go.

To console ourselves we went into the museum in Pezenas

Where we met our old friend St Roch, still flashing his thigh.

And I took a photo of myself in a beautiful mirror.

And a picture of two cheeky dancers at a Ballo in Maschera

And these two ladies being warm to each other

And of Sile looking totally at home in this Palace

And of this amazing red Marble on a fire place.

All these,I took, in the solitude of being the only people
in the museum in February and before I saw the
notice on the ticket saying Strictly no Photographs

The next day was the last day and we celebrated by
having a lunch out.
On Petra’s recommendation we tried a restaurant, in Bouzigues,
most unpresupposing on the outside, called
Le Jardin de la Mer
We had a great lunch, including Oysters, Mussels and Cuttlefish,
three courses of excellent fish for €18.50.
AND on the terrace, in February!
Bliss!

That should have been it really but with us of course it wasn’t.

Passage to Stanstead was event free this time.
In Stanstead we met , in total surprise, Sile’s brother Brian and his wife Beth.
They were also coming back from a house hunting trip.
In their case it was to Brittany, and successful.

We were especially glad to have met them when we got to the long term park on our way home.
Our car, under a solid inch of ice, refused point blank to start.
We managed to contact Brian and Beth, still in the car park and so, once again tragedy was averted.
We were whisked by heated Volvo to a warm bed in Skerries and in the morning back to the airport whene the Volvo and some jump leads made short work of our cars reluctance and we were able to head off on the road home.
We do have disasters, but we do manage to have great luck getting out of them!

And so at last we got to Languedoc.

Our house in the town of Marseillan was a classic
town house and very comfortable.
The owners had sensibly sacrificed one
of their rooms to create an upstairs terrace
which we were able to use even in February.

Then we started to look at property.
The first few were large enough but fairly grotty

Going from one property to another we followed
a sign to an old Roman bridge

Which had next to it a mill which had been
running since Roman times, incredible!

Nearby we found the fishing and fish farming village
of Bouzigues

This is a shot of the Bassin de Thau which was
full of Oyster and Mussel farms.

The following day we went 150 klms north to St Affrique to see the “Dream House”.
It had been just sold.

Serious Bummer.

The Auctioneer drove us another 50 odd klms into the wilderness,
(called Les Pays de l’Enfant Sauvage,and I have yet to find out why) through the snow.

To see another incredible property.
This was a huge farm stead with roots going back to the middle ages.

Even the outhouses were stately

The lanes at the back had come straight out of a medieval film set

But it was just madness.
The barn alone would have been enough for us!
And it was way too far off the beaten track.

We strolled through St Affrique afterwards I saw how they sold paint here.
Separate pigments to mix yourselves.
Great.

As I promised the last day I blogged we were headed off to dip our toes into the property pool in France last week.
In the Dwyer Travel Agenda things seldom work out as planned.
This trip was no exception.
We were to fly to Stanstead and then on to Montpellier, hire a car there then proceed down to a house we had rented for the week in Marseillan, a little fishing town on the Mediterranean.
We boarded the Ryan Air flight in Dublin, hopes and expectations high on Saturday morning. We had plenty of time in hand to brave the queues of Stanstead and make out 3.30 flight to Montpellier.
As soon as we went to go through immigration in Stanstead Sile realised that she had no longer got her passport.
She had put it in the pocket of her jacket which I had put into the overhead locker.
It had to have fallen out in transit.
The Ryan Air people in the airport didn’t hold much hope of us getting it during the 25 minute “turn around” time (they didn’t) and they couldn’t let us continue on our flight without one so we were faced with no chance of proceeding before Monday morning with either a new passport or a found one.
So we had an unexpected 48 hours in London.
I was I confess all for going home.
Sile was the one who decided that we should tough it out.
We bought a copy of the “Time Out” London guide in the bookshop, booked into a hotel in Bayswater (all London districts have a certain raffish sound) and headed, reluctantly into the huge smoke.

It wasn’t too bad at all.

The hotel, The Garden Court Hotel in Kensington Gardens was clean, welcoming and sympathetic to our plight, and (unusually for London) included a buffet breakfast in the reasonable charge of £46 per person per night.
We ate very well, again thanks to “Time Out” in a place called the Cow Dining Room in Westbourne Park. I had the very best Seakale(unexpectedly but very successfully served with Chanterelles) that I have eaten since I had cooked them myself in Snaffles.

Round One to London.

Unfortunately my cousin Vicki and her husband Rhod were in the states (as we later discovered) so we were left to our own devices on the Sunday.
I had a memory of Mary Boydell telling me that there was an excellent glass collection of glass in the Victoria and Albert.
Here was an excellent opportunity to find out.

There is.
Round Two to London.

Here are a few of the delights that I photographed there

These beauties from Persia were assumed by
the Victorians to have been used by the daughters
of the Shah to gather their tears. They do have a
certain long necked and very feminine mystery to
them that makes that thought understandable.
Nowadays they are thought to have been bottles
from which to sprinkle perfume into rooms.

I miss the Victorian idea.

There were of course numerous examples of wine
and beer glasses from 17th and 18th century England,
beautiful and simple enough to make my pulses race

Some good examples of both Waterford and Cork Glass

And some wonderful modern pieces

Including this witty piece called; Half Full or Half Empty?

I loved the stained glass

This was by one of the Pre-Raphaelites
(I should have made notes!)

But the lovely thing about the V and A was that all
of the details were beautiful, I got a quick glance
into a reading room

And through a window into the garden

And all this for free!
On the way out of the Museum (We decided that to
do one section well was enough) we passed by
the textiles section

This beautiful tapestry I am sure I have seen used for
the cover of a book somewhere.
And I also took a shot of the model of the façade of
the Cathedral in Compostella to give to our friend Finola
as a “Scallop Shell” for the pilgrimage she is taking at Easter

Then it was on for a flying visit to the Tate, again free.

I thought the Alison Lapper sculpture looked great on
Tralfalgar Square (as did the bird on her knee)

This time as well we knew that there were two
artists we wanted to see a “live” picture of.

Piero Della Francesca,

I had too see his “Baptism of Christ” having loved so
many of his pictures when I was in Tuscany

And this particular Vermeer,
Lady with a Balance, is just one of my
all time favourites.

After all this culture we headed to the cinema and finally caught up with Brokeback Mountain, as yet unseen in Waterford, which we loved.

The following morning we queued in the Irish passport office (opposite Harrods) for a passport for Sile, which she didn’t need at the end as Ryan Air did eventually manage to find the other one, and to sell us new tickets to Montpellier (for another £360) and disgraced themselves by demanding a “finders fee” of £5 for the passport.
So 48 hours later we were on our way.
But London, to give it its due, had turned up trumps.

It must be about six months ago when I found this house for sale on the internet.
It is somewhere in the Tarn, near St Affrique and I thing looks stunning.
As we are going to France next week, with the intention of looking at some house (just to test the water,) I contacted the auctioneers who had this house and unbelievably, or perhaps ominously, it is still for sale.
We have made an appointment to view it next Wednesday.
It is over budget, in the wrong area and since it has been on the market for ages probably has all sorts of things wrong with it.
Just like my sort of place in fact.

This is one of my favourite photos of France, but like most of my favourite of my own photographs its best effects were accidental.
In this case I love the delicate tracery of the wrought iron work and the serendipitous reflection of the Provencal roof on the open window.
The fact that the men were playing boules in the shade, the women in the sun.
All unobserved when I took the photograph.

We stayed in the same house in Rasteau in Provence for two years, 2002 and 2003.It was beautifully situated with windows out on to the square of this very pretty wine village and yet room in the garden for a pool.
I took this picture of boule players out our bedroom window one afternoon in 2002.
It is a very French scene and I framed a copy which we have kept on the mantelpiece for years, I think the breath of the warm south which it exhaled kept us going through the winters.
We made friends with the Augiers, Marie-Jo and Jean, who live in the village and in 2004 they came to Ireland on holidays and came to see us.
The minute Marie-Jo saw the picture on the mantelpiece she said
“That’s Jean! I recognise his t-shirt”
And indeed it is.
So a precious picture became even more personal.

Commercial:
The house in Rasteau is still for rent by Kevin Aylott
see it at:
www.cheznous.co.uk
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In April of 1974 Sile and I decided that we would head off to work in France for a time, I really wanted to add some French experience to my culinary CV and having at that stage worked in Ireland for a few years we wanted to experience “abroad” before we settled down.
Where to go or how to set about getting a job in a kitchen in France being a total mystery to us, I decided to write to the three cookery writers I revered to get some advice.
So the three culinary goddesses of that time; Elizabeth David, Margaret Costa and Theodora FitzGibbon were duly canvassed.
All, God Bless Them, replied.

Theodora’s answer was perhaps the most useful.
She suggested contacting Mme Graves in Ballyllickey House Hotel, who, as a member of the Relais de Campagne group, could put us in touch with their central office in Paris which might have an employment section.
We did, and they had and that was how we inded up working in the Chateau de Teildras in Anjou.
Margaret Costas advice was to look for a job with her husband in Laceys in London, this I also did, much later, and even ended up working there, if only for one night!
Elizabeth David’s advice, basically to contact my local catering college, was perhaps the least useful but her’s is the letter I treasure most.
That she took the time to write at all was very moving.
Here is her letter,which I still have (as indeed I still have the other two) and no, it is not for sale.

When I heard that Glanbia was closing its Kilmeaden Cheese Plant and going to move all production to Kilkenny I was horrified.
Kilmeaden, marketed with a certain amount of justification, as the “Fillet of Cheddar” is an extremely impressive product.
In my youth the only “cheese” which was produced and available in Ireland was the over-processed, rubbery and tasteless “Golden Vale”or the same in white “Calvita”.

When Veronica Steele started to produce her “Mileens” in the late seventies she started a revolution in the cottage cheese industry in this country (and indeed she initiated a similar revolution in England and even America)
The creameries weren’t slow to see that there was now created a market for a quality cheese product and quite a few did manage to come up with the goods.
Our own local effort was “Kilmeaden”
These things don’t come easily and it was the product of many years of research and development and most importantly co-operation between the cheese makers and the local farmers .
That they have succeeded in producing an unique quality product is evident from not only the higher price they are able to demand (over four times that of standard commodity cheese) but also in their prize winning ability, winning Gold and Bronze at the world cheese awards in 2005.

As the French have known for centuries a successful food product is always integrally linked to the area in which it is made.
They call this a product’s Terroir.
Glanbia have refused to believe in this concept.
In 1998 they moved the production of Kilmeaden to Ballyragget in Kilkenny, there, even when using the Kilmeaden cheese makers, they discovered that they couldn’t replicate the quality of Kilmeaden.
They haven’t learned from that.

When I heard that the creamery was moving I made an impassioned plea for its retention on my food slot in the local radio station WLR.
My points were that there is no way the French would permit shifting the production of its Roquefort to -, for instance- Toulouse, or that the Italians would happily up sticks and start producing Parmesan in Naples.
There are so many reasons why these products have developed their unique character in their own Terroir.

As a result of my piece on WLR I was asked by a farmer friend of mine to speak to the Minister of Agriculture should they persuade her to visit.
Today was the day she was persuaded to attend a meeting of the various people who were interested in some way retaining Kilmeaden as a viable creamery and I dutifully attended.

Not quite dutifully as it turned out.
Due to nothing except my own profound stupidity I got the time wrong and was ushered into a meeting which was well under way.
Far from being a casual “come and have a chat with the minister” occasion it turned out to be a fairly formal board meeting with not only the Minister of Agriculture, Mary Coughlan, present but also our own Martin Cullen, Minister of Transport, Senator Brendan Keneally, the head of Enterprise Ireland and a director of Bord Bia among various luminaries.
I had hardly sat down when the chairman asked “The Late Comer-chef Martin Dwyer” to say a few words.
Thank the lord I was sufficiently together to speak, and I think (says he modestly) I spoke quite well.
I made the points I had made on the radio but also managed to make some about product integrity and uniqueness that made sense.
I won’t say I sat down to universal applause but both Ministers referred to my input as they summed up, and, both the chairman, and Martin Cullen shook my hand to thank me after the meeting.
So there the matter stands, both ministers were off to see the Board of Glanbia, armed with all that was said at the meeting.
It would be my hope that if Glanbia don’t see their way to reopen the plant at least they might release the name Kilmeaden to another cheese producer in Kilmeaden itself and so permit a product which has achieved not only national but international recognition to survive.

There aren’t sufficient food names of quality in Ireland that we can afford to let any of them die.

I have been aware since my youth that we did possess at least one ancestor of which my mother and my maternal grandmother were particularly proud.
John Francis Maguire, who flourished at the latter half of the nineteenth century, was the same Granny’s grandfather and therefore my great-great grandfather.
Among his many claims to fame were that he founded the Cork (now Irish) Examiner. (I remember my Granny telling me that he would get someone to row out to the Transatlantic Liners in Queenstown, as it was then, to get the latest news from America, then telegraph it on to London to be the first there with the news.)
He also stood as an MP for the city of Cork, served on many occasions as Lord Mayor for that city, but, principally he earned his place in history by writing many learned books on politics and history.
His book on Rome so pleased the Vatican that he was awarded a Papal Knighthood by the Pope. His book on the Irish in America was obviously a seminal work in that field and now has been preserved on line.
Two recently learned facts about the man have fascinated me.
One was that he also wrote fairy stories for children, one of which called Prince Marigold and Other Stories I am trying to locate, the other was that he was pictured by the cartoonist “Spy” for Vanity Fair in 1872.
This I discovered, too late for purchase, on a link into Ebay.
But my luck has returned because I found the cartoon in an on-line antique print specialist in Canada, managed to buy it and it arrived this morning.
So at last I am able to look at the illustrious man himself.

Not very flattering is it?
Well it is a caricature.
Labelled, rather sardonically “A Home Ruler” the print is dated March 23rd 1872.
I am delighted, as I know of no other extant picture, to be able to see the man at last.
I am even more delighted to see the strong family resemblance.

There is no denying my Great grandmother, Mary Maguire Harding (his daughter)’s nose and chin

Nor her daughter, Josephine Harding Daly, (on the left below) my grandmother’s similar features.

Indeed the man must have had a particularly strong set of genes as I could name several first cousins with the same features (But won’t!)

So 135 years later, nice to see you Great Great Granda!

Post Script on February 3rd 2006

It was not the only extant picture of the illustrious forebear as I discovered when I opened todays post.
My brother Ted has managed to unearth another of John Francis all dickied out as Lord mayor of Cork.

No oil painting is he?
In fact the Spy cartoon wasn’t so unflattering after all.