This week I had to preside as Comissioner General for the first time on our Annual General Meeting.
It was held in the Wine Port Hotel in Glasson County Westmeath.
The Chef, Fergal O Donnell is a comissioner of Euro-Toques and the owners, Jane and Ray Byrne are old friends.

As Sile wasn’t able to join us until Monday evening, Myrtle Allen, driven by her daughter- in- law Hazel, offered to give me a lift up to the hotel.

This meant I had the pleasure of having one of Myrtle’s delicious Ballymaloe picnics on the top of the Vee Gap on the way up

On the Vee I saw this rag decorated Hawthorn bush near a holy well, this must be a fairly universal supplication to the gods and, although claimed by the church, is certainly pre christian survival.

We also called in to see Keith and Helen Lamb who Euro-Toques gave one of our Food Awards to a few years ago for his work in propogating Cranberries.

He showed us his Nepalese Daphne, beautifully scented,

And some of his hundreds of different types of Snowdrop.

The Wine Port itself was a relevation.
It sits on top of the water, beautifully designed , all wood and glass, with even the toys for the children, all in wood of course, looking like they had been designed for the place.
The food was excellent.

The following morning the lake outside my window was covered in thick fog.

But as it cleared the wonderful peacful lapping of lakewater was Yeatsian
in its calmness.

We were even resolved to try the hot tub on Tuesday morning but fluncked it.

The AGM itself went fine, which was a great relief.

We went through all the usual manoeuvres and lived.
I had decided on a mission statement last year of trying to persuade our children to return to eating with the family at table, which we had done a lot of work on during the year.
This year I varied it a little.

My Mission Statement

As I said last year it was the sharing of the hunted meal that is reckoned to be the beginning of civilization.
King James 1 warned his son never to eat alone, lest people think it was for”Private satisfying of your gluttony,which you are ashamed would be publicly seen”
The social act of eating with other people puts moral limits on our consumption.
It creates a beginning and an end of the time to eat.
Social meals define the
When
What
How
How Long
And
The How Much.

You adjusted your comsumption to those who were eating with you.
You didn’t have exactly what YOU wanted
When you wanted it and as much as you wanted.
This marking, ordering and above all limiting of eating has remained intact until recently.
Let us try to insure that as restaurateurs and therefore champions of social dining that it doesn’t die out with this generation.

And there endeth the lesson.

As you will have probably gathered I have been sorting through some old pictures over the last few days. (Thus the last three entries)

This picture of a beautiful girl is of Sile’s Great Grandmother, Teresa Brady, who married in New Ross where the maternal side of Sile’s family came from.
It is a haunting portrait, she looks so wistful, and surely her hair is cut short, unusual in the 1870’s or 80’s when I guess this was taken.
We know very little about her.
On the back of the photo it says Teresa Brady née Archbold.
The photographer was “Lauder Bros.” of 45 Lower Sackville Street Dublin.
We also know that her daughter Winifred married a Kennedy from New Ross who was to become Sile’ grandmother.

But I now know where Sile got her looks.

Baie de Trepasses, Brittany
July 1988

Since I hauled out the photograph of Sile and myself in the last entry
I have been reminded of the strange coincidence we unearthed around the time it was taken.

Sile and I had met in Sion Hill teacher training college in 1971 and had started to go out together in Connemara in the Easter of 1972.
Of course Sile had to come to Cork as soon as possible to meet all the family and friends, she was from Skerries and had beem born and reared in Westmeath, so would never have met these people before.
We went to see my friends Siobhan and Sue Curtis who lived on the Magazine Road in Cork at that time (the last entry photograph of the two of us must have been taken then by one of them in their back garden)
As soon as we were in the sitting room of their house Sile spotted this photograph of Sue and Siobhan’s parents wedding on the mantlepiece over the fire.

Something about it obviously intrigued her as she stood up for a closer look. She had recognised her mother in the photograph!

Sile was quite correct , her mother was not just at the wedding but had acted as chief bridesmaid.
Sile’s parents and the Curtis parents had been friends in the forties but had lost touch over the years.
Madge Curtis (better known to the people of Cork as “Maeve” the woman’s editor of the Cork Examiner) had been on holiday in Glengarrif with Sile’s mother when she had met Tony Curtis, the groom in the wedding photo.
The two ladies had taken photographs of each other on their bikes on that holiday and we found these recently when looking through old photos in Sile’s parents house in Skerries.
This is the one of Sile’s Mum

And this of Madge Curtis

Small world isn’t it!

Our friend Mary Dorgan gave us a Christmas present of this Camellia, called Wisley White, from Mount Congreve. I managed to photograph it this morning while there was still some dew on it.

Helping to organise a “Friggers” exhibition in Waterford in 2003 was a project I was proud to have been associated with, and one I enjoyed immensely.
I was at that stage a fairly novice member of the Glass Society so my involvement was just a question of being in the right place at the right time.
I was also asked to give the opening introduction speech and, as I still have a copy of this, and it is self explanatory, I will quote most of it and illustrate where appropiate with some photos which my daughter Caitriona took of the exhibits.

This is the original Programme
As you can see we were fortunate to have Miroslav Havel, the father of Waterford Crystal, to open the exhibition.

Waterford Friggers Exhibition
(My introductory speech)

When Una Parsons told me, about six months ago, that the glass society of Ireland-on a suggestion by Roisin de Buitleir- were going to put on an exhibition of “Friggers” in the Waterford Museum of Treasures, I must confess to feeling some surprise that -even in this permissive age-such people were going to be celebrated.
The Oxford dictionary soon however put me right.The second given meaning of Friggers are those pieces of “end of day” glass made in their own time by workers using up the left over molten glass from the furnaces or the scraps or off cuts of other pieces. There is a long tradition of making friggers and they were made in the 18th and 19th centuries in nearly every glassmaking district. Certain objects seem to have been universally popular as friggers,possibly because the factory product gave a jumping off ground for their production. In Waterford the more popular pieces included fish, swans,walking sticks, baskets and many more.
Three of us then got together to organise this exhibition of Friggers.The indefatigable Una Parsons was to be our chief whip. Eamonn Hartley,who had just recently retired as an engraver in Waterford Crystal to set up an independent business on his own,provided many of his own friggers for the exhibition as well as being an invaluable lifeline to the frigger makers of the crystal factory.My own contributions were to be a fish,which my wife, a teacher, had been given by a pupil one Christmas,

a milk bottle with a cut base which had been delivered with milk in one morning

These were practice pieces, young apprentices would try their hand at cutting on milk bottles, much to the annoyance of Snowcream, the local dairy!

and a mysterious glass rod,
purchased in a junk shop in Virginia County Cavan last June.

( from a darner or a slicker stone?)
since revealed to be a Confiseurs Rolling Pin by the good auspices of the Ulster Museum, and therefore not a frigger at all!

We decided that to gather the Friggers we should have an “Antiques Roadshow” event and invite people to show us their friggers and to select some for exhibition. Our main job then was to crank the publicity machine into action to make sure we got a good attendance at the roadshow.In this of course we knew we were going to be helped enormously by the ambiguity of the word frigger.We were also helped, if inadvertently, by the compilers of the programme for the fringe of the Waterford Light Opera Festival. They included us as an exhibition “organised by the Waterford Friggers” and in a moment gave our little group a name!
I introduced the “Frigger” on our local radio station here in Waterford in the begining of the August. I just asked “What is a frigger” and offered a prize for the correct answer, the only clue was “most of you will have one at home”. The reaction was amazing!It appears that a lot of Waterford people have the most astounding things at home, the best answer was unfortunately unprintible,
(This was by a lady who phoned me and said she”thought it was something of a sexual nature”)
but quite a few got it correct.

This started the ball rolling, we got a lot of coverage from the local press and posted the town with bills saying “Have you got a Frigger in your house”,but we still faced our “Frigger Roadshow” on August 26th in Dooleys Hotel with much trepidation. Were we going to get absolutely no-one in? Were we just going to get hundreds of walking sticks, fish and swans? (Waterford artist Ben Hennessy tells how, on the way home from school, he and his friends used to compete to see who could spot the most swans/fish/walking sticks in the windows of Ballytruckle)
We of course had no cause for concern. Waterford excelled itself and the quality of pieces which which were brought in on that day was a revelation.
People arrived with suitcases of masterpieces which they shyly showed to us. I use the word masterpiece very deliberately, as this is exactly what they are. Products, in some cases, of many years work by skilled master craftsmen whose great creativity was perhaps not sufficiently challanged by their work in the factory, the variety and ingenuity of the way these people had put together their peices was breathtaking.
We were told how the fish were an extension of a vase form, how one frigger started off as a fish, got pot bellied and became a grecian blue and white jug, how an off cut from the wings of an American eagle became a delightful pot-pourri bowl with a humming bird perched on its rim.
We were shown a piece of cullet whose naturally occurring bubbles gave the idea for an engraving of a school of dolphins, and another piece of glass when the bubbles became the holes in a block of cheese)

This by artist Greg Sullivan was awarded 2nd place by Mary Boydell

(in this case made even more interesting by the engraving of a mouse in one of the holes)

A heart love token (made from the stem and base of a drinking glass)was presented by a lady who wasn’t prepared to tell us anything of it’s history

This beautiful “Swan In Flight” by Henry Moloney was , justifiably given 1st Prize

and a wonderful prism into which had been cleverly engraved a hot air balloon,

One of several great pieces by Eamonn Hartley

And this was only the recent stuff!
Miroslav Havel himself was kind enough to send us some early Czech friggers and some examples of pre- production glasses,including an elegant piece of soda glass called Carnival,which was cut and painted with coloured glass clowns ,made before the factory had even started.

Vivienne Keane brought in a charming and delicately blushing pink pig which came from the 40s or 50s

Given 3rd Prize by Mary, this afterwards made it to the cover of Gloine, the glass society journal

but our one possibility of a frigger from the first incarnation of “Waterford Glass” came in the shape of a walking stick. This was brought all the way from Wicklow by a gentleman who’s grandmother had come from Mullinavat and whose walking stick’s pale green tint revealed it as bottle glass and to definitely pre date modern Waterford Crystal.

These levels of recognition and skills in dating could only have come from one person. We were privileged to have Mary Boydell as our judge for the day.As well as judging the friggers to go to the exhibition, and the prizes for the most interesting, Mary had to act as an unofficial, one woman Antiques Roadshow of Glass as word got around Waterford that she was in town and people started arriving with all sorts of glass for her to identify. This she did with great tact and erudition and I confess that when I got her to my restaurant that night I likewise kept proffering pieces for identification.
We had got ourselves some T shirts with the logo; “I am a Waterford Frigger”printed on them and in an official ceremony at the end of the roadshow we elected Mary to our society and presented her with the T shirt which she promised to wear at her next cocktail party.
Perhaps the whole day can best be encapsulated by our winner of the most interesting prize for a frigger:
Henry Moloney had to be persuaded to produce his “Swan in Flight” from his bag. He said that he was just “fooling around with some molten glass on a broken off port glass”, he tried to do a swan and “the neck just stretched out, it looked nice so I decided to leave it”.
It’s a beautiful piece which captures the take off of the flight of a swan in an most impressionistic way.
I feel fortunate to have been there when these pieces were shown for the first time.In fact we discovered it was the very first exhibition of Friggers in Ireland.
The next is going to be even more interesting.

So that was my introduction.

Before I gave that, one of my very first pieces of public speaking and I was petrified, I felt it only fair to introduce my self.
I said that I hoped that the people of Waterford wouldn’t be offended by a “Blow In “ of a mere 24 years residence introducing them to their own craft.

The best moment of the day was when I was leaving the exhibition an old retired blower from “The Glass” caught my hand to thank me.
“You are no blow in Martin” he said “Sure you are one of our own”
One one my nicest compliments ever

Sometimes it is necessary to remember that there is life after January.
This photograph was taken in a rented house in Provence in July 1997. It shows my father and mother in law, Con and Sheila and my sister and brother in law, Una and Martin and myself recovering after a long, leisurely and blissfully warm lunch .
The photo was taken by Sile.

I have loved this song of Jacques Brel’s since I first heard it last year and have tried on various occasions to translate it.
Here is the original in French:

Le Plat Pays
Avec la mer du Nord pour dernier terrain vague
Et des vagues de dunes pour arrêter les vagues
Et de vagues rochers que les marées dépassent
Et qui ont à jamais le cœur à marée basse
Avec infiniment de brumes à venir
Avec le vent de l’est écoutez-le tenir
Le plat pays qui est le mien

Avec des cathédrales pour uniques montagnes
Et de noirs clochers comme mâts de cocagne
Où des diables en pierre décrochent les nuages
Avec le fil des jours pour unique voyage
Et des chemins de pluie pour unique bonsoir
Avec le vent d’ouest écoutez-le vouloir
Le plat pays qui est le mien

Avec un ciel si bas qu’un canal s’est perdu
Avec un ciel si bas qu’il fait l’humilité
Avec un ciel si gris qu’un canal s’est pendu
Avec un ciel si gris qu’il faut lui pardonner
Avec le vent du nord qui vient s’écarteler
Avec le vent du nord écoutez-le craquer
Le plat pays qui est le mien

Avec de l’Italie qui descendrait l’Escaut
Avec Frida la Blonde quand elle devient Margot
Quand les fils de novembre nous reviennent en mai
Quand la plaine est fumante et tremble sous juillet
Quand le vent est au rire quand le vent est au blé
Quand le vent est au sud écoutez-le chanter
Le plat pays qui est le mien.

I see it as a love poem which Brel wrote to his native land, and, as a poem it is beautifully written.
It has a wonderful sonorous music with its rolling “Rs” and sibilant “Ss” to suggest the tides and winds which batter Belgium.
When recited aloud or chanted, which is the treatment Brel gives the poem himself in his recordings, it sounds both mellifluous and dark.
It also has a meticulous structure with the four stanzas representing the four winds and the four seasons.

When our book club decided that the next meeting should be that we each pick and recite our favourite poem there was no choice for me but this poem.
The only problem was a suitable translation.
The only English versions which I could find were not at all to my liking so I set about working out my own.
My first attempt was a literal and faithful translation:

The Flat Land

With the north sea as the last abandoned post
The lines of sand dunes stand to break the waves
But still the tide comes in and bares the rocks
Which show their naked blackness to the sea
And then the endless mist drops down
With the east wind , which grasps
The flat land which is my own.

With the tall churches as the only mountains
With black steeples like the masts of ghostly ships
With their stone devils piercing the clouds
And only the turning days to mark their passing,
And only the falling rain to bid them “god speed”
And then the west wind, listen to him steal
The flat land which is my own

With a sky so low that a canal lies hidden
With a sky so low it instils humility
With a sky so grey the canal ceases flowing
With a sky so grey that this must be forgiven
With the North wind which rips us asunder
With the north wind, listen to its whiplash
On the flat land which is my own

Then when Italian warmth falls on the rivers
Winter’s Frieda becomes summer’s Margot
And the beats of November become the rhythms of May
When the land steams and trembles in July
When the wind laughs, when the wind bears fruit
When the wind is in the South listen to it sing
To the flat land which is my own

This was all fine in its way but where was the music which was so integral to Brel’s original?
I decided that I would have to try and sacrifice the literal translation to get back to Brel’s musical rhyme.
This leads to my second version, a bit free, and not a patch on the original but I hope it conveys a little of my admiration for the poem.:

The Flat Land.

With the north sea as the last abandoned post
The lines of sand dunes stand to save the coast
But still the tide comes in and bares the stones
Which show the cold North sea their blackened bones
Then, as the endless mist the land enfolds
Then comes the east wind , the wind that holds
The flat land
Which is my own.

Where tall churches are the only peaks
With black steeples like the ghostly beaks
Of stone devils piercing through the fog
With only the turning days to mark their log
And only the falling rain to bid “god speed”
And then the west wind, listen to his need
Of the flat land
Which is my own

With a sky so low the canals lie hidden
With a sky so low sorrow comes unbidden
With a sky so grey the canals cease flowing
With a sky so grey even this is forgiven
Then comes the North wind which rips all asunder
In comes the north wind , roaring like thunder
On the flat land
Which is my own

And then warm Italy blows up river
And the seeds of November make May quiver
And winter’s Frieda make Junes’s Daisy
Then July is steaming , and trembling and hazy
Then the wind laughs, then the wind is ripe
Then the wind is in the South listen to its pipe
In the flat land
Which is my own

I am conscious that every time we hear about the emergency services in hospitals in this country, that these reports are filled with stories of long delays, violence and overworked unfriendly staff.
I have only once before have had to go to the A & E in Waterford, that was in March in 1991 and, as I was in the process of having a brain haemorrhage at the time, I mercifully can remember none of it.
My wife Sile tells me that they treated me well and whisked me off to Cork University Hospital and ultimately complete recovery.

This morning just as I finished my leisurely breakfast (as a retired restaurateur I am now under very little pressure)I started to do a Sudoku.
Quite suddenly the numbers started to dance and spin before my eyes.
This feeling was similar to that moment when you stand up too suddenly and have a spell of out of focus vision and dizziness.
The only difference was that on this occasion the moment didn’t pass, I went to the door for some fresh air, no change, in fact my vision started to get worse.
I looked up at the clock and realised that I couldn’t read the spinning numbers.
At the same time the back of my head felt as if it was clamped with a band of steel, no pain but total tension.
My mind was suddenly flooded with feelings of awful recognition.
I was sure I was having another brain haemorrhage.
I struggled to the phone, now both dizzy and very scared, tried to look up the number of Sile’s school, the numbers kept spinning out of my vision.
Using every inch of control I could gather I settled on one number, then dialled that before settling on and dialling the others.
I got through and as luck would have Sile was on a break and by the phone and once I said, “I’m having some sort of attack , I can’t see properly” she just said “I’m on my way”
There followed an interminable 20 odd minutes while Sile drove home and I told myself that my chances of recovering from a second insult to the brain were not likely.
Mind you I was aware that there was some differences between this attack and the previous one.
Firstly even though I was feeling some pressure at the back of my head this was nothing like the intense pain I had experienced 15 years ago.
Secondly there had been nothing like this totally distorted vision the last time.

Eventually Sile got home, sure like myself that this was brain haemorrhage number two.
At that stage, to my relief my vision started to marginally improve.
As we were going out to the car to make our way to A & E, I glanced at the phone numbers list, even though my vision was still very blurred and out of focus I could now read the phone numbers with much less difficulty.
Then in the car out to the hospital I started to experience a circular tunnel of clarity in my vision, I discovered that if I looked directly forward I could see the car in front of us very clearly.
Thus was some hope born.
By the time we got to Emergency I was walking on my own even if I was leaning heavily on Sile for balance.

From the first moment I entered A & E I was treated with courtesy, patience gentleness and real concern.
As soon as we had told the checking in nurse something of my symptoms and history I was whisked on to a trolley, examined and questioned by first a nurse then, at much greater length, by a young doctor from Perth who was so considerate and gentle that I was quickly assured that I was in the best possible hands.

As all this was happening my dizziness was abating all the time.
The strange pressure band at the back of my head remained but the blurred images were now just an aura around my peripheral vision.

I began to feel that I was going to live.

My friendly Australian doctor then went off to consult a senior colleague and then said that because of my history they were going to give me a CAT scan to test for any bleeding in the brain.
I was then given a long examination and interrogation by a medical student from Trinidad, again I cannot emphasise strongly enough how polite she was, and how considerate of my comfort.
During all this time, possibly about an hour , I was constantly under observation, being hooked up all the usual ER type monitors but, and much more importantly, for a very nervous and frightened patient, there was someone physically with me at all times.
This was enormously reassuring.
At this stage Sile was allowed in to see me and we both began to realise that the prospect of my recovery was beginning to look like a possibility.
This feeling of relief that that gave me was enormous.
There was only one more serious hurdle to get over.
The CAT scan.
We both knew that if they found any traces of a bleed the chances of having an operation to repair the leak were much more likely.
We also both knew the long recovery process necessary after any operation on the brain.
The Cat scan experience was as comfortable as being strapped on to a trolley and the wheeled, prone, and into a machine could be expected to be, then we were back in A&E and waiting for the results.
We were brought into a private room for the meeting with a senior doctor in charge.
The first piece of information was that the CAT scan was clear.
Huge relief.
His diagnosis was even more surprising.
He examined in great detail my account of my vision problems.
He asked for exact descriptions of to the type of lack of focus, “ As the images were whirling were they still sharp?” “ How did the blurriness start to clear?”
When I told him about the moment in the car when my tunnel of clear vision began to expand he nodded in satisfaction.

His diagnosis was that I had not had a bleed in my brain, I had had all the symptoms of a migraine, my descriptions of my vision problems were casebook migraine symptoms.
That I had never before had an attack like this before was unusual but not unprecedented.
He explained that some attacks of migraine could even paralyse patients for their duration.
When I told him that I used to suffer from strong migraine type headaches from overindulgence in red wine until I had virtually given it up he reckoned that that clinched it.
(Important to remember at this stage that I had not consumed any drink since December )
I could go home.
At that stage my doctor from Perth took the time to see how I was getting on.
They then both stood there and beamed at Sile’s and my obvious joy that the whole ordeal was now over.

And that is it really.
I had a couple of paractemol when I came home which got rid of most of the end of the headache.
The phisycal symptoms were alleviated.
It may take a bit longer for us both to recover from the trauma.

It is shocking to realise how much doctor time I had been given , but very rewarding to know that never once did I receive anything but the very best of care and attention.
Thank you Waterford A&E