As promised I will report progress.
Having gone through 12 days of total abstinance (as Fr Matthew would say)and intense morning exercise I am now back at 16 stone, or roughly where I was before the excesses of the Christmas.
This is not technically what one should call progress but at least the efforts are sending me in the right direction.
Watch this space.

Sign in my brother Ted’s office

I have just finished re-reading, for at least the second time, this novel by John Mortimer.
I think it gets into my top ten favourite books of all time.

It tells a tale of a family’s three week holiday in a rented villa in Tuscany.
That in itself would be enough to make me salivate, being an addict of that particular genre of travel fiction, but this book delivers much much more than that.
As anyone who has read any of the “Rumpole of the Bailey” series by Mr. Mortimer will know, this man is capable of writing with great fluency of wit, evident again in this novel, but this time he also provides a mystery story of great subtilty(and after three readings I am still knitting up loose ends).

The heroine is Molly Pargeter, middle aged, middle class, big boned, a disappointment to her father, her husband and her three daughters but, nonetheless, very endearing to the readers.
She is forced to bring her father on holiday with them.
The same Haverford Downs is one of Mortimer’s great comic creations.
He is a classic randy old man who ekes out a living by writing a column called “Jottings” in a Fleet Street “pinko” publication.
The book is littered with excerpts fron the same “Jottings”.
I defy any blogger not to cringe as they read these pretentious words. even though written in 1988, long before the advent of the blog, it is a fairly biting satire of the same.

As travelogue the book gives us a lovely introduction to Tuscany, a great description of the Palio in Sienna but principally (and this is seminal to the plot) a wonderful tour through the paintings of Piero della Francesca.
These are examined with great detail by Mortimer in the book and he sent me off, hot foot, to buy a book of his paintings as soon as I put “Summer’s Lease” down from the first reading.

“ Piero’s Flagellation, undoubtedly the greatest small picture in the world“:-Mortimer

He also set me off searching the highways and byways of Tuscany to see examples of Piero’s work while on holiday there about 10 years ago.
The “who dun it” mystery is lightly referred to all the way through the novel.
Molly becomes a sleuth, determined to discover the source of their water problems in the villa “La Felicita” and also to piece together information about their landlord, Buck Kettering.
Even though there are two murders in the course of the novel, these are only allowed to be background noises to the setting of Italy and the Mortimer’s great fun at the expense of Haverford and his pretensions.
You will laugh, bite your nails, and be inspired to persue both the countryside and its art.
How many other novels could possibly give you as much!
It’s out of print now but, fairly easily available second hand on the net.
Get one today!

At last we got a decent frost, too late to glaze my decorated tree, but, as the tree is a live one, and we are keeping it in its pot until next year,I scurried forth in dressing gown and slippers to photograph it this morning before the frost could melt.
Serendipitously we had left a single glass droplet (bought in a junk shop in Schull a few years ago) on the tree and with shivering fingers I managed to snap it.
Positively the last christmas shot!

Last November I went on the dry for the month.
There was a combination of reasons for this.
I thought it would help in the battle to lose weight. In addition to eschewing the calorific values of the drink, in my case mostly white wine, I recognise my tendency to pig out on munchies when I have “drink taken”. (the state of inebriation being a very lenient dietitian)
I also am getting heartily fed up of hangovers, they do not get any easier with the years and now, as I get older I notice that there is a third distressing symptom creeping into the hangover complaints.
We all recognise the feelings of nausea and lethargy on the morning after the night before, the secondary symptom with I am only too familiar is the classic headache, mind you I must say that this happens to me only after red wine, which I should completely cut out , but don’t.
The third punishment of the hangover, that I am recently beginning to suffer from, is depression.
This is not debilitating clinical depression, more a form of self loathing that one has overdone it once again, also unlike true depression , it passes during the day.
Don’t get me wrong in this .
I have not suddenly become a rabid anti-drink pioneer.
On the contrary I love alcohol.
All alcohol.
Wine is one of the pleasures of my life, white wines of The Loire, Burgundy and Alsace are one of my great luxuries, and, even though it obviously does not love me (see headaches above) I also love a good bottle of Red; Burgundy, Bordeaux, Cote de Rhone or more likely anything affordable from the South West of France are often my nemeses.
My preferences don’t even stop with wines, although I haven’t yet mentioned favourites such as fortified wines like Manzanilla from Jerez in Spain,or Chambery Vermouth from the French Alps, I also enjoy many spirits and liqueurs and have my moments with stout and, given a hot enough day, (or a hot enough chilli) have even been known to sip an icy lager.
This brings me, fairly obviously to the main reason why I gave up all alcohol for November.
I wanted to see if I could manage without it.
The good news is that I could.

Not only did I manage without it I actually enjoyed the month.

I was, I promise, very aware that this was just a temporary stratagem.
I was also very aware of the passing month, the milestones passed on the 15th (Half Way There!) and the 20th (Two Thirds Done!).
But I did have the satisfaction of managing to stick it out for the month and a certainty that, so far at any rate, I had managed to avoid the slippery slopes of alcoholism.

I would love to report that I reached December with a new maturity and a better ability to drink in moderation.
No.
I set off into December with my usual determination to abolish the French Wine lake single handed (Well it was Christmas)
Any great achievements on the weight-loss fronts were quickly dissipated in the same lake, not to mention a prolonged and successful assault on the turkey, sprout and Christmas cake mountains.

My doctor, a man of profound insight and understanding, has told me that he can’t see any way that I am going to successfully reduce my weight by eating less. He told me (and for this God Bless him) that if he cooked as well as I did he would eat as much as I did.
He consequently advised me to double up on my morning sessions on the exercise bike.
I am now under contract to do a full hour or 30 klms. on the same bike each morning. I have been doing this for most of the month of December.
(The bike was actually sent into the shed for the 12 days of Christmas, I mean you have to take a holiday from everything-even diets- for the Christmas!)

I stepped on the scales for the first time since December this morning.
I’m not telling anyone what I weigh.

This month, it is no holds barred.
30 klm on the bike every morning and no drink.
Not a drop has passed the lips since the early morning of the 31st.
I promise to relate any progress made.

This Irish roman-a-clef of the Browne family was written in the 1950’s by Joseph Brady (nom de plume of Moss Browne) and was,I think, a bit of a best seller at that time.
It tells the story of the Browne (called FitzGerald) family, Maurice and Kate and their five children and their home in Grangemockler(Letterlee) in South Tipperary.
The whole story is, as is typical of its time, full of the healthy joys of rural Ireland at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. In this the characters and the descriptions of the fairs and football matches do tend to read like they were picked wholesale out of one of Canon Sheehan’s or Kickham’s novels.
There is no doubting both the politics and the religion of the biographer and he is very partisan whenever he comes up against either the English or Protestantism.
The father of the family is Maurice, he was injured as a boy in a carting accident and lost his right arm, because of this he wasn’t able to continue in the family business of cooperage in Cappoquin Co. Waterford.
Instead he became a school teacher and taught for some forty years in the little village of Letterlee.
His children obviously profited from their fathers academic leanings as four of them went on to have brilliant careers, three of the boys became priests, one Peter, (in fact a shallowly disguised portrait of Monsigneur Padraic de Brun) also a mathematician of international renown and president of UCG, another son a Cardinal of the church,and the girl, Margaret(Mary), ended up lecturing in the National University and was the mother of our own renowned poet, Maire Mac an tSaoi, whose father was Sean MacEntee, and who was wife of Conor Cruise O Brien, both very important figures in the political history of Ireland.
(it is thanks to Maire Mac an tSaoi’s excellent autobiography;The Same Age as the State that I was able to unpick the clef of the roman)

Even though the novel does tend to be a bit traditional in its depiction of the Irish peasant, it does have wonderful insights into the social history of the times. The FitzGerald family were particularly well integrated into the parish as, not only was Maurice the “Master” but Kate ran the General Store so they were the very pillars of the village.
There is also towards the end a most moving description of the events of “Bloody Sunday” in 1920 in Croke Park in Dublin, where a young footballer from their own village, wearing the Tipperary colours was shot by the Black and Tans.
But here I must declare my own interest.
As I have already written my brothers and sisters and I are beginning to compile a history of the various bits and pieces of my family in Cork.
The company of Dwyers of Cork in fact was in fact distributing goods to an area far outside Cork and indeed, from what we can gather to most of rural Ireland. This is nowhere better demonstrated than in this piece from “The Big Sycamore”.
John, the youngest and most sporty of the boys, was the only one not to enter the priesthood.
It is fascinating to see that the family then make the decision to get him employed in a firm which must, in its day, have had the necessary kudos, respectability and blue chip stability to balance the other childrens career choices:
Dwyers of Cork.
Sadly he died young after an accident on the football pitch so didnt live to take up the post.
This is how they described the job offer in the book;

Next Thursday, January 6th, known in Ireland as Little Christmas or Womens Christmas, is the last day of of the season so it is time to take down the decorations.
I didn’t get a frost to naturally decorate my tree but this morning an obliging mist gave it a nice romantic sparkle and showed up the spiders efforts to decorate it for us.
The decorations are mostly junk shop purchases of old pieces of chandeliers and god knows what,anything which we reckoned would stand up to the weather outdoors.
We were pleased with our outdoor tree, I think a new tradition has started, especially if this one survives in its pot.

The first Spring blossom pictured against an abandoned warehouse on Waterfords Quays yesterday, January 1st.

While wandering in the Comeragh Mountains after Christmas
I was lucky enough to spot one of the last surviving packs of Humanatis
Multicolouris perching on a rocky outcrop.
It is believed that they owe their continued existence to their preternatural propensity to look in different directions at the same time, their garish colouring which frightens off predators and their natural cheerfulness.

2005 has brought me more change than any in the last decades.
The restaurant was sold in September 2004 when we moved into our new house
and so 2005 became the first year of my new life.

This has been a full year of me in my new roles as ,
Commissioner General of Euro-Toques,
Consultant Chef,
Food Journalist,
House Husband,
and (since the end of February)
Compulsive Blogger.
This has also been a year of extraordinary amounts of travel.

Sile and I have holidayed in France on three separate occasions, in the Loire at the new year, Paris at Easter and a marvellous, mostly camping holiday spent zig-zagging through France for five weeks at the end of the summer.
I have also been to Dunblane in Scotland for a Meat Conference, Brussels twice for Euro-Toque Chief Commissioners meetings, to Panticosa in Spain for the Euro-Toque international AGM , and Sile and I had a wonderful Cooks tour of the Parma region of Italy in September.

It has also been the year of The Wedding, with our eldest daughter Caitriona adding Aonghus into the Dwyer family in July.

All this is a huge change from the years which I spent tied to the kitchen sink in Dwyers Restaurant of Mary Street.

And I love it.

Highlights of the year were:

Rediscovering the joy of cooking, happily baking our daily bread, and force feeding anyone who visited us.

Writing my “Words” pieces for my web page and discovering a new addiction;
writing.

The Wedding, a joy from start to finish.

Our magical meal in Massimo Spigaoli’s house by the River Po in Italy.

The Euro-Toques Forum in Brook Lodge, chaired with much style by John Bowman, on the topic of educating our children to eat well.

Presenting the Euro-Toques food awards, particularly that one presented to Honor Moore for her lifetime contribution to Food Journalism.

Rediscovering the joys of camping in France, especially Au Bord de Tarn.

Being interviewed by BBC Five about my “Words” pieces, nothing like a bit of recognition to boost the ego.

Realising that my “Food Matters” pieces in Waterford Today has brought my profile
way up in Waterford, another bit of ego boosting!

Getting feedback from my “Words” pieces from places as far away as America, Australia, and even the Turks and Caicos islands.

All in all a year of enjoyable challenges, many changes, but above all else, terrific fun.
It is a great privilege to start another new life aged 56.

Happy new Year!