It was on July 14th 1973, 32 years ago today that this happened.

Happy Anniversary Sile

And a special thanks to
David Dwyer, Maire de Baldraithe,Una Lyes and Michael Healy
who stood by us on the day and have been there for us ever since

From an early age I was stage struck.
Isn’t every child?

I remember making up, costuming and acting in plays of our own devising from an early age with my Daly cousins.
My first real stage experience came from the Cork Ballet Company.
I was given tiny parts in two of their large City Hall productions at around the age of eleven.
I was a page accompanying the prince in Giselle, as far as I remember I had to walk across the stage and knock at the door of Giselle’s house.
To hear any of that music to this day still gives me collywobbles.
Giselle was the beautiful dancer Domini Callaghan, she was kind to a nervous 11 year old boy,
I was struck.
In the same season I was then a street child in a marvellous production of Petruchka, the smell of the greasepaint (numbers 5 and 9 applied with care) and the roar of the crowd totally captivated me.
My next experiences happened in school.
Christians Brothers College in Cork doesn’t have many fond memories for me but their annual Christmas productions of Gilbert and Sullivan Operas were my happiest times there.
The first production I was involved in there was Patience, as a member of the chorus of “Love Sick Maidens”.
It perhaps should be explained that in the early sixties it wasn’t reckoned to be sexually deviant to dress pre pubertal boys up in dresses as the female chorus. The reason being that their voices had yet to break and they could sing the soprano and alto roles.
I was as I said a mere member of the chorus, but in the classic Broadway tradition one of the leads, “The Lady Saphir” got laryngitis the day before we opened. I, with my relatively vast theatrical experience, was plucked from the chorus to prefect the role in 48 hours.
It was established fairly early on that where as I could manage the solos OK someone else would have to sing the harmonies from the wings during the part songs while I mimed the words.
I have never managed to avoid singing the melody when singing harmonies and as Saphir was the alto part I was lost.
Otherwise though I must have acquitted myself well because the following year when about 13 I was given the lead role in “The Yeoman of The Guard”
As Phoebe I opened the opera singing a solo, being “discovered”seated at a spinning wheel.
I was in my element.
Then puberty came, my voice broke and my singing career was over.
At much the same time I realised that to become any good at ballet it would require a gruelling round of classes which I was much too lazy to undergo so my ailing theatrical career was rescued by “The Loft”
The Loft was quite a marvellous theatrical institution.
The practices took place in an old loft over a sweet factory in Mulgrave Road in Cork.
Founded by the legendary Fr. O Flynn the Loft had trained many Abbey and even some Hollywood actors in its time.
What it did leave me with is a lifetime love of Shakespeare.
I got lots of minor parts from the Loft over the years, the often involved carrying a spear, or a message.
My Loft highlight came when I was playing the flamboyant but distinctly minor character of Osric in a production of Hamlet, a part of no more than 4 or 5 lines but a bit of business with a hat. In the review in the Examiner the following day drama critic Mary Leland praised my part as a “delightful cameo”.
The fact that I can remember the words still today tells all!

The next, and final part of my acting career happened while I was at university.
I did various parts in various plays while at UCC, and even for a heady moment played an “ ingenu” in a Feydeau farce produced by the semi professional Everyman theatre company.

The highlight of my career, and my virtual swan song was in a Becket play, “ Act without Words”.
A young producer in UCC, acknowledging my previous dancing experience, decided to produce this one act solo mime piece by Becket.
It is a fairly depressing piece about a man, on his uppers, having even the consolation of suicide taken from him.
There is a moment where a bottle of water, labelled “Water” is lowered from the flies only to be whisked away just as my fingers closed on it.
The play was a success and received good notices and that would have been that had not the Universities Drama Festival of Irish Language Plays been hosted that year in Cork.
Discovering that we were technically eligible to enter, our single word in English being the “Water” label, we changed the label to “Uisce” ,changed the title to Gniomh gan Focail, and entered.

My “Oscars” moment was at the adjucation of the festival when the adjucator , the actor Donal Farmer, announced that the award for best actor –An tAisteoir is fearr- went to, Mairtin O Duibhir agus Gniomh Gan Focail.
This was definitely a moment of adrenalin intoxication.

Where as I did a few more bits and pieces on the stage after that, nothing lived up to that moment and I soon abandoned my notions of stardom.
Mind you there are a few traces of the old Ham still in my make up.
Pat Murray, a well known set designer and a one time member of the Arts Council took one look around my restaurant when in for dinner and said;
“My God Martin, this place is so like a theatre set!”

My daughter Dee, God love her, seems to have inherited the theatrical gene but unlike her father, her interest is not so much in the limelight, but in the design and production side.
She went also to UCC where she did a degree in Theatre and English.
The head of the drama department was an old friend of mine and I kept saying to Dee “Did you tell him who you were?”
“Dad”, she used to say “I will do this on my own”
Her spirit finally weakened when the same lecturer told the story in class one day about Becket, and how Act without Words became Gniomh Gan Focail.
At that stage she felt she had no choice but to tell him that he was talking about her father!

We had the start of the Tall Ships Race in Waterford for the first time ever last week.
Our wonderful Georgian quays were again dressed as originally intended.
The whole town was En Fete, congratulations to all.
A huge success.
(I took this picture on one of the pontoons at about 9.30pm, having just come off a reception on the Asgard, many thanks to Noirin and Paul for the invite!)

This “Words” piece is in modern parlance a “Blog”.
This is what Lewis Carrol would have called a portmanteau word.
A running together of Web and Log.
In other words a web diary.

I haven’t treated it as such I confess.

But at the moment the time for quiet reflection of the past and times for gentle thoughts of what my favourite brand of tomato might be are banished.

The serious countdown has started.

It is now just 16 days from my eldest daughter, Caitriona’s wedding.

Weddings are like a combination of a runaway elephant and snowball.
As they progress on their uncontrolled stampede towards D Day, crashing through the gentle fabric of ones life they gather , in snowball fashion, all sorts of extraneous paraphernalia which then becomes part of them making the snowball/elephant even more an object or fear and danger.

Who decided that “For The Wedding” we should have our sitting room
-as the Americans say- “remodelled”.
As I write I am sitting in the ghost of a living area, with stripped and scarred walls, showing 80 vestiges of 80 years of redecoration, with a black hole where the fireplace used to be, a kitchen completely full of stacked books from the sitting room, in fact every room in the house is full to the brim of refugees from the same sitting room.

Outside in the garden the chaos is even worse.
The runaway elephant/snowball picked up the complete remodelling of the garden along the way.
The garden yesterday was looking like we had decided to fill the entire area with an abstract artists impression of a swimming pool and had got bored half way. It was however filling slowly with mud.
Today it looks like we have decided to fill the swimming pool with stones.
Next week I am promised that it will be an immaculate patio and lawn.
I wonder.

Part of the reason why everything is taking so long is that Waterford is completely seized up. The entire city is taken over by the start of the Tall Ships, quite the biggest thing that has ever happened to Waterford, and quite the worst time ever to decide to “Remodel” ones entire life.

The original elephant had a list of jobs to do before he ever got joined to the snowball.
There’s the flowers, just simple White Hydrangeas Caitriona wanted.
They are everywhere in peoples gardens but not available in florists.
Tomorrow I have to go to Mount Congreve to beg the head gardener for some. Then if he consents, I will have to go back the night before the wedding to collect same.
This will have to be fitted in between helping the Organist to deliver and carry on to the organ loft his own personal organ, talk to the chef in the hotel to persuade him to serve at least some of the fillet of beef less than well done, have a complete rehearsal of the wedding service, without the priest who will only arrive on the day, assisting a friend who has agreed to take over the responsibility of decorating the church (with, hopefully, more white Hydrangeas), prepare food for the probable 100- at least- who will, we know arrive at our house the day after the wedding to visit.
Erect a Gazebo and organise outdoor heaters for same, and then also make sure that I will be dressed and beautiful to travel, by vintage Rolls Royce, to the wedding the following morning.

Last week Caitriona said that Aonghus (the groom) had said, “Do you know what I hate about weddings? They are so Gay!”
I think I know what he means.

I was reminded recently of a word lost in translation by Caoileann, a niece of Sile’s.
Caoileann was being raised in the Gaelteacht in Connemara and her first language was Irish. We met her with her parents one night in the Great Southern Hotel on Eyre Square in Galway about 18 years ago when she was no more than 5 or 6.
Caoileann disappeared from the lounge at one stage only to return, flushed and triumphant after a little while. On enquiry she told us, to our mystification, that she had been having fun on the “Spin”.
We eventually worked it out. She was making a heroic effort to speak English in front of us foreigners and, so understandable when you regard the erratic nature of public transport in Coinnemara at that time, had confused the two English terms for a free ride in someone’s car.
She had of course been having fun on the lift.

Caoileann’s older sister was called Sorcha. We were in their house in Connemara once when an English family with a daughter of a similar age arrived on a visit. On arrival, and when she realised that this was to be her destination, the same child burst into tears. “You told me we were going to the circus” she said with some bitterness.
Sorcha’s house had become Circus House to the disappointed girl.

Our own Eileen lost an even funnier word in translation when she was about the same age.
We were living at that time in Kilmacleague in a house without central heating. The front door wasn’t the tightest fit either so when it got cold we had a tendency the close all doors firmly because of the fierce draught coming in from outside. On one such a cold night we could see our Eileen jiggling uncomfortably by the fire and tried to encourage her to go to the bathroom.It became obvious after a while that she was frightened of making the journey to the loo on her own.
Eventually she told us the reason; “ I’m afraid of the Fierce Giraffe”.
On such small mistranslations are large fears founded.

When I was much the same age I was with my mother when we went into a record dealer on Washington Street in Cork.
I can still remember that it was called Cripps and Farren.
My mother was looking for something to clean out very new collection of 33 rpm records which we at this stage enjoying on the state of the art record player of the time called a “Black Box”.
The salesman sold my mother a small pink sponge, in which, he explained to her , you must always keep a little moisture (obviously a new word for me) in the middle.
I was horrified when we got home to see her squeezing the same sponge with some vigour as she cleaned the records.
“Don’t do it so hard !” I said, “ You’ll kill the little mice in the middle”

This story was always told by my Mother as an true family story.
I was discouraged from this belief by finding it, or at least a very close approximation of it, related in the Private Eye “True Stories” series of urban myths. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the story originated from my Grandmothers house and,as the protagonists are dead, I suppose we will never know.
Myth or truth, the story bears retelling.

My Grandmother and Grandfather Daly lived in some luxury in the fashionable suburb of Blackrock in Cork. Their red brick Victorian detached house was on a very smart row of houses known as Ardfoyle Villas and had an extensive back garden, I would say about an acre in size. (Then again I was very little when I last saw the place)
The house was on a rise over the garden which had a vegetable garden on one side and the rest was lawn which I remember them using for croquet..
My mother was the eldest of six siblings and her brother Neil was a bit of motor bike fanatic. This incident happened in the late twenties when my mother and Uncle Neil would have been in their early twenties.

Uncle Neil, in the pursuit of motor bike perfection, was taking a bike to pieces in the back yard of Ardfoyle. Having stripped it down he was engaged in cleaning off the various bits with cotton waste dipped in petrol when my grandmother got him to clean up the mess as she was having visitors around to play croquet on the lawn. Expediency being the better course he decided to flush the petrol soaked bits of waste down the outside toilet which was also in the yard.
Shortly after that , the gardener, seeing that my grandmother would be occupied with the croquet, decided to take advantage of the break to use the same toilet and also smoke a pipeful of tobacco.
The gardener arranged himself luxuriously in the toilet, trousers around his ankles, for his session as my Grandmother entertained her guests on the lawn sloping down from the yard. He lit his pipe, and , as always flicked the match down the toilet.
There was an immediate explosion and the gardener was catapulted out of the toilet, trousers still around his ankles, right into the middle of my grandmothers croquet party.
He lay there, stunned and totally mystified and looked up at my Grandmother and said;
“ Jaysus Mam !, it must have been something I et.”

That was the story as my mother told it.
It has since gathered various alternative endings.
One that was told to me by a cousin also managed to find its way into the Private Eye version.

The gardener who was shook and –I have no doubt burned- by the explosion was brought upstairs in the house to be attended to.
Deciding that the nature of the injuries were beyond their first aid skills the decision was made to call an ambulance.
This arriving in due course the gardener was being carried down the stairs by the two ambulance men on a stretcher (lying on his front one assumes)
One of the bearers asked what happened, on being told he collapsed in hysterical laughter, let go of his side of the stretcher, and let the poor unfortunate gardener roll off, and down the stairs thereby managing to add to his injuries by breaking his leg.

That ending must definitely be regarded as apochriphal.
My mother, who I have never had cause to doubt , told the first half as the gospel truth.

Inside a Poppy in Barryscourt Castle in Carrigtwohill County Cork

Continuing my Give me Five campaign
I offer you another seven Fives
(and one Six)

Five of my favourite;

Female Singers

Sandy Denny
Astrud Gilberto
Judy Collins
Gillian Welch
Shirley Rumsey

Fruit

White Peaches
Black Cherries
Apricots (Poached)
Raspberries
Japonica Quince (in Jelly)

Organisations (of which I am a member)

Euro-Toques
Glass Society of Ireland
Madrigallery Groupies
Patrick O Brian’s Gunroom
Liz Seeber’s Antique Cook Book Club

Pieces of Furniture

Clive Nunn Limestone Table (I have)
Eileen Gray Glass Table (I have)
Le Corbusier Black Sofa (I want)
Le Corbusier Besculant Chair (I want)
Clive Nunn Book Boxes (I am getting!)

Soups
(all recepied on my web page)

Potage Pere Tranquille
Jane Grigson’s Curried Parsnip
Jerusalem Atrichoke
Mushroom and Tarragon
Smoked Haddock Chowder

Books I find Funny (6)

“My Family and Other Animals” by Gerard Durrell
Any “Just William” book by Richmal Crompton
“The Third Policeman” by Flann O Brien
“At Swim Two Birds” by Flann O Brien
“The Penguin Patrick Cambell”
“The Meaning of Liff” by Douglas Adams

Singer/Songwriters

James Taylor
Joni Mitchell
Leonard Cohen
Jacques Brel
Bob Dylan

Elizabeth David Cookery Books
French Provincial Cooking
Salts Spices and Aromatics of the English Kitchen
Italian Food
An Omelette and a Glass of Wine
English Bread and Yeast Cookery

My friend Clive Nunn was celebrating his 60th birthday a couple of weeks ago and, as we going up to help him celebrate we realised that, as per usual, we had forgotten to get a card.
I went to the old photo albums and found a shot of Sue, Clive and I with Naoise (aged about 12 months and sheltering under Clives raincoat.)
This was taken by Sile as we went across to Inis Oirr in the Aran Islands in the summer of 1974, all of 31 years ago. I remember it was a fairly tiny boat and we all got soaked on the way across, but we had had a lovely few days holiday.
With a little judicious scanning and then cropping to lose myself I managed to produce a passible if blurred image.

Clive and Sue were suitably polite about it.
It however left me with a nagging feeling that I had seen an image like it before.
The mind eventually dredged up;
“The Last of England” a typical Sentimental Victorian picture by Ford Madox Brown.

The same windswept boat, the same child under the coat.
Snap!

A friend (thank you Petra) has just lent me Susan Sontags novel from 1991 The Volcano Lover.
I had asked to borrow it because, having read a lot about the Napoleonic Wars at sea by way of Patrick O Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin seafaring epics I was anxious to learn more about Jack Aubrey’s great hero, Horatio Nelson.
This novel is about Nelson’s affair with Emma Hamilton but more about her cuckolded husband Sir William Hamilton who is the Volcano Lover of the title and in fact its hero.
It is obvious from the first time we meet him that Sontag has little time for Nelson and reserves her admiration for Sir William and his two passions, for Vesuvius and for collecting beautiful antiquities.
Sontag, who is much better known for her intellectual essays than as a novelist goes on to praise the role of the collector.
I was reading a piece from this novel this morning which is so amazingly apposite to my blog from yesterday that I am going to quote it to you.
Sontag, correctly, allies the role of collector to that of list maker:

“The list is itself a collection, a sublimated collection. One does not actually have to own the things. To know is to have….. it is to value them, to rank them, to say they are worth remembering or desiring.
What you like: your five favourite flowers, spices, films, cars, poems, hotels, names, dogs, inventions, Roman Emperors, novels, actors, restaurants, paintings, gems, cities, friends, museums, tennis players….just five.”

I read this and immediately whooped out loud. At last I had a perfect intellectual justification for my “Give Me Five” Campaign.
Thank You Susan Sontag!