Our neighbours have asked us to come around to their house on Tuesday next to eat Crepes for Chandeleur.

I made the assumption that this was a celebration of St. Blaise’s day , this was always the day in Catholic Ireland when we went to the church to have our throats blessed. There we all knelt down at the altar and the priest came and placed crossed candles at our throat to protect us from sore throats during the year to come. Thus , for the last few years , when we saw the time come around for Chandeleur to be celebrated (traditionally with pancakes) at the begining of February , we assumed it came from a devotion to St. Blaise.

When our neighbour invited us to celebrate Chandeleur with them next Tuesday I mentioned St. Blaise and was greeted with a blank stare , it was obvious that she had never heard of him, obviously some research was needed.

First thing I discovered was that I had my dates wrong , Chandeleur is celebrated on the 2nd of February , St. Blaise has his day on the 3rd.
Chandeleur is in fact Candlemas , the day in which people brought their candles into the church to be blessed. This feast seems to have merged in time with the purification of the Virgin Mary (which seems to be like the Catholic post birth churching) and the presentation of Jesus in the temple.

Then I learned something else , Candlemas is thought to be a relic of an ancient pre-christian festival of light . It celebrates the day which is mid way between the shortest day and the spring equinox and the return of brightness.

À la Chandeleur, l’hiver cesse ou reprend vigueur
On Candlemas, winter ends or strengthens

In other words what we have here is a christianisation of an old pagan festival of light christianised as are Christmas and indeed Halloween.
In Ireland, a nation suffering from constant winter colds and flu, we use the candles practically as a guard against sore throats- in France they (typically) use the feast as another excuse to party.

Portrait of the Chef as a Writer (taken on the terrace this afternoon by Mrs. Dwyer)

Sometimes I think I have just that.
You will all be aware at this stage that I am plugging away on A BOOK- (at long last ) this oeuvre is at the moment somthing less than half way through but I have been blabbing on about it on the principle that this will shame me into finishing it.
It is part memoir , part travelogue and part recipe book and so will probably disappear instantly between three stools.
It has a working title ; À Table ; An Irish Chef in a Village in the Languedoc.

I was contacted a couple of weeks ago , totally coincidentially , by Waterford Writers Week (which festival takes place at the end of March) to ask would I be part of a panel on an open forum on Cookery Writing (this from my bits and pieces of food journalism) , this I accepted , they further contacted me today looking for a picture and a bio for their programme and to tell me that the local paper wanted to do a spread on me to publicise the festival.
Could any writer (especially putative) ask for better pre publication publicity ?

The divils own luck I tell you.

And now I am certainly going to have to finish the thing!

We are back home in France now for just over a week and the difference of temperature in the house in that time is remarkable.
The first few days after we got back were perishing – this was not at all the fault of the outside temperatures- they rarely, even at night , went below 4 or 5 C -but due to the fact that we live in an old stone house.
Stone has some very strange properties, one of them is its ability to conserve temperatures. We have a large wood burning Godin in our living room but for the first days back it might have been a candle in a freezer for all the heat it gave us. Gradually the wood heat penetrated into the bones of the house and by about Thursday we could come down stairs in our dressing gowns again.

All this time the outside temperatures were rising , which also obviously affected the interior but , oddly , not as much as you would expect.

The house has a remarkable ability – based also on the fact that there is quite a small area of windows- to remain a bit aloof from the outside , a fact which we are greatful for in the summer when the temperatures outside can hit the thirties.

Another relevant factor are the shutters , putting these across the French windows into the terrace in the evenings in winter has an immediate effect on the inside , as this also does in the heat of the day in summer .

We were strolling around the village last week and noticed that the New Builds in the lotissments are all furnished with air conditioning units , it seems almost as standard. These houses are of course , as all modern houses are , built of cavity brick.

Just as we bought our Presbytere , a French government initiative was brought in that each house as it was sold had to be furnished with an energy rating , ours was one of the first in our area to be so rated and I remember the Nortaire remarking to us that it had scored particularly well, better than the new builds.
This is proof -I suppose- that sometimes the old ways were not the worst.

When we bought the Le Presbytere, now five years ago, the sisters who had been living here left some things behind which the archdiosces of Montpellier , whom we paid for house, didn’t think worth removing.

In the courtyard under our terrace , just outside the garden lavatory , they left a full sized statue of Our Lady of Lourdes . we were bemused with this legacy , not being strong Catholics it didn’t seem appropriate to bring her into the house and offer her a niche on which to be venerated, but still we were far too engrained in our religion to either destroy her or give her away.
She is a little past her prime , we think she had lost her place in the church (replaced by a newer model) when her blue sash started to flake off.
And so she has stood in the courtyard , occasionally putting the heart and soul across an unsuspecting guest who might wander in the garden as she appeared out of the gloom.

Yesterday Síle was doing some gardening and decided to move some plants around , a Lemon tree was moved to a sunnier spot and another Lemon (another legacy from the nuns which has never borne fruit but which has the most spectacular thorns ) was moved out to a place where it would perhaps be less sunny to stop its heady growth .
Then under our climbing Solanum – another legacy from the sisters which produces lovely clusters of white flowers for ten months of the year- we had a hole to fill.
Síle was inspired to put the virgin into this bower and so , with much pulling and hauling (and puffing and panting) we pulled the lady across the garden and set her into her new grotto.

It was made for her.

We are not quite sure what will happen next , the weather may be unkind to her and remove her last vestiges of colour , being made of plaster of Paris she may start to melt away slowly but whatever is in store for her I think we are both much happier that she will not end her days , in a gloomy courtyard outside a lavatory door , but in a position where she can be admired and where she will be crowned with Solanum blossom.

I know well that people talking about their diets is just about as boring a topic as you could imagine , however , obese people – like me- even those -again like me – with an ostrich ability to bury their heads in the sand find themselves facing this four letter word every so often.

The buzz word for diets over the Christmasin Ireland was low carb. My son-in-law was the first to moot it as a diet from Sweden, then Tom, a young sportsman friend laid up for six months with a broken leg claimed it’s success but it was Lucinda O Sullivan in the Indo, a food critic with the sort of necessity of eating for a living as I have extoling it as a painless method of weight loss that finally clinched it for me.

I am (but of course) doing my own version of this.
I have decided to eschew for six days of the week all the bulk carbs I normally eat with each meal viz ; Bread, Potatoes , Pasta , Rice and also to exclude from between meal snacking on biscuits or cake.
Nothing else is going to be excluded, butter, cream, cheese (my firm favourites) are allowed, but of course are eaten in lesser quantities without their carb fellow passengers- butter and cheese need bread like cream needs cake.

So far very little pain at all, I will discuss weight loss at a later date when I have had the nerve to climb on the scales.

Principal difficulty is breakfast- formerly being a la francais i.e. bread, croissants and jam.

On our way to the ferry in Cherbourg at Christmas we stopped at an absolutely charming hotel in Chinon called Hotel Diderot , there (as well as about 150 jams) they offered a plate of fresh goats cheese drizzled with honey and scattered with fresh walnuts. I tried it. I was conquered.
This is now the basis of my new breakfast.
I have added some fresh fruit to the mix, I now line a plate with some fruit (Satsumas and Mangoes have worked well) cover this with a generous disc of Fresh Goats Cheese (it must be like a set yoghurt ) and then proceed with the honey and walnuts.
This has so far provided me with a pain free breakfast.

If I manage to keep this up I will let you know in a few weeks if it works.

Interested to see that our friend Clive has a new business blog at
www.clivenunnfurniture.com . He also has some nice pictures of Le Presbytere on it , here.

The Christmas Tree (snitched from the nearest wood) in Wicklow

The Christmas Ninjas reheat the Marques et Sparques feast for Christmas Eve

Ronaynes all

The Spanish Orphans , Kelleher-Lynches

Flic, the new adopted Granddaughter visits Dunmore East

St Moling guards two of his booted daughters

A selection of Dwyer kin in Blackrock in Cork

Some more Dwyers (including two week old Naoimi in the arms of her Great Uncle)

Ruadhán walks

Fionn cycles

At 2 AM this morning we finally landed back in the home in Thezan which we had left nearly four weeks ago.
Knackered , but delighted with our travels.

When we left Ireland , 2, 3 or 5 years ago (it was a gradual progress parting) we left behind a strong body of much loved family and friends which we never had any intention of letting go. It was our intention that all these people would meander out to our village in the Languedoc pretty frequently and party there with us.
Do to many circumstances , including some dodgy deals by various bankers , that hasn’t been as easy as we anticipated.
In truth most of them have managed the trip but I am a tenacious friend (and indeed relative) so there is no way the others were going to be let lose touch.
We this in mind Síle and I planned this trip home to Ireland this Christmas.

Wicklow being a fairly central county we rented a house there for the first ten days and there we entertained.
We had two large lunches for Dublin and surrounding suspects (mostly Síle’s family and mine ) , several afternoon teas (great meal this !) for others , were fed ourselves in Sandymount by old friends, Robert and Anne giving a dinner party in our honour as well , of course , of getting a terrific go off the daughters, their partners and the precious grandsons. (Our youngest daughter D was in India at a wedding , but that is certainly her story)

From there we moved to Dunmore East to meet our newest adopted grandchild, up to Thomastown to be royally enterained by our oldest friends the Nunns who miraculously produced the Lechleiters (of similar ancient vintage ) for the walk along the Barrow between St. Mullins and Graignamanagh .
In Waterford we skipped promiscuously between beds , eating with the Moore Kindlers (perhaps even using the very seat later that week to be occupied by Mick Hanley- certainly another story) And then cooking huge quantities of Tangiers Chicken for our traditional annual Book Club “Bite and Recite” dinner in our friend Finola’s house.
We had an excellent lunch in Blackrock Castle in Cork with all my brothers and sisters and their spouses , (well nearly all, sister D. was spending Christmas in Spain) , making a handy dozen of us , and then (the Dwyer offspring being fond of their roots, have stayed mainly within the sound of Shandon Bells ) summoned Nephews and Nieces (and their families) to Blackrock Market for a Sunday morning coffee. To our intense pleasure somewhere between 40 and 50 arrived.
We spent the last week in Dublin doing some overdue babysitting for our stunning grandsons, Fionn and Ruadhán , there managing to just catch daughter D in flight between India and Portrush and see the amazing pictures of the wedding in India.
That , just about, brought us to the boat in Rosslare on Satuday morning and yesterdays long , 12 hour, drive down through La Toute France, the carrot being the thought of a night in our own bed.
To all those members of friends and family whom we missed I can only apologise , it was only geography and time that kept us from you.
To everyone else thanks are due for not having forgotten us and , we hope to see every one of you out here soon.

Post Haste
(Please God before she reads this ) I must add that our first night in Wickla ancient mates Paul and Isabel arrived – from France offa plane but via Dublin- bearing dinner from those well known master chefs Ms Marque et Sparque and relieved us of some of our B.I.B’s which Mr.O Leary doesn’t allow as hand luggage.

At last after nearly four weeks wanderings in Ireland.

Normal life will resume as soon as I get my breath back.

The royal tour of Ireland progresses, 20 nights , nine different beds ,
re-meeting wonderful people.
Happy new year to all will be back to normal soon.