Keeping cool under pressure

Our freezer has a mind of its own. And not always on the job in hand. Tonight as we're sitting watching television in the other room, the warning ding starts up on the freezer.
"You must have left the door open," I say, starting up. The noise immediately stops.
"I don't think so," Herself says, swirling the ice cubes about in her soft drink.
As soon as my bum hits the seat:
"Ding...! Ding...! Ding...!"
We go out and inspect what little there is to inspect.
The digital readout says -16C for the freezer and 1C for the fridge, like it's supposed to do. But the whole thing is ominously quiet.
I poke it. Herself moves bottles from the floor in case the feng shui is being upset. I open and close the fridge door. I open the freezer door. It has a disturbing slick look that speaks of malfunction.
"I think it's defrosting."
Immediately Herself falls back on 100,000 years of female evolution in the face of imminent calamity by asking as many questions within 60 seconds as it is possible to ask.
"What's wrong?
"Is it broken?
"Should we get another?
"Is the fuse gone in the plug?
"Shall I move another bottle?
"Should we start putting things in the other freezer?
"Is it safe to use ice that defrosted?
"Was it the weather?
"Was it the cats?
"Is it broken?
"Shall we buy another?
"Is the fuse gone in the plug?
"Why are you choking me?"
We ferry geriatric cuts of meat in their papyrus wraps to the small freezer in the ultilty room, in turn emptying from it the store of bread Herself squirelled away in there last Christmas when the snow levels meant we would obviously soon have 100 extra guests all eager for toast. In between trips, I press some buttons experimentally on the wonky freezer. It's now reading a balmy 9C in the freezer. I press a button labelled "Turbo Freeze" and a second later the motor starts to run again.

"It's fixed!"

We do a little dance then retrieve all the "we'll never finish that" stores that we just binned, plus Santa Claus's sliced pans, and shove them back onto the empty shelves. In a few moments, the temperature is 8C and we're on the way back to peaceful TV watching.

In ten minutes time, the dial indicates minus figures. Grand. Everything going in the right direction.

Half and hour later, during an ad break, Herself shouts from the kitchen:

"It's minus 25! It'll EXPLODE!"

I rush out and open the freezer door.

The Bird's Eye Polar Bear isn't so fucking chatty about the standard of my fish cakes any more. He's lying very, very still, a look of mild surprise on his clothy white face.

In fact, I didn't know that fish cakes could chatter like comedy false teeth, but the din is rattling all the salad dressing bottles in the fridge next door.

Bela Lugosi appears from the gathering white mist flowing about the kitchen, sinks his teeth into Herself's outstretched neck, then makes like a bat. I ignore the constant thumps of his dashing his head against the closed Velux ceiling windows in the dining room.

I undo the big fat freeze button and we head off to bed, content in the knowledge that the temperature is on its way back up.

I expect a tropical jungle to greet me in the morning.

Soup with Sherry

Rat-tah-tah-tah-tah-tah-tah-tah!
The sound of mechanical engineering in action comes from the kitchen.
Rat-tah-tah-tah-tah-tah-tah-tah-TAH!
"Do you think," Herself shouts into the other room, "Do you think there are enough mushrooms in this to serve six?"
I drag myself away from the search for a point to the WALL-E movie to peer at the replica Sugar Loaf Mountain in white mushrooms lying amid an absolute chaos of onion peelings and stock cube wrappers and a blotted inkjet printed Internet recipe for Cream of Mushroom Soup to grunt something non-commital but hopefully encouraging.
Herself waves the shiny new hand blender at me.
"Do you know where the green bowl is? The one I used for the Christmas trifle?"
I sniff the air and home in on the substitute trifle bowl, a brown one, where a mashed up sponge cake is marinading to death in Harvey's Bristol Cream.
"Sorry, I haven't seen it."
Herself looks at the recipe.
"It serves four. Will there be enough for six?"
"Just double everything. You might end up with too much, but you won't have too little."
"I could just add some milk to the cream. Or water."
The adage about too many cooks comes to mind and I leave her to it. I tidy out the fridge of expired vegetables and out of date yoghurts adding in more soft drinks for our guests who'll be arriving tomorrow afternoon for a New Year's Day tea.
In clearing up, I find the green bowl, sitting amid biscuit tins and tea cake boxes in the middle of the table. For an inanimate object, it looks distinctly smug. It's had a near miss: Herself likes sherry trifle to be heavy on sherry and this time the brown bowl is having to swallow the medicine instead.
Herself waves vaguely to her side of the kitchen.
"Don't bother clearing up over here," she says, as if I'd be brave enough to start moving things while she's cooking. "I'm still using things."
"Here," she says, proffering a white hot spoon from the very depths of the pot. "Try it."
I take the spoon, knowing if I don't manoeuvre it personally, it'll brand a neat oval shape on my lower lip. I blow on it and sip the half cooked soup.
"Does it taste of mushrooms?"
It does. In fact, it's delicious.
"It'll take ten minutes more of simmering," she says. "Will we have a sherry?"
So we join the brown bowl in marinading ourselves in Harvey's Bristol Cream and ponder the good things a while.

Breaking the Circle

If all those over-paid Astologers are to be believed, you're supposed to have an improvement in luck as your birthday gets nearer. Mine is turning turtle at the moment and it's my birthday in two days' time.

I was in the canteen last week and queuing with a tray in hand. There are two checkouts parallel to each other. If one side of the queue gets busy, or one of the staff has to go get more change, or replenish mugs, or answer a call (of nature or otherwise), the lady on the other side will double-up temporarily. Likewise, if food has to be weighed before purchase. Our canteen caterers sell stuff like salads or breakfast cereals by weight.

So two girls in the queue in front of me were yapping happily away and taking their time putting change into purses and such. Christine, on the checkout nearest me sat impassively waiting for the next customer, me.

Across from her, the girl on the other checkout craned her neck to see what I'd chosen, punched it into the register, twisted the readout my way so I could see that €5 was the price, took my tenner and gave me back a €5 note in change.

Christine, meanwhile, punched a couple of buttons. I supposed she was taking for the meal of the person behind me. I picked up the tray and went and sat down.

"They're saying you didn't pay, Willie," said a colleague, passing by, grinning.

"I paid the other girl!" I said to the universe at large. I got up and went to tell Christine of the mistake. On the way, I bumped into the assistant canteen manager.

"Are you stealing food?" she asked. I presume she was trying to be funny. I ignored her, but I could feel the niggle starting.

I plucked Christine's elbow.

"I paid the other girl," I said, pointing.

A few minutes later, Christine appeared beside me, red-faced. She must have checked with the other girl.

"I'm very sorry," she said. "I didn't see you paying. I really must apologise."

"If I'd been stealing food," I said, trying unsuccessfully to be non-chalant and humourous "You wouldn't have seen me do it!"

We both chuckled a little self-consciously.

Christine apologised again. I said:

"I hope that manager one knows I paid." I pointed over my shoulder at her.

"Oh, don't mind her," said Christine, and scuttled off back to her register.

I did mind. The more I thought about it.... ("Are you stealing food? Ha Ha Ha!")... the more annoyed I felt. Most of the dinner went uneaten.

At quitting time, I walked over towards my bus stop. Here was the canteen assistant manager coming the other way on foot.

"Hello!" I said. I stopped.

I said: "Tell us. Are we all square about that thing earlier?"

She smiled and laughed and went on walking. I stood looking after her, now fuming! Why the fuck wouldn't she put my mind at ease and just say everything was fine? I went home in very bad humour.

There's now a definite atmosphere in our canteen up at the checkouts when I queue there. No-one asks me any more how my day is going, or how my colleagues are that aren't with me today, or if I have any holidays planned. They just take the money in silence. Not quite a stony silence, but silence nonetheless.

If I could afford it, I'd take my business elsewhere. But the job subsidises the food prices in the canteen, making up for how little they pay us otherwise. I'm stuck.

This morning, kick in the pants Number Two.

I got on my usual bus and travelled up to The Square on my way to work. I usually get off the bus a bit before The Square, but this morning I wanted to get some cash from the ATM to see me through the week. The bus pulled in and the driver switched off the engine. I thanked him and stepped off. There was a smallish man of about 50 in front of me, moving along the footpath. He stopped and turned towards me.

"Excuse me," he said.

I thought maybe he was going to ask for directions. I stopped and said:

"Yes, sir?"

He said: "I was sitting at the back of the bus." He pointed. "You got on and looked at me. I don't like people looking at me..."

I blinked.

"What?"

"I was on the bus. You looked at me..."

"I did not! This is the first time I've seen you today...!" I laughed.

He stood looking at me. I realised he was serious and now that I looked at him he did seem a little familiar. But I had clambered onto the bus this morning without a thought for anything other than my usual twin goals of not falling over as the bus pulled away from the bus stop and finding a seat upstairs.

"Where you sitting behind me or what...? I asked, puzzled. I was trying to get my head around what he was saying. It wasn't sinking in at all.

"I don't like people looking at me."

I thought: "Little wonder, you ugly little fucker."

I said: "I absolutely swear, I did not look at you in any way whatsoever!"

He walked off, mumbling.

Jesus Christ! I went into The Square, mindful that he was walking in front of me by a few yards. All I need now, I figured, is for him to tell a security man I'm following him or something. That would really put the tin hat on the whole business!

Around five o'clock I remembered how he looked familiar. The little bollix lives in Firhouse and.... wait for it.... is often at the bus stop I use every single morning! On his way to see a psychiatrist, I have no doubt, but fuck it! He'll probably be standing at the bus stop tomorrow morning.

"I'm getting a car," I said to myself on the five o'clock bus. I had found myself looking around at the other passengers suspiciously. Who was going to pop out of a bag or a box and twist my noodle this time? Would the other little bollix turn up again? What would I do if he said something?

At home, the third piece of what I hope is the end of this circle of the most bizarre luck there's been around here in ages happened. Herself came home without her much-loved, mobile phone. Surely that broke the charm?

I was so sympathetic on hearing the phone had been left in work. Among unknown cleaners. With keys to the office.

"Oh, that's terrible," I purred. "There, there. I'm sure it will be just sitting there when you go into work in the morning."

So tomorrow, the day before my birthday, I'll have an angry Firhouse gnome gunning for me on the bus to work. My tea will be served by people afraid to smile or joke in any manner. And I shall probably not receive any texts to brighten my day.

Roll on next year.

Happy Birthday to me.... Happy Birthday to me....

Turkey and whiskey a la mode

When you have been cooking with a bad oven for a long number of years, it is easy for a good oven to become a bad oven. And not in a good way.

Our old electric cooker -- the one with which I cooked our Christmas dinner in 2006, for example -- had a wonky oven seal. It had also given up its internal glass door one day in spectacular fashion, exploding while hot into a million tiny fragments that danced like a netted shoal of fishes on the cold, tiled, kitchen floor. But I was used to cooking with it, despite these flaws.

"Add another hour to the time," I would say, having done all the cooking-time calculations.

This year, 2007, I installed a new oven. Then I uninstalled it and moved the cabinet to another position. Then I reinstalled the oven again. This week, I stuck a 20-pound turkey into its stainless maw and tried not to think about the seven place settings for Christmas dinner. Many hours later, the turkey was not inedible, but to me it was a little dry.

"In the oven too long," I thought.

The old cooker used four large electric elements to heat the huge cauldron in which we cooked the 2006 ham. This year, in 2007, the halogen-heated ceramic hob I fitted into the counter (then uninstalled and refitted into another, permanent kitchen surface) only needed one-and-a-half rings to bring the water to a furious, steaming maelstrom. The meat eventually fell like large pink raindrops off the bone.

"Tender," Herself called it.

"Over-cooked," I said to myself.

But the turkey tasted like turkey and the ham tasted like ham and no-one has been unaccounted for since December 25th with possible food poisoning. We are, however, more stuffed with turkey than the turkey ever was. We have had turkey with ham and ham with turkey. Turkey with gravy and turkey without. We have clawed the last shreds from its bones and served them cold. There was even talk of turkey soup made up from the bones and the last bits of pale flesh. But the ham finally ran out yesterday and the stinking remenant of the turkey walked itself out into the wheelbin today.

I am now replete with good old fashioned pork chops and mashed potato and have no particular yearning to taste fowl until at least St. Patrick's Day -- which, incidentally, is not allowed by the church to fall on March 17th in 2008, so we are shaping up for two days worth of St. Patrick's Day festivities next year. We've done it before. We know it can be done again.

I must ask Herself what became of the jar of apple sauce she dropped into the shopping trolley in Lidl in Ballyfermot this afternoon. I thought it was to feature in this evening's meal.

I am presently having a whiskey and red lemonade (with ice, thank you). It is a hard and unfair life all round.

At least I have my health

Following on from cheesy dreams and toothache, I found myself on Monday suffering with stomach ache. And when a stomach the size of mine aches, that's a BIG ache!

There's a gastro- bug going around at the moment and I seem to have got a version. It seemed in my case to only exhibit cramps rather than resolving into anything messier. All the same, I was in bed shivering like a jelly by 9.30 and though I went to work yesterday feeling only a little sore, I decided to take today off to chase off the very last of the bug.

Update on the seagulls: Three of us were looking out the window at the puzzling seagulls on Monday when a small brown blob of fluff on webbed feet scuttled across the roof tiles! The pair evidently have at least one chick, possibly two. Yesterday the parents spent quite a long time away but came back in the late afternoon. I suppose they were out shopping.

None can compare with the cliffs of.... Tallaght?

Tallaght Town Centre and two large gulls appear to have made a home recently on top of one of the pitched rooftops. I can see one of them from my office window, on the north face of the clock tower of County Hall, one sitting in the niche of a louvred ventilator. When its mate appears, the two greet each other with many "Shree! Shree! Shree!" calls that remind one of being at the seaside.

Someone speculates that perhaps the sitter is one of this year's young, still being fed by a dutiful parent.

I don't know enough about them to judge, but it looks to me like they're considering nesting on the rooftop. It is sheltered from the prevailing wind. It overlooks a courtyard that isn't accessible to the public. There are several fast-food restaurants in the area from which an enterprising gull might, conceivably, glean enough discarded food to raise a chick.

The nesting theory gained a little ground yesterday when the sitting gull maintained its position even during the worst of a number of thunderstorms that swept the area.

We are quite a way from the sea, though, and I wonder if nesting is a viable option. I shall bring my binoculars tomorrow. If nothing else, it should worry my colleagues in the opposite side of the building as I peer out the window and focus in one something unseen over their heads.

[Pic by User:Dschwen at Wikipedia Commons. Republished under terms of GNU Free Documentation Licence]

Home baking

"Have you ever eaten one of my sponge cakes?" Herself asks me, the other evening, as we are watching television.
"Nope," I say, swigging my beer.
"Didn't you know me when I used to bake sponge cakes and butterfly buns and flans and maringues?"
"Er... no."
"I shall make us a sponge cake at the weekend."

Come the weekend there was a crisis of ounces verses grams. I was entertaining my father in the other room and so I couldn't help much.

"Look it up on the Internet," I said.

An hour later I was eating.... something.... sponge-like....

"Do you like it?"
"Er... yes...."

I chewed at the lump of fruit-topped, cream-filled yellowish stuff. Having to chew or gnaw at a sponge cake is probably an indication that it hasn't come out right.

"I think I didn't get the measurements right," she said. "And I think there was something about folding the mixture rather than beating it."

I seprated my upper teeth from my lower ones with an effort, long enough to say:

"No, babe. It's fine, really."

There was a definite clunk when a piece of leftover spong hit the bottom of the kitchen bin. I could feel strange protestations starting up in my gut.

Herself Googled for sponge cake recipes.

"I know what went wrong!" she shouted in to the other room. "I'll make you a proper one tomorrow!"

So, today, I'm eating a wafer-thin sponge-cake that hasn't turned out either. But it is lighter than yesterday's.

"I know where I went wrong. I'll make another one tomorrow that will be right this time. I promise."

My gut is thanking Heaven that we're back at work on Tuesday. It might not have survived an extra day of sponge making.

"You can write about it," Herself said. "On condition you write a sequel when it turns out...."

Watch this space.

The Judge Dredd Mega City 1 version of a cheese triangle

You know those round boxes of processed cheese? The ones with individual cheese wedges wrapped in tinfoil like a presentation counter for 50 years of playing Trivial Pursuit?

Used to love them as a kid.

Calvita cheese had a little blondy young one on the front like someone off the BBC test card, only she was a typical Irish Cailin type from the 1970s and she didn't have a blackboard or a bunch of coloured squares or a slightly scary stuffed toy around her. I see she's gone missing from the brand in recent times. There's a modern blondy young one on the labels now. Don't know why they did away with the first one when all that 70s stuff is getting back into fashion.

Anyhow, the machine that wrapped the cheesy bits in their little silver rounded triangles used to fix the tinfoil tighter than a trumpters arse on a high C note. And at the corners it was battened down so well that I copied the technique for wrapping foreign brown paper parcels for Christmas. Ask any of my family that live abroad and they'll tell you a special samurai from the post office has to be used to open my brown paper packages.

Anyhoo... Herself decided I was looking a bit thin, so she bought a couple of packets of the cheesy goodness for me. I was most disappointed when I went to open the box.

First, the box itself was hermetically sealed with a tear strip around it. Most modern and not a bit nostalgic. I opened it up and took out a couple of the cheesy triangles. Happily, they were still folded at the corners like the nuns were running the hospitals and scaring country girl nurses into the correct way of making the beds. But there was a little red stub sticking out.

"Not another bloody tear strip!" I shouted. "The convenience of it all!"

"What's wrong?" Herself asked from under a pile of washing she'd just carried in from the line, while also ironing a shirt with one foot.

"Oh this is no good! Sure, what's the point if you can't get bits of processed cheese up your fingernails? Lookit!"

I tugged at the red stub and the little silver package opened magically all around its outside like a zipper on my favourite rubber bed wear.

I still ate the cheese. But under protest though.

And I picked a bit off to go under my fingernails.

You have to have some standards.

Contacting your inner pigeon

When the slightly eccentric looking Blond Woman of a Certain Age sat down and started rooting in her handbag I was already ten minutes into the bus journey and was at the very end of the outer limits of my nerves. I had spent the day in my least favourite work activity -- trying to balance accounts -- and all I wanted to do was get home, get fed, and get sat in my favourite armchair in front of my favourite television programmes.

The scent of Vicks chest rub wafted over the bus passengers from someone down the back.

Blond Lady of a Certain Age lifted a bottle of Benecol to her lips and took a giant swig. Then she opened up a bank letter (Balance more than €5,000 I noted, over her shoulder) before stuffing it back in her purse. Then, unexpectedly, she started eating the segments of an orange out of a tupperware lunchbox.

It was a slightly spoiled orange of the type that lets off a faintly acrid odour but is nonetheless edible.

Then the coughing started from somewhere behind me. A man, with a cough like the call of a wood pigeon:

"Whoo-hoo-hoo-hoo! Whoo-hoo-hoo-hoo! Whoo-hoo-hoo-hoo!"

Oh bugger.

"Whoo-hoo-hoo-hoo!"

Me nerves.

"Whoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-HOOOOO!"

Silence.

Thank God.

"Whoo...!"

We all waited for the next "Hoo!" Nothing. There was a palpable sense of relief from those of us not listening through headphones to scritch-scritch-scritching music.

"WHOO-HOO-HOO-HOO-HOO-HOOOOO!"

Only forty more minutes to my bus stop.

Next time I see that Blond Woman of a Certain Age I'm going to tell her to keep her oranges to herself. I'll probably get thrown off the bus.

Speed dating meets table service

So we took the bedding out of the wardrobe where it had been piled against the outer, wettest wall of the house and lo and behold it was damp and unusable. The fact had to be faced that it would have to go to the recycling centre and off we went, deposited sheets, pillow cases, duvets, duvet covers into the great yellow bins from which they will be made into socks for elves in Switzerland. Then we started thinking about lunch.

"I'll buy, if you like," I said.
"Okay. We could go to The Place in the Village. It's nice."

The Place in the Village is in the back of the Pub in the Village and as we had arrived ten minutes early for service, we bought tea and coffee and sat down at our Number 18 table and chatted. A large group of women in their 60s were gabbing away loudly in one large corner. Artificial Christmas trees blinked little multi-coloured lights at us. Kitchen staff busied themselves behind the self-service counter.

When the carvery opened for business, we queued and ordered peppered steak and chicken curry and sat down to eat.

A hand appeared from no-where and swiped the empty tray from my hand before my ass reached the chair.

"Er. Thanks," I said to the back of the girl, now quite a distance away.

Herself proclaimed the steak to be rare, which is not a complete crime in her lexicon of food faults, but is fairly close to the top. Oh, and the carrots were cold. I decided the chicken was tasteless and the curry barely registering. But feck it! It's better than cooking, eh? Sure, aren't we on holiday? Grand.

The hand reappeared and removed the plastic Number 18 from the centre of the table.

"We appear to be no longer sitting at a table," I said to Herself.

We talked a little about plans for the afternoon, then Herself made a visit to the Ladys' Room.

"Excuse me," the waitress cooed in my ear in Eastern European English. "Are you finished?" Her eyebrows wiggled slightly as she nodded towards my plate.

"Er, yes. Thank you."

"And this woman...?" She pointed at Herself's half-eaten steak and cold veg.

"Yes."

The plates blinked out of existence. She scuttled off towards the kitchen.

A new hand appeared and a plastic Number 17 appeared in the middle of the table. Was this demotion, I wondered. Or had we moved up a place in the charts?

Someone walked by and Herself's coffee cup vanished. On the next pass, a hand alighted on top of my ceramic teapot.

"Are you finished?" a Dublin voice said. Before I could answer, it continued: "Oh I'll just leave them." When I looked up there was no-one there.

Bloody hell! You can take the aul' "efficient service" a bit too far, you know?

We got into the car and drove away, checking through the rolled-down windows that the windshield wipers and hubcaps were still on... We weren't finished with them.

Raining Semolina

The Irish Independent reports today:
"Amount of semolina which fell on seaside town

"MORE than two tonnes of semolina fell on a seaside town after a factory silo malfunctioned and blasted the grain into the air.

"Residents of Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, woke up to find a dusting of white grain covering roads and pavements. The problem proved a major headache for the local council because as staff tried to clean the semolina away with water it simply turned into the much-loathed dessert.

"Council spokesman John Hemsworth said: "We had 15 people trying to clear it up, but as soon as it got wet it became more of a problem." "

Pub Grub is alive and well

Over the holiday, Herself and I had the pleasure of dining out more than once. We're not foodies and we don't do the posh restaurant thing. Our local, The Old Mill, is quite good for carvery at dinner hour, but our travels usually meant that we missed this and had to rely on the "waitress service" alternative. This doesn't differ much from the carvery, and in fact has some advantages. No queuing. Also, while the Mill's grub is good and comes in generous amounts, I've always found the veggies to be on the chilly side. It's difficult to keep food hot when it's been pre-cooked.

The waitress service comes with a set daytime/evening menu but there's plenty on it. The 8 oz sirloin appears still sizzling on a small platter of its own on a bed of sweated onions and mushrooms. Chips make up the rest on a side-plate. Although it looks smallish, there's enough in the whole to make a decent meal. And it's been made on the spot, so everything is piping.

We did the Burger King visit this holiday too. The drive thru on the Belgard Road produced a semi-defrosted bun between whose halves over-chilled salad bits sucked the heat out of a wafer-thin piece of beef. This was called a "Whopper". The fries, so thin they could do nothing but go cold and hard, scratched about in their cardboard.

Somewhere in between, we found two pubs serving sandwiches in a way that doesn't seem to have changed much in the past thirty years. Delaneys, in Firhouse, displays the sambos in wrap, then performs surgery on them with little plastic skewers in the shapes of sabres. This took me back to my childhood, as my father used to bring these home. He obviously drank in Delaneys too.

The other pub, The Coach House, in Roundwood, Co. Wicklow, served up our sandwich orders on huge white porcelain platters and provided a good sized teapot.

Both Delaneys and The Coach House had one extra ingredient served on the side of the plate which caused me some small surprise. The contents of a bag of cheese and onion crisps.

I'm not a foody but I've obviously been watching the wrong food programmes on the telly. I haven't seen the freshly made sandwiches being arranged nicely; the few leaves of exotic lettuce, the sliced greens, the onions being arranged as an optional salad or garnish. The chef, I know, went to some trouble to stir up a light vinegrette and drizzle it over this. But at what point does the waiter say:

"Open another bag of crisps. A customer wants a chicken salad sandwich"?

Are they being served as "Traditional Fare"? Any thoughts?

Skerries

"We could go to Skerries. Then maybe on to see Oliver Plunkett's head in Drogheda," I suggested. I was perusing one of our new roadmaps.
"I haven't been in Skerries in years," Herself said.
"And I've never seen yer man's noggin."

We found that Fingal County Council love roundabouts. You can't travel any length of good roadway there without meeting one.

"Go straight."
"Where those cars are going?"
"Yep."

"Er... go right at the next one."
We sped down a carriageway lined with new apartment buildings.
"This one isn't on the map. Must be new. Can we turn around..?"

We decided that "Head for Belfast" was the new motto, and so despite some car-horn honking and (presumably) shouts of "Bloody tourists!" we loped into Skerries without any major incident.

The town itself is mostly untouched by the major redevelopments of places like Malahide, another coastal town an hour down the road. The houses all appear to be occupied and generally they look unaltered. Like most seaside towns, the houses huddle with their backs to the sea, small windows looking into the main street.

Although we looked briefly at the harbour, our main interest was in visiting the beach. Sand dunes of the finest quartz sand led onto a popular strand with plenty of families enjoying the warm if overcast weather. Herself, born on the coast, naturally took a short paddle in the water. We sat under a dune and watched a swallow dipping low over the strand to catch flies. A sure-fire prediction of rain to come.

"Sorry. I can make you tea or coffee, but no sandwiches," the genial barman told us. "The EU tells us we have to have a full kitchen installed before we can serve a sandwich."

He pointed us good-naturedly in the direction of a bar and restaurant across the way called "Tommy Bahamas." After two pints and two inch-thick home-made burgers in the spotless (EU approved, no-doubt) restaurant, we didn't feel much like seeing yer man's head, so we braved the roundabout system and made for home. If we ever win the Lotto, we might look for a house in Skerries.

Peaks and Valleys on the food front all of a sudden

Our chef -- God be good to him -- has been on an upward quality curve these past few months. The meals we've been getting in the Local Government canteen are improved ten-fold over what used to be proffered. I think the new management changes there have brought the standard right up. Although in some areas there is always room for improvement.

Because of various problems with the cooker at home, I tend to have a brunch at work now around mid-morning. This means that I have been paying closer attention to the food on offer than I might otherwise. The scones, for example, come in at least two varieties. One is your plain, slightly soda-ish type and the other has some cherries through it. They also appear to have grown to the size of half a loaf, as if a bit too much yeast was added. The difficulty in eating them is the same as in trying to get one's mouth around a squash ball. The effect is the same. I have personally caused at least three fellow employees to have to take evasive action as pieces of cherry scone have richocheted off the ceiling and pinged, rattling, into the light fittings.

"Sorry! Cherry scone!"

They nod in understanding.

The heating apparatus used to keep this confectionary warm consists of a catering pan over a water boiler. This does the task, but sets the outer layer of the ball of dough into a concretion that defies the sharpest teeth. I nearly put my eye out tapping a butter knife off the surface experiementally only yesterday.

Dinnertime is when our catering people shine, however. Wonderfully expressive concoctions from bacon and cabbage for our country-born colleagues to exotic Mexican dishes which come with a verbal health warning to every customer are followed by traditional bread-and-butter puddings, or crumbles, or custards.

Everything was fine with this until Barbara sat down at our table yesterday with a giant panini which had been assembled by a team of architects rather than served.

"You'll never fit that into your mouth."

"You'd be surprised," she said, yanking at serviettes and wrapping it up in swaddling clothes. Her progress was hindered when the whole thing fell assunder and she discovered a large hole in the panini bread that spilled the contents onto the plate and table top.

Just as we were marvelling that so many swear words were known to such an otherwise serene young lady, our reveries were interrupted by an Environmental Health Officer leaping backwards from his plate at the next table.

"What the HELL is that...!!!???" he shouted, peering over the back of his chair.

"I think it's called 'Brie'..."

He poked it suspiciously with the tip of his fork. It looked like it had been hiding inside the grated carrots in the salad for some dangerous purpose. Ambush, possibly.

"I think it's off," he said, sticking it closer to his nose.

We passed the object about the table on a side-platter. I declined the scratch 'n' sniff experiment.

When I left them, they were thinking about teapots. Tsk, tsk!

When crapping rings about me later, doubtless I'll regret it

I arrived home this evening to find a bowl of grapes in the kitchen. Even in March, we're still finding packets and boxes of Christmas goodies and sharing them out, so something nice and edible is nothing new here. Fruit, however, is a rarity. And I like grapes. Even if they don't like me.

I went out to feed the cats and popped a grape into my mouth in passing.

"Mmmm...! Nice."

The cats eyed me with that expression only they can have, which means:

"What is the f**king monkey saying now? Doesn't he know we are commanding him to serve us meat? Quit stalling, Monkey! We are not amused."

On the way back in, I stole another grape.

And while switching on the oven, there was an excuse to pass by and purloin another. And when pulling down the shades, another. And plugging in the computer, another. And switching on the sitting room light another. And coming back in to put my password into Windows, another. And checking the oven, another. And coming back in to write something for the Blog, another.

I think I'll have to start using the double-doors to the living room rather than pass them by again. My constitution is not up to healthy living, and I shall have to suffer the grapes of wrath in a few hours when my body finds out I'm not swallowing my accustomed lard.

Some of those gift horses are right mouthy

Our workplace likes to observe corporate niceties in regard to staff welfare, and staff education, and staff entertainment. I suppose it's an attempt to off-set the staff depression, staff alcohol intake and staff whimpering in corners that happens.

Today I met a colleague who had been on an earlier tea-break to me. I thought she must have popped out to the Square, because she was carrying a small, brown-paper bag with a logo of some kind and was smiling excitedly.

"No, I didn't go out" she said. "I got this for free in the canteen."

"What's in it?" I asked, poking one eye over the rim in case this freebie might be slightly dangerous. We enumerated the goodies, which were all foodstuffs, apart from some printed bumph which we immediately disregarded. Happy with her prize, she went back to work.

Hot-footing it downstairs our little group made sure to reach the freebie table in good time to rootle about the goodiebags. There was fruit...

"I want a banana," my pal said petuantly, peering into the neatly ordered rows of brown paper. She fished out a bag containing a banana and joined the queue to buy tea. I looked into my bag, which contained a fruit scone, an orange, a strawberry yoghurt, and various pieces of plastic cutlery. And a small pat of butter wrapped in paper.

"How is it I always get yoghurt with nuts in it?"

"Oh shut up! You can have my strawberry one instead."

Around us was the louder than usual buzz of office staff in conversation over their cups of tea and coffee and heads bobbing among forests of brown-paper bags placed in protective custody about the tables. Obviously word had filtered through to the upper offices that something free was afoot in the canteen this morning.

The engineers had lined up theirs in neat rows with the handles standing to attention. We lowly clerks plonked the goodiebags in haphazard confusion among the cups and saucers and ducked around them in conversation.

There was an instruction booklet on how to eat the contents. At least I presume that's what it was. In keeping with all members of the public everywhere, I deigned to read whatever had been provided for me. On the outside of the bag was something about healthy eating and the Irish Dairy Board.

"It's all a gimmick," declared Billy Fitz, sitting down at the table and resolutely buttering a croissant. He would not be eating from a free bag of food today.

"Never refuse a gift of money or food," I said. "Or a bath."

They looked at me.

"You forget, I came from a house without any plumbing."

At dinner hour I had a piece of Southern Fried chicken, mashed potatoes with broccoli and turnip. I forgot all about the healthy eating message. I did remember to bring the bag home though. I mean it was free, after all.

Think I might attempt the fruit scone, even though I'm full.

Healthy eating, how are you!

Ah! The cup of tay! and other breakfast musings

First published on The Dublin South-West Forum, July 30th 2005

My father recently forwarded a supply of teabags to us which, somewhat strangely, made putrid tea. It was bitter stuff, and the strangeness of it was that it was from a reputable tea blender. I can only guess that he came by an old supply at cheap rates someplace.

This morning I had the pleasure of *two* mugs of Barry's tea. Barry's is owned by the family of Peter Barry (born August 10, 1928) a retired Irish Fine Gael politician and businessman.

My mother and father went through the war years (known in Ireland as "The Emergency", but to everyone else as World War II), when tea was rationed to half an ounce per person per week. Considering that "loose tea" (as distinct from the modern bagged stuff, which although I drink it for convenience sake is still to my mind inferior) was generally sold by the quarter pound, this was a poor amount indeed to have to try to survive upon. Tea being so scarce, my father has tales of his Aunt Maggie serving tea all week from the same batch of leaves, which doesn't bear thinking about too closely.

We got our tea-drinking habits from copying the English who started drinking it in the 1650s. It was so expensive that early tea caddies came with locks and keys which only the mistress of the house carried. Antique teapots and teacups are therefore tiny, like dolls-house teasets. Great profits were eventually made from tea imports, but as time wore on it stopped being such an unreachable luxury and spread out from the upper crust in England through their houses in Ireland to become a staple of the Irish diet as it remains today.

In our house, the tea caddy was almost never empty and held mostly Lyons Green Label or Mauve Label tea leaves. We also drank PG Tips. A souvenir tea scoop, with the Isle of Mann coat of arms on its handle, was what was used to measure. One scoop per person, and one for the pot was the law. Of course, the pot must first be warmed with scalding water. The tea would not brew properly if dumped unceremoniously into a cold pot! And the length of time the brew was allowed to do its work was also important, as was a proper knitted cosy to cover the pot.

At work, we have a well-appointed canteen, which, until recently, suffered from bad tea. It had those large tea boiling urns that, no matter what end of the day one visited, consistently brewed "mouse trotting" tea. (Tea so strong that you could trot a mouse across its surface.) They lately changed tack and supplied us with miniature teapots, each accompanied by a single teabag. Now, if the strength of the tea is not to one's taste, the blame can't be placed on the canteen staff. It's still a teabag though. Not "real tea" as my mother would have liked it.

An American visitor in the 1990s complained that he couldn't get a decent cup of coffee in Dublin. Back then we invariably used the condensed granular stuff (We've since heard of coffee beans, btw). As I pointed out, you could always get a decent cup of tea. My American friend was not impressed.

"Tay" by the way, is the original pronunciation of the brew. It's survival in Hiberno English proves our long history of tea-drinking. In fact, the use of "Tay" instead of "Tea" was at one time a social stigma, at a time when all things English were considered superior, and anything of Irish origin considered inferior.

I read some place that Jonathan Swift, on visiting a Dublin high society soiree in the 1700s at which the ladies were doing everything possible to avoid the "Tay"-like accent and sound more "dignified", encountered someone who asked him if he had enjoyed his visit to the "Bee of Neeples."

She should have stuck to the cup of tay.

Of course the cup of tay is fine on its own, but it's at its best as a follow up to "The Full Irish", which is to say a proper fried breakfast.

Opinions differ as to what the full Irish actually is these days. With influences from foreign travel and the influx of visitors from near and far oddments have been added and subtracted. If you go into a cafe in the city, the full Irish is likely to consist of friend pork sausages, fried or scrambled egg, and maybe some black and white pudding. Extras include buttered toast or fried bread. Baked beans may also feature.

I don't think of beans as a breakfast food and I think they've crept onto the menu from truck stops in the U.K., where long-distance lorry drivers combined breakfast, lunch, and tea in one meal. Beans are more an evening meal for me and I can't do them justice in the morning.

Pork sausages come in so many guises these days as well, that it's difficult to buy the "perfect" breakfast. Hafners are my sausage of choice in the breakfast department, but they're not stocked by the local supermarkets any more. (They used to be available back in the days of H. Williams supermarket, long since departed from Tallaght Village). I'm sure a butcher or two must still sell them.

These days the shop-bought sausages of "Everyday" brand, fill the gap in the frying pan. I'm not so fond of the "Denny" varieties, unless very well cooked they tend to have a softer filling.

Puddings are again a matter of individual taste. The black rings of puddings made by Walshes and filled with white veins of suet are the favourite in my book. You can keep yer aul dry Clonakiltys as far as I'm concerned. Likewise the white puds, which should be browned and accompanied by the shrivelled skins they came in.

Last but not least is the fried egg, which has so many ways to go wrong it's amazing that it stays on the menu at all these days. To give evolution its due, I've stopped frying my foods in the traditional lards (or cooking fats, if they're of slightly different origin). I now use vegetable oils. The egg tends to fry reasonably well in these, and I'm a soft yoke man myself. Not that I send back an egg that has a slightly hardened yoke. Burst the yoke, though, and half the breakfast ritual of dipping toast, fried bread, or bread and butter in it is sadly lost.

I hope your croissants tasted nice this morning. I'm off for a real breakfast.