Eating (in no particular order)

Smoked haddock cakes at home. I bought the haddock from the fishmonger’s truck in Mangan’s parking lot; he comes every Thursday.

A free range chicken roasted in my oven.

 Poached salmon at Alan and Eleanor’s.

 Gristly steak but good company at Fury’s Pub.

 Wexford strawberries from a truck on the road above Broadford.

 Brown bread every week from Eden Deli.

Tea on a Sunday evening at Sheila’s, with ham and salads and tea brack.

 Scones at Ballindoolin. A ham sandwich at the dining room table, and a cupcake made by Zara, split with Esther and eaten standing in the kitchen.

 Fried porridge on a plate with two kinds of salmon and salad for an al fresco lunch at Simon and Erica’s in Tipperary.

 Boiled ham and coleslaw at Nodlaig’s, followed by a great game of Scrabble.

Mature goat gouda from Deirdre’s organic farm shop.

Porridge with milk and An Grianan honey.

 Turbot on a bed of baby courgettes topped by a thin razor clam shell filled with seafood terrine at La Vie de Chateau. Before this there were marinated caper berries, their long stems still attached.

 Paella and wine and lovely company at Niamh and Niall’s.

Street food at the Saturday market in Dublin.

A cheese toastie made under the broiler late one night after an evening at the theatre and a long drive home.

 An Eden Deli breakfast of Niall’s house-cured bacon rashers with poached eggs, followed by ham and leek quiche for lunch the following day.

 Banoffi made by Hannah at Una’s.

Tuna salad for lunch at Larkin’s.

Trip two to La Vie de Chateau: A cherry and almond clafouti with crème fraiche shared with Esther and washed down with Moroccan mint tea with pine nuts floating on the top.

Carmelized red onion chutney from the food hall at Marks & Sparks.

Milk chocolate digestives. Hobnobs.

An Irish grass-fed steak grilled on the barbecue in Tipperary, with grilled zucchini fresh from the garden.

It was raining; I held the umbrella over the grill to keep the steak dry.

One salty French fry from the chipper at Una’s at 11:30pm.

Seafood risotto before the theatre at Just Off Francis in Dublin.

A soft-boiled duck egg from the farm just down the road, with Eden Deli bread to sop it up.

Hummous from Tesco.

Duck confit from Super Quinn, on the recommendation of Simon.

Turnips from Geraldine’s garden, simply prepared.

At the dig at Bective Abbey, a ham and cheese sandwich and powerfully strong tea in a ceramic mug.

A goat cheese, rocket, carmelized onion and candied walnut salad with no goat cheese, no onions, no walnuts and no rocket at Conrad Hotel before a performance at the National Concert Hall across the street.

Exotic and tasteless Chinese tea at Bill and Joan’s, given to them as a gift. Joan dumped out the tea, then made a pot of Barry’s Tea that we drank to accompany their homegrown raspberries. Perfect.

Summer songs

By now I should expect the sort of eclectic concert that I attended in the National Concert Hall in Dublin. What else, after all, could be on a program billed as light summer music in a country whose only classical music station plays the slow movement of a Haydn symphony immediately followed by that iconic American classic Camp Granada (Hello Mudda, Hello Fadda, here I am in Camp Granada), then one of the least rousing numbers from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang? And so it was. The first half of the concert (which took place not in the large auditorium but in a modest side room) was billed as the Classical Mix. It began with Some Enchanted Evening to set the mood, then moved to all the usual operatic chestnuts (Voi che sapete, Quando m’en vo,  and of course that old favorite, The Queen of the Night). As a prelude to this, the main talent, an American who shall to save some embarrassment remain nameless, came on stage, or I should say platform. Oh no! It’s the old I-have-a-cold speech. After explaining in some detail the source of her difficulty (cold, fever, shivers, cough) she called on none other than God Himself (as in, with God’s help) to get her through whatever singing she might be able to manage. After she left the stage she could be heard intermittently hacking from stage right at various points throughout the evening, as if to prove her point.

            As for the rest of the ensemble, it became quickly apparent that this was a family concert, not a public one. The main singer, a soprano with a great deal of stage presence and a very decent voice, was never introduced. Everyone in the audience evidently knew Donna, as the other performers referred to her, already. Had there been programs, some of this might have been clarified, but alas, there were none, although we discovered later that ‘the promoter’ according to the ticket taker in the concert hall, had printed a few for those lucky enough to grab them. At intermission I managed to liberate one from what we knew to be an empty seat so we could at least see what would happen next.

            That would be Act Two, the Motley Mix. Actually, this act was more fun. Once the requisite numbers from West Side Story were gotten out of the way, the rest of the evening’s singing turned out to be toe tapping. There were three Irish songs, then four spirituals complete with embarrassing dialect (I’s headed for the river), these last in arrangements by Mark Hayes that differed very little from those by, let’s say (since they were virtually identical), Copland. There was a very funny aria by a master student (one of three such students, the other two best not mentioned) about a bride preparing for her wedding (‘a tiara, you call this a tiara’) which ranted at one point about the weak dwarves hired to carry her train: give me midgets with muscle, she sang. Since this piece was not listed on the non-program, I don’t know who wrote it, but I’d love to hear it again.

            Next, a group of white singers billed as the Dublin Gospel Choir came on stage and sang Lean on Me and Swing Low Sweet Chariot, thinly but tunefully. After the choir, back to Donna and crew, who finally got around to Copland himself. There was a credible if gimmicky Boatman by the only cold-free professional singer of the evening, a tenor in a white tuxedo jacket and a silk waistcoat with lounge-lizard hair and an Ezio Pinza voice, followed by a full-cast finale of The Promise of Living that hadn’t quite reached the work-in-progress phase; evidently they were rehearsing for the real concert that would take place in South Carolina next March. We were all, of course, invited to attend.

As for the unnamed American, she managed a perfectly reasonable suite of folk songs in a deep mezzo voice that didn’t match the soprano billing (but of course this was only verbally confirmed) so that it wasn’t possible to know if the singing was deep because of the cold or because this was her normal, no-cold voice. In general the idea seems to have been that the American was fronting for what was really an opportunity for singers from her master class to perform in front of an audience. In other words, the main singer was never going to do much singing, cold or no cold. I also saw this phenomenon last summer, when I attended a concert headlined by Dawn Upshaw, who barely opened her mouth to sing during the evening (and she didn’t have a cold) but instead introduced a series of young singers, the final one refusing to relinquish the stage despite the increasingly restive audience. My main memory of that performance was that the endless song set meant I missed my train and nearly didn’t get home at all.