Daisies and Lavender and Chester

Yaaaaawnny stretch... another delightful restorative yoga session.

Well, this week has just zipped on by.



At Chester Beatty



In a backpack somewhere is a little camera waiting to be downloaded, but for now, here's a couple of iPhone pics from a very lovely Saturday. Me at the Chester Beatty library (note to self: a Queen of Sheba fridge magnet also awaits in that backpack). And below, a lavender margarita in NoName Bar (which I consider to be named 'The Sign of the Snail'). The photographer's caption was 'Waiter, there's a picture in my Margarita!'



Those photographers don't miss a trick!

I had a gin daisy after that, but by then we were talking tech and not playing with it.

Alrightey, time to curl up :-)

Weekend blooms

Now that I'm reunited with my camera cord, and before the vortex of another work week draws me in, some piccies to share from two visits to June Blake's garden over the last few weeks.

Beautiful planting and setting :-)

Catch up: St Patrick's Day

Late, yet better than never!

Over the years, I've avoided many a St P's celebration - particularly when abroad, where things can get Oirish quicker than you can say leprechaun costume. This year, a little group of us were invited (through our charity work) to the President's St Patrick's Day reception. Unexpected!

The first thing that happened was that I got the Ferrero Rocher ad stuck in my head. Most unfortunate.*



The second thing was that I put it all out of my mind entirely. And so, on the morning of St Pat's, there I was: curled up, watching Murder, She Wrote, when a friend texted:

What are you going to wear?

A worthy question, as it turned out.

I pause the sleuthing Jessica; head upstairs. I stare at my little wardrobe, reasoning that if I'm going to Áras an Uachtaráin on St Patrick's Day, I should at least wear Irish clothing.

I wonder if Dunnes Stores counts.

Sigh.

Most semi-formal stuff that I own is black: probably a smidge sombre for a daytime, celebratory thing. Even if they're not serving Ferrero Rocher.**

Which leaves one dress that is (a) Irish-designed and (b) a colour.

Now, the whole visionary ensemble of the dress was that it went with a lovely (black) shrug, which is currently away from me. I meander around (as much as one can in a teeny cottage) wondering what to wear with it...
...and glanced at what was hanging on the wall.

And lo, I didst bless the name of Sharon Rose, and her multi-functional designs :-)

A wall-hanging by morning, a wrap by afternoon -  one that probably looked familiar to the President, since she had complimented Sharon Rose on one of hers back in January.

The day was fab, without a nutty chocolate in sight. Poetry and music and dance, and a couple of lovely speeches. Afterwards we milled around the Áras, taking pictures on historic sofas against a backdrop of historic art in various rooms of the historic variety. And then life went back to normal :-)

*Even if you happened to like Ferrero Rocher nut-infested chocolates.
**Which I would never never eat. Nuts. Gakkarama.

Family Day

Gorgeous afternoon with my sister: after lunch, she surprised me with a treaty visit to the Mandala Spa. Glass or two o'champers, fabulous massage (yes, we felt kinda like the Boneless Chicken Ranch afterwards) and many giggles.

I was conscious this morning that a friend of mine was marking his mother's anniversary today. Last year we visited her grave together, lay bright flowers down as the wind whipped about us. And the thoughts helped me to stay in the moment and treasure the day even more.

Sisters in the City

Yesterday began and ended at Paddington. My sister was over, and in true only-have-one-day fashion, there was a wish list.

We managed to squeeze a bunch in: Harrods, Rigby & Peller, The Fifth Floor at Harvey Nichs (a restaurant I fell in love with from Henry Harris's cook book), Hamley's (with an epic Lego Buzz Lightyear) and miscellanous shops. Great catch-up, fits of giggles along the way, sigh of tolerance when I was more interested in sparkley kitty shop decorations than the handbags for sale. We did the wish list and more, for there was also the V&A, and a wide-eyed wander through Liberty's, with some feather-fun en route.

At one point, I reminded myself that I must get a third copy of the Fifth Floor cook book (a break-up counted for the first, and the second is with all my other books, undelivered. In Portugal somewhere. Away from me). 'Oh, is the replacement cookbook in the s-?' my sister began, then caught herself. 'I call it The Skip,' she admitted, with a cute smile.

And so the nebulous unknown place containing all I-owned-before-now has a name. The Skip.

It's good to be able to laugh about this stuff.



Gorgeous, treasured day :-)

A world of delights

Scribble scribble scribble. Thus went the day, happily :-)

Off to the British Museum later for their 'Belief and Faith' evening. The programme has oodles of things running simultaneously: lectures, performances, demonstrations and storytelling. I'm thinking a little gospel music, islamic calligraphy, Easter Island statue-making, and maybe finish up listening to a storyteller conjure up some Hindu myths. It seems a lot to squodge in to two hours; we can but try!

In Kitty News: they are gradually getting introduced to the local wildlife. They encountered their first squirrel yesterday; they were duly psyched. And although the Cat of the House regularly faces down the adult foxes that frequent these parts, the little munchkins have not yet had the pleasure...

The Burren

One of the highlights this weekend was our guided walk across the utterly unique landscape of the Burren. Where to start... wild orchids, natural bonsai, heart-shaped grooves, wishing trees, holy wells, volcano kettles, undulating organic stone, gentian flowers, fab chocolate cake, a unicorn grove (okay, I made that last one up).

As we walked, famine walls stretched across the mountains away from us; massive stone walls going nowhere, built by the starving. Eavan Boland's great poem on famine roads echoed through my mind; as she observed, the roads are "so powerful in their meaning and so powerless at their origin". But so much of the stone tells stories of the past, from colonial mappers to thirteenth century Cistercian monks to older, Celtic Christian communities, and yet older, pagan ones.

A remarkable place.

Woodn't it be nice...

To kick off the images from the lovely weekend, here is the oh-so-treaty sculpture garden of Liam O'Neill. I headed out there on Saturday afternoon, between brunch and rugby:



Liam's current works draw strongly on Irish mythologies: Finn, the Children of Lir, Dagda's Cauldron; trinities and guardian-warriors and trumpeters...

His website is worth a look through, particularly (under 'Commissions') the 'Brothers' commission from the Pearse museum in Dublin - the stumps on which they're mounted actually formed a single tree. When the tree died, Liam was contacted: he cut down the trunks, sculpted them into a pair of brothers, and then restored them to their place of growth. Lovely. Similarly, when a tree on Fota Island died, Liam transformed it into a Regeneration Circle.



Beautiful wood forms, for interior & exterior. And a lovely family :-)

Entertaining spaces

I spent most of Friday in the V&A Museum, in their newly revamped Medieval & Renaissance galleries. Such a thoughtfully considered space, filled with a zillion treaty things: mermaid capitals and fantastic salt cellars and sumptuous tapestries and reliquaries and illuminated manuscripts and champleve enamels and lions and tigers and bears oh my...

Anyway, I'd recommend it. That's all I'm saying. Most treaty.



And from there, I met Sara and we headed for London Bridge, to gather under the arches for Southwark Playhouse's Henry V. On arrival, it turned out that for that evening, we would be mostly French. So we sat with the blue team, lining three sides of an enormous board game (the red English squeezed along the fourth side). Clearly, tonnes of thought had gone into how to communicate the heavily-edited script with a small cast, and while several things didn't really work, it was great to see them tried at least. Despite shortcomings, I thoroughly enjoyed the wacky take on Hal growing up, as trains rumbled overhead. It suited us perfectly that evening.

And the Battle of Agincourt was a skittles match. Can't beat that!

At the dimming of the day

Today was a mixture of long- and super-short-term things; felt kind of like a camera refocusing from a detailed foreground to an epic horizon shot, and back again...

But the big break was nipping out on the sea for a bit: we headed over to Sherkin, where we had a picnic (crab sandwiches & wine) then took a spin around.



We got to Hackett's Creek at low tide, and for about five minutes we just sat in the stillness, herons and seals moving around us as dusk settled.



A lovely evening :-)

Tuesday Treats

My drive up to Bantry this morning was lovely: the brilliant red fuschia hedgerows are thinning out, revealing purple heathers in full bloom; and the air was speckled with butterflies and autumn leaves. Very purdy.

And now, back in Baltimore, folk are making the most of the sunshiney day:



Me, I'm scribbling away, and feeling quite pampered. And even though it's only Tuesday, the odds-on favourite for Post of the Week is clear:

Nightcap

Yawwwwwnnn...

The day unfolded nicely: the Great Shakespeare Costume Search (Part the First) merged seamlessly into some treaty wooden boat sailing, and from there to Castletownshend for a concert (flute, viola and massive black glossy kick-ass harp - if Batman played the harp, this would be it). I was looking forward to hearing the Ravel & Faure, but my fave turned out to be a piece for harp composed by... (actually too tired to look up his name - but he was the harpist in Tchaikovshy's orchestra, so all those Nutcracker/ Swan Lake harpey pieces were composed specifically for him) - anyhoo, it was delightful.

And late night coffee (and/or dessert, including a basil sorbet) finished the evening beautifully.

Nighty night x

Birthday Bliss

Aaaah, treaty breakfast, candles, sparkles, tripping through gardens, fairy play complete with fairy wings, popcorn and laughter and singing and meeting old friends and scrumptious food and conversation from one end of the day to the other.

Oh - and limoncello. In dinky limoncello glasses.

Seriously, does life get better?

And now to head to Dublin to see U2 tonight - whooo hoooooo!!!

Holiday Day

Well, the day has been a smorgasbord of treaty things from start to finish: morning birthday party (for my sister's twins), pirate playground (for all), lovely drive, miniature railway heaven and home again.

Little glass o'red on the go now. Think I have enough left in me to take in a movie. While eating a cupcake. Just maybe...

Bloggus Interruptus

In brief... in Dublin... friends... family... sunshine... various celebratory occasions... camera now fully charged & I am ready for the evening!

Will be babysitting twins & baby tomorrow day & night, with a bunch o'chicken pox added into the usual mix. I suspect that there will be no time for blogging.

Have a wonderful weekend :-)

Cork in a nutshell

So, super-quick post this evening, as I'm back from my little road trip to Cork (cue song: "on the road again...") and in need of some concerted flumping.

In brief: a fantastic day, shared with the Fabulous Baking Lady. And one of the many lovely things about such company is the early-morning moment when we're deciding who should drive, when she simultaneously passes me a parcel of scrumptious chocolate blondies - instant decision: I clearly need both hands free to eat and drink coffee. She should, like, toooooootally drive :-)

In the metropolis, we were both similarly enraptured by things of an arts & craftsey nature: we ooohed over papers and ribbon and paints and... well, fecky things in general. And we also hit the grown-up shops, until we were TK Maxxed out, and had bought enough bulk health-food seeds & nuts (dirtydirtydirty) to give the impression that we were stockpiling for the apocalypse. Or the Rapture. I'm never sure what order in which that's supposed to happen...

Anyhoo, Rapture aside, it was a delightful day. And now to focus - One, Two, Three: and Flump.