Until last night, I was a Raclette Virgin. My friends around the supper table wouldn’t believe it….couldn’t believe it. To have lived in the Haute Savoie for over a decade and never done Raclette……”NEVER”? they quizzed, dumbfounded “Never EVER?” It was as though they had discovered I’d never ridden a bicycle or been in a Museum. Christian joined his hands, bowed his head and said I deserved a monument “L’église de la Vierge de la Raclette.” “La Vierge de la Raclette, priez pour nous” he intoned as The Cheese Ceremony began.

Raclette is more than just a cheese, it is an Alpine tradition, eaten religiously in some households every Saturday night. Sister to the fondue, made individually by each diner at the table, it is served as small (raw) slices, accompanied by boiled potatoes, ruffles and rosettes of thinly sliced cured hams and salamis (“charcuterie”) and bowls of gherkins and pickled silver-skin onions. According to Diana Henry in her wonderful book “Roast Figs and Sugar Snow” my bible of cold weather cooking “Raclette is an ancient mountain cheese made in the French Savoie and the Calais region of Switzerland. Once heated, on a grill, it becomes sweetly savoury and wonderfully elastic, perfect for scooping up with bread or potatoes.”

Diana Henry quotes the cookware company Le Cruset as reckoning that two in every ten British households owns a fondue set.  Certainly, this might have been true in the ‘Seventies, when fondue parties (and, let’s face it, wife swapping…see “The Ice Storm” film) were all the rage, but nowadays, I dunno.  There is a storm of protest over posters of “Your Thighs on Cheese” which have been posted on highways in upstate New York -ironically just before this weekend’s ice storm – by a vegan advocacy group in a campaign against dairy foods, to spread the message that meat and dairy will make you fat. Fondues, raclettes and their other sister Tartiflette (potatoes boiled, sliced, sautéd in butter with diced fat bacon, then covered with slices of Reblochon cheese and spoonfuls of crème fraiche and baked in the oven) have never gone out of fashion in Switzerland the French Alps. It is, however, winter food and sun-burned tourists who order these heavy dishes outdoors on a balmy evening are of course served, but dismissed as …..well, tourists…..by wait staff in lake-side restaurants. However, so loyal are natives and besotted skiers to their cheese-based dishes, that it is not unusual to see cars in our area with the bumper sticker “In Tartiflette we Trust”

At the Fete de St André market in the first week of December in Annecy, raclette is cooked on the city streets in huge half moons over a burner. When hot, the cheese is dolloped and spread onto halved baguettes and squidged together again over a good scoop of frites, to be eaten on the hoof with mulled wine or cider. Last night, sitting around the table, each diner was given a little square pan and a wooden scraper. In the centre of the table was an electric grill, with space for eight of these pans. A basket of bread, plates of sliced raclette cheeses, charcuterie, gherkins and onions was passed around. While our cheese was cooking, we helped ourselves to boiled potatoes from the bowl on top of the grill, and by the time a potato was cut on our plates, the bubbling cheese was ready to be scraped from the pan directly onto it and eaten with the meat.

I lost my raclette virginity last night with affectionate bantering, community support, guidance and mutual enjoyment, minimum fuss and maximum pleasure.

But I durst not look at my thighs this morning…….

We live at 480 metres. At 9 pm on January 13^th it was -1.5C outside. We have some electric underfloor heating downstairs, but no central heating upstairs or in the house generally.  Today, we did not light our wood-burning stove in the living room until until 5 pm. Supper finished and about to watch some television, we are snug at 25C.

At this time of year, in our part of the French Alps it would not be unusual for the daytime temperature to be –5C, the nighttime temperature to be -10C. At the moment, the birds – though very glad of their well-stocked, multi-storey diner in the garden – are experimenting with their Springtime songs. The Irish tv news reports plants sprouting and budding 2 -3 weeks early, but the nice weatherwoman (with the bad wardrobe) is saying not to be too complacent, that the winter might yet arrive. At home in Ireland in December, a brother-in-law bought for Christmas presents, a dozen pairs of those silly looking (but effective) shoe grips to give purchase on ice. My niece gave me a glovely scraper for de-icing the car windscreen. Sorry Mark, no takers for your crampons, sorry Rachael, haven’t even taken your scraper out of its box.  It’s cyclical, I know, but this ‘not knowing the seasons but for the length of the days’ (prophesies of St Columcille) is a bit discombobulating.

At 1,000m., there’s snow in these here mountains with bright clear skies by day or dense fog.   The conditions are perfect for the Grand Odyssee, the European version of the Alaskan Iditarod Dog Sled race.  ( See:   http://www.grandeodyssee.com/fr/62/Programme-détaillé/) The Grand Odyssee, with international dog teams and A-List mushers, began on January 7^th and runs (literally) until the 18^th…..The current leg is in the Savoie – Manche Haute Maurienne Vanoise.  I may yet get up to see them…I really, really want to be a musher.

We have not yet done any snowshoeing, I haven’t yet this season clicked into a pair of Nordic skis, wobbled a bit, got my feet entangled and fallen down (albeit while wearing the very best of Extreme Sports Gear.)  We had snow for a few days down here, but it was wet and unreliable (what I call ‘Cork snow’.) It was not good enough to make an igloo, or to roll in to clean my fur coat. The latter is a handy household hint learned in Iqaluit in Nunavut: parents gladly give polar bear skins to the children to use as toboggans (furside downside) in order to clean them.

In the meantime, here is a short video so that we may be prepared when the snows return (ah, where are the snows of yesteryear?) by the Exceedingly Excellent National Film Board of Canada whom God preserve.  How to build an igloo It is from 1949 so the delivery is a bit dated (and I get antsy when Eastern Arctic First Nation peoples are called ‘Eskimos’ rather than Inuit, but the 1940s weren’t exactly known for their political correctness.) The design and the skills demonstrated have never been bettered– and probably never will – and they are presented with respect. It is, as the narrator says, a perfect design.

Oh to have a little igloo, to own the soapstone and stool and all; the heaped up Arctic cotton grass and seal oil beside the kudlik, the pile of furs against the ice blocks.…..but if I can’t have the snow, maybe I could have the Hermes scarves?

Today a French TV war correspondent died in a grenade attack while working on a story in an area near the city of Homs in Syria.  Gilles Jacquier of France 2 Television was one of a reported 10 people killed and 25 wounded, including a Dutch journalist, injured in the face by shrapnel. He was the first Western reporter to die in the 10 months of unrest in the country. A Syrian journalist, Shoukri Ahmed Ratib Abu Bourghoul was shot on December 30^th by a group of armed men on his way home after presenting his weekly radio show, near the capital, Damascus, and died on January 2^nd.  One hundred and three journalists were killed in the line of duty throughout the world in 2011.

The French President, Nicolas Sarkozy appeared on French TV news bulletins this evening. He said: “Gilles Jacquier was just doing his journalist job by covering the violent events in Syria as a result of the unacceptable repression by the regime of the population.” The unrest began with demonstrations against President Bashar al-Assad’s rule in March.

In March/April last we did a French course at a large language school in Geneva. The school occupies – from memory – the first and top three floors of a building on a city street. In between, is the Syrian Embassy.  One day, tomatoes were thrown at the windows – mainly hitting the classrooms – by a small group of men in the street outside.  Almost immediately, they were quietly – and it seemed not aggressively – moved on by Swiss police.

Day-by-day, the news of killings and repression in Syria got worse. Between full-time and evening classes, a few hundred people of every nationality passed up and down on the stairwell outside the door of the Syrian Embassy every day, but nobody ever (to my knowledge, while I was there at least) left a sign of their displeasure. Neither did I. I thought about it, but I didn’t do anything.

Journalism was my trade too.  It’s a tough job, even when one never leaves home base. I will be in Geneva before the weekend. Maybe I should climb those stairs again and this time, leave the Syrians a calling card……

In the past decade, Ireland was on the Pig’s Back. For the previous century and a half there had been a constant flow of emigration. Then with the new millennium came the Celtic Tiger economy. From all over the world people flocked to the small island for work and a better quality of life and the emigrants returned. Ironically, while it was awash with money, the quality of life diminished because the nation lost its soul. Now Ireland is one of the Pigs of Europe, along with Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain, a poor country in big trouble, with abandoned buildings, high unemployment, decreased wages and lost pensions.

Again, there is mass emigration. The modern exodus is eased with convenient air travel and new technology, but still it is heart breaking. The Irish Times newspaper has a regular ‘Generation Emigration’ series for which, recently, emigrants home for Christmas were asked to post their thoughts about the Ireland they found on their return.  This is what “Eamon McL” wrote:

“Depressing, cold, dark, miserable, expensive, wet, nanny state, taxed to death, deprived of hope, no inspiration or leadership present, second rate education system, rampant begrudgery, repressed sexuality, cute hoorism, snobbery, dishonesty, victim complexes, woe is me’ism, sheep mentality, gossiping, delusional (sure aren’t the Irish great – the world loves us?) self indulgent, alcoholic, bad breath, upstart jobsworths everywhere…”

We went back to Ireland in early December for the filming of the “Other Voices” music television series in Dingle, County Kerry – an annual pilgrimage.  In Dublin en route, we overnighted in Bewley’s Hotel in Ballsbridge, where we’ve stayed before, during the Celtic Tiger era. Albeit convenient it used to be expensive for what it offered, a bit conveyor-beltish, and though the building itself is old and pleasing, the rooms felt as thought their change-over was rushed. The staff – then newly arrived  immigrants from Eastern Europe – used to cautious Eastern European ways, were cold and almost mute as they had so little English, and were so terrified by the casual, vociferous Irish.

This time round, the hotel was relaxed, comfortable, affordable and friendly. The staff had settled in and settled down and were welcoming and smiling.  Our room looked out over the parade ground of the Royal Dublin Society, where for generations horses have paced and raced and laced ladies graced the ring. Breakfast was generous – hot, (the ‘fullirish’) fresh and part of a package which included parking – in the huge downstairs dining room which used to be O’Connell’s restaurant.  Because we always enjoyed the food and ambiance of O’Connells, we had gone to its new location (the old Madigan’s pub in Donnybrook) the night before for a meal.

One does not suffer future-shock in O’Connells. Its décor is similar to that of the former Bewleys brasserie, but the ghosts of the old pub were still visible; the intelligentsia, the politicos, the sharks, the creative and the good talkers, the cunning and the ambitious, the self-important of Dublin. It was to there the staff of RTE (the national television broadcaster down the road in Montrose) would decamp and encamp.  The guilty (such as I) can still summon the aura, the miasma, of time and opportunities and talents and emotions wasted, stolen, scattered on the froth of pints, the dregs of whiskeys.

The restaurant is still called ‘O’Connells’ after its owner Tom (brother of the more famous Darina.) The international staff, Eastern and Southern European, is efficient, friendly and talkative (now with a noticeable Dublin accent) and by dint of an influx of Italians, even charming and flirtatious. The food, as usual, is excellent, fresh, varied and affordable. The restaurant was very buzzy and busy, but the clientele relaxed, with older women dining together, families of three generations and office parties.  The up-tight business people dining alone, the couples anxious to make an impression, were not as much in evidence as they used to be.  Himself, disappointed with the amount of pumpkin in his starter, mentioned it en passant to a wait person. Within minutes, the maitre d, Tom O’Connell arrived to discuss the dish, take notes and make assurances that he’d tweak the ingredients to fulfill the menu description.

Parking in Dublin is still outrageously expensive – almost on a par with Sydney in Australia, where last year we paid $30 an hour – so after breakfast we left the car at the hotel, walked out the gate and immediately got a bus into town, hopping a bus back out later on to collect the car and baggage safely stowed therein.

We met friends, ate lunch and shopped. Himself had a business meeting and was amazed by the undercurrent of enterprise, of innovation, of ideas and opportunities being harnessed through endeavour, expertise, dogged hard-work and the tolerance and common-sense borne of experience, running quietly beneath the doom and gloom.

The sojourn in Dublin was so enjoyable we decided to spend Christmas in Ireland.  It was as though the country we had fled partially a decade ago and from which we’d sold-up within the past five years had found itself again…..a bit frayed at the edges, but kinder, easier on itself and others, more honest and even contented despite the economic hardships. We had left as when our mothers died the focus of family shifted, and because we didn’t like the brash new Celtic Tiger Ireland.  The country had lost the run of itself, becoming intolerant, judgmental, status-focused and money-obsessed, with false values, false expectations and false demands.

Somewhat by virtue of global warming and its location on the West coast of Europe where it acts as the weather filter for mainland Europe, Ireland can still be depressing, cold, dark and wet. Its citizens are indeed being taxed to death for the sins of the Tigers, and the sadness of the unemployed, the two thirds of all young mortgage holders who are now in negative equity, is palpable.  But Ireland is finding itself again, even finding its warmth, sense of humour and creative talents and can, and will, emerge from the ruins, the abandonment, the way it was led astray, because the nation is stronger than those guilty of its ruination (mainly political) who force-fed a golden goose and then promised and pre-sold far too many golden eggs, which never hatched.

There are several reasons for my posting yesterday’s blog “Last Week I found a Button on a Beach”:

Instant gratification. With new technology there are so many distractions and different forms of immediate communication that life has become a comic strip of simple pictures with bubbloid coments, pictograms and smileys (Zap! Kapow! OMG! LOL! FYI.)  Attention spans have been shortened by the dumbing-down of media (‘Gotcha!’ newspaper headlines, music played behind the traffic and weather reports, crawlers on the news.) People are uncomfortable with long tranches of text, they need to know the length of a piece before they even consider reading. Two paragraphs of short sentences is visible at the outset as requiring little time and concentration and therefore manageable.

Self-obsession. Every twinge of physical discomfort, every cup of tea swallowed, every tear or smile is nowadays publicly recorded and recounted.  The art – for art it is – of conversation is no longer practiced (except in Ireland, where most of the population speaks as though Finnegan’s Wake were their childhood bedtime story and conversation can still be interesting, stimulating and exciting, hilarious, colourful and complex.) A discourse begun with some observation, information or idea, put to a listener for rounding, criticism – discussion- is not pondered, led on, embroidered and gem-studded with scintillating thoughts in easy words, but is immediately tripped-up with a dull personal anecdote.  “It’s probable I may have just discovered the God Particle” is met with “My cousin’s friend thinks she might have found that too…she lives on the Isle of Wight, we don’t see her often, since her husband died –they’d been married for 40 years…..” comments which shift the focus to the ‘listener.’ (Though people rarely listen any more. I met a woman at a party recently, an acquaintance of about 6 years.  She did not know I had a daughter) A topic is tangentialised with anecdotes of no intellectual merit quashing of the idea and thus ending that particular train of thought.  A question to lead-on the original conversation might offer enlightenment and enjoyment rather than frustration and boredom.

To find a button on a beach is amazing as it is so tiny – try finding a button one has LOST in an expanse of shifting sand – but is of no consequence. Maybe the description is good – it is a long time since Frost told us about stopping by woods on a snowy evening but it is still a joy to read and feel – and related immediately an incident such as the discovery of a button on a beach is amusing ….wait for a week and it has lost its impact.

Irony. The piece was irony, which is a form of intellectual snobbery.  One explains visual kitsch in the home as irony just in case it might be suspected (oh God forbid) that one has unsophisticated taste….and here I am, telling you this, in case you might have thought (oh God forbid) that I had joined the ranks of the self-obsessed of unsophisticated taste.

Last week, in the grey dying days of the year, I found a button on the beach at Lislee in West Cork, latitude 51.615458 N,  8.701859 W.

In the million million grains of sand, amidst the waxy fronds of bladderwrack, sugar kelp and dabberlocks, the mollusc-purple stains of curlew pooh, neighbour til the next high tide of pebble, rock and limpet, a white, ersatz mother-of pearl button.

My friend Janis has a problem.  She collects dogs. Big dogs. And then, when she has the dogs, she doesn’t – like the rest of us – just let them run riot, she brings them to a “Université des Chiens” to have them tutored (“in wha Belle?”….oh  I don’t know, metaphysics?) and then they (sometimes) behave themselves, but then, dogs will be dogs…..and for the first year they had  a Giant Schnauzer, her husband spent every meal with the dog’s lead strapped tourniquet-like to his thigh in an effort to keep her – literally – at heel.

You know the character Rabbit in the book “Winnie Ille Pu”?….sorry, that’s the Latin version…I think it’s called “Winnie-the-Pooh” in English.) Rabbit is never pictured, or quoted, alone. It is always “Rabbit and all her friends and relations.” Janis is a bit like that. She not only collects dogs, she also collects people, including her children’s friends (she also has lots of ‘yours, mine and ours’ children) and stray language students. Traditionally, Janis and her family come over to us for a drink on Christmas morning. We have to source, sort and polish drinking glasses for days beforehand in order to have enough to go around. F’rinstance, a couple of years ago, an airline pilot nephew was rostered to fly to Lyon on Christmas Eve and out again on December 26^th.  So on landing, he immediately hires a car and drives up to his Auntie Janis….but at least he didn’t need a glass, so it was a case of “Paulie put the kettle on…..”

So every year, I offer to make the Christmas pudding for Janisandallherfriendsandrelations. This year, I happened to be in Berlin when it was time to start the gathering, stirring, pleating of basin paper and foil covers (to allow for steam and expansion) and tying with twine (for things fall apart the centre cannot hold) and the boiling process. Everything necessary for cooking is not always in my Berlin kitchen when I need it. It took us a very long time and the aid of Science and German language expert friends to ascertain what raising agent to buy in lieu of our usual Shamrock Irish Bread Soda and English Royal Baking Powder.

I went to make the puddings and became so overwrought that I posted a Social Network stream of (dazed) consciousness as I proceeded, first asking….”Where are the men in the white coats when you need them? Typical.  It’s like the 46A bus and policemen….they don’t arrive for aeons and then they all come together. I want to weigh the flour. The scales, bought in Berlin, is digital (digital should mean ‘fingers’ except in horology, where hands mean ‘analogue’.) I find and print out an English language translation for the instructions and start stabbing buttons…. “press 5 times to set weigh/mode……” But now the battery is dead, so the only reading is “Lo”. What became of judging the weight of butter by the size of the yellow fat in the greaseproof wrapping?  What became of measuring ounces with a table spoon?…..or indeed, of measuring alcohol with a fork? My favourite culinary advice, from, I think, Darina Allen….or maybe it was her mother-in-law Myrtle, but definitely not her daughter-in-law Rachel was that alcohol in cooking should always be measured into the other ingredients with a fork. I passed on this advice to a Canadian friend, who, being Canadian, looked at me with an odd expression and said “but….wouldn’t the whiskey pass through the tines?” Canadians. You just gotta love ‘em.

Maybe that is what has become of Justice in the modern world.   Her scales are digital. She cannot weigh, she cannot understand the measurements, they do not translate into comprehensible balances of right and wrong.

Meanwhile, back in the kitchen on the banks of the Spree, in an area which used to be behind a very big, high wall, I am losing my will to ho-ho-ho, to make wishes with every stir……to make Christmas puddings…..to live. So P goes across the courtyard to borrow a weighing scales from our neighbour, a Doctor of Political Philosophy and the official translator of Jürgen Habermas.   Nota Bene: This is not a mere aside. It is as important to this story as ladling whiskey with a fork. Habermas deals in critical theory, pragmatism and the public sphere, social theory and epistemology, the rule of law in a critical social-evolutionary context, emancipation, and the human capacity to deliberate and pursue rational interests. He is known for his work on cosmopolitanism and the concept of modernity, action theory and poststructuralism. All of these are vitally relevant to Facebook, the chronicling of one’s status on same, and the making of Christmas puddings.

Scales on table, we begin to weigh and chop and stir and mix and squeeze.  (One should always cook with love, my Goddaughter Lucy Pearce says; the end result is influenced by the moon’s and tides’ cycle in relation to a woman’s moods.) It is time to add the rum. Ah rum!  Gimme rum! I measure in the rum with a fork and taste to ascertain the love in the end result. Uh-oh…..eggs.  Bleary eyed I go back to my butter-smeared, Demarara sugar-sticky laptop, half concealed – as it is thin as tinfoil – under the tinfoil on the kitchen table -  and type “Eggs….I furgot….firgot…..fugorabou the eggs……..”

Post Scriptum. It is done. I found 3 saucepans large enough to boil the puddings: one stainless steel saucepan (Dunnes Stores) one enamel deep-fat frying saucepan (Lidl) and one aluminium saucepan whose provenance is lost in the mists of time. Preoccupied with rum, I didn’t check the stovetop often enough, and the aluminium saucepan of dubious provenance burned dry.  Unfortunately, that contained the pudding of the Doctor of Political Philosophy. I will have to decant it, cut off its bottom and once again take out the rum and the fork, to entice it back to plump, juicy life. Ah well, he is, at least, from Bishopstown, and I am adding to the gift a drum of old fashioned Bird’s Custard powder, purchased in his family’s local Centra supermarket and carried back to Germany (with no regard for time, tides, or weight allowances, but with love) to give him the real taste of home…………

Driving through Switzerland last week I saw my very first Tannenbaum mit lichtern of the season outside a motorway restaurant in Neiderbipp.  The lights were red, the sky was blue, the tree – and the Alps – were green. Well, Mont Blanc stood out over them, white-capped as one would wish. (In the evenings, Mount Blanc has a girlie moment and turns pink. I love this glow for two reasons; one is aesthetic, the other is because the slanting of the setting sun on Alps is our yard-arm and ‘pink mountain time’ is the call to uncork the wine.)

Crossing the French border I saw another first of the season – the first car with skis on the roof. Good luck to them finding snow. They were going West – I hope they were heading for Canada. At least the North West Passage is closed. Rather than glory at a new sea-route, I always get uncomfortable at the thought of the waters being too open too late in the year in the Far North. It is something of which those such as Tom Crean and John Franklin, swinging in their hammocks might have dreamed…imagining a channel of water opening and allowing them to cross through the top of the world….. but they could have had no idea of the knock-on effects such an event would cause down the latitude line, of how such an opening would effect the climate, the food chain and migration routes of people and animals, physical structures and the coastlines of the entire world.

In the Canadian territory of Nunavut, one can see the effect of climate change by looking out of the window, and even by listening. Last year, on December 21^st, the first official day of winter, the temperatures, which should have been in the region of -19C to -28C were only around -9C, ten degrees higher than usual for that time of year. The sea ice had not yet crawled over the sea-lift beach out over Frobisher Bay at the southern tip of Baffin Island and hunters, who would usually travel on skidoos (snowmobiles) were still using boats. I do not like seeing skidoos below the tree line, but at night in Iqaluit, overlooking the Bay, there is something very comforting hearing the drone of the engines and seeing the dancing pin-pricks of light jumping as a solitary driver, or a line of skidoos crosses the bumps in the snow – the frozen waves of the sea ice – going home. I think of the “Night Sun” song in which the hunter prays for a moon to guide him home…..”the skidoos are roaring, but they’re deafened by the wind…. “

Meanwhile, back in Europe…… Just after the Swiss-German border I saw my first decorated construction crane, aglow with lights up its trunk and all along its arm, right down to the multi-coloured twinkling tree at the hook end. In Germany, they are still building, they still have cranes, they still have money to buy lights and the will to get all lit-up for Christmas. Ah, God be with the Celtic Tiger days when such sights were commonplace in Ireland in December; when the Aleckadoos used to foff  “The crane is the national bird of Ireland haw haw haw….” But let’s not talk about the Irish economy….that’s taxi driver talk.

The Germans do Advent better than anyone else in the world. Everywhere trees.  Trees everywhere.  Signs to huge acres taken over with trees in their neat plastic monofilament, ready for hauling home.  All along the 3.5kms of Kurfurstendam –  the 5^th Avenue, the Grafton Street of Berlin – the four lines of plane trees are covered with tiny white lights….at dusk it really is magic. KaDeWe (KaufhausDeWestens-“Department Store of the West”) the second largest department store in Europe, next to Harrods in London is aglow with swags and trees covered in multi-coloured reflective birds and balls, as sensuously tactile and lustrous as a Jeff Koons sculpture. There are Christmas markets a-plenty all over town from Mitte to Prenzlauaer Berg and out through the forests to Charlottenburg and the outlying burghs. Here everything – including ferris wheels and artificial toboggan slopes is enclosed within squares of wooden chalets, every one rimmed with fir and branches. The smell is of pine and spices, mulled wine and gingerbread, chestnuts roasting on an open fire, bacon grilling and boiling bacon in all its re-incarnations. Smoke rises from the charcoal braziers and mingles with the steam from the mugs of hot chocolate and glasses of gluhwein, the hot breath of laughing people in the frosty air. Germans and Weihnachtsarktes are hugely sociable and everyone stands around in long ear-flapped hats, fat coats and bright woolly scarves, leaning on high tables eating, drinking, making merry.

Finally, finally, the air is getting frosty. There may not be rain – there has been so little rain in some parts of Europe this autumn (except of course in Ireland, southern France and the Ligurian coast in particular) that there is no snow in the Alps and the great rivers flowing through the Continent are exposing dangerous secrets through the fissures in the dry mud which used to be the dark depths familiar only to pike and mullet.

There are butterflies in the Arctic, but the trees are up all over Germany, and at least the North West Passage is closed. Christmas is coming, and as for doom and gloom……let’s leave that to the taxi drivers.

Yesterday we went to Villefranche-sur-Saone for the Beaujolais Marathon, part of the weekend celebration for the ‘percée” or opening of the first barrel of this year’s Beaujolais Nouveau wine.  Villefranche S/Saone, capital of the Départament of Beaujolais, is a lovely town and a spirit of bonhomie pervades the streets.

The Gamay grape produces Beaujolais wine, from a region in the Rhone Alpes north of France’s second city Lyon, and with Burgundy to the south. The Romans first planted vines along the banks of the Saone river (thanks Romans.) The light wine of the fast fermenting Gamay Noir a Jus Blanc grape became popular in the mid Nineteen hundreds when the French authorities (there are lots of French authorities, to govern wine and cheese, snails and festivals well as taxes) officially allowed the new wine to be sold just a month after bottling and “Beaujolais Nouveau Day” became the third Thursday in November. Marketed aggressively – or rather, with a velvet fist, for the very nature of Beaujolais Nouveau; light, fresh, fun, best when young –  was the strategy employed.

Spurred by aspirational journalism, by the mid 1980s such an international  appetite had been whetted for the new season’s wine that races were instigated by restaurants well beyond France for the kudos of being the first to open the Beaujolais Nouveau at their tables. That it was merely a craze was brought painfully to a head when in November 1984, four popular Irish journalists were killed when the light ‘plane in which they were travelling to France with some night-club and restaurant owners, to bring back the wine to Dublin, crashed just short of the channel in England, killing all nine on board.  The journalists were Niall Hanley then Editor of the Evening Herald, John Feeney one of that paper’s writers, Tony Hennigan, a columnist for its daily title the Irish Independent, and Kevin Marron of the Sunday World.

Not long before, I had had a major row with Kevin Marron, then the Sunday World’s Editor. He wanted the story surrounding a teenage boy in Cork who had committed suicide by hanging himself in his school toilets. I was trying to make it in journalism at the time and desperately saving to buy a house, but I knew the family involved and refused toapproach them, and add to their grief with sensationalist publicity. I was fired from that paper, and never worked for them again, but never regretted my stance. When working with the Irish Press group, I admired and greatly enjoyed the company of John Feeney. It was said at the time that the Press had been approached to send someone on the trip, but they deemed it a junket not a news item, so nobody from those three titles was lost that November night.

By the turn of the millennium, Beaujolais Nouveau had fallen from fashion and repute, production dropped and global sales almost halved since the start of the century (it is currently around 36 million bottles.) Japan and China, who don’t know the history, are now being wooed with fun and new wine frenzy.  Locally in Beaujolais, Burgundy and Isere, however, the piercing of the first barrels of the year’s Beaujolais is a big, amiable and tremendously enjoyable event in a festive atmosphere, and this year prospects are bright for a drinkable wine and good sales.

This weekend, Villefranche-sur-Saone is en fete and the streets of the small city are given over to market stalls of local produce from cheeses to ceramics, there are bands and dancers and people strolling, many wearing around their necks the “Tastevin” scoop with which to …..taste the vin. Yesterday there were all of the above, plus hundreds of runners, with three races, a full marathon, a half marathon and a 12k, winding their way through the villages and the chateaux, – even down the steps of monuments – and past the gates of vineyards, where the producers held out glasses of wine rather than damp sponges as they passed.

Many of those participating in the 12k race and partaking of the wine, were in fancy dress. There were at least a dozen Smurfs, lots of cats and a couple of cows, a nun and a friar, Dominique Strauss Khan (in a white toweling bathrobe) a caveman complete with club, a banana…..and a posse women from Dublin in forty shades of green. One of these women – dressed as a sídhe …Irish fairy, pronounced ‘shee  – was my Goddaughter. This athlete’s family pet-name is “Ayshee” which is fitting for one who runs in black tights under a bright green net tutu, with green leg warmers, tri-colour feather wings and green tinseled shamrock deeley boppers.

So that makes me a Fairy Godmother.

Out in the garden early the other morning, I heard the rumble of the garbage lorry at the end of the avenue and got to thinking, that now the bins are mechanically lifted and dumped into the trucks, there are worse jobs than being a sanitation worker/garbage collector/bin woman. I’m rather partial to rubbish and dumps.

Here in France our refuse is collected twice a week and so long as it is properly binned and correctly placed on the given morning, with no questions asked. Then there is a wonderful system called the “Déchetterie.”  You pay for it local taxes, but it’s worth it. Everything for re-cycling is brought to the local “Déchetterie” where there are huge individual dumpsters for green waste – which in some areas is heat treated and turned into compost which one can then request for the garden – plastics, paper and cartons, printed matter, bottles, tins, building rubble, cooking oil, paints and semi-toxic substances.  Our déchetterie must be one of the most beautiful in France; a hundred metres from the lake, with a superb view of the mountains.  I could go there just for the view….but I also go there for the talent.  I love doing the recycling or getting rid of the grass/hedge clippings/rubble, telling Himself “I’m going up to put on make-up, I need to go to the déchetterie”

The guys in the déchetterie can be rather gorgeous. When it’s hot, they strip to the waist and muscles rippling, they ensure everything is dumped in its correct container, but they’ll also fish something out if they notice your longing gaze or for if you ask them nicely. Then there are the lads who wander up from the “Aire de Gens de Voyage” (Travellers’ Halting Site) next door and sit on discarded white plastic chairs chatting and eyeing the goodies which arrive by the minute, and they’re rather cute too, in a Gitanesque kind of way.  Goodies do arrive, and I do fish them out, or stare longingly enough at the nice black guy with his long pole…..

What I have acquired from our local Déchetterie: a repro mahogany round three-legged side table; an old atlas to cut up for collage; a set of magnificent full colour art magazines which I used to renovate 45 year-old cork backed table mats with de-coupage, some small clear Perspex box shelves; 20 really long, thick bamboo poles with which I’m going to set out the design for a moon-window around P’s huge, hideous satellite dish blighting my orchard.

There was an American comedy series on television a few years back called ‘Men in Trees’ starring Anne Heche. It was based in the small, remote fictional town of Elmo Alaska and focused on Marin, a New York relationship coach and writer who had gone North after a break-up, and her subsequent romances – or lack therof – and those of her friends. It was like a Yellow Pack ‘Northern Exposure’, it didn’t have the magic, but it had some charm. Marin’s editor was a very Manhattan lady; edgy, trendy, intellectual, cool, who fell for a guy she met in Elmo, who drove a snowplow for a living. The romance prospered, despite the couple’s differences. He moved down to New York to be with her and as there wasn’t any call for snow plows in NYC for ten months of the year, got a job as a bin man.

The couple decided to get married and he gave her a ring, a beautiful, valuable ring. It had been found in the trash and “Plow Guy” was able to buy it cheaply in the Depot as lost goods. His fiancée loved it, but when she managed to get their wedding announcement into the New York Times, she didn’t want it published that he was a Sanitation Worker and that her engagement ring was from a garbage bin. (When she realized her snobbery, it was all resolved.)

Earlier this week, the NYC Mayor’s office sent out a message saying that the books which formed the Occupy Wall Street ‘library’ confiscated when protestors were evicted from the camp in Zuccotti Park were available for the taking at the 57^th St Sanitation Garage in Manhattan.

So I would be quite happy to work in refuse….it has its rewards. If one is a student of Irish language and literature at an Irish university – or even an American university – it is extremely difficult to get a Fulbright scholarship….that is, unless one is a garbage collector.

New York Times

Ed Shevlin, from the Rockaways in Queens in New York had a County Cork mother and his family spoke with a decided Cork accent when he was a child. Now 51, he has had a varied career, punctuated by bouts of alcoholism which began as a teenager and which interrupted his schooling, but aged 30, he went back and did his civil service exam. Ed was a bar tender and part-owner and in 2001, he successfully quit the booze. Fascinated by hearing Irish spoken in the Rockaways, he became interested in the language and politics of Ireland. His Republican leanings are denoted by a large “SAOIRSE” emblazoned on the back of his big Harley Davidson motorbike and tattooed on his forearm.  (A “Saoirse” tattoo in Ireland tends to mark one out as someone who probably spent time in gaol, most likely as a ‘political prisoner’.)

Ed, who plays the drums, got involved in various Irish-American social, charity and cultural events and activities and began to learn Irish. He works as a garbage collector with the Sanitation District of New York (abbreviated as his motorbike license plate) and five mornings a week, driving the truck in the Rockaways, speaks Irish to householders on his rounds. Some people make sure they are on their stoops or on the street when their trash is being picked up, just so they can talk to him in Irish. He met his girl friend online, when he advertised seeking  “Grá mo Chroí” (love of my heart.)  A teacher, her Match.com name was “GaelicSpeaker” and she responded in Irish.

This year, the Fulbright Commission for Summer language Study awarded Ed Shevlin a grant to study Irish in Ireland and the NY Sanitation Dept accommodated him to organize his holidays around a month’s language immersion course at NUI Galway– his second in two years – and time spent with an Irish speaking family in the Gaelteacht. Ed is now doing a BA in Irish Studies at the Empire State College in Manhattan and is an evening student in Irish at Lehman College in the Bronx. He wants to go on to do a Masters and after he retires as a bin man in two years, to go on to teach Irish at third level.

(info+pic Ed Shelvin, Corey Kilgannon, Julie Glassberg, New York Times. The John Murray Show RTE Radio 1)