Lèche-vitrines*

“I suddenly found myself on the front line as missiles sailed over my head towards a phalanx of CRS riot police. With their kevlar exoskeletons they looked like killer robots from the future.”

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Happy New Year...

I’d only just bought the mug and was walking around the corner when the bag holding it tipped against a bollard, breaking the handle off. I brought it home and fixed it. It broke again, in a different place, and I fixed it again, and again. It’s been broken in 12 different places, and it still works.

Happy New Year.

Confinement Cuisine

Even though it seems like I’ve been really busy all through the lockdown, on some days it felt like the most I achieved was dinner. On some better days, there was also a lunch that worked out well enough. I’ve been cooking way more than usual, and it’s really helped me get through this bizarre, uncertain time. What also helped was having someone to cook for - my housemate Mounia, who came to stay for two weeks in mid-March and has been here ever since. It helps even more that she’s a great cook.

Here are some of the meals we’ve shared over the last three months, including a couple of disasters. She moves back to France tomorrow, and I’m going to miss her.

Click images and hover over for captions, recipes at the bottom of page.

I got vegetable deliveries from Hussey Farm and Clonanny Farm, and meat, fish and poultry from the Corner Butcher. Assassination Custard’s piccalilli is available from The Fumbally and Gailliot et Grey, who make amazing sourdough bread. Most of the more unusual ingredients came from the halal shops on Clanbrassil Street. Photographed in Helen James’s beautiful bowls.

Recipes

MIX TAPES

I've been going through a box of old cassettes, some of which date back to the late Seventies, and am photographing a few of my favourites before I throw them out. I have a tape player with a digital output but the sound quality isn't very good, although it is great to hear snippets of radio announcers in between the songs I taped off the radio. So rather than digitising the contents, I've started an ongoing playlist as a memento, with each cassette in roughly chronological order and the songs in the order that they appear on the tapes.  Some of them immediately transport me back to working late at night in the darkroom, and to other very significant moments in my life, and anyone who ever worked in the Lad Lane or Pembroke Lane studios will find a lot of the music very familiar…

You can listen to the ever-growing playlist via this link.

Radio Radio

Many years ago a friend and I were chatting as we waited for the ferry back from Inis Meáin, when the poet Rita Ann Higgins marched over and without a word of introduction told me "You have such a fabulous voice - you should charge people to do phone sex!"

The time to start doing that hasn’t come, not yet anyway, but I have done bits and pieces of radio over the years, including a stint on Jazz fm (“Dublin’s only black music radio station”) about twenty years ago.

RTE broadcast tower, New Year’s Day, 2020

My father and I have very similar-sounding voices, and have often been mistaken for each other on the phone. When I was very small, he hosted a Sunday show on RTE radio, and while he was on air the rest of the family would drive past RTE on our way to visit my grandparents. I can remember craning my neck to see the top of the radio tower, as I figured that’s where he’d need to be broadcasting from. He went on to have a very distinguished career as a journalist, politician and professor of journalism and was Ireland’s first Press Ombudsman. Here’s a clip of him in 1965, at the very beginning of his career.

Click image for clip

Click image for clip

I’ve been following in his footsteps recently, as I’ve been on the radio a couple of times this week - the first was an interview about shooting Mary Robinson’s election poster, which was broadcast on The History Show. Then I did a voiceover for my friend Amanda Feery’s Swimming Studies show on Dublin Digital Radio.

The last one was my first essay for Sunday Miscellany, called “Shoeboxes”.

"But of course, what really tipped me over the edge were the love letters. Letters signed with love, lots of love, with all my love...."

"But of course, what really tipped me over the edge were the love letters. Letters signed with love, lots of love, with all my love...."

This one was different - a very personal account of going through old shoeboxes full of keepsakes and letters. I was quite nervous as it was broadcast but it seems to have gone down well, so I may even do another one sometime. In the meantime, you can hear two of my father’s Sunday Miscellany contributions here:

Rome, 1965 by John Horgan

I told nobody I was coming by John Horgan

Elvis: Radio Radio

Me at 20

 
Working as a geoelectrical surveyor in the Northern Rif Mountains of Morocco.

Working as a geoelectrical surveyor in the Northern Rif Mountains of Morocco.

Living in Midar with a mix of German squatter punks (like me) and geophysics students (not like me) from the Max Planck Institute in Hamburg. Driving out to work in the desert every day in big Land Cruisers, listening to Pil and the Funboy 3 at top volume. When we arrived in Morocco we didn't have enough cash to bribe the customs officials to let the measuring equipment through, so the first month was spent roaming around Tangier with no money, putting everything on room service. Half-way through the job I got into a relationship with Brigitte Vogelgesang (Brigitte Birdsong - her real name). I was 20, she was 34 - every young man should be so lucky.

Annaghmakerrig

I’m staying at the Tyrone Guthrie centre in Annaghmakerrig, getting some writing done. It’s a fantastic place, which I wrote about for The Dubliner magazine a few years ago - you can read the article here.

I found this couch yesterday on a walk near the centre, and one of the artists sat in for the picture.

The big house

The big house