A restaurant review!
Since we moved south, eight years ago, there has been a ðearth of restaurants where you can bring visitors to show off the best in food of this region. The Old Convent in Clogheen is an obvious exception but while that is truly spectacular it has it's own difficulties in terms of isolation.
Based on last night's dinner, there is a new kid on the block and The Stonehouse has set high standards for itself and hopefully this will continue. Clonmel needs a Fine Dining Restaurant. This was a great place when it was Clifford's and is a welcome return. Clonmel has more than enough Chinese restaurants who churn out almost 100 dishes on a menu. The StoneHouse is very much the opposite to this.
It has quite a limited menu. This is not a bad thing. It helps with both seasonality and te sense of walking before running in terms of getting the basics right. The food was exquisite with a high emphasis on presentation and taste. Our starters were the terrine where the duck was really allowed to come through. It was strong in flavour. The pain roti that it was served with was just a little bit too delicate for the terrine. Luckily we had been offered homemade bread on sitting and the sweet brioche worked well, by accident with the starter. My wife had the smoked salmon which looked beautiful and tasted just as good.
We both had lamb. It was lovely and pink. The parsley crust pulled every bit of the parsley flavour through. The ratatouille with feta was worthy of a course in itself. The little gnocchi were flawless
The pastry chef is certainly on their game. My wife adored the chocolate fondant. The honeycomb nougat was quite exquisite. Good coffee finished things off nicely.
Well done! We look forward to coming back.
Sunday 5 August 2012
Sunday 22 July 2012
"Good my lord, will you see the players well bestowed? Do you hear, let them be well used; for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time: after your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live."
I am a Wilco fan. In a recent Wilco concert, founder and singer, Jeff Tweedy, stopped the concert when somebody with a smartphone was recording him. Wilco have a very liberal attitude to recording music at their concerts. They condone the sharing of concert tapes by their fans and have released a few concerts in lieu of a charitable donation on their website. So, this wasn't a copyright or Metallica/Corrs (what a combination) plea to make more money.
What Tweedy was berating the fan for was the stealing of memories. It was the creation of a cache of memories that could be accessed easily on request. The very point of memories are that they are faulty. By the time they pass through the synapses, they get corrupted by other experiences. We argue about our experience of an event. Live music or theatre is precious because of the spontaneity of that event. Wilco's Virtuoso guitarist Nels Cline plays the solo in Impossible Germany differently each night because it depends on how the mood takes him.
When I see a concert, the experience that I have depends on the mood I am in. The text of the performance is interpreted by me and the experience is the combination of the musicians, those around me and myself. I can't fully engage if I am focused on getting the right angle on my iPhone (which I don't own).
I have to accept here that I am a hypocrite. (I am after all a teacher, and our collective mantra is 'do as I say, not as I do.) I take photographs of my children all the time. The wall in our hall has over twenty framed photographs of my two wonderfully photogenic kids. However a photograph is a kicking point into a memory and these points flood us with more memories.
I was struck by this as I watched the footage of the Dark Knight Rises slaughter in Colarado. In the midst of chaos and death, how can someone's first instinct be to reach for their phone to record it?
As Hamlet said "For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ."
What Tweedy was berating the fan for was the stealing of memories. It was the creation of a cache of memories that could be accessed easily on request. The very point of memories are that they are faulty. By the time they pass through the synapses, they get corrupted by other experiences. We argue about our experience of an event. Live music or theatre is precious because of the spontaneity of that event. Wilco's Virtuoso guitarist Nels Cline plays the solo in Impossible Germany differently each night because it depends on how the mood takes him.
When I see a concert, the experience that I have depends on the mood I am in. The text of the performance is interpreted by me and the experience is the combination of the musicians, those around me and myself. I can't fully engage if I am focused on getting the right angle on my iPhone (which I don't own).
I have to accept here that I am a hypocrite. (I am after all a teacher, and our collective mantra is 'do as I say, not as I do.) I take photographs of my children all the time. The wall in our hall has over twenty framed photographs of my two wonderfully photogenic kids. However a photograph is a kicking point into a memory and these points flood us with more memories.
I was struck by this as I watched the footage of the Dark Knight Rises slaughter in Colarado. In the midst of chaos and death, how can someone's first instinct be to reach for their phone to record it?
As Hamlet said "For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ."
Friday 20 July 2012
Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue. But if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines
Some films I lke
In no particular order.
Vertigo
From the startling titles to Bernard Herman's score. Hitchcock at his devilish best.
The Empire Strikes Back
I loved this the first time and loved it more when I got to watch it with my son.
The Third Man
I had the pleasure of seeing Welles' masterpiece on the big screen when I worked for the Cork Film Festival in my teens. The speeches alone make it worth watching.
Casablanca
Ingrid Bergman!
Finding Nemo
There are so many films about Fathers and Sons. Indeed there are many plays also but this is one of the best. The best film Woody Allen never made.
12 Angry Men
The intensity, the heat.
Jesus of Montreal
Again, from my days at the Cork Film Festival, an incredible film about acting.
Citizen Kane
Another Welles and Cotton combo. Psychologically taut and deep.
The Shining
I saw this in our school film club under the guidance of Padraig O Scanlain. It scared the bejesus out of me. It also led me to reading Stephen King. An added bonus.
High noon
Every town needs a hero even when they don't know it.
The Shawshank Redemption
Every footballer's favourite. More Stephen King. A great story.
Godfather 2
Brando, De Niro, Pacino.
In no particular order.
Vertigo
From the startling titles to Bernard Herman's score. Hitchcock at his devilish best.
The Empire Strikes Back
I loved this the first time and loved it more when I got to watch it with my son.
The Third Man
I had the pleasure of seeing Welles' masterpiece on the big screen when I worked for the Cork Film Festival in my teens. The speeches alone make it worth watching.
Casablanca
Ingrid Bergman!
Finding Nemo
There are so many films about Fathers and Sons. Indeed there are many plays also but this is one of the best. The best film Woody Allen never made.
12 Angry Men
The intensity, the heat.
Jesus of Montreal
Again, from my days at the Cork Film Festival, an incredible film about acting.
Citizen Kane
Another Welles and Cotton combo. Psychologically taut and deep.
The Shining
I saw this in our school film club under the guidance of Padraig O Scanlain. It scared the bejesus out of me. It also led me to reading Stephen King. An added bonus.
High noon
Every town needs a hero even when they don't know it.
The Shawshank Redemption
Every footballer's favourite. More Stephen King. A great story.
Godfather 2
Brando, De Niro, Pacino.
Saturday 26 May 2012
Every man thy ear, few thy voice
Paul Buchanan's first album at 56
Mid Air is a collection of 13 ballads and an instrumental, recorded at some 3am of the soul, in the cell in the tower of song a few storeys above where Leonard Cohen is eternally recording Songs From A Room, Sinatra is composing “Where Are You?” and Tom Waits is working on Small Change. It barely rises above murmur and sigh, the clang of the night-train, the chime of the city clock, the foghorn from the docks.
It’s also, it almost goes without saying, magnificent. But here is a record that in its determinedly modest way – Buchanan describes it as a “record-ette” and apparently toyed with titling it “Minor Poets Of The Seventeenth Century” – matches their immaculate ’80s albums A Walk Across The Rooftops and Hats. It’s no great departure; it’s more like a refinement or elaboration of latent possibilities in the earlier music. In a way, Mid Air revisits the deep, still pool of Rooftops’ “Easter Parade” and explores the musical and emotional space as though it were a new ocean.
“Easter Parade”, in fact, always felt like the first draft of an ideal Blue Nile torch song, one that Buchanan pursued keenly down the years, across the classic early B-side “Regret” (“It’s 3.30 and I’m thinking of you…”) , Hats’ “From A Late Night Train” and Peace At Last’s “Family Life”.
Mid Air amounts to 14 enigmatic variations on this mood, just piano, voice, the occasional pale moonbeam of orchestration, which miraculously never feels monotonous or morose. This is partly due to the songs’ brevity (none lasts more than three minutes) and the spare neon-haiku imagism of Buchanan’s words. The title track lists “the buttons on your collar, the colour of your hair”, like the ingredients in a spell to conjure someone’s presence, while “Wedding Party” is not much more than a handful of snapshots – “tears in the carpark”, “a long walk in the wrong dress”, “I was drunk when I danced with the bride” – that seem to condense lifetimes of regret. But it’s also down to Buchanan’s peerlessly evocative croon. From a country known for its bluster and bravado (from the sublime – Billy Mackenzie – to the ridiculous – Jim Kerr), Buchanan signifies heartsick soul-storms with little more than the muttered, broken “yeah…” that closes the final song, “After Dark”.
It is an effortless portrait of life in all its simple glories and heartaches. Remarkably wonderful.
Mid Air is a collection of 13 ballads and an instrumental, recorded at some 3am of the soul, in the cell in the tower of song a few storeys above where Leonard Cohen is eternally recording Songs From A Room, Sinatra is composing “Where Are You?” and Tom Waits is working on Small Change. It barely rises above murmur and sigh, the clang of the night-train, the chime of the city clock, the foghorn from the docks.
It’s also, it almost goes without saying, magnificent. But here is a record that in its determinedly modest way – Buchanan describes it as a “record-ette” and apparently toyed with titling it “Minor Poets Of The Seventeenth Century” – matches their immaculate ’80s albums A Walk Across The Rooftops and Hats. It’s no great departure; it’s more like a refinement or elaboration of latent possibilities in the earlier music. In a way, Mid Air revisits the deep, still pool of Rooftops’ “Easter Parade” and explores the musical and emotional space as though it were a new ocean.
“Easter Parade”, in fact, always felt like the first draft of an ideal Blue Nile torch song, one that Buchanan pursued keenly down the years, across the classic early B-side “Regret” (“It’s 3.30 and I’m thinking of you…”) , Hats’ “From A Late Night Train” and Peace At Last’s “Family Life”.
Mid Air amounts to 14 enigmatic variations on this mood, just piano, voice, the occasional pale moonbeam of orchestration, which miraculously never feels monotonous or morose. This is partly due to the songs’ brevity (none lasts more than three minutes) and the spare neon-haiku imagism of Buchanan’s words. The title track lists “the buttons on your collar, the colour of your hair”, like the ingredients in a spell to conjure someone’s presence, while “Wedding Party” is not much more than a handful of snapshots – “tears in the carpark”, “a long walk in the wrong dress”, “I was drunk when I danced with the bride” – that seem to condense lifetimes of regret. But it’s also down to Buchanan’s peerlessly evocative croon. From a country known for its bluster and bravado (from the sublime – Billy Mackenzie – to the ridiculous – Jim Kerr), Buchanan signifies heartsick soul-storms with little more than the muttered, broken “yeah…” that closes the final song, “After Dark”.
It is an effortless portrait of life in all its simple glories and heartaches. Remarkably wonderful.
Sunday 20 May 2012
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, To tell my story.
The end of the school year is always filled with mixed emotions. There is the overriding exhaustion of an unfit 40 year old. There is the apprehension felt for my students as they go face to face with the toughest exam that they'll ever likely face.There is certainly the optimistic vista of the summer holidays, the travel, time with the children and all that brings with it and there is also the regret at losing students whose company you've enjoyed in the classroom and on extra curricular activities.
Every year, I am asked by my leaving certificates if I will miss them. I rarely answer honestly. I could say of course, you were the best ever, but that is too facetious. I could say another year another group, you lot are just another over the last eighteen years of teaching but that is far from true too. I've always loved the coda to Damien Rice's song The Blower's Daughter: "I can't take my eyes of of you"............... Until I find somebody new."
I honestly believe that each student I teach affects my teaching profoundly. I was proudly presented with a plaque last year by my leaving cert students it bore a quote from Henry Adams:"A teacher affects eternity he can never tell, where his influence stops." The significance of this is profoundly overwhelming. But I must say "right back at ya!".
My thought process, my educational philosophy, my view of people and my core beliefs have been changed by the fact that my profession is teaching and therefore by the students that I have taught. This year's leaving cert class are an exceptional bunch of thinkers and I am grateful for having known them. I have been blessed that as a group they are exceptional writers and incredibly creative. They have an admirable work ethic which will stand to them forever.
My school will miss them. I will miss them............... Until I find somebody new.
Every year, I am asked by my leaving certificates if I will miss them. I rarely answer honestly. I could say of course, you were the best ever, but that is too facetious. I could say another year another group, you lot are just another over the last eighteen years of teaching but that is far from true too. I've always loved the coda to Damien Rice's song The Blower's Daughter: "I can't take my eyes of of you"............... Until I find somebody new."
I honestly believe that each student I teach affects my teaching profoundly. I was proudly presented with a plaque last year by my leaving cert students it bore a quote from Henry Adams:"A teacher affects eternity he can never tell, where his influence stops." The significance of this is profoundly overwhelming. But I must say "right back at ya!".
My thought process, my educational philosophy, my view of people and my core beliefs have been changed by the fact that my profession is teaching and therefore by the students that I have taught. This year's leaving cert class are an exceptional bunch of thinkers and I am grateful for having known them. I have been blessed that as a group they are exceptional writers and incredibly creative. They have an admirable work ethic which will stand to them forever.
My school will miss them. I will miss them............... Until I find somebody new.
Thursday 10 May 2012
new blog time
You know sometimes when you think out loud?I have a problem! I do it all the time. Today in class, I started rambling as is my wont. I was congratulating one of my fine erudite young students on being accepted for his drama course. I told him that it is a rare treat to make your hobby your profession. I also confessed that if I hadn't been waylaid into the teaching profession, my dream job would have been to be a critic; a food critic, a TV or film critic, a book critic it doesn't matter. A number of students simultaneously proffered the view; why not now? as only a seventeen or eighteen year old can. I offered the usual excuses that any forty year old balding fat man can; mortgage, kids, time. As has been proved many times over the past two years they are wiser than I. (Collectively at least). This blog is the result of that discussion.
One of the great virtues of being an English teacher is the opportunities that it gives you to see great writing being written and subsequently the urge to help somebody make that great writing even better. While we criticize as teachers, the best of us only do it to allow our students improve that which is already there.
I love Ego's speech at the end of Ratatouille:
In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations, the new needs friends. Last night, I experienced something new, an extraordinary meal from a singularly unexpected source. To say that both the meal and its maker have challenged my preconceptions about fine cooking is a gross understatement. They have rocked me to my core. In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau's famous motto: Anyone can cook. But I realize, only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.
I hope to use this blog to thrive on positive criticism. To celebrate books, food, tv, film, teaching, parenting, sport and all the rest and I hereby dedicate my ramblings to my Leaving Certificate Class of 2012.
One of the great virtues of being an English teacher is the opportunities that it gives you to see great writing being written and subsequently the urge to help somebody make that great writing even better. While we criticize as teachers, the best of us only do it to allow our students improve that which is already there.
I love Ego's speech at the end of Ratatouille:
In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations, the new needs friends. Last night, I experienced something new, an extraordinary meal from a singularly unexpected source. To say that both the meal and its maker have challenged my preconceptions about fine cooking is a gross understatement. They have rocked me to my core. In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau's famous motto: Anyone can cook. But I realize, only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.
I hope to use this blog to thrive on positive criticism. To celebrate books, food, tv, film, teaching, parenting, sport and all the rest and I hereby dedicate my ramblings to my Leaving Certificate Class of 2012.
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