Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Addicted to love
'Love rats'.... I just can't escape my past in the world of tabloids...My feature in today's Irish Independent on sexual addiction. Forget bad jokes about Tiger Woods - there's something in it.
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/sex-addiction-a-real-ailment-or-just-men-behaving-badly-2043467.html
Once upon a time, adulterous spouses were branded 'love rats'. Now the term 'sex addict' is being used with increasing frequency to describe chronic cheaters.
But is 'sex addiction' a real disorder, or is it just an excuse used by men (and some women) who have been caught behaving badly?
Golfer Tiger Woods is the latest celebrity to check in to a sex addiction clinic - he was recently photographed outside the grounds. Woods is paying around €45,000 for six weeks of treatment. Is his stint in rehab an act of contrition or an exercise in damage limitation?
The concept of sex addiction tends to enter public consciousness only when a high-profile figure has been caught in the throes of infidelity. It carries the distinct whiff of a publicity stunt designed to save a reputation and a career.
The cynicism extends to the medical community. There is no general consensus that too much sex can be classified an addiction in the same manner as the abuse of cocaine or alcohol.
"The use of the word 'addiction' is still controversial in that context," admits Eoin Stephens, director of training for the Irish Centre for Sexual Addictions. "In the medical profession, they prefer to keep the word purely to describe addiction to substances."
The traditional view would be to bring excessive sexual activity under the umbrella of compulsive behaviour. Stephens would argue that using the word 'compulsive' brings its own problems.
"It brings obsessive compulsive disorder to mind," he says, "But the things people get compulsive about aren't intensely mood-altering. The textbook obsessive compulsive behaviours would be things like someone feeling the need to wash their hands repeatedly, or turn on and off a light a certain number of times.
"Addiction to having sex is compulsive self-rewarding -- each time it is a 'hit', a buzz. OCD I would call compulsive self-protection -- it's not rewarding, it's something the person feels they need to do to preserve the status quo."
So if it's not a form of OCD, does that necessarily imply that the desire to have excessive amounts of sex falls under the remit of an addiction?
The director of the Pine Grove clinic in Mississippi where Tiger Woods is currently trying to mend his ways is one of the strongest advocates of branding sex addiction as a definite disorder. Dr Patrick Carnes heads up a growing industry which claims that sex addiction is as real as an addiction to cocaine or alcohol -- and can be treated as such.
Carnes believes that up to six pc of the US population suffers from sex addiction. A high sex drive doesn't make you a sex addict, he says, but he does outline a range of excessive behaviours which he believes mark one out. Excessive time spent on sex that impacts negatively on your family, career and mental health is a warning bell.
Colin O'Driscoll is principal psychologist with the Forest clinic in Co Wicklow which specialises in addiction treatment. He absolutely believes that sex addiction exists, and says the last two years have seen a rise in approaches to the clinic from people who believe they are out of control. Some women have made enquiries, he says, but most of their clients have been men.
"We would classify it as a behavioural addiction," says O'Driscoll. "That means that it is not a case of being addicted to an external substance. However, it is similar to other behavioural addictions like gambling, where the person might be gambling to zone out rather than deal with bad memories or to emotionally compensate for something. They are behaviours that lend themselves to escapism."
'Some people play it down and laugh and say, 'If I was to have an addiction, that would be the one to have'. We see that people are suffering and their families are bearing drastic consequences as a result of their behaviour and that is genuine."
O'Driscoll is correct to say that there isn't much public sympathy for the sex addict. Several films and TV shows have used the sex addict as the punchline to a joke. In Blades of Glory (2007), Will Ferrell's lustful character attends a sex addicts' meeting which ends with the 'patients' hooking up in the bushes outside. Sex toys were given out as promotional gifts at the premiere of Choke (2008), a film about sex addiction.
There remains this nagging feeling that sex addiction is the affliction 'du jour'. A few years ago it became trendy to call oneself a chocaholic or shoe-aholic. In the 'because we're worth it' climate it was a badge of honour to be indulgent to the point of claiming an addiction. Similarly, the idea of too much sex evokes whispers of a guilty pleasure, of something that's a bit . . . well, naughty.
Eoin Stephens agrees that the legitimacy of the label is questioned when it's used by people to describe a habit or passion. "It can be abused," he says. "But when the reward lessens and that struggle -- 'I wish I hadn't spent all that time or money on doing that' -- increases then the addiction has taken hold."
America, whose population tends to be more outspoken and self-analytical, has been most free with the term. Z-list celebrities can be seen scrutinising their sexual patterns on the VH1 programme, Sex Rehab with Dr Drew.
We have a tougher time believing that Irish people could go down that line but, says Stephens, Ireland has spawned its own particular context which encourages sex addiction. "When you look at our history, up until 1993, Playboy was illegal here," says Stephens.
'In the space of a few years, lapdancing, telephone sex, easy access to internet pornography all mushroomed. That won't turn everybody into a sex addict but a move from low availability to high availability, and the historical repression of sexuality in this country, makes these seem all the more exciting and subject to overuse and abuse." Ireland has its own branch of Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, which takes referrals from treatment centres. The treatment of so-called sex addicts is modelled on the 12-step type programmes familiar to AA clients.
"Although," says Colin O'Driscoll, "abstinence is easier to promote with a substance like drugs or alcohol. You can imagine how complicated it would be for an alcoholic to be told, 'You can have one glass of whiskey a week'.
"It's much more complicated with a sex addiction because it's very like overeating -- they have to learn to engage with the process at some stage again but in a controlled way."
So while Tiger Woods might still be practising celibacy in his stay at Pine Grove, his hope will presumably to have a 'normal' sex life again.
"Do I think Tiger Woods is a good example of what I would call a sex addict?" asks Eoin Stephens. "I would be curious if this is the first time he's been caught.
"Or if he has promised to stop several times before but hasn't been able to, showing that it was definitely a case of being out of control."
As opposed to taking advantage of the opportunities that present themselves to a fit, famous, rich young man who finds himself frequently away from home, one presumes.
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/the-stars-who-loved-too-much-2043468.html
THE STARS WHO LOVED TOO MUCH
* DAVID DUCHOVNY The former X-Files star became the butt of his own joke in 2008 when he announced that he had "voluntarily entered a facility for the treatment of sex addiction". At the time he was playing a sex-obsessed writer on the TV show Californication.
* RUSSELL BRAND The comedian bad boy (right) wrote in his memoir, My Booky Wook, that he received treatment at the Keystone Centre in Pennsylvania for sex addiction. "One day," he wrote of his treatment, "I had to write a victims' list -- a litany of the women I'd wronged as a result of my sexual addiction. I felt like Saddam Hussein trying to pick out individual Kurds."
* michael douglas Douglas became one of the first A-list celebrities to be linked to sex addiction but has since said that his reasons for going into rehab were misinterpreted. He said: "Around 1990, I voluntarily went into rehab because I was drinking too much and some smart-ass editor said, 'Oh, another boring story about an actor going to rehab. Let's give him sex addiction'."
* eric benet Musician Benet, Halle Berry's ex-husband, was reported to have gone into sex addiction rehab in 2002 but he later told New York magazine, "In retrospect, it's not what I would label my situation."
* woody harrelson He once admitted openly that he was a sex addict and said: "Monogamy is one of the most confusing things about getting married. I don't understand marriage in the traditional sense." He has been married now for 12 years.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
The website formerly known as everymonday.ie
http://www.silvercircle.ie/health/343-turn-your-back-on-pain.html
TURN YOUR BACK ON PAIN
Four out of five adults suffer from back pain at some stage in their lives. As we get older, the simple 'wear and tear' of time on the body can make it more frequent and severe. SUSAN DALY has some ideas on the best ways to manage a bad back - or to prevent getting one altogether.
HOW ironic that calling someone spineless, or telling them they lack backbone, is considered an insult. A sufferer of chronic back pain might consider that absence – however physiologically impossible - a blessed relief. Standing, sitting, lying down: when your back is playing up, there is no respite.
No wonder then that back pain is the second most-frequently reported reason for visiting the GP surgery, after the common cold. It is one of the most difficult ailments to treat, affected as it is by so many factors, from posture and lifestyle to osteoporosis and old injuries. As the American actor George Burns once put it: “Love is a lot like backache. It doesn’t show up on X-rays, but you know it’s there.”
Obviously some back pain has its source in a severe, diagnosable condition. Any persistent pain should be reported to the doctor who might be able to confirm if an issue such as degenerative disc disease – common as we age – osteoporosis, stenosis or another syndrome is at the root of the problem.
Our sedentary lifestyle is frequently blamed for the occurrence of back problems. Frances Moran is physiotherapist to the senior Leinster rugby team and runs spine fitness and Pilates classes from her Dublin premises. She says that only around 20 per cent of backpain cases that present to her are the direct result of an injury.
“You will have the odd person saying they were lifting something heavy and put their back out,” says Moran. “But the majority of people coming in have developed a vague onset of pain from bad habits, from sitting, driving, chronic posture, playing golf, repetitive movements. The use of computers is now a huge factor because people are sitting at desks for longer, perhaps carrying a bit more weight and experiencing chronic tightness in their back and neck.”
Getting exercise is the most obvious and least expensive solution in this scenario, according to Moran. Here, though, is the catch-22: When that niggling ache sets into the lower back region, it is tempting to put off being active for another evening. Unfortunately, unexercised muscles are weaker muscles and the spinal column loses support.
“There is a huge fear associated with exercising, that it might aggravate backache,” says Moran, “But the opposite is true. With lack of use, certain muscles will spasm and tighten and others weaken, putting uneven pressure on discs.”
So following the school of ‘use it or lose it’, it’s worth looking into the Alexander technique of posture or signing up to a course of Pilates and yoga. These forms of exercise are ideal for stretching and realigning the spine. They develop the ‘core’muscles around the stomach and lower back, providing an invisible band of support for the area.
Swimming, walking and – would you believe it – cycling have also been shown to increase back strength. Specific exercises to target the area are important, if you can make room for a few every morning or evening. Most can be carried out without any equipment but incorporating a blow-up Swiss ball can help you get the best out of some of the movements (see ‘Useful websites’ below this article for specific instructions on these exercises). Fitness and sports stores sell Swiss balls – and Argos has some for under a tenner.
Prevention is always better than cure. However, there are alternative treatment options for back pain sufferers. Some people swear by acupuncture, the ancient Chinese method of realigning the ‘chi’ or energy flow in the body. In addition to physiotherapists, chiropractors also claim to be able to help relieve back pain by the manipulation of the spine. Unlike many western countries, there is no chiropractic legislation in Ireland but the website for the Chiropractic Association of Ireland, which self-regulates its members is perhaps a good starting point.
For the lucky ones who have yet to experience the twinge of backache, remember – sit up straight, stretch and stay active!
USEFUL WEBSITE:
www.back.com/articles-exercises.html - Simple exercises that strengthen the back.
www.bodyworksphysio.ie – Physiotherapist Frances Moran runs specially-targeted Pilates and ‘strong spine’ classes from a studio in Dublin’s Baggot Street
www.back-shop.com – Respected Irish company specialising in spinal-aid products for the past 25 years.
www.irishhealth.com/clin/documents/backcare.pdf - A free, ready to download, booklet on all aspects of back care from the Health Promotion Unit.
www.chiropractic.ie – The Chiropractic Association of Ireland’s official website.
TURN YOUR BACK ON PAIN
Four out of five adults suffer from back pain at some stage in their lives. As we get older, the simple 'wear and tear' of time on the body can make it more frequent and severe. SUSAN DALY has some ideas on the best ways to manage a bad back - or to prevent getting one altogether.
HOW ironic that calling someone spineless, or telling them they lack backbone, is considered an insult. A sufferer of chronic back pain might consider that absence – however physiologically impossible - a blessed relief. Standing, sitting, lying down: when your back is playing up, there is no respite.
No wonder then that back pain is the second most-frequently reported reason for visiting the GP surgery, after the common cold. It is one of the most difficult ailments to treat, affected as it is by so many factors, from posture and lifestyle to osteoporosis and old injuries. As the American actor George Burns once put it: “Love is a lot like backache. It doesn’t show up on X-rays, but you know it’s there.”
Obviously some back pain has its source in a severe, diagnosable condition. Any persistent pain should be reported to the doctor who might be able to confirm if an issue such as degenerative disc disease – common as we age – osteoporosis, stenosis or another syndrome is at the root of the problem.
Our sedentary lifestyle is frequently blamed for the occurrence of back problems. Frances Moran is physiotherapist to the senior Leinster rugby team and runs spine fitness and Pilates classes from her Dublin premises. She says that only around 20 per cent of backpain cases that present to her are the direct result of an injury.
“You will have the odd person saying they were lifting something heavy and put their back out,” says Moran. “But the majority of people coming in have developed a vague onset of pain from bad habits, from sitting, driving, chronic posture, playing golf, repetitive movements. The use of computers is now a huge factor because people are sitting at desks for longer, perhaps carrying a bit more weight and experiencing chronic tightness in their back and neck.”
Getting exercise is the most obvious and least expensive solution in this scenario, according to Moran. Here, though, is the catch-22: When that niggling ache sets into the lower back region, it is tempting to put off being active for another evening. Unfortunately, unexercised muscles are weaker muscles and the spinal column loses support.
“There is a huge fear associated with exercising, that it might aggravate backache,” says Moran, “But the opposite is true. With lack of use, certain muscles will spasm and tighten and others weaken, putting uneven pressure on discs.”
So following the school of ‘use it or lose it’, it’s worth looking into the Alexander technique of posture or signing up to a course of Pilates and yoga. These forms of exercise are ideal for stretching and realigning the spine. They develop the ‘core’muscles around the stomach and lower back, providing an invisible band of support for the area.
Swimming, walking and – would you believe it – cycling have also been shown to increase back strength. Specific exercises to target the area are important, if you can make room for a few every morning or evening. Most can be carried out without any equipment but incorporating a blow-up Swiss ball can help you get the best out of some of the movements (see ‘Useful websites’ below this article for specific instructions on these exercises). Fitness and sports stores sell Swiss balls – and Argos has some for under a tenner.
Prevention is always better than cure. However, there are alternative treatment options for back pain sufferers. Some people swear by acupuncture, the ancient Chinese method of realigning the ‘chi’ or energy flow in the body. In addition to physiotherapists, chiropractors also claim to be able to help relieve back pain by the manipulation of the spine. Unlike many western countries, there is no chiropractic legislation in Ireland but the website for the Chiropractic Association of Ireland, which self-regulates its members is perhaps a good starting point.
For the lucky ones who have yet to experience the twinge of backache, remember – sit up straight, stretch and stay active!
USEFUL WEBSITE:
www.back.com/articles-exercises.html - Simple exercises that strengthen the back.
www.bodyworksphysio.ie – Physiotherapist Frances Moran runs specially-targeted Pilates and ‘strong spine’ classes from a studio in Dublin’s Baggot Street
www.back-shop.com – Respected Irish company specialising in spinal-aid products for the past 25 years.
www.irishhealth.com/clin/documents/backcare.pdf - A free, ready to download, booklet on all aspects of back care from the Health Promotion Unit.
www.chiropractic.ie – The Chiropractic Association of Ireland’s official website.
Sir-sha, Seer-shan, Saar-sheen... sorry, Saoirse
From today's Irish Independent - now here's a 15-year-old to make you wonder how you spent your wasted youth....
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/how-our-saoirse-signed-for-the--premiere-league-2033041.html
By Susan Daly
Wednesday January 27 2010
It should have been difficult for Saoirse Ronan to play the victim in her new film. The 15-year-old has known little but success in her short life. She starred in a major Hollywood movie, Atonement, at 11; was nominated for an Oscar at 13.
A few days ago, she was shortlisted for a BAFTA for Best Actress -- her competition is Meryl Streep. Days before that, she waltzed off with the award for Best Young Actor at the prestigious Critics' Circle bash in Hollywood.
Susie Salmon, the Lovely Bones character that has won Ronan the most recent accolades, is raped and murdered by her pervert neighbour. Although audiences are spared the graphic details, it's an intense role for anyone to play, never mind a teenager from rural Carlow.
And yet Saoirse ended up comforting Stanley Tucci, the Devil Wears Prada actor who has the thankless job of playing Susie's murderer. "It turned out she's the one who really in some ways made us all feel comfortable because she's so mature," he said of his co-star.
That's our Saoirse -- all grown up. As The Lovely Bones premieres in Dublin, it hardly seems four years since she landed her first major Hollywood role. Back then she put the tiny village of Ardattin, outside Tullow, on the showbiz map by bagging the part of Keira Knightley's complex little sister Briony in Atonement. She had previously only had two small parts on Irish television, in The Clinic and Proof.
And can it be only two years since Hollywood scrambled to find out how to pronounce 'Saoirse' after her shock nomination for Best Actress for her role Briony Tallis in Atonement? (Hollywood still fails miserably to get its mouth around her first name.)
The dizzy ascension from Carlow to California could make a child grow up fast. Atonement was followed by roles opposite Catherine Zeta Jones and Michelle Pfeiffer. She will next be seen in The Way Back with Colin Farrell and after that, playing an Eastern European assassin called Hanna. From murder victim to would-be murderer.
Thankfully, it appears that Ronan is as Tucci claims: mature rather than preternaturally aged by her experiences. Although she has been glamming up for The Lovely Bones premieres from New Zealand to New York, her gorgeous gunas have been age-appropriate. In promotional interviews for the film, she opts for the teenage uniform of jeans and her favourite Nike high-tops.
When Vanity Fair photographed her last year, she wore a red satin dress but teamed it with a pair of white Converse trainers. It was the perfect portrait of someone successfully negotiating the line between young girl and young adulthood.
So much of this level-headedness must be down to her parents, Paul and Monica. "They come everywhere with me, and they're a huge part of keeping me grounded,'' Saoirse told The LA Times. "And living in the country in Ireland, which is so far away from the Hollywood scene, keeps me from getting caught up. Nobody where I live is interested in that side of things, really."
Her parents emigrated to New York in the 1980s, returning to Ireland in 1997 when Saoirse was three. Paul, an experienced character actor, encouraged his creative only child to try acting when she was around eight or nine, for a "lark".
She wasn't a stage school brat, yearning for stardom. They sent a tape of Saoirse auditioning at home to the casting director for Atonement and that was it. Her career went stellar -- but her feet stayed on the ground.
"She still has the friends she would have made in school here," says Paddy McInerney, Principal of Ardattin National School, which Saoirse attended. "She meets up with them whenever she's home.
"And the children now follow her with interest -- they're excited when she appears in magazines or on television. But she's been back to attend a couple of things since she left -- she was here when we were opening an extension to the school a while back, for Confirmations, for Christmas events."
Saoirse had a normal, consistent childhood, he believes. "It was really only in fifth class when she started to film Atonement and a few other films that things began to take off for her," Mr McInerney told the Irish Independent.
"So her last two years with us were intermittent, but she had a tutor on set. She had her textbooks we were using and the tutor was in touch with us. She was a very good student, very bright, so she kept up very well."
She now has a home tutor as she combines her last few years of schooling with the growing demands of an A-list career but she's making a good fist of keeping it real. Far from trying to take advantage of her fame -- she claimed last week to be grateful she's not as famous as the "Twilight people or the Harry Potter kids" -- she is a teenager to a tee.
She's not falling out of LA nightclubs -- TV and computer games and playing with her old border collie dog Sassie are her past-times.
She has professed concern about whether boys are interested in her, or in "Saoirse Ronan the actress". But she also converses freely with pals on the social networking site Twitter.
In one tweet, she raves breathlessly about the new Lady Gaga album; in the next, she urges friends to "Go see The Lovely Bones guys!! Hope you like it!!" An uninformed reader would think she was recommending a film she saw down the omniplex with her mates last night. There is a hint that there might be something more to this 15-year-old. Her friend Katie has posted a picture of the pair hugging fiercely on a night out. Teen girls are nuts about their friends.
But look a little closer. Katie's dad is standing in the background. He looks familiar: it's Peter Jackson, director of Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Lovely Bones. And he's talking to Steven Spielberg. Normality is relative.
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/starlight-starbright-five-ways-we-can-tell-saoirse-is-on-the-rise-2033039.html
Starlight, starbright: Five ways we can tell Saoirse is on the rise
IT WAS WRITTEN IN THE STARS
Saoirse's first brush with fame came early when her dad Paul was acting in The Devil's Own (1997). He brought her on set to meet the leading man, Brad Pitt, who picked Saoirse up in his arms.
Saoirse doesn't remember that fateful moment -- she was just a toddler -- but clearly some of Brad's star quality must have rubbed off on her.
SHE HAS SCHEDULE 'CLASHES'
Saoirse was in the original line-up for Ridley Scott's upcoming blockbuster Robin Hood alongside Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett but, as happens to those in demand, ended up having to choose between Scott and Peter Weir, who wanted her for his new film The Way Back.
She plumped for the latter, which also stars Colin Farrell, Ed Harris and Jim Sturgess. Tough choice, eh?
THE BRITS HAVE CLAIMED HER
You know an Irish performer's international stock is high when the Brits start claiming them for their own. And so it is with Saoirse, who has been nominated by the London Film Critics' Circle 2010 Awards as Young British Performer of the Year for her role in The Lovely Bones.
The Critics' Circle's website has tried to clarify the matter, posting the following on their website: "Irish citizens are eligible for these awards but many Irish actors and directors work on what are technically British films and their work deserves recognition."
The Lovely Bones is a film based on a novel by an American author, directed by a New Zealander and produced by Steven Spielberg's company (but co-produced by FilmFour, which must make it 'technically British').
SHE'S A LITTLE PIECE OF OSCAR HISTORY
By being nominated for the Oscar for best supporting actress in 2008 -- for her role as Briony in Atonement -- Saoirse joined an elite group. At 13, she became the seventh youngest actress to be nominated in that key category.
MERYL STREEP'S A FAN
If Meryl is Queen of Hollywood, she gave the royal stamp of approval to Saoirse at the Critics' Choice Awards in LA. She swept the 15-year-old into her arms for a huge bear hug after Saoirse won the Best Young Actor gong.
Hopefully Meryl felt as friendly when Saoirse became her competition six days later, with both of them nominated for Best Actress in the upcoming BAFTAs ...
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/how-our-saoirse-signed-for-the--premiere-league-2033041.html
By Susan Daly
Wednesday January 27 2010
It should have been difficult for Saoirse Ronan to play the victim in her new film. The 15-year-old has known little but success in her short life. She starred in a major Hollywood movie, Atonement, at 11; was nominated for an Oscar at 13.
A few days ago, she was shortlisted for a BAFTA for Best Actress -- her competition is Meryl Streep. Days before that, she waltzed off with the award for Best Young Actor at the prestigious Critics' Circle bash in Hollywood.
Susie Salmon, the Lovely Bones character that has won Ronan the most recent accolades, is raped and murdered by her pervert neighbour. Although audiences are spared the graphic details, it's an intense role for anyone to play, never mind a teenager from rural Carlow.
And yet Saoirse ended up comforting Stanley Tucci, the Devil Wears Prada actor who has the thankless job of playing Susie's murderer. "It turned out she's the one who really in some ways made us all feel comfortable because she's so mature," he said of his co-star.
That's our Saoirse -- all grown up. As The Lovely Bones premieres in Dublin, it hardly seems four years since she landed her first major Hollywood role. Back then she put the tiny village of Ardattin, outside Tullow, on the showbiz map by bagging the part of Keira Knightley's complex little sister Briony in Atonement. She had previously only had two small parts on Irish television, in The Clinic and Proof.
And can it be only two years since Hollywood scrambled to find out how to pronounce 'Saoirse' after her shock nomination for Best Actress for her role Briony Tallis in Atonement? (Hollywood still fails miserably to get its mouth around her first name.)
The dizzy ascension from Carlow to California could make a child grow up fast. Atonement was followed by roles opposite Catherine Zeta Jones and Michelle Pfeiffer. She will next be seen in The Way Back with Colin Farrell and after that, playing an Eastern European assassin called Hanna. From murder victim to would-be murderer.
Thankfully, it appears that Ronan is as Tucci claims: mature rather than preternaturally aged by her experiences. Although she has been glamming up for The Lovely Bones premieres from New Zealand to New York, her gorgeous gunas have been age-appropriate. In promotional interviews for the film, she opts for the teenage uniform of jeans and her favourite Nike high-tops.
When Vanity Fair photographed her last year, she wore a red satin dress but teamed it with a pair of white Converse trainers. It was the perfect portrait of someone successfully negotiating the line between young girl and young adulthood.
So much of this level-headedness must be down to her parents, Paul and Monica. "They come everywhere with me, and they're a huge part of keeping me grounded,'' Saoirse told The LA Times. "And living in the country in Ireland, which is so far away from the Hollywood scene, keeps me from getting caught up. Nobody where I live is interested in that side of things, really."
Her parents emigrated to New York in the 1980s, returning to Ireland in 1997 when Saoirse was three. Paul, an experienced character actor, encouraged his creative only child to try acting when she was around eight or nine, for a "lark".
She wasn't a stage school brat, yearning for stardom. They sent a tape of Saoirse auditioning at home to the casting director for Atonement and that was it. Her career went stellar -- but her feet stayed on the ground.
"She still has the friends she would have made in school here," says Paddy McInerney, Principal of Ardattin National School, which Saoirse attended. "She meets up with them whenever she's home.
"And the children now follow her with interest -- they're excited when she appears in magazines or on television. But she's been back to attend a couple of things since she left -- she was here when we were opening an extension to the school a while back, for Confirmations, for Christmas events."
Saoirse had a normal, consistent childhood, he believes. "It was really only in fifth class when she started to film Atonement and a few other films that things began to take off for her," Mr McInerney told the Irish Independent.
"So her last two years with us were intermittent, but she had a tutor on set. She had her textbooks we were using and the tutor was in touch with us. She was a very good student, very bright, so she kept up very well."
She now has a home tutor as she combines her last few years of schooling with the growing demands of an A-list career but she's making a good fist of keeping it real. Far from trying to take advantage of her fame -- she claimed last week to be grateful she's not as famous as the "Twilight people or the Harry Potter kids" -- she is a teenager to a tee.
She's not falling out of LA nightclubs -- TV and computer games and playing with her old border collie dog Sassie are her past-times.
She has professed concern about whether boys are interested in her, or in "Saoirse Ronan the actress". But she also converses freely with pals on the social networking site Twitter.
In one tweet, she raves breathlessly about the new Lady Gaga album; in the next, she urges friends to "Go see The Lovely Bones guys!! Hope you like it!!" An uninformed reader would think she was recommending a film she saw down the omniplex with her mates last night. There is a hint that there might be something more to this 15-year-old. Her friend Katie has posted a picture of the pair hugging fiercely on a night out. Teen girls are nuts about their friends.
But look a little closer. Katie's dad is standing in the background. He looks familiar: it's Peter Jackson, director of Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Lovely Bones. And he's talking to Steven Spielberg. Normality is relative.
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/starlight-starbright-five-ways-we-can-tell-saoirse-is-on-the-rise-2033039.html
Starlight, starbright: Five ways we can tell Saoirse is on the rise
IT WAS WRITTEN IN THE STARS
Saoirse's first brush with fame came early when her dad Paul was acting in The Devil's Own (1997). He brought her on set to meet the leading man, Brad Pitt, who picked Saoirse up in his arms.
Saoirse doesn't remember that fateful moment -- she was just a toddler -- but clearly some of Brad's star quality must have rubbed off on her.
SHE HAS SCHEDULE 'CLASHES'
Saoirse was in the original line-up for Ridley Scott's upcoming blockbuster Robin Hood alongside Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett but, as happens to those in demand, ended up having to choose between Scott and Peter Weir, who wanted her for his new film The Way Back.
She plumped for the latter, which also stars Colin Farrell, Ed Harris and Jim Sturgess. Tough choice, eh?
THE BRITS HAVE CLAIMED HER
You know an Irish performer's international stock is high when the Brits start claiming them for their own. And so it is with Saoirse, who has been nominated by the London Film Critics' Circle 2010 Awards as Young British Performer of the Year for her role in The Lovely Bones.
The Critics' Circle's website has tried to clarify the matter, posting the following on their website: "Irish citizens are eligible for these awards but many Irish actors and directors work on what are technically British films and their work deserves recognition."
The Lovely Bones is a film based on a novel by an American author, directed by a New Zealander and produced by Steven Spielberg's company (but co-produced by FilmFour, which must make it 'technically British').
SHE'S A LITTLE PIECE OF OSCAR HISTORY
By being nominated for the Oscar for best supporting actress in 2008 -- for her role as Briony in Atonement -- Saoirse joined an elite group. At 13, she became the seventh youngest actress to be nominated in that key category.
MERYL STREEP'S A FAN
If Meryl is Queen of Hollywood, she gave the royal stamp of approval to Saoirse at the Critics' Choice Awards in LA. She swept the 15-year-old into her arms for a huge bear hug after Saoirse won the Best Young Actor gong.
Hopefully Meryl felt as friendly when Saoirse became her competition six days later, with both of them nominated for Best Actress in the upcoming BAFTAs ...
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Captain Buycott
Why we'll all be peacocking and buycotting this year
Forget SuBo and Twitter, Susan Daly reveals the 'hot' buzzwords that will be on everybody's lips in 2010
This time last year, the world had never heard of SuBo. But by the end of 2009, everyone -- including Oprah -- could recount the tale of Susan Boyle, never-been-kissed Scottish spinster, surprise star of Britain's Got Talent.
What a difference a year can make to the hot words on everyone's lips. By August, the Collins English Dictionary announced that it was adding the word "Twittering" to its hallowed pages to recognise the phenomenal rise of the social networking site. If someone had asked 12 months earlier if you "tweeted", you might have thought they had confused you for a bird.
Some of 2009's more used and abused words we could have done without knowing. We tried "jeggings" for the first time, the hideous skintight cross between denim and leggings.
For those who had given into the cult of the iPhone, conversation revolved around the "apps" -- that's applications to the iPhone-less -- they had downloaded on to their new toy.
The less fortunate found that their jobs were not "recession-proof". They had to consider "re-skilling" in the hope of landing a new post.
Those affected by the "credit crunch" (that phrase was so 2008) could only afford a "staycation", ie to spend their two-week holiday at home on the couch watching box sets.
But it's a new year -- and that means a whole mouthful of new jargon. The year 2010 was but a pup when the new buzzwords started to filter through. Anyone for a spot of "exergaming"? (You may not know it, but if your family have a Wii Fit or some such exercise video game, you're already in the virtual fitness club).
Confused? You won't be if you hold on to our glossary to the jargon that will be on everybody's lips this year. Warning: some words might prove to be highly irritating.
LIFESTYLE Peacocking -- January, recession, bad weather: this isn't the most cheerful time of year is it? Boo to all that, say fashion-forward types. This year's hottest threads will be in neon colours, make-up will be given an injection of acid brights and accessories will be in vibrant, stand-out hues -- all designed to fly in the face of how miserable we are supposed to be feeling.
Voluntourism -- Last year's staycation is over. This year, we're travelling again -- but with a purpose. Volunteering on worthy projects a la Niall Mellon's township housing challenge in South Africa will reach peak popularity as people either stretch their redundancy payoff by spending the year volunteering abroad, or find it counts as sustainable travel.
Maybe they'll even celebrate their "canniversary" -- the anniversary of the day they lost their old job -- while away on a voluntour.
Generation G -- Not Generation Greed, but Generation Generosity. Social networking sites have been promoting concepts like "pay it forward" and "one random act of kindness a day" for a while now.
The idea is that economics and capitalism have failed us -- so we should be investing in "happynomics" instead and finding out what really makes the world go round.
Ghost tweeters -- Twitter became a staple of last year's lexicon. This year, as more people join in the business of posting updates about their daily activities, competition to be noticed and collect "followers" on the site has become fierce. Some Twitter account holders are even turning to wittier pals to rewrite their Tweets for them. No fair, folks.
Fitness-training tools -- So you think you can just fling on a pair of runners and go for a run? Think again. While many continue to shy away from expensive gym memberships, technology will continue to shoulder its way into our exercise regimes.
Tracking devices like the Fitbit and GoWear fit, and online training software will offer training schedules and progress checks, as will downloadable "apps" (they haven't gone away you know) on iPhones and other personal gadgets.
CONSUMER/BUSINESS Buycotting -- This is the antithesis of a boycott of a company because, for example, they use child labour to make their products. Buycotts are the way forward; consumers actively support a company that they feel runs its business in a sustainable, ethically-conscious way.
W -- We know what you're thinking -- this one's about two years out of date. It's not. This letter "W" is nothing to do with George "Dubya" Bush. The Economist magazine is, in fact, predicting that the most overused piece of business jargon this year will be the letter "W".
It refers to a W-shaped economy, which looks like a graph of how the burgeoning recovery will peter out in the second half of 2010 "as stimulus-spending fades" but then resumes in 2011 to shoot for the stars. Good news for next year then.
Rental culture -- Renting rather than buying property has been very "in" since the property crash. The new "rent, don't own" attitude is beginning to extend to other areas.
This year it will be perfectly acceptable to rent everything, from musical instruments to clothes, to the artwork on the walls of your (rented) home. Lifeswapping -- bartering your house, clothes, homegrown veg and so on, will also gain popularity.
Next-besting -- Only eat a certain brand of bread? Never dream of straying from Barry's Gold Blend tea bags? Shopping around for the best value in groceries means that more of us are actually ditching our old favourite brands and trying new ones to see if we can continue to reduce our shopping bills.
And when we find a new shampoo/yogurt we can live with, why, that's the Next Best Thing.
Underbanked -- The reputation of high finance has been so shredded that -- to use a phrase that is so 2009 -- banks are like, OMG, total fail.
Lack of public confidence in banks and disgust at NAMA could lead to us adopting the term currently gripping America: "Underbanked" is a person who has chosen to have minimal contact with a bank, using other methods for paying bills, transferring money etc.
TECHNOLOGY Cloud-computing -- At the moment, data and applications that we use in computing are stored on our desktops and laptops.
The move is to store that data from now on in global servers or "the cloud" so that you can access it from anywhere in the world, and it will never be lost. Google's Chrome OS and the launch of Microsoft's Office Web Apps in the first-half of this year will be a major step.
Emotionology -- We're all feeling a little vulnerable these days. Scientists and product designers are banking on our need to be treated gently: they are developing products that are sensitive to their owner's mood.
We will be soon looking at music players that can sense which playlist you need to hear and jewellery that changes colour with your mood (a new take on those cheap "mood rings" of childhood).
Mass mingling -- We've been told that online social networking sites will be the death of human contact. Pope Benedict worried himself at the start of last year that "obsessive use" of Facebook and MySpace can foster false friendships and lead to isolation. (Ironically, this was around the same time as the Vatican got its own channel on YouTube.)
But according to trendwatching.com, people are making more and more use of the internet to make arrangements to meet up in real life with strangers who they have come in online contact with and who have similar interests, politics and hobbies.
Energy dieting -- While governments have been fighting over having to cut down on their carbon emissions and wasteful use of energy, we mere mortals have been much better at implementing energy-efficient practices in our homes for a very simple reason: saving energy means saving money.
This year, as the phasing out of incandescent lightbulbs continues in earnest and the Big Freeze has cost us a fortune in heating bills, households will find themselves on a permanent energy diet.
Another piece of eco-jargon -- greenpliances -- also feeds into this trend.
These are items like soapless dishwashers that are not only kind to the environment but, because of their efficiency, kind to the pocket.
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/issues/why-well-all-be-peacocking-and--buycotting-this-year-2031294.html
Forget SuBo and Twitter, Susan Daly reveals the 'hot' buzzwords that will be on everybody's lips in 2010
This time last year, the world had never heard of SuBo. But by the end of 2009, everyone -- including Oprah -- could recount the tale of Susan Boyle, never-been-kissed Scottish spinster, surprise star of Britain's Got Talent.
What a difference a year can make to the hot words on everyone's lips. By August, the Collins English Dictionary announced that it was adding the word "Twittering" to its hallowed pages to recognise the phenomenal rise of the social networking site. If someone had asked 12 months earlier if you "tweeted", you might have thought they had confused you for a bird.
Some of 2009's more used and abused words we could have done without knowing. We tried "jeggings" for the first time, the hideous skintight cross between denim and leggings.
For those who had given into the cult of the iPhone, conversation revolved around the "apps" -- that's applications to the iPhone-less -- they had downloaded on to their new toy.
The less fortunate found that their jobs were not "recession-proof". They had to consider "re-skilling" in the hope of landing a new post.
Those affected by the "credit crunch" (that phrase was so 2008) could only afford a "staycation", ie to spend their two-week holiday at home on the couch watching box sets.
But it's a new year -- and that means a whole mouthful of new jargon. The year 2010 was but a pup when the new buzzwords started to filter through. Anyone for a spot of "exergaming"? (You may not know it, but if your family have a Wii Fit or some such exercise video game, you're already in the virtual fitness club).
Confused? You won't be if you hold on to our glossary to the jargon that will be on everybody's lips this year. Warning: some words might prove to be highly irritating.
LIFESTYLE Peacocking -- January, recession, bad weather: this isn't the most cheerful time of year is it? Boo to all that, say fashion-forward types. This year's hottest threads will be in neon colours, make-up will be given an injection of acid brights and accessories will be in vibrant, stand-out hues -- all designed to fly in the face of how miserable we are supposed to be feeling.
Voluntourism -- Last year's staycation is over. This year, we're travelling again -- but with a purpose. Volunteering on worthy projects a la Niall Mellon's township housing challenge in South Africa will reach peak popularity as people either stretch their redundancy payoff by spending the year volunteering abroad, or find it counts as sustainable travel.
Maybe they'll even celebrate their "canniversary" -- the anniversary of the day they lost their old job -- while away on a voluntour.
Generation G -- Not Generation Greed, but Generation Generosity. Social networking sites have been promoting concepts like "pay it forward" and "one random act of kindness a day" for a while now.
The idea is that economics and capitalism have failed us -- so we should be investing in "happynomics" instead and finding out what really makes the world go round.
Ghost tweeters -- Twitter became a staple of last year's lexicon. This year, as more people join in the business of posting updates about their daily activities, competition to be noticed and collect "followers" on the site has become fierce. Some Twitter account holders are even turning to wittier pals to rewrite their Tweets for them. No fair, folks.
Fitness-training tools -- So you think you can just fling on a pair of runners and go for a run? Think again. While many continue to shy away from expensive gym memberships, technology will continue to shoulder its way into our exercise regimes.
Tracking devices like the Fitbit and GoWear fit, and online training software will offer training schedules and progress checks, as will downloadable "apps" (they haven't gone away you know) on iPhones and other personal gadgets.
CONSUMER/BUSINESS Buycotting -- This is the antithesis of a boycott of a company because, for example, they use child labour to make their products. Buycotts are the way forward; consumers actively support a company that they feel runs its business in a sustainable, ethically-conscious way.
W -- We know what you're thinking -- this one's about two years out of date. It's not. This letter "W" is nothing to do with George "Dubya" Bush. The Economist magazine is, in fact, predicting that the most overused piece of business jargon this year will be the letter "W".
It refers to a W-shaped economy, which looks like a graph of how the burgeoning recovery will peter out in the second half of 2010 "as stimulus-spending fades" but then resumes in 2011 to shoot for the stars. Good news for next year then.
Rental culture -- Renting rather than buying property has been very "in" since the property crash. The new "rent, don't own" attitude is beginning to extend to other areas.
This year it will be perfectly acceptable to rent everything, from musical instruments to clothes, to the artwork on the walls of your (rented) home. Lifeswapping -- bartering your house, clothes, homegrown veg and so on, will also gain popularity.
Next-besting -- Only eat a certain brand of bread? Never dream of straying from Barry's Gold Blend tea bags? Shopping around for the best value in groceries means that more of us are actually ditching our old favourite brands and trying new ones to see if we can continue to reduce our shopping bills.
And when we find a new shampoo/yogurt we can live with, why, that's the Next Best Thing.
Underbanked -- The reputation of high finance has been so shredded that -- to use a phrase that is so 2009 -- banks are like, OMG, total fail.
Lack of public confidence in banks and disgust at NAMA could lead to us adopting the term currently gripping America: "Underbanked" is a person who has chosen to have minimal contact with a bank, using other methods for paying bills, transferring money etc.
TECHNOLOGY Cloud-computing -- At the moment, data and applications that we use in computing are stored on our desktops and laptops.
The move is to store that data from now on in global servers or "the cloud" so that you can access it from anywhere in the world, and it will never be lost. Google's Chrome OS and the launch of Microsoft's Office Web Apps in the first-half of this year will be a major step.
Emotionology -- We're all feeling a little vulnerable these days. Scientists and product designers are banking on our need to be treated gently: they are developing products that are sensitive to their owner's mood.
We will be soon looking at music players that can sense which playlist you need to hear and jewellery that changes colour with your mood (a new take on those cheap "mood rings" of childhood).
Mass mingling -- We've been told that online social networking sites will be the death of human contact. Pope Benedict worried himself at the start of last year that "obsessive use" of Facebook and MySpace can foster false friendships and lead to isolation. (Ironically, this was around the same time as the Vatican got its own channel on YouTube.)
But according to trendwatching.com, people are making more and more use of the internet to make arrangements to meet up in real life with strangers who they have come in online contact with and who have similar interests, politics and hobbies.
Energy dieting -- While governments have been fighting over having to cut down on their carbon emissions and wasteful use of energy, we mere mortals have been much better at implementing energy-efficient practices in our homes for a very simple reason: saving energy means saving money.
This year, as the phasing out of incandescent lightbulbs continues in earnest and the Big Freeze has cost us a fortune in heating bills, households will find themselves on a permanent energy diet.
Another piece of eco-jargon -- greenpliances -- also feeds into this trend.
These are items like soapless dishwashers that are not only kind to the environment but, because of their efficiency, kind to the pocket.
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/issues/why-well-all-be-peacocking-and--buycotting-this-year-2031294.html
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Chocolate for celery
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/parenting/when-the-carrot-becomes-the-stick-2012918.html
When the carrot becomes the stick . . .
The problem of getting kids to eat what's good for them. By Susan Daly
Thursday January 14 2010
The news that 99pc of packed lunches are nutritionally unbalanced came as a stark statistic this week. Researchers at Leeds University in the UK found that crisps, sweets and sugary drinks take precedence over fruit, vegetables and dairy products in school children's lunchboxes.
That's bad enough in a country where half of all children can at least avail of nutritionally-sound school dinners. In Ireland, where school canteens don't exist, a healthy packed lunch is even more important.
"I wish some parents realised that," said one Montessori teacher at a Dublin inner city community crèche. "Based on what some of my kids come in with in the morning, I don't hold out much hope for them settling for an apple and a ham sandwich when they go to big school.
"Some of the parents give the kids sausage rolls from Centra on the way in. They promise them sweets to get them out of the house. It makes our job really difficult because they're cranky when the sugar buzz wears off."
Most primary schools in Ireland now offer healthy eating guidelines to parents and some impose strict regulations on children bringing junk food to school. The Department of Agriculture has been funding a healthy-eating programme in primary schools since 2007 called the Food Dudes. Michael Maloney from An Bord Bia, which runs the scheme, says it has been rolled out to 1,340 of the State's 3,500 primary schools so far. They supply fruit and veg for an initial 16 days, encouraging the children through a series of non-edible rewards to taste raw foods.
"In primary schools, you don't find vending machines but I know, anecdotally, they are available in some secondary schools, and if not, teenagers can go up the street and buy what they want in a shop," says Michael Maloney. "I know that certainly the earlier you can change children's behaviour and attitudes, the better.
"The programme was developed by Fergus Lowe, a psychologist, so it's all about changing behaviours. Children don't like to be different but because it's introduced from infants right up to sixth class, the whole culture changes."
Teenagers are a totally different kettle of battered fish. When I worked and lived in an affluent south Dublin suburb -- the type of place that knew its wholemeal pitta and hummus from its Tayto sandwiches -- the queue for the wedges counter in the local shop at school lunchtime was out the door.
This isn't just about teens having more disposable income. One adult acquaintance admitted to a teenage love of mayonnaise sandwiches while another said his schoolbag was a living organism by the end of each term from all the uneaten sandwiches.
Dr Muireann Cullen, manager of the Nutrition and Health Foundation, says that getting teens involved in what they bring to school is helpful. "There is no such thing as a bad food," she says, "If kids say they want X, Y and Z one day, it's alright to say, 'Fine, but tomorrow, we'll balance it out with these other foods', and explain why.
"Remember those mothers in the Jamie Oliver programme, pushing 'banned' foods through the school railings to their kids? That was about personal choice. Once everyone was included in the decision-making, that problem was taken away."
When the carrot becomes the stick . . .
The problem of getting kids to eat what's good for them. By Susan Daly
Thursday January 14 2010
The news that 99pc of packed lunches are nutritionally unbalanced came as a stark statistic this week. Researchers at Leeds University in the UK found that crisps, sweets and sugary drinks take precedence over fruit, vegetables and dairy products in school children's lunchboxes.
That's bad enough in a country where half of all children can at least avail of nutritionally-sound school dinners. In Ireland, where school canteens don't exist, a healthy packed lunch is even more important.
"I wish some parents realised that," said one Montessori teacher at a Dublin inner city community crèche. "Based on what some of my kids come in with in the morning, I don't hold out much hope for them settling for an apple and a ham sandwich when they go to big school.
"Some of the parents give the kids sausage rolls from Centra on the way in. They promise them sweets to get them out of the house. It makes our job really difficult because they're cranky when the sugar buzz wears off."
Most primary schools in Ireland now offer healthy eating guidelines to parents and some impose strict regulations on children bringing junk food to school. The Department of Agriculture has been funding a healthy-eating programme in primary schools since 2007 called the Food Dudes. Michael Maloney from An Bord Bia, which runs the scheme, says it has been rolled out to 1,340 of the State's 3,500 primary schools so far. They supply fruit and veg for an initial 16 days, encouraging the children through a series of non-edible rewards to taste raw foods.
"In primary schools, you don't find vending machines but I know, anecdotally, they are available in some secondary schools, and if not, teenagers can go up the street and buy what they want in a shop," says Michael Maloney. "I know that certainly the earlier you can change children's behaviour and attitudes, the better.
"The programme was developed by Fergus Lowe, a psychologist, so it's all about changing behaviours. Children don't like to be different but because it's introduced from infants right up to sixth class, the whole culture changes."
Teenagers are a totally different kettle of battered fish. When I worked and lived in an affluent south Dublin suburb -- the type of place that knew its wholemeal pitta and hummus from its Tayto sandwiches -- the queue for the wedges counter in the local shop at school lunchtime was out the door.
This isn't just about teens having more disposable income. One adult acquaintance admitted to a teenage love of mayonnaise sandwiches while another said his schoolbag was a living organism by the end of each term from all the uneaten sandwiches.
Dr Muireann Cullen, manager of the Nutrition and Health Foundation, says that getting teens involved in what they bring to school is helpful. "There is no such thing as a bad food," she says, "If kids say they want X, Y and Z one day, it's alright to say, 'Fine, but tomorrow, we'll balance it out with these other foods', and explain why.
"Remember those mothers in the Jamie Oliver programme, pushing 'banned' foods through the school railings to their kids? That was about personal choice. Once everyone was included in the decision-making, that problem was taken away."
With this toaster, I thee divorce
Debenhams have launched a new service called the Divorce Gift List. How nice of them.
http://www.herald.ie/opinion/susan-daly-with-this-toaster--i-thee-divorce-2021296.html
By Susan Daly
Tuesday January 19 2010
It's clearly a tough time in the retail sector when Debenhams decide it's fine to burrow out a crass new niche: the Divorce Gift List.
Their logic is that when couples break up, they also draw a dividing line down their communal belongings.
Or worse, one partner ends up out on their ear entirely without so much as a can-opener to their name.
The Debenhams gift list is posing a question that only they felt needed to be asked: Just what do you buy the man or woman who has nothing? A store spokesperson said that as well as the basic bed and kitchen basics, they expect microwaves, plasma screen TVs, computer games and non-iron shirts to be popular choices among divorcees.
How sensitive. Congratulations on the breakdown of your marriage. We now expect you to sit slobbering microwaveable ready meals down your idiot-friendly shirt while you numb the loneliness of your life by playing video games on your giant TV. Why not just add, "You sad immature sack," and be done with it?
Is it just me or does it also sounds like a particularly masculine wish list? I don't think divorcee support groups will be delighted by the stereotype that men straight out of a marriage revert to their 20-something selves. It might sound like fun -- but probably not to the man who has lost love, a home and perhaps daily access to his children. A flatscreen TV is scant consolation.
Marital breakdown is a horrible fact of life -- the most recent figures show that one in four married Irish couples are now estranged. That is incredibly sad and there is nothing wrong with the idea of helping a needy friend to start over.
There is also something to be said for anything that helps destigmatise divorce, which is still a relatively new phenomenon here. But a divorce gift list sounds sneakily like a companion to a wedding gift list. Except the gift card reads: "I'm sorry to hear... You didn't dump that loser sooner" or "Ding dong, the witch is gone".
Like those divorce parties that have become popular among such dignified, restrained divorcees like Jordan and Heather Mills, it smacks of a celebration. Don't get me started on how inappropriate that is if children, in particular, are involved. It's a surprise the list doesn't include a special silver-plated kiddies' tissue holder.
Who, by the way, would register for such a gift list? If you're getting divorced, it's safe to assume you got married, too. And if I'm a good enough friend to be sent an invite to your divorce party, I probably shelled out for a wedding present at that happier time too. Isn't that a little -- dare I say it -- greedy?
Debenhams would argue that the list is not an exploitation of the old maxim that where there's muck, there's brass. They might say they are supplying a real demand.
Perhaps -- but there are plenty of other situations where someone might need to assemble the basics of a home. A student starting college away from their parents, for example. So why don't they launch a Home Starter Kit that would cover all eventualities? I think we know the answer to that.
It wouldn't generate the same publicity.
How's this for cynicism: the launch came on the day known as Blue Monday.
It is officially the most depressing day of the year, the point at which many people are hit by post-Christmas financial, emotional and physical stress. Who in Debenhams thought it would be a kind gesture to add a reminder of relationship breakdown to that mix?
It seems they have in fact actually answered their own question. What do you give the person who has nothing? A kick when they're down.
http://www.herald.ie/opinion/susan-daly-with-this-toaster--i-thee-divorce-2021296.html
By Susan Daly
Tuesday January 19 2010
It's clearly a tough time in the retail sector when Debenhams decide it's fine to burrow out a crass new niche: the Divorce Gift List.
Their logic is that when couples break up, they also draw a dividing line down their communal belongings.
Or worse, one partner ends up out on their ear entirely without so much as a can-opener to their name.
The Debenhams gift list is posing a question that only they felt needed to be asked: Just what do you buy the man or woman who has nothing? A store spokesperson said that as well as the basic bed and kitchen basics, they expect microwaves, plasma screen TVs, computer games and non-iron shirts to be popular choices among divorcees.
How sensitive. Congratulations on the breakdown of your marriage. We now expect you to sit slobbering microwaveable ready meals down your idiot-friendly shirt while you numb the loneliness of your life by playing video games on your giant TV. Why not just add, "You sad immature sack," and be done with it?
Is it just me or does it also sounds like a particularly masculine wish list? I don't think divorcee support groups will be delighted by the stereotype that men straight out of a marriage revert to their 20-something selves. It might sound like fun -- but probably not to the man who has lost love, a home and perhaps daily access to his children. A flatscreen TV is scant consolation.
Marital breakdown is a horrible fact of life -- the most recent figures show that one in four married Irish couples are now estranged. That is incredibly sad and there is nothing wrong with the idea of helping a needy friend to start over.
There is also something to be said for anything that helps destigmatise divorce, which is still a relatively new phenomenon here. But a divorce gift list sounds sneakily like a companion to a wedding gift list. Except the gift card reads: "I'm sorry to hear... You didn't dump that loser sooner" or "Ding dong, the witch is gone".
Like those divorce parties that have become popular among such dignified, restrained divorcees like Jordan and Heather Mills, it smacks of a celebration. Don't get me started on how inappropriate that is if children, in particular, are involved. It's a surprise the list doesn't include a special silver-plated kiddies' tissue holder.
Who, by the way, would register for such a gift list? If you're getting divorced, it's safe to assume you got married, too. And if I'm a good enough friend to be sent an invite to your divorce party, I probably shelled out for a wedding present at that happier time too. Isn't that a little -- dare I say it -- greedy?
Debenhams would argue that the list is not an exploitation of the old maxim that where there's muck, there's brass. They might say they are supplying a real demand.
Perhaps -- but there are plenty of other situations where someone might need to assemble the basics of a home. A student starting college away from their parents, for example. So why don't they launch a Home Starter Kit that would cover all eventualities? I think we know the answer to that.
It wouldn't generate the same publicity.
How's this for cynicism: the launch came on the day known as Blue Monday.
It is officially the most depressing day of the year, the point at which many people are hit by post-Christmas financial, emotional and physical stress. Who in Debenhams thought it would be a kind gesture to add a reminder of relationship breakdown to that mix?
It seems they have in fact actually answered their own question. What do you give the person who has nothing? A kick when they're down.
Monday, January 18, 2010
The mad hatter's ball
http://www.herald.ie/opinion/susan-daly-they-really-are-a-bunch-of-mad--hatters-out-in-rte-2018674.html
The whole country was caught on the hop by the floods-snow-floods cycle of hellish weather. But is that any excuse for some of the gear that RTE news reporters have fetched up in for their outside broadcasts?
We know it wasn't quite suit-and-tie weather but some of these lads and lassies looked like they had fallen into a prop box for Tom Crean: Antarctic Explorer on their way out the door to work.
Paul Cunningham's Pakistani pakol hat -- which, frankly, looked like a knitted condom -- was so outstandingly bizarre that it got its own Facebook fan page. He was even seen wearing it at a press briefing with Brian Cowen. Indoors.
Mary Calpin joined in the mad hatters' party with a Bond villain furry number and Paschal Sheehy upped the ante with a frayed camouflage baseball cap stealing the attention from the thaw.
You can't knock the reporters for entertainment value. They were right up there with the poor unfortunate who had his slip on an icy pavement recorded for posterity by RTE news.
It would seem that these standout sartorial moments were down to the reporters themselves. That is to say, no-one in RTE's wardrobe department seems eager to rush forward and claim credit.
But there seems to be more of a concerted effort going on in the brand-flashing department. From the number of fleeces and anoraks bearing the North Face logo, you might think RTE News was sponsored by the brand.
The Berghaus clothing logo got an outing on one of the bulletins briefly this week. In the main, however, it appears that North Face is the label any self-respecting TV journo wants to be wearing in the field. Now unless the outdoor clothing brand has donated a job lot of sample-size fleeces to the RTE newsroom, has it any business getting all this promotion on the national broadcaster?
RTE has extensive guidelines on product placement and sponsorship deals, which it lists clearly on its website. Sponsors who make a "direct or indirect contribution" to a programme, be it through funding or provision of goods or services, are supposed to get a sponsor credit at the beginning or end of the programme to make clear the relationship. I didn't notice any such "Survival clothes by North Face" at the end of the news, did you?
The thing is, if RTE aren't being given free clothes or cash by a brand that they are giving prominence to, they are missing a trick. It's ironic because TV3, a commercial station that knows all about squeezing the last cent out of everything, got a bit of a lash for all the product placement on The Apprentice.
The new Broadcasting Authority of Ireland is currently considering whether RTE, as a public service broadcaster, should be allowed to be as free and easy with certain types of sponsorship as other independent stations are. I don't know if this means they might have to tell their reporters to turn their fleecy little numbers inside out so a non-sponsor brand doesn't show.
Maybe it will herald a return to those school uniform-type RTE anoraks you used to see the regional correspondents sporting at the ploughing championships. But let's hope Paul Cunningham gets to keep his hats.
The whole country was caught on the hop by the floods-snow-floods cycle of hellish weather. But is that any excuse for some of the gear that RTE news reporters have fetched up in for their outside broadcasts?
We know it wasn't quite suit-and-tie weather but some of these lads and lassies looked like they had fallen into a prop box for Tom Crean: Antarctic Explorer on their way out the door to work.
Paul Cunningham's Pakistani pakol hat -- which, frankly, looked like a knitted condom -- was so outstandingly bizarre that it got its own Facebook fan page. He was even seen wearing it at a press briefing with Brian Cowen. Indoors.
Mary Calpin joined in the mad hatters' party with a Bond villain furry number and Paschal Sheehy upped the ante with a frayed camouflage baseball cap stealing the attention from the thaw.
You can't knock the reporters for entertainment value. They were right up there with the poor unfortunate who had his slip on an icy pavement recorded for posterity by RTE news.
It would seem that these standout sartorial moments were down to the reporters themselves. That is to say, no-one in RTE's wardrobe department seems eager to rush forward and claim credit.
But there seems to be more of a concerted effort going on in the brand-flashing department. From the number of fleeces and anoraks bearing the North Face logo, you might think RTE News was sponsored by the brand.
The Berghaus clothing logo got an outing on one of the bulletins briefly this week. In the main, however, it appears that North Face is the label any self-respecting TV journo wants to be wearing in the field. Now unless the outdoor clothing brand has donated a job lot of sample-size fleeces to the RTE newsroom, has it any business getting all this promotion on the national broadcaster?
RTE has extensive guidelines on product placement and sponsorship deals, which it lists clearly on its website. Sponsors who make a "direct or indirect contribution" to a programme, be it through funding or provision of goods or services, are supposed to get a sponsor credit at the beginning or end of the programme to make clear the relationship. I didn't notice any such "Survival clothes by North Face" at the end of the news, did you?
The thing is, if RTE aren't being given free clothes or cash by a brand that they are giving prominence to, they are missing a trick. It's ironic because TV3, a commercial station that knows all about squeezing the last cent out of everything, got a bit of a lash for all the product placement on The Apprentice.
The new Broadcasting Authority of Ireland is currently considering whether RTE, as a public service broadcaster, should be allowed to be as free and easy with certain types of sponsorship as other independent stations are. I don't know if this means they might have to tell their reporters to turn their fleecy little numbers inside out so a non-sponsor brand doesn't show.
Maybe it will herald a return to those school uniform-type RTE anoraks you used to see the regional correspondents sporting at the ploughing championships. But let's hope Paul Cunningham gets to keep his hats.
Five grumpy chefs hanging on the wall
Editor: "Can you review opening night at Conrad Gallagher's restaurant?"
Me: "Do I live and breathe?"
Conrad Gallagher, erstwhile enfant terrible of Irish haute cuisine, has been M.I.A. from this island for many a year since Peacock Alley collapsed. (Well, I say M.I.A. - I mean, off opening other restaurants abroad, none of which seem to have worked out for him).
His new place, Salon des Saveurs on Aungier Street, has an interesting concept behind it: read the following review I had in Saturday's Irish Independent to find out more. I had less than an hour between coffee and deadline to file, and only a few hundred words, so I'm sure others will add different angles to the experience over the coming weeks.
Two things that I wish I had had the time and room to add to the piece was the fact that 12.5% 'suggested' service charge is automatically added to the bill, even for a table of two. (How is it 'suggested' if it is mandatory?)
That's fine if it's a table of six or more, but I don't like that in smaller groups, especially since Gallagher appears to be aiming for affordability with the price rang of the menu. Coffee and chocolates are a e6.50 add-on too - I only had time for a quick espresso but was charged e6.50 regardless, and no-one offered me chocolate in any way, shape or form to take home. Hmmm....
Here is how the review appeared last Saturday:
REVIEW: SALON DES SAVEURS – Conrad Gallagher’s new restaurant at 16 Aungier Street, Dublin 2
MINIMALISM has never been Conrad Gallagher’s style. The man who was arguably this country’s first celebrity chef – and one of a holy trinity of Irish chefs to win two Michelin stars – has never known how to go quietly into the night.
The group of photographers waiting outside his new Dublin restaurant, Salon des Saveurs, last night were hoping nothing had changed since he left the city several years ago trailing controversy and creditors in his wake. They were rewarded with a snap of Gay Byrne and wife Kathleen wandering in amiably for opening night, and later, a sedate Gallagher coming out to shake hands.
He seems to have tried to keep his reappearance on the Irish dining scene a low-key affair. An advertisement for a head chef for his new venture, Salon des Saveurs, turned up in the inauspicious hiring pages of networking website, gumtree.ie.
This understatement - appropriate for staging a comeback in a recession – is reflected in the new dining room. It is situated in the small venue that once housed Darwin’s on shabby-but-not-quite-chic Aungier Street. Inside, the décor is a simple red and white affair, with unfussy tables slotted in around a bar of dark-wood panels and smoky glass.
There is only one painting on the wall – a giant oil of five of the chefs who have most inspired him. Between our table and the next, we identified three – Bocuse, Robuchon and Ducaisse – and the waiting staff, none at all. It makes you wonder why it’s not just hanging over Gallagher’s station in the kitchen if he’s the only one who can appreciate it.
The service is friendly without ever getting intrusive - there were some understandable opening-night jitters involving unruly water jugs and uneven timings between certain courses.
It is the food – as one would expect from the man who introduced Ireland to ‘tall’ food in the 1990s – that is the only immodest feature of the place. It is brazenly good – and excellent value.
Gallagher hasn’t lost his taste for a risk: his concept is to offer four tasting menus to his customers, five courses in each with coffee and chocolates an extra add-on. The menus cost e24, e34, e44, and e54 per person.
I and my guest went for the e34 menu and it didn’t put a foot wrong. Silky pumpkin soup, a perfect risotto with darling little chanterelle mushrooms, asparagus and shredded duck, a ravioli of spiced crab and the pinkest, softest lamb that must surely have died for a higher purpose. The lemon taster dessert plate was not perhaps tart enough in its entirety to be truly refreshing but it was never less than delicious.
Wine is an added extra but glasses and bottles, all reasonable, starting with e6.50 glasses and bottles for e24, are matched with the different courses and menus to cut out the guesswork for wine ignoramuses like myself.
A quibble would be the fact that only one type of menu can be ordered per table, so this is not a place to come if one member of your party has an aversion to seafood and another can’t stand the sight of duck. There will be fisticuffs.
Me: "Do I live and breathe?"
Conrad Gallagher, erstwhile enfant terrible of Irish haute cuisine, has been M.I.A. from this island for many a year since Peacock Alley collapsed. (Well, I say M.I.A. - I mean, off opening other restaurants abroad, none of which seem to have worked out for him).
His new place, Salon des Saveurs on Aungier Street, has an interesting concept behind it: read the following review I had in Saturday's Irish Independent to find out more. I had less than an hour between coffee and deadline to file, and only a few hundred words, so I'm sure others will add different angles to the experience over the coming weeks.
Two things that I wish I had had the time and room to add to the piece was the fact that 12.5% 'suggested' service charge is automatically added to the bill, even for a table of two. (How is it 'suggested' if it is mandatory?)
That's fine if it's a table of six or more, but I don't like that in smaller groups, especially since Gallagher appears to be aiming for affordability with the price rang of the menu. Coffee and chocolates are a e6.50 add-on too - I only had time for a quick espresso but was charged e6.50 regardless, and no-one offered me chocolate in any way, shape or form to take home. Hmmm....
Here is how the review appeared last Saturday:
REVIEW: SALON DES SAVEURS – Conrad Gallagher’s new restaurant at 16 Aungier Street, Dublin 2
MINIMALISM has never been Conrad Gallagher’s style. The man who was arguably this country’s first celebrity chef – and one of a holy trinity of Irish chefs to win two Michelin stars – has never known how to go quietly into the night.
The group of photographers waiting outside his new Dublin restaurant, Salon des Saveurs, last night were hoping nothing had changed since he left the city several years ago trailing controversy and creditors in his wake. They were rewarded with a snap of Gay Byrne and wife Kathleen wandering in amiably for opening night, and later, a sedate Gallagher coming out to shake hands.
He seems to have tried to keep his reappearance on the Irish dining scene a low-key affair. An advertisement for a head chef for his new venture, Salon des Saveurs, turned up in the inauspicious hiring pages of networking website, gumtree.ie.
This understatement - appropriate for staging a comeback in a recession – is reflected in the new dining room. It is situated in the small venue that once housed Darwin’s on shabby-but-not-quite-chic Aungier Street. Inside, the décor is a simple red and white affair, with unfussy tables slotted in around a bar of dark-wood panels and smoky glass.
There is only one painting on the wall – a giant oil of five of the chefs who have most inspired him. Between our table and the next, we identified three – Bocuse, Robuchon and Ducaisse – and the waiting staff, none at all. It makes you wonder why it’s not just hanging over Gallagher’s station in the kitchen if he’s the only one who can appreciate it.
The service is friendly without ever getting intrusive - there were some understandable opening-night jitters involving unruly water jugs and uneven timings between certain courses.
It is the food – as one would expect from the man who introduced Ireland to ‘tall’ food in the 1990s – that is the only immodest feature of the place. It is brazenly good – and excellent value.
Gallagher hasn’t lost his taste for a risk: his concept is to offer four tasting menus to his customers, five courses in each with coffee and chocolates an extra add-on. The menus cost e24, e34, e44, and e54 per person.
I and my guest went for the e34 menu and it didn’t put a foot wrong. Silky pumpkin soup, a perfect risotto with darling little chanterelle mushrooms, asparagus and shredded duck, a ravioli of spiced crab and the pinkest, softest lamb that must surely have died for a higher purpose. The lemon taster dessert plate was not perhaps tart enough in its entirety to be truly refreshing but it was never less than delicious.
Wine is an added extra but glasses and bottles, all reasonable, starting with e6.50 glasses and bottles for e24, are matched with the different courses and menus to cut out the guesswork for wine ignoramuses like myself.
A quibble would be the fact that only one type of menu can be ordered per table, so this is not a place to come if one member of your party has an aversion to seafood and another can’t stand the sight of duck. There will be fisticuffs.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Don't call 'em cougars
Early morning chat about Iris Robinson and the dreaded term 'cougars' on TV3's Ireland AM last Wednesday...
TV3 - Video - Ireland AM,
TV3 - Video - Ireland AM,
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Jesus loves her more than she will know. Whoa oh oh.
Iris Robinson - the gift that keeps on giving
http://www.independent.ie/national-news/sugarmummy-affair-with-man-just-a-third-of-her-age-is-the-stuff-soap-writers-dream-about-2006227.html
After the dust settles on this sad and tawdry story of the toyboy, forbidden sex and funny money, how will the ruined Robinsons bear to face each other across the breakfast table, asks Susan Daly
Saturday January 09 2010
IT is horribly appropriate that while the misadventures of Iris Robinson were playing out so publicly on BBC's 'Spotlight' programme on Thursday night, a quick flick of the channels would have alighted on the actress Stephanie Beacham queening it up on 'Celebrity Big Brother'.
Beacham, as any 1980s TV drama fan will tell you, is most famed for her role as Sable Colby in 'The Colbys', glamorous matriarch of a power-hungry family dynasty. For all the fundamentalist rigour of the Robinson religious creed, it appears that Iris had been modelling her lifestyle on the flamboyant big-haired Sable.
So outlandish are certain elements of the Robinson affair that it is hard to believe they exist outside the mind of a soap opera screenwriter. A cross-generational affair between a 19-year-old and a woman three times his age. Murky insinuations of sugar-mummy donations. Hellfire evangelism undermined by breathtaking hypocrisy.
Like Peter Robinson's televised statement about his wife's doings, the unfolding story is excruciating to watch but impossible not to. Impossible, too, not to wonder open-mouthed at the motivation behind the then 58-year-old Iris -- handsomely well-preserved woman though she is -- taking a 19-year-old into her bed.
Her own three young adult children are of the same generation as her former lover, Kirk McCambley. As if that were not toe-curling enough -- "icky" is the technical term, I believe -- McCambley's father was a friend of the Robinsons. Close to death, he apparently asked Iris to take care of his son. In what we can only hope was a confusion of maternal affection for attraction, the relationship between Iris and Kirk took off a few months after the funeral.
"She looked out for me to make sure I was okay," McCambley told 'Spotlight'.
What are we to make of McCambley?
The death of a parent can be deeply traumatic. It could drive a vulnerable young man to seek comfort in the most unlikely of quarters. Yet he is clearly no fool. He had won a young entrepreneur of the year award by his late teens. Robinson's help with arranging a £50,000 (€55,000) business deal gave him an enviable leg-up in starting his own restaurant.
As for Robinson's "inappropriate" behaviour, as it was coyly dubbed by husband Peter, it is not clear if it was the result of, or resulted in, the mental difficulties that drove her to a suicide attempt last March.
There has been much schadenfreude expressed over Bible-thumper Iris being hoisted by her own moralistic petard. It's almost too delicious -- the woman who believes homosexuality to be such an "abomination" that it makes her feel "nauseous" rides roughshod over several of the Commandments she so cherishes.
And yet: how to banish the niggling feeling that any person in such distress that they try to kill themselves deserves our compassion? Not aggression veiled as compassion, mind, as per Mrs Robinson's offer to recommend a good psychiatrist who could "fix" gay people. We are better than that, even if she isn't.
In the end, it doesn't really matter if the public accepts Mrs Robinson's display of self-flagellation or buys into her husband's statement of "love the sinner, not the sin". Three months down the line, Mr Robinson's political fate will have been decided one way or another.
If he's lucky, he will still be First Minister, having been found guilty of nothing more than standing by his woman.
Or he may be found negligent of his public duty, of not alerting the relevant watchdogs to his wife's lack of disclosure to the donations she sought for her lover.
That decided, the spotlight which the Robinsons themselves shone on their home with their pre-emptive revelations of infidelity will have moved on. They will be alone at their breakfast table, 40 years of marriage behind them and the dark chasm of an uncertain future together yawning in front of them.
Mr Robinson has said he still loves his wife. He referred to the years she stood by him in the political wilderness, the children she bore him.
Having made his moral beliefs very much part of his political policies, he has given himself no choice but to stand by her now that she has 'fessed up and begged forgiveness. That's the Christian thing to do, isn't it?
Yet when Mr Robinson made his statement about her affair, you had to wonder what his obviously genuine tears were for -- surely not for the betrayal about which he has now known for 10 months?
The carefully placed card from his children 'To Dad' on the bookshelf behind him said it all: Don't ever forget who the victim is here. And it's not her.
It was interesting how quickly his "we" turned to "I" when it came to defending his wife on anything other than sexual matters.
The affair he can theologise away -- the brass tacks of any funny money, he can't.
And what of Iris? A woman whose tastes in sports cars and lavish interior design contributed to the "Swish Family Robinson" tag the pair acquired in a report on their MPs' expenses last year is unlikely to want to prostrate herself in contrition forever.
A show of public unity is all well and good -- but if unhappiness and resentment reign in private, it will make for a bitterly divided home.
http://www.independent.ie/national-news/sugarmummy-affair-with-man-just-a-third-of-her-age-is-the-stuff-soap-writers-dream-about-2006227.html
After the dust settles on this sad and tawdry story of the toyboy, forbidden sex and funny money, how will the ruined Robinsons bear to face each other across the breakfast table, asks Susan Daly
Saturday January 09 2010
IT is horribly appropriate that while the misadventures of Iris Robinson were playing out so publicly on BBC's 'Spotlight' programme on Thursday night, a quick flick of the channels would have alighted on the actress Stephanie Beacham queening it up on 'Celebrity Big Brother'.
Beacham, as any 1980s TV drama fan will tell you, is most famed for her role as Sable Colby in 'The Colbys', glamorous matriarch of a power-hungry family dynasty. For all the fundamentalist rigour of the Robinson religious creed, it appears that Iris had been modelling her lifestyle on the flamboyant big-haired Sable.
So outlandish are certain elements of the Robinson affair that it is hard to believe they exist outside the mind of a soap opera screenwriter. A cross-generational affair between a 19-year-old and a woman three times his age. Murky insinuations of sugar-mummy donations. Hellfire evangelism undermined by breathtaking hypocrisy.
Like Peter Robinson's televised statement about his wife's doings, the unfolding story is excruciating to watch but impossible not to. Impossible, too, not to wonder open-mouthed at the motivation behind the then 58-year-old Iris -- handsomely well-preserved woman though she is -- taking a 19-year-old into her bed.
Her own three young adult children are of the same generation as her former lover, Kirk McCambley. As if that were not toe-curling enough -- "icky" is the technical term, I believe -- McCambley's father was a friend of the Robinsons. Close to death, he apparently asked Iris to take care of his son. In what we can only hope was a confusion of maternal affection for attraction, the relationship between Iris and Kirk took off a few months after the funeral.
"She looked out for me to make sure I was okay," McCambley told 'Spotlight'.
What are we to make of McCambley?
The death of a parent can be deeply traumatic. It could drive a vulnerable young man to seek comfort in the most unlikely of quarters. Yet he is clearly no fool. He had won a young entrepreneur of the year award by his late teens. Robinson's help with arranging a £50,000 (€55,000) business deal gave him an enviable leg-up in starting his own restaurant.
As for Robinson's "inappropriate" behaviour, as it was coyly dubbed by husband Peter, it is not clear if it was the result of, or resulted in, the mental difficulties that drove her to a suicide attempt last March.
There has been much schadenfreude expressed over Bible-thumper Iris being hoisted by her own moralistic petard. It's almost too delicious -- the woman who believes homosexuality to be such an "abomination" that it makes her feel "nauseous" rides roughshod over several of the Commandments she so cherishes.
And yet: how to banish the niggling feeling that any person in such distress that they try to kill themselves deserves our compassion? Not aggression veiled as compassion, mind, as per Mrs Robinson's offer to recommend a good psychiatrist who could "fix" gay people. We are better than that, even if she isn't.
In the end, it doesn't really matter if the public accepts Mrs Robinson's display of self-flagellation or buys into her husband's statement of "love the sinner, not the sin". Three months down the line, Mr Robinson's political fate will have been decided one way or another.
If he's lucky, he will still be First Minister, having been found guilty of nothing more than standing by his woman.
Or he may be found negligent of his public duty, of not alerting the relevant watchdogs to his wife's lack of disclosure to the donations she sought for her lover.
That decided, the spotlight which the Robinsons themselves shone on their home with their pre-emptive revelations of infidelity will have moved on. They will be alone at their breakfast table, 40 years of marriage behind them and the dark chasm of an uncertain future together yawning in front of them.
Mr Robinson has said he still loves his wife. He referred to the years she stood by him in the political wilderness, the children she bore him.
Having made his moral beliefs very much part of his political policies, he has given himself no choice but to stand by her now that she has 'fessed up and begged forgiveness. That's the Christian thing to do, isn't it?
Yet when Mr Robinson made his statement about her affair, you had to wonder what his obviously genuine tears were for -- surely not for the betrayal about which he has now known for 10 months?
The carefully placed card from his children 'To Dad' on the bookshelf behind him said it all: Don't ever forget who the victim is here. And it's not her.
It was interesting how quickly his "we" turned to "I" when it came to defending his wife on anything other than sexual matters.
The affair he can theologise away -- the brass tacks of any funny money, he can't.
And what of Iris? A woman whose tastes in sports cars and lavish interior design contributed to the "Swish Family Robinson" tag the pair acquired in a report on their MPs' expenses last year is unlikely to want to prostrate herself in contrition forever.
A show of public unity is all well and good -- but if unhappiness and resentment reign in private, it will make for a bitterly divided home.
Refusing Residence
From Thursday's Evening Herald
http://www.herald.ie/opinion/susan-daly-please-save-residence--or-these-braying-champagne-charlies-might-end-up-in-my-friendly-local-boozer-2003195.html
Please save Residence -- or these braying Champagne Charlies might end up in my friendly local boozer
By Susan Daly
Thursday January 07 2010
What a frightful palaver over at Residence. For those without a butler to keep an ear trained for the word on the street, allow me. It seems the private members' club on St Stephen's Green is experiencing some cashflow difficulties.
I know, I know -- what's the world coming to when an establishment which initially charged members a €1,600 annual fee for the privilege of crossing the threshold is forced to 'restructure' its finances? And that didn't include the €250 joining fee.
Clearly any lapsed members have their priorities entirely wrong. Who chooses to keep up with their own mortgage repayments over unlimited access to a haven of exclusivity, sophistication and gilt-edged mirrors? Bleedin' riff-raff.
Of course no one should gloat when any Irish business totters on the precipice of life and death. An examiner has been appointed to Residence but the doors haven't shut yet. For the sake of the 58 staff employed there, it would be churlish not to hope that they find some way of staying open.
The club rules -- keeping the hoi polloi firmly outside with their noses pressed to the window -- are going to have to change if that is to happen. Residence claimed to fill a niche that existed in Dublin for an upmarket members' club that was as luxurious but not as stiff as the old-guard establishments in the area.
The nearby Kildare Street club, for example, once turned down Mary Harney as a member because she was a woman. (She joined when they reversed their ban on the skirts, which was nice of her).
Yet Residence was/is as ruthlessly selective, making cash the must-have credential. How elitist on one hand, and on the other -- how very crass.
The other difficulty of trying to fill a niche is that it can only ever cater to a small number of people.
I'm sure there's a niche market too for smoking jackets for labradoodles, but I wouldn't throw the family silver at the idea.
Focusing on a small number of big spenders means that you risk everything on their loyalty (and solvency).
If it is the case that Residence reduced their annual fees drastically in the past year in an attempt to attract members, then they must have alienated a few of the Champagne Charlies who fancied themselves part of an elite.
You can't be all things to all men. Especially when your USP was to be one thing to a select few of them.
And just who wants to belong to a club that would have members like that? Not as many as Residence presumed, I suppose.
I interviewed someone there last year, not at my insistence I might add. The swag-and-tails decor was very nice if you like that kind of thing, although I'm not sure I'd have blown a few mill on it. As it turned out, the club was the perfect venue to record an interview. Nothing rings out as clearly on a dictaphone as the sound of one's own voice booming around the corners of a near-empty room.
It was actually a bit sad -- the lunch was delicious, but there's not much point in producing the perfect tarte tatin if there's no one there to taste it.
Most bars have trouble getting bums on barstools midweek these days but you'd think that wouldn't be a problem for a club whose members effectively pay their cover charge in advance. If it were me, I'd be living in the lounge 24/7 to get full value for my moolah.
But perhaps I have more sense than cent. For one thing, I refuse to take up Residence in any bar that lets Eamon Dunphy and Eamon Keane commandeer the piano room. Possibly even at the same time. Good heavens -- has the VIP club fallen asleep and woken up in Lillie's circa 2004?
I do have one concern should time be called on Residence's tenure and its brass knobs (on the door, people, on the door) are polished for the final time.
Does that mean the contents of No41 St Stephen's Green will be evacuated into the nearest 'public' houses?
The last thing I want to hear in my friendly local is some hee-haw Henry braying loudly about how it's impossible to get a bellini made with fresh peach pulp in this town.
http://www.herald.ie/opinion/susan-daly-please-save-residence--or-these-braying-champagne-charlies-might-end-up-in-my-friendly-local-boozer-2003195.html
Please save Residence -- or these braying Champagne Charlies might end up in my friendly local boozer
By Susan Daly
Thursday January 07 2010
What a frightful palaver over at Residence. For those without a butler to keep an ear trained for the word on the street, allow me. It seems the private members' club on St Stephen's Green is experiencing some cashflow difficulties.
I know, I know -- what's the world coming to when an establishment which initially charged members a €1,600 annual fee for the privilege of crossing the threshold is forced to 'restructure' its finances? And that didn't include the €250 joining fee.
Clearly any lapsed members have their priorities entirely wrong. Who chooses to keep up with their own mortgage repayments over unlimited access to a haven of exclusivity, sophistication and gilt-edged mirrors? Bleedin' riff-raff.
Of course no one should gloat when any Irish business totters on the precipice of life and death. An examiner has been appointed to Residence but the doors haven't shut yet. For the sake of the 58 staff employed there, it would be churlish not to hope that they find some way of staying open.
The club rules -- keeping the hoi polloi firmly outside with their noses pressed to the window -- are going to have to change if that is to happen. Residence claimed to fill a niche that existed in Dublin for an upmarket members' club that was as luxurious but not as stiff as the old-guard establishments in the area.
The nearby Kildare Street club, for example, once turned down Mary Harney as a member because she was a woman. (She joined when they reversed their ban on the skirts, which was nice of her).
Yet Residence was/is as ruthlessly selective, making cash the must-have credential. How elitist on one hand, and on the other -- how very crass.
The other difficulty of trying to fill a niche is that it can only ever cater to a small number of people.
I'm sure there's a niche market too for smoking jackets for labradoodles, but I wouldn't throw the family silver at the idea.
Focusing on a small number of big spenders means that you risk everything on their loyalty (and solvency).
If it is the case that Residence reduced their annual fees drastically in the past year in an attempt to attract members, then they must have alienated a few of the Champagne Charlies who fancied themselves part of an elite.
You can't be all things to all men. Especially when your USP was to be one thing to a select few of them.
And just who wants to belong to a club that would have members like that? Not as many as Residence presumed, I suppose.
I interviewed someone there last year, not at my insistence I might add. The swag-and-tails decor was very nice if you like that kind of thing, although I'm not sure I'd have blown a few mill on it. As it turned out, the club was the perfect venue to record an interview. Nothing rings out as clearly on a dictaphone as the sound of one's own voice booming around the corners of a near-empty room.
It was actually a bit sad -- the lunch was delicious, but there's not much point in producing the perfect tarte tatin if there's no one there to taste it.
Most bars have trouble getting bums on barstools midweek these days but you'd think that wouldn't be a problem for a club whose members effectively pay their cover charge in advance. If it were me, I'd be living in the lounge 24/7 to get full value for my moolah.
But perhaps I have more sense than cent. For one thing, I refuse to take up Residence in any bar that lets Eamon Dunphy and Eamon Keane commandeer the piano room. Possibly even at the same time. Good heavens -- has the VIP club fallen asleep and woken up in Lillie's circa 2004?
I do have one concern should time be called on Residence's tenure and its brass knobs (on the door, people, on the door) are polished for the final time.
Does that mean the contents of No41 St Stephen's Green will be evacuated into the nearest 'public' houses?
The last thing I want to hear in my friendly local is some hee-haw Henry braying loudly about how it's impossible to get a bellini made with fresh peach pulp in this town.
Did a volcano just erupt there?
Did some research for an article that got bumped to make room for Iris Robinson's naughtiness but if you're interested in past weather patterns, you might find this interesting....
WITH arctic weather conditions sweeping the globe from India to Italy, there has an apocalyptic feel to recent weeks. China has been paralysed by 10 inches of snow and Poland devastated by temperatures of minus 25C.
At home, what seemed like an inconvenience when most of the country was on holiday has become a daily battle against ungritted roads, ill-equipped public transport and frozen water supplies.
But the shock is probably heightened by the fact that we have spent the past decade with our ears burning to the buzzwords of global warming. The severity of the snow and ice is not in fact unprecedented in Irish history. While a temperature low of -13C was recorded in Mullingar on Christmas Day, it has been neither the most bitter nor the most protracted freeze here. The lowest ground temperature in Ireland was -19.1C recorded in January 1881 in Sligo.
The poor citizens of 1740 Ireland didn’t need (or have) meterological measurements to alert them to a fatally bitter winter. The great frost that covered the country froze winter vegetables in the ground and seized up water mills.
It was a similar story in much of the rest of western Europe although London managed to hit a note of gaiety by staging a carnival on the ice of the frozen-over River Thames. Here, the atrocious conditions – followed by a drought in 1741 - led to what has been called ‘the forgotten famine’. The deaths and wave of emigration it sparked were almost as catastrophic as the potato crisis that would hit a century later.
The 19th century was no more kind – global temperatures dropped dramatically after a volcanic eruption in Indonesia in 1815 rocketed ash and sulphuric acid into the atmosphere and threw a veil over the globe. The following year, spent in darkness and depressed weather conditions, became known as the year without summer.
Ireland again suffered terribly, with rain falling 142 out of 153 days of summer and 60,000 people dying of starvation or typhoid. (Interesting footnote, book fans: this was the summer in which Mary Shelley, bored and trapped indoors by the terrible weather, wrote Frankenstein.)
As if that were not freak enough, a great blizzard swept across Ireland, Wales and parts of England in March 1891. My now 90-year-old grandfather, hearing that edges of Lough Gur in Co Limerick were beginning to freeze this week, remarked: “That’s nothing – I cycled my bicycle across the middle of the lake when it was frozen solid in 1939.”
That bitter winter was in itself a mere icicle by contrast to 1947, dubbed nationally the Big Snow. Again it was a late freeze, a fierce easterly wind blowing non-stop daytime snows across the country from late February on into March.
Fifteen-foot high snow drifts were commonplace and whole herds of sheep were suffocated and lost until a thaw set in in April.
While we naturally focus heavily on the state of the roads in our highly-mobile modern society, we can only imagine the conditions that had one newspaper van driver tell the Anglo-Celt newspaper that he had to be dug out of snow drifts four times on his slow progress from Dublin to Cavan.
In the worst-hit parts of the country that year, shops ran out of provisions, the postal and telephone services were cut off and farmers ran out of fodder. The Kilnaleck News reported that the coffin carrying the remains of one Mrs Mary Galligan had to be borne three miles from church to cemetery on the shoulders of local young men, with more going ahead of them to cut a way through the snowdrifts for the procession.
Snowdrifts are a living memory for even this generation – in 1982 a short but intense blizzard over 10 days in January caused havoc. The Canadian government donated six snow ploughs to help clear the runways at Dublin airport. The then-Tanaiste Michael O’Leary was briefly dubbed Minister for Snow as he co-ordinated efforts like the rescuing of motorists from their cars on a blizzard-hit Naas dual carriageway.
But it was the winter of 1962/63 that took true grit to survive. It was the coldest since 1740 across western Europe. The River Shannon froze solid around Limerick. Fuel and food ran dangerously low as even ports froze over. The natural world seemed turned on its head – starving birds boldly hopped into kitchens looking for scraps while there were reports of foxes hunting domestic cats to eat. And daredevils were not just able to cycle across frozen lakes: in Blessington, Co Wicklow, the locals drove their cars on them.
IS THE HEAT REALLY ON?
Even those least sceptical of climate change claims must have stared into the powdery heavens recently and wondered: They call this global warming?
Funnily enough, in the 1970s it was global cooling that was obsessing climatologists.
In 1972, a group of European and American scientists warned US President Nixon that the earth would plunge into a glacial zone within a century. They claimed that the new global freeze would be caused by natural factors similar to those behind the most recent Ice Age, which ended 10,000 years previously.
The rising levels of carbon dioxide heating the atmosphere has since switched the focus. So isn’t so-called global warming a good thing then, allowing us to remain artificially in this interglacial period of warmth?
Not exactly. Some scientists warn that a rise in ocean temperatures would disturb certain major currents. While other areas of the world would heat up, this would cool the region currently warmed by the North Atlantic current, including the Nordic countries, Britain, Iceland and Ireland.
It is also worth looking at the overall picture of current meteorological conditions across the whole world. The big freeze, caused by static high pressure systems blocking the usually warming winds, is plummeting temperatures below average from Scandinavia westwards. But in Canada, north Africa, south-west Asia and other areas, the temperatures were above average - in some places from between 5C and 10C higher than usual. Baby, it’s cold outside – but not everywhere.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Your marriage or your job
From today's Irish Independent - I knew I should have stuck to the Tipperary tradition and married a farmer with decent frontage and headage...
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/love-sex/your-marriage-or-your-job-1999098.html
Having a dancer as your significant other might seem like a match made in heaven, says Susan Daly, but it's more likely to be a step in the wrong direction
WHILE SOME folks might dream of marrying a dancer, it turns out it could simply be an invitation to divorce.
Personal relationships can take a hit when one partner is married to the job. New research, however, shows it is not just how much work you do, but what work you do that is important to your marriage's chance of survival.
According to a paper from the Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology, entertainers, those in high-stress jobs, and people working in the caring professions have the highest rates of divorce and separation.
Dr Michael Aamodt, an American industrial psychologist at Radford University in Virginia, made his findings after he set out initially to establish if police officers suffered a particularly high rate of marital breakdown.
It emerged that police officers were not the most likely to separate. Some 16pc of their marriages fell apart, about the same rate as that experienced by writers and travel agents; although slightly above that of teachers.
Dancers, however, had a 43pc chance of marital breakdown. We already know that when they gravitate towards a superstar spouse (entertainers have an almost 29pc chance of a split), it's disastrous. Think of Jennifer Lopez and her eight-month marriage to backing dancer Cris Judd, or Britney Spears and her two years with dancer Kevin Federline. Marilyn Manson's marriage to burlesque dancer Dita von Teese ended two years after they married in a castle in Co Tipperary. Country-pop star LeAnn Rimes has announced that her marriage to dancer Dean Sheremet is over.
But bartenders and massage therapists are not far behind, second in the split stakes at 38pc.
Next are many of the caring professions -- nursing, psychiatric and home health aides -- with almost 29pc of their marriages dissolving.
As the fundamental nature of these jobs doesn't change from country to country, one can imagine that they bear some relevance here. At last count of the Irish population two years ago, one in four married couples had separated so all of those professions listed above are above the average.
We can assume we know why entertainers, performers and sports stars have such a high rate of divorce (at 28.49pc) when we think of the lifestyle that takes them frequently from home. We may think of Tiger Woods and the raft of extramarital allegations levelled against him, many of which reportedly occurring when he was away on the golf circuit.
Last year, pop star Pink blamed the lack of quality time together for her split with her husband Carey Hart.
"It's such a cliché when you talk about a Hollywood divorce, but the scheduling did get very hard," she said. "I got tired of being the Schedule Woman."
But it might seem surprising that those in the caring professions should experience a rate of separation similar to a pop star.
It's no shock to Lisa O'Hara, a counsellor with 15 years' experience at the Marriage and Relationship Counselling Service. "People in those professions tend to have caring natures and it is natural for them to be the nurturers in their own relationships," she says. "They give and give -- but they may not get much in return."
When a marriage loses its initial passion, and even many years down the road, that unconscious resentment that has been building up within the nurturer can explode.
"In women in their 40s also, oestrogen levels drop, the hormone that makes them so nurturing," says O'Hara. "They might sit back and think, the kids are getting older and moving on -- what am I doing here now? I'm tired of giving so much and not getting back."
Tim Dunne, an organisational (work) psychologist, also says this finding is borne out by his personal clinical observation.
"I have found that many people who enter the caring professions can have a lot of unresolved personal issues -- they are often co-dependent people who are working out their own solutions. They can burn out very quickly in their personal relationships."
At the other end of the scale, chief executives have a relatively low level of marital discord - at 10pc. Again, not so surprising, says Dunne. The perception is that the higher up you go in the industry food chain, the more stress you expect to find.
"But research has found that in fact those at the lower end; telephonists, people on production lines, suffer higher levels of stress than CEOs," he says. This is borne out by Dr Aamodt's research which finds baggage porters and telemarketers lolling at the 28pc level of break-up. Waiting and cleaning staff are only a percentage point or two below that.
"The key aspect is that they have very little control over their work flow whereas CEOs would have a huge amount of control about how, when and where they work."
O'Hara points out the possibility that the foundations of a marriage to a CEO might be exactly the same as those that anchor marriage to a farmer (they suffer a break-up rate of just under 10pc).
"The expectations are clearly set out at the beginning," she says.
"Chief executives are very likely to be the go-get-em type even when they meet their partners in their 20s and the couple perhaps clearly define their roles at that point. I provide, and you nurture.
"The same with farmers -- they often marry people who have an understanding of the lifestyle and know what to expect so there is less tension later."
That's not to say that there can't be problems later in even these apparently stable unions.
Change, says Dunne, is often the catalyst for separation -- for example a chief executive's wife may find herself in her middle-age, children reared, wanting to do something more with her life and that might clash with her husband's expectations of her role.
O'Hara has also counselled some agricultural workers "who married townies, so to speak".
The relationship is fine until they marry or move in together and many of the more trying aspects of a farmer's life -- long hours, few holidays, mucking in together -- come as a surprise to a partner who is not aware of the culture.
"What people get caught up in," says Dunne, "is the Hollywood myth that a marriage is just two people against the world, when in fact you are buying into another family, an extended kinship, a culture. If you come from very different backgrounds, that (can) be a source of conflict rather than stabilisation."
There is some good news though. If you are a judge, a vet or a funeral director, you only have an 11-12pc chance of getting divorced at some stage. Pharmacists and dentists join farmers with some of the lowest levels of marital breakdown of all.
And, most importantly in this age of unsociable working hours, Dr Aamodt found that shift work, overtime and weekend work had no real effect on a marriage's chance of survival.
O'Hara says she has found that couples who do not work strictly 9-to-5 can actually be skilled at really finding quality time with each other.
"There is time apart but a couple for whom this variable schedule is a given seem to adapt to negotiate and prioritise time for each other.
"You'll often see it with guards and nurses: they will actually schedule time in for each other on a certain day so that it's not just collapsing in front of the TV and not talking as you might if you know you will see your partner at home every night.
"And if they know there will be two weeks where they won't see each other much, they tend to be great texters! It's all about not feeling disconnected."
The Marriage and Relationship Counselling Service are at www.mrcs.ie or lo-call 1890 380 380 l Tim Dunne's publications and contact details are at www.carlowpsychology.ie
Jobs which carry the highest chance of a divorce:
1. Dancers and choreographers 43.05pc
2. Bartenders 38.43pc
3. Massage therapists 38.22pc
4. Nursing, psychiatric, and home health aides 28.95pc
5. Entertainers, sports and related workers 28.49pc
6. Baggage porters and concierges 28.43pc
7. Telemarketers 28.10pc
8. Waiters/waitresses 27.12pc
9. Roofers 26.85pc, and maids and housekeeping cleaners 26.38pc
10. Chefs/head cooks 20.10pc
Monday, January 4, 2010
And another one...
...from everymonday.ie
Because today is - Monday!
http://www.everymonday.ie/technology/331-twitter-away-at-any-age.html
Because today is - Monday!
http://www.everymonday.ie/technology/331-twitter-away-at-any-age.html
Friday, January 1, 2010
EveryMonday.ie
So-called silver surfers are pretty adept at doing their business on the web these days so kudos to Margaret Ward for catering to the over-55s with her everymonday.ie website which publishes fresh articles from experienced journalists every Monday. Please refer to a silver surfer near you!
Here are two of my recent posts on the site:
http://www.everymonday.ie/home_and_leisure/320-movies-for-the-young-at-heart.html
http://www.everymonday.ie/relationships/327-fun-yet-frugal-entertaining.html
Thursday, December 31, 2009
That was the Noughties...
The Review of the Decade magazine I edited is FREE with today's Irish Independent - plenty to read when you're hibernating at home tomorrow. Having switched so much to writing these past two years, it was great to get my teeth back into a meaty piece of editing for a month or so.
Listen to me plug it here on the Tom Dunne Show on Newstalk... http://vimeo.com/8471386
Listen to me plug it here on the Tom Dunne Show on Newstalk... http://vimeo.com/8471386
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Global gifts
I would love if people would read this piece and consider giving one of Concern's Global Gifts as a stocking filler to loved ones this year - see the range at http://www.trocaire.org/globalgift
'Kindness is not a weakness'
Having seen the impact of Irish generosity in Africa, Lorraine Keane is on a mission to show that a little kindness goes a long way, both in charity and everyday life, writes Susan Daly (cover story from Irish Independent's Weekend magazine)
It's not often that Lorraine Keane is left struggling for words. But she is as she tries to explain how she felt when she met a five-week-old baby infected with the HIV virus.
"It was the saddest moment of the trip," says Keane. The TV presenter met the baby boy and his 29-year-old mother, Clara, when she travelled to Zimbabwe and Mozambique this month to publicise the work of Trócaire's Global Gifts campaign.
Clara had been very sick towards the end of her pregnancy and she didn't know why. "It turned out that Clara was HIV positive and, because she wasn't aware of it, she wasn't given drugs during the pregnancy to stop the virus passing to her baby. When her husband found out, he left. Now she's living back with her mother, the baby and her other three children."
These are the kind of heartbreaking stories that Keane has been haunted by since her return from the Trócaire projects. "But this is why we must keep giving. Clara's baby still weighs only five pounds, but he put on weight for the first time last week because of medicine and nutrition he received from Trócaire -- Irish people's money is literally keeping people alive here."
The last time I met Lorraine Keane was exactly one year ago in entirely contrasting circumstances. Back then, she was still the central presenter of the TV3 fluff-fest Xposé and posing with her colleagues for the cover of Weekend magazine's Christmas edition. The floor of a ballroom in the Shelbourne Hotel was covered with glittery gowns for the shoot, hair and make-up artists primping and powdering the girls for our photographer.
Keane had arrived with her hair and make-up already styled, courtesy of two of her younger sisters, Tori and Becky, "my A-team". While courteous and professional, she was clearly there to get the job done and get out. She managed -- pleasantly, mind -- to insert her own agenda into proceedings by making reference to her clothing line with designer Michelina Stacpoole.
She happily admits she's a PR person at heart. "My actual qualification is PR. I went to college and studied broadcasting and journalism, but my real qualification is PR, which I did at night."
But this isn't the red-carpet Keane the Irish public is accustomed to. Hair in plaits, in T-shirt and flat sandals, she toured mud huts and schools made of bamboo, seeing first-hand the effects that gifts of a goat, lunch for a schoolchild and clean water have had on lives there.
"We visited the Amazon school in Insiza, Zimbabwe, where the children get their only meal of the day from Trócaire's Global Gifts. It costs an Irish person just €10 to feed one African child for a year. Some of those children were walking up to 12km each way in their bare feet -- they wouldn't make it if they weren't being fed. It's difficult to put into words how heart-breaking they are."
A week earlier, sitting in the kitchen of her home in Dublin, she confessed that she wasn't expecting the trip to be a pleasant experience. "I'm just so scared," she said. "I don't know what I'm going to see."
Hands wrapped around a mug of tea, she said: "I'm not worried about me (physically)," she said, "but since I've had the girls, I'm a mess. I just can't handle sick babies or anything."
At this stage, with eldest daughter Emelia (now six) and Romy (three), her maternal instincts are finely tuned. She was dreading the latter half of the Trócaire trip, to Mozambique. "That's where we're going to be visiting orphanages and AIDS babies, moms and babies with HIV, and sick and vulnerable people," she said. "Those are the people that weren't helped by funding last year but are to be helped by funding this year. It's important to show both sides of it."
Even as she put on a defiant face -- "if we raise money, I don't care what it does to me" -- her speech came more haltingly than at any other point in the conversation. She was feeling particularly vulnerable after the death of her daughter Emelia's schoolfriend, Ruby Ayoub, the little Dublin girl whose meningitis was misdiagnosed twice as swine flu. When I first rang to arrange this interview, Keane and her daughters had just been releasing balloons in a ceremony to mark what should have been Ruby's sixth birthday.
"With Ruby dying, it just knocked all the stuffing out of me," she says. "I'm a friend of Ruby's mom. That Friday [before she died] Ruby ran up to me in the schoolyard wanting to pick Romy up because she just loves babies and it's just ... it frightens the life out of me. That made me fear this trip even more; I get really upset when I see children sick or dying."
Keane comes from a family that values industry. Her father was a member of The Indians showband (and still is; they celebrate 40 years performing next year). Her mother raised seven children and Keane, as second eldest, saw how hard her parents worked to make them happy, to educate them and occasionally to spoil them. "My parents separated 16, 17 years ago," says Keane. "I think they worked so hard that they didn't have time for each other. In the end, they lost what they started out with."
Keane has reiterated frequently since April that her departure from TV3 was a decision based on wanting to spend more time with her family and was something she had been talking about to her husband, Peter Devlin, for months. His new job as musical director on RTE's All Ireland Talent Show must have made any decision that might have affected the family finances a lot easier.
There is no doubt that, on a personal level, she is happier. Sometimes, when her daughters would call out at night she would say, "Oh no, Peter will you go in? I'm just so wrecked and I'm up early and I'm on the telly", then feel awful about it, "riddled" with the guilt of the career mum.
This candour makes Keane likeable -- "kindness is not a weakness" -- but she is clearly shrewd. Because her resignation from TV3 seemed sudden and she was reportedly unhappy with changes being imposed on Xposé from on high, it is understandable that people have been fascinated by the minutiae of her departure. When I ask if she realised that she was "missing out on more important things in life" after she left, rather than before, she shuts down with a definitive, "No. It's why I left".
She spent much of the summer away from Ireland with family -- she and Devlin have a holiday home in the south of France -- so Keane didn't see the Total Xposure! reality contest TV3 ran to find a new Xposé presenter. "Thank God," she says, laughing. "I believe I didn't miss much." She adds: "I always try to get the positive out of things, so I took it as flattery. They took an entire programme over a summer to try and find a replacement."
There's that PR instinct again; the positive spin. Asked about her future plans for TV she says that she "can't give too much away", but adds, "I like talking. You might have noticed, I like dealing with people; I like the idea of sitting down on a couch and being allowed to ask any question you want. Like you are now". So I take it that she's either got a chat show on the cards, or she's cultivating the idea that she would make a great talk-show host.
There is plenty to admire about Keane's personal motto that "just because you're nice, doesn't mean you're marshmallow". She's unapologetic about liking the finer things in life: she began collecting art as a young woman, paying for pieces in monthly instalments from her AA Roadwatch cheques.
Now, she has a small Guggi in her kitchen (a wedding present from the artist/musician who is a family friend) and a giant Graham Knuttel tapestry in her elegant living room.
On the other hand, the family sponsors a child in Nigeria called Clemence, and Emelia in particular is very sensitive to the world beyond the elegant front door of their Georgian home.
"Our children are privileged, as we all are, as my own childhood was. You have to let them know that it's not like that everywhere and to appreciate it," she says, using that as a cue to explain how half a million children in Mozambique don't have birth certs because their impoverished parents can't afford the €10 to register them.
"So as a result, the child's not entitled to anything. Medication, education, food; they can't avail of any of that. So €10 can make a child exist and therefore make them survive.
"I'm in the business a long time and I'm kind of hard to say 'No' to anyway," she laughs.
To purchase a Trócaire Global Gift this Christmas log onto www.trocaire.org/globalgift or call 1850 408 408 (ROI); 0800 912 1200 (NI)
- Susan Daly
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/kindness-is-not-a-weakness-1972399.html
'Kindness is not a weakness'
Having seen the impact of Irish generosity in Africa, Lorraine Keane is on a mission to show that a little kindness goes a long way, both in charity and everyday life, writes Susan Daly (cover story from Irish Independent's Weekend magazine)
It's not often that Lorraine Keane is left struggling for words. But she is as she tries to explain how she felt when she met a five-week-old baby infected with the HIV virus.
"It was the saddest moment of the trip," says Keane. The TV presenter met the baby boy and his 29-year-old mother, Clara, when she travelled to Zimbabwe and Mozambique this month to publicise the work of Trócaire's Global Gifts campaign.
Clara had been very sick towards the end of her pregnancy and she didn't know why. "It turned out that Clara was HIV positive and, because she wasn't aware of it, she wasn't given drugs during the pregnancy to stop the virus passing to her baby. When her husband found out, he left. Now she's living back with her mother, the baby and her other three children."
These are the kind of heartbreaking stories that Keane has been haunted by since her return from the Trócaire projects. "But this is why we must keep giving. Clara's baby still weighs only five pounds, but he put on weight for the first time last week because of medicine and nutrition he received from Trócaire -- Irish people's money is literally keeping people alive here."
The last time I met Lorraine Keane was exactly one year ago in entirely contrasting circumstances. Back then, she was still the central presenter of the TV3 fluff-fest Xposé and posing with her colleagues for the cover of Weekend magazine's Christmas edition. The floor of a ballroom in the Shelbourne Hotel was covered with glittery gowns for the shoot, hair and make-up artists primping and powdering the girls for our photographer.
Keane had arrived with her hair and make-up already styled, courtesy of two of her younger sisters, Tori and Becky, "my A-team". While courteous and professional, she was clearly there to get the job done and get out. She managed -- pleasantly, mind -- to insert her own agenda into proceedings by making reference to her clothing line with designer Michelina Stacpoole.
She happily admits she's a PR person at heart. "My actual qualification is PR. I went to college and studied broadcasting and journalism, but my real qualification is PR, which I did at night."
But this isn't the red-carpet Keane the Irish public is accustomed to. Hair in plaits, in T-shirt and flat sandals, she toured mud huts and schools made of bamboo, seeing first-hand the effects that gifts of a goat, lunch for a schoolchild and clean water have had on lives there.
"We visited the Amazon school in Insiza, Zimbabwe, where the children get their only meal of the day from Trócaire's Global Gifts. It costs an Irish person just €10 to feed one African child for a year. Some of those children were walking up to 12km each way in their bare feet -- they wouldn't make it if they weren't being fed. It's difficult to put into words how heart-breaking they are."
A week earlier, sitting in the kitchen of her home in Dublin, she confessed that she wasn't expecting the trip to be a pleasant experience. "I'm just so scared," she said. "I don't know what I'm going to see."
Hands wrapped around a mug of tea, she said: "I'm not worried about me (physically)," she said, "but since I've had the girls, I'm a mess. I just can't handle sick babies or anything."
At this stage, with eldest daughter Emelia (now six) and Romy (three), her maternal instincts are finely tuned. She was dreading the latter half of the Trócaire trip, to Mozambique. "That's where we're going to be visiting orphanages and AIDS babies, moms and babies with HIV, and sick and vulnerable people," she said. "Those are the people that weren't helped by funding last year but are to be helped by funding this year. It's important to show both sides of it."
Even as she put on a defiant face -- "if we raise money, I don't care what it does to me" -- her speech came more haltingly than at any other point in the conversation. She was feeling particularly vulnerable after the death of her daughter Emelia's schoolfriend, Ruby Ayoub, the little Dublin girl whose meningitis was misdiagnosed twice as swine flu. When I first rang to arrange this interview, Keane and her daughters had just been releasing balloons in a ceremony to mark what should have been Ruby's sixth birthday.
"With Ruby dying, it just knocked all the stuffing out of me," she says. "I'm a friend of Ruby's mom. That Friday [before she died] Ruby ran up to me in the schoolyard wanting to pick Romy up because she just loves babies and it's just ... it frightens the life out of me. That made me fear this trip even more; I get really upset when I see children sick or dying."
Keane comes from a family that values industry. Her father was a member of The Indians showband (and still is; they celebrate 40 years performing next year). Her mother raised seven children and Keane, as second eldest, saw how hard her parents worked to make them happy, to educate them and occasionally to spoil them. "My parents separated 16, 17 years ago," says Keane. "I think they worked so hard that they didn't have time for each other. In the end, they lost what they started out with."
Keane has reiterated frequently since April that her departure from TV3 was a decision based on wanting to spend more time with her family and was something she had been talking about to her husband, Peter Devlin, for months. His new job as musical director on RTE's All Ireland Talent Show must have made any decision that might have affected the family finances a lot easier.
There is no doubt that, on a personal level, she is happier. Sometimes, when her daughters would call out at night she would say, "Oh no, Peter will you go in? I'm just so wrecked and I'm up early and I'm on the telly", then feel awful about it, "riddled" with the guilt of the career mum.
This candour makes Keane likeable -- "kindness is not a weakness" -- but she is clearly shrewd. Because her resignation from TV3 seemed sudden and she was reportedly unhappy with changes being imposed on Xposé from on high, it is understandable that people have been fascinated by the minutiae of her departure. When I ask if she realised that she was "missing out on more important things in life" after she left, rather than before, she shuts down with a definitive, "No. It's why I left".
She spent much of the summer away from Ireland with family -- she and Devlin have a holiday home in the south of France -- so Keane didn't see the Total Xposure! reality contest TV3 ran to find a new Xposé presenter. "Thank God," she says, laughing. "I believe I didn't miss much." She adds: "I always try to get the positive out of things, so I took it as flattery. They took an entire programme over a summer to try and find a replacement."
There's that PR instinct again; the positive spin. Asked about her future plans for TV she says that she "can't give too much away", but adds, "I like talking. You might have noticed, I like dealing with people; I like the idea of sitting down on a couch and being allowed to ask any question you want. Like you are now". So I take it that she's either got a chat show on the cards, or she's cultivating the idea that she would make a great talk-show host.
There is plenty to admire about Keane's personal motto that "just because you're nice, doesn't mean you're marshmallow". She's unapologetic about liking the finer things in life: she began collecting art as a young woman, paying for pieces in monthly instalments from her AA Roadwatch cheques.
Now, she has a small Guggi in her kitchen (a wedding present from the artist/musician who is a family friend) and a giant Graham Knuttel tapestry in her elegant living room.
On the other hand, the family sponsors a child in Nigeria called Clemence, and Emelia in particular is very sensitive to the world beyond the elegant front door of their Georgian home.
"Our children are privileged, as we all are, as my own childhood was. You have to let them know that it's not like that everywhere and to appreciate it," she says, using that as a cue to explain how half a million children in Mozambique don't have birth certs because their impoverished parents can't afford the €10 to register them.
"So as a result, the child's not entitled to anything. Medication, education, food; they can't avail of any of that. So €10 can make a child exist and therefore make them survive.
"I'm in the business a long time and I'm kind of hard to say 'No' to anyway," she laughs.
To purchase a Trócaire Global Gift this Christmas log onto www.trocaire.org/globalgift or call 1850 408 408 (ROI); 0800 912 1200 (NI)
- Susan Daly
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/kindness-is-not-a-weakness-1972399.html
Friday, December 11, 2009
Wham bam? No thank you, ma'am
EveryMonday.ie is a website aimed at the more mature internet user - I've been recommending some movies that reach the parts Vin Diesel cannot...
Check it out here -
http://www.everymonday.ie/home_and_leisure/320-movies-for-the-young-at-heart.html
Some older people shy away from the cinema because it seems that the big film studios are intent on targeting young male audiences with wham-bam action thrillers. Susan Daly previews a few upcoming gems that will appeal to a more mature audience
When animation studio Pixar released a feature called Up last month, it might have been one to bring the grandchildren to see. An old man, tired of his dreary lot, ties helium-filled balloons to his house and floats away on the adventure of a lifetime. However, this was no piece of childish whimsy. The film captivated older viewers who could relate to the poignancy of ageing but also to the joy of fulfilling long-held dreams.
The wonderful news is that while Up might have departed most cinemas (but will soon be available on DVD), there are plenty of movies on the way that are worth the ticket price. Anyone with an interest in the intriguing Orson Welles, director of classics such as Citizen Kane and The Lady from Shanghai, should see the newly released Me and Orson Welles. The mannerisms, voice and charisma of the young Welles in his early career as a theatre mogul are brilliantly captured by actor Christian McKay.
Others to watch out for
Where The Wild Things Are (in cinemas from December 11), like Up, has cross-generational appeal. This semi-animated feature is based on the 1960s children’s book of the same name. It centres on a troubled boy called Max as he escapes home to enter a world of fantasy. Wise, older eyes will recognise it as a charming rite-of-passage tale.
The Beatles are still a favourite with authors, film-makers and music lovers almost 40 years after they split up. Nowhere Boy (from December 26) focuses on the teenage years of John Lennon as he struggles with his complex relationships with a largely absent mother and the aunt who raised him.
Holmes aficionados can compare their favourite TV and film Sherlock (Basil Rathborne or perhaps Jeremy Brett?) to Robert Downey Jr’s version in Sherlock Holmes (from December 26). The inimitable Dr John H Watson is played by Jude Law.
The film trailer for The Road (from January 8) has been somewhat misleading in depicting the movie as a post-apocalyptic action thriller. Those sequences are in fact a very small part of the film, which is based on the stunning Cormac McCarthy novel. The rest is a profound contemplation on what makes us human and it asks questions about mortality and spirituality that few of us dare to face.
Light of heart
If you would prefer to start the New Year in a more light-hearted mood, try It’s Complicated (from January 8), which stars the luminous Meryl Streep. She plays a divorcee whose ex (played by Alex Baldwin) decides he wants her back just as she begins to fall for nice-but-shy Steve Martin. It’s directed by Nancy Meyers who brought Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton together in 2003’s Something’s Gotta Give.
There are Oscar bells ringing all over Precious (from January 29), an Oprah-backed tale of a teenage girl who strives to overcome abuse, neglect and illiteracy. It has been recommended warmly as “inspiring and funny” by the Reel Geezers, a dynamic octogenarian film critic couple called Marcia and Lorenzo who record their movie reviews for the internet. They are an excellent port of call for down-to-earth recommendations on new releases.
Two other films to look out for at the start of next year are Everybody’s Fine and Invictus. Everybody’s Fine, due out on February 26, is a sweet, moving story that sees Robert deNiro as a widower who tries to reconnect with his adult children after his wife’s death.
The release date for Invictus has yet to be announced but this Clint Eastwood-directed biopic of Nelson Mandela is highly anticipated. Morgan Freeman plays Mandela at the 1995 Rugby World Cup in South Africa, an event that went some way to heal the nation after the fall of apartheid.
Looking for a classic?
For those who insist that the oldies are the goldies, it’s worth noting that the Wild Strawberries club at the Irish Film Institute (IFI) in Dublin returns with two screenings of festive favourite White Christmas on December 16 and 18. Join the IFI and your ticket is €4 including tea and coffee. Now there’s a winter warmer!
Useful Websites
The Irish Film Institute and the Wild Strawberries film club: www.irishfilm.ie
Film reviews from Marcia and Lorenzo, aka The Reel Geezers: http://blogs.indiewire.com/reelgeezers
For film listings for the whole country, click on the ‘Cinema’ tag at www.entertainment.ie
Check it out here -
http://www.everymonday.ie/home_and_leisure/320-movies-for-the-young-at-heart.html
Some older people shy away from the cinema because it seems that the big film studios are intent on targeting young male audiences with wham-bam action thrillers. Susan Daly previews a few upcoming gems that will appeal to a more mature audience
When animation studio Pixar released a feature called Up last month, it might have been one to bring the grandchildren to see. An old man, tired of his dreary lot, ties helium-filled balloons to his house and floats away on the adventure of a lifetime. However, this was no piece of childish whimsy. The film captivated older viewers who could relate to the poignancy of ageing but also to the joy of fulfilling long-held dreams.
The wonderful news is that while Up might have departed most cinemas (but will soon be available on DVD), there are plenty of movies on the way that are worth the ticket price. Anyone with an interest in the intriguing Orson Welles, director of classics such as Citizen Kane and The Lady from Shanghai, should see the newly released Me and Orson Welles. The mannerisms, voice and charisma of the young Welles in his early career as a theatre mogul are brilliantly captured by actor Christian McKay.
Others to watch out for
Where The Wild Things Are (in cinemas from December 11), like Up, has cross-generational appeal. This semi-animated feature is based on the 1960s children’s book of the same name. It centres on a troubled boy called Max as he escapes home to enter a world of fantasy. Wise, older eyes will recognise it as a charming rite-of-passage tale.
The Beatles are still a favourite with authors, film-makers and music lovers almost 40 years after they split up. Nowhere Boy (from December 26) focuses on the teenage years of John Lennon as he struggles with his complex relationships with a largely absent mother and the aunt who raised him.
Holmes aficionados can compare their favourite TV and film Sherlock (Basil Rathborne or perhaps Jeremy Brett?) to Robert Downey Jr’s version in Sherlock Holmes (from December 26). The inimitable Dr John H Watson is played by Jude Law.
The film trailer for The Road (from January 8) has been somewhat misleading in depicting the movie as a post-apocalyptic action thriller. Those sequences are in fact a very small part of the film, which is based on the stunning Cormac McCarthy novel. The rest is a profound contemplation on what makes us human and it asks questions about mortality and spirituality that few of us dare to face.
Light of heart
If you would prefer to start the New Year in a more light-hearted mood, try It’s Complicated (from January 8), which stars the luminous Meryl Streep. She plays a divorcee whose ex (played by Alex Baldwin) decides he wants her back just as she begins to fall for nice-but-shy Steve Martin. It’s directed by Nancy Meyers who brought Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton together in 2003’s Something’s Gotta Give.
There are Oscar bells ringing all over Precious (from January 29), an Oprah-backed tale of a teenage girl who strives to overcome abuse, neglect and illiteracy. It has been recommended warmly as “inspiring and funny” by the Reel Geezers, a dynamic octogenarian film critic couple called Marcia and Lorenzo who record their movie reviews for the internet. They are an excellent port of call for down-to-earth recommendations on new releases.
Two other films to look out for at the start of next year are Everybody’s Fine and Invictus. Everybody’s Fine, due out on February 26, is a sweet, moving story that sees Robert deNiro as a widower who tries to reconnect with his adult children after his wife’s death.
The release date for Invictus has yet to be announced but this Clint Eastwood-directed biopic of Nelson Mandela is highly anticipated. Morgan Freeman plays Mandela at the 1995 Rugby World Cup in South Africa, an event that went some way to heal the nation after the fall of apartheid.
Looking for a classic?
For those who insist that the oldies are the goldies, it’s worth noting that the Wild Strawberries club at the Irish Film Institute (IFI) in Dublin returns with two screenings of festive favourite White Christmas on December 16 and 18. Join the IFI and your ticket is €4 including tea and coffee. Now there’s a winter warmer!
Useful Websites
The Irish Film Institute and the Wild Strawberries film club: www.irishfilm.ie
Film reviews from Marcia and Lorenzo, aka The Reel Geezers: http://blogs.indiewire.com/reelgeezers
For film listings for the whole country, click on the ‘Cinema’ tag at www.entertainment.ie
Saturday, December 5, 2009
I'm getting too old for this...
My Nightwatch col from yesterday's Day and Night magazine. The headline as published in the magazine was 'Sleep is for wimps'.
Check out the headline as it appeared in the online link for a good laugh -
http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/day-and-night/columnists/nightwatch-susan-daly-1964095.html
Vampires and zombies are so hot right now. And rightly so -- they're the trademark bookends of an excellent night out. You start the evening, all smoky-eye make-up and trailing an aura of mystique. If you're lucky, you get to sink your fangs into someone.
By the wee hours, though, you've shapeshifted into the other; drooling, mascara on a downward slide, arms stretched out ahead trying to feel your way home. Very few people know this next bit is a scientific fact. After 3am, if you close your eyes while walking, your internal GPS will kick in and bring you the most direct route to your bed. That route will also magically take in a chipper. It's biological genius.
What is not so genius is timing your arrival home after your first all-night party in ages -- ages, I tell you! -- with the departure of the new neighbour for work. Three words to strike dread into the heart: Walk Of Shame (WOS).
He's all "Oh, good night was it?", wink, wink. You're all mortified, fumbling with a key that turns out to be the one to your gym locker. It's all well and good to watch the sun rise on a beach in Barcelona. It's another to have to walk against a tide of office workers in one shoe.
That's why this is the perfect time of year to pull an all-nighter. As long as you make it home by 8am, you can do the WOS under cover of darkness. The temptation might be to put the head under the duvet and sleep until spring. But hibernation is death my friends. (Not literally. Unless you're a tortoise. If they're not fat enough when they go to sleep, they never wake up. Sad, no?)
This is the kind of reasoning that kept me from giving into my wintertime circadian rhythms last Friday night. When the clock struck three, I decided I could go home or I could stay and see what cocktails were to be constructed from Kahlua, gin and red lemonade. Naturally, the Portobello Power Punch(™) won out.
The house party is the best place to pull an all-nighter. It gets an injection of energy when a wave of people arrive as the pubs close. Three o'clock is the new midnight. Six is the new three. Seven is ... time to start clearing up and making tea.
You're among friends, or at least like-minded lushes. Chances are there is always someone who wants to be the last one standing. As long as that's not you, it's quite easy to not feel like a complete saddo for re-enacting Billie Jean on someone's kitchen tiles at half past five in the morning. Billie Jean will always be cool. Another scientific fact.
Also, the universe has been sending me signs recently that staying up is the right thing to do. A friend has acquired a turf-burning brazier. This means we can clink beers in the back garden without the earth-destroying guilt that goes with sitting under a patio heater for the night. The downside of this is that I woke up on Saturday wondering what was burning. It was the smell of a night of smoky peat in my hair.
There is also the curious case of 'little helpers' for the sleep-deprived (legal, I assure you) that seem to be popping up all over the place. I asked the guy in Spar if he'd tried the new Red Bull shot capsules. No, he said, but he'd heard they were "rocket fuel". I might save it for emergencies.
Then the local coffee shop started offering something called an 'intense' americano. I'll be having one of those, thank you, I told the girl behind the counter. She looked around her as if to check for the caffeine cops, leaned in and said: You know there are four shots of espresso in that?
"I can handle it, baby!" I said before going outside and gagging like a contestant in a bushtucker trial. If all this sounds like an endurance test, then I guess it is. But like the best tests of mettle -- climbing Everest, watching the Late Late Toy Show -- it's a bonding experience. You'll never have a friend like the one that sits up playing the ukulele with you till dawn.
- Susan Daly
Check out the headline as it appeared in the online link for a good laugh -
http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/day-and-night/columnists/nightwatch-susan-daly-1964095.html
Vampires and zombies are so hot right now. And rightly so -- they're the trademark bookends of an excellent night out. You start the evening, all smoky-eye make-up and trailing an aura of mystique. If you're lucky, you get to sink your fangs into someone.
By the wee hours, though, you've shapeshifted into the other; drooling, mascara on a downward slide, arms stretched out ahead trying to feel your way home. Very few people know this next bit is a scientific fact. After 3am, if you close your eyes while walking, your internal GPS will kick in and bring you the most direct route to your bed. That route will also magically take in a chipper. It's biological genius.
What is not so genius is timing your arrival home after your first all-night party in ages -- ages, I tell you! -- with the departure of the new neighbour for work. Three words to strike dread into the heart: Walk Of Shame (WOS).
He's all "Oh, good night was it?", wink, wink. You're all mortified, fumbling with a key that turns out to be the one to your gym locker. It's all well and good to watch the sun rise on a beach in Barcelona. It's another to have to walk against a tide of office workers in one shoe.
That's why this is the perfect time of year to pull an all-nighter. As long as you make it home by 8am, you can do the WOS under cover of darkness. The temptation might be to put the head under the duvet and sleep until spring. But hibernation is death my friends. (Not literally. Unless you're a tortoise. If they're not fat enough when they go to sleep, they never wake up. Sad, no?)
This is the kind of reasoning that kept me from giving into my wintertime circadian rhythms last Friday night. When the clock struck three, I decided I could go home or I could stay and see what cocktails were to be constructed from Kahlua, gin and red lemonade. Naturally, the Portobello Power Punch(™) won out.
The house party is the best place to pull an all-nighter. It gets an injection of energy when a wave of people arrive as the pubs close. Three o'clock is the new midnight. Six is the new three. Seven is ... time to start clearing up and making tea.
You're among friends, or at least like-minded lushes. Chances are there is always someone who wants to be the last one standing. As long as that's not you, it's quite easy to not feel like a complete saddo for re-enacting Billie Jean on someone's kitchen tiles at half past five in the morning. Billie Jean will always be cool. Another scientific fact.
Also, the universe has been sending me signs recently that staying up is the right thing to do. A friend has acquired a turf-burning brazier. This means we can clink beers in the back garden without the earth-destroying guilt that goes with sitting under a patio heater for the night. The downside of this is that I woke up on Saturday wondering what was burning. It was the smell of a night of smoky peat in my hair.
There is also the curious case of 'little helpers' for the sleep-deprived (legal, I assure you) that seem to be popping up all over the place. I asked the guy in Spar if he'd tried the new Red Bull shot capsules. No, he said, but he'd heard they were "rocket fuel". I might save it for emergencies.
Then the local coffee shop started offering something called an 'intense' americano. I'll be having one of those, thank you, I told the girl behind the counter. She looked around her as if to check for the caffeine cops, leaned in and said: You know there are four shots of espresso in that?
"I can handle it, baby!" I said before going outside and gagging like a contestant in a bushtucker trial. If all this sounds like an endurance test, then I guess it is. But like the best tests of mettle -- climbing Everest, watching the Late Late Toy Show -- it's a bonding experience. You'll never have a friend like the one that sits up playing the ukulele with you till dawn.
- Susan Daly
Friday, December 4, 2009
Have yourself a mini little Christmas
A bit of fun from Wednesday's Indo. Freelance tip #234 - sometimes the number of calls you have to make to research an article is larger than the number of words in the finished piece.
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/christmas/the-experts-guide--to-christmas-1960531.html
The 12 Tips of Christmas
The Late Late Toy Show has come and gone, 'Fairytale of New York' is on the radio. Christmas is coming and it's easy to be overwhelmed by the seasonal build-up.
We have assembled a team of experts to advise on how to make your Christmas smell, taste and look great (and on how to avoid fisticuffs at the office party). As a famous Cork footballer once said: Fail to prepare, prepare to fail.
1. FOOD: Have yourself a mini little Christmas
Thousands of Irish people have to work on Christmas Day, a fact that doesn't lend itself to spending five hours in the kitchen. Donal Skehan, author of Good Mood Food (just published by Mercier), has a simple idea for a festive dinner.
"You can buy turkey breasts on their own," says Donal, "Take one per person, slice in half but not all the way through and fill with ready-made stuffing. Wrap the turkey in slices of pancetta and pop in a hot oven to cook for 15 minutes, until the meat is cooked through.
"You can put chunks of parsnips, carrots and potatoes on a tray, drizzle with olive oil and a little balsamic vinegar. Roast and in just under an hour, you're done!"
2. GIFTS: Yesterday's news is today's gift wrap
Nichola Doyle of Daintree Paper on Camden Street, Dublin, suggests layering different colours of tissue paper to make your gifts look sumptuous.
"We've been using other materials too," says Nichola, "wrapping strips of brightly-coloured magazine pages around red wrapping paper. Personalise the wrapping -- one of the girls here used the Sudoku page from the paper to wrap a band around a present for her father who likes puzzles. Then she pasted Sudoku squares on the top."
3. PETS: Be(a)ware of the dog
Dog trainer Samantha Rawson (www.irishdogtrainer.com) says now is the time to get your pet ready for the chaos.
"Take pre-emptive action," says Samantha. "At Christmas the family schedule is out the window so prepare now by varying the time you feed pets or when you walk them so they won't be too upset when the routine is disrupted."
Samantha insists that people should never feed pets dried fruit such as sultanas and raisins, or chocolate, all of which are highly toxic to dogs. As for cats, never leave them alone where there is a Christmas tree. "They think; 'Wow, look at the toy they've put in the sitting room just for me!'"
4. CHILDREN: Sites for bored eyes
There is an assumption that kids and the internet are a problematic mix, but these kid-specific website are safe, non-commercial and cool.
* www.northpole.com -- A magical site with activities related to Santa's kingdom.
* www.best-kids-party-ideas.com/christmas-games-for-kids.html -- Games that don't need battery power.
* www.seussville.com/grinch coloring -- Use the mouse to paint in a Christmas scene.
* www.elfyourself.com -- Slightly older children can download their picture to the site and star in their own Christmas elf e-card.
* www.best-christmas- stories.com -- A great resource for stories.
5. OFFICE PARTY: Express yourself (safely)
Relationship psychologist David Kavanagh (www.avalonrc.com) says that some inappropriate behaviour at the Christmas party is forgivable to a point.
"But there is a line that needs to be gauged," says David. "If you feel like you might tell that middle manager what you really think of them once you have a few drinks in, you need to tackle that days before the party.
"Send yourself an email (on your personal email, not your work one) or, better still, write down on paper what it is exactly that bugs you about that person. Use every swear word, every detail; then burn the letter in a grate and walk away.
"Writing like this is a tool to take what is in our subconscious and make us conscious of it so it doesn't blow up in our face."
6. HOUSE: Smells like Christmas spirit
Gisele Scanlon, author of the best-selling Goddess Guide and The Goddess Experience (HarperCollins), makes a wonderful festive potpourri. "You could make extra and give it as a gift to a few people nicely bagged and ribboned," says Gisele.
Take one orange, one lemon, one satsuma peel, one sliced apple, some pine cones, a few pine twigs with needles nipped from the Christmas tree, some rosemary, half a handful of cloves, two cinnamon sticks, and eucalyptus.
Bake it in the oven on a very low heat for a couple of hours until it dries out and then place around the room in little bowls.
7. BUDGET: Write down everything you spend
The Money Advice and Budgeting Service is a solid source of advice to people worried about debt. For this Christmas, expected to be difficult financially for many families, they say children should be encouraged to pick what they would like Santa to bring before TV ads decide it for them.
MABS has created a simple to use Christmas budget planner at www.mabs.ie/publications/leaflets/Christmas_2009_MABS.pdf
8. EXERCISE: How to sneak in a bit of the burn
The new series of RTE's Operation Transformation hits our screens in January. Its exercise guru Karl Henry (www.karlhenry.ie) suggests ways to keep moving over Christmas.
"If you take two weeks out of gym it's going to be a nightmare in January," says Karl, "but at least make exercise feasible by walking to friends' houses where possible when visiting. It's a great time to try something new -- maybe go hillwalking. By all means, get the kids an X-Box game but also include a football or rugby ball in their stocking. I'm a big fan of the Wii Fit and EA's Sports Active. The whole family can get involved."
9. CASH FOR OLD ROPE: (Well, old gold actually)
The idea of earning cash around Christmas is always attractive. Richard Walsh's Galway-based goldparty.ie (091 877340) facilitates home 'gold parties', popular with groups who get together for a drink, a catch-up and possibly to make some money from unwanted or broken bits of jewellery (or unwanted presents!)
"Our agent comes to the house and uses two testing procedures to check the value of the pieces. They then make an offer depending on the weight and purity of the gold or silver," says Richard. "People don't have to accept the offer."
10. HOUSE PARTY: Get the whole picture
Darren Rowse of www.digital-photography-school.com has a smart idea for recording the party fun.
"A few years ago, I set up a little place where I asked everyone who came to sit for me so that I could take a nice shot of them," says Rowse.
"I photographed everyone as they came in and then left the camera set up on a tripod and set to a short self timer time so people could photograph themselves.
"I left a few Santa hats and tinsel for people to decorate themselves with. It was the hit of the party."
11. STYLE: All that glitters
There's no getting away from it. Sparkle = Christmas style, says Wendy Duggan of alwear.
"The way to play it is to make it understated," says Wendy. "There are sequins on everything -- jackets, dresses, tops. They key is to not be full-on, to wear one sparkly piece with tights.
"Key accessories to update your Christmas look this year would be the crossover Chanel-style bag, and the leather jacket is very big this season."
12. RESOLVE ... to take it easy
Life coach psychologist Elaine Ryan (www.drelaineryan.com) says that Christmas can be overshadowed by thoughts of having to buckle down on January 1.
"New Year's Day is not the time to be implementing resolutions," says Elaine. "It should only be the time to start laying the plans for change." She recommends a SMART plan for formulating resolutions: the goals should be Specific, Measurable, Agreed, Realistic and Time-Phased.
"Around Christmas, it's fine to start thinking of the how, why, what, when of your new resolutions, and in the early New Year to set out a plan. If your goal is to stop smoking, you can decide to reduce by one a day and record it."
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/christmas/the-experts-guide--to-christmas-1960531.html
The 12 Tips of Christmas
The Late Late Toy Show has come and gone, 'Fairytale of New York' is on the radio. Christmas is coming and it's easy to be overwhelmed by the seasonal build-up.
We have assembled a team of experts to advise on how to make your Christmas smell, taste and look great (and on how to avoid fisticuffs at the office party). As a famous Cork footballer once said: Fail to prepare, prepare to fail.
1. FOOD: Have yourself a mini little Christmas
Thousands of Irish people have to work on Christmas Day, a fact that doesn't lend itself to spending five hours in the kitchen. Donal Skehan, author of Good Mood Food (just published by Mercier), has a simple idea for a festive dinner.
"You can buy turkey breasts on their own," says Donal, "Take one per person, slice in half but not all the way through and fill with ready-made stuffing. Wrap the turkey in slices of pancetta and pop in a hot oven to cook for 15 minutes, until the meat is cooked through.
"You can put chunks of parsnips, carrots and potatoes on a tray, drizzle with olive oil and a little balsamic vinegar. Roast and in just under an hour, you're done!"
2. GIFTS: Yesterday's news is today's gift wrap
Nichola Doyle of Daintree Paper on Camden Street, Dublin, suggests layering different colours of tissue paper to make your gifts look sumptuous.
"We've been using other materials too," says Nichola, "wrapping strips of brightly-coloured magazine pages around red wrapping paper. Personalise the wrapping -- one of the girls here used the Sudoku page from the paper to wrap a band around a present for her father who likes puzzles. Then she pasted Sudoku squares on the top."
3. PETS: Be(a)ware of the dog
Dog trainer Samantha Rawson (www.irishdogtrainer.com) says now is the time to get your pet ready for the chaos.
"Take pre-emptive action," says Samantha. "At Christmas the family schedule is out the window so prepare now by varying the time you feed pets or when you walk them so they won't be too upset when the routine is disrupted."
Samantha insists that people should never feed pets dried fruit such as sultanas and raisins, or chocolate, all of which are highly toxic to dogs. As for cats, never leave them alone where there is a Christmas tree. "They think; 'Wow, look at the toy they've put in the sitting room just for me!'"
4. CHILDREN: Sites for bored eyes
There is an assumption that kids and the internet are a problematic mix, but these kid-specific website are safe, non-commercial and cool.
* www.northpole.com -- A magical site with activities related to Santa's kingdom.
* www.best-kids-party-ideas.com/christmas-games-for-kids.html -- Games that don't need battery power.
* www.seussville.com/grinch coloring -- Use the mouse to paint in a Christmas scene.
* www.elfyourself.com -- Slightly older children can download their picture to the site and star in their own Christmas elf e-card.
* www.best-christmas- stories.com -- A great resource for stories.
5. OFFICE PARTY: Express yourself (safely)
Relationship psychologist David Kavanagh (www.avalonrc.com) says that some inappropriate behaviour at the Christmas party is forgivable to a point.
"But there is a line that needs to be gauged," says David. "If you feel like you might tell that middle manager what you really think of them once you have a few drinks in, you need to tackle that days before the party.
"Send yourself an email (on your personal email, not your work one) or, better still, write down on paper what it is exactly that bugs you about that person. Use every swear word, every detail; then burn the letter in a grate and walk away.
"Writing like this is a tool to take what is in our subconscious and make us conscious of it so it doesn't blow up in our face."
6. HOUSE: Smells like Christmas spirit
Gisele Scanlon, author of the best-selling Goddess Guide and The Goddess Experience (HarperCollins), makes a wonderful festive potpourri. "You could make extra and give it as a gift to a few people nicely bagged and ribboned," says Gisele.
Take one orange, one lemon, one satsuma peel, one sliced apple, some pine cones, a few pine twigs with needles nipped from the Christmas tree, some rosemary, half a handful of cloves, two cinnamon sticks, and eucalyptus.
Bake it in the oven on a very low heat for a couple of hours until it dries out and then place around the room in little bowls.
7. BUDGET: Write down everything you spend
The Money Advice and Budgeting Service is a solid source of advice to people worried about debt. For this Christmas, expected to be difficult financially for many families, they say children should be encouraged to pick what they would like Santa to bring before TV ads decide it for them.
MABS has created a simple to use Christmas budget planner at www.mabs.ie/publications/leaflets/Christmas_2009_MABS.pdf
8. EXERCISE: How to sneak in a bit of the burn
The new series of RTE's Operation Transformation hits our screens in January. Its exercise guru Karl Henry (www.karlhenry.ie) suggests ways to keep moving over Christmas.
"If you take two weeks out of gym it's going to be a nightmare in January," says Karl, "but at least make exercise feasible by walking to friends' houses where possible when visiting. It's a great time to try something new -- maybe go hillwalking. By all means, get the kids an X-Box game but also include a football or rugby ball in their stocking. I'm a big fan of the Wii Fit and EA's Sports Active. The whole family can get involved."
9. CASH FOR OLD ROPE: (Well, old gold actually)
The idea of earning cash around Christmas is always attractive. Richard Walsh's Galway-based goldparty.ie (091 877340) facilitates home 'gold parties', popular with groups who get together for a drink, a catch-up and possibly to make some money from unwanted or broken bits of jewellery (or unwanted presents!)
"Our agent comes to the house and uses two testing procedures to check the value of the pieces. They then make an offer depending on the weight and purity of the gold or silver," says Richard. "People don't have to accept the offer."
10. HOUSE PARTY: Get the whole picture
Darren Rowse of www.digital-photography-school.com has a smart idea for recording the party fun.
"A few years ago, I set up a little place where I asked everyone who came to sit for me so that I could take a nice shot of them," says Rowse.
"I photographed everyone as they came in and then left the camera set up on a tripod and set to a short self timer time so people could photograph themselves.
"I left a few Santa hats and tinsel for people to decorate themselves with. It was the hit of the party."
11. STYLE: All that glitters
There's no getting away from it. Sparkle = Christmas style, says Wendy Duggan of alwear.
"The way to play it is to make it understated," says Wendy. "There are sequins on everything -- jackets, dresses, tops. They key is to not be full-on, to wear one sparkly piece with tights.
"Key accessories to update your Christmas look this year would be the crossover Chanel-style bag, and the leather jacket is very big this season."
12. RESOLVE ... to take it easy
Life coach psychologist Elaine Ryan (www.drelaineryan.com) says that Christmas can be overshadowed by thoughts of having to buckle down on January 1.
"New Year's Day is not the time to be implementing resolutions," says Elaine. "It should only be the time to start laying the plans for change." She recommends a SMART plan for formulating resolutions: the goals should be Specific, Measurable, Agreed, Realistic and Time-Phased.
"Around Christmas, it's fine to start thinking of the how, why, what, when of your new resolutions, and in the early New Year to set out a plan. If your goal is to stop smoking, you can decide to reduce by one a day and record it."
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