Poppycock

Something really rather irritating happened on the last night of the Wexford Festival on Sunday evening. I was wearing with pride an enamel shamrock poppy and found on Monday morning that I’d lost it.

There was much sympathy from my friends the next morning at breakfast, one of whom had a spare paper one that he gave me. I put the incident out of my mind until I saw this picture.

Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar wears red ‘shamrock poppy’ in parliament to honour island’s war dead.

When we were at the opera on Sunday I had, frankly, been flattered when the Taoiseach flirtatiously fingered the silk lapel of my dinner jacket in the interval. Draw your own conclusions as to what became of my poppy but I just hopes he sends it back.

Meanwhile here is a recipe for making soda bread kindly shared by Katherine, a reader in Canada.

11 comments

  1. I’m going to try the soda bread. Thanks for this. Love the stuff. By the way, I rather agreed with you about that silly bread machine debate. We’ve most certainly got one and find it useful. It’s what you do with it that counts. Now, where did I leave my fish knives?

  2. I have never understood the politicizing of the poppy in Ireland. The poppy is not a British symbol but is taken from the French battlefields were many nationalities fell in action. Can we not accept that many Irish men served and gave the supreme sacrifice and mark this by remembering and, if desired wearing a poppy, not some hideous concocted amalgamation of red and green. ‘In Flanders fields the poppies blow’, not the shamrocks.

    1. A good point so let’s deconstruct the Barmeath writing paper. The telephone number, in my day, was Dunleer 5. That got rather extended as more people signed up to having a telephone. The postal address, disappointingly, was never Grange Bellew, but Dunleer. Then it changed to Togher, I think when the soda bread receipt was written. If you have not been to Togher it makes Grange Bellew seem like a local hotspot. These days letters go to Drogheda. How they get to Barmeath is a mystery.

      1. You state ‘receipt’ but I rather think you intended to state ‘recipe’. It could indeed be a receipt if Barmeath purveyed such goods but I suspect no money changed hands.

        1. Actually, for once, I didn’t make a mistake. my Jameson grandmother always said receipt and her usage is apparently Chaucerian:
          A Receipt is an old form that means the same as recipe. Both derive from Latin recipere, to receive or take. Receipt was first used in medieval English as a formula or prescription for a medicinal preparation (Chaucer is the first known user, in the Canterbury Tales of about 1386).

          1. Well Christopher, I had no idea – thank you. Whoever said blogs cannot be educational? I continue to enjoy your posts, they provide a foil to the humdrum of other reading material that passes for news these days. As an old Hibernophile I especially enjoy the Irish themed pieces.
            More posts on Ireland please!

          2. Anything to oblige and although I have called tomorrow’s post Swiss Role it has significant Irish content.

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