i haven’t done of these in a minute for a myriad of reasons. one, i’ve had a bit of writing fatigue (welcomed). because a lot has been happening (which is also the second reason) in the world and in my own world. things i’ve wanted to write about (certain men who’ve recently died and their questionable past) but have just been too shattered to properly commit to. other people have done it better. part of me is worried about striking the right balance between frivolous food essays and stuff that’s somewhat significant or whatever. but three, i simply have not been arsed to sit down at my laptop while the last of the summer begged to be squeezed like a big, juicy orange. sin é, a chairde.

but i’m back here now on a rainy day off, nursing a mild hangover as ian plays grand theft auto: san andreas, ready to regale ye with the nice things i’ve put in my body over the last couple of weeks and months and staving off deciding what to make for dinner.

1. young buck blue cheese martini from the seafood cafe

martinis, for me, must always be made with vodka. keep gin away from me — it doesn’t agree with me. they need to be doused with so much dirtiness that they may as well be served in a tin of olives or jar of pickles. and if there’s some ridiculous, epicurean element as well? i’ll be floating to the bar in the air like a cartoon character to pie cooling on a window sill. the seafood cafe in temple bar continues to be one of my favourite places and they lured me in like their daily catch when they announced their cocktail of the month for august was to be a blue cheese martini (made with ketel one vodka, thank you). but it’s not just any aul’ blue cheese, dear readers, but my number one blue cheese eva: young buck blue made in belfast by michael thomson. i saw the post on instagram heralding her arrival and was in the door in less than a week. now ye know how to get me to walk into an open grave. this shit was so good but at €18 a pop, i was able to curb my appetite after one.

2. tuna sandwich & tomato soup from roundwood stores

on a recent venture out for a cleansing splash around in st kevin’s pool in the deep, foresty heart of wicklow, our respective stomachs rumbling and geographical positioning made it a pitstop at roundwood stores for lunch inevitable. the carpark to the side of the combination the coach house and roundwood stores is a ginormous pain in the hole to navigate (as is trying to dart across the road to the cafe itself) but it’s worth it when you pass under the sunny yellow archway and see what lovely bits are behind the display counter. ten foot tall focaccia sandwiches, baked goods and a good cauldron of simple but delicious soup are things you can always count on — that and them being delish. as an irish woman, a soup and sambo combo is inherently one of my favourite things on the planet. and enjoying a great soup paired with a great sandwich is, perhaps, akin to euphoria for me. on this particular day, there was a juicy tomato and basil soup which i paired with the spicy tuna sandwich. gorgeous bread and side salad and baby, i was ag gaire. and while i was so savagely horsing into my sandwich, i clocked my fifth class teacher coming into the cafe with her family, a woman who always encouraged my creativity and love of reading.

3. cod chip from mamó

the last bank holiday monday rolled around all gas no breaks. now while they don’t affect me as someone who’s off on mondays anyway, it does mean i get to hang out with people who do work on mondays. i’d planned a day out to howth with ian to do the cliff walk like all the tourists and then squeeze ourselves into somewhere for grub and a pinteen. again, like all the tourists. anyway, long story short, ian was rendered completely incapacitated with a flu so i was on my own. i was feeling a bit sorry for myself then remembered the beauty that comes with doing shit on your own that young sian was so accustomed to growing up and pre-relationships. so i gathered the dog and took her over to howth on the dart, rammed with italians who were all very fond of her. we did the full cliff walk, chatted to lots of lovely people while my palms sweat as we edged our way along the peninsula’s circumference. on the way down again, i hopefully enquired at mamó — an aspirational spot for me for quite a while — if there was room for one and a dog outside. i was in luck! jess, mamó’s front of house queen, looked after me so well while i was there, living beyond my financial means. but of course, the first dish i tried, the signature cod chip so well-known by food lovers in dublin, lived up to every breathy utterance of praise i’ve heard of it over the last couple of years. the food howth pumps out in droves to hungry tourists (fish and chips, duh) takes on a sleeker, fancier form at mamó. the kind of dish that’ll haunt your waking hours and dreams until you find yourself booking in again. i’ve got a full run-through of what i ate on my tiktok here.

4. mapo tofu from good world chinese

some restaurants are made for big, slightly frenzied group dinners. george’s street’s good world chinese is one of those places. i already posted a note about this but it bears repeating how great this restaurant is. ian booked for a modest group of 12, each a couple of pints in — almost serving as an amuse-bouche. i came scurrying over after working a busy saturday service to find ian, in the centre of the disciples at the clothed table, prattling off the order. the control must be relinquished to one person at a place like this. the notes app comes out, the counting fingers too. the giddiness of the table is dialled down to a simmer — until the question of how many tsing taos are required raises its head. ian did do a fine job ordering, bualadh bos a stór. plenty of dim sum, char siu buns, roast duck and the like. but the standout for me was the mapo tofu which, luckily for me, was close by and, confusingly enough to me, wasn’t being snapped up by anyone else. jokes on them, though, because it was whopper. sumptuous pillows of tofu with well-cooked beef mince and sauce that’s fragrant and plentiful. despite being in a little cloud of food and friend-induced heaven, i did manage to snap a quick pic on my phone before tossing it back into my handbag on the floor by my seat.

5. nettle sparkling drink from wild about ferments

i don’t know loads about this company, wild about ferments; but they stock their stuff in my local supervalu. they’re based in wexford and run a regenerative, biodiversity farm according to their website. and as well as sloe jams, wild garlic oils and the like, they also make this nettle sparkling drink that, until recently, escaped my attention. i love a sparkling beverage of any kind — whether it’s kombucha, wine, water or health shite like this. and nettle, as much as it scared me as a child, always delights me when it’s used in food and drink. i’m not well-versed in foraging or dealing with it myself (yet) but in the meantime, wild about have me covered with this yoke.

6. braised beef noodles from zhuyi fang

it’s hard not to get all feverish when word of a new restaurant opens. especially when it comes from the word of mouth of a colleague and not an instagram carousel. zhuyi fang has recently roosted in the old meltdown space on montague street, itself becoming a little hive for food businesses. you’ve got la gordita, cn dumpling, two faced wine bar and sushi & go — all places i’ve frequented and loved. zhuyi fang alerts you to its presence by its neon sign outside. no words, just the visual of someone pulling noodles which is, coincidentally, their speciality. it’s similar to north mary street’s biang biang (another fave of mine) in terms of casual, delicious hand-pulled noodle dishes at affordable prices. except zhuyi fang is closer to my workplace and easier to pop into on the way to my bus. it was busy when me and ian went — again, after another busy saturday shift i’d worked. but the staff working were super sound despite orders flooding in from deliveroo and tables to quickly clear. forgoing the temptation of staff dinner, i opted for a bowl of the braised beef handpulled noodles and we threw some sichuan wontons on the side. portions were huge, the food was lovely and i’m delighted to have this in my arsenal for the incoming winter.

7. eggs and greens from slice

anthony bourdain has spoken for so many of us already about the industry-wide hatred of brunch. it’s a balls to work and is so repetitive. overpriced eggs, orange juice and toast and needy clientele. it’s not a category of meal i usually wish to partake in on my days off, however i was meeting two friends (one i used to work with, one i currently work with) and brunch was on the cards in stoneybatter’s slice. i’ve spent years working and playing in the general smithfield/stoneybatter area but had, admittedly, never been to slice. i suppose my daytime hours in this part of dublin were usually dominated by own, respective hospitality jobs to be able to pop in for a goo. and i think i had a preconceived idea about it just hashing out eggs and avocado on sourdough. groundbreaking. so it was a welcome surprise to me, when i joined charlotte and eoghan after cycling 14.5km hungover to meet them here, that i had such a great experience. the staff were so warm from the second they took our names in the queue to the second we left after paying. and the food was genuinely lovely. lots of similarities to our own menu in work — eggs, sourdough, mcnally’s produce, etc — but also delivered so differently that made it feel novel and exciting. i ordered the eggs and greens which arrived with poached eggs, greens from the aforementioned mcnally’s, avocado and pea guacamole, lemon crème fraiche, pickled onions, slow-roasted tomatoes, shallots and coriander. i wasn’t mad on the bread, but the rest of the dish was really good. i paired it with a watermelon aperol spritz to heal me. and while i do think this photo looks like a bit of a mess, with too much things going on; taste-wise, it was so harmonious and worth the 28km roundtrip on the bike.

8. coffee and tahini cookie from roasted brown

flinging us back to cill mhantáin for the final gem of this TIA&DRTITWC roundup. roasted brown have been a familiar name to me through years of working in coffee. they’re an irish roastery who, in the last year or so, turned said roastery into a fully-fledged cafe and sauna. and while you may roll your eyes at that currently trendy combo of things, kudos to where its owed because it is a phenomenal space in a part of wicklow (kilcoole) that, dare i say, doesn’t have that much going on. sorry, but it’s true. my great aunt may lives out that way and when we’d visit as a child, the surrounds did often lack the same excitement that may’s maximalist gaff interiors did. we stopped off after another wicklow excursion for an oat flat white, a batch brew and a treat. there was such a peaceful vibe to the place, despite people sitting, chatting, reading and sipping. it feels open, not cramped and genuinely, a lot of cafes are probs jealous as shit of such a great space. anyway, i threw a tahini and dark chocolate cookie on to the side of my coffee, served on these stunning (but heinously spenny) ceramic saucers and i was happy.

that’s everything for the moment, a chairde. thanks to everyone who reads bosca macántacht. i’ve recently surpassed 600 subscribers and i think that’s so insane and so cool that that many people read what i write (or at least skim the first paragraph in their email inboxes). i appreciate it and am glad ye fuck with my lack of consistent proof-reading. le meas, sian x

TW: ED MENTIONS DUH

i’ve been dismantling my interest in celebrities massively over the last few years. in this hellish timeline that we’re currently living through, their appeal has fallen flatter to me than a jenga tower after one dodgy brick removal. i simply can’t find it in me to give a fuck about them anymore. obviously there’s still those that i admire, especially for their contributions to art, film and music; but moslty, i find myself circling the unfollow drain on their social media platforms the odd time they pop up on my feed. what do i need to know of their lives? i’m also immune to the obligatory press junkets they do the rounds of, where they’re lured out of their professional, media-trained shackles by interviewers eager to capture a viral moment showcasing how relatable they are. i wince when i see, in the big 2026, how willingly people are to bat for their fave — even more so when i see how much they’re willing to shell out to see them in the flesh. parasocial relationships with celebrities are to me, in my 31st year of life, a bit embarrassing and a bit…sad. i don’t have the brain space anymore to invest time and effort into a relationship that isn’t reciprocal. unless it’s with my GP.

i feel bad for celebs, in a way, though*. it seems like the worst time in history, since the french revolution, to be famous. the plebs of the world are largely waking up to the unfair disparity between the lives of those with acclaim and wealth and themselves (ie. us). food, healthcare and housing costs are rocketing beyond what most on a modest salary can afford — not to mention the very real threat of environmental and political collapse. things feel so heavy and so fraught; celebrities seem like a shiny, useless commodity, parading around in gowns that cost almost as much as you make in a year. it must’ve been amazing to be famous in the 20th century until maybe even 15 years ago: you could say what you want, do as much drugs as you want while doing your job and swagger around with your ego bursting out of your chest. whereas nowadays — and not to be all you can’t say anything anymore but — celebrities can’t, really. any word or move that could be misconstrued by a discerning fan or hater and that’s your next project pulled. the wealth and fame of celebrities no longer seems stable, rather like it’s on loan from their agent or record label and could evaporate at any minute if the pre-release viral moment doesn’t land and the masses stop talking. celebrities need your attention span: it’s their new currency.

this all leads me to ariana grande, the singing, acting starlet who is known the world over for her disney princess eyes, incredible vocal range and, until a few years ago, a scalp-scraping high ponytail. i’ve been a fan of grande for a long time, but that servitude has begun to reach an expiry point. my first introduction was via victorious, the tween nickelodeon show about a group of musical theatre students that my little sister loved. i watched peripherally, usually also while on tumblr on the family laptop. i loved grande’s portrayal of cat valentine, the cranberry-haired, ditzy comic relief of the show. a few years later, grande made the transition from teeny-bopper to pop star — a move that launched considerably less snarky criticism and think pieces as did that of her generational successor, addison rae. her tunes were instant classics and she got the full “not-a-girl-not-yet-a-woman” glow-up. break free would have you hoofing the rest of your cigarette down in record time before tossing it on the ground and latching onto your mates to reef them back inside from the smoking area to the dancefloor at inhuman speed. in 2016, she released dangerous woman, the single and album, which cemented her as a pop force to be reckoned with alongside your madonnas, beyoncés and gagas. the following year, a couple of days after i saw her in the 3arena with a friend, she performed in the manchester arena where a bombing ensued, killing 22 people and injuring many more.

it can’t have been easy for her. people — as they always do — speculated. wondered how she would cope, what she would do. turns out: a fundraiser concert, one love manchester, where she and a host of big names performed to a crowd of 50,000 to raise relief funds. the gig was a hopeful and beautiful response to a horrible incident, but the following year, grande opened up about her ongoing PTSD from the incident and her ex, mac miller, died from an overdose. in the years since, her star never wavered though; and despite backlash from playing racial ambiguity and cheating scandals, she continued to release music. and most recently, she nabbed her dream role as glinda the good witch in the wicked franchise where her commitment to the bit, alongside her onscreen counterpart cynthia erivo, had everyone talking. this is where things began to feel strange. their combined chemistry was cute at first, then managed to seem co-dependent, then frazzled. then someone clocked what i couldn’t quite see at first, but that harked away in the background with a ghostly familiarity: the eating disorder competitiveness. sinewy arm in sinewy arm, the two would traverse a premiere or sit cuddled up on a couch, holding space in their contracted pink and green, and the internet, as it so often does, would spew its discourse: grande and erivo are in an anorexic pact! and so on.

but they had a point. for me, a large majority of the press buzz during the wicked movies’ reign was about grande — and in a slightly smaller respect, erivo’s and michelle yeoh’s — bodies. how much they’d shrunk during the making and promoting of the film (which also prompted concerns about working conditions on set). nothing was made of the appearances of the men acting in the film (maybe because no one cares). but for grande in her first major motion film — the role of a lifetime — the focus was solely on her gaunt appearance. but that also kept the pr wheel turning, too. and i’m going to sound very tinfoil hat, conspiracy-theorist here when i say: i wonder if her team eats up the body commentary and even encourages it so that people will continue to keep her name in the headlines. like, even over her own welfare. wouldn’t be the first time. it’s out of grande’s hands, more than likely. her brain’s probably too addled with calorie calculations and the weight of upcoming promo.

right now, grande’s forthcoming album petal is about to be unleashed. with it, the usual album roll-out gimmicry of tiktok filters and stickers and gays making it their whole personality even if the eventual album is embarrassingly shite. but most of all, social media has been a barraged with content discussing grande’s physical form. again. every second scroll is a video, laced with performative concern, that says nothing, just verbally wrings hands about how thin and unwell grande is. how protruding her bones are. how she might not make it to the end of her tour. it’s not unwarranted, of course; but it is relentless and useless (as are the comparisons to karen carpenter). there’s almost a circus of morbid fascination around it, especially at a time where thin is back in and every second person is on a GLP-1. she’s being fabled by strangers before she’s even been hospitalised, which is crazy. it’s a constant knock to the foundation of a recovered anorexic, how much air-time it gets and how little anyone on grande’s team or in her family is doing about it. her own publicist is lying to the public’s face about her performing “healthily”. it’s bullshit and only fuels the problem.

it’s insane to see your own body used as thinspo. with anorexia, i was so blinded to the reality of my own physical being that i couldn’t actually believe that anyone saw me as thin because i sure didn’t. two weeks after i turned 16, blighted by the torment in my own brain, i took a photo on my digital camera of my skeletal form, in my bra, underwear and fluffy slippers, right before being rushed to hospital because of failing organs. the body it captured didn’t feel like my body. it certainly didn’t resemble the one i saw when i looked in the mirror. but there, in the photo, alongside the garish camera flash reflecting back from my full-length mirror, was a girl with no fat on her body at all. her skin was purple and stained with burns from constant hot water bottle exposure and self harm scars. that photo did the rounds a few times on tumblr, via my private tumblr. as did photos of me prior to my diagnosis. but buried beneath the ocean floor depht of disbelief, i did feel a flutter of pride. it took over a decade to not see it, in hindsight, as the ideal for myself. and for someone as famous as ariana grande, during this glossy new era, amid the span of eating disorder tiktok, i can’t imagine how it feels to be the ultimate thinspo of the moment. to have high-res clips and pics of her own chest bones gracing the darkest reaches of the internet. to see her frail, decaying body be glamourised as the body goals to those who openly fat-shame other people on the same app. will it translate into album sales? will it ever be enough?

there’s only so much i’m willing to delve into stuff because unfortunately, i am a highly triggered snowflake when it comes to eating disorder stuff (last year, i watched the series say nothing and wasn’t expecting just how affected i’d be by the scenes where dolours price and her sister, marian, are on hunger strike and being force-fed until ian had to console me on the couch afterwards). everything’s all groovy until you’re watching a woman flaunt her thinly-veiled skeleton in a matching co-ord in a music video while the world gabbers on about it. then the habits come flooding back: the leg-bouncing, the meal-skipping and all the other little behaviours the voices train you to do, oh-so-diligently, so you don’t ever become fat**. the worst thing in the world, allegedly. more than corruption, more than child abuse, more than genocide. and from the brief clip i allowed myself to watch from the petal music video, where grande stiffly manipulates her tiny body amid more normal-sized ones (bodies that would probably have been called large two decades ago), i wondered how many times they had to refilm the sequence. the girls move from side to side in their chairs and from knowing from how difficult it was to walk when i was at my worst, where i’d physically have to lift my leg in front of the other on the 10 minute walk from my bus stop to school; i know that this was a ball-ache for the director to capture. and for grande to get through without collapsing.

who knows how long grande has suffered in this way. who knows if she will finish the tour. who knows if someone will intervene. i feel for her from someone who’s been there. and then there’s part of me, the sick, teenage sian who was forced to the doctors against her will envies her (and others like eugenia cooney) whose loved ones aren’t intervening. who get to just live it out and relish the concern and attention but in an emaciated body. that’s the rotten part of me, the small part of my core where it’s still latched on by a thread, ugly and festering. the part that wants to feed off the discourse to regain strength and get itself back in the driver’s seat. i hate it.

recovery from an eating disorder — like recovery from all other diseases — is not linear. it’s being fine one minute and unravelling 3 years down the line because of something you thought you’d already conquered. it’s falling down again and again despite the progress made over a long time. it’s a daily effort. you have to wake up and choose it every single day for the rest of your life. and it is that dramatic. but also largely chill after a while, like how people say operating a moving vehicle and driving manual in said vehicle becomes second nature somewhere down the line. somewhere the harshness and freneticness of the brain mellows and remembers who it is outside of an insidious mental parasite. it just takes regular, diligent maintenance, is all. it’s easier to stay nestled in the taloned clutches of the prescribed fear of fatness, itself masking something more nefarious, under the thumb of insanity, than it is to venture out into the bracken with a gleaming sword and fight the beast itself. in a time when women are under so much scrutiny over their appearance and so many are desperately seeking to rid their body of any sign of fat — from their facial cheeks to their arse cheeks — as if it’s a sign of moral failure, why would someone choose recovery? the answer to that is hard-won and blurs often, even after 16 years.

in spite of all the above, i wish ariana nothing but safety, peace, health (despite that being a dirty word to those of us who’ve been anorexic because it’s perceived as “fat”***) and recovery. it’s not as glamorous, though, as a cigarette-thin figure. it requires a lot of time burrowing away into your brain trying to rewire it entirely — and that’s quite inconvenient during the rollout of a new album. i have her name and petal blocked online to keep myself safe from further discourse i don’t need to be sucked into caring about; but regardless, i hope that whoever is in her life, who genuinely cares about her is able to drag her (against her will, unfortunately) to seek the help she needs. and at least then, if the album flops, she could have a lucrative career spike flogging r.e.m. recovery packages.

*i feel bad the way one does for a parent with a screaming child in public: pure pity

**or what the mentally-blighted anorexic brain thinks will prevent becoming fat and if you ever fail to do said behaviour, you’re fucked

***fat, in the aforementioned, unwell mindset, seen as morally deplorable and to be feared as opposed to just a physical state of being

this morning, i took a notion during my usual day-off breakfast brainstorming. it’s something few people have the luxury of doing on monday mornings — particularly monday mornings after back-to-back big sporting finals. but my mondays are always guaranteed as my work closes for that one day and they are sacred to me. necessary, too. people’s unavailability grants me the ability to shield myself from distractions and get the shit i need to get done actually done. housework, long runs, writing, laundry. it’s boring stuff, but i’m indebted to its predictability so i can keep some loose control over myself each week after i’ve lost it. so while the rest of the world is slogging through another muggy morning over a desk, relying solely on overpriced caffeine to get them through, i’m doing a quick kitchen inventory scan to figure out what delicious thing i can make myself to savour over home-brewed coffee. jammy stuff.

i don’t know where it came from or what jolted me with the inspiration, but as i counted the abundance of eggs in the little egg hutch on the counter and the glut of veg in the fridge, the word frittata came pulsing into the fore of my mind and refused to go away. i don’t even really care for frittata. it’s, to quote this piece, far from it i was reared — even quiche was something reserved for high-brow people, not me and my family. growing up, eggs were something that came scrambled, boiled or mashed into mayonnaise for lunchbox-stinking sandwiches that humiliated you in school. cakes, sometimes. eggs were a stand-alone food, something that was weaponised when my eating disorder took hold. i abhorred what i referred to as “sneaky eggs”, eggs that became invisible agents in a dish, incorporated into a host of other ingredients to create things like frittata, quiche, cake. it meant extra calories and i couldn’t trust that. so i abstained. the first time i had a frittata was only in the last 5 or 6 years when my friend clara, an effortlessly brilliant cook, made one for ten or more hungover heads in our friend pearse’s kitchen in donegal after a big night of putting away pints. i was shocked at how much i enjoyed it, despite going in gingerly with my fork, the old eating disorder bias making me suspicious. but i was proved so wrong.

i don’t think i’ve had frittata since. i’m not a massive brunch girl — i tend to work them rather than enjoy them myself — and frittata seems to have fallen out of culinary favour on breakfast and lunch menus the same way people are finally starting to get sick of avocado and peanut rayu on sourdough. while it doesn’t seem like rocket science either, i’ve also never made a frittata and always prefer having a recipe i can softly follow while trying something new for the first time. some previous cast-iron firsts i did try this year included jalapeño cornbread and spanish tortilla which, admittedly, i knocked out of the park; but in the interest of not bruising my ego by fucking it up, i consulted one of our go-to resources in the house, kenji lópez-alt’s behamoth of a book, the food lab, for some help. nada. the glossary in that book is heaving and so thorough, but frittata isn’t on kenji’s radar so i took to google and found this recipe from love & lemon. what i like in a recipe such as this one is conciseness and simplicity: two things i benefit from but am useless at myself. also the ability to know i can — and inevitably will — go off the rails and wing the rest, safe in the knowledge that it won’t fuck up my previous efforts. so i followed the basic recipe guidelines and then veered off with adding some scallions, korean chilli flakes, fennel, tomatoes, vintage irish cheddar and parsley.

unlike the aforementioned cornbread and tortilla efforts, frittata is actually really quick to make. i take longer doing scrambled eggs on my days off than this, most times. and the clean-up was pretty swift too. my oven timer was yelling at me before i’d finished all my post-weekend whatsapp correspondences and was looking hefty. there was a significant hump of heat-trapped domage as well as being browned lightly and fluffy. i served it up with a little wheaten brown roll slathered in a herby feta dip from lidl (órla emphatically informed me last night it was greek week when producing a pre-match spanokopita to my delight) and a cup of this dreamy colombian, peach-infused coffee from imbibe. might even reheat and repeat for dinner, now that the weather’s finally given up the golden rays. for something i’ve never really been exposed to or desired, it was sure nice to start my week off with. it’s a good thing to surprise yourself every now and again; you never know what you might discover.

photo below taken by my gorgeous friend 📸

despite the fickle nature of may’s mini heatwave and the failure of leaving cert weather to appear on the paper this june, the hot days haven’t ceased. you may have noticed. you may have found yourself melting in your workplace, local park, favourite swim spot or third space of choice. you may have blown your budget on soaking up every last drop you could possibly stomach before getting lightheaded, burnt to a crisp or in need of a taxi home one or several times. it’s impossible to ignore. the nation has metamorphosed into that beautiful, gleaming swan it becomes when the weather’s like this, breaking free of its perennial greyness once more. and the evidence is everywhere.

there’s a glut of plans, of people. beer gardens bulge and the mouths of pubs and wine bars spew out onto the kerb-edge with bodies. the queue for the descent into the mouth of the forty foot could be likened to the one outside copper’s any thursday night. sweat slides, suncream sticks and smears, skin is bared, reddened, scorched, bespeckled and — if you’re lucky — goldened. bikini strings sneak up above tank tops like weeds that have dodged the lawn mower’s blades, signifying the ever-present potential of a swim at a moment’s notice. songs you used to hate blast out of car windows as they roar past, making you twinge and fawn with nostalgia instead of rage. dogs are out in force and i’m not talking canines — warts, bunions and dusty cracked heels all freed from their dark, booted hovels. sirens wail in the distance all the time like it’s new york or something. there’s a constant bustle. the place feels alive. it feels different. there’s also a certain, undignified satisfaction about the temperature here being the envy of the rest of the world as it reaches the 40s and beyond elsewhere. finally it’s our time to have it all!

there’s a horniness to it — the heat — that hums, unrelenting through each day like a pulse. it’s in the skin on show, the sweat sliding down below what little clothes you can get away with. hedonism is in full swing, the pleasure principle. naps are abundant, as are pints and ice creams that require attentive licking. dips with friends, lunch while lolling around in the crunchy sun-bleached grass in the park. the glass of wine after work because fuck it, it’s roasting. the way the relief of swerving into a pocket of shade soothes like a kiss on the neck just beneath your ear. it’s very much an antithesis to the ozemporexia movement of the moment, i feel, which is also beautiful. livin’ life and lovin’ it with minimal clothes on regardless of what you look like. on the island of ireland!!! this is the future the freedom fighters of éire could only have dreamed of for us, i imagine.

it feels like when your teacher is out for the day. those few minutes between when they should arrive and the announcement that you’ll be spending the day being babysat by a substitute or ferried off to another classroom become a breeding ground for minds sharp enough to notice the change in pattern. the excitement is tangible as the possibility of something different becomes more and more likely. grins and giddiness gallop to the surface. no one’s in charge — not really, anyway. every day could be the last. we all know this and love to remind each other. it’s to turn next week, a man warns me from the bar-side of the liberty belle pub, unaware of the crime he’s committing by sitting indoors on a blistering day like the one it was. we have to soak it up like it’ll never come back is the underlying warning. because for all we know, it may never. in the blink of an eye, we’ll be standing at unsheltered bus stops in the dreary pissings of rain, soaked to the bone, with nothing to keep us warm but the fading heat of summer memories. when you don’t live in a warm country, that forgetfulness is, i think, a part of our dna. a way to help us cope and carry on through the shite hand our island’s weather deals us. 60 days of non-stop rain now, in my back garden in the glow of a 28-degree day, feels like it never happened. a memory i can barely travel back to in my mind’s eye. how would we have dealt with that?!

i want to hate it, the heatwave. ethically, i should hate it but it feels too good. the extra moisture and sun cream is causing my skin to break out in a way it did when i was living in the grimey, sweltering heat of new york city as a 20 year old. i get dizzy often. i’m not sleeping too well because the bed’s too hot. it’s exhausting doing chores so the house is in a bit of a tip (on my end, not ian’s). sitting my sweaty back against the tufty, fabric chairs on a dublin bus coming home feels torturous. my underwear is soaked from having to wear another layer on top of them after merely an hour or two of work. wasps are in their prime. dirt is clinging to the bed under my nails with the tenacity of a tick embedded in unsuspecting flesh and my braless chest is gathering ogles from slack-jawed men who waste no energy trying to look away as they pass me. the fact that all of this is being caused by our species’ insatiable greed and inability to care for the planet we live on, amplified by the nefariousness of ai and data centres.

and yet, i can’t hate it. i used to — i was ill-prepared for the skimpiness of clothes it required, the bodily regulation, the demand of each day to fill it with activities. but now, i relish it and all that it brings. rising to a room already fully illuminated despite the blinds and curtains being drawn and going back to sleep before the sun does. the whispery rustle of tree leaves when licked by the tail of a breeze. the big sighs when lapping up the unbridled attention of the sun on your face, surrounded by friends, where there’s nothing else to be said. stretching out languidly on a towel by the sea like a sleepy, old cat, lulled to near-dozing by the asmr of the waves beyond your closed eyelids. the way it transforms people into the best version of themselves.

today, a customer brought us in four boxes of ice creams. i’d already vowed to buy some for the team on shift today, but logan got there first. he comes in most mornings and gets coffee for himself and his colleague. sometimes he sits and has breakfast. today was the first day i’ve ever seen him in shorts. he left us a box of brunches, ice bergers, rowntree ice lollies and cornettos. i didn’t even see him drop them in, so stealthy was he in his generosity. i horsed that brunch into me, so i did. i even got a little clichéd spillage on my jorts. classic. and tomorrow, i’ll get logan back with a free coffee to say thank you for the ice cream, it healed us all.

it feels good knowing there’s a swim on the cards this week where we’ll gather, strip, launch ourselves at the frigid altar of the ocean then share chats and a share-size bag of crisps or chipper chips. it feels good to talk to people about the heat as it blazes on. it feels good to turn my face to the sun and let it rain down on me and stipple my extremities with more light-brown spots. it feels good to eat an ice cream at 3pm on a weekday and feel the hot pavement against the bare sole of my foot when i’m bringing the recycling out. it feels good having an ice cold pint leaning back against a cold, brick wall in a beer garden. it feels good hearing the thumping of pit bull and lil jon in marlay park from where i type in the grass in my back garden. and christ, it feels good to be alive, soaking it up and knowing that despite it all, i am so lucky to be alive.

as this is technically a kind of pride post, it’s maybe worth sharing that i had a radio show airing this morning as part of dublin digital radio and éist’s queering the airwaves special. the show is called GREEDYFM and is an hour long homage to my bisexual baddies through bangers that i think have bi energy (or am greedily co-opting to serve bisexual means). i assume it’ll be available to listen back while cooking in the sun if you didn’t get to listen live. the rest of the week’s lineup is also stacked with juicy gay shit and i’d recommend tuning in if you can!

i can’t remember when i first learned of the diceman, alias thom mcginty, the scottish-born queer street performer and activist who roamed dublin’s streets in ensembles that reeked of fantastical pagentry and campness. it may have been pre-covid, but still, it was shockingly late for a bisexual woman from dublin. irish legends and icons are prescribed and etched into our brains from such an early age: your phil lynotts, your mary robinsons and your bonos (like i said: prescribed). regardless of how you feel about the last one, you can’t deny that the aforementioned — and their ilk — are all people who’ve managed to rise above our quaint, emerald hills and firmly plonk themselves into international consciousness through their respective contributions
to culture, politics or what have you. they put our small, wee island on the map, solidifying a tricoloured sense of pride for irish people in their identity on a worldwide scale. a people need icons to look up to, after all. people like them who speak to them, who feel what they feel, who tell their stories. maybe that’s why christianity caught on so well here.

i feel like as a young queer irish person, i scrambled to find such icons even before coming out. madonnas whose feet i could throw myself at, literally and figuratively. any altar that could offer shelter, understanding, inspiration and good craic. like i said, maybe a catholic upbringing is partially to blame. pop girls were, unsurprisingly, very important to me growing up. but i was especially lucky enough to be 14 years old, primed and eager for pop salvation, when lady gaga arrived on the scene — the first person outside of myself i ever heard declare themselves as bisexual. gaga was so paramount to me as someone who felt what i did. she had things to say, she was an artist, she had taste and served it all up in a campy way that challenged people while also inviting everyone to the dancefloor. poisoning her a-list boyfriend in a mickey mouse-themed outfit with a cheeky, demure smile on her face in the paparazzi video or spurting blood in the midst of performing and dying mid-ascension on a stage full of the world’s biggest celebrities struck me at the very centre of my teenage being. it’s how i imagine people must have felt the first time they saw the sistine chapel or the invention of fire: irrevocably changed and hungry for more.

that was all well and good, but sometimes it felt otherworldly. like that shit could only spawn from the bustling streets of new york or los angeles. like it wasn’t allowed here. glitz and glamour didn’t feel synonymous with the unstimulating grey and greenness of ireland, even of my relatively recent youth. and with irish people’s innate and honed ability to judge one another for so much as wearing a hat at an acutely jaunty angle, it’s a wonder anyone had the bravery to fucking do anything at all. i’m sure even setanta was accused of having notions when he took up the role of culann’s hound in place of the one he killed. i remember how it was for me to burst forth in my discovery of my bisexuality, at the apex of ireland’s blossoming liberal era at the beginning of the 2010s. i was lucky — queerness was no longer shameful. it was gaining traction, recognition, visibility and rights. there was possibility and lots of pride. that all seem to be sliding backwards, which is especially prevalent for queer irish poc and trans people trying to access recognition and healthcare (as captured here by kelly earley).

but i simply can’t imagine how it must have been for those pre-decriminalisation of homosexuality in ireland. in 1993 — a year before i was half-cooked in my mother’s womb. i can’t imagine the hiding one would’ve had to subject themselves to; the slurs, the unaccepting, the loneliness. the feeling of being shut out, unwanted, harassed and humiliated by the rest of the country. we all know how deeply shame permeates irish society, passed down from generation to generation. but some carry the weight of it more than others, forced into corners or hidden away in laundries to toil in it for their sins. to speak out or stand out would ensure further annexation or retribution. you may as well be painting a target on your face. and in a way, that’s a little bit like what thom mcginty did. he painted on the brave face, donned a g-string or a royal purple gown and shot cheeky winks at passers-by, entertained, served and pushed against a conservative current. and he delighted people doing so. he was “a rare peacock in a city of crows would attract large crowds, which could bring pedestrian traffic to a standstill” a gorgeous epitaph on an equally-gorgeous subreddit full of memories of mcginty by dubliners.

we’ve gotten nowhere as a people without those who’ve stuck their necks out and demanded to be heard and respected. women, workers, people of colour, queers. getting out and existing and refusing to be silenced, even in the face of potential peril. it’s something i try very hard not to take for granted. the work’s not done — it’ll probably never be done, to be fair. there’s still so much stigma and lack of safety, rolling back of rights, of recognition that was fought for. i’ve seen the ease with which the casual but biting homophobia of my youth has come roaring back into comment sections of young queer people online. tolerance has had its day in so many regards. mcginty arrived to ireland with next to nothing in his pockets, depending on the spare change of strangers who passed him on the street, but his charisma that bled through, even while silent and statuesque, dowsed in face paint, caught the attention of people like the diceman, the games shop where he got his moniker, and eventually bewleys and rte. cringe feared him, social anxiety couldn’t touch him — not even a public indecency charge. thom’s career only seemed to expand, as well as his rotational arsenal of characters.

but mcginty’s number was up, like so many others, as ireland moved into the 90s. the rampant nature of the AIDS crisis — which claimed so many so cruelly, so quickly and so prematurely — took thom off dublin’s streets in 1994, leaving the city just that little less whimsical. he was 42 years old. his funeral was held on a frigid, late-february morning on his own turf: grafton street. the crowded street he once roamed so fluidly now matched his professional silence in a bubble of unspeaking reverence, before being burst by “a one-man band complete with drums, cymbals and gaudy decorations began his own tribute at his own tempo, singing in a subdued voice.” who knows what else mcginty could’ve offered the people of ireland had he survived; what other delights that could’ve bloomed from his incredible mind. he may have died premature, but he did go down as a true icon. and had he lived until now, who knows, we could’ve got him on gogglebox or something, winking suggestively during love island and being gas. but his memory still lives on in pockets of the city he entertained. a plaque in meeting house square is dedicated to him as well as in tralee and there was an exhibition in his memory as part of this year’s phizz fest in may.

and honestly? the last place i was expecting an homage to mcginty was at a high-end cocktail bar in the westbury hotel. look, let’s just get this out of the way: i’ve only darkened the sidecar’s door once before. it was a press event where they, alongside bar 1661 and killarney’s pig’s lane, received accolades as cocktail bars of excellence in ireland by the pinnacle guide. it’s stunning in there, obviously, and the drinks are gorgeous. but it’s not exactly somewhere my modest salary can justify frequenting that often. or at all, lol. i’m a far cry from just popping into the westbury on a random wednesday evening, but like azaelia banks’ perfect debut album, i am broke with expensive taste so one evening before an event, loaded with a book and some time to kill, i followed my thirst for something a bit bougie and turned down balfe street.

the sidecar’s signature cocktail menu is called dublin unfiltered. it’s a beautiful, wee book which, unlike a lot of representations of / odes to dublin, doesn’t actually feel gimmicky or over-romanticised for the singular goal of wooing american tourists. i flipped through it slowly, while unintentionally eavesdropping on the throngs of those aforementioned yank tourists in the booths around me, waiting for my intuition to choose a drink for me. and then she arrived, feather boa around her neck on the adjoining page: roll the dice, a sippable homage to mcginty. it’s a tropical, boozy number, not for the faint of heart or too serious, like the man himself with teeling single malt whiskey, disaronno, amaro montenegro, amer picon à l’orange, (deep breath) pineapple, coconut, demerara sugar…and a dasheen of chocolate bitters.

it’s €21 which is steep, believe me, i know, but i’d just been paid and wanted to sit somewhere nice and sip on something equally-as-nice while reading my book. i was paying that premium, like. it did come with little bowls of snacks which i’d wolfed down before ungracefully licking the coconut rim off the cocktail glass. and jesus, it was very delicious — sure, it’d want to be at that price, says you! but also such an unlikely place to run into a tribute to one of ireland’s queer icons gone too soon.

life is worth living-maxxing to the power of infinity this month, jeeeez. so much so, my boss (jokingly but also not) has banned me from taking any more time off in june. such is the price i’ll willingly pay for living it up all may long: eating, drinking, laughing, matrimonial celebrating, loving, screaming, crying, no throwing up. i plead guilty for the good time gloating. so slap the shackles on me, guard; i’m ready to go.

but before i’m shoved, head-first, into the back of the allegorical cop car and sped to my detention, i’ll take one last chuffed look back at what was passed my way on plates and in glasses or waffle cons the last 4 weeks. a singular tear will roll down my cheek and my smile will stretch further across the plains of my cheeks from the delicious memories of it all as the car rumbles to a start and the sirens begin to wail. it was all worth it.

sun, sea, september

being a decently walkable distance from my gaff — that is to say 35 minutes give or take when i’m pure stomping — blackrock is a handy little haven of great spots to eat. there’s sea shanty, liath, 3 leaves, little forest, lebanese tapas and daata. and if you’ve followed this blog for a while, it’s probably abundantly obvious that i have a particular goo for september, a wee seaside-facing nook with views that are trumped only by its roster of natural wines and dishes. magnetic in its appeal, it’s near-impossible not to drift in when you’re in the vicinity and on my long runs, which happen to bring me by it, my powers of self-restraint are severely tested each time.

when you land yourself a last minute res for two on a sunny friday evening though, and the menu du jour barks right up the tree of what you’re craving? that’s peak. restless dog in tow and summer dress on for its maiden voyage after picking it up at the quirk market, what awaited me was the summery meal of my dreams. we drank tantaka txakolina, a wine i’d had before at work after a wedding party i’d served gave us the bottles they didn’t finish. tastes like holidays. pair that with juicy connemara oysters with preserved seabuckthorn, a modest slab of pork belly (which i’m not normally a fan of) that tempted me with its accompaniment of fennel and dalkey mustard and the diva of the whole show: dinish island crab with lemon and cassarrecce, a pasta i love to eat out because i’m not arsed making it at home. the walk home was made more bearable by a blood orange spritz and a tiramisu we obliterated beyond recognition (see below).

one hundred 99s

and by 100, i mean three. i consumed three 99s in may (and was in the presence of a perfect, custard-based one that i was too full to enjoy beyond a good lick of ian’s from indulge in dunmore east). that doesn’t sound like a lot, though 2 of these were consumed in the space of 24 hours. but it’s about quality not quantity as we all know and each of these silky, creamy towers of summery joy came about at just the right time each and every time. it’s intuitive, your lust for a 99; like how a sneeze just sneaks up on you and expels itself, feeling right when it does. not a moment before. when the sun is suspended high and mighty in an unblemished blue sky and the exertion of existing beneath it pushes you just so, sweat dribbling incessantly and endorphins waxing throughout your being. that’s when it hits. and sure, one declaration of going for a 99 kickstarts the domino effect and suddenly everyone around you is in a race against cream and gravity with a cone in hand and a big, sticky smile on their face.

the first hailed from the gem in howth after a coastal half marathon. the second came from a londis near our gaff where ian had pulled in for something else entirely on a drive home. and the final one — surprise, surprise — was from teddy’s after a swim. i’ll remember each one fondly. my choice of sauce, in case anyone’s wondering, is a toss-up between raspberry and bubblegum. it’s not essential but definitely preferred.

borgor-maxxing

similarly to the 99s, i feel like i had at least a hundred burgers in may but actually it was about 2 (and a half, technically). the first was a #invite from hunter media group to pop along to the dash burger x alvin cailan pop-up at their capel street location. as a longtime avoider and re-discoverer of the beauty of a good burger (cheers, anorexia) i’ve been so pleasantly surprised by the quality of burgers in the country at the moment. dash, bujo, bunsen are the big three for me and probably most people. good quality irish meat, incredible consistency and the right amount of filth to satisfy an itch when it arrives. throw a lovely whiplash, boundary brewing or wicklow wolf beer on the side and you’re laughing. barry wallace, dash burger’s owner, is also one of the loveliest human beings i’ve met in the world of irish food. a man as unintentionally gas as he is passionate and generous. while i only know of alvin — a burger shop maestro with several endeavours under his belt, including the infamous eggslut — peripherally, i did love his saucy spin on the classic dash smash burger. there was a lot of people waiting a lot longer than myself and ian (we sauntered in late in the evening and were served pretty quickly unlike the fans and food writers alike who’d arrived promptly) but i think most people left pretty satisfied.

by the way, none of this post is remotely chronological because this here burger preceded the dash one by about 3 and a half weeks. no rules on this substack, baby! it was the night before the first of two weddings back-to-back over two weekends and i was firmly in fuck it, girls camp, financially-speaking. i didn’t want to trek to the shops, i didn’t want to think about what would go with what, what was seasonal and i definitely didn’t want to stand over the hob for an hour plus. his arm was rubber, but it did take a fair bit of twisting before i convinced ian to take a detour on the way home to bunsen in ranelagh. he was less enthused about waiting, but i was being the annoying, earnest bitch i am, sewing encouragements for him to see the line through. it moved quick enough (lucky girl syndrome) and soon enough, we were dropped our bounty of burgers, fries and sauce. i do think there’s few things on this earth that hit as hard as those crispy, salty sweet potato fries from bunsen dunked into a lagoon-sized dollop of heinz mustard. i crave it as soon as i think of it, which is pretty often. and sure, the burgers have stood the test of 2015 hipsters-who-cycle-fixed-gear- bikes time and still reign supreme.

bitta bevvin’

how exciting is it to find a new drink! something that can exist in its singular serving, taste nice and hail from the place you’re in, that gives you a wee buzz and something to consider! i got to visit waterford’s sunny-but-rainy seaside cove at the end of the month for my friend ash’ birthday. visiting new places — sorry waterford, i’ve never given you much love on account of my bias towards the west coast — always spurs the literal hunger for discovery in any self-respecting tourist. where are the good places to eat, to have a pint? what wee gems are waiting for me just around the corner? in between swims, showers and baby’s first visit to seagull bakery, i got a local beer from dungarvan brewing company into me with some fish and chips at east pier before the sun was shooed away again by cantankerous pewter clouds.

on the distinctly opposite end of the alcoholic beverage spectrum, was the indecent cocktail on the libertine’s inspiring cocktail menu. as someone who works in the area and feels the need for a sippable comedown treat after a sunday shift in work, i’d been looking respectfully for the right time to pop in for a nose. she’d opened, trickled out her menus on insta, dipped for renovations then opened again, blue-balling me and my thirst. but the team sent me a wee #invite shortly after to come in and have some grub on the house (more on that in a bit). the food is good and all the big names have written their better reviews, but the drinks menu had me hooked. i ordered myself a post-dinner indecent: a sultry, smokey and sweet with bourbon, peat, peach, lemon, malt and my kryptonite, cherry lambic. like her menu epigraph says: i can avoid everything but temptation. go díreach, a cailín. she’s €14 and worth every ice-cold, pretty-in-pink sip.

freebie fish dogs and fine shyt sauces

now, this is the section where i’ll be discussing things i did not pay for but did love. take that with as much #gifted salt as you like, or skip entirely! it’s your choice, babes. first up is the aforementioned grub from the libertine. we were treated to two starters, a huge portioned main and a glut of sides. but my favourite thing of all was the cod dog. perhaps a slightly left-field choice for a gastro bar snack, but very good news to this fish-lover. taking something usually quite cheap, gussying it up a little and swapping out the meat for fish is a genre of food i’m very interested in. i’ve seen it before with the dogfish sausage roll i had at coleraine’s lir restaurant 2 years ago that i still think about regularly. it’s not for everyone, but i don’t care because it is for me. sauced up to the nines with curried mayo and fresh herbs, it’s not something you can eat daintily. but if your dining partner is a decent one, they’ll succumb to the mess with you and go to town on the other end of it, lady & the tramp style.

i love when food is fun. sometimes it can be so woefully stuffy and serious. i love brands and restaurants that can have a laugh as well as make delicious food. chimac are those baddies. i don’t eat there as much as i’d like (but every bad hangover makes me want to call them up), but i do love their bottled sauces. their korean hot sauce, sriracha caramel and k-bbq sauces have all found their way into my fridge over the years and zhuzhed up many a lacklustre midweek dinner. so i was very delighted that they sent me out their newest baby, the jalapeño honey sauce. i know we hit peak hot honey oversaturation a while back. i know it’s been memed to death since. but i’d argue there’s room for jalapeño honey to have her day in the sun. a bit more verdant, pickly and a touch subtler on the sweetness makes this baby gorgeous with so many different things. it goes great with eggs (obvs) and it snuck its way onto shakshukas, rice bowls and several other things in the last few weeks. you can get her here or in fallon & byrne.

salves during the heatwave

i’ve two quick ones here to shoutout for helping me during the unprecedented levels of heat in dublin during may (that is to say a touch over 22 degrees). first we have this beautiful peach iced tea from hatch in glenageary. juicy, peachy with a lil lick of lime throughout. it was perfect after a lot of schlepping to and from the sea, as packed as a club on a saturday night, under the relentlessness of the sun. €4 for a well-made iced tea that took a lot of effort not to slurp down in one go. also the cutie behind the till was so lovely, despite working on one of the nicest days of the year and was so good to my dog too, giving her snacks.

the second was this aguachile made by my colleague katie quinn and her helping-hand chef and friend marina in work. it was one of the dishes they were prepping for a wedding in the stables, but naturally there was some left over for staff. my god, were we all grateful, running into the bakery kitchen from the cafe to lap it up like dehydrated dogs, forgoing our duties and responsibilities. the fumbally gets very hot very quickly in the summer months, just as it gets unbearably baltic in the later months. the big concrete walls seem to trap heat so well (just as they seem to expel it in winter) and no matter how little clothes you wear that’s deemed as respectable for serving the public, the sweltering lethargy is inescapable. katie let us all come in our droves, like the poor young lads from oliver lining up for their daily gruel, and cool ourselves off. it was so fresh, zesty and soothing with the skinniest discs of radish, a big smack of lime and coriander and bulked up with succulent chunks of cod.

high steaks

sorry this might be a lot for some people but i think the above photo is so pretty. christ, if vegan me could see herself now. despite living with an fx buckley butchers five minutes from my house, i’ve yet to really take advantage of that until recently. it’s like clockwork when my period starts to rumble back around, rousing my carnal lust for steak. and i’d had it in my head that i wanted it with chimichurri, new potatoes dressed modestly with butter, salt and pepper, and some kind of seasonal green. i love steak but i’ve never really shopped for it myself before, but the lads in fx buckley were so good and not patronising at all when i ventured in (which i really appreciated). it was late in the evening and the one cut i was looking for was gone, but they did have some bavette left, which is lean and has this kind of gamey grain to it. again, maybe i’m a psychopath or something but i loved the look of it in the paper, just stark, red and pleated almost.

i still find steak pretty scary to cook — less with the food poisoning aspect, but more that i’ll inherit my dad’s fondness to turn a cut of meat into roadkill and run it. so ian cooked the steaks off while i prepped the chimichurri (a tad too sharp from whatever nuclear fucking garlic bulbs we had in the fridge), the spuds and these gorgeous, juicy asparagus i’d gotten in work that just soaked up the olive oil and charred nicely.

fell-on-my-feet dinners

a rare day in the early may sun with a bit too much day drinking and not enough snacks found a group of us leaping on a last minute reservation for wicklow street’s ka shing, a personal favourite. sometimes the cure for impending tipsiness is simply more bottles of tsing tao and a rake of dishes spun around to one another via a lazy susan. it was a sunday evening and a lot of dishes were sold out (understandably) but i was pretty happy milling into a plate of razor clams with glass noodles, making an undignified mess of my place setting.

the aforementioned marina barjau, who i believe works as a chef in lilliput stores in stoneybatter, took over the friday dinner slot at work on the second friday of may. her menu, a mexican-irish medley, lured me in and i found myself nabbing a plate and a glass of wine after my shift in the cafe next door. it was the evening before a half marathon so i considered this to be appropriate carb-loading. a mexican woman herself, she made flautas filled with colcannon. i mean, let’s just stop right there. what a gorgeous marriage of two dishes so beloved in their respective countries. two hard hitting classics. stunning. marina had made her own salsa picante for the irish heads at dinner who wanted to push the spice boat out a bit and served it with a side of fresh, summer courgette, sweetcorn and queso fresco.

and staying tangentially along the mexican side of things, we have my first burrito in a fat fucking minute. i’d worked a 7:30 to nearly 6pm shift and gone to the launch of muine bheag arts’ radio show (in which my work was featured, shameless plug!) in the fire station art studios with but one meal in my stomach. not glorifying business on an empty stomach here, but you know how it happens. that kind of gnawing hunger scrapes at the pits of your insides, making you delirious and dizzy. i nearly slipped in and out of consciousness (and out of my chair) during the listening to the entire radio show in its entirety towards the end. we were a good bit away from home and too from the well-populated eateries of parnell street. but ian had the car so we decided to splurge on takeaway from salsa authentic mexican in the ifsc.

man, i slept on this place for so long. my friend steve would also go on about this place when we all lived in around east wall. it was his go-to as a mexican food-loving vegan surviving on not that much money. he swore by it, to the point it almost became a running gag. but i’ve yet to have a bad meal from here. i do prefer sitting inside and slurping down some barbacoa tacos with consomé, but a burrito and bottle of jarrito to go was okay with me this time around. i needed the privacy of food inhalation. and i will say, it travelled very well. over a half an hour drive and miss burrito was still pleasantly warm and in-tact. and, as per, i made the naive mistake of thinking i could finish the whole thing. womp womp!

this is the end, my final ode to the delicious, hedonistic month that was may. one that was abundant in good times and fun as it was with good food and drink. tá an t-ádh orm, i ndáiríre. chat to ye again in july, maybe, when my wallet’s caught back up to me.

i recently submitted the subsequent piece of writing as an audio track to muine bheag arts for their upcoming broadcast show about sheds. the prompt was juicy, looking for work that celebrated the shed as “the domain of the amateur” and which “consider anti-professionalism, leisure time, hobbies, DIY enthusiasts, YouTube tutorials and other casual pursuits”. no sooner had i read the above and my mind was immediately whirring with memories of a very specific shed owned by a very specific man (john, the son of my great aunt una who we’d visit in tipperary every summer on the pilgrimmage to kerry).

it was as fun to write — exploring my own memories of this quiet man and his place of peace and artistic practice deep in the irish country — as it was to record an audio recital. i captured some ambience from my back garden to tie it all together and at one point, you can hear my dog hack up some doc leaves she’d been chewing on. i was delighted to have it feature on muine bheag’s newest radio show aptly titled “the shed” alongside some other gorgeous pieces, and even more so to hear it all in its entirety on thursday at fire station arts studio in a cool, dark room that transported me from the blistering sun outside and into some sheds.

i’ve decided to post the piece below because my reading in the audio is a lot quicker than i thought at the time of recording. and just because i like it a lot. big grma to mark and jack at muine bheag arts for having it on the show. you can listen to the whole thing here.

john’s shed

whenever we’d go down to castlegregory in kerry on our holidays, we’d stop off at my great aunt una’s in nenagh, county tipperary, en route. it was always high summertime and squeeezed into the backseat of my dad’s car rumbling through the country, fidgeting and whining about which sibling was taking up the most room, it was a relief when the car finally came bumbling to a halt at its only stop on the four/five hour journey before arriving in the kingdom. our seatbelts would spring open and our small, clammy hands would scrape at the door handles, exposing us to the thick, country air of nenagh. it felt like the big gulp of breath you take after holding it underwater for as long as you could, despite the air itself feeling more oppressive than it did at home. me and my siblings would immediately try to escape una’s abundant generosity — a full arsenal of queen cakes, scones, tea, 7up and what have you lying in wait on the linoleum table inside in case of callers — and head outside as quickly as possible. a smooch on the cheek was accepted and off we’d fly out the back door.

like so many country houses that flank a road bringing you through the centre of ireland on the way to somewhere else, una’s garden circumferenced the house. it was a butter-yellow bungalow. runty little apples would fall from the crooked tree to the left of the driveway, littered with loose pebbles and a hedgerow lined the back of the house, over which you’d hear the occasional crescendo of a cow mooing in the next field over. it would always be pretty muggy when we’d go down to una’s, with july being our usual calling time. even when it was overcast, the air would still somehow be sticky and thick like treacle, stinking to high heaven of silage, of the deep irish country. it was heavy, but it was also comforting and felt charged and alive, even in its solitude. time seemed slower here, like it was trying hard to move through the air. it moved slow and lazily, like a cow flicking at a fly with the brush of its tail. so in the time that my parents would take catching up with una, me and my brother and sister would lock in and occupy our own time in the limited grounds of the garden to try squander as much of it as possible.

countless games of hide and seek would be carried out over the couple of hours between getting turfed out of the backseat of the car to say hello and diving back in again to find solace in a gameboy with limited battery remaining. there weren’t many places you could conceal yourself that weren’t obvious to everyone else, though, for hide and seek; so you had to be creative with what little you had. there was the bathroom, the far side of dad’s car if you sunk down on the opposite side to the house, the gap between the hedgerow beyond which a farm operated or behind the big tree by the electric fence. But the best hiding spot of them all was in plain sight. immediately beyond the back door of the house and the wee concrete ramp adjoining it, was a shed. it was made of thinner wood than our one at home. it hadn’t ever been varnished or painted, yet it never looked shabby. in fact, it never had as much as a whisper of a cobweb clung to its splintery facade and its door was always open.

it belonged to una’s son, john, a quiet and gentle man with an incongruously high-pitched yet mumbling voice and a set of eyebrows like two shoe polishing brushes. i never did learn much about john in all of my years coming down to tipp and pit-stopping at una’s — not from his mouth anyway. but from his shed, i knew that he did the gardening duties and that he liked to paint. john’s shed wasn’t a place shrouded in restriction or forbiddeness. there was never any warning from our parents or una or john himself to not go near it. the door was nearly always open — except for those few minutes you had to yourself after sliding the stiff bolt into place on the door, waiting to be sniffed out by a prowling sibling. it was a big shed and there wasn’t too much inside bar a hedge-strimmer and a few other gardening sundries. but in the very centre of it all was an easel and typically, a canvas that was currently being worked on. the canvas would often depict milquetoast pastoral scenes, pastel in colour, framed with big, baby blue horizons and a smaller layer of green at the bottom. they could almost be comparable to works by rothko, just devoid of any drama or tension.

john’s shed was his workspace, but also his personal space, probably. even in the quiet life he kept in tipperary, as a quiet, unassuming man, he still needed his escape. a place where his thoughts, worries or inner workings could be translated into pottering about or applying paint to canvas in peace. and stepping into that space, even as a child, made me feel reverent towards its sanctity. john’s shed was the antithesis to the shed in my garden at home, varnished to a burnt terracotta with a bottle-green horseshoe hanging from the centre of the door. shit hung or was wedged in place in nearly every available corner of the place. the shed wasn’t just our shed – it was my dad’s, coincidentally also named john. this space, too, was dad’s palace of personal freedom. outside the tiny parameters of the house he shared with 4 other human beings, the cramped and cluttered channel between the shed’s walls was somewhere he’d spend hours in the summertime on the weekends. a place he could guarantee his solitude, as our fear of spiders prohibited us from spending more than a few seconds at a time in there. we’d nip in in search of a bucket or spade or hurley stick or bike and be right back out again, lest we got got.

the quiet, dusty confines of these sheds weren’t too dissimilar to those of a church in the daytime, in the vacuum between services, where everything is still and silent. sun streams in through the hexagonal patches of stained glass tiles, spilling onto the musty carpet dividing the rows of empty pews. specks of dust twirl in the light like some divine troupe of dancers. the church, historically speaking, served as the sole place where irish people could open up about their inner qualms – with a catch, though. someone was ready to listen but also to dish out the appropriate retribution. the ears of the priest were supposedly non-judgemental, but at the same time, represented an imbalanced power dynamic. knowledge is power and communities are small; and so, the less someone knows about what’s going on in your brain, the better. shove it down, suppress, say less. the impact of the ecclesiastic chokehold on where, when or how men opened up has had clear impacts to this day. it’s clear in the words they don’t speak, the stories they don’t tell, where they occupy themselves outside of their obligatory roles of usefulness.

between the modest, wooden walls of john and john eile’s respective sheds, they – pardon the pun – shed all of that. they could breathe, express themselves freely, whether with paintbrushes or spirit levels and ladders. through their amateur passions or dabbling in DIY pursuits, they constructed their own sanctity and sanity, perhaps. their internal worlds were held and respected by their sheds, whether in a small back garden of a semi-detached house in the dublin suburbs or in the verdant expanse of north tipperary.

i love films, i love movies, i love da pictures! but like all media, there’s an insurmountable well of art that’s been crafted since our kind began committing it to paper and celluloid. it seems imperative yet impossible to get around to it at all, no matter how hard one may try. exhausting even, just thinking about all there is to see and consume and be inspired by! but honestly, my letterboxd tally at the end of 2025 was pitiful, despite how much i love going to the cinema. i don’t watch as much as i used to, curse the addiction of algorithms and my lack of self-discipline. must-see classics can slip through the cracks just as quickly as an indie darling hottie weaves through its limited run in whatever two cinemas are showing it in ireland before they’re straight to a boycotted streaming service or dodgy torrent link. sometimes the sheer amount of what there is to see makes my head dizzy and i end up numb, rewatching twilight for the 700th time or nothing at all. and sometimes without the strict rules to reverently adhere to in the cinema, blocking out all distractions and devices, it’s hard to sit diligently and watch a film from four decades ago on your hand-me-down telly with tinny speakers in your stuffy sitting room. it’s somehow easier on a 6 inch screen where the film is in 28 parts alongside carpet cleaning clips to fully engage the dopamine receptors.

excused excuses and really, all this is to say i have a long list of stuff that’s managed to pass me by that i probably should’ve seen by this point. and one of those films is john schlesinger’s midnight cowboy. i’ve always had a thing for cowboys — midnight or otherwise — so i’m genuinely surprised that it’s taken me this long to bring this horse to water. sometimes i hate stuff that’s just about guys doing stuff, because that’s not my life and there’s enough of it. but here we are. this film, however, reeks of fame, of precarious queer adoption, of rich cultural relevance and reference alike. it’s the origin of the infamous, belligerent delivery of “HEY, I’M WALKIN’ HERE” — yelled, unscripted, by dustin hoffman after a taxi accidentally drove through the set — that’s shaped a thousand and one portrayals of new yorkers. and it’s maybe the most positive portrayal of male friendship i’ve ever seen in film (i’m not being remotely facetious when i say that). midnight cowboy is basically a movie about two lads who have nothing to their name but the shiny penny of idealism who become besties in their combined goal of finding a better life. and in between frames where i marvelled at the saturated colours, the surrealist transitions and lore-stacking flashbacks (and at just how much of jon voight’s genes angelina inherited), i really picked up on the food and drink that, alongside john barry’s wistful theme music, quietly buttresses the story to life.

a dishwasher’s dream

we begin our story with a snappy montage of several people calling out for one joe buck (coincidentally, the inspiration behind the instagram handle for belfast’s mike’s fancy cheese shop, makers and purveyors of the incomparable young buck blue cheese). our texan cowboy is missing for his poorly-paid and uninspiring dishwashing job, too busy is he mogging out in his room in his western best. i’ve personally spent many a late night with my elbows deep in suds and grease in an industrial-sized sink basin, tackling the most stubborn of food clinging to the tightest of crevices like spelunkers in crags that should never be reached by humans, with nothing but a can of prazky and intense gabber tunes to motivate me. it’s not glam, it’s not necessarily fun. your hands suffer the most, the skin absorbing all the secondhand chemicals and hot water to the point of drying out and cracking, even with marigolds on. the stack of dirty dishes seems unceasing as do demands from the rest of the establishment for hot, sparkling crockery. you learn to mentally zone out, focusing on the steel wall backing in front of you, entering peak mindfulness. it’s a tiring job, it’s a thankless job and as we all know, it’s mostly done by immigrants who are abundant in engineering degrees at home. i can’t imagine our hero, joe buck, actually being a good kp. dressed in his brimmed hat, suede and fringe, his face kinda gives what iphone face would look like if it existed in the late 60s. he’s poor, yes, this is being made clear to us, but i know those hands are soft and i know he’d be fond of calling in sick last minute before his shift so he can get his hole off his missus annie. he’s already decided he’s swapping soggy diner food residue for the big city streets of new york city, as he tells his colleague, who’s attention despite glistening in sweat in the thick of the shift is nothing short of admirable; cocksure in his dream to make it out of this deadend hell.

manhattans in manhattan

i struggled to find a picture of this but there’s a sweeping shot outside a bar after joe meets rico “ratso” rizzo and the two enter into a kind of soft pimp-management agreement. this bar is the kind of place where neither of them could afford even a singular packet of peanuts between them. we see a waitress carry a tray of drinks down to a table. one of them is amber and in a martini glass and, i’m pretty sure, is a manhattan cocktail, a visual nod to the city the story takes place in and one of my favourites. an on the nose — or palate — divide between the lifestyles of the elites and the down-and-outs of manhattan, despite their proximity.

i always get ketchup stains on my pants

conned out of the money he was trying to con out of some rich upper west side aul wan in exchange for sex and down on his luck in a city that’s ready to gobble him up and spit him back to the lone star state, poor joe’s “stud” status is in shaky territory. what’s a young buck to do? he takes his sorry ass to a diner for soup and saltines, of course, ignoring all the empty tables as he passes them and choosing, instead, to sit directly opposite a woman and child. weird, tbh. but not a bother on them that this strange, 6’4ish cowboy has taken to ogling them out of it and asking for their leftovers because they’re nearly lucid in a state of play, racing toy rats up and down one another’s limbs and hair. how new york. in joe’s daze watching this all go down, joe spills a bottle of ketchup into his lap and stains his lovely high-waisted pants. like everything going wrong and you step in dog shit in a new pair or heels on your debs night or whatever alanis morissette said about a planet crashing when you’re afraid to fly. down on your luck and you’re after spilling own-brand diner ketchup on your only nice trousers

floridian oranges

the thing we learn early on about rico rizzo is not only that he’s a hustler with a sharp tongue, but also that he’s a dreamer the same way joe is. living in near-squalid conditions with barely a penny to rub between his fingers — his pockets fat with little else but loose tobacco and scraps of paper — and a host of ailments, his survival is almost entirely hinged off his dream of moving to florida. delusion is a powerful thing, and when you’re on the breadline, a clear focus and future goal will get you through the nights where rats scuttle underneath your bed and the frigid air begins to smell like death itself. accepting defeat signals game over. florida is the furthest thing from rico’s new york — inviting, easy, breezy and orange instead of harsh, cold and arduous. florida’s famous for its oranges, citrussy, juicy and full of vitality and vitamins — everything rico is not. the few decorative elements in his squatted apartment are posters for the country and its produce, like subliminal motivators to keep going despite how hard it gets for him. when it’s so cold they can’t stand it, the lads dance jankily to a jingle for orange juice on joe’s prized radio to keep themselves warm. it also makes me kind of emotional how joe ends up jumping on board to share rico’s aspirations for life in a better land not long after moving to new york himself. whatever gets them there fastest begins to motivate him with the same ferocity as his friend.

no matter how desperate the boys’ collective situation becomes, rico remains a pro manifester. he plays out the life the boys will share in miami while joe tries (and fails) to intercept another escourt’s jobs. dog eat dog, after all. rico keeps watch on the wither side of the road, in the dark and the cold. he’s almost smiling as he envisions a reality far from their own: one where they’re dressed suavely, drenched in sunlight, waltzing around a resort packed with women and fineries beyond their wildest dreams. running on the beach, having their shoes shined and being beckoned to by beautiful brroads on balconies. and before the job goes south for joe and the bubble is burst, we see rico at the head of a 360 degrees table, lined with food and flanked by white-coated waiters. rico himself is adding the finishing touches before inviting the throngs to come dig in and eat.

bros who cook for bros <3

calling rico the domestic goddess of the two is a bold statement, but here we are. while he would definitely benefit from an appearance on kim and aggie’s how clean is your house, rico is a good roommate all things considered. he has barely anything himself yet shares what scraps he does have with joe, tenderly asking him to come live with him after their spat on the street. the imminent threat of eviction or death side, he shares his one square meal a day with joe too, cooking with the few bits he can manage to nick from local grocers in his wee cast iron despite joe’s insolence. but one thing about rico: he won’t accept reading at the table (not being present) or not coming to the table when you’re called (him and my mother and grandmother have that in common).

coconut milk

speaking of stolen produce, just because he’s shit-poor, doesn’t mean rico doesn’t have taste. while making another meal for the man who can’t even call him by his actual name, rico waxes lyrical about the necessity of coconut milk:

“the two basic items necessary to sustain life are sunshine and coconut milk. do you know that? that’s a fact. in florida, you got a terrific amount of coconut trees there. in fact, i think they even got ‘em in the…uh….gas stations over there”

stealing salami at a party

stealing ham from the function because you’re dirt poor and your mate is off their tits on yokes trying to ride some aul wan sounds like one of several episode premises of peep show. and my own life. but it was portrayed first in midnight cowboy. after being falsely scouted by some aloof arty types in a diner by having his picture taken (GDPR who?) and lured to a warehouse party, joe insists on rico joining him. they’re co-dependent as fuck at this stage that even despite his reluctance and greasiness because of the fact he is literally on death’s door, rico obliges. but this party is esoteric as hell and i love that even these two weirdos are like ಠಿ_ಠ

joe eventually realises he can maybe make a dime with this wan he offers him some drugs, leaving the ailing rico by himself to be prodded and picked at by insufferable and probably rich artists. the man, starving and penniless, stuffs some salami in his coat pockets and is caught out by them and made a fool of.

“why’re you stealing food?”

“i was just noticing that you’re out of salami. i think you oughta have somebody go over to the delicatessen, you know, bring some more back”

ultimately, his clapback to when they ask him why’s he’s stealing free food being it’s not stealing if it’s free is a great final bow in his life of struggle and hardship. and because we end up following joe back to your one’s apartment where he struggles to get it up (it’s the drugs) (or is it because, as she implies, he’s gay), we don’t even know if rico got a chance to enjoy the salami in the end.

every cowboy has his day

there’s a lot more to this film that i could say but alas, this isn’t the plot description on wikipedia. also i’m tired. but i did love this movie a lot (spoiler: it got 5 stars from me on letterboxd, fight me if you wish idgaf). there’s a lot to this story in all of its elements that captivated me and at the time of watching, a few days ago, i just didn’t anticipate the food aspects of it to be so striking or apparent, really. the sun eventually sets on poor rico on the back of the crowded, stifled bus to florida where his one and only friend joe calls for help and holds him tight, vowing silently to live out his dream for him — a dream which will inevitably save joe from his own uncertainty and misery. because sometimes you meet people, where where you’re both at your worst, and despite that person not always being there for the long haul, they get you back on your horse and on to where you need to be going.

london: the city i hate to love. an aspirational metropolis, a necessary pilgrimage for those who need escaping from small towns and smaller mindsets, a cauldron bubbling over with diversity and things to do. a place with everything i could ever possibly want — including many of my friends — and yet i have a brick placed between me and embracing it fully. like it’s contagious. like proximity could coax me into coming over myself and staying. i have to keep my boundaries locked with london. though i do let myself indulge in a good time when i’m there.

every london visit usually hinges off a couple of days — 72 hours or less. usually less. it’s a flying visit normally, with an event or plan centring it: a festival, a gig, a birthday. then the itinerary is built around that and what time you’re in work the hours immediately after schlepping back on the last ryanair flight of the night. there’s always too little space in your limited luggage allowance to pack exactly what you need and much more actual travelling involved despite it being just an hour away, technically. but even i’ll admit that the juice is always worth the squeeze.

in london, i get to microdose the life i wish existed in dublin. i get to have everything for a little while, and why shouldn’t i, to semi-quote the band everything but the girl on their perfect track wrong (who coincidentally, we were in london to see). ian nabbed two tickets to see them play an intimate set in hackney’s recently-saved-for-now moth club (a venue i’ve always wanted to visit). there’s a freedom, a floating, a flâneuring about that’s more possible in london’s thriving streets and postcodes that, dare i say, isn’t as expansive in dublin, which often feels like it’s being held by the throat by corporate colonialism.

another track by everything but the girl — five fathoms — explores this freedom, this metropolitan mooching about. loving a city and it, in turn, loving you. it reminds me a lot of when i’m london or on the continent in places like berlin or barcelona or wherever; whether accompanied by sunny d warmth raining down on your skin as you sip away on a caña or an austere, eastern chill nipping at your face and fingertips. tracey thorn sings:

I drag the city late at night
It's in my mouth, it's in my hair
And the people fill the city
Because the city fills the people, oh yeah

and she’s singing about me: here in a land whose parliament is the reason i speak their language better than my own. but i’m parking all that and soaking it all up with a big, fat straw. the opportunity, the endless potential, the excitement. it’s all for me, if i want it. it serenades me with a cheeky wink and an “alright, darlin’?”

naturally, the eating and drinking of being in another city or country is the best part. you don’t need to be a food writer or whatever the fuck to know that. with every other national or international excursion, my research is done typically before i even have flights or accommodation on lock. except for london. i don’t know, maybe it’s having a wealth of friends there (or here) who will prattle off a host of recommendations before the postcode i’m staying in even leaves my lips. maybe it’s because there’s so much there that to make plans cuts you off from the possibility of serendipitous discovery. so i tend to go in with a mostly free schedule. i don’t open it up to the floor of instagram stories (my DMs are already an unopened mess). i just lay in wait; because the recs will find me.

huge shoutout to for her expertise as a london local and food writer and eater for so many years, for not only sharing most of these places with me, but for being there with me and ian for a good few of them too. and also a massive shoutout to , a regular london visiter, for giving me a fat stack of her favourite spots over the counter of my workplace the day before (though only two of them i managed to squeeze in).

1. feed the fox pop-up, n5 kitchen

first thing off the flight — or indeed, after the trek from standsted airport through tottenham hale — the hunger kicks in. the early hustle through dublin airport and the joylessness of a ryanair flight nips hunger right in the bud, for me. an oat flat white and a pre-packaged porridge thing from cloud picker in terminal 1 kept me going from 6am til about midday; where after a brief mooch around finsbury park charity shops, we met cissy at n5 kitchen. a fellow baker of hers, sarah fox, who once worked at dublin’s no messin’ was doing a pop-up for her venture, feed the fox, promising sandwiches and treats. perfect. the queue was made up of thirty-somethings in olive tones, knitted bonnets and salomons (carrying either babies or small dogs) and stretched right down the road, though we got through it quick enough. the menu consisted of 3 focaccia sandwiches — a chicken caesar, a squash and feta and a beetroot one with hazelnut cream and salsa verde. £12 for the addition of a sweet treat: donuts, lemon yum-yums or viennese whirls with cardamom and rhubarb.

2. few pints, mackintosh ales

i’m not strictly an airport pints person. despite my love of a drink, the idea of downing one before the sun has risen turns my stomach. however, i am strictly into the idea of having a pint as soon as is socially acceptable when i’m on my holliers (if that’s what a sub-48 hour trip constitutes). i didn’t realise that london pub hours on a sunday were almost more conservative than in ireland — with very few places open before noon or 1pm. but after our lunch at n5 kitchen, we were directed over to stoke newington to a pub called mackintosh’s. our stroll in the light rain led us to a modest courtyard building with a glossy green wooden facade. inside was even more modest, with a small mustard bar, two taps, one barman, a bar barnacle reading, light internet radio playing on the solitary speaker and a few repurposed church pews and bar stools dotted around the few tables there were. it was quiet as i asked for two pints (one pale ale, one bitter — the only options, brewed next door). i felt self-conscious a bit at first, but as more stragglers came through the door, i began to sup up the place like the pints before me. the fixture at the bar reading his book must have clocked our accents as me and ian found ourselves talking about the pope because he deigned to chat to me on my second visit up to order a pint. his name was ted and he was from portrush originally, through he’d lived in stoke for 20 years. he was an old man with a wiry, white bush of a beard and globular, cherry-red cheeks, a bit gnome-like. he was in heavy contrast to the rest of the patrons, like myself and ian or the 6’4 nonbinary person in a fur coat and platform boots who came in with their huskey. it’s always a good sign of a place for me: diversity of clientele.

3. breakfast sandwiches at the dusty knuckle

third sandwich of the trip (we’d had an decent-enough bánh mì the night before for dinner) came via the dusty knuckle bakery, which i’d heard about from so many people. passing cafe oto, which looked too suave and unforgiving for my lightly hungover state, we gingerly heading around the corner behind what looked like a dead-end street, ventured down only by binmen and delivery trucks. after a brief bit of cursing google maps, ian spotted the milk crate with the white and red branding beckoning us down. the place was surprisingly hopping of a monday morning pre-11am, bustling with people, chatter and miley cyrus blasting at a million decibels. the menu provided exactly what we both needed, but my god was this the most overstimulating place i’ve ever been in. i work in the fumbally which in itself is loose with its structure, but as i waited for our food and coffee — ian had to head outside for his sore head — i marvelled at how it operated with such terrible systems and setup. one of the women dropped our bag of food on the ground without much of an apology, but i can gloss over that. because their americano was genuinely one of the nicest i’ve had in a long time — here or abroad. and the breakfast sandwich i ordered — with chilli, cheese, egg and coriander — was exactly what i was craving. served on floppier focaccia than sarah’s the day before, but saltier and easier to eat in a less-than-100 state. the wind had picked up and the outside eating area was just as chaotic as inside the bakery, with an erratic playlist that jumped from song to genre within 30 seconds, and a dog that refused to stop yelping in the same time signature.

4. pints at the pocket pub

before the gig, we’d arranged to meet some pals beforehand at the pocket, in islington. cissy and jess were friends with one of the guys working the bar and that was as good a reason for me. the pictures i’d seen in my independent pre-search showed a literal pocket of a bar with deep mahogany furnishings and a myriad of bar taps. a dream. but upon arriving, the outer windows were fogged up from the amount of life inside, sheltering from the rain and the threat of monday morning. it was jammers, and there were two lads on a double bass and a piano inside the front door playing some live jazz. it was a bit mental but much more bearable than the dusty knuckle earlier in the day. i didn’t get any pictures but i did get to see my friends briefly, supping down a 7% cloudy IPA that tasted like divilment. i wished we could’ve stayed longer but we had to make a beeline for moth club before the gig (where i bumped into tracey thorn and ben watt of everything but the girl in the hallway after coming out of the bathroom). also sorry to the person going to town on her nose in the above photo.

5. macgillycuddy’s reek, batch baby

it’s one thing to benefit from the knowledge of friends in their locale; it’s another for them to curate their suggestions perfectly to your liking. another place cissy brought us to for coffee on monday — famously a day of refuge for us hospo workers — was called batch, baby. i knew as soon as i heard the name this was gonna be *cheryl cole voice* right up my street. set in a brutalist shared building with artist spaces and other things, the ground floor cafe had a hefty menu with a host of speciality drinks which caught our eye, one coffee already woven into our bloodstreams. as someone who doesn’t go out of their way to drink matcha nor really cares for iced lattes, i can be tempted by something that’s a bit of both, but with more depth to it. and then i clocked it on the menu: the macgillycuddy’s reek. named after the biggest mountain in ireland who you’d rarely even see or hear at home, let alone on english soil. a hot slightly sweetened filter coffee (my fave) with oat cream foam and the seasoning you’d be used to on an irish coffee. a bit of hot, a whisper of cold and a touch of zest. it was gorgeous and served in that stunning orangey-brown pyrex so evocative of the 70s.

6. aussie shapes at dan’s

post-batch, the claws of the hangover began to sink into our skulls. left to our own devices, we did more traipsing around which, coincidentally, is one of my favourite things to do when i’m in a new place. but especially in london. there’s so much to see in every postcode. there’s similarities to home, but little enough that it still feels exotic. the caffs, the business names, the types of people you pass, the fancy gaffs. after a couple of hours drifting in and out of charity shops, UNIQLO and here and there, my thirst was rearing its head again. dan’s was a wine bar that i’d been suggested by friends and google maps due to how close it was to our accommodation and by sheer luck, it was open on monday — famously a day of respite for those of us who work in hospitality. ian was getting worse before he got better so to entice him to walk from angel to dalston again, he made a pitstop at gregg’s for a sausage roll. we were the first ones in the door at dan’s. my earnest chattiness was a wee bit too much for the aloof woman working there, i think, but she still entertained me. their snacks menu, written in chalk, was the kind of shit you see in every cool wine bar: bread and butter, olives, etc. but one snack caught my eye: aussie shapes. what are they, i’d asked the woman, an aussie herself. expecting her to say something like chicken nuggets, she’d told me they were flavoured cracker like yokes that were a bit of a nostalgia thing. i ordered them immediately for the R&D of it all, sending a picture to my aussie friend clara who replied with an instant with WHERE THE FUCK DID YOU GET THOSE? and having never heard of them before, i think i’m now myself a convert. the sweet chilli flavour actually had hints of spice unlike sweet chilli crisps in ireland and the uk which just taste saccharine with no spice. and the crackers actually served as a better combo with an easy-going natural wine than a bowl of fancy crisps do, as we lay back on the low tapestry couch, watching the sun dance in through the windows.

7. the last supper at kiln

the final stretch of evening we had left was reserved for a slightly less casual dinner than the previous night’s. i’d gone tback to trà’s wonderful list of places for dinner, narrowing them down between ease of getting to, what was open and what we were in the mood for. we settled on kiln, plonked on a sub-street off oxford, a part of london i don’t particularly like or spend that much time in. it’s busier than your east london joints, its commercial, it’s not as charming. like grafton street on speed if it took itself more seriously, or the real life incarnation of perfume and wristwatch ads in a glossy magazine. but kiln was a nice little gem, whose thai menu intrigued us while not scaring us off financially. we got in just before the crowds and were sat in less than 10 minutes at the steel counter where we watched the chefs work over flames and chatted to them. thai food always manages to strike that sweet spot between big flavours and freshness and meat done well — which was exactly what we got here. there was a bit of googling on our part but we started off with celeriac miang, a one-wrap bite with juicy kumquat. we followed that with shrimp relish and rhubarb, gai yang with smoked chilli, long pepper curry of ox tongue and claypot baked glass noodles. there may have been two glasses of le coste natural wine in there for me too. i can’t speak for ian, but i left with a prickle of heat in my tongue and a pleasant satedness rounding off my trip.

8. the sour cherry on top, gelupo

after a load of spice and the edge of the hangover being taken dulled, ice cream was the natural next step. kiln doesn’t do dessert so we asked one of the chefs where to go and he suggested gelupo, the gelato offshoot of the italian restaurant bocca down the road. like the murphy’s of soho, it’s menu boasted such a range of inspired flavours that it was hard to choose. but once i saw ricotta & sour cherry, my work was done for me. sitting in a wee ice cream parlour nursing a cup of gelato is one of the last safe havens in this world, i think. sheltered from the reign of traffic beyond, it was just me, ian and my ice cream; not yet enduring the mental exertion of getting to and from the airport and back home for not enough sleep. i paired the cherry with an affogato and coffee flavour, happy enough to go back to normality after.

there’s more i want to say about my conflicted feelings about london, but i can’t concoct them right now. if i’m to be a decent-ish writer, i should use another lyric from everything but the girl and say i wanna love more. but that’s about as much as i’ve got in me for now. i’m on a bus from dublin to tralee with no working sockets ahead of a half-marathon on valentia island that’s due to be pelted with ferocious weather. it’s fair to say there’s more going on in my mind than detangling my own feelings about other places. that and i’d like to shamelessly plug that i have the utmost honour of getting to read at the upcoming salon rógaire event, hosted and organised by the incredible . the theme is newsletter which is something i know a thing or two about and will feature myself, the aforementioned , and on april 7th in the winding stair. tickets can be found here and you should definitely come along x

patience is a virtue that, over the years, i have honed pretty well. i certainly didn’t inherit it from my parents nor come fully equipped with it. patience probably isn’t natural to anyone, even the most diligent of monks, to be fair. people’s respective fuses all have their own breaking points and can depend on a whole host of external factors. mine can be on a short leash when dealing with the general public who are famously thick, when someone’s playing tiktoks out loud on the bus while forgoing headphones or when i can’t get something to work because it requires a specific knowing or hand that i don’t possess. it takes serious work to keep a lid on it day to day.

but i can — and try to — exercise more saintly patience when i can. i’m actually really good at queuing, entertaining myself by keeping my hands clasped in front of me and fastening a drishti to some spot on the wall beyond the cashier. i’m patient with children (you have to be, they’re only small). and i’m patient with the seasons. despite being naturally susceptible to various mental malaises, i don’t suffer too badly from SAD (seasonal affective disorder). thank god, says you, because you live in ireland. the winters aren’t the worst, but they sure as fuck aren’t pleasant. and when the first 60 days of a new year bring nothing but relentless rain and the country plunges into collective misery, its pretty handy that i can wait it out pretty well, promising myself that spring is so soon.

you can’t always hang hope up on a promise so flimsy: irish spring, an american brand of nuclear green soap and a recurring event that can be as beautiful as it is fickle. spring starts in february — argue elsewhere — when we’re still in the chokehold of winter, meteorologically-speaking. the grand stretch is beginning to unfurl but now it’s somehow wetter and more baltic than january was. soon, i tell myself as i endure another day of arriving to work drenched to the marrow of me. soon the daffodils will wink at me from beyond the kerbs and the grass will be dry enough to be mown, filling the air with that gorgeous, green scent of freshness. soon i’ll leave the gaff in a light jacket — or no jacket at all — and the sun will plant little smooches of heat over every ounce of skin i choose to bare. this way of thinking becomes a kind of mantra in patience practice that’s as natural to me as breathing.

but it’s not all mental grind and discipline because as everyone who enjoys food knows — or should know — the reward for making it through winter is the delicacies of spring; namely wild garlic. i’ve already seen several substack posts from irish food writers on the arrival of wild garlic season and seen it on menus at and in work at the fumbally. it’s worth celebrating because one, it’s delicious; and two, it’s a sign that you’re through the worst of it for another 8 months. these verdant and fragrant green leaves are a punchy little emblem of the warmer, brighter days incoming. last year, a walk up killiney hill left us a bit short and in fear of the small bounty of wild garlic leaves being doused in dog piss. then the season passed us by. so on my work-regulated monday off, i vowed to snatch some up.

ian accompanied me after he finished work, when the sun conveniently broke through the grey as we drove 19 minutes up the n11 to glen of the downs, a wooded spot tucked off the road between loughlinstown and greystones. my mam worked in bray and i had plenty of cousins in bray who i regularly visited so i traversed this stretch of road a lot growing up. i distinctly remember my parents telling me about some eco-protestors who had housed themselves in the trees here for years after plans to construct a building complex through glen of the downs had been proposed. as the car rolled by, i always kept an eye out for signs of life in the trees, slightly afraid because at the time, i didn’t know what a protest was.

this time, the only thing i was on the hunt for was wild garlic. i was expecting we’d trudge on up the inclined paths and find the treasure deep in the heart of the woods. but when i opened the car door, i realised it was all around us, right there in the car park. and there was shitloads of it, too. myself, ian and mira ventured a little bit further inwards and filled up a plastic container to the brim, that lovely waft of garlic hanging in the air and all around. if you closed your eyes, you could almost imagine you were near a pizzeria or something. though the leaves were literally everywhere, i was conscious of not taking more than i needed and of course, leaving the place almost as i found it. peace and love and kisses to mother earth, etc.

home and straight into our duct-taped, banjaxed food processor hanging on by a few plastic shreds went the wild garlic, blanched to keep its colour (thanks to ian for that), lemon juice, a dash of pickle brine, good olive oil, heaps of black pepper, smaller heaps of sea salt, flat leaf parsley, a light amount of grano padano, spinach, soaked cashews and some seeds. i’ve had so many versions of wild garlic pesto made by so many different hands and i don’t think i’ve ever tasted a bad one. but i don’t care too much for preciseness in recipes, so i doubt i’ll ever make one that tastes the same again. this one had a tiny note of sweetness to it that i think might be down to the pickle brine, and the odd crunch from an intact sunflower seed; but it was still good. and so green!

i’d gotten some trecce pasta because i didn’t think my best girl, rigatoni, was the right one for the job. i like the way the pesto files itself away throughout the pasta ringlets without being fusilli. fusilli is for five year olds — again, argue elsewhere. once that was sufficiently mixed, i split a blob of macroom’s gorgeous buffalo burrata to add on top. the creamy milk inside burst forth like the chestbuster from alien and gave me a bit of a fright but look, theatrics are all part of the process. i cracked another healthy go of black pepper on top and finished with some lemon zest and a drizzle of olive oil. a lovely, simple dinner for a monday evening. a lovely green dinner for paddy’s day eve.

you’ve made it to spring, babes. you may pass go, you may collect your prize out in the woods or in your local park or wherever it finds itself growing near you. marshy woodlands or public parks. stuff your metaphorical pockets and make delicious stuff. your patience has paid off and now you can reap the fruits of it, blitz it up and eat it on your toast.

algorirhmically, i’ve been made to feel like kelly osbourne’s sunken-in face at the brit awards should have been the main focal point of my day. something that i should share into group chats and discuss fervently in the few precious moments i can scrape with colleagues or friends or my partner. and it nearly was. i hate it. this image-oriented “media moment” was something that i’ve tried to stave off the fringes of my attention through the dogged, determined will of a recovered anorexic but also as someone who exists in the world that i do currently.

that is to say: a fraught one.

i don’t care for celebrities the way i did ten years ago. as someone who exists in this current iteration of the world, paying bills, watching suffering in HD on a screen and struggling financially regularly, i can’t care — even for the ones i used to fervently idolise. i can’t relate to the glitz and the glamour or the spectacle the way i used to, nor am i able to separate it all from their more “relatable” BTS personas. it doesn’t make sense anymore to me. if you’re hitting up multiple awards shows in a few weeks, you’re less likely to be someone who can’t afford the bus in the same amount of time which is where we differ as people. sometimes i even feel pangs of bitterness that i can’t afford the same kinds of holidays that my friends, who have better paying jobs, are booking — and we’re in the same tax bracket, for the love of christ.

it’s not all necessarily stemming from envy, but i guess it’s just recognising that cutting my interest off with people who don’t share the same concerns or reality that i do in my community and the world at large is a good thing actually. that sometimes the energy spent obsessing over someone’s work done or weight lost could’ve been better tending to someone or something more tangible and important. more down to earth. that their world is not to be aspired towards and mostly is just some kind of shiny puppet show that means sweet fuck all in the grand scheme of things.

kelly’s face even serving as a mantle upon which this post could hang annoys me. that i needed to include someone’s topical, neurosis-riddled extreme weight loss pisses me off. a rich person’s weight loss — even if they, as a younger version of themselves, experienced othering and fatphobia — being praised or marvelled at does not interest me. out of self preservation as a woman intent on not regressing back to previous behaviours AND as a woman who can appreciate that thinness is next to facism. and yet here i am using it as the hook for this post. i’ll take my hypocrisy crown with me as i go, go raibh míle maith agaibh.

thankfully for me this week, there was a lot more going on than just kelly’s — or indeed, jim carey’s — face. shit more substantial, shit more deserving of my brain space. the attention economy is so starved it’s getting us worked up over literal gauntness (just not the kind caused by famine, starvation and geopolitics). someone on tiktok commented on a video of mine earlier in the week saying that i needed to go to turkey for my teeth that i’ve always hated. that would’ve bothered me before, maybe. when i saw the comment, i was already out and about, my feet dressed in red socks with little teeth embroidered on them (ezra williams merch that i bought at merchy christmas). it was a saccharine dose of coincidence. rockets were flying across the skies in the middle east as i read that comment and suddenly, i loved my teeth, crooked and discoloured as they may be.

in the general running of my day-to-day, this shit holds no real weight, pardon the pun. internally yes, i am always conscious of my corporeal prison and how much i’m moving and consuming and how it manifests physically from the outside. but that’s like the purring of an engine while you’re driving the car — it’s all happening under the hood and still you’re driving, singing along to the radio, chatting to whoever’s in the backseat, tapping on the steering wheel, thinking about what junction to avoid, etc. because you have to, or it’ll consume you. it exists but so do you. there’s more important stuff to contend with: what day the green bin is going out, paying off the debts to your boyfriend from financially bailing you out several times, what to do about the mould festering on the wall by the stairs, the state of the world and all its horrors, having a go of the rope swing installed on a tree in your locale when you need a boost of whimsy.

outside of this, i’ve managed to keep the lid on and the rain more or less out. i performed don’t tell me by madonna as part of gcn’s so you think you can drag fundraiser night in the george last week, supported and cheered on by friends, acquaintances and the queers of dublin. in my new role at work at the fumbally, we underwent 2 days of interpersonal training that bonded and united us as a management team, solidifying why i want to continue working there in the capacity that i am. i giggled and laughed ‘til i cried in the presence of my friends, zipping out in the night, kinetic with giddiness, on the hunt for ice creams. i was forgiven for personal slip-ups.

on the night of tuesday’s blood moon, after a couple of celebratory post-training pints, my empty tank demanded sustenance that was 1. local and 2. cheap. from the window of kavanagh’s pub came the alluring artificial glow of chicken hut across the road. why did the sian cross the road? to get to the 4 piece chicken and chips box on the other side, complete with dip and can of palestine cola for under €7.50. the temperature had plummeted sharply after a few lofty promises of spring finally coming, warmer weather and blooming purple crocuses in its mouth. i was wearing denim three quarter length shorts and loafers much too close to the ground to provide warmth. the moon sat silently above me, swollen and luminous; watching as i, cradling my box of chicken and chips, weaved through the lanes of dublin 8 on the way to my bus stop. i normally hate walking and eating in any capacity — always with a hot step and somewhere to be that doesn’t suit digestion — but that night, i felt connected to myself, to my hunger, to the universe. people walked by me and i had no qualms about sucking the chicken clean off the bone or popping another chip in my mouth. nor did they, i’m sure.

there’ve been plenty of times where i would’ve berated myself for lack of discipline — for eating a snack box from a fried chicken joint or for several pints on a tuesday evening with work in the morning. but that evening, i simply did not care. i relished my not caring. discipline has been readopted by the pro-ana girlies who’ve been co-opted by the far right and it’s all a rotten pipeline that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. but things are waking up, grounds are shifting and a new version of life is yawning and stretching into being (both good and bad). but for me, it feels like my petals have finally broken open after clammed shut for some time. the exposure to the air is fresh and new and exciting. and none of it has anything to do, really, with how i look or whose collarbones were debuted to record levels of sharpness at X red carpet.

class shit altogether.

on a frigid-cold february evening, hundreds of bodies packed in tightly together on the coved street between the hoxton hotel and madame pho and danced in the name of justice. we were all there for one reason: to protest the hotel which, just this week, sought an injunction against its neighbouring nightclub, yamamori izakaya, due to late night noise complaints. in a tale as old as time at this stage, this news was the straw that broke what’s remaining of the already-banjaxed backs of a lot of dubliners, myself included. the word hotel, for many of us living in ireland, is now synonymous with greed, with culture death, with foreign money. and an english hotel, no less, coming in fresh off the business class plane, branding itself as this cool new space for tourists and locals alike, having the liathróidí to start picking on an independent spot that’s been providing people with a space to unwind and let go for over 15 years, is just too much to bear.

because you see, this malarkey is nothing new and it’s as exhausting as it is enraging. an international business moves in — usually with very little to offer the citizens of dublin — then begins its play to elbow out the spaces who’ve actually been providing for those of us that live here, like a real life version of monopoly; knocking the little guys off their stoops, one by one, until dublin is nothing more than a homogenous playground for tourists wielding carroll’s bags and mass-produced trinity college varsity hoodies. a hotel for hotels is what it’s come to look like here. for all its fat-pocketed developers, dublin city has itself developed into a sort of graveyard in the last ten years or so, its streets haunted by the ghosts and good times of music venues and art spaces past. the complex, the bernard shaw, jigsaw, jaja, unit 44. in its wake, pardon the pun, are a host of shiny new international chains and corporations who have latched on and leeched heartily, providing sweet fuck all in return. ireland’s GDP is supposedly one of the best in the world, yet we’re all struggling to pay rent, on the cusp of moving back in with our parents again (if we haven’t been able to move out in the first place), emigrating in the hopes that the grass will be greener and the rent cheaper, while the figures of homelessness in ireland creeps up and up and up.

i don’t go out nearly as much as i should, to be honest. as someone who usually works weekends, i am now allergic to coming in on no sleep, unlike my younger self who did it and came in in last nights clothes genuinely thinking i looked like a slightly scruffier version of miss liza in the above photo. but i still treasure the sanctity of a night out when the moon is blue and the mood is right. the twitch of anticipatory divilment beforehand is akin to a shot of buckfast. the preamble, the pre-drinks, the pilgrimage to the venue: it’s as delicious as the promise of the night itself. inhibitions get checked into the cloakroom or stuffed under chairs if €2 isn’t handy. your life bullshit doesn’t normally follow you as you snake your way through bodies to get closer to the call of the booth; though, one time, as a poor 24 year old working a cash in hand job, my enveloped wages of €200 disappeared from my bag upon reaching the doors of yamamori tengu. my friend luke paid for me in, the dote. after shedding a few tears of devastation and worming up the stairway with my friends, my eyes quickly dried as the music poured into my ears and my limbs began to move as if it was their vocation. the power of a bop, lads.

there’s also very few places on earth that rival a dancefloor when it comes to creating a solid sense of unity among people. broad city’s ilana glazer was right — in the clurb, we are all fam. who you are in the light of day, where you’re from, what you do, who you fancy or what you’ve done or not done is irrelevant; what matters is that you move. like, idk what the craic is in coppers or dicey’s but i’d say it’s the same situation: when mr brightside comes on, i’m sure a sea of county-coloured cops-to-be and student nurses fly into a fit of euphoria en masse. every time i’ve had the pleasure of seeing a donal dineen set, who famously cannot stop playing like his life literally depends on one more tune, i’ve indulged in a tangible sense of communal joy that is so rare these days that it feels like what old people make out going to church to be like.

the raw energy and buzz of being out dancing is the antithesis to the sanitised, sexlessness of the corporate world. bodies so close together it’d send a head of HR into a tizzy. mouths stretched out in grins, gurns and gnashes of lips and teeth. laughter is infectious and the breeding ground for what can send you reeling with the giggles is so fertile it could be considered contagious. the floors are sticky and the smoke plumes will cling to your clothes, but sure, that’s tomorrow’s problem. and when the club finally spits you all back out, there’s that thrumming feeling that zips through the very foundations of you reminding you that you are alive, as cold night air licks along your exposed skin.

if they could bottle the flood of dopamine that emanates from a sweaty, packed dancefloor, my god they’d make a mint and we’d be fucked. and standing on the street last night in inappropriate footwear for the freezing temperature, i felt hopeful. it felt like things could change. that as a group of people — determined and fed up with constantly being taken from in a city we struggle to afford — we could literally take back our city. that we could congregate, dance and feel joy in a world so cold, cruel and conservative. that we could demand better for our own lives. and all on the first trot of the year of the fire horse. it felt charged, it felt powerful, it felt like a seismic fuck you to corporate greed.

it felt similar with the momentum to save the complex and that came to an abrupt and anticlimactic end. it‘s hard to not have your optimism for community power ground down to a nub by the irish government and its blatant lack of giving a fuck. their job is to work for us, the citizens. i think we forget that. i think they do too. vulture funds, venture capitalists and genocidal and fascistic world leaders seem more important to mícheal and the gang. i think leinster house should be emptied out and turned into a club slash leisure centre slash outdoor lido slash bowling alley slash late-opening cafe slash jazz club. it’d do more good that way. see if they can rustle up a few fucks then.

in the meantime, as twee as this sounds, it’s worth reminding (to myself as much as anyone else) that dancing is radical. dancing is community, dancing is freedom. clubs have more to offer than a hotel chain settling in, with no real intention to give back to the people of the land they’ve taken up. they ask not of KPIs. AI cannot thrive in them. also everyone looks hot, more or less, when they give over to a boogie. so on that note i say: long live izakaya, long live clubs. blessed be the dancefloors and the feet that stomp the living bejaysus out of them.

“you’d be such a good mother” are words that i — and countless other women, surely — have been told by sundry men in our time. men who, usually, know very little about us. and from the kinds of men who’ve said it to me over the years, i’ve come to assume it’s merely a flimsy flirting technique or implied as a sort of, i don’t know, compliment? that we, on the receiving end of this sentiment, should be elated that a man has deemed us suitable for childrearing. it may seem harmless in its fecklessness but for me, it always flings me off into an internal, white-hot fury. these men have never known anything enough about me to even guess my surname let alone be so confident in their assessment of me as a potential mother. and have more often than not, not been dissuaded in their opinion by my own feelings on the topic.

i don’t want to have children, i never have. when i was younger, i used to feel compelled to armour myself with my extensive list of reasons as to why i didn’t want them, defiantly, like i was defending my right to live if anyone ever asked. from a very young age, admitting i didn’t want to have children was always met with indignant replies of “ah, you’ll change your mind” from women older than me. younger and not even really that less wise than i am now, i always had to prove that i knew myself better than the flippancy these women shut me down with — women who hadn’t really had as much of a choice in having children. like my own mother, herself a child of 12. i’ve spent so much time justifying my reasons as if i was appealing to a jury of people who would never have any proximity to my personal life thus, my engagement or not in motherhood. i no longer feel the need to do this, thank fuck.

yeah i could be a great mother. i harbour a lot of the classic traits that “good mothers” are supposed to carry: patience, kindness, empathy, warmth, selflessness, the ability to think on my feet and multitask to beat the band. but i can also lack patience, i can be unkind, my empathy eventually has its limits. when stress gets to me, i can snap or shut down. sometimes i can be cold. i’m prone to bouts of crippling depression the way some people are lifelong magnets to cold sores. i’ve never been good at earning or keeping money. i can be selfish with my time and my space. i don’t like to give up things i enjoy. my body dysmorphia has always made me morbidly petrified of the body horror that is pregnancy. i hate the smell of warm milk, piss, shit and vomit. i still can’t drive.

i live in a first world country and i’m so far from ever remotely being trafficked or sold into a marriage i don’t want. unwanted motherhood did creep its way into my concerns though in the years before the repeal movement took on more momentum after the 80s. stories from the magdalene laundries stayed with me, as did this country’s generations-deep treatment of women in general. having sex with men terrified me deep down — even with condoms, which i would insist on despite being on the pill. the fear of waking up one day with a scant bank account and a clear blue line indicating pregnant was a recurring, waking nightmare for years. having to tell my parents, having to figure out a way to afford a trip and a procedure in england. the thought of that not happening and having to see it through to a screaming, crying heap in my arms. thankfully, i’m on my second IUD which is as much of a peace of mind device as it is a literal life-saver, keeping me safe from pregnancy and easing my PMDD symptoms. i love modern medicine :)

only at one point in my life did my desire to not have children waver. due to what i can only assume was an age-related hormonal push from my body to get me to do my “biological duty”, i was coerced into thinking i wanted to have babies around the age of 25. funnily enough, this was also the time my PMDD really hit its stride, making me so emotionally volatile at times that pregnancy seemed like a better option than feeling suicidal every month. the problem was though, that i was deluded into a brief period of intense baby-fever that at once consumed me as it thoroughly rattled me. having kids was never something i fantasised about or dreamed of — quite the opposite. thus, i was hella spooked. i was with my boyfriend of the time and though that relationship, too, was brief in the grand scheme of things (7ish months), i was convinced i wanted to have children with him. it led to some truly cringe feelings and admissions that only when i was dumped, did i snap out of it entirely and wonder who the fuck had possessed me during that time. it make me break out in hives when i think about it. seven years later and those feelings haven’t surfaced again once.

i did always know though, that i wanted a dog. we never had one growing up — no pets at all bar a few goldfish when i was very small, named after myself and my three friends in play school. i’ve always yearned for a dog as a wee companion, something to love and cherish that didn’t have to be ripped out of me or put through the education system or that could grow up and tell me one day that it hated me. make what you will of that. a dog is not the same as a child, and i don’t want to claim it is and irritate those who are parents to actual children; but they do require a lot of work and responsibility. there’s the minding, the walking, the general caretaking, the medical stuff, the dog-proofing, the poo-picking up and of course, the wariness of what they can and can’t eat. chocolate is the one everyone knows. alliums, too. anything derived from a grape is another one but it seems like a lot of people aren’t aware of that, or simply forget as in my case this week. more on that in a bit.

we adopted our whippet mira three years ago from the incredible people at the kwwspca. she was a princess from day one, a silly little creature who has turned me into even more of a sap than i already am. she’s cute, curious, silly and social and every single day since we first met and i held her in the back seat of ian’s car while he drove us from my parent’s house to ramelton (a 4 and a half hour drive), my love for her has somehow managed to burrow deeper and deeper into the well of my heart. she means everything to me. it’s not like i could never muster up those same feelings for a real human child that grew inside of me, that nursed from me, that was formed through literal copies of the genetic material that makes me me'; but if i never wanted one to begin with, i fear it’d only happen through gritted teeth and delusional perseverance. like how you’d have to force yourself to eat olives in an effort to like olives if you really hate olives. motherhood, for me, would be an acquired taste.

but i don’t want it to be my whole personality — itself hard to not do when the ticking of one’s biological clock is always audible in the back of your mind, since the first time you felt that warm, sticky trickle of blood from your vagina. for me it was at the age of 11. i was still a child when my body announced i could, technically, produce one of my own. grim shit, that is. my decision to not have children is just like the ones made by those who want to have them: personal. i can’t wait until the people i love have babies and i get to meet them and dote over them and spoil them rotten when they’re dying for a night out or weekend away and call on me to babysit. it’s different strokes, is all.

recently enough, someone had told me i’d be a good mother. someone who, as it’s always gone, doesn’t know enough about me to say that with the authority in which they did. the usual lick of anger lit up throughout my body like blue flame in a kerosene lamp, but i did my best to turn it down to a simmer: it wasn’t worth my energy. fast forward to last week, and my good mothering really shone through when, having left mira alone in the sitting room for 10 minutes as i nipped out to the post office, she’d managed to find a box of mince pies that i had no awareness of and horse 3 into her. back to the grapes thing: highly toxic to dogs to the point where a singular raisin can kill a dog. embarrassingly enough for me, i forgot these were laced with sultanas and left the house for a couple of hours. i met ian in town, sat down with him for a beer before we were going to go have dinner in ka shing and told him what happened with a stifled laugh. his face turned to stone and he said, we need to get her to the vet immediately.

that was that. we spent an hour in the car, the effects of the fresh bottle of modelo i’d sucked down in under 3 minutes taking the edge off my anxiety and guilt a wee bit, but not entirely. i’ve killed our dog, my brain bleeted at me over and over again while replaying images of mira lying lifeless on our bed in a puddle of raisin-dotted vomit. the only thing we’d have to remember her by — that and the residual foil casings from the mince pies (lidl all butter, in case you were wondering). she wasn’t dead, nor particularly phased; but she was carted rover to the vet immediately to have her stomach pumped. my nerves were shot and the skin of my fingers shorn to bits from my teeth. the vets retrieved 16 intact raisins in her stomach — one alone being enough to cause fatal kidney failure. she was transferred to UCD veterinary hospital for the night, a place she’d been last year after contracting pancreatitis and costing us about €900. ian picked her up early the next morning and i was to drop her back to the local vet before work, with her IV drip fastened to her forearm, for supervision and blood work. in the few minutes before we left, as i gathered her bits and my own, i found her in the sitting room…having miraculously demolished another mince pie.

this was the point where i sunk to my knees and yelled at a capacity that probably had the neighbours wondering whether they should call the guards. i’d swept the sitting room for mince pies the day before, i’d thrown out the rest and already nearly €400 had already been spent making sure mira didn’t die. i was terrified and ashamed bringing her back to the vet where the receptionist asked me cheerily how she was. she’s eaten a-fucking-nother one, i said, mouth dry with embarrassment and shame. the vet on shift bluntly told me they’d have to pump her stomach again, like a 16 year old who’d gone to town on vodka, and that he knew another vet called mira who was a swinger. i went to work wanting to die. wishing i had a job that didn’t pay meagerly, that wasn’t customer facing while i tried to hold in my emotions about inadvertently killing our dog with fucking mince pies!!!

mira spent another night in UCD that night. and then another. one of the nights ian said to me, imagine it was a real child to which i’d retorted that it’d’ve been easier if it had been a real child. a real child’s guilt would eventually lead them to ‘fess up to their crimes, like if they’d drank toilet bleach or swallowed a razor blade or ate super glue thinking it was bonjela (my sister did this last one at the age of 3). they could scream or cry or vomit respectively. they could warble, mommy i don’t feel good. they could throw tantrums and stamp their little feet. but mira? she could be bleeding through her internal organs and still would just sit there, silent as ever, blinking up at us through her big brown eyes. we’d be none the wiser. and still i’d pick that over a baby.

right now, it’s monday 9th february. the first ever michelin awards ceremony is being held about a 35 minute drive from my house. i am, as always, intrigued to see what it’ll mean for the celebration of ireland’s restaurants. but conversely, i feel broker than i ever have with me and ian being shot €1,600 down the drain due to vet bills. thus, i find myself struggling to muster up any interest. last night, a fiery white chilli my friend clara made for dinner saved me and soothed my soul after 3 days of wondering how the fuck i’m going to financially recover. though on sunday morning, before the sun returned to the skies and before we picked mira up, ian was making eggs. he tossed a knob of butter into the pan and it melted into the shape of…well, a knob. it’s one of the best things to happen all week. a dose of stupidity amongst all the stress. a mickey being one of my favourite terms for a penis but also one of mira’s several hundred nicknames. a very silly coincidence.

this could’ve been three different essays, i think, but given that most of it was pretty recent, it felt right to stitch it all together as one. motherhood feels like a vocation that has not come calling for me like it has for others. i’m glad. i’m delighted to have my girl home but jesus, i am weary from the high drama of it all. from this experience, i’ve concluded several things:

• i never want to see a mince pie again in my life, let alone in my house

• not that many people know how bad raisins are for dogs

• you never know if your vet is a swinger in their spare time

• i definitely am happy never having actual children as long as i live

• mapo tofu is a perfect dish

• mira is one sturdy fucking animal, jesus fucking wept

• even if you think there’s nothing in the dog’s reach in a room, there probably is

• we are getting pet insurance

this weekend just gone, i attended my first ever hen party. a gaggle of us congregated over in doolin — a part of the world i’ve spent a lot of time in growing up and adore — for my friend aoife, the bride-to-be. spoiled by the expertise and military-like organisation of aoife’s three bridesmaids, ciara, johanna and emma, i not only had a great time celebrating my friend on her journey to impending marriage; but also from an anthropological viewpoint, got to witness and participate in the wildness and silliness of the hen party tradition for the first time. and in my findings, noted the main delicacies that accompany the hen party through a weekend of girly debauchery. these are listed below:

• penis straws — environmentally unfriendly sure, but maybe humankind’s silliest, campest invention. the penis straw — whether figurative in appearance or sprouting thick veins more faithful to nature’s own design — is as emblematic of a straight woman’s hen party as eagles and guns are to america. sorry to turtles everywhere, but they’re better than penis-shaped pasta and way more versatile. whatever about your preference — or lack thereof — of genitalia, sucking down your poison of choice is that bit more gas with a plastic or glittery willy perched below your lips.

• baby guinness — if white wine is lady petrol according to morgana, then baby guinness is bitch turf according to me. jot that one down. dark and mighty with the ability to turn even the most demure woman into the human equivalent of a rifle opening fire, shots of baby guinness rarely manifest alone. and no sooner has their name been uttered, than you can expect an envoy of them making their way over, pinched between fingers or aboard a sticky black tray. to drink a baby guinness is like conscription at the hen — it comes for you, not the other way around. and when it does, you better open up and let it slide down the hatch, hun.

• aperol spritz — the ‘20s answer to blue wkd, an aperol spritz is a beverage that is unnaturally coloured and full of shite that’s neither beer nor wine, for the selective or tummy-sensitive. it seems classier than the above as a choice of beverage because it’s associated with italy and the glassware it’s served in isn’t as weighted a commitment as a balloon glassed G&T, say. while they do require multiple parts, people will forgive the lack of orange slices after a certain hour. they can also be made by the guests themselves, enjoyed in whatever vessel is available and still taste grand even when increasing drunkenness skews ratios and technique.

• cigarettes — i’m not going to preface this by saying smoking is bad. but i am going to say how grateful i am that vapes are rarer at a hen than a good, classic cigarette. they’re not totally absent, but when the drinks have taken hold, the karaoke songs are drying up and breakaway groups of chat are beginning to blossom, a vape can’t hold a flame (literally) to that of a cigarette. providing a semblance of sobering up, mental stability, an arena for intimate conversation, pensiveness and/or a solo breather — especially for the non-smokers — a full box of cigs is a non-negotiable at a hen. vogues suck, i have to be honest, and though i’m a rollies girl myself, if it’s a box you’re going for, something with more substance is better. camel blues > silk cut slims. provides a bonus hen game where all cigarette holders fight over who has the most heinous scare tactic image on the front of the censored box (the mangey foot is the worst, in my opinion).

• sundry medicines and tablets — the big three of the hen are also more sought after than any of the above in the mornings: rennies, diarolyte and ibuprofen. if it fizzes in a glass of never-cold-enough tap water or comes sheathed in crinkly silver foil, it’s akin to gold when the transgressions of the night before — or night before that still — come rudely knocking. self-pity floods out of the bloodstream along with cranium-seizing tremors, ragged breathing from one too many cigs and a hefty dose of The Fear. it wasn’t your fault, you were just having the craic. so if you’re lucky enough to be gifted a ziplocked bag of chemical lifesavers the next morning, you’d be forgiven for thinking you did in fact pass away and wake up in heaven. but in actuality, angels do walk this earth (and some have done this hen dance several times, knowing just what to expect and how to salvage their soldiers’ damage).

• prepackaged sweets & jellies — serving a double function of tapas and hen party game apparatus, sweets and jellies will always have their place at the hen. much like cans of smirnoff ice and white claw, their appeal is in their bright colours, convenience, sweetness and ability to be tied to something or someone and repurposed as part of a slightly-humiliating bride-to-be mini game. peach rings, marshmallow flumps, fizzy and sour anything and those wee strawberries are low-cost and fill up a snack table easily. unlike the subsequent category of crisps, they’re also less likely to disturb a meticulously-applied lip combo.

• crisp assortments — while i said what i just said, a savoury counterpart to the above is necessary to the hen. with drinking, the capacity for cooking tends to go down while the need for salt skyrockets. bowls of decanted onion rings, as well as bags of chipstix and meanies are not just a nice snack to have for the girlies — but also a necessary measure to lessen the likelihood of someone getting sick on the carpet in the rented accommodation. the price of tayto multipacks isn’t pretty these days, but a small investment is worth it for the inevitable and rabid pre and post-pints crisp sandwich making and consuming.

and while i’m very delighted to have now popped my hen cherry, i will now be crawling into a hermetic hole for the necessary mental, physical and financial recovery before aoife’s big day arrives in may, hoping to not be tempted by any of the above until then.

nostalgia, like jealousy, is a curse (i’d argue even more so). and right now, we have an overly-saturated, liquid-lipped, 2016-shaped epidemic on our hands. timelines are flooded with some of the worst outfits i’ve seen since living through the 2011 seapunk era (and i’m being dead serious) and i’m genuinely amazed that so many people still were rocking combover fringes that late into the 2010s. throwbacks will always hook people, we know this: to look back at your younger selves and either revel or cower at what you deemed your “best” is like a virus the way it latches onto people and spreads rapidly — and rabidly — across timelines. i’m not trying to be obtuse here, i obviously get that reminiscing about the “good ol’ days” can be a fun and not-that-deep experience for most, as if the act itself cements your personal existence like a flag in the craggy rock of the mountain summit that is this lifetime, as time itself plows cruelly forward.

but doing so often clogs me with a hollow sadness that i can’t seem to explain properly, nor swallow down. things will always look better from the vantage point of your mental rear-view mirror. you can’t escape your current woes, mounting bills or tribulations, but they rarely litter the highlights reel of your past when looking back. maybe that’s better for evolutionary purposes, or something. i used to feel trapped by the immobilising, treacly trap of the past; the future seemed like an unfathomable dimension that i’d never reach. now, i find myself semi-allergic to looking back, as if i might accidentally lean over too far when peering down, lose my balance and get stuck in it again, unable to resurface. there’s a lot of memories that have held me down by my ankles in the dark depths for too long and i’m afraid of getting caught by them again. so i keep my head down, keep pedalling.

also whether it’s ageing or that damn fucking phone, my memory seems to glitch a lot when i do microdose personal editions of reeling in the years which, in turn, makes me feel a bit :/ little chunks of memories — surnames, fragments of conversations, yarns spun over pints, entire months of years — seem to be missing when i go on a retrieval mission in the storage facility of my mind. i’m embarrassed by how much chronically online shit has taken up the space once reserved for the aforementioned, and how much got tossed out to make room for crap that doesn’t serve me at all instead. i pretty religiously kept handwritten diaries from the age of 15 up until about 10 years ago (and a wee bit on and off after that). it’s something i’ve started doing again recently just so that, for the love of christ, if i get to my senior years — or even my forties — i’ll have more substance to my memories than viral tiktok sounds and useless z-list tea that burrowed their way in there like moles.

but if i look at my own version of events in 2016, i’d say it was a good year with a sprinkling of bad shit in there for good measure. it was the year of my first heartbreak, a failed suicide attempt, a sexual assault which i only managed to put properly into words last year, that evil fucker getting sworn into the white house, a slow nosedive of my journalism undergrad degree due to as-of-yet unrealised neurodivergence, worse eyebrows than i care to remember, working in retail and periods of depression that have conveniently wiped out a lot of the year.

but aside from all of that, i was having a pretty good time. i had a lot of sex, was out cycling my beloved blue puegeot racer all the time, and drawing and developing photos like my life depended on it. it was my summer of yokes and acid, of flitting in and out of pubs and cafes like a modern-day flâneur, downing coffees and pints and chats with anyone who rocked up that day. my instagram was colourful and bustling with photography, art and friends, with no ads or AI slop or algorithms intent on making me feel insane. blond by frank ocean came out and latched itself onto my soul. i was literally dopamine-chasing but irl, though i didn’t know it at the time. dublin city held so much promise at the time, so much potential — or so it seemed to me (again, this could be a rose-tinted view from the pits of dublin in 2026 or just youth-induced myopia). less people had emigrated. the city still felt like it loved me and in turn, i loved it right back; all open-mouth smooches and embraced arms. the aortas of my heart may well have been candy-striped red and white like the chimneys that watched over me every day from the coastline.

some of my go-to places are, unfortunately, gone. the bernard shaw — the epicentre of my life, really — was a second home, conveniently combining a large premises for socialising, pints and dinner (via the big blue bus’ fantastic vegan pizza) into one, easy-to-get-to location, full of all the people who i might only ever have seen on my phone otherwise. i’ve never been able to get over the loss of it as a space. then there were the cafes i’d haunt, with pleasant street’s late meet me in the morning never being able to shake me from its outdoor window seat when it initially opened. pouring over coffees and photos just developed from john gunn’s across the road while basking in the late afternoon sun was dreamy shit. something i could afford to do even on a shite part-time wage. there was definitely trips to grogans and kaph, though i preferred pints over at mvp on clanbrassil street, opposite the harold house.

when cycling the 15km to town from my parents’ house, where i still lived, i rarely ventured further from this area of town — especially with an eventual, uphill return on the cards. there were fuel-ups at aprile’s chipper on richmond street, snarfed down on the canal-side with a plastic bag of craft beer cans from stephen street news in tow. in the winter months, the dinnertime refuge took place at super miss sue where masa is now — another establishment i will mourn to the day i die. i was vegan at the time, but was sufficiently happy with an order of steaming, thick-cut chips and a plastic chalice of white wine on the side, enjoyed in the big black faux fur jacket i’d found in vincent’s chazza down the road, watching from the bench as chaos tumbled out of p mac’s across the road. govindas was also still kicking on aungier street for a good feed at a low fee. and when i needed some late night socialising without a pint in hand, i’d take myself to accents cafe’s little downstairs cubby with a soy milk hot chocolate the size of my head and a book. or the tea garden along ormond quay.

it’s weird looking back like this, in a way i haven’t about 2016 at all really since it happened (bar the bad stuff, obvs). that version of me doesn’t seem like a root version of me now. in ways, she’s a better version — underdeveloped, sure, and definitely more naive; but she was so proactive with the things she loved and cared about, in a way i feel i’ve been trying to get back to for a while. that hollow feeling is creeping in a little bit now as i make these analyses, wondering whether i prefer it there or here; wondering whether that version of sian would be proud of — or hell, even like — this one. i can’t tell if i was happier then or now, either. i guess it’s just different. it was literally a different time, a different life.

maybe the retrospective is a good reminder to lighten up a bit, to not take everything (and myself) so seriously all the time. that i’m going to die one day and maybe i’ll at least get a laugh out of remembering seeing grimes getting electrocuted on stage at the olympia or whatever the fuck i was wearing the day i got dumped. that the first time i did poppers (while buzzed from my first yoke) i had to get my equally-high friends to convince me i wouldn’t shit myself. that i could get a pint for less than a fiver and not see joe.ie articles about it every few days. but for now, i’m happy to shove it all back in a box in the filing cabinet of my temporal lobe and let it gather dust until i kick the bucket. as a sagittarius, i’m finding a lot of affinity with this current year of the horse and i’m more than happy to keep galloping onwards, unbound by reminders of how things may have been in comparison to now. 2017 won’t be given any time of day when she comes around, i’ll tell youse that much for nothing x

THE SPIEL

it’s been over a decade since i did my j1 in new york city. brooklyn, specifically. it was a dream: 4 months, a year before trump’s election and at the very nose tip of my twenties. i’d emerged from the confined chrysalis of basically 4 and a half years of post-eating disorder depression like a lamb bouncing out of its mothers womb and into the spring grass on shaky but sprightly new feet. there was a lot of excitement and new feelings buzzing around me — excitement, curiosity, the burgeoning of a first love — and no ground more fertile to let it all blossom than on the streets of brooklyn. on my first week there, i bought a bike that took me all the way from ocean parkway to greenpoint. that bike and the subway became my interchangeable, trusty steeds. and after three weeks, i’d landed myself a job at a health food / grocery store and vegan cafe called perelandra that paid well and kept me fed, well-nourished and paid, most importantly.

perelandra was named after a CS lewis book that i’d never heard of before, nor have read since. it sat demurely on remsen street, wedged between the aspirationally-affluent yet chic brooklyn heights and bustling jay street area, flanked by a barbershop and probation office. through its doors every day were literally all sorts: celebrities, well-off yuppies, people on food stamps, shoplifters, health freaks, vegans, shoplifters, chaos merchants, men whose brains had been melted from overexposure to the entertainment industry, hassidic jewish men who would check every price i rung up according to the weight and calculations of prices they’d pre-recorded in pencil before coming to my till with a trolley full of groceries. it was a great place and i was really sad to hear it closed last year after 50 years in business. that’s showbiz, i guess. but one last culinary impression it left on me was a goo for cornbread, which i’d never had before — or again when i got back home.

perelandra’s all vegan deli and juice bar, snugly fit down the back of the shop by the doors to the walk-in, was a busy little thing. sandwiches, juices, smoothies, baked goods, wheatgrass shots and salads all flew out before 2pm most days; with the same faces coming in in their droves each day, occupying the little space between the glass counter and the ceiling-to-floor wooden shelves teeming with holistic toiletry products. this is also where i had my first chai latte and bought my first moon cup. but the thing that i loved the most from here was their jalapeño cornbread: a decent-size, muffin shape of bright yellow flecked with green that was as spongey soft as it was delicious. if it was a quiet day for the deli, there’d be near squabbles over who got the leftover pieces of it that didn’t sell. growing up in ireland, as many reading this will agree, there was very little exposure to southern comfort food — kfc was the closest thing. so to me, this was a revelation, an eye-opening. i dreamt about it for years.

the other day, the craving resurfaced across the plains of my tongue after reading ’s roundup of meals they’d eaten this year (mostly soul food). one restaurant featured was one that had effaced my radar entirely: bayou, a provider of southern comfort cooking in the heart of cork city. reading the name alone had me racing to instagram to live vicariously through what i hoped would be a grid full of pictures of what was promised by john and sally. spoiler: it was. as much as the united states terrifies and disgusts me these days, i have to admit i’ve always quietly been a bit of a weeb when it comes to the deep south. the swampy gothic of it has enchanted me the same way irish bogs have, but especially the food. so i scrolled, rabidly, down through a feed full of fried okra, gumbo, cajun chicken — actual cajun style not just with a cheap cajun seasoning sachet — pumpkin pie tartlets and the pièce de résistance: cornbread. well lads, that fuelled me enough to ditch my hatred of baking for a moment and declare i wanted and was going to make cornbread.

as you can see from the photo above, it looks pretty good albeit a touch browner than it should be. but i can also attest to it being delicious as fuck — not just from me, but also ian and my coworker paddy. and while i always aim to give credit where it’s due, i’m not tagging the OG recipe writer because the person who wrote it was:

• 1, an american using cups and ounces and all of that unnecessary shite that i can’t get on board with; and

• 2, frankly, not doing a good enough job mentioning a lot of things that should have been mentioned that impacted the process and the bake

so i don’t want them to see that and get offended. sorry babes, it was good but could’ve been better. this is where i’ve come in and where i stop shiting on and deliver.

THE RECIPE

what you’re going to need:

• 4 garlic cloves, unpeeled

• 2 jalapeños, deseeded (i used green serenade chillis but would’ve used 3 if i had them)

• 225g melted salted butter

• 80g brown sugar*

• 3 large eggs

• 480ml buttermilk

• 228g yellow cornmeal (hard to find in ireland but we got one from the gourmet pantry in dun laoghaire; but you can use polenta, i’m pretty sure)

• 120g all-purpose flour

• some additional scúpíns of salt (use your intuition)

• 1 tablespoon baking powder

• 1 teaspoon baking soda

• 1 block of irish cheddar (i used booker’s vintage)

• a bunch of scallions, sliced

• *optional: hot honey but i wasn’t sure if it’d burn quickly in the oven

the process, according to a non-baker:

• preheat the oven full whack then pop the deseeded jalapeños and unpeeled garlic cloves onto a wee enamel tray with some olive oil and roast until the chillis are charred and the garlic is soft. once they’re done, transfer them to a small bowl, cover with cling film, then peel the garlic and finely chop both. but keep your oven lit for later.

• meanwhile, make sure all of your wet ingredients are WARM and your butter MELTED (the previous recipe didn’t let me know this and again, as a non-baker, it led me to calling in the big guns — ian — to help me). whisk the butter and sugar together (i did it by hand but a mixer also would’ve made my life simpler, i fear), then add in the eggs and the buttermilk incrementally until it’s all nice and smooth. if you opt for hot honey, add this in here now too.

• in a seperate bowl, mix all your dry stuff together (another heads-up for my fellow anti bakers out there) before adding it to the slop. that means your cornmeal, your all-purpose flour, your salt, your baking powder, your baking soda (they’re different — ian, if you’re reading, i do remember that soda is stronger). mix all that shit together first and then and only then should you add it to the fold. chaos could ensue otherwise.

• stir your wet and dry ingredients together. i still don’t know why sugar is counted as wet. brown sugar i kinda get, but not really. it should feel nice and moussey and dreamy to fold into itself. keep going, young one, until it’s all incorporated and there’s no telltale lumps of white in there.

• grate your cheddar whatever way you fancy. i used a big ass cheese grater because i like the mozzarella-type shreds of cheese throughout. toss in your scallion rings. add anything else you may fancy (i threw in another cheeky smidge of salt, just because i’m going to die one day anyway).

• transfer all of this to a stainless steel pan and commit it to the oven (which should’ve stayed on from earlier). i cooked mine for about 31 minutes before the fork test proved successful, but because my OG recipe guy said 35 minutes, it ended up a little more browned than i anticipated.

• let her rest for 10 minutes (i did not do this, i was too excited). load it up on a plate, pie-slice style, and enjoy with some barbecued beans, chicken thighs, homemade slaw, mac n cheese and well-cooked corn on the cob. or whatever.

  a lovely crisp bottle of limeburner by kinnegar was a great reward, personally, for my undertaking.

this is my first time writing a recipe — and i didn’t even start from scratch — so massive shoutout to you recipe folk (here’s looking at you , , ) because it’s hard. but most of the above is me trying to put some form on a lot of intuitive stuff. all ovens are different, all brands react differently. some people don’t have stainless steel pans (mine i’ve half-inherited through being with my boyfriend) etc. but this is at the very least, a springboard with which to explore the deliciousness that is cornbread. gallop forth and enjoy x

making this list made me starkly aware of two things: one, how incredibly lucky i am to have disposable income, even at the modest level i do, to spend on food and drink; and two, i really didn’t travel around ireland as much as i would’ve liked to. the nts radio dj distilled the types of years one can have into three categories one morning on her show: you can either have a slay year, a flop year or a maintenance year. now for most of this year, i would’ve said mine was somewhere between a maintain and a flop. but there’s also been a good few slays, so i actually can’t tell what this one was.

i won’t lie, though, financially it’s definitely been a bit of a flop year. money’s trickled in in tight, erratic dribbles and my overdraft’s been put under more duress than usual. i’ve hovered in and around the drain of minimum wage for most of the year which has made saving, planning and doing a bit tricky — but not entirely impossible. when you’re used to not having much, it can make you feel abundant with modest amounts tbh. and within those moments of hot potato-ing tiny lumpsums of my wages, i’ve used it all and used it well. permanent tsb, you can suck my fat one.

so to send 2025 off properly — while also clearing my slate for this new one with a frankly horrific set of numbers in it — here’s a new year’s edition of things i ate & drank that i thought were class as eaten and drank in ireland in the now deceased year of our lord 2025.

COFFEE

the most important substance on this earth to me — far more than water or tea, or hell, even mdma. coffee is as necessary to my unmedicated, adhd-riddled soul as petrol is to a car. the second my feet hit the floor, i need some gas in the tank. it’s a bolster for my mind as it struggles into the guise of something that’s able to operate before 5pm. but also because i love it too. i’m conscious of how often i buy coffee out because i work in a place that does great coffee. also, as we know all too well, it’s not cheap. though when i am out and able, there’s several places that i always know will be worth the small sacrifice to my revolut:

• éist, glenageary (dublin)

• graft coffee, deansgrange (dublin)

• proper order coffee co, smithfield (dublin)

• luna, killarney (kerry)

• shoe lane, multiple locations (dublin)

• two pups, francis street & fairview (dublin)

• clement & pekoe, south william street (dublin)

• the counter, letterkenny (donegal)

• bean in dingle, dingle (kerry)

• cloud picker, pearse street (dublin)

• OMMA, clarendon street (dublin)

• vice coffee, abbey street (dublin)

• mister magpie, leeson street (dublin)

• coffee angel, south anne street (dublin)

• 3fe, multiple locations (dublin)

• happyout, multiple locations (dublin)

BAKERIES

the bakery boom is showing zero signs of slowing in ireland as we take another beheeled step into 2026. thank god, says you. ireland’s rabid desire for all things sourdough and laminated has seen the near-extinction of danish pastries (yuck) and the humble scone (unfortunate). but for me, pastries, baked goods and sweet treats are only a relatively new-ish addition to the roster of things i like to eat and god forbid, let myself enjoy. in the darker caverns of my brain where the ghostly remnants of my ed linger like old cobwebs, there isn’t much room for food whose main components are butter and dough. i was very stubborn about that shit, though i longed for a crispy-shelled pain au chocolat. having a boyfriend who became a baker at two spots on this list for nearly 2 years and more self-compassion, warming in my bones like butter, helped me to see the light. that and half-marathon training. while i’ll still nearly always vouch for the savoury option, i’m starting to catch up on what i’ve been missing:

• ursa minor, ballycastle (antrim)

• bread41, multiple dublin locations (dublin/wicklow)

• scéal bakery, greystones (wicklow)

• blossom artisan bakery, ballymun (dublin)

• elliot’s, arran street & phibsborough (dublin)

• kern’s bakehouse, ramelton (donegal)

• russell street bakery, russell street (dublin)

• no messin’, smithfield (dublin)

• folk espresso, enniskillen (fermanagh)

• artybaker, dalkey (dublin)

• fable, dun laoghaire (dublin)

LUNCH

i’ve never fawned over lunch as a meal. growing up, it was never exciting — sliced pan sandwiches cemented with two scrapings of butter and denny’s ham were the usual buzz, a few crips on the side if you were lucky. lunch was merely a checkpoint in the day, more so than other meals; a bridge between one part of the day and the next. a cessation, an intermission. lunch is unfortunately bound to connotations of work or school; and unless you’re rich or on your holliers, it’s rarely a long one or a fun one. but i’m coming around to what lunch can be, if your wallet is cooperating. sandwiches, after all, are my favourite vehicle for eating food but as cher once asked me, do i believe in lunch after sandwiches? and she took my hand and led me down the path of bountiful luncheon exploration:

• nomo ramen, charlotte’s way (dublin)

• assassination custard, kevin street (dublin)

• tango street food, killarney (kerry)

• ard bia @ nimmos, spanish arch (galway)

• ifi cafe bar, eustace street (dublin)

• bibi’s cafe, portobello (dublin)

• the fumbally, clanbrassil street (dublin)

• chiya, dame street (dublin)

• pho ta, temple bar (dublin)

• dash burger, capel street & kevin street (dublin)

• falafel, temple bar (dublin)

• fish box, dingle (kerry)

• white rabbit, capel street (dublin)

• fairmental, ballsbridge (dublin)

• roundwood stores, roundwood (wicklow)

• castle grove house, letterkenny (donegal)

• lotts & co, sandymount & clontarf (dublin)

• 147 deli, clontarf (dublin)

• eleven deli, greystones (wicklow)

• the pig & heifer, pearse street (dublin)

• umi falafel, dame street (dublin)

• eleven deli, greystones (wicklow)

• la cocina ceuvas, naul (dublin)

• mani pizza, drury street (dublin)

• chimac, aungier street (dublin)

• tang, multiple locations (dublin)

• barack obama plaza (lol), moneygall (offaly)

• amuri deli, chatham street (dublin)

WINE BARS

look, i love to drink wine — let’s get that out of the way. i know i don’t need to clarify that and i definitely don’t need to reiterate it (though i’ve just done both). wine serves a different function to pints — usually, though not always, a need for wine is a klaxon sent out by gals. a need to catch up, to bitch, to unwind, to celebrate. sometimes it’s a calming measure or a solo maith thú as a reward for getting something done: an iud replacement, an arts grant or moving out of a shitty, old gaff. wine is also a vehicle for necessary divilment or camaraderie; and it’s almost always prefaced by a shy, mutual uttering of “will we just get a bottle?”, followed by the slow unfurling of cheeky, matching grins. here’s where i went this year for all of the above:

• two faced, montague street (dublin)

• notions @ two pups, francis street (dublin)

• loose canon, drury street (dublin)

• bar pez, kevin street (dublin)

• barossa wines, sandymount (dublin)

• brindle, lennox street (dublin)

• cellar 22, stephen’s green (dublin)

• 64 wines, glasthule (dublin)

• piglet, cow’s lane (dublin)

• ely wine bar, ely place (dublin)

• note, fenian street (dublin)

• frank’s, camden street (dublin)

• margadh @ the RHA, ely place (dublin)

DINNER

let’s face it: no one has gone to brunch for years and no one in their right financial mind has wanted to. either you pay out your hole for mid eggs and mimosas made without care, and leave feeling rinsed of value and too buzzed to do much else after except lie down. breakfast may be the most important meal of the day, but dinner is the most anticipated. this may change now with rising costs etc, with people’s spending habits morphing accordingly (see, the quiet return of the at-home dinner party). that’s what makes going out for dinner such an occasion and event — it requires planning, people and sometimes a bit of penny-pinching prior. resdiary and opentable can be fickle and cruel mistresses in an already-difficult game of syncing your precious free time to the others in your life, too. but i do believe wholeheartedly that to gather for dinner and drinks is one of the biggest luxuries i get to savour in this life, and i’m grateful every damn time:

• kaldero, stephen’s green (dublin)

• paladar, bridge street (cork)

• the tan yard, killarney (kerry)

• sea shanty, blackrock (dublin)

• tap up, ramelton (donegal)

• sfuso, millenium walkway (dublin)

• lee’s charming noodles, parnell street (dublin)

• terra madre, bachelor’s walk (dublin)

• comet, dawson street (dublin)

• sea shanty, blackrock (dublin)

• o’neills the point seafood bar, reenard point (kerry)

• hang dai, camden street (dublin)

• sister7, smithfield (dublin)

• fired up, goatstown (dublin)

• rei momo, drury street (dublin)

• 505, dingle (kerry)

• jaipur, dalkey (dublin)

• king skewer, cathedral street (dublin)

• el grito, mountjoy square & rathmines (dublin)

• share korea, camden street (dublin)

• l mulligan grocer, stoneybatter (dublin)

• agave, dame street (dublin)

• daruma, parliament street (dublin)

• september, blackrock (dublin)

• kicky’s, george’s street (dublin)

• kinara, ranelagh & clontarf (dublin)

• hillbilly’s, multiple locations (dublin, clare, donegal)

• the old spot, bath avenue (dublin)

• lena, portobello (dublin)

• space jaru, meath street (dublin)

• ka shing, wicklow street (dublin)

• liath, blackrock (dublin)

• fallon & byrne, exchequer street (dublin)

• cantina valentina, the hoxton hotel (dublin)

• arisu korean bbq, capel street (dublin)

• fish shop, benburb street (dublin)

• the seafood cafe, temple bar (dublin)

• reggie’s pizzeria, rathmines (dublin)

• eddie rocket’s, multiple locations (dublin)

• achara, aston quay (dublin)

• variety jones, francis street (dublin)

COCKTAIL BARS

it’s far from cocktails i was reared, i can tell you that for nothing (unless you count vodka mixed with pepsi max mixed and drank in a bush at the age of 15). but i’ve developed a taste for them over the years, for my sins. i like a good cocktail. i simply won’t settle or pay for a less than perfect one and thankfully there are many places that stand proudly behind their serves. five irish cocktail bars were rewarded for their excellence in their craft this year by the pinnacle guide and i’m lucky enough to have frequented 3 of them. accolades aren’t everything, i know, but with long-standing titans like the world-renowned bar 1661 leading the way with cocktail creativity and finesse, the bar is being raised for everyone else across the country (pun fully intended):

• fidelity, smithfield (dublin)

• pig’s lane, killarney (kerry)

• bar 1661, green street (dublin)

• the sackville, sackville place (dublin)

• the big romance, parnell street (dublin)

• the sidecar, the westbury (dublin)

• roe & co distillery, the liberties (dublin)

• kodiak, rathmines (dublin)

• 9 below, stephen’s green (dublin)

PUBS

like a lot of things in the sphere of irish food and drink (spicebags, guinness, crisp sandwiches, etc) i sometimes feel that we’re coming to a total saturation point on romanticising pubs. however, as the granddaughter of a publican and an irish person, i do think irish pubs are worth romanticising. it’s said so much these days — and has since the dawn of their time in irish society — that the pub is not just a place to sink a few pints, but that it is also a place of community, integral to the social fabric of ireland. the pub can be a place of refuge, a meeting place. a place where one goes to celebrate, to catch up, to down sorrows, to escape. sometimes it’s a place that makes a criminally-short hospo break stretch out just a tiny bit. the pub is the ultimate third space, as much as that frustrates me at times. i find it terribly hard to say no to a pint; not always out of an unquenchable thirst for guzzlin’ pints, but because of everything that comes with frequenting a pub. they’re such special spaces that see us, as a nation, through every spectrum of emotion and state of being and you’ll literally have to kill me to stop me from frequenting them. good luck to me, so, after pledging to finally complete a dry january this year. this one is gonna be the longest list of this article so buckle up or get your scrolling thumb ready, a chairde:

• conway’s, ramelton (donegal)

• the liberty belle, francis street (dublin)

• the palace bar, temple bar (dublin)

• dick mack’s, dingle (kerry)

• harold house, clanbrassil street (dublin)

• the lord edward, christchurch (dublin)

• caribou, stephen street lower (dublin)

• the laune bar, killarney (kerry)

• neary’s, chatham street (dublin)

• delaney’s, smithfield (dublin)

• mcneill’s pub, capel street (dublin)

• fitzgerald’s, sandycove (dublin)

• curran’s, dingle (kerry)

• fallons, the capstan bar, the liberties (dublin)

• peadar browns, clanbrassil street (dublin)

• the blue light, barnacullia (dublin)

• the stag’s head, dame street (dublin)

• the hacienda, arran street (dublin)

• the harbour bar, bray (wicklow)

• j o’connell’s, richmond street (dublin)

• kehoe’s, south anne street (dublin)

• arthur’s, thomas street (dublin)

• the pebble beach, clontarf (dublin)

• ainsley house, north strand (dublin)

• jr cleary’s, amien street (dublin)

• mccafferty’s, letterkenny (donegal)

• the headfort arms, kells (meath)

• the glimmerman, stoneybatter (dublin)

• the sandyford house, sandyford (dublin)

• piper’s corner, marlborough street (dublin)

TAKEAWAY

the least chartered territory of this list belongs to takeaway. irish people love a takeaway and i’m not trying to say i’m not like other girls but, i much prefer to slip into a cheaper restaurant when i couldn’t be arsed making food and/or when hungover. sitting on my couch eating a 3-in-1 rarely appeals to me, but i am a human being after all and sometimes i do indulge:

• hawker, rathmines (dublin)

• johnny’s ranch, ramelton (donegal)

• libero chipper, deansgrange (dublin)

• san sab, clontarf (dublin)

• difontaine’s, parliament street (dublin)

• nagomi, monkstown (dublin)

• green dragon well, killiney (dublin)

• bambino, stephen street & merrion street (dublin)

BONUS: IRISH FOOD BRANDS THAT GOT ME THROUGH 2025

a final category as a treat! as much as i love going out to eat, i can’t do it as much as i wish i could, though i was definitely destined to be a socialite with infinite funds who slips in and out of restaurants and bars as frequently as she does fur coats and new gowns. but until that materialises itself, this upcoming batch of food & drink producers are legends, ensuring that i eat just as deliciously when i’m home as i do when i’m out. kindness and genius seems to be a prerequisite to being a small producer in ireland and luckily, i’ve gotten to enjoy not only the produce but also the company of a lot of the legends on this list. spoiler alert: they’re all sound:

• harry’s nut butter (dublin)

• kerrygold (dublin)

• salt rock dairy (wexford)

• fierce mild brewing (louth)

• sawyers (belfast)

• killowen dairy (wexford)

• imbibe coffee roasters (dublin)

• calendar coffee (galway)

• foxes bow whiskey (limerick)

• murphy’s (cork)

• wicklow way wines (wicklow)

• mcnally’s farm (dublin)

• rí-rá lager (wicklow)

• st tola cheese (clare)

• chimac (dublin)

• clonakilty yoghurt (cork)

• kinnegar brewing (donegal)

• olly’s farm honey (dublin & wicklow)

• rivesci (tipperary)

• manhattan peanuts (dublin)

• nearynógs (down/armagh)

• guinness (dublin)

• farmhand coffee roasters (dublin)

• dingle farm dairy (kerry)

• 4hands kombucha (westmeath)

• carlingford oysters (louth)

• wicklow wolf brewery (wicklow)

• young buck blue cheese (belfast)

• dingle distillery (kerry)

• murphy’s ice cream (kerry)

• lilliput stores (dublin)

• picado mexican (dublin)

• sheridan’s cheese (dublin & galway)

• west kerry brewery (kerry)

• folláin (cork)

• cashel blue (tipperary)

was going to do another list of places i want to eat at in 2026 but i think that’s another post for another day. also as i said before, there’s probably several places that slipped through the tiny circles of my sieve brain but alas, my eyes are going square and i have some pre-nollaig na mban meditations and tarot to do for myself before i try and remember them. athbhliain faoi mhaise daoibh ✨

i’m not the biggest fan of christmas. i’m sure most people who read this and know me are already aware of that. there’s a plethora of reasons as to why that is: primarily the rampant, suffocating consumerism and pressure to enjoy a holiday that is usually just so fraught with emotions tangled up like last year’s christmas lights. there’s obvs ed shit that gets dredged up, despite how hard i work to prevent it. my birthday tends to get folded into the war zone that is christmas party season too, and i detest it for that too. (early december silliness and divilment is sacred, it’s sagittarian; to me, christmas begins on the 23rd and ends three days later). plus, it’s just a testy time that demands so much of everyone for one singular day that, from experience, tends to fall flat in terms of expectations or end in tears. that’s not everyone’s experience, of course, but i try not to go on about it too much lest i yuck other people’s yum — and that’s not allowed at christmas time. i know that.

over the years, though, i’ve built up a semi-decent arsenal of tricks and cheats to help me survive the holiday — or at the very least, get through it. nice wine helps. this year, i’m drinking arndorfer zweigelt (which i’ve enjoyed before but love the value, taste and litre bottle of it all) and have treated myself to a bar of nearynóg’s spenny but gorgeous soda bread chocolate, made with 60% single origin chocolate from ecuador. in 2 days time, i’ll escape up to ramelton in donegal to see my boyfriend, our dog, his family and my gaggle of friends from up there. i’ve got plenty of new, secondhand and library-loaned books to occupy me too (including eat the ones you love by sarah maria griffin which i am currently, pardon the pun, devouring). and if all else fails, there’s the ol’ reliable christmas time trinity: grazing on grey strips of turkey right out of its tinfoil throne while standing in front of the fridge, oak smoked gubbeen cheese and the muppets take manhattan.

outside of all of that though, it’s a time where i try to be grateful at the very least for what i do have, as opposed to what i don’t (i suppose this is the true meaning, potench, of christmas, question mark). i’ve survived most of 2024 into 2025 on a very low wage (with the odd, modest freelance invoice thrown in here and there). it’s been hard: there’s been a lot of scrimping and wincing when settling bills, paying rent and hearing about other people’s pay progression. but i have more than a lot of people out there, still, in many ways. the nice wine is there — as is the food, the shelter; no matter where it comes from. i’m alive, able-bodied and not spending my christmas day lining up for relief or food anywhere outside of my family home. seeing the absolute generosity of the volunteers providing dinners for those without today at the rds (as well as lifts to and from) was the kind of shit that soothed my soul like a balm in the midst of all the horror in the world at the moment. the knights (or saints) of st columbanus dishing out plates in christmassy garb and entertaining thousands of people today had me tearing up like the scene in love actually when emma thompson gets her joni mitchell cd. and the knights have been at it since 1924, the legends.

speaking of feeding others less fortunate, while we were up with my 91 year old grandad kevin this afternoon and the throngs of cousins, aunts, uncles and second cousins — even our own parents — had left, we got treated to a little kev spesh: storytime. like most irish men of a certain vintage, the man is a divil for a story, and there’s no stopping him when he gets going. in his time and in all the work he’s done, he knew everyone and their business — from ballybrack to ballyferriter. and despite his age, he’s got a memory that would and does shame someone 60 years his junior (ie, me).

a lot of the stories i’ve heard in constant rotation over the years but every now and again, a fresh nugget will be revealed, like a sneaky green triangle at the bottom of the quality street tin when you thought they’d been long demolished. if you’re patient, of course. now kevin and my grandmother mona, who died a few years back, were very devout catholics. the tiny house he still lives in (where they raised 12 children) is decked out with religious iconography: ancient, plastic bottles of mary’s likeness from lourdes or knock filled with stagnant holy water, pictures of john paul ii on the fridge, mass cards, etc. i once posted a picture of the assortment of catholic-y trinkets mona had on the 60s laminate cabinet at the end of her bed that did mad numbers on tumblr in the early 2010s. and one time, as a younger child still, grandad kevin and nana mona had called my own mam, all a-flutter, because they’d heard the virgin mary herself had appeared on the bmx track at marlay park and were on their way down with camping chairs to see if she’d appear again.

that’s their bag, all that stuff. so there kevin was, regaling me and my siblings earlier today about getting a card from sister carmel, who’s apparently 100 years old. she’s part of the poor clares monastery down in simmonscourt, not far from where the free christmas dinners were served today; and him and mona used to go and make dinners for them. well now, my ears pricked up here because this is new-to-me kevin lore. he said the nuns were dirt poor and got no funding from:

“the church” i scoffed, half-rolling my eyes.

“no, the government” kevin retorted, staunchly.

he continues, anyway, not a man to be put off in his narratives even by interruptions. he said the nuns were so poor that the literal Poor People of dublin used to come and bring them bread and tea and all the rest. crazy. i had a few of my own thoughts about that to be honest, but i decided to keep my mouth shut and let grandad keep the mic. he said himself and mona, who did a lot for the nuns up until she died, would go in and make them dinners frequently, down in the monastery. now we were cookin’, i thought to myself. the questions couldn’t leave me quick enough and grandad was loving the interest. he said he used to pilfer the gardens of the monastery which would be ripe with runner beans (“big, fat lads, cooked with a bitta butter and they were gorgeous”). then a generous side of new bidaydos, coming into summer.

grandad said the nuns didn’t eat meat but they did like fish, and by god, were they vocal about how they wanted it cooked. one nun would want it poached, one fried, another roasted, and so on. we both made some joke about beggars not being choosers (raging i didn’t take my phone out and document it verbatim on the notes app before it left me, but i was merely too locked into the convo). grandad laughed too, but i know he didn’t begrudge the nuns needing the service. nor his 12 children who all needed to be fed over the years. and their children.

food is so interwoven into the celebration of christmas: annual gorgeathons are more socially-anticipated than some young fella in a manger, or whatever. fuck, christmas pints in the run-up to the big day are more exciting than the day itself. but there’s not much food history and stories in my family. there’s my dad who always makes a trifle, though no one else eats it. there’s my mam who makes the dinner almost single-handedly every year, but there’s more annoyance if you want to assist or ask about the process than appreciation. so it was nice to hear something a bit different, even though it doesn’t really have any correlation to christmas — only that it was told me on christmas day by my grandad.

my soul is tugging at me lightly to make some new food traditions and weave some stories of my own, outside of the arena of what i know and have known for 30 years at christmas. if it were up to me, there’d be a much different kind of spread, but of course i’d want to cater to everyone. there’s talk among pals of a thailand christmas venture in 2026 which excites me, despite my ever-dire financial state. that or perhaps volunteering myself with the st columbanus crowd next year, giving back instead of taking. much to think about, but before i decide, there’s a ros na rún christmas special, the trifle i’m turning down for the 7th time and the wedge of gubbeen that i’m actually getting stuck into.

nollaig shona daoibh, a chairde, agus tá súil agam go mbeidh 2026 maith agaibh go leor x

this was going to be a post about how much the internet is rotting my brain from the inside out and how i want to significantly cull its dominance over my life. in a flurried swarm of pre-period emotions this week, i was feeling it all too much and too strong as per usual. between tears provoked to the edge by obligatory christmas socialising, i was slamming down hard on my phone screen, trying to capture all of the feelings i have about existing online after 20 years of doing so before my bus reached my stop. then my period hit and the dramatics ceased, neatly like the final decrescendo in an orchestral piece. suddenly i felt lighter, but also exhausted by the gargantuan task of writing an obituary for my chronically online self — which would also be highly hypocritical with no concrete plan of how i’m going to whittle down my phone time put in place just yet. that’s 2026’s job.

ian just asked me there what i was writing about. i told him i’m writing about what i’m not writing about, which was a smart arses’s answer, but also not untrue. it’d be a bit embarrassing to say i’m writing about the solstice while it’s still happening. not that i think he’d judge me, of course; i think i’d judge myself more. one of my big issues with my online life is the idea of “content creation” and whether or not the stuff i put out is single-use or if it’s more perennial. i do think my writing on here is more evergreen, though. it’s less reactionary or spur of the moment than a video. i have to let things happen, think about them, allow thoughts to develop and take shape, then arrange them like puzzle pieces until they become wee essays. a lot of my video stuff follows a similar format, just with a quicker turnaround, though. i guess figuring this shit out is also 2026’s problem.

when life feels relentless and like one day is rolling straight into the next, it’s things like the changing of the seasons and celebrations thereof that bring me back to earth. the solstices have always been important to me. and even if it’s pure delusional to pin my hopes and desires and aspirations to change onto them, i’ll acknowledge them diligently each year, twice a year, with some ritual or another. a swim usually accompanies the summer solstice, but i’ve never really been so brave in the winter. i can withstand the biting cold of the irish sea, but the winter months usually see me dropping off out of cowardice to the cold. i admire the stoic bravery of the year-round swimmers, who i mentally salute and long to emulate when i see them out, silently skimming the ice-sludge-grey water lapping around them. sometimes my jealousy makes me say the kind of shit you almost-begrudgingly say when someone does something you want to do, but can’t muster up the courage to do so: fair play to them.

so this year, i decided to change that and take a ginger step towards year-round swims. for the head, obviously. the progress will be slow, but a birthday present from my parents this year of a pair of neoprene swimming gloves and booties carried me up to this morning and down the steps into the water at seapoint. usually when i swim, i’m embarking into the Great Icy Known with a friend or even a few. the laughter, shared nerves and camaraderie takes the edge off and pressures you to get in quickly, so you don’t look like a wimp hopping from foot to foot alone on the shore. but this afternoon, bhí mé i m’aonar. ian was standing further up above near the road because he had the dog, who’s not allowed down near the swimming area (nor does she want to be, either). so i stood there, with my ridiculous-looking foot and hand-wear, unshaved bikini line and lightly-hammering heart, and waded in without as much as a yelp. fair play to me.

as i tread the water, my head was completely empty of anything — no resolutions or mantras or manifestations. just a focus on moving and breathing which, in a way, is the very kind of reminder i need in life as it is at the minute. shutting out the shit and just moving and breathing. and also enjoying. i had a hyperventilated chat with a woman as we swam around one another. we talked about the usual shit: how it’s lovely and never as bad as you think it’s going to be and sure aren’t the boots great, they really keep the cold out! we nodded our goodbyes, swam in the opposite directions and as i was getting out, i gave gentle encouragement to a man getting in, face contorted with agony and disbelief at what he was doing to himself of his own free will. the torch passed on.

on the walk to and from the beach, i bumped into people i know who have never fit into my life nor i in theirs. our offline lives, that is. people i recently unfollowed, people that i never followed back to begin with. i smiled at one and chatted to the other. then off we went on our separate ways. how pleasant to not have to know anything about where they went on holidays recently or what they wore to an event. we stopped for a lovely sandwich in september in blackrock and then ambled through the blackrock market, for nothing but a little gawk. i found a vinyl copy of frida from ABBA’s 1982 album, something’s going on, that i love for only €5. i dithered around the stall for a while, almost morally uncertain as to whether i should buy it. very unlike me to not buy on impulse, which in this case would’ve been grand because it was only a fiver. i ended up leaving it behind, much to me and ian’s surprise. something something solstice sensibility something something.

hours later and the chill is lingering slightly in the tips of my toes, but not unpleasantly. the freezing cold does wonders when you work on your feet for 8-10 hours a day. it feels like a balm after a mental christmas working in service. i’ve lit the candle my friend jess made that she gave me on friday (bergamot, lavender and lemongrass that i thought was a jar of sauce at first). the house is in a bit of disarray, but it’s helping to make it feel less so. there’s a calmness in me that i haven’t felt in weeks. the soft swoosh of the sea is still whispering in my ears even while typing this. all the stress of what i need to do, buy or who i need to see or text before christmas is being blocked by that undulating wall of grey water i swam in earlier acting like a bouncer, telling them “not tonight” as they try to flood my brain. affording me some more much-needed peace this solstice evening.

god, it’s been a time. a good time in parts, but definitely a gruelling time. the winter season is supposed to be a time of rest and hibernation, but for me (and many others), it’s a ramp-up before the brief, annual wind-down. i find myself crawling to the christmas eve finish line, my body finally beginning to crumble because it knows it can for a few days. people always talk about winter being hard and cruel, which of course it absolutely can be. case in point, as i’m sitting here writing this, my eczema-inflamed hands are being stung by the sharp bite of the cold laptop keys. i can see my own breath inside the house. the darkness feels omnipresent, like a surveillant dictator, and warmth is in short supply.

people don’t talk about the positives of winter the way they harp on about summer or spring or autumn’s respective positive traits. except if it’s about being sardined in a pub in the run-up to christmas when they flock back from london or melbourne or wherever they’ve fucked off to. they are harder to appreciate, for sure; but being a december baby, i will die on the hill that if you hate winter, you’re a coward and if you love it, you’re a true romantic. and maybe a melt. i’m okay being both. ultimately, one of the nicest things when you’re on the sprint through samhain to sag season, is seeking shelter from the elements and the dark with a friend or a partner or a parent or an enemy and eating some food or having something to drink. crowding around a table or countertop, shedding the multiple layers, shaking off the rain like a dog, and pouring over a menu together.

that’s been my saving grace over the last 2 months. as i’ve worked through the exhaustion every day and tried my best to get it all done. at least there’s food, i’ve reminded myself, as i scratch my hands red-raw like a honey badger. there’s been a few invites, a few new-to-me gems and now acquaintances, a few ol’ reliables, a few cocktails. it’s been busy and some winter begrudgers would say tough but it’s also been tasty. i think i’m ready for a big sleep and the bland palate cleanse of being home for christmas for a few days. not a bit of seasoning in sight, just a lick of salt and butter. but in the meantime, let’s take a look at the big hitters of the season:

1. spicy beef bulgogi dup-bap from arisu
   while i don’t necessarily think non-mildstone birthdays don’t deserve as much hoo-haa and celebration as mildstone ones, my 31st was a more casual affair than my 30th. i was tired, working too much and not arsed coralling people and plans together in the spare hours i had on my birthday week. luckily though, a band i’ve wanted to see live for a good while (the incredible trá pháidín) were playing in jr cleary’s on amien street. and also luckily for me, ian got us a pre-gig booking at a place i’d wanted to eat at for a good while: capel street’s arisu korean bbq. obviously the big barbecue hot plate in the middle of the table is the main attraction of this place, but having had a late lunch in work, i wasn’t hungry enough for that (and also sometimes i just want my own plate of food. the spicy beef bulgogi dup-bap was everything i needed to send me into my 31st year. (shoutout to for letting me know in advance i would stink of barbecue after eating here. girl, you were so right).

2. weiss by marto wines

   the wine we paired with the above. light orange times, but not too club orange-juicy — just enough to cool my tongue down during a succulent, spicy korean meal. thank you to my manager, gosia, for getting it in for the shelves at work. thank you work for my staff discount.

   

   3. everything on the menu at liath

   my first time at blackrock’s liath and my second time at a two michelin-starred restaurant came through ian’s christmas bonus (thank you ian). this was technically a pre-birthday birthday dinner — nay, experience. i definitely felt like the poorest person in that room of only 13 other diners, but we were treated so richly by the staff and chef damien. there’s so much to be said about the craftsmanship, creativity and respect for the art of making food here that i can’t properly formulate into words still, over a week later. maybe i’ll give it a try over christmas, but for now, just know this was one of the standout meals of my entire life. pictured above was part of the umami portion of the meal (with the entire thing broken up to honour the senses), featuring sika deer and more that i forgot to take down in my notes.

4. french onion buns from the fumbally
   sometimes i refrain from outwardly mentioning where i work. not because i’m ashamed, but maybe for like, privacy? i am about to sound up my own hole, but i do have people come up to me a good bit while i’m in work who like what i do (it’s always very lovely and sweet and i’m always very honoured). and i supposed it’s not like i think i’m someone people are trying to track down like a celebrity in the wild, obviously. but seeing how much time i spend here, in the fumbally, it’s a bit absurd to not acknowledge it out loud or in text. especially when it feeds me more than my own house does. emily is one of our bakers and she recently produced these absolute feats of bakery wizardry: french onion buns (that i like to call “chunions” for the craic). i don’t even really like french onion soup, but these are so good. super soft dough and when you bite into it, your mouth is flooded with caramelly onions, sprinkled with parm and chives. constantly begging customers to skip the croissants and try these instead.

   

   5. cantonese duck from ka shing

   a place that’s intrigued me for a while but that i never found the excuse to visit — until last sunday after a hike with a big group of pals. the cravings were mutual: nature > chinese food > few tsingtaos > bed. ash booked for 10 of us and walking in felt like a portal to a world i never dreamed could’ve existed behind ka shing’s narrow wicklow street façade. what burst forth was a multi-tiered and bustling place, filled with saturated colours, patterns and characters. the expectations continued to rise and top themselves for all of us and we ordered generously, even though our group was sizeable; but despite my love and near-constant craving for sezchaun dishes, the standout for me was the cantonese duck and, as pictured above, the lazy susan it sat on.

6. a bountiful feast at la cocina cuevas

   la cocina cuevas has been on my mental radar for a few years, though i had no idea where this fabled land of the naul was, where they’re based. i knew it was more northerly than north dublin, and perhaps flirting with the border of meath. but i did know i needed a driver to get me there. luckily, ian did take me while i was doing a shoot for rí-rá. it was freezing cold but it didn’t stop the hordes from cuddling up in the little shelters for diners. the service was so lovely and to make the most of the drive, we ordered a cornucopia of cali-mex bits: birria tacos with consommé, chilaquiles, papas fritas and agua fresca. got to have a chat with owner jeremy too, who is really lovely and threw out a tasty hot portions reference to me as he delivered our food. a sweetheart.

7. soup and buzzball combo

   went to peter’s in bray for the annual launch of christmas fm and some festive silliness. brought along a bottle of fierce mild non-alcoholic beer (one of my favourites, made in louth) and a buzzball. balance, baby, j’know? peter had whipped up a delightful little carrot and coriander soup, which i do think is an under-appreciated soup flavour; and for clean girl posterity, i paired it with my chilli mango buzzball.

8. greenville deli christmas sandwich

   i am a bit of a christmas hater, but i do love christmas sandwiches. i love the creativity that seems to outdo itself every year in ireland alone. the box of what constitutes a christmas sandwich is pushed well past its traditional confines — sure, it is in itself a riff on the christmas dinner — and you see some incredible shit: pizzas, sausage rolls, chip trays, etc. i would truly love to try them all. i’m fortunate i’m the flavour of neurodivergent that never gets sick of things — i could eat the same thing every day that i’m currently enjoying and never get tired. and when i do, i move on to the next thing. greenville deli’s christmas sandwich is a prime example of that — i probably would eat it every day if i had the money and wasn’t petrified of what that would do to my body. big ups to mira for being So Well Behaved below me while i horsed it into me after a morning of editing.

9. prawn croquetas from cantina valentina

   our first #invite of the post comes from cantina valentina, the peruvian-inspired restaurant in the newly-opened hoxton hotel (thank you host pr). i thoroughly enjoyed the food here: a lovely selection of ceviches, pisco sours, whole sea bream but my favourite were these prawn croquetas with amarillo mayo. admittedly, they are heftier than i’ve made them look here. but while i did enjoy the food here, i did check the prices while out for a smoke mid-meal and was a bit gobsmacked, so i don’t know how likely i’d be to return.

10. bresaola panino from amuri

    mortadella gets more love than it deserves, in my opinion. real bitches want bresaola on their sandwiches. scusi, panini. amuri deli on chatham street is one of my favourite places for a sandwich if i’m in town and starving. €9.95 for a panino on a soft (but with a small crunch) bread roll with proper italian bits. the bresaola one, in my opinion, tops the gorgeous mortadella one (i say after what i already said at the start of this). the italian flag in sandwich form, la amo.

11. irish coffee with parm dusting

    nearing november’s end, i got to take part in vice coffee’s annual irish coffee competition as a judge. gas, i know. ian was also on the panel (also gas) on behalf of his work, imbibe coffee roasters; and there was a rep for teelings whiskey on the panel too. what ensued was a fun and boozy night with 10 contestants from across the coffee and bartending scene showing off their riffs on this christmas classic. but though this one didn’t crack the top 3, the choice to sprinkle some parm on top along with the usual nutmeg was so genius and delicious that i hope it gets replicated by every cocktail bar in ireland.

12. beef shin ragù from september

    there’s a few upsides to moving into my nana’s gaff in the shticks of deansgrange: one of them is the proximity to the sea. the other, as bougie as this is gonna sound, is being close to blackrock. look, i’m not from a posh family but i always loved blackrock. i loved the wee, wonky street. i loved wandering through the market on cold sunday afternoons, hoking around, chasing the smell of deep fat fried jam donuts. i loved watching the crash of the sea against the walls below, while the dart screeches by. i loved visiting my grandad when he used to own conway’s pub and he’d give me a package of crips and a bottle of finches orange. blackrock has changed a lot over the years. the frascati centre has morphed into this gargantuan tower of ugliness that looks so uncanny i simply have to pretend it’s not there when i pass it on my runs. but the micro food scene in blackrock is worth paying attention to. there’s sea shanty (one of my favourite restaurants in ireland, above conway’s), little forest, hatch coffee, three leaves indian, poulet bon femme (which is delicious but fuck avoca and especially fuck aramark) and of course, september. the old corner spot that used to be occupied by the wooden spoon (who never got back to me after i applied for a job there at 16) has been revitalised by september, modestly advertising dinner and natural wine. but really, it is so fantastic here. they should probably boast a bit more, but until then, i’ll do it for them. i’ve eaten their food a good few times now, but recently we were in on an #invite to try their chef’s menu. lads, i can’t fault a thing. there’s a soft buzz in there each night, keeping the briskness of the winter nights outside at bay, while you dine, sip and chat. the beef shin ragù, with beef from doyle’s butchers and homemade tagliatelle, is a perfect dish. no wheels are being reinvented — nor should they be. that’s the assignment understood and aced by the chefs at september. plus, the wig of powder-soft parm down the side of the dish is heavenly.

13. shakshuka by moi

    when it’s all a bit much and the wheel of work > commitments > sleep > work > commitments > sleep becomes relentless, eating can end up relying on convenience over nourishment. this is why i’ve loved shakshuka since i abandoned my veganism years ago. it’s such an easy way for me to get everything i want and crave in one pan. this one, particularly, was a knockout one even in my repertoire of unreal shakshukas. 18 ingredients (mostly spices) and it took less than 15 minutes. then, as i ascended into flow state, i tossed a few toasted hazelnuts in there too. a bit of ian’s homemade sourdough on the side and that was an off-duty meal that picked me up off the floor slightly and dosed me up with some vitamins at least.

14. the horchata bombe from blossom artisan bakery

    i’m trying to say shit like “ugh, i’ve wanted to go to this place for so long” because i feel like i never stop. there’s only so many times i can eat out as a woman on €14 p/h who can’t drive; but blossom artisan bakery was one of those places. out in ballymun at buddie’s farmer’s market, their pastry reputation precedes them, clearly. so one rare saturday off me for me had us in the car driving out northbound to get some for ourselves. i’d actually seen via la cocina ceuvas’ instagram that they picked up something called a horchata bombe from blossom. well, lads, my eyes bulged out of my head in and my heart honked out an AWOOGA! i love horchata, but it’s rare i’d get to have it, so that was that decided. the pastry itself was, as you can see, a little domed situation, dusted with very fine cinnamon sugar. inside was the bombe: a flood of dulce de leche and horchata-flavoured rice pudding. absolute perfection.

15. citrusy pork carnitas at picado

    lily ramirez-foran’s lovely little mexican pantry has enthralled me since 2015 when i’d whizz down richmond street on my peugeot racer. wee, red and decked out with colourful mexican groceries, it was hard to ignore. you’d walk by in the evenings and see 6 people crowded around a table under lily’s spell as she taught them how to make tortillas and you’d wish you were crammed in there with them. last year, lily opened picado 2.0 on cork street, boasting a bigger premises for more events, workshops and dinners. to celebrate, her and anthony o’toole hosted a night celebrating picado’s success and masa as a cornerstone of mexican cooking. we were spoiled rotten with a 4-course meal where masa was the centrepiece in each dish; one of these being these citrusy pork carnitas with blue corn tortillas. i actually built this, so props to me for making it look not like a mess. but lily and her team supplied all the rest — the soft, shredded pork, fresh slaw, herbs and salsas.

16. mcnally’s tomatoes

    i know it’s not the season, but they’re irish grown, they’re delicious and they’re beautiful. i need loewe to make the tomato clutches in these colours as tribute (and for them to not be a million euro).

17. cockagee irish keeved cider by the cider mill

    gas name, sorry but it has to be addressed before we carry on. but the name is actually the variety of tree that produces the apples used in this cider. i loathe mass produced irish ciders like bulmers, orchards thieves, outcider, etc. that stench of sugar feels like an assault at festivals and during the summer. you can almost here the rabid wasps loading themselves up, ready to sting, when a can of it is opened en plein air. i do, however, love an irish craft cider, not to be a pompous dick about it, but because it doesn’t taste sickly, sticky sweet. there’s so many craft irish ciders that are doing justice by, what i’d call, our national fruit. giving it the tlc it deserves, in all its modesty, to bring out the myriad of flavours, acidity and subtle sweetness that apples contain. this one is from the cider mill in slane. i tried it at the aforementioned samhain festival banquet dinner and will be hunting it down again.

18. pumpkin, hazelnut & goats cheese pastry from elliot’s

    waiting for my bus to kells for samhain festival on a blisteringly cold but bright winter’s day, i had with me but one companion: this pastry from elliot’s. looking like a present wrapped up thanks to those marigold slivers of pumpkin, the prize inside was creamy, pumpkiny goats cheese of the same colour. hazelnuts and a well-laminated pastry casing topped it off perfectly. idk if she reads this substack, but hi again to síofra who walked past me as i was hoofin’ it into me.