The Gness Holiday Diaries (Part 3)

DTCwordfan | 12:33 Thu 08th Nov 2012 | ChatterBank

8 Answers

Phew, Guys and Gals, it's wonderful to be back on old Gness stomping grounds.

The first night over, a breakfast of Kerry porridge, duck scrambled eggs and wild boar bacon, Irish cheddar and soda bread, and Kerry Apple cake, something that B00, Voddie and Eccles would adore, soon saw me straight.

So gals here is the recipe for the Apple Cake

Ingredients:

175g/ 6oz butter
175g/ 6oz caster sugar
2 eggs, beaten
225g/ 8oz self-raising flour
2 medium cooking apples, peeled, cored and chopped
1tsp lemon rind
2tbsp demerara sugar
pinch cinnamon
pinch nutmeg

Method:

1. Preheat oven to gas mark 4/ 180°C/ 350°F, and grease and line a 900g/ 2lb loaf tin.
2. Cream butter and sugar. Gradually add eggs and flour.
3. Stir in apples and lemon rind. Pour into the tin and sprinkle with sugar and spices. Bake for 1-1.5 hours.

This followed on by the fest of a dinner my daughter had put on the evening before, (Sibbo would have hated the first part). Valentia scallops, Dingle Bay prawns, Kerry mussels and lobster, Kerry mountain lamb, and boxty (not boxtops but potato pancakes with various meat and vegetable fillings – maybe that is she what she is named after – note to self, message to nibble on return). Plus two surges of Guinness and two from the barrel positioned underneath my bum and marked “GNESS’s Only.”

Note as well to Janine and DTC, no Cornish Pasties here, plenty of Sloopy boats to go out fishing on - maybe later if I can find a Fisherman Friend and his crew.

I needed the breakfast; it has been a long while that I slept on a horsehair bed with flax sheets, the local cat “ Six Inches” nestled up on the Donkey hair blanket. The wailing of the girl band, “The Shenanigans” also helped me to go to sleep, they having come round for a practice on the premise and distinctly untrue that we were deaf. More like, it was the quantity of black stuff here

However, breakfast accompanied by a refreshing pint (or was that alba-branded coffee) soon had me thinking about this “literary” festival starting tomorrow and what I should narrate, a heady mixture of poetry, readings, music and copious booze of all alcoholic levels and colours.

Thirty minutes later and a pint, I had my first offering ready.

"Grey Paint"

Fifty Shades
Mixed by Tony
Shed-like
Leaning

To mix the Paint

Seductive
Mysterious
Dark
Dangerous

Can be white
Can be black
Can be any ABer you may desire

This led on to our first expedition of the day, into the old, beautiful and cray Sneem, a village that I had come close to destroying when I was a young teenager, even to the threat of a compulsory evacuation during the famous storm of 1967 when I managed to close down the local mortuary known to us as “O’Deadorans” with its famous A board, always outside the pub it also owned and shared with the stiff’s office, the words “Graves are always open.” I had made some nitro toluene in school chemistry and accidentally it had gone one more stage to something they call tri-nitro-toluene.

Well it had worked, bodies scattered all over the village.

Gness had kept her head down

So Sneem, full of its pubs, like Dan Murphys, the Blue Bull and Rineys, it’s shops like Hillery’s food and Burns Butchers (they changed name from O’Donnell’s to Burns after I had singed them in my explosion) and finally my Irish Cathedral, Dan Galvin’s Hardware, the very place where I learned about galvinising things, the original centre of this wonderful way of making replacement limbs for the sheep as I went about the fields testing with my chemistry products.

Carbines, screwdrivers, picks, spades, barrels, wind deflectors, gin and man-traps, Galvin’s has it all. So, yes, AB folk, Tony, Excelsior, NOX and Bellbick have some souvenir traps coming their way.

I wonder if they work.

Ouch, I have just dropped the bag on my left foot.

They do.

To be continued.