This review first appeared in the Irish Daily Mail in February 2012

Brendan Behan used to claim that members of the Garda Siochana were recruited by luring them from the Kerry mountains with hunks of raw meat. I can't vouch for the veracity of this obersavtion as it was way before my time; but there's no doubt that the relationship between the average Irish male and the flesh of animals, is close and lip-smacking.

It's more likely that a GAA or rugby star will take to competitive crochet than veganism. Our teams have been built on meat, and plenty of it.

It is appropriate then that Jamie Heaslip has joined forces with Joe Macken (of Jo'Burger, CrackBird and Skinflint) to create not a lentil bar but a restaurant in which bits of dead animal have heat applied to them.

The cuts avoid the usual suspects. You can have onglet for €24.95 or bavette for €29.95, a flank for €34.95 or a London Broil for €59.95.

Now, I don't know what a London broil is, but the rest are cheaper cuts that require quick cooking and then to be sliced across the grain of the meat. You get chew but you get first rate flavour.

And so it proved with our massive onglet. It would have been sufficient to serve three ravenous Irish males and perfectly adequate to satisfy four normal human beings. We brought half of it home with us.

And how was it?  This monumental piece of meat was nicely charred outside and nicely rarely within, a near perfect exercise in steak cooking. Part of it could have been better trimmed (had this been New York, the stringy bits would have constituted a capital offence) but overall it was a fine piece of meat and full of good, beefy flavour. Indeed, it set one wondering why such a steak experience is so rare - no pun, honestly - in this land of ours which produces the finest beef in the world.

So Bear - this is what the restaurant is called, for no apparent reason - does a good piece of steak and at a fair price. It's a shame about much of the rest.

Jamie and Joe, I have to tell you this. Cold mashed spud mixed with a bit of smoked haddock and dumped in a jam jar is not, by any stretch of the imagination, "smoked haddock skordalia". It's unpleasant, fishy mashed spud in a jam jar and I can't imagine anyone being prepared to part with €6.95 for it.

Now lads, "toasts"? Well where do we start? You shouldn't have to be told this but there's an ocean of difference between bread (even good bread, as it is here) that has spent a few moments in a toaster and thus become tepid and, you know, toast. Crisp, er, toasted toast. Tepid bread is unpleasant.

Not quite as unpleasant as cold, fishy mashed spud in a jam jar, admittedly, but not nice. At all.

Lads, I don't know if you'e ever had actual skordalia but bear in mind that the conventional version, made with breadcrumbs, needs a lot of really good olive oil and either almonds or walnuts to make it work. They use spud in Cephalonia and they have to try even harder to make it taste good.

Your "salt and vinegar fries" turned out to be slices of fried, unpeeled potato which managed to be sweet, flabby and overbrowned (all because the wrong kind of spud was employed). They were revolting and we sent them back. "Fries" were at least chip-shaped but equally unpleasant because, again, the spud was wrong.

There are potatoes that make good chips and potatoes that should never be used in this capacity. Honestly, you shouldn't have to be told this.

Look, if you're doing really good steak at a decent price, is it too much to ask for a crisp, properly made chip? And while you're at it, what is steak withhout bearnaise sauce? You have a few details to work out, lads...

With four glasses of wine, our bill came to €77.

Bear

34/35 South William Street

Dublin 2

www.twitter.com/beardublin

WINE CHOICE:

Oh dear, it's one of those wine lists that seem to have just happened without any reason, rationale, point... It's been a while since we saw any Bulgarian wine in Ireland. Taste Domaine Boyar Cabernet (€18) and you will understand why. It's foul.  Domaine Boisson Cotes du Rhone is OK at €25 (or €6.50/€8.50 for a small/large glass). Bear in mind that Chianti Corale (€23) is not made by Badia a Coltiuono as claimed here.

THE SMART MONEY:

There's no arguing with the value offered by the shared grills.

I wrote this piece for the Irish Daily Mail way back in 2007. I joined the Church of Ireland at the age of 21, having been brought up by very devout Roman Catholic parents and educated, up to a point, by Jesuits. My parents were not pleased, but took it on the chin. The Jesuits didn't express an opinion.

It’s almost a quarter of a century since I gave up on the Roman Catholic church into which I had been born and signed up as an Anglican.

The reasons for this decision were probably less complex than I thought at the time. The fuse had been lit when my mother, a wonderful woman whom I loved deeply, asked me (rhetorically) when I was 14 "Who are you to disagree with the Magisterium of the Church?"

By the time I was studying the Reformation at school, I had decided which "side" I was on. I couldn't understand the need for celibacy, was astonished that people should have their sex lives ruled by unmarried men and, much as I was enthralled by the Sistine Chapel, failed to fathom how Jesus Christ could have founded a very rich and power-obsessed Church.

Despite the many flaws in the Anglican Communion - and they are legion - it seemed like a good idea at the time to make the switch and I’m still a member of the Church of Ireland, albeit not a very ardent one; but I long ago abandoned the notion that any organisation, religious or not, has got it right. There are times when I’m more comfortable with Buddhism or Quakerism than with Anglicanism. And so, I’m neither bothered nor surprised that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a group of celibate men appointed by the Pope, has announced, yet again, that the reformed churches, such as the Church of Ireland, are not actually churches at all but mere “ecclesial communities”. Like voluntary prayer groups, I suppose.

This is because, according to the Vatican, we poor Anglicans (and Methodists and Presbyterians and so on) don’t have the benefit of apostolic succession. The Roman Catholic church is the only real church because its clergy and hierarchy have all been ordained by bishops who in turn were ordained by other bishops all the way back to St Peter. Ordination has been handed down, generation by generation, from the rock upon which Jesus is supposed to have founded his church (if you believe that he was in the business of founding churches, which I rather doubt.) Some of the reformed churches point out that apostolic succession is a bit of a red herring while Anglicans protest that we do actually have apostolic succession even if most of us never give it a thought. On the other hand, we get a bit tetchy when the Roman Catholic church says we don’t.

The present Pope and his rather more charismatic predecessor belong to that deeply conservative tradition that seems to overlook an awful lot of facts in order to believe that you can’t change church teaching. Because what was taught in, say 1200, could not possibly be wrong. The Roman Catholic church doesn’t do “wrong”. But I wish it would make up its mind. It took away the Latin Mass and now the present Pope has given it the green light again. Limbo was fully up and running when I was a child and now it seems to have been abolished. Under Pope Paul VI Anglicanism and Methodism, for example were “sister churches” but now “cannot, according to Catholic doctrine, be called ‘churches’ in the proper sense”. So, if you believe the Vatican under Pope Benedict XVI, Pope Paul VI – not a wacky liberal if I remember correctly – was in pretty serious error.

What bothers me about all this is not the breathtakingly arrogant assumption of superiority – especially when you consider some of the less wholesome episodes in the history of the Roman Catholic church – but the sheer rudeness. It comes out of the same blundering, tactless school of Roman Catholic thought (or teaching if you prefer) that lead Archbishop Connell of Dublin to describe the Eucharist that President McAleese shared in at Christ Church Cathedral as “a sham”.

At the risk of sounding like an American evangelical (from whom Heaven preserve us) it might be a good idea for everyone to stand back and ask “What would Jesus do?” Gratuitously insult your fellow Christians? I don’t think so.

While the Vatican was doing so, something inspiring was happening in the Church of Ireland Cathedral of St Patrick in Dublin. Dr Alan Harper, the Primate, installed two non-Anglican clergy as Canons of the Cathedral, the Roman Catholic theologian Professor Enda McDonagh and the former Methodist leader Ken Newell. In Dr Harper’s sermon he referred to division among the people of God as “a permanent scar on the body that is Christ’s”. Dr Harper added “we…recognise that, in placing them here as part of the capitular body of the national cathedral, as a church we are incomplete without them.” So, who decided to appoint two non-Anglicans as canons of St Patrick’s, notwithstanding all the “arcane theological and doctrinal disagreements”, as Dr Harper called them, between the churches?

It was the General Synod of the Church of Ireland, the body that represents all Irish Anglicans, that did so. Unanimously. Of course this hugely significant event will get very little exposure compared to the Vatican’s effectively saying “sorry, but there’s only one true church and that’s us. Christian unity is highly desirable and as soon as all of you guys accept that we’re right and you’re wrong, that’s what we’ll have.” Of course, it was put in rather more elegant language but I’m afraid this is what it boils down to: “we are not only superior, we are the only real church.”

It is, of course, some consolation that most of us, Roman Catholic, Anglican, whatever, are unlikely to pay a great deal attention to what these elderly bachelors in Rome are saying. We are probably more concerned with trying to forge a system of belief that sits comfortably with the 21st century, with our natural and healthy scepticism and the fact that so much of the Bible is…let’s be honest here…just plain weird.

The Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu enchanted me when he was talking about dying (he was very ill at the time but thankfully has recovered) and how he looked forward to being reunited with many friends in heaven. He was confident of getting there because, he said, “God has very low standards”. In a recent interview in The Irish Times, Tutu said “God is not a Christian” because if he was, “he would be a very small God. If God is Christian, what was he before Christianity?”

One wonders what the Vatican would make of that? The Vatican’s God is a very cranky God, a very legalistic and unyielding God, and a God that is frankly not really interested in the spirit but in the letter. One can’t help thinking that the Vatican’s God, in the words of Monty Python, gets quite irate when Anglicans take Roman Catholic communion and vice versa. Perhaps it all comes from the notion of an all powerful, conquering king of a God. If God exists, you can be sure it is in a way that we mere humans find very hard to grasp.

I like to believe, in so far as I can, in a weak God, a non-interventionist God, a God that is in every living person.

 During World War II a Lutheran pastor was imprisoned in a German concentration camp when a boy tried to escape through the barbed wire fence. There was a burst of machine gun fire and his young body hung there lifeless. Another prisoner turned to the pastor and asked, bitterly, “where is your God now?” And the pastor pointed to the dead boy and said “there.”

That kind of God is not concerned with apostolic succession or leglastic niceties or arcane theological arguments. That kind of God, one suspects, is concerned solely with love.

The past is a foreign country

As the 1990s dawned on this misty island, condoms could only be bought on prescription and there was no divorce. It was an interesting decade in many ways and one feature of those years which gave me much entertainment was the spectacle of the more reactionary elements in society resisting changes in anything that had to do with sex.

Their mouthpiece was a weekly newspaper called The Irish Family (which later became The Irish Democrat), an organ (if you will forgive the phrase) which I was obliged to read as PR consultant for Durex at the time.

One evening, as we ate in Cooke’s Café, I told my editor, Peter Murtagh, about this curious duty and the amusement (mingled with some horror) which it brought to me.

We decided to invent a character who would caricature (not that this was always required) the outpourings of the extreme Catholic right. Peter came up with the name, and the suffix (which stands for National Teacher): Aodhghán Feeley NT. Mr Feeley channeled his thoughts through me and I wrote his Real Ireland column in the Tribune for several years during the first half of that turbulent decade.

Mr Feeley is still going strong, somewhere in the recesses of what passes for my mind, and is now a sprightly 116.

Anyway, here’s a sample of what he was saying in 1995. Nora Bennis and Joe McCarroll were, and I hope still are, real people. The rest were products of my fevered imagination.

FAMILIES UNITED IN COMBATTING KINKY SEX
by Aodhghán Feeley NT
The Sunday Tribiune, January 1995

As everybody knows by now, I have a bit of a "thing" about Nora Bennis of Solidarity. Whenever I hear her voice ("like the breath of an angel on your cheek," as Brother Cathal says) or see her picture, I get this funny feeling in my legs and I am reminded of that day, many years ago, when I first saw Breda over a steaming plate of champ and crubeens.

Anyway, there I was, driving home in the rain, listening to the evening news when I hear that young whippersnapper, Myles Dungan, tell a shocked nation that Limerick City is about to have a sex shop. And you could hear the sneer in his voice as he introduced the lovely Nora who has organised a fast and prayer vigil in response to the outrage.

"This is all about kinky sex," Nora began, in that wonderful voice which Brother Cathal, as he says, frequently compares to "a celestial exhalation". Now my interest was immediately aroused. Nora was very clear that she knew what she was talking about. It was kinky sex, impure and simple.

Now, as soon as I got home I wrote Nora yet another piece of "fan mail", but in this instance, I was seeking her advice. You see, at a recent meeting of Families Against Secular Humanism (FASH), held in the Macushla Room of the Pathé Hotel, Roscrea, the issue of kinky sex came up. It was my old school friend and fellow-pedagogue Labhras "Imperial Leather" Ui Laoire who cut to the core of the issue. "In order to defend the virtue of Irish women," he thundered, "it is essential that we know precisely what kinky sex is. Nora Bennis has drawn attention to kinky sex. But I, for one, need more information as to how to define what exactly it is."

A sub-committee was immediately formed, under the chairmanship of Brother Cathal, charged with the task of defining the nature of "kinky sex". They have been meeting daily, behind closed doors, in the Mostrim Arms in Edgeworthstown, for several weeks now and Brother Cathal tells me that "progress is slow, but light is dawning." Breda is acting as what he calls his "amanuensis" and while I can't put my finger on it I can't say I'm happy with this. Wasn't there a series of films called that?

Anyway, now I can tell Brother Cathal and his sub-committee that Nora Bennis can put them properly in the picture as far as kinky sex is concerned. Incidentally, I would advise Nora to initiate a local single issue group to tackle the Limerick problem: Families United in Combatting Kinky Sex is Breda's suggestion for the title, though, of course, it would be unfortunate were it to be referred to by its initials.

As many readers will be aware, I was invited to attend a seminar on "Traditional Family Values and Say No to Gun Control" at the University of Moosejaw, Idaho last autumn. It was at the behest of the traditional theologian Professor Anna L. Sphincter (a great admirer, she tells me, of Joe McCarroll's Homosexual Challenge). The Moosejaw Moral Alert Centre is where I attended a PIMPLE Program (Principles in Moral Protection and Lewdness Eradication) and was first made aware of the insidious ways in which practicioners of the Occult penetrate the sub-conscious of our young people.

Using simple equipment the PIMPLE team at Moosejaw can detect satanic messages in "pop" songs. I was so interested in this that I have set up a PIMPLE research laboratory as part of the Aodghan Feeley Foundation in Mullingar. Using my old Pye radiogram, a couple of reel-to-reel tape recorders, a large stock of HB pencils and their own piercing intelligence, a crack team of volunteers, all of them occasional contributors to the Irish Family, are screening tapes and records even as I write and we will publish the shocking interim results very shortly.

THE OLD BLOG ROAD...


At the height of what Michael Parsons, in The Irish Times, calls the Septic Tiger, I was chatting to a friend of mine about our mutual interest in cars.

“I can’t understand why these people are driving Aston-Martons,” he said. “Why don’t they just go around with a big placard over their heads that says I’m A Fucking Builder”?

I was reminded of this the other day when I was talking to a restaurateur about – to use his words – the plague of food bloggers.

“I don’t like to piss anyone off,” he said. “And I really don’t want to piss off someone with a few followers. But the ones you notice are noticed for all the wrong reasons. They wave their cameras around and get sniffy about the table you give them. They might as well have a great big sign around their necks saying “I’m A Fucking Food Blogger.”

There you are, then. Don’t shoot the messenger. It seems that some of our food bloggers are doing what some of our restaurant critics have been doing for years and carrying about with them an aura – or perhaps something more substantial than an aura – which has the words DO YOU NOT KNOW WHO I AM? in emblazoned on it in day-glo.

Anyone who reviews restaurants needs to be careful to see the experience from the punter’s point of view as far as possible. If you are love-bombed, you have to watch what is happening to other diners and take your assessment from there. Having a fuss made of you, because of who you are, is actually just embarrassing and unhelpful.

Prior to a wonderful dinner from Richard Corrigan and Paul Flynn at the Waterford Food Festival last weekend, Matthew Fort was asked by – I think – Ivan Whelan of Cully & Sully, if restaurant critics should have experience of working in a professional kitchen before they pass judgement on the work of chefs.

Matthew gave a very elegant reply in which he recounted his experience of working very briefly in a rather grand kitchen and how it was a rather humbling experience but I think he implied that no, such experience should not be a pre-requisite.

And I agree. Ivan’s argument seemed to be that only professional cooks are qualified to comment on professional cookery. This is tosh. Only people who design cars should write motoring columns? You have to have stood in Herbert von Karajan’s shoes to be qualified to hold a view on his Beethoven’s Ninth?

No, what you need to be a critic in any sphere is a passionate, all-consuming interest in the subject, to be almost an anorak. And to have wide experience of that field of endeavour so as to make valid comparisons. To be fair, balanced, dependable and to flag up your prejudices (because we all have them).

This is a tall order and none of us critics can ever be sure that we tick all the boxes. But we have to strive to do so.

We also need to know how to write (and not all columnists do) and we must have some capacity to entertain the audience (and not all columnists ditto), otherwise readers will skip to the bottom line. Or just skip.

We also need to understand our brief, to have a specific word-count for our column and to have an editor who will, when appropriate, give us a sharp kick in the arse (or a word of appreciation if we have done well).

Bloggers who review restaurants, by and large, don’t have such constraints. The very best of them are pitiless self-editors (usually because they have long experience of being edited by others).

That’s the thing about blogging. Anyone can do it. You can blog to your heart’s content. If you want to write a 5,000 word review, there’s nobody there to stop you. You have total freedom.

And you know the trouble with total freedom? It’s take a lot of self-discipline to make it work.

I’m just glad I have an editor. Most of the time….

Gerry Haugh 1950-2011

In 2004 The Irish Times published an extract from a book of mine, and the passage they chose concerned my time at Belvedere. Not suprisingly, it also concerned the biggest influence I encountered there, Gerry Haugh.

When I told him about this, he harrumphed (if that's the word) a little and said "Remember, I've devoted my whole life to the place." As indeed he did.

In the end, he was happy with the piece and commented that the accompanying photograph of myself, sitting at the base of tree, "looked as if it was straight from Tolkien".

By then, of course, Gerry was much more than just part of Belvedere; he had become synonymous with it. He was intensely proud of the school and, when required, both defensive of it and critical of it.

I first met him when I was twelve and, I suppose, he was all of twenty-one. It was 1971 and Gerry had emerged from UCD, tall and thin. In his gown he looked like a somewhat ungainly black bird and he was charged with the uneviable task of teaching English to the lower reaches of First Grammar in a couple of pre-fabs in what was called, in those days, the Back Yard.

The late Jim Gough, who taught us history and was later Vice-Principal, gave Gerry a bit of advice about how to tackle IGB. "I told them to take out their rulers and measure the length of St Patrick's beard," he said, implying that there was not much to be done with us.

Gerry ignored this and proceeded to introduce us to The Hobbit and much more. He organised a short story competition which I managed to win with a painfully artless pastiche of PG Wodehouse; I still have the counterfoil of the book token I received, paid for out of Gerry's own meagre pocket; he was a mere HDipEd student at that stage.

The thing that I most keenly remember about him at this point was his energy and his encouragement. He sought out something in me - a way with words and a kind of thinking which was perhaps a little off-beat - and he made me feel valued.

After a number of fallow years, Gerry re-entered my life in Poetry as my history teacher. In terms of sticking to the course and advising us how to pass the Leaving Certificate, he was a glorious failure. In terms of getting us - most of us - to think for ourselves, ask questions, read widely and understand the subject, he was - in a mildly chaotic way - simply brilliant. He was also just a little subversive, in the best sense of the word.

It is hard to believe now, for anyone who knew Gerry in his last years, that he was once something of an outsider, a challenger of the status quo. By the mid-1970s he was not only displaying his contempt for rote learning and his passion for what I can only describe as holistic education, he also founded the Belvedere College Dramatic Society. This was heady, radical stuff in those days.

Whatever about his distinctive teaching methods, his insistence on producing plays - starting with Robert Bolt's The Thwarting of Baron Bolligrew in 1974 - was perceived by many as a challenge to the dominance of the annual operetta which had been a school tradition since God was a boy. For many years, Gerry's plays were decidedly peripheral to the core of school activites but all the more exciting for that.

Gerry's early productions - The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Richard III, Tamburlaine the Great to name but a few - were crammed into the audio-visual room in which the audience was literally held (being separated from the only exit by the stage) for hours. His early productions were famous for their length; the late "Buddy" Campbell commented on Tamburlaine (the longest play in the English language, as it happens) that it was"a bit much when he headed off to conquer Africa at half-past-eleven".

There followed sojourns in the refectory, the old science lab and, despite ferocious acoustics, the gym. It was in the latter space that my daughter, Gerry's god daughter, aged six, was so enchanted by his production of Peter Pan that she gradually crawled right onto the stage. Gerry was equally enchanted by that; he liked to create magic.

In time, of course, Belvedere got its fine theatre ("my theatre" as he, quite correctly, called it) a mere thirty or so years after the original one was demolished. And Gerry was finally established as a kind of school treasure. It took time for Belvedere to realise that Mr Haugh was, indeed, a unique asset but, well before his 100th and sadly final production, the school had accorded him his rightful place as a devoted, eccentric, single-minded, warm-hearted, sometimes infuriating, delightful servant of both the institution and of the boys who were lucky enough to come into contact with him.

Vignettes. Gerry reading from our history textbook in a parody of Micheal MacLiammoir. Yelling "you're all being so bloody stupid!" during rehearsals. Watching his form playing pool in the Sigerson Arms in Ballinskelligs. Conducting the makeshift choir at Midnight Mass. Pouring late night whiskeys during my college days. Hiking through Wicklow with a dozen thirteen year olds before he developed an aversion to any form of exercise. Playing the piano in my parents' drawing room as we sang carols. His ability to put me down, firmly but gently. That very distinctive frown. The equally distinctive chuckle.

Gerry, of course, never married but it's wrong to say that he never had children. He had hundreds of them, including me. His love for his children was unspoken but palpable and like any good parent, he let us go but took a pride and a mildly proprietorial interest in our doings when we reached man's estate.

I think he dreaded retirement. He was wrong, in a sense, when he told me that he had devoted his whole life to the school. Belvedere, ultimately, is just a place. He devoted his life to the people he taught - oh, so much more than taught - at Belvedere. It was the people, collectively and individually, who really mattered.

He was the dearest friend I have ever known.

SWEET PEAS

"All human life is there." That's what they used to say about the late and unlamented News of the World, perhaps adding that there was some inveterbrate life forms involved too.

Today, all human life seems to be on Twitter. When I tweet - as we Twitterers say - about broad beans or early spuds, I get a moderate response. When I comment on shrubs, there is a deafening silence which suggests either that shrubs have passsed the Twitterati by or that devotees of this particular social network have just become a bit glib about shrubs.

However, when I mention sweet peas, Twitter comes alive. There are tweets about how they remind people of dear, departed grandmothers, about the need to pinch out the side shoots, about the date of the first bloom, but especially about the scent. Sweet peas, I conclude from this quite unscientific observation, are held dear, clasped to the collective bosom of this particular social network.

Sweet peas are, of course, annuals and annuals are mildly bothersome in that you have to sow the damn things every year. And the means preparing a bed. Perennials are a doddle, by and large.

Sweet peas are, contrary to what a lot of people say, quite difficult to grow. They need a rich soil (two bags of well-rotted manure form the foundation for my short row each year), they need something up which they can climb, and ideally they need a bit of pinching and de-shooting here and there in order to encourage suitably stout flower-bearing stems.

They climb by way of tendrils (which I always think of as tentacles) which fasten on to any object which can aid and a abet them in their life of climb, including themselves. The tendrils of a a sweet pea will, in the absence of anything more suitable, cling to the plant itself. Sweet pea is the one plant which can, literally, tie itself up in knots.

If you let your sweet peas just scramble away, obeying the laws of the jungle, they will produce blossoms which, in turn, will provide you with intoxicating scent. But their very short stems will be crooked, the blooms will be small and because they will be hard to pick, the crop will be small. If you want lots of lovely sweeet peas you need not just rich soil and a climbing frame on which they can gambol upwards, but also lots of patience for guidance and the application of string and wire or whatever else you might use in order to keep the plants from contorting themselves into a promiscuous mass of green knots. And, most important of all, you must pick the flowers every day. By denying the plants the opportunity to set seed you encourage more blossom. It's cruel, perhaps, but it works. You must never let your sweet peas sit back and think that their job is done; you must be a slave driver.

The rewards are great. Sweet pea, for me, is the smell of summer. They were not a regular feature of childhood; I suppose my hard-working and frequently ill mother, who loved sweet peas above every plant except roses, found herself unequal to the task most years. But they did appear, perhaps in bunches from my grandmother's garden.

While the scent is what sweet peas are really about, it's not the alpha and the omega. Not quite. The colours are glorious too, ranging from dark reds that are almost black to delicate lilacs and lavenders.

Open a seed catalogue - Unwins is the best in this respect - and observe those colours, those giant flowers, those ultra-hybridised sweet peas which clearly sell well enough to justify all this colour photography. The thing that beats me is how people obviously buy whole packets of one colour, one variety. Can you imagine their gardens?

I expect that these are bought by sweet pea exhibitors, a somewhat perverse bunch who spend all their spare waking hours between Autumn and, golly, late Summer, torturing sweet peas and bending the plants to their iron wills.

I buy one pack of sweet pea seeds every year: mixed colours, ideally an old fashioned blend for superior scent as the bigger, blowsier, more dramatic and more recent sorts are rather deficient in this essential respect. And if I'm organised, I will sow them under cover in October, producing the first blooms the following May. Or, if I am being my usual chaotic self, they will finally get sown in late May and burst into flower in August as the first hint of autumn hovers in the air.

The sweet pea itself originated in the Mediterannean and found its way to these islands thanks to botanical tourists who liked the scent. The early sort, the original Lathyrus odoratus, was grown in England for the first time by a schoolmaster in Essex in 1701 and was described in Henry Phillips' book of 1824, Flora Historica as "the emblem of delicate pleasures". Phillips goes on to say that it had really caught on over the previous century and was now to be found "in every garden, from the palace of the monarch to the cottage of the peasant, where it equally dispenses its fragrant odours, without regarding the rank of its possessor."

This Bolshevik amongst flowers, according to Phillips has a perfume which "although delightful in the open air, is found rather oppressive than reviving when confined to close apartments, and we therefore caution ladies from admitting it into their chambers."

The Victorians were made of sterner stuff and the vastly improved sweet pea hybrids introduced by Henry Eckford, one of the great head gardeners, took them by storm, with ladies wantonly cavorting with them in their boudoirs by the 1890s. These were the so-called grandifloras, bigger, more highly scented and appearing in a much wider range of colours than the earliest kinds.

Then came a mutation in a single grandiflora sweet pea plant which grew in the gardens of Earl Spencer (yes, that Spencer family) in Northamptonshire. The blossom was bigger and the edges of the petals were a little bit frilly. From that plant descended the so-called Spencer varieties which so enthralled the British public that competitive sweet pea growing became somthing of a national obsession.

The old Eckford varieties are still in the best in my book. That Spencer mutation proved, in the end, that bigger and better came at the expense of fragrance. The latest, sometimes monstrous, varieties of sweet pea are quite light on scent and can be admitted to even the chambers of even the most delicate ladies with impunity. Perfume may not be what sweet peas are all about but it's what attracted the attention of gardeners in the first place. And it's what makes me go through the whole rigmarole of growing the damn things every year. (ends)

You know what I mean?

ARE WELFARE SCROUNGERS HAVING SEX WITH SWANSEA'S BRITONS? OR, THE MEANING OF MYERS, by Garvan Tiddley.

Sigh. Or, as Slavoj Žižek puts it in his recent book on the dialectical discursivity of self-actualising practices within late-capitalist faux-communitarian formations, 'Sigh'.

When Kevin Myers, himself a kind of pre-Saussurean signifier for the kind of interpellative mauvaise foi so redolent of what Habermas so pointedly thematises in his recent paper on the surreptitious structuration of autologically self-codifying media genres in 1970s West Germany, opens a recent article with the words: “We all know that the remarks in the garda car about rape were unacceptable”, we all know that he cannot possibly mean what he says. For it would surely be taking the intentional fallacy to a ludicrous – and ludic? – extreme to ascribe monological 'meaning' to the 'word' “unacceptable”.

Inscribed in that word is the very masculinist category of 'acceptability' which so patently serves as a kind of significatory Trojan horse for Myers' rightist ideologemes to disseminate beyond the matrix of his soi-disant textual ejaculations. He, in short, says X in order to insinuate, sous rature, not-X. A green sheep, anyone? Kind of like the guy at the football match (or should that - in a kind of subaltern gesturing to the primacy of the yankoid hegemony – read: soccer?) who insists on cheering for his favourite team.

We've all met him. The Bud-swigging, Springsteen-loving dude who cannot quite bring himself to admit that his real allegiance is channelized not to 'this particular team' but to the authoritarian notion of 'teamhood' itself.

It is both symptomatic, telling and revealing that Myers follows up his innoculative disclaimer about the “unacceptable” “remarks” (Myers' rhetorical disinflation of the state-sponsored Garda speech acts duly noted) “about” rape with a methinks-the-gentleman-doth-protest-too-much clincher: “That much is obvious.” For is there not a covert ideological complicity between the notion of obviousness and the concept of rape? Do not both partake of a certain phallogocentric unicity? Did I not recently co-write a book? Did we not set out to reality-test our belief that there is a great deal of social injustice in Europe? Did we not, to our surprise, find this hypothesis confirmed at every turn?

Do you, Kevin, still dare to eat that peach?