The day before I headed to Cloona (for details of my stay there see the previous post) I read an article in the Irish Times by Pico Iyer, originally published in the New York Times as, ‘The Joy of Quite’, – (to read it click here )) which examined our plugged-in-infomation-overloaded-lives. He suggests that the future of travel may well lie in ‘black hole resorts’ where it will not be possible to go online and where there will be no televisions in the rooms.
Disconnected Days
Filed under Healthy Living, Musings
Cloona: Health Retreat Centre
I arrived home yesterday from a six-day sojourn in Cloona, a health retreat centre in the West of Ireland. Now that I am safely home, I realize that my decision to go to Clonna was one of the best, if not the best, that I made in the past twelve months.
Filed under Healthy Living, Ireland
Hello from Westport
I have just arrived, following a four-hour drive, in Westport a smallish town in County Mayo in the west of Ireland. Westport is a laid out town as opposed to, a hey let’s just stick another building here and there topsy-turvy type town. Architect James Wyatt designed it in the eighteenth century. His client was the then Lord Sligo, from nearby Westport House, who wanted a place for his tenants and workers to live.
Filed under Travel
Lost in Translation
George Bernard Shaw described America and England as two countries separated by a common language. Perhaps because he was Irish he didn’t delve into the differences between English as spoken in Ireland and English as spoken in the rest of the Anglophone world. I was reminded of one of the differences when I saw the ‘KEEP GOING SURE IT’S GRAND’ poster in the Irish Design Shop before Christmas. Here in Ireland we pepper our everyday conservation with words or phrases that are probably incomprehensible to visitors to these shores. Here’s a small selection.
Filed under Musings
If Only
As I type this I am listening to Edith Piaf singing ‘Non, Je ne Regrette Rien’. It’s one of my favorive songs. I am not prone to major regrets but I do occasionally indulge in *if only* thinking.
Filed under Musings, Shops/Shopping
Welcome to 2012
It’s the first day of the New Year and incredibly we are already in the twelfth year of the twenty-first century. How did that happen? It feels like just six months or so have passed since we celebrated the millennium.
Filed under Musings
♥ Favourite Days
My favourite days of the year are the ones that immediately follow Christmas. There is no contest, no other day or days (for me) in the annual calendar holds or hold the same allure as the 26th and the 27th December. They are days for rest and relaxation. They are days when behaviour, that at other times of the year might appear lazy, such as taking cups of coffee or tea back to bed and spending an hour or so there poring over a magazine seems almost de rigueur. They are days when culinary treats, such as a large slice of Christmas cake heated in the oven and served with a giant dollop of cream, which might mark one as an eccentric eater outside the festive season seem perfectly normal edible fare. In short they are blissful, restful, and battery-recharging type days.
Filed under Musings
♥ Happy Christmas
Dear reader,
I find it so hard to believe that it’s the night before Christmas Eve and that a whole year has almost passed since I last celebrated Christmas. Time does have a way of skating its merry way swiftly away across a twelve-month.
This yuletide I would like to thank you for reading Just Add Attitude; but most of all I would like to wish you a joyful, peaceful and happy Christmas. If you don’t celebrate Christmas I hope you have a restful, enjoyable and happy holiday weekend.
I will be back *on air* early next week. Talk to you then.
Love from B at Just Add Attitude.
Filed under Celebrations
♥ Baking: Last Minute Christmas Cake
As an expression, it’s never too late to bake a Christmas cake, may not be in the same league as one of my favourite quotes ‘It’s never too late to be who you might have been’ (George Eliot). This recipe is from a Delia Smith Christmas Cookery book; she calls it last-minute Christmas mincemeat cake. It seems to prove the point that as in life so too in Christmas baking it’s never too late. Once cooked it can be iced in the traditional way, topped with a glazed nut topping, or simply left as is.
♥ Last Minute Christmas Shopping
This is the last of the pre-Christmas shopping posts. I won’t go through the whole preamble again but will just say, as a quick reminder, that the emphasis in this series of posts is on: craft, home/handmade items, and independent shops. If you are entering the final run up to Christmas with some present shopping left to do, it would of course be lovely to stumble on a shop where you could scoop up diverse items to match all the gaps on your list. The Irish Design Shop, which carries a large range of items spanning different craft disciplines, is that sort of shop. Below are a few of the items they stock that caught my eye.
Filed under Craft, Dublin, Shops/Shopping
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