Weird Scenes Inside the Coffee Mug

On the 24th January I bought a litre of Premier Dairies milk in the Centra on Barnhill Road in Dalkey.  We were out of milk so we started using it immediately.

On the evening of the 26th January I was watching TV when my daughter came in much agitated and interrupted my Breaking Bad orgy to show me the thing she found in her mug of coffee.  Being of a squeamish disposition I didn't look too closely but it looked like a mouse embryo or a piece of intestinal tubing of some sort.  See image.


I eschewed my normal tea and biscuit that evening and went to bed feeling decidedly queasy.  I had been pouring milk from the offending carton over my meusli for three days.

The following morning (stomach still upset) I contacted the Consumer Protection Association.  A very nice lady shared my concern and then passed me on to the Food Safety Authority.  A man there informed me that this was an issue for my local Environmental Health Officer in Dun Laoghaire and supplied he relevant number.  I got in touch with a very helpful lady called Grainne who asked me to email her the details of milk's origins and an image of the creature.

She queried me about how the coffee was made and whether the thing could have been in the coffee machine.  No chance I assured her as the milk had been poured directly into the coffee mug and the machine had been used to froth it only.

Things rested so.  An hour later she called me back and said she'd spoken to her scientific advisor and that he wouldn't be able to look at it until Monday - it was now late on Friday afternoon.  However she said he wondered was it possible that it was a lump of curdled milk.  Not a chance I said - it's definitely animal.  However a seed of doubt had been sown.

That night I took the thing out of the deep freeze and resolved to examine it more closely the next morning.  Getting up early I took it out to a table in the back garden, laid it on a sheet of paper, and dissected it with a sharp knive.  It was indeed a lump of curdled milk that had built up inside the frother on the coffee machine.

It's clearly time I instituted a new cleaning regime in the kitchen.

Christmas Reading

Stoner by John Williams

A real slow burner by an author previously unknown to me.  The uneventful and mildly tragic life of a farm boy turned academic at a Mid-Western university. It's the density and quality of the writing that pulls you in.  The late author reminds me a little of James Salter. The scene where the conniving student is guided through a exam committee by his mentor is a classic - as is the dying scene at the conclusion.

Breakfast with Lucian  by Geordie Greig

This is more an admiring gallop through the life than a biography. It's beautifully illustrated with Freud's ruthless paintings and is easy reading but it never gets to the core of what made Freud such a brute.  The writer doesn't skip over his subject's appalling behaviour towards his women and children but seems to relish each unsavoury anecdote.  Only the whippets around Freud were treated respectfully.  Everyone else had to accept things on his own monstrously egocentric terms or be excommunicated.  There were moments of grace like his tendency to read Flaubert's letters to his girl-friends but these instances were overwhelmed by the astounding levels of callous abuse.

Olivier by Philip Ziegler

A serviceable biography of the tyrannical old thespian. Olivier was very far from a luvvie.  He flew with the Fleet Air Arm in the Second World War and brought an unprecedented physical bravery to many of his parts.  He was an extremely hard worker but he was also a stone autocrat.   He liked to act, produce and direct - all the better to maintain total control over a production. His triumphant films of Hamlet and Henry V were examples of this. Actors working for him were told how to do it and he brooked no debate.  Art always came before life and he had little interest in the world outside theatre.  His private life was of secondary importance although he was initially besotted with Vivien Leigh before she went of the rails. No great depths to the book, or perhaps its subject, but a bit of a page turner nonetheless.

Hughie O'Donoghue - Red Remembered Fields

Hughie O'Donoghue (Paddy Benson)

An edited version of this piece appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 8 December 2013.

It's a long long way from the manicured playing fields of Eton to the melancholy bog-lands of Erris.  But Hughie O'Donoghue can traverse imaginatively this distance and find inspiration in both locales.  He is currently artist-in-residence at Eton College, working on a Somme series for the centenary of the Great War, in which the casualties included many from that school.  And last week his exhibition Gort Rua opened at the Oliver Sears Gallery.  This show is based on his memories of childhood summers in North West Mayo - an area that itself suffered many casualties during the Great Famine.

Given his bifurcated background, and his constant moving between Ireland and England, you might think that O'Donoghue would share the Anglo-Irish malaise expressed by  Elizabeth Bowen - feeling "Irish in England and English in Ireland".  On the contrary, the artist is quite at home in either place.  You sense that this modest, soft-spoken, and amiable man would be at ease wherever he went.  Speaking to him in Dublin recently he told me that "complexity of origin is something I'm proud of - it's like a mongrel dog - they're usually quite intelligent".  Here's a painter steeped in childhood memories of rural Ireland, with an Irish name, an English education (that he much appreciates) and lingering traces of a Mancunian accent.  He was born in Manchester to a mother from the shores of Lough Carrowmore and a father who was born in England of Irish parents.  He's proud of his father's Kerry roots and mentions family encounters there with both Collins and De Valera.  Though formally educated in England, his school years were punctuated by annual summer trips to his mother's birthplace.  His childhood reveries were also stimulated by frequent trips to the Manchester City Art Gallery encouraged by his father. Paintings there such as Van Gogh's Pear Trees in Blossom and Veronese's Baptism lingered in his consciousness as did the rivers and fields of the West of Ireland.  His father also took him to Old Trafford to watch Matt Busby's team create its own masterpieces.  O'Donoghue remarked on the death the previous day of Bill Foulkes, one of his heroes from that era.

O'Donoghue holds both UK and Irish passports and is content to be claimed by both countries.  He sets little store on nationality.  He sees himself as a citizen of the inclusive world of art and culture.  A world that transcends the narrow boundaries of nationhood.  He and Sean Scully are unique among Irish artists in being members of the Royal Academy and of Aósdana.  He may also be unique in having his work hanging in the Royal Collection at Windsor and in Áras an Uachtaráin.

O'Donoghue's career took a few twists and turns before he found the righteous path. With his father's active encouragement he drew and painted from an early age.  However, rather than going to art college, which involved staying at home an extra year and taking a mandatory foundation course, he choose the freedom of getting out and doing a teacher training course.  After graduating he spent six years as a secondary school teacher, teaching art.  He ended up in the tiny town of Goole in the East Riding of Yorkshire.  He continued his painting and occasionally exhibited at group shows.   In 1982, he was offered his first solo show at the Ferens Gallery in Hull.  Encouraged by this he decided, at the age of 29, to quit his tenured position and focus on his art.  His wife Clare was a strong advocate of this courageous move.  "It was absolutely Clare's call" he emphasised.  She had just landed a job teaching in a middle school so they had a safety net.  He quit his remote outpost in Goole and headed to Goldsmiths College in London to do an MA in Fine Art.   Goldsmiths at that time was hardly the most sympathetic environment for someone who aspired to be a painter.  Duchamp was God and art was more about theory than practice.  For someone who was influenced by the Old Masters and loved the physical act of painting it was a shock to the system. There were positive aspects to it however for the aspiring artist:  "it intellectually toughened me up in terms of being able to articulate what I was doing".

Immediately after leaving Goldsmiths College he got a residency at Drax Power Station. His benefactors were none to pleased with his depictions of black smoke billowing from chimneys that allegedly emitted only steam.  These days Drax has the reputation of being the UK's single largest emitter of carbon dioxide so maybe O'Donoghue was posting an early warning.  This gig within the dark satanic mills was followed by a heavenly residency at the National Gallery in 1984.  There was huge competition for this residency and O'Donoghue was thrilled and somewhat bemused to have been awarded it.  Perhaps the London art mandarins decided to add a little northern grit to the mix.  This residency took on greater significance when the National Gallery found itself with spare marketing space on the London Underground due to a cancelled project.  It decided to use these prime locations to advertise their artist in residence programme. The ads featured a photograph of O'Donoghue in his studio.  A trickle of interest in his work turned into a flood as visitors crowded his studio in the National Gallery.  This son of a railwayman father, and a mother who had worked as a bus conductor, was accorded yet another favour by the gods of public transport.  At the end of his tenure there he was allocated a gallery space within the National Gallery for his concluding exhibition.  This was a singular privilege - previous incumbents had to hold their shows within the inferior studio spaces.

His brief at the National Gallery was "to take something out of the Old Master tradition and make it my own."  He encountered Francis Bacon while there and his engagement with figuration gave O'Donoghue the confidence to follow a similar path.  Bacon's work "had a human dimension" and it encouraged him to make "ambitious figure paintings".  His concluding exhibition there was called Sleepers.  It featured figures being consumed by the earth - harking back to bogs around Erris where his grandfather was reputedly buried.  Commercial success didn't follow immediately.  A few galleries came to see the work and loved it but he was told that it was "too dark, too heavy, too serious".  The art appetites of the time called for irony and humour - the quick fix.  O'Donoghue's art is not for the frivolous.  It demands time and concentration.  It's portentous in the best sense of that word - full of substance and meaning. A chance encounter with Fabian Carlsson at a London show a few months later got him up and running.  Carlsson took in all his work and paid him a princely retainer of £2,000 a month.  Riches indeed for an artist who never earned a penny previously.

In 1986 a "seismic" event was to occur that set his career on a path that he still retains some ambivalence about.  An American investment banker called Craig Baker commissioned O'Donoghue to embark on a series of paintings based on the Passion that were to take up the next 10 years of his life.  "This took me out of the mainstream art world which was certainly a negative".  The positive aspect of course was that he was given the time and space to create a series of 39 masterly paintings on which his reputation as a major artist was established.  Subsequently Baker bequeathed these paintings to IMMA for the delectation of the Irish nation.

O'Donoghue and his wife moved to Kilkenny after he completed the Baker commission in 1996 and they were to spend the next 15 years there rearing their family.  Now that their children have flown the nest the couple are free to move around a bit more.  He maintains a base in London and intends to spend time there every year keeping abreast with the metropolitan art scene and contributing to the activities of the Royal Academy.  He is currently coordinator of its Summer Show.  He also has a house and studio near Bangor-Erris where he can flee the hurly burly of the London scene.  "A good place for the gestation of ideas" he maintains.  He is planning a larger studio there and this will be his artistic base.  In the meantime the couple are enjoying a peripatetic life.  After his Eton residency he will take on another residency at Ballinglen in January 2014 - down the coast from his Erris base.

His latest show at the Oliver Sears Gallery is a contrasting take on ground he covered in 2001 in his Naming the Fields exhibition at the Rubicon Gallery.  The current paintings are lighter and brighter in tone, although Moonlight Marine is an exquisite exception.  They reflect O'Donoghue's  observation that "more recently my focus has shifted to colour".  Also, there's not a figure in sight unless you count the occasional dark intrusion of a raven.  The title of the show, Gort Rua, is a reference both to the intense red fields in the paintings and to the vivid nature of memory itself.  But this doesn't look like Tir na nOg.  The fields seem somewhat ominous - especially those shadowed by the presence of the looming raven.  "They are never carefree my paintings" he told me, but he doesn't see these birds as portents of doom.  For him the Fiachra or raven is an emblem of the subconscious and the bird’s flight represents the imaginative journey of the individual.  The name is also a harking back to the ancient tribe that occupied the area.  A disused cottage is the only indication of habitation in these works.  This building recalls his mother's home and the adjacent hay barn.  But the paintings are not aiming to recreate topographical landscapes but rather to recapture childhood memories.  "I remembered Erris as a mysterious and magical place as a child and this is what I wanted to convey in the paintings."

A Brief Interlude in Stratford

Shakespeare as Plump Burgher

It being that dreary time before the fully-fledged December debacle we headed over to Stratford-upon-Avon on Friday last to see the RSC do Antony and Cleopatra at the Swan Theatre.  Getting there involves a flight to Birmingham and then, if you're brave, a rented car the 30 mile journey to Stratford.  This trip involves a nightmarish criss-crossing of the spaghetti junctions around Birmingham so the expense of a taxi might be best for the well heeled or the nervous. We made it thanks to the excellent GPS aboard my Audi A4 - a most unexpected surprise from Herz.  They must have been out of Astras.

If you're just going for a short trip you might as well large it so we stayed in the Arden Hotel, a beautiful boutique hotel directly across the road from the theatre.  It has fine old photographs of RSC alumni in the reception area and I was drawn to a striking one of Helen Mirren in her prime.  There was also a moody shot of Vivien Leigh - an equally alluring woman.  The rooms were large and luxurious and the wi-fi worked - so no complaints there.  They did a pre-theatre dinner for our party which allowed us to eat two courses before the show and come back afterwards for cheese and dessert. Civilised stuff.

Talking of formidable women, I noticed Hilary Mantel sitting at a nearby table when we came into the bar.  I know her husband from an old technical writing gig I did in Winchester so I went over to say hello.  She was very amiable telling me about two plays based on her recent novels that are forthcoming at the RSC - so this was a scouting visit for them.  My erstwhile colleague had slipped his technical writing yoke to become her manager.  She has extraordinarily bird-like features. Very short and very lady-like.  A bit Womans Ownish in demeanour.

We had prime tickets for the play - sitting within spitting distance of the action just  above the circular stage.  The show began with an arful nude scene where Cleopatra bathes in milk (I think - it was done in subdued lighting).  She's a well upholstered black actress and she plays the role as a woman of fleshly appetites rather than a seductive siren with political motives.  A Juillard graduate called Joaquina Kalukango, she seems very young for the part.  Antony is played as a posturing stud (sort of sub Erroll Flynn) by Jonathan Cake, who has form in Desperate Housewives.  There's a live orchestra above the stage and there's plenty of dance, colour and life in the production.  The text however is cut and minced in a fairly radical manner.  I recognised a few lines - but not many. Good fun but hardly a classic production in every sense of that adjective.  And you certainly never felt the real shock and awe that tragedy should engender.

Breakfast the next morning was entertaining (oh and the food was superb).  Most of our fellow diners had the vaguely raffish look of actors, or former actors - the age profile suggesting the latter.  One larger than life character came down in expensive white pyjamas and dressing gown and elaborately kissed his waitress before settling down to breakfast.  His booming delivery ensured we heard his every utterance to the mute and chastened looking woman who joined him.  Later he appeared in the lobby in an ankle length astrakhan coat - still booming away.  A Michael Gambon type but not the man himself.

After breakfast I went across the road to watch the early morning rowers on the Avon - mostly women doing their double sculls training amid the many swans.  Girls in smart leggings pass by on their way in to the RSC building - presumeably rehearsing for the next show.  Next stop was the Holy Trinity church nearby to have a look at Shakespeare's grave.  Not much to see really, just a flagstone in the chancel with the famous words inscribed - and reproduced rather shoddily in an adjacent sign.  Above the grave in an alcove was a plaster bust (much restored) of the great man.  Its supposed to be a good likeness. If so, he looked like your average middle-aged burgher with good capon lined. Hardly a romantic figure.  Who knows?  Who cares?  His legacy is secure.  The town teemed with tourists but our work was done and we hit the road back to Birmingham.

Half Light at Hillsboro Fine Art

Lamb Series

An edited version of this piece appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on 17 November 2013.


Paddy Graham is one of the great old warriors of Irish art. His canvases are battlegrounds marked by the blood, sweat and tears he expends in the act of creation.  Religious iconography, nudes, pages from sketchbooks, cryptic phrases, and traces of earlier endeavours jostle for position. The man from Mullingar is still struggling with the sacred and the profane but this exhibition also shows a more meditative side. The Half Light series consists of three large diptychs inspired by the sea off the coast of Mayo.  These are not conventional seascapes but rather recreations of the feelings engendered by Graham's coastal encounters. They invite contemplation in much the same way as Mark Rothko's (a painter much admired by Graham) work does.  Two of the works are predominantly grey and formidably austere.  The third is an ethereal lime green with a jagged grey gash in the middle. The accompanying Lamb series comprise six smaller pieces where grey again predominates but this time the austerity is compromised by sacred hearts and gaping crotches. The Lamb of God contending with the sins of the world.