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Irish Examiner
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Theatre For One review: Intimate setting makes for wonderful experience at Cork Midsummer
Theatre for One, Emmet Place, Cork Midsummer Festival, ★★★★★ All of the city is a stage is a central tenet of Cork Midsummer Festival, one that is underscored as the queue begins to grow outside the Theatre for One venue near Cork Opera House and the starting time is delayed as we wait for a noisy street-cleaning machine to pass by. It all adds to the camaraderie and anticipation for the offerings from Landmark Productions and Octopus Theatricals, as does the welcome offer of sunscreen from the staff as the midday sun makes its presence felt. Theatre for One presents five-minute pieces performed by a single actor to an audience of one in a confessional-style booth. This year, the theme is Made in Cork, featuring plays by six Cork writers, directed by Julie Kelleher and Eoghan McCarrick. As the door shuts, the sudden darkness of the plush red velvet surrounds strikes a particularly Proustian chord with this former convent school girl. The religious theme continues to echo in The Green Line, written by Michael John McCarthy and performed with affecting conviction by Marion O'Dwyer. The set-up is quickly and skilfully achieved, as an older woman at a New York bus stop unburdens herself to a fellow waiting passenger — I startle when she asks my name. As she reminisces about her childhood in Ireland, the New Yawk accent is replaced by the musical lilt of her West Cork upbringing. Wearing a cross, she has been at the church to pray for her late husband and imagines an idealised version of her own funeral at home before dismissing the idea. She indicates that my bus is coming and it's time to say goodbye. Next up is Hex, showcasing the considerable talents of Gina Moxley, who both writes and performs. She recounts a trip with her college friends to the US and an encounter with Elijah, the palm-reading hotel worker with 'a bang of Southern Gothic' whose casual aside has tormented her for years. Fragile, yet determined, she, like my friend at the bus stop, is confronting her mortality. It sounds deep but it's also very funny, employing Moxley's gift for a neat turn of phrase. The intimate, and confronting, nature of the format comes to the fore as she asks to hold my hand, commenting on how soft it is before giving me a notebook and asking me to write something for her, the text of a tattoo she plans to get across her chest. As she spells out the three words, I catch my breath at the implication and hesitate to complete her request. It's one of the most powerful and profound moments I have ever experienced in a theatrical setting. As the screen comes down, my eyes prickle with tears. I need a moment to compose myself but the door opens, the darkness recedes and the sunlight floods in — time to go back to the real world.
Eater
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Eater
Last-Minute Father's Day Gift Idea: An Infomercial Icon for 27% Off
If you're still blanking on what to buy Pops for Father's Day, I come with deliverance. We've assembled the best last-minute Father's Day gifts, all of which either off super-fast shipping or require none at all. You won't be the black sheep of the family this year — or if you are, it's not because failed to get Dad a gift. But there are even more great gift ideas popping up and catching our eye with each passing second — that can still make it to your papa if you act quick. The Magic Bullet, aka the GOAT of small and idiot-proof (trust me) blenders, is currently 27 percent off, and if you order today, it will arrive before Sunday. I have a surprising amount of fondness for the informercial-famous Magic Bullet. I'm not just talking about the seamless pleasure of using the small appliance, which is revered for its ability to pulverize everything from onions to ice at the touch — actually, it's more like a bop — of the top of its blending chamber. Decades later, the Bullet is still my Proustian appliance of choice, reminding me of simpler days spent sitting on a shag carpet, slamming Ben & Jerry's chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, and watching its dancing blades steal the show from all the other As Seen on TV products. (Minus the Shake Weight, of course.) The first Bullet I blasted off was actually at the house of my then best friend's dad, who was very in-the-know, loading up on DVDs and treating his kids to the spoils of the Furby universe. All of this to say: I think every self-described 'hip and food-loving dad' has, at some point in his life, dreamed of firing up a Magic Bullet. Luckily, the Magic Bullet of today is more affordable than it was decades ago, and you don't have to order it with a rotary phone. This saucy little model, for example, is an 11-piece set that includes BPA-free plastic cups for blending, a 250-watt motor base, a to-go lid, and a 10-second recipe guide. You know, so your dad can finally make that iconic omelet from the infomercial. The Magic Bullet is 27% off on Amazon . For more food gift ideas for dad, check out our last-minute Father's Day gift guide . See More: Eater at Home Shopping and Pantry Guides
New Statesman
04-06-2025
- Health
- New Statesman
True 'Yorkshire tea' is the ultimate in processed food
Photo by Lauri Patterson / Getty Images Dorothy Hartley opens her monumental Food in England by recalling the kitchens of her Yorkshire childhood – and the oatcakes, hot buttered toast, beef sandwiches and Yorkshire puddings made within. One particularly outstanding spread inspires this exquisitely Proustian sentence: 'The Craven Heifer Inn served a massive Yorkshire tea with ham, game pies, apple pies, parkin and cheese, hot teacakes, jam and honey and black treacle, and tea.' It conjures not just the craft of an inn kitchen, but the old magic of processing food to help it keep: pickling or salting, fermenting, preserving with sugar, baking with black treacle (which kept gingerbreads and parkins moist for days). Processes that change the taste and texture of food, or those that keep it, are often ancient and regionally specific. Adding the name of a place changes the way we think about smoked, salted or acid-pickled fish, territorial cheese, fermented dairy foods, something sweet and baked. Even if you've never tasted a butcher-made York ham, Mrs Kirkham's Lancashire cheese or Grasmere gingerbread, it obviously won't taste anything like those packets of re-formed slices of meat, a plastic-wrapped cheese, or a snappy little ginger biscuit. Carlos Monteiro, the Brazilian professor of nutrition and public health, first recognised and named the problem of ultra-processing in food by setting out to discover why obesity rates in Brazil were rising even as sugar sales were falling. He came to think that a bag of sugar in a kitchen was a sign of good health, as it meant people were cooking for themselves. His four 'Nova' categories distinguish food not according to the customary levels of fat, salt and sugar, but by levels of processing. The first two encompass unprocessed or minimally processed foods; the third acknowledges that factories can also use mechanised versions of long-established techniques, such as drying, canning, freezing. These are not the same as the industrial contortions, extrusions and additions of the fourth category, UPF. The food industry wants us to think that Nova is problematic: too simple, too negative. Having spent time in an ordinary kitchen, these categories feel quite intuitive to me, as they would to anybody who has worked on a farm, in a smokery, a brewery, a dairy or a bakery. Processing food takes effort. 'Making a Meal of It', an exhibition at the Ryedale Folk Museum in North Yorkshire, shows just how much skill and graft went into turning rye, oats and, in later centuries, wheat, into bread – as well as barley into beer, pigs into hams, combs into honey and fruit into jams and marmalades. The dairy was where women, cool and clean without the disruption of men, made cream, butter and cheese from milk. York ham, traditionally dry cured over months, was so renowned that, like cheddar, it was copied (to a lower standard) all over the world. From the 17th century, gingerbread moulding, cake-baking and, eventually, tea-drinking joined the list of Yorkshire's famed skills. It is no coincidence that these foods sound like just the thing for Dorothy Hartley's magnificent Yorkshire tea. 'Tea' in the north (and other parts of the country) is still the name for an early-evening meal that others call dinner. For farm and factory workers, who might only have a fire and kettle, the brew transformed a cold meal of bread, cheese or bacon into a hot one. Add in gingerbread, cakes and pies, and it is easy to see why it was talent-spotted by the aristocratic culinary writers of the 1930s, who distinguished 'high tea' eaten sitting up at a table from the armchair 'tea' taken mid afternoon. Lady Troubridge's Etiquette and Entertaining decides that high tea could be made acceptable in one's weekend cottage, so long as it was done with a knowing embrace of 'farmhouse fashion': butter in an earthenware crock, a pot of jam, a big brown teapot and no genteel china. Whatever 'Yorkshire tea' suggests today, it's worth seeking it out in its full historical glory: a hearty, hard-won gastronomic pleasure. Pen Vogler is talking about 'The Politics of Pudding: The Past, Present and Future of Yorkshire Food' at Ryedale Folk Museum in Hutton-le-Hole at 2pm on 12 July Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe [See also: 'Picnic at Hanging Rock''s vision of girlhood] Related This article appears in the 04 Jun 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Housing Trap
Daily Mail
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
With WH Smith's name set to disappear from the high street, LAURA CRAIK writes a love letter to the stores that are no more
All bosses are intimidating, and never more so than your first boss in your very first job. When said boss is tall, stunning, flame-haired and in a rock band, your teenage self quakes in their very presence. When I applied to be a Saturday girl in the Edinburgh branch of Miss Selfridge, I knew the staff would be cool. I just didn't think one of them would be Shirley Manson. Before the alt-rock band Garbage penned a James Bond theme ('The World Is Not Enough', 1999) and sold-out stadiums, Manson, its lead singer, was my manager at Miss Selfridge. Of course she was: in the 80s it was the city's hottest store. Everyone shopped there, from the club kids to my history teacher. Sure, Topshop was great, but Miss Selfridge was its cooler little sister; the Miu Miu to its Prada. It had the best chainmail dresses, the best make-up and the best uniforms. My 20 per cent staff discount more than made up for the pong of the changing room at closing time. Miss Selfridge is no more, like a slew of fashion meccas that live on only in the memory – Chelsea Girl, Clockhouse, Tammy Girl, Kookaï. Every woman has her favourite. Remembering the shops from our youth evokes a particular wave of sentimentality. Like much of the UK, I felt an unexpected pang when Woolworths went into administration in 2008, an event that prompted an outpouring of Proustian memories among midlife British shoppers. When I was a little girl, as my mother browsed the aisles of household goods, I was given 10p to spend at the Pic'n'Mix counter. I remember stuffing a paper bag with chocolate tools, foam bananas, cola cubes, milk bottles and strawberry bonbons. Ten pence went a long way. All the way to the dentist. Each vanishing shop closes another portal to a bygone time. As the planned closure of WH Smith proved, nostalgia can be sparked however prosaic and/or objectionable the retailer. Gen Z might struggle to romanticise the strip-lit, haphazardly laid out, shabby interiors of Britain's 233-year-old purveyor of stationery (they don't need it), greeting cards (they don't send them) and meal deals ('a rip-off compared to Tesco', according to my 14-year-old) but, for a certain generation, 'Smiths', as it was fondly known, was an electric blue-carpeted place of wonder. 'It had the best selection of scented rubbers,' remembers one friend, who still possesses the cake-scented Swiss-roll eraser she bought in the Reading branch circa 1986. 'We'd go to Smiths on the August bank holiday to stock up on stationery for the new school year. My dad would get his wallet out, huffing and puffing about the cost of a fluffy pencil case. The plastic bag always split, which would make him apoplectic. Smiths always had the weakest bags, with the flimsiest handles.' None of which prevented WH Smith from becoming one of the first chains to introduce a plastic bag fee. It was also an early adopter of the self-service checkout, and the dreaded TPC – till point conversation – which involved harried customers being asked whether they wanted a giant bar of Dairy Milk for £2. I derive the same mawkish sentimentality from the retail landscape others might draw from the land. Just as my husband, a farmer's son, might lament the loss of a yew tree, I feel sad about the loss of Edinburgh retailers such as the second-hand store Flip or the cheap-as-chips womenswear retailer What Every Woman Wants. My mother, meanwhile, misses BHS. 'Feel the quality of that,' she'll say, proffering a beige BHS jumper bought some time in the early 90s. 'Better than M&S, I'll tell you.' According to Professor Sophie Scott, director of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College, London, it's not uncommon to attach huge emotional significance to shops. 'The connection they make to our past is heightened by the emotional context,' she explains. 'People feel nostalgia more intensely when they are with family and friends, or when eating, because these situations are rich in retrieval cues that trigger memories. Shops seem to fulfil a similar function.' This might explain why so many midlife and millennial women still miss Topshop, despite its narrow range of sizes and associations with disgraced former owner Sir Philip Green. Were Topshop's jeans any better than H&M's? Were the heels in Freeman Hardy Willis or Ravel any different from those sold currently in Office or Kurt Geiger? In an era when you can buy anything from anywhere (Trump's tariffs notwithstanding), what is it that we're nostalgic for – a frock or a feeling? Maybe it's a connection to who we were. Online shopping may have sounded the death knell for any number of retailers, but it has also been deleterious in other ways. While a trip to the shops is clearly not as healthy as a bracing country walk, it's exponentially healthier than shopping online, an activity that requires precisely zero steps. Given some shopping malls have estimated that people walk up to seven miles on any given visit, the argument to frequent bricks and mortar stores is clear. In-real-life shopping is also good for your mental health. For older customers, particularly those who live alone, a chat with a sales assistant can be the only social interaction of the day. It's why those who prioritise old-fashioned 'service with a smile' are so valued. 'Whether it's simply acting as a friendly face, our people make a real difference,' says James Breckenridge, John Lewis retail director. The store's 'school of service' initiative, which focuses on training employees, is said to have freed up over 500,000 hours for its sales assistants to spend helping customers. Whatever our circumstances, however we like to spend Saturday afternoons, we all grieve the loss of our favourite shops. Accustomed to downloading any film on demand, our kids will never understand the white-knuckle ride of visiting the local Blockbuster Video with our parents, praying that Home Alone was in stock. Whether you miss Blockbuster or Biba, House of Fraser or Virgin Megastore, their closures likely marked the loss of something more nebulous and far more precious than the opportunity to rent the latest film or buy a new lipstick.
Telegraph
06-04-2025
- General
- Telegraph
Gristly beef and watery cabbage: the school dinners I'll never miss
If you find yourself near Stowmarket, Suffolk, this Spring, you could consider visiting the Food Museum, where a Proustian experience awaits. The museum's new exhibition is devoted to the history of school dinners from the 1940s to the present. The show explores menus old and new, the role of dinner ladies and (alarmingly) offers visitors the opportunity to sample school food from different eras. The provision of school meals began in 1906, when the nursery school pioneer Margaret McMillan argued that if the State intended to make education compulsory, it must also ensure that pupils were adequately nourished. An enlightened understanding of the role of food in maintaining morale led to the universal provision of school dinners from 1944. But over the decades it is striking to observe how some things about school dinners remain constant, while others have profoundly altered. The sharpest divergence is in menus, which have changed dramatically over the decades, driven by the tension between evolving ideas of adequate nutrition and economies of scale. I was at school in the Sixties and Seventies, and apart from the obligatory milk (frozen in winter, curdled in summer) I remember most vividly the dinners at my village primary school. We ate in the gravy-smelling village hall, to which the food was delivered in metal vats and dispensed by dinner ladies who kept a beady eye on my attempts to scrape away my uneaten meals. I was a weedy child with a negligible appetite, and I struggled with gristly beef and watery cabbage, the brown slop with pink sauce ('Medway mud and shaving cream') that passed for pudding and the horror of Gypsy Tart – a dire Kentish delicacy of congealed evaporated milk and tough pastry. Of my grammar school lunches I recall only the Spam fritters, served in a cacophonous space that doubled as the school theatre and gym, pungent with the pong of deep-frying and teenaged angst. Younger pupils arguably had an even less appetising experience after the opening of provision to private tender in the 1980s. On Radio 4 a dinner lady recalled Pork Hippos and Cheesy Feet – not to mention the Turkey Twizzlers that reduced Jamie Oliver almost to tears during his gallant attempt to reform school food in the 2005 television series, Jamie's School Dinners. Studying the school menus of that era, you can see the future obesity crisis inexorably forming. Over the years menus have evolved but the memories of former schoolchildren seem strangely consistent: a kind of rueful affection for the comic nastiness of school food. Bridget Phillipson, the current education secretary, recalled her school dinners as 'absolutely awful', featuring 'custard with a thick skin and orange fish fingers'. Phillipson was born in 1983, but evidently catering standards had not noticeably improved in the decades since Nigel Molesworth's devastating analysis of 'Skool Food, or The Piece of Cod Which Passeth All Understanding'. Meanwhile the role of dinner ladies can be traced in a direct line from Dickens's fearsome Mrs Squeers ('I can't find the school spoon anywhere') to the Beano's unforgettable dinner lady, Olive Sprat, with her concrete-reinforced ladle. These days, current government standards for school meals virtuously minimise salt, processed foods and sugar. But other nations still seem better than we are at persuading children that food is one of life's civilised pleasures. In France, meals still tend to reflect the cultural as well as nutritional aspects of food, with several courses and proper plates and cutlery (back in 2008 the then schools secretary, Ed Balls, called for school meals to be served on china plates, rather than 'prison-style food trays'). A recent episode of Radio 4's Food Programme explored public catering in Copenhagen, where 90 per cent of school meals are prepared from scratch with organic produce. The budget is strict, the ingredients mainly plant based – and the secret of popular uptake? Sprinkle a bit of bacon over the top, apparently. Education budgets, like everything else, are sharply squeezed, but some aspects of the European approach could be worth considering, if we don't want our children and grandchildren to look back on their own school meals with the blend of nostalgia and comic dismay so vividly captured by the Food Museum's exhibition.
