Tots to Teens: Bugs and beasties for nature lovers
These interactive events start tomorrow, July 23, and continue weekly until August 27.
First up is a 'Biodiversity — Bugs & Beasties', which will introduce children to the bugs and creatures found in various habitats in the gardens.
Next is the 'Budding Botanist', which will involve an expedition through the gardens and learning how to identify and collect various plant specimens.
They will then press these plants in a flower press that they construct themselves.
The third event is 'Pond Dipping', which will teach children about the weird and wonderful diversity of insects that live in and around the ponds in the gardens.
The fourth event is the 'Bird Safari', during which the bird author Glynn Anderson will bring children on a guided walk through the gardens, pointing out all the different birds he spots along the way.
There's another 'Biodiversity — Bugs & Beasties' event on August 20 and a 'Budding Botanist' one on August 27.
All of these tours are suitable for children aged eight and up. Tickets, €5, can be booked online via eventbrite.ie.
Woodies fundraiser
Woodies' Heroes.
Woodie's has announced the return of Woodie's Heroes, its annual fundraiser in aid of Irish children's charities.
The DIY, home and garden store has held this fundraiser since 2015 and has raised over €4.1m in that time.
This year, the Woodie's Heroes campaign will run from now until August 9, and every cent raised will be donated to Childline by ISPCC, Down Syndrome Ireland, Autism Assistance Dogs Ireland, and the Cancer Fund for Children.
Supporting the campaign is easy. All you have to do is donate at the till in any Woodie's store or contribute online at donate.ie/event/woodiesheroes251.
Adventuring in Ireland
My Irish Adventure
My Irish Adventure is a great book to pack in the suitcase if you're planning on taking a trip anywhere in Ireland this summer.
It was written by five-year-old Eoghan Corrigan and his mum Carol, and reading it will encourage children to discover more of what this country has to offer.
The book follows Eoghan as he journeys across Ireland. Each page is devoted to a different county and features colourful illustrations as well as Eoghan's favourite facts about that particular part of the country.
On the page devoted to Cork, for example, he mentions the Blarney Stone, Cobh and its association with the Titanic and how Spike Island was once the world's biggest depot for convicts.
My Irish Adventure is widely available and costs from €10.
Summer schooling
Top of the Class
The Irish summer can be hit or miss weather-wise. One minute, the kids are happy playing outdoors in the sunshine. The next torrential rain can force them back indoors, where they are likely to complain of having nothing to do.
The 'Top of the Class' board game is a great thing to have on hand when such complaints arise.
It's an Irish general knowledge and trivia game suitable for all ages from six and up.
To win, participants must answer questions based on English, maths, history, science, geography and general knowledge they will have learned at school. They must also avoid hazards, handle the principal's instructions, and pass their summer tests.
This board game can be purchased from topoftheclassgame.ie for €34.95.
M&S back-to-school
It's never too early to plan for the children's return to school, especially if there are special offers available.
Marks & Spencer has announced that it is keeping its prices locked at 2021 levels for another year and is currently offering 20% off its back-to-school range.
Parents can now avail of deals like two cotton unisex polo shirts for €6. Offer lasts for a limited time only.
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What is myopia and can it be caused by children spending too much time on screens?
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RTÉ News
31 minutes ago
- RTÉ News
Irish-produced drama Mix Tape and the musical love letter
BBC drama Mix Tape, a tale of star-crossed lovers who bond over music, is coming to RTÉ soon but can it reinvigorate the lost art of the mix tape as musical love letter? It was a teenage rite of passage and also what the kids now call a major flex. Making a mixtape was a labour of love, a musical way into the heart of the one you fancied and also a proud artefact of just how very good your taste in music really was. Carefully pressing the right buttons on your twin tape deck, choosing the tracks of your hopes and dreams and lovingly inscribing the song titles and artists on the inlay card became something of a minor artform back in what some people probably correctly call simpler times. Van Morrison called it the inarticulate speech of the heart and for millions of seventies, eighties and nineties kids, the mixtape was the musical equivalent of the love letter - the spark for countless nervous conversations and maybe even debates. God knows, I still have a box of them in my spare room. And no, they weren't all retuned, un-played and unloved. These days, of course, you will see wizened old Boomers and Gen Xers posting tiresome memes on wizened old Facebook (it's where the adults hang out, OK?) of cassette tapes accompanied by a pencil. If you know, you know. This, apparently, is the modern age's equivalent of uncovering ancient runes and explaining arcane rituals to digital nativists. In our era of instant gratification, even the noughties phenomenon of the CD burn has given way to soulless Spotify playlists and causal YouTube shares on mobile phones. As ever, something has been lost but with a new generation turning to vinyl and even the cassette format making its own comeback, can the actual physical mixtape become a tribune of love once again? Perhaps recent BBC drama Mix Tape (ta-dah!), which is due to air on RTÉ soon, will inspire a fresh flood of spooling polyester plastic film coated with magnetic material as musical missives. Perhaps not. In any case, the fabled mixtape is the jumping off point for the four-part series. It is the overwrought story of two music mad Sheffield kids, with the very Irish names of Daniel O'Toole and Alison Connor, who meet as teens at a house party in 1989. The young Daniel (who looks like a cross between Grian Chatten of Fontaines D.C. and a young Neil Morrissey) is a music obsessive and he wins bookish Alison's heart with his impressive knowledge of Cabaret Voltaire. Then again, we later learn that his favourite Bowie song is Modern Love. Their first dance is to Joy Division's immortal Love Will Tear Us Apart, their first kiss is to The Jesus & Mary Chain, and when their bedroom fumbling goes much further, they DO IT to the strains of In-Between Days by The Cure. Oh, the drama! Oh, the great basslines! There isn't enough of The Fall featured in Mix Tape for my liking but music is the spine of young Dan and Ali's romance and it plays out the beats and missed heart beats of puppy love (thankfully, no songs by Donny Osmond were used in the making of this programme). Daniel slips his mixtapes into Alison's school bag and she hands him lovingly curated TDKs on the bus to school. We hear The Jesus & Mary Chain, The Velvet Underground and The Stone Roses. All very good, indeed. But just as their teen crush turns to full-blown romance, Alison vanishes from Sheffield, leaving Daniel feeling like a Morrissey song. It's an intriguing premise and the drama plays out in a dual timelines and dual time zones, making it a lot like Sliding Doors meets Sleepless in Seattle - a Proustian rush of 'what ifs' and 'if onlys' played out longingly in verboten mobile phone texts and mutual cyber stalking and the songs of their lost youth. Normal People it is not. However, it is fraught stuff. We follow Daniel and Alison, who is now a successful novelist living in Syndey and married to a total eejit, and move between their teenage romance in 1989 Sheffield and the modern-day reality of their adult relationships living on opposite sides of the world. Daniel and his wife aren't exactly singing from the same hymn sheet back in Sheffield. He now works as a music journalist but never seems to do any actual work (so, that makes sense) and he is toying with writing a book about some great lost music figurehead, like Daniel Johnson or Nick Drake. Mix Tape is a very Irish affair. The four-part drama was originated and developed by Dublin-based production company Subotica, who have previously produced North Sea Connection and The Boy That Never Was, with help from Ireland's generous Section 481 Film and Television tax incentive and the support of Fís Éireann/Screen Ireland and Screen Australia among others. It was also filmed entirely on location in Dublin and Sydney. And so, the former steel town of Sheffield is played by Dublin's Liberties (I was tickled to see that some of it was shot on the very street where I live), while location filming was also completed in Australia. However, things get seriously meta when the young Alison actually moves to actual Dublin and young Daniel nearly has a whitey on the actual Ha'penny Bridge when he sees her with another bloke. Strangely, no U2 was used in the making of this programme. Based on the novel by Jane Sanderson and adapted for television by Irish writer Jo Spain, the show stars Teresa Palmer as the adult Alison and Jim Sturgess as the adult Daniel and Rory Walton-Smith as young Daniel and Florence Hunt as young Alison. And here's the thing, the actors who play the younger versions of our protagonists are so much better than the anguished grown-up versions, who spend most of the time moping about like extras in a Cure video. Of course, the whole thing reminded me of that minor noughties indie hit about an estranged couple haggling over their shared record collection in the same way rich people haggle over their condo in Bel Air or their D4 pied-à-terre. If you're looking for a good music-based romance, Stephen Frears' film of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity is still your best. Mix Tape is a mite too tortured and joyless but it does have two major flexes - those Dublin locations and the actual music. It also asks an eternal question posed by music obsessives in every time line and time zone - can the songs that sound-tracked our young lives and loves ever really sound the same again?
Irish Examiner
3 hours ago
- Irish Examiner
Joe McNamee: Is it time to subsidise Irish hospitality?
Our shared and serious passion for music and film led my daughter and I to The Bear, a truly magnificent TV series (TV being the new 'film') set in a Chicago restaurant with Michelin star aspirations. As a recovering chef, I can confirm its authenticity, at times almost as stressful as actually being back in a slammed kitchen, slaving under a sociopathic bully — it is why some chefs I know can't watch it. Flush with marvellously written characters, we struggle to pick our favourite. We adore transcendently serene pastry chef Marcus and the sweetly naive Fak brothers; we flat out venerate jittery, driven head chef Sydney. Jamie Lee Curtis's monstrous matriarch is nitro-glycerine plonked next to an open furnace; her children, Michael, Natalie and Carmen Berzatto, three differing studies of the impact of her dysfunctional parenting. Every single character, even minor, is fully realised. And then there is 'Cousin' Richie Jerimovich (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), who runs front of house. A loud, boorish and deeply obnoxious character, we spent the first few episodes wishing him serious harm until, gradually, tiny slivers of his humanity and vulnerability began to slip through. But he utterly transformed in our eyes when sent on a training internship to the fictional Ever, 'the world's best restaurant', site of his Damascene culinary conversion. Breaking through his innate cynicism, he comes to understand why high-end restaurants operate as they do and, most of all, learns to appreciate the complexities of service and its fundamental importance in a good restaurant. After that, he could do little wrong in our eyes, even when he does — regularly — do wrong. Over a decade ago, after a major food awards in Dublin, two of Ireland's finest restaurant managers and I wound up in deep conversation about service, the lack of awards for service, wondering whether it related to the marked decline in service standards, from what was always a wildly varying benchmark. Irish restaurant service has only worsened since; good service — the exception rather than rule — is an unexpected pleasure rather than automatic entitlement when dining out. When Patrick Guilbaud first opened his now Michelin two-starred Dublin restaurant, it took him a while to realise most of his non-French waiters, many of them students, viewed their role as a mere staging post en route to a 'real' career. Indeed, working as a waiter/server has rarely been viewed as a profession in this country even though innate Irish sociability makes for a natural-born host. Service is about so much more than ferrying plates to and from the table and it takes time and effort to train even the good ones. Imagine the frustration when they then leave for a 'real job'! For all the advance 'engagement' — online, reviews and so on — a diner's first human interaction with a restaurant is through service. A good first impression is vital; sustaining it throughout the course of an entire meal, equally so. (Take note, all servers who seem to ghost a table once desserts are served.) More worryingly, I see the decline in standards of Irish restaurant service as a canary in the coalmine for the Irish hospitality sector overall. Many businesses operate on a fiscal model that wouldn't last kissing time in other industries, while a dining public, ignorant of the harsh realities of hospitality, only ever registers the rising prices of eating out. When the minimum wage was raised to €13.50 an hour last January, the best restaurateurs acknowledged the additional financial stress on their business models, yet never begrudged their employees the extra 80c an hour. In Dublin, for example, many of the lowest-paid hospitality workers have to commute from far outside the city to afford accommodation — if they can find it. There is one question that gauges the real viability of Irish hospitality like no other: as a waiter/server, will I qualify for a mortgage? (It applies equally to lower-paid kitchen jobs.) The answer is almost inevitably, no. Which begs another question — is it time we start a conversation about subsidising the Irish restaurant sector, as we do with the farming sector? TABLE TALK A recent soiree at The Metropole Hotel to launch its newly designed reception/lobby area and a casual all-day menu sees a venerable old aristocrat of Cork hospitality substantially sharpening its offering in tune with the overall energy sense of energy that has imbued its home, MacCurtain St, in recent times, reminding that it is about so much more than just an annual venue for 'The Jazz'. In further reference to today's main theme, belated congrats to the Market Lane group for their ongoing achievements at the Fáilte Ireland Employer Excellence Awards, voted on anonymously by employees, and, yes, the ML group does number more than a few well-supported professional waiters/servers in their ranks. Vada café in Dublin's Stoneybatter, may cleave to a very familiar formula for what is currently cool in casual dining but more than gets away with it on the back of some tasty food and a genuine commitment to sustainability and zero waste so, additional opening hours to serve dinner on Friday and Saturday evenings could be well worth checking out. TODAY'S SPECIAL Make Hummus, Not War print from Bia Blasta This week's choice is more about food for the mind and soul than the belly, a handsome print from Blasta Books inspired by their latest authors, Izzeddeen Alkarajeh and Eman Aburabi, and the original version of the Free Palestine mural painted next to their Izz Café in Cork City. Available in A4 (€25) and A3 (€38) sizes and shipped anywhere in the world, all profits will be donated to World Central Kitchen. Read More Ireland's best food trucks and street food stalls to try this summer
Irish Examiner
3 hours ago
- Irish Examiner
Anita Thomas: Vietnam completely surprised me — bags of frogs for sale on the street!
Favourite childhood holiday memory Our exotic family holidays usually meant packing up the red Derby and heading to Sparly Cove in West Cork. My aunt had a static caravan down there and every year, without fail, we'd spend two weeks in the same spot. No phones, just showing up and seeing the same families every year like a kind of reunion no one organised. We always say it felt like we had proper summers back then: sunburnt shoulders and sandwiches with sandy hands on the beach. You had to be quick for the first one before the sand got to them. But I just remember everyone being really happy. Even the car journey was a sing-along. Simpler times, but that's what stays with you. Most memorable trip Anita Thomas at Emirates' A380 onboard bar One that stands out was flying to Singapore with my husband and daughters. My husband and I are both aviation nerds, and we've passed that on to our kids; we've been known to choose destinations based on aircraft type. This trip was all about flying on the Emirates A380 and getting the chance to experience First Class as a family. From the private suites to booking your own shower time at 30,000 feet, it was surreal. We were pinching ourselves the whole way, and we ended up having such craic at the onboard bar, chatting and arranging to meet up in Singapore. And all the little touches, the Voya products from Sligo, for example, just made us feel even prouder to be Irish while travelling. Most surprising destination Vietnam completely surprised me. I didn't know if it would be my thing, but I absolutely fell in love with it. We started in Hanoi, and it was chaos in the best way, scooters everywhere, carrying everything from washing machines to umbrellas. At one point, we saw actual bags of frogs for sale on the street. Ha Long Bay in north Vietnam Then we travelled to Ha Long Bay for an overnight boat trip that felt like something out of a film. Later, in Da Nang, everything slowed down. We helped cook on a local farm, though I can't cook to save my life, and I had a moment of panic when my fake tan came off during a traditional foot- washing ritual! The poor woman thought she'd scalded me. It was one of those funny, unforgettable travel moments. Favourite city Dubai Dubai. We go there so often as a family, with friends, and even my neighbours. People often think it's all bling and not suitable for families, but it's actually the opposite. Safety is key for me, especially with my three daughters, and I never have to worry in Dubai. There's a buzz the second you land. Whether you want the beach, a city break, or something affordable, it has it all. You could eat for €10 in Deira or go full luxury in Palm Jumeirah. Most memorable food experience It wasn't in a fancy restaurant, but in the Maldives. A local fisherman had just brought in his catch, and the chef invited me to choose a fish. He grilled it right there, with some local spices and lime, and we ate barefoot by the sea with the sunset going down. It was so simple, but everything aligned in that moment, the place, the food, the people. We still talk about it whenever someone mentions fish. Favourite hotel Atlantis The Palm Dubai If we could only ever go back to one hotel, it would be Atlantis The Palm. It ticks every box for us: luxury, amazing service, loads of dining options, and great entertainment. My family has very different tastes, and this is one place that works for all of us. From the waterpark to the aquarium to the food, there's so much to do, even if you never leave the resort. And more than anything, it's the hospitality. The more you travel, the more you value that kind of service. That's what makes it really stand out. Favourite thing to do while travelling Food is a huge part of it. Even if I'm not hungry, I'll try something new. I love finding local spots — street food stalls or tiny restaurants in villages. I'll always look for where the locals are also make a point to do at least one activity that's unique to wherever we are. In Dubai, we've done the desert safari so many times, but it never gets old. Bucket list trip Kyoto, Japan Since covid, we've tried to say yes to travel as much as possible. We've covered the US, Europe, Asia, and the Indian Ocean, and we visit Dubai regularly. But top of the list now is Japan. I'd love to do it early next year. And as a family, we're planning to visit Australia and New Zealand in a few years once school schedules allow.
