A trip down Memory Layne

I'm visiting Ireland to see my mother and the YD.  I hired a car at Shannon airport to go to Cork, and after I left it back, I went for a wander through Shannon town with my friend Elayne (who has featured in this blog before).  We both grew up here and we had fun revisiting our old haunts, so I thought I would share our roots with you all.

This little sunken area is where we played when we were little.  The community hall was on the patch of concrete in the background, but it was set on fire a couple of times and was demolished recently.  When we were small, we used to play "The Billy Goats Gruff" on the bridge - somebody was picked to be the Troll and hid under the bridge and then leaped out and chased the Billy Goats when they tried to cross.  Simple pleasures, simpler times.

My first home was in one of the blocks of flats in the background.

There used to be three swings here, strung between the concrete pillars.  See the stone wall behind the pillars?  That was VERY VERY high and jumping off it was a massive feat of bravery and sometimes resulted in a scabby knee.

The former home of the Shannon Lawn Tennis Club, where I spent many an unhappy hour perfecting the Fresh Air Shot.  Nobody realised I needed glasses for years.  I also wasn't particularly interested in tennis... nobody realised that, either.

There used to be a clubhouse on the far side of the courts, a green portacabin, but that's gone too.

The mighty Shannon estuary.  I used to love walking or cycling down here or on one of the other "points," as we used to call these peninsulas which jut out into the river.  That's County Limerick on the other side.

Outside our first school :

We were very careful not to look like we were trying to photograph kids in case someone called the Guards!

This used to be the football pitch for the school.  The boys played football or hurling while the girls did knitting and sewing.  Different times, folks.

The church, which is straight across the road from the school.  Where we all went every Sunday, no matter what.  Did I say different times already?

This is me in front of my second home.  My earliest memory is of playing on the street in front of this house, I was probably about two and a half or three years old.

One of the local hostelries.  It was the only local hostelry initially, apart from the bar at the airport, two miles away.  

Yeah, I know it looks a bit grim.  The daffodils were nice though.

Shannon in the 1960s was a strange place, it was custom built to provide housing for the the brand new industrial estate which grew up beside the airport.  My family was one of the earliest to move there.  Everybody was a blow-in which made us all equal, although some people were more equal than others and lived in "posh" houses like this :

This house is one of a row which is straight across from the blocks of flats in the first picture.  We thought they were HUGE, but they look so small and ordinary, now.  Initially, the flats and these houses were the only accommodation in Shannon, apart from some really grotty barrack-style hostels at the airport itself where my father lived initially.  Elayne's family lived in "the flats" too - apparently they brought the population up to 302 when they arrived!  Then the first stretch of "housing estates" was built, which was where I lived from the age of two to four, and after that the town mushroomed, with a massive boom in the seventies and another more recent boom in the late 1990s.  According to Wikipedia, the population now stands at about 9,600.

This was my third home, where I lived from the age of four to fourteen.

Just as I was about to leap out and take a photo, a car pulled up outside and stayed there, so we ended up doing a "drive-by shooting" instead.  I didn't want to look as if we were casing the joint or anything like that.

Then we whizzed by our old secondary school, which looks much the same as it always did, except somehow the yellow brick on the walls has become red.  This school was pretty special, it was Ireland's first ever Comprehensive and heralded a new era in education.  We were guinea-pigs and they tried out a lot of new courses on us before introducing them into the mainstream school system.

After that, we had a look at some of Elayne's former homes, where she lived in the early years of her (first) marriage, and then drove back to Granny's house via the scenic route.

A dolmen type-thing we passed along the way.

Granny's house (my fifth home, the fourth one was only a temporary rented house so it doesn't count) looks out over this beautiful lake.  It's a lot nicer than Shannon, and most importantly, the riding school was only three miles away!

Limerick, you're no Lady

Limerick : a city that thrived during the boom years and, even now, still has a feeling of vibrancy in the streets.  They've fought hard to clean up their act and get rid of that nickname.

While window shopping last Saturday, a jeweller's shop caught my eye.  Oh sez Granny, they're one of the oldest jewellers in Limerick, they're very good.  So we crossed the road and had a look in the window.

This was the first thing that caught my eye (apologies for the crappy photo, the rest are a bit better)

Yeah.  That's a cannabis leaf pendant on the left and a blinged-up armalite on the right.

There were a lot more cannabis leaves in the display, plus this this pony & sulky :

That might be a cultural reference that only Irish people would get, this next one is a little more obvious :

I guess this jewellers caters to... hmm... an interesting cross-section of the underbelly of society, shall we say.

Sorry, Limerick, you'll always be Stab City to me.

Thank Friday it's Lunchtime - Saigon Wok, Cavaillon

Last Saturday, I had to collect the LSH from Marseille Airport.  It had snowed overnight, leaving the road over the Luberon covered with a layer of packed, frozen snow.  By the time I left, the snowplough hadn’t passed yet, and I crawled carefully along.  I was confident that by the time I got to Manosque, it would be slightly warmer, with less snow, as Manosque is usually a few degrees warmer than our side of the Luberon.  I was wrong.  Not only was Manosque covered in snow, but the Autoroute was also snow-covered and treacherous.  At least the snowploughs were in action there, clearing one lane on each carraigeway, so I trundled along in a long line of traffic, presumably with a snowplough at the head of the line.  Traffic in the opposite driection was desperately slow, even at a standstill in some places, so when I finally met up with the LSH in a completely unsnowy Marseille, we decided to go home via the Western end of the Luberon – a long detour, but we decided to have lunch along the way and do our TFIL meal a day late.

Just as we passed through Cavaillon, I spotted this.

All-you-can-eat Chinese, basically.

We can’t lose, we said, and in we went.

You don’t often see very overweight French people, but there were quite a few in this place – it’s obviously a popular choice for those with – eh – large appetites.

It’s a gigantic hall of a restaurant, with the buffets laid out in the middle.  There was one with bits and pieces you could ask the Wok chef to cook, one with starters, one with mains and one with desserts.  We stuck the the stuff that was already cooked, to keep it simple, and we hit the starter buffet - nems (spring rolls), chicken things, fried vegetable things, prawn things and some other seafood things (that I stayed away from), with an array of salads and sauces to accompany them.

I could have just kept eating the starters until I exploded, but after one revisit, I moved on to the mains, in the interests of research, y’know.  There were Brochets à Poulet (chicken skewers), Thai Beef, Pork Caramel, Moules au sauce Chilli (chilli mussels, a weird combination, neither of us tried that) and Poulet au Gingembre (Ginger Chicken).  These were fine, but less awesome than the starters, with the exception of the Brochets à Poulet which were the best I’d ever had.  It’s possible that they were laced with MSG, but I reckoned that if it triggered a migraine, it would have been worth it.

By the way, if you really love spicy food, you'd be better off getting something cooked by the Wok Chef - the French don't really do "Hot" and we find that Chinese restaurants here cater to the French palate, with Thai and Chilli dishes tasting a bit bland.

Desserts were a bit lacklustre by comparison with the first two courses; there was Dame Blanche, a soft meringue sort of thing, crème caramel and fresh fruit.

Value for money?  At €12.90 per head during the week, it’s brilliant value.  If there’s something you don’t like, you can just go back to the buffet and get something else.  They put the price up at the weekend, so it cost us €14.90 per head, with a pichet of wine bringing the total up to €32.50.  If you’re a big eater and find the portion sizes disappointing during your Provençal visit, it’s definitely worth calling in here.

Comfort wise, yeah, it’s a big barn of a place with no ambiance whatsoever.  We were seated beside the door and were chilled everytime someone came in or out, despite the electric heater placed nearby.  The toilets were surprisingly minimalist for such a large restaurant, too – just one cubicle each for Dames and Hommes.  I bet the queues are not too nice when it's busy in the summer.

I wasn't overly impressed with the service.  I know it was self service, but they brought wine to our table (when asked) and cleared plates.  However, they also left us hovering in the doorway looking bewildered for quite a while when we arrived.  My advice is to march in confidently and just grab a table if that happens.

Here's the ratings.  I know it doesn't look great with the one star for Service and two stars for Ambiance, but that's just the kind of place it is.  I'd happily go back again.

Service : ✮

Food : ✮✮✮ 

Value : ✮✮✮✮✮ 

Ambiance : ✮✮