Image via Wikipedia

Published in the WOW! supplement of the Evening Echo.

Forget your Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs, your Andean chinchillas, your African pygmy hedgehogs and your North American chipmunks: apparently tiny Irish cattle are the latest en-vogue pet for forward-thinking families. Spurred on by high food prices and a growing desire to “get back to basics” on the nutrition front, people, it seems, are going gaga for miniature cows, and the most popular breed – the Dexter – hails from Ireland.

Pet cow with benefits

According to an article I read over the weekend, for anywhere between €250 and €2,500 (presumably depending on the pedigree) you can get yourself a mini food factory that stands no taller than a large dog, produces around 9 litres of milk every day, keeps your grass trimmed and will make a popular family pet for a few years before eventually filling your freezer with high-quality beef.

Families across the UK, it seems, are turning to Dexters, and launching themselves into very-small-scale farming. Registrations of the breed, which originated in the south of Ireland as the perfect “cottager’s” cow, have more than doubled since the millennium, according to the Dexter Cattle Society. But the traditional miniature breed isn’t having it all its own way; keen to jump on the miniature band wagon, people are busy creating miniature versions of other popular breeds, including the Mini-Hereford and Lowline-Angus.

A single Dexter cow will, in theory provide as much milk as a family can use, and a single calf each year that can then be grown on for meat. With concerns over the quality and health implications of intensively reared meats, and food prices heading skyward at an alarming rate, its easy to see why mini cows are catching on. I’ve no doubt the girls would love one, but I can think of a few downsides.

Not all good news

Cow pats for one thing. Dexters may well be ideal for keeping the lawn trim, but a miniature cow pat is a cow pat nonetheless, so there goes letting the kids run around barefoot on the grass. And instead of getting the lawn mower out once a week week, you now have to start milking twice a day – so more work, not less. Then there’s all that artificially insemination, calving and vets fees to think about….

What about when you want to go on holiday? It’s difficult enough to persuade good-natured neighbours to take on a cat or a dog for a fortnight. We have pet ferrets, which are even more of a struggle – but at least they’re portable. Can you imagine the response when you ask someone to mind your cow? And you can’t exactly pop a Dexter in the boot and drop it around to an obliging neighbour.

Suffice it to say we won’t be rushing out to get our own cow just yet, although I really do see the appeal of producing your own food. Chickens or ducks would perhaps be a more feasible option, although again they tie you down, and need looking after while you’re away. This autumn I’m planning to take the ferrets out after rabbits – which is free food in every sense of the word. Wild food is wonderful: you don’t have to invest time, money and energy growing or rearing it; you don’t have to tend it, care for it or worry about it. You just catch or collect it, then you eat it.

Whether it’s rabbits, fish, shellfish, mushrooms, wild herbs or blackberries, it’s got to beat dodging cow pats on the back lawn if you’re looking for a more self-sufficient lifestyle.

“Dad, what are those white bits in your beard,” the little one asked me the other day. I rubbed my chin, thinking a few stray crumbs from the sandwich I’d eaten at lunch were lingering. “They’re still there,” she said helpfully. She disappeared, and returned moments later with a shaving mirror. “Look!”

I took the mirror, and realised she was talking about the grey highlights that peppered the otherwise dark brown hair. Even though I look at my beard every day, this close-up scrutiny revealed much more grey than I remembered. “They’re grey hairs,” I said to her. “They mean Daddy’s getting older.” She looked at me; you could almost see the cogs turning as she processed this information. “They’re in your hair too,” she said, and ran off to play with her sisters.

I sat there for a long moment, looking into the mirror, holding it this way and that, wondering when the occasional grey hair had turned into this epidemic. My hair was looking a bit on the scruffy side, which wasn’t helping matters, so I decided it was time for a hair cut. Out came the clippers, off came the hair. As it fell to the floor in small clumps I tried not to dwell on the fact that there were more grey flecks in it than usual. Was it real, or had the little one’s observations just sparked the onset of paranoia.

Suitably shorn, I went to the bathroom mirror to investigate further.

Now, I’m not much for excessive self-scrutiny. I use a mirror to shave, and tend look in the mirror when I’m brushing my teeth, but that’s about it. Close inspection revealed that perhaps cursory glances were perhaps the best policy, as far as the grey hairs were concerned.

To be honest it wasn’t all that bad. Men tend to have an easier ride than the ladies when it comes to ageing. There’s much less pressure on us to look perpetually youthful into our thirties, forties and beyond than there is on our female contemporaries. As we go grey people tend to trot out adjectives like “distinguished”, and while we might not quite be ready to embrace the distinguished look, it certainly beats some of the alternatives.

One of the problems with the ageing process is that, in the early stages at least, it all tends to happen on the outside. On the inside you still feel like you’re twenty one, and you believe your body just as capable of absorbing the same sort of punishment. It’s only when you put it to the test that you realise things are not, in fact, as they once were.

Comments like the little one’s about my slowly greying hair, draw attention to the fact, as do some other events. One thing that really brings the age issue into focus is the fact that authority figures in society – policemen, doctors, lawyers and teachers, for example – are suddenly so much younger than I am. When did that happen? I stopped at a Garda checkpoint recently to be confronted by a couple of teens in fancy dress. The Garda car seemed real enough, and the costumes were A1, but surely there was no way these fresh-faced youngsters could be the real McCoy, was there?

I’m getting older, that’s the plain and simple truth. But that’s OK; we all get older. My brother-in-law, who’s just turned 30, and has a few years yet before he has to contend with the relentless march of time, suggested “just for men” the other day. I don’t think so. In fact on reflection I’m quite comfortable with the whole greying business.

I’ll keep the grey hairs, cherish them even, as a badge of honour, a memento of parenthood and of life. They’re a signature of maturity, of experience and of the wisdom only time can impart.

Sums it up nicely really. I’m a writer, not a designer, but as soon as anyone finds out I do some website stuff… or I’m in any way involved in internet related work, this is almost invariably the way the conversation pans out!

Does this resonate with anyone else out there?

Photo Credit: Rain! by tanakawho

It’s August already. One month will see the kids back in school… but the rain it keeps a falling! The buckets, spades, nets, balls, kites, fishing rods and all the other summer paraphernalia remain steadfastly in storage, untouched and unneeded.

I used to think we were lucky living down here in West Cork – making our home in a place where people choose to come on their holidays. This year, watching disheveled holiday makers trudging their way through the deluge, I’m not so sure. They, after all, are heading home to more clement weather, leaving us to weather West Cork’s unpredictable climate.

With rivers bursting their banks left, right and centre, Cork had the unenviable distinction of being the wettest part of the country for the month of July. The highest rainfall for the month since 1975 was recorded at the Cork airport monitoring station. Soggy, to say the least.

For parents rainy summers are tortuous. Wet weather is bad enough when the kids are at school, but when they’re home it can be particularly traumatic. One of the key parental survival strategies during the summer holidays is the ability to hunt the little devils out to play. It gives them… and perhaps more importantly, you… a bit of breathing space. With that option curtailed by the rain this year, everyone’s been stuck indoors, and it doesn’t take long before tempers start to fray and things go haywire with alarming rapidity.

It’s not just about being out of doors either. The weather affects everybody’s disposition. Bright, sunny skies tend to lighten the mood, while dark, sombre ones send it plummeting. Little wonder, then, that the children are proving difficult to manage this summer.

Planning things is impossible. Organising anything like barbecues, picnics or anything outdoor-related puts you at the mercy of our unpredictable and inhospitable climate. You always have to have a plan B, in case the heavens open. There’s no consistency; everything is spur of the moment – grabbing at fleeting opportunities to make the most of the sunshine while it lasts.

In other countries you’ll find predictably warm, fine summers, and crisp, cold winters. Here in Ireland we seem to occupy a perpetually soggy middle ground that offers none of the benefits of either. Sweden is a case in point.

You might expect the Swedes to have weather just as bad as ours. But not so. I was talking to my uncle recently, who’s spending a lot of his time over there these days. It was a scorching 34 degrees Celsius. When I spoke to him in March it was minus 15 degrees Celsius, and he’d just returned from a spot of cross country skiing through sun-dappled forest. Both times I looked out of the window in West Cork onto a vista of brooding clouds and driving rain. Depressing!

Surely we’re due a bit of a summer between now and when the girls go back to school. A few weeks of consistently fine weather, is that too much to ask? The beach gear is in the car, ready to go (alongside the wellies and the raincoats)… so come on sunshine, we’re ready for you. We don’t mind the occasional half-day of rain here and there, it helps to keep the verdant scenery at its best, but please, let’s have a bit of sunshine to see out the summer.

Got an e-mail this morning from our publishers Kogan Page with a link to our new Digital Marketing book on their website.

I’m more excited than I thought I would be. Somehow seeing the book up on their website makes it all seem very real, and I just wanted to share it with everyone.

We’ll be launching a new website over the coming months to support, develop and build on the book. We’re hoping to build a dynamic and constantly evolving, community driven digital marketing resource. It should be quite an adventure… will keep you posted here and over on Digital Marketing Success.

This is the most popular image in our photo wedding invitation line up. It’s the photo that inspired the business, and the one that best captures what Image Invitations is all about.

Hanging out – a photograph that inspired a business

I know this isn’t a forum for commercial promotion, and that’s not the aim. I thought I’d share the image with you here on its own merit.

The teddies, which belong to my twin daughters, were hanging on my parents’ washing line in North Wales after a much needed “bath”. I took several images from a variety of angles… this was the one that stood out.

Image by Rev Dan Catt under the this CC license.

There’s nothing particularly special about five. It’s just a number, nestled between four and six. There’s no real reason why five should take on any more significance than the numbers that precede or follow it, and yet somehow it does.

Five minutes, for example, tends to be a much more significant division of time than, say, 3 minutes or seven minutes. Why? Why do people tend to make five year plans, rather than three year ones? The most destructive tornadoes are ranked F-5 on the Fujita scale, and the worst hurricanes rate as category five on the Saffir-Simpson scale. Five, five, five!

Maybe it’s as simple as the fact that we have five digits on each hand and foot that leads us to lend more weight to the number. Who knows?

Some other distinctions enjoyed by the number five: it is the atomic number of boron, the number of books in the Torah, the number of times each day that muslims pray to Allah, the number of oceans in the world, the number of human senses (sight, sound, smell, touch and taste) and the number of vowels in the English alphabet, to list but a few.

Of course, when you’re four, with only a week to go until your birthday, five suddenly becomes a very significant number indeed. The little one had been hyper all week, planning her party, changing her mind about this detail or that. No boys, she’d decided… and no adults, except for Mum and Dad, she conceded.

“You two have to come,” she said, “someone has to make the food and mind all the kids.” Charming!

On the morning of her birthday she woke up disappointed. I asked her what was wrong. “I still feel like I’m four Dad,” she explained. Her glum disposition soon lifted when she realised there were presents to be opened. As she unwrapped them I explained that, unlike four-year-olds, five-year-olds were responsible, always did as they were told and helped their mums and dads whenever they were asked. She shot me her best “who are you trying to kid” look and redoubled her assault on the wrapping paper.

After breakfast we got busy in the kitchen preparing for the party that afternoon. The little one was in her element, bossing her older sisters about and generally lording it over everyone. They were sulking. It wasn’t fair, they said, that she got to choose everything, just because it was her birthday. I told them that when their birthday came around they’d get to choose… but that wasn’t fair either, because their birthday wasn’t until November, and besides there were two of them. What could I say… sometimes being a twin sucks! I turned back to cutting love-heart shapes out of rolled out pizza dough.

It’s been a hectic five years. I know this because of the perpetual tiredness that’s crept into my life, and the plethora of grey hairs that now adorn my head – particularly around the fringes. It must have been hectic, because you know what… looking back it’s all a blur. I can’t really remember much about it at all. That’s no surprise, I suppose, when you consider the inevitable result of adding a precocious lunatic with boundless energy into the empathic but often volatile dynamic you get between twins. Let’s just say it hasn’t been dull!

We’ve survived her first five years, and are looking forward to the ups and inevitable downs of the next five. Parenthood is a voyage into the unknown… every child and every day brings something new, challenging, sometimes traumatic and occasionally even exciting.

Let the adventure continue!

Front of the Potato Bag

Nothing strange there, you might think… until you turn the bag around and read what’s on the back.

That Irish culinary classic, Smoked Reindeer Stew

Yes, you read that right smoked reindeer stew! That’s just the sort of thing you might want to make with your bag if Irish spuds! Oh, hold on, I seem to be out of smoked reindeer again… I’ll just pop down to the local Dunnes Stores and pick up a pack!

What’s unbelievable is that somebody somewhere in Irish Potato Marketing actually chose to put that particular recipe on the back of the bag. Priceless!

Published in the WOW! supplement of the Evening Echo (image by

Toni Maticevski)

“No Dad, that doesn’t match,” the little one said as I picked out another cardigan to go with her summer dress. A soon to be five-year-old was letting me know that, when it comes to picking out girls’ clothes I didn’t have a clue.

“She’s right Dad, it doesn’t,” confirmed one of the twins. Two against one: I looked to the other twin for support; she shook her head ruefully: a unanimous condemnation.

Fashion has never been my strong suit. I take a purely utilitarian approach to my wardrobe. If it’s comfortable, functional and practical I’ll pretty much wear anything. My wife, thankfully, has a much more discerning eye, and makes sure that the comfortable, functional and practical clothes I wear are more-or-less acceptable to wear in public.

Women’s wardrobes – even little women’s wardrobes – are a complete mystery to me. A wardrobe, as far as I’m concerned, is a convenient place to hang your clothes. But to a woman a wardrobe is so much more than a collection of garments. It’s an extension of her being, a mirror of her personality, a window into her soul. It’s a symbiotic synergy that I don’t pretend to understand, and really don’t want to. But I have three daughters, so inevitably I get caught up in the occasional clothes-related issue.

They have their mum’s eye for clothes. My wife has never been one to jump haplessly from one trend to another, chasing whatever happens to be “en vogue”, but she definitely has a very acute sense of style. She knows what works and what doesn’t. I, on the other hand, am the first to admit that I haven’t got a stylish bone in my body. The girls learnt very early on never to trust Dad’s judgement when it came to matching their clothes – and they were dead right.

Thankfully the whole clothes thing is Mum’s department, and the girls are still young, so it isn’t all that ingrained yet, but the tell-tale signs are there. Clothes are already more than a layer they put on to keep warm: everything has to match, the top has to go with the end, the colours have to work and then there are the accessories to think about.

That’s all well and good when Mum’s around to offer advice and to help them pick out what they’re going to wear – or when she’s left complete outfits ready for them. But on the odd occasion when it’s just them and me – like it was this afternoon – it can be an absolute nightmare.

We were invited to a party at a neighbour’s house. All I had to do was get the girls changed before my wife arrived back. No problem… or so I thought. The twins were fine: they put on the outfits Mum had left for them without a bother, but I was struggling with the little one. For reasons known only to herself she’d decided not to wear the cardigan Mum had picked, and was busily rooting around in her wardrobe for an alternative. I tried reasoning with her: the dress was white, I surmised, therefore surely any colour cardigan would go with it. A simultaneous look of disdain from the twins soon put me in my place.

I don’t spend much of my time thinking about clothes, so when I’m forced to, quite frankly, I flounder. My indecision, coupled with their need for parental reinforcement and an inherent distrust of my fashion sense makes for a very frustrating experience.

Eventually I managed to persuade her that, given Dad’s ineptitude in the wardrobe department, she’d be better off going with Mum’s preferred option. Drama over, just as Mum rolled up.

For the umpteenth time this trip I found myself wishing I’d bought a GPS navigation system before leaving Cork. No more wrong turns, no more uncertainty, no more doubt, no more trying to decipher ineligible foreign road-signs through rainy windscreens. As it was we’d taken the wrong turn onto the motorway from Tours and were heading for Paris instead of Le Mans.

This wouldn’t have been quite so bad if we’d realised our mistake straight away. But Murphy’s Law works just as well in France, so we naturally realised our error just after passing the last convenient exit to reach the right road. Forty minutes later another exit hove into view. We were miles out, but, loath to retrace our steps on the motorway we set off cross-country.

Here a GPS would have come in really handy, rapidly calculating a new route to get us to our destination as quickly as possible. But of course, if we’d had a GPS we never would have gone wrong in the first place. Seven hours later an exhausted Jones party rolled into Cherbourg.

Ironically, I’d only been talking about GPS systems with my brother-in-law the day before. He was commenting how they were depriving a generation of the joys of uncertain car travel: mum and dad in heated debate about which turn to take while the kids chorus “are we there yet” from the back seat. Somehow, I think it’s an aspect of childhood and parenthood we could all live happily without.

On reflection our trip to France was a very successful one this time. We had a wonderful holiday out in the countryside of central France, surrounded by châteaux and medieval villages that oozed the character, charm and the culture borne of ages. And when we didn’t feel like going out, we had our own pool and tennis court back at the accommodation. It was with a twinge of regret that we bid farewell to the gite and headed for the magnificent city of Tours, on the banks of the Loire, to catch up with the rest of the Irish contingent who’d travelled over for my sister-in-law’s wedding.

It was great to catch up with everyone. The wedding – which consisted of a short ceremony in the breathtaking Tours town hall, followed by a wonderfully rustic wedding reception in the nearby village of Amboise, and an all-day lakeside barbecue the following day. The food was good, the wine and beer flowed freely, everyone was singing and dancing and a good time was had by all. What more could you ask for… except of course for a GPS.

The girls had a ball this trip: spending time with their French cousins, theme parks, real-life fairytale castles and getting dressed up for the wedding. Seeing their Nana and Granddad over in France also gave them a real kick.

So, a successful holiday all ’round then, apart from the occasional wrong-turn. Still, all of that travelling around can be rough on children and parents: chopping and changing, staying in different beds every night. Nobody gets their quota of sleep; kids get cranky, parents get even crankier.

After our nightmare drive we crashed in a chain motel in Cherbourg before catching the early morning ferry to Poole. At the other end we faced a drive up to Hereford to visit my sister and the girls’ Welsh cousins, then up to my parents’ place in North Wales. Finally, next week we travel to Holyhead, catch the ferry to Dublin and make the five hour drive back to West Cork. Pretty hectic, draining stuff… and a far cry from the days lounging around the pool we were enjoying just a week ago.