A round-up of today's other stories in brief
Basque country adventures
Time is running out if you want to take part in the next Basque Country adventure led by author Paddy Woodworth and food guide John Warren. From July 6th to 9th the pair will host a series of events that aim to wander far off the tourist trail and give a real insight into local culture and gastronomy.
On the first day, 15 guests will travel deep into the heart of the Basque country to the little known Pyrenean mountain village of Lesaka, which has preserved architecture dating back to the 14th century. At noon, the official start of the San Fermin Fiesta will be signalled by fireworks from the balcony of the town hall, followed by drinks and pintxos in some of the town’s 22 bars. The trip includes a guided tour of Lesaka with local historian Rafael Eneterreaga, tapas, lunch with wines, a fiesta scarf and costs €185.
The next day guests experience the ceremonies of Lesaka's San Fermin Fiesta including a local sword dance along the narrow stone banks of the Onin stream, then travel into rolling Basque hills for lunch at a local restaurant. It costs €235 per person. For information on the events see sansebastianfood.com. EDEL MORGAN
Surf's up in . . . Blanchardstown?
Anyone who has been at the Blanchardstown shopping centre in Dublin this week might have seen a strange sight – surfers pulling their tricks and stunts in the car park. This is the inaugural 53 Degrees North Open Surf Championships and it's been taking place all week on a Flowrider machine, the first mobile wave machine of its kind in Europe. Today, some of Europe's top surfers will be taking part in the heats and pratice runs, and members of the public will also be giving the wave a bash, and the competition finishes tomorrow when one rider will be crowned the 53 Degrees North Open Surf Champion.See 53degreesnorth.ie. LAURENCE MACKIN
More Powers to you
Many thanks to all our readers who responded – with gusto – to the Powers Whiskey Short Story competition in The Irish Times Magazine. We received almost 3,000 entries of a very high standard; an intriguing mix of fact, fiction, memoir and humour. We will publish the winning story on July 9th.
Strings to their bows
There is a rare opportunity to see Ireland's violin makers at work from today until next Saturday, July 2nd, at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival in Bantry. A group of 10 violin and bow makers are taking part in a special exhibition of their instruments and are demonstrating their craft each day, as well as allowing musicians to try a selection. One of those taking part is the award winning bow maker Gary Leahy who won three gold medals in the US in November at the Violin Society of America bow-making competition in Cleveland. Leahy, who is based in Newport, Co Mayo, makes bows in the French tradition and all sorts of materials go into their making from rare Brazilian wood and Mongolian horse hair to ebony, mother of pearl, ivory, lizard skin, silver and gold. His bows sell to both classical and traditional musicians all over the world. See westcorkmusic.ie. DEIRDRE MCQUILLAN
Get on yer bike in Belfast
A new initiative offers guided bike tours around Belfast’s historic sites and beauty spots. What’s more, the organisers promise there’ll be no sore bottoms at the end. “It comes down to choosing bikes with big comfy saddles, so it’s always like a sofa on wheels,” says Jerome O’Loughlin, who set up Belfast City Bike Tours along with his business partner Rory Martin. O’Loughlin says the most physically demanding part of the 10km tour will be a gentle incline through the Botanic Gardens. “We go at the pace of the slowest person, stopping off at Custom House Square, the Albert Clock, the Cathedral Quarter and Queen’s University,” he says.
The price is £15 per person and the tours leave at 10am and 2pm on Saturday and Sunday, from the Linen House Hostel in Kent Street. See belfastcitybiketours.com.
Architectural designs
Shelter, structure and style: architecture and fashion have much in common, although clothes trends move faster than those in architecture. Yet the parallels can be seen in the longer term historical perspective, for instance when the French aristocracy went ornate during the decorative Rococo period and when structural post-Modernism paralleled 1908s shoulder pads . An exhibition in Dublin, conceived by stylist Aisling Farinella, links clothes with architecture. She has taken the lead from six Irish fashion designers and found buildings that relate to their work visually and conceptually. Una Burke's designs are set against the Casino at Marino. "Her sculptured works with leather are sometimes contorted to create a new body shape. The Casino looks as if it is one storey outside but it is actually three floors, so it's another way of masking or contorting and hiding what's beneath," says Farinella, who worked on the project with photographer Rich Gilligan. Farinella linked Joanne Hynes's work with the Beckett theatre in Trinity because the designer is influenced by the playwright "in the use of various ideas of personality";. Simone Rocha's extensive use of white fabric with "sheer windows" led to her clothes being photographed in the white Douglas Hyde Gallery with its "moveable doors that create windows". Tim Ryan's work was photographed at architect Tom de Paor's pumping station in Clontarf. Eilis Boyle's designs are pictured with the ruins of a church in Kildare, while Eme Vandal's structured and blocky pieces are featured in Trinity's Long Room Hub.
GH Mumm Fashion & Architecturewill run for a week at 28 South William Street, Dublin 2, from July 13th. EMMA CULLINAN
Win dinner at Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud with wines by Dom Pérignon and Penfolds
Wine merchant Edward Dillon Co is hosting a wine dinner featuring iconic wines from Penfolds and Dom Pérignon at Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud on Tuesday, July 5th. The wines will be introduced by Penfolds chief winemaker Peter Gago and Dom Pérignon winemaker Vincent Chaperon. Penfolds Grange will be among the wines featured, along with Dom Pérignon blanc and rosé. Places at this exclusive event are already sold out, but the Irish Times Magazine is delighted to offer readers five prizes of a pair of tickets to this exclusive five-course dinner. To enter the competition, go online to irishtimes.com/winetasting
INDEX
WHAT'S HOT
John HammNot only is the Mad Menactor talented and oh-so-swoonsome (below left), he recently declared himself a feminist in an interview with the Guardian
Food trucksThe successor to the pop-up; watch out for Lidl's King of the Grill this summer
Teenagers as curatorsA group of them will look after the Butler Gallery Collection in Kilkenny city for a month. Who says teenagers are all about me, me, me?
MulberryRecession? What Recession? The luxury leather brand announced pre-tax profits of £23.3 million, a jump of 358 per cent from the previous year
The Loft bookshopLast time we checked, Kindles had not taken over the world, so get down to Dublins latest independent bookshop, on Middle Abbey Street
Fleet FoxesTheir folksy harmonies have never been better than on Helplessness Bluesand they play the Marquee in Cork tomorrow (ably supported by Agnes Obel and Owen Pallett)
Baltika non-alcoholic beerIt doesn't have the nasty metallic taste that can blight some of its rivals
Reef and BeefOn a trip out west, we found the perfect post-surf meal in Strandhill's Trá Bán restaurant – a T-bone steak with half a lobster tail on top. Epic
WHAT'S NOT
The Food PyramidIt's been replaced in the US by a visual of a dinner plate, showing how much fruit and veg, grains and proteins we should be eating. See choosemyplate.gov
Couch potatoesBeing one is getting harder to justify thanks to Wimbledon fever and Rory McIlroy's golfing triumph
The Club Orange adProving that sexist, dated stereotypes of big-breasted women is alive and well in advertising
The sun on strikeWhich we're told will cause Artic wintertime conditions across northern Europe for the next 50 years. Yet another reason to emigrate?
Amy WinehouseThe footage of her stumbling, being booed and generally not singing at a Serbian gig last week makes for uncomfortable viewing
The presidential campaignNot inspiring us so far
WORD ON THE STREET: Bra-mance
What it means:The bromance is sooooo over. Hollywood has exhausted the comedic possibilities of men bonding over fart jokes, and is looking for something new to get bums on cinema seats. So they've come up with a doozy – women bonding over fart jokes. Bridesmaids, released this weekend, is a gross-out girlie movie in which women act like real women, swearing, bitching about other women and competing to be the bride's VBF (and maid of honour). It also has a toilet scene that out-grosses anything a bromance can come up with.
It's been dubbed a bra-mance – and already it's taken more than $125 million in the US. For women fed up with fashionista flicks such as Sex and The City, rubbish romcoms starring Jennifer Aniston or touchy-feelie chick flicks in which women group-hug over a pot of fried green tomatoes, Bridesmaidsis a godsend. And they won't have to drag their husbands or boyfriends kicking and screaming to see it. It's produced by Judd Apatow, who directed Knocked Upand T he 40-Year-Old Virgin– so it seems we'll happily sit through a chick-flick, just as long as the chicks act like guys.
Where it comes from: Bridesmaids, co-written by and starring Kristin Wiig, is a twist on the traditional wedding comedy. This movie isn't about finding love or bagging a husband, this is about getting one over on your frenemy.
How to say it:"We went to see a bra-mance last night, but we had to leave, the cinema was filled with stag parties." KEVIN COURTNEY
TRUE CHARACTERS
Gerry Collins, former Olympic kayaker and owner of the Great Outdoors
Thirty-five years ago outdoor pursuits meant .. .mainly mountaineering.Then along came sports such as canoeing, kayaking, orienteering, scuba diving and surfing. Our initial stock in the Great Outdoors was really simple. I remember
unpacking blow-up air beds, sleeping bags, tents, waterproofs and hiking boots. Our accountant came up with the name. He was a bit of a paddler at heart.
I started kayaking.. . in the late 1960s, when I was 15 or 16. In those days you paddled every kind of kayak or canoe, from sprint boats one week to whitewater river trips. And you knew everyone. You'd be driving somewhere and see a boat on top of a car and know whose it was. Nowadays paddlers specialise. They pick a discipline and stick to it. I think it's really
boring. But it’s the competitive way. You want to be the best.
My memories of the 1972 Munich Olympics. . . are of marching in the parade as a member of the Irish kayaking team,
watching the crisis [when Palestinian gunmen killed 11 Israeli athletes] on television in the Olympic village. Although it all happened only two blocks away there was a huge lockdown so we were hearing about it through television and phonecalls home. I also remember sitting on the start line of the first ever Olympic kayak slalom event with the minutes ticking by, waiting for my turn.
If I had to have only one piece of outdoor equipment it would be. . . a really good goose-down jacket. You can shove it in the bottom of a rucksack because it's very compact and then you're super warm if you're sitting on a riverbank, or combined with a waterproof over it, when you're genuinely in the hills, you're properly warm.
I'm happiest doing. . . a white-water river trip with a couple of friends, guys you can rely on if things get tricky. My favourite river in Ireland would be the Upper Liffey from just under Kippure down to Blessington. In a flood, it's as good as any Alpine river.
One of my favourite indoor activities is. . . eating. My wife's a brilliant cook.
In the 1970s in Ireland surfing was. . . confined to a small hardcore of people in Tramore, Lahinch and Rossnowlagh in Donegal. We surfed badly then and kayaked reasonably well. It's all changed now.
Irish coastal waters are. . . superb for sea kayaking, scuba-diving and surfing. We have the best conditions in Europe on the south and west coasts. It's all booming at the moment. And you have visitors who can't believe that they can have an entire beach to themselves for days with these conditions.
Outdoor enthusiasts don't get old they just. . . get more nerdy about their equipment. We have a T-shirt brand called Old Guys Rule. When you reach a certain age you go out and buy a better boat or a longer surfboard, just to give yourself the edge. I was in a coffee shop in Laragh recently and saw a group of men from mid-50s to 70-plus in Lycra on their racing bikes. They had every bit of gear you could imagine.
If I had to start again tomorrow I'd. . . probably spend more time with my family.
The Great Outdoors is celebrating 35 years in business and is organising a series of events, including weekly talks on various topics. On June 29th it will focus on climbing Kilimanjaro. See greetoutdoors.ie or tel: 01-6794293 for further details In conversation with CATHERINE CLEARY