Be adventurous with food on your holidays by seeking out local culinary traditions in corner cafés or shops, writes Haydn Shaughnessy
Being the kind of simpleton who believes rural Bandon is the heart beat of Ireland, I also take the view that summers should respectfully fall in the dead of winter. That is, the summer holidays should be stood on their head and allow us a roasting Christmas in the sun.
To be racing off abroad now when the cloud cover is below 60 per cent seems like folly.
Why not save the big school break for when the temperature in Spain is a moderate 20 plus rather than a scorching 40 and when Ryanair is desperate enough to deliver a €1.99 seat for around €25, each way, and that's before your credit card comes out to pay for the coffee?
Okay, so you're rushing off anyway. Let me protect you against yourself.
Last Christmas we'd been anticipating the grand meal of our late, late summer holiday the whole week, and saved it for our last day on the Mar Menor, an inlet off the Mediterranean where they do things differently.
In this case it was paella, but prepared the local way. Instead of cooking prawns along with mussels, the locals pound the bone and skulls of the daily catch and create a hideously pungent stock, which they use to cook their rice.
I'd told them I write the odd article for a paper back home, not so I could get a freebie but in order to get access to the chef. That's how I know I'd been eating mashed fish brains and squashed intestines. It took me two days to recover. So my advice for the adventurous is be wary and trust your nose.
If I was travelling to new places - I'm thinking the European accession states - I'd trust Lonely Planet and the Rough Guides for a steer on basic good eating. But holiday eating dangers are not necessarily evident in the basics.
For those who tend not to be at all adventurous with food, the risk is missing out. For those who know their way around, there's another danger. Restaurants don't necessarily reflect local culture or take you to the heart of food that's healthy as well as memorable.
Guides can take you so far. Les Routiers, the red and blue sign you see tacked to the walls of cafes across France, is trustworthy on quality food at a fair price. But as Routiers cafés are those favoured by France's more discerning stomachs, the truck drivers, don't expect the bijoux cafes you find in Ireland and Britain.
I can vouch for one dilapidated recommendation in Normandy. After an exhausting six-hour drive, my wife and I stopped at the only eatery left open. It was nine in the evening, closing time in rural France.
The robust patron, we call them obese these days, wore a hazardously filthy apron over a prominent stomach. This walking health risk would not be allowed into an Irish kitchen - we still talk about his pork chops and apples in cider and cream. Simple yet somehow elevated. The room, the bed and the sheets were unbearably dirty but I slept happy.
On guides and awards: Be discriminating. In Ireland now there has sprung up a new best restaurant award and plaque that sits in the windows of restaurants and pubs whose claims to excellence are at best dubious.
In England I've been foxed, only once, by an extremely diverse menu. It turned out the restaurant was buying in frozen prepared meals and using the microwave. Chefs have to specialise to be good and a diverse menu should make a conscious eater a little sniffy. I don't use a microwave and don't want my food zapped by one.
In France, Spain and Portugal some of the best eating experiences are to be enjoyed in corner cafés, though the breed is dying.
In the Camargue, one of the last unspoilt regions of France, the pizza invasion is well under way. In Spain, outside Madrid and Barcelona, I believe self-catering is the best option.
Why? Restaurateurs have the measure of us guys with light skin. And Spain's supermarkets can offer better ways to tap into local culinary traditions. The healthy Mediterranean diet is to be found in the shops.
Seek out the hams, obviously, the sardines, the varieties of nuts and seeds available, tomatoes to use alongside olive oil as a substitute for butter on your bread, and the garbanzos or chickpeas. Jars of chickpeas are stocked in impressive quantities in the supermarkets and are a Spanish ready meal. We eat far too few pulses and beans. They need just a little bacon and a herb or two.
Elsewhere the supermarkets are far more interesting than those at home, less intimidating than the local butcher or patisserie and a fair reflection of daily life.
In France I head to the supermarkets for the tins and jars, for the pâtés but also the remnant fat of preserved goose and duck, richness and textures not encountered in Ireland but which make me feel I could belong in the sun, on the terrace of a southern avenue, walking tall on a boulevard.
Even in summer I enjoy an Alsatian choucroutte, a simple meal of preserved cabbage, again abundantly available in jars, perfumed with juniper berry, embraced by the thick lard of a ham, a bacon, a sausage. The French eat fatty food and prosper on it because . . . you just have to.
Here also you can encounter a sausage, the angouleme, which is lumpy offal in a small sack. You cut in and the grease drips along your fork, releasing to the nose the dense aroma of living objects in too close a proximity. Before you munch, you may want to remind yourself that the wife and I conducted a similar experiment on the Mar Menor.