Ireland day 1416. Thursday 14 August 2025- Proper Potter

Today’s summary	Made a light breakfast and had a call with family in Sheffield in the morning. Then did some shopping, made porridge for lunch(!) and started on Spanish deberes. In the afternoon, had a chat with a friend in the US, and then later another call – this one with more family back in the UK. Then Val and I went on a short walk. Made chicken stuffed with Mozzarella and roast vegetables for dinner. Aperol Spritz as an accompaniment.
Today’s weather	Overcast but warm and mostly dry although there were a few spots of rain in the afternoon. Some sun in the evening. Almost no wind. Appx 21c

Today’s overview location (The blue mark shows the location of our route)		Close-up location (The blue line shows where we walked) (Click button below to download GPX of today’s walk as recorded, or see interactive map at bottom with elevations corrected): Proper Potter round Malahide

Commentary

Today followed a similar – but extremely comfortable – pattern to previous days.

We got up, enjoyed cups of tea and coffee, and set about our daily tasks. My first priority was a video call with family in Sheffield, UK, so we spent a good hour this morning sharing news and generally putting the world to rights.

After that, I dropped into the town to do some shopping – mainly to get ingredients for tonight’s dinner. Then, once I got back, it was lunchtime but neither of us felt like eating a huge amount. So actually I just made us some porridge, which I supplemented with a few oatcakes and hummus. It was briefly warm enough to sit outside, so we enjoyed our lunch on the balcony.

In the afternoon, I started to tackle the deberes from last night’s Cervantes class, which for once I didn’t find too difficult. I only did about half of it, but I’ll finish off the rest tomorrow. After that, it was time for another video call. This time it was to my friend in Houston – we had been scheduled to talk last week, but it got delayed by Covid. Once again, there was lots to discuss.

After that, and after numerous cups of tea, we had a call with more UK based family – this time in Oxfordshire. Lots of news to share, in both directions. We rounded off the afternoon with a short walk up the side of the Demesne, then back into town down Church Road. We needed to get some vital ingredients for dinner tonight (i.e. Prosecco to go with our Aperol Spritz), so dropped into SuperValu and O’Briens (one of our local off-licences) to get what we needed.

Finally, I cooked our dinner which sounds elaborate but which actually relied on a lot of external assistance. It’s chicken breast stuffed with mozzarella and scallions [spring onions] (SuperValu), Mediterranean roast vegetables (Kerrigans) and mashed potato (Donnybrook Fair). Anyway it looks OK and smells good. So the impending readiness of dinner, combined with the temptations of the Aperol that Val has just rustled up, are reluctantly (!) dragging me away from the keyboard – so I’ll sign off now.

Feels like we are living the good life today!

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


First job of the day – read the gas meter. I have no idea if this is a lot or a little, but it’s bound to be expensive	When we arrived in Ireland 4 years ago, these were 45¢ a packet. That’s what real inflation looks like

*Magnificent Magnolia grandiflora* coming into flower in the Demesne. The blooms smell – pretty uniquely as far as I know – of grapefruit marmalade.**	This is a very posh semi in Church Road, Malahide. A massive renovation job started on the right hand side of the house about a year ago, and still seems to be in the middle of the project. Now it appears that whoever owns the left hand side has decided to join the party and restore their side too. Another few years disruption, no doubt. Keeping up with the Joneses, or maybe just revenge



On clear days, for a few moments in the afternoon and for a short period of the year, sunshine hits the glass of the balcony of the flat above us and refracts prismatically into our spare room. It’s quite a spectacular example of physics in action