It has been a wonderful journey of pure imagination and I feel so entirely fortunate to be delivering this programme in just a few short weeks. Together, myself, the teachers and our young participants will be practicing what it is to sing well and to sing well as part of a choral ensemble and all the while, we will be exploring forests and jungles and taking great journeys on great ships across vast seas.

What a wonderful life to live.. a life of singing and of music and of journeying around the world both in fantasy and reality.

So once again as I embark upon another adventure in the realm of children’s arts, do watch this space and I will keep you posted.

All you need is 15 minutes of your day and a little flair.

Easter Nests

• 100 grams butter
• 100 grams toffee
• 200 grams marshmallows
• 3 mugs of rice crispies (or 2 mugs of rice crispies and 1 mug of cornflakes for a more authentic-looking nest!)

In a non-stick pan, melt your butter, marshmallows and toffee together over a gentle low heat, stirring often with a wooden spoon. Once melted, allow to cool as too hot a mixture will make your rice crispies loose their crunch. Stir in your rice crispies, one mug at a time. Your mixture will look stringy and this is perfectly fine!

Spoon onto baking parchment and gently mould into nest shapes or make one enormous nest. This sticky mix will be easiest to manage whilst mildly-warm to almost-set.

Fill generously with a your preferred selection of miniature eggs, ready yourself a cup of your favourite coffee and take a spring-filled moment to admire your handiwork in pinks and blues and pastel hues..

Have a very Happy Easter!

And so ‘Children’s Choruses around the World’ will become ‘Children’s and Youth Music around the World’ and I will continue to keep you updated with my adventures and innovations in children’s and youth music around the world.

This May, for example, I will return to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia where I will feature as children’s chorus specialist for the Malaysian Choral Eisteddfod and as guest facilitator with the Malaysian Philharmonic Youth Orchestra. This is a rare pleasure indeed – one long-haul flight for two glorious children’s and youth music events.

So while, with my tiny choristers at MCE, we will be playing while we are singing, I will be encouraging my older novices at MPYO to sing while they play! This is the beginning of a intensely interesting musical journey and one which I will, I have no doubt, find both challenging and immensely rewarding!

So watch this space and I will keep you posted..

My sister asked if I had seen our grandfather, that she had spotted him in the same documentary, sharing a panel with Nuala O’Faolain on The Late, Late Show.

Thanks to RTÉ player, I was able to watch Nuala again and sure enough, approximately 36 minutes into the programme, there was our grandfather, the late and great, Larry Lyons.

This unexpected appearance has sparked a week-long dialogue in our house. Grandad, or Pop as we fondly called him, was somebody. He was recognised in Irish society for his contribution and commitment to journalism. He was acknowledged for his best-seller The Gay Future Affair which some thirty years later can still be found on amazon.com! He was editor of The Cork Examiner, husband to Eileen Lyons née Buckley, father to my mother, Paula, and to her six siblings, and he was my grandfather, larger than life, unashamed and unabashed. Cigar smoke surrounded him and miniature bookies’ pencils could always be found in his inside coat pocket which is where, incidentally, I began my relationship with him.

As a small child, my grandfather used to scoop me up in his great padded hands and gently drop me into his inside coat pocket. Then as he would walk, I would stand with my bare tippy-toes pressed against the cool satin fabric, my hands gripping tightly to the folded fabric seam. Sometimes, I would rest my chin on that same seam and stare starry-eyed at the world and sometimes, I would allow myself to slip into the corner of his pocket and sleep secret sleeps close to his heart. With my grandfather, I was a fairy, often cold and never bold. I was Thumbelina. I was Jack. I was Captain Cook and Peter Pan. I was a member of the Swiss Family Robinson and he was my tree-house, my lookout, my elephant marching through the forest. He showed me what it was to hold a birds-eye view of the world.

When I grew too big for his pocket, I progressed to the arm of his moss-green velveteen chair. We studied the form together and wrote with miniature pencils on miniature slips of pink paper. Sometimes, I made it to the bookies with him and, even as a very young child, I understood that I had been granted a special access to the secret world of men. Through the beaded curtain, it was a guttural, smoke-filled place, so strange and wonderful that I barely dared to breathe. When the smoking-ban was first introduced to Ireland, I felt a deep regret for all the young children who would never experience the smoke-filled booking office with their grandfathers on an easy sunny Saturday morning.

At the age of seven, I won the Grand National with a bet on “Forget-me-not”. I won well and with good odds. I remember the sitting room with dust glittering and dancing in the warm light. We focussed. We discussed my selection. I liked the name. We marked our slips and walked out together. It was crisp and cold. I held his hand. He was warm and tall and broad and glorious. He was my Gentle Giant and I was.. well it was enough then that I was his. We watched the race on the television and in colour. I can still feel the strange-urge in my bowels, the anticipation, the final furlong, the win, that glorious win, the pink slip in my hand, that valuable pink slip in my hand, and the look of utter satisfaction on my grandfather’s face. “Forget-me-not” was a horse aptly named.

As I grew from child to young girl, my grandfather recognised the shift and moved me from the world of men to the world of ladies and gentlemen. We took afternoon tea at the Imperial Hotel. A white-gloved doorman marked our grand entrance to fine china, starched white linen, tiered cake-stands and french fancies. I blushed with pride and blossomed in my grandfather’s company. He liked me. He introduced me as his first grandchild. I was somebody too. When the bill came, my grandfather toyed with a fresh young waitress. Monies had changed from old to new some years previous and still he feigned shock at the new sum totaled. “Surely a penny will do?” he exclaimed with mock horror and amazement. She faltered for he was both handsome and debonair and yet his suggestion was clearly absurd. It was cruel.. and yet.. how I enjoyed his wolfish grin.

Reaching double digits, I was neither a child nor a teenager. I was an inbetweenager or a ‘tweenager as my own daughter now protests. I visited with my grandparents that summer and enjoyed a time of near womanhood with my grandmother. My grandfather was writing. His was an intense hermititude, a heavy breathing presence on the wrong side of a firmly shut door. The typewriter clacked and paused and clacked, and clacked and clacked and clacked ever more. Sitting on the polished wood floor outside his door, I became aware of the rhythm of writing, the ebb and flow, the stop and start, the pause and sometimes necessary break to allow the subconscious time to work out where next to journey. I came to anticipate these breaks when my grandfather would emerge from the front room in a plume of smoke, eyes set firmly forward looking to the middle-distance, seeking the next word and key to the next sentence. We hushed ourselves and were still. Granny understood his need and I, adoringly, followed her lead. A gentle kiss, a brush of his lips on her forehead, or eyelid, or sweet powdered cheek and a quiet cup of tea were taken and a brief connection made.

I saw reason to writing that summer. I saw that it was to be quietly regarded, that it could neither be forced nor interrupted, that it was both habit and skill, inspiration and discipline, and that it required stamina and courage and clarity and conviction. Ebb and flow. Stop and start. Pause and break.. and flow again.

I could write and write and write ever more and still only manage to sketch his outline. Suffice to say that I continue to be grateful for having been his grandchild.

Larry Lyons, suffered a heart attack and died in the night when I was 16 years old. My mother gently woke me at first light. I can still feel the drugged confusion of early morning as I struggled to sit and to make sense of her intrusion. It was then she told me.. and I was sad for a very long time.

I am sometimes that dandelion!

And whilst it can be a challenge to be a dandelion ever-gazing skywards, in the company of daffodils simply-staring sideways, the greater challenge often comes when the daffodils spot you and whisper,

“We have a dandelion in our midst!”

Parades and parties prevail.

This year the Gray Clan decided to approach the day a little differently.

We climbed down the steep stairwell of the Mitchelstown Cave into the womb of our land. It was a wet and weird and wonderful world. In the darkness, my daughter whispered, ‘Nature is awesome.’

We climbed up the steep incline of the Hill of Corrin and made it to the iconic cross which marks the County of Cork. We stood proudly, drawing in the fresh spring air, soaking up the afternoon sun and admiring of our land and of its forty shades of green.

Home again, we watched the Irish play England in the rugby 6 Nations and consoled ourselves with green milkshakes for tea.

It was a day when we indulged in our land and were thankful for our home.

Happy St Patricks Day 2012.

What an utter privilege it is to be a mother and to be able to raise a family in Cork and of Cork!

Truly blessed!

Missing Attachment Missing Attachment Missing Attachment

I only considered them because they were heart-shaped and because I felt my children would enjoy the dough-rolling, shape-cutting, fork-pricking activity as promised by the recipe. We don’t usually “do” Valentine’s Day, however, on this particular Valentine’s, I thought that it might be nice to celebrate our love for each other with heart-shaped biscuits for tea.

Neighbourhood friends joined us that day and we passed a very fine afternoon making and baking, assembling and sampling these very tasty biscuits. Come tea-time, visiting children were sent home with a plate of custard creams to share their work and continue the celebration with their families.

The very next year, when I announced that it would soon be Valentine’s Day, my children asked if they could help make the custard creams – an association had been forged.

This year, I marveled at the ease with which my daughter and her friend measured and mixed and chilled and rolled and even managed the custard cream assembly line with all the brothers. And so it would appear that we have created our very own loving tradition – Custard Cream Hearts on Valentine’s Day. Long may it continue…

Thank you Yukino and Koya for your beautiful New Year’s wish.

I am thinking of you and I hope to see you soon.