Restaurant Review: The Castle Café, Blackrock

THOUGH a saltwater baby, half my childhood seemingly passed in the sea playing Man From Atlantis (ask anyone with receding hair and expanding belly), with age I am infinitely more reticent in my dealings with the cold, cold Atlantic, inching in toe by toe — and that’s while wearing a wetsuit. And so it is with January, these days, I ‘inch into it’, toe by toe.

Plenty of souls out there kicked off the new year with #Veganuary, turning vegan for the entire month; I braised a humongous shoulder of beef on New Year’s Day that we were still picking at 10 days later. Many of you began the #100DaysOfWalking initiative, 30 minutes’ walking a day for… you get the picture; but we hardly left the couch until it was time to return to school on January 7, loath to leave beloved Christmas behind us.