Window into the past

IT’S THE weekend, I’m scoured, showered and powdered, rightly dickied up for dinner, but I don’t quite know where to settle for my pre-prandial libation in Sandbrook House, a fine old country home built back in the early 1700s on the Carlow-Wicklow border.

Should I plump for the patio just outside the kitchen alongside a purring cat, a strong smell of basil in the air as one of the evening’s chefs, Gerald Esposito of Youghal’s Capri Bay Restaurant, conjures up a pasta medley for starters? Or I could opt for the covered terrace looking out over the walled-in suntrap kitchen garden, hens strutting archly around croquet hoops still embedded in the lawn from earlier when owner of Sandbrook House, Christopher Bielenberg, was offering himself up as tutor.

There’s always the music room, an airy light-filled room at the end of the house with a piano just pleading for a little light plinking if not a downright pounding. It’s the weekend and, much as I love them, I am on a night away from bairns, which means the only one getting the bottle is me and I ain’t gonna change any nappy other than my own.