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.

EAT THIS

ONE CONSEQUENCE of the global economic kerfuffle was the increased clamour for culinary comfort, nostalgia for food that evoked the safe haven of childhood, when all was right with the world.

“WE’VE enough on our plate for the moment,” says foodie Conrad Howard, one of an entrepreneurial trio that opened its third Cork eating house this week.