Angela can keep her ashes, elsewhere it was all cosy coddle
Miriam Lord
November 28 2001 12:11 AM
AS THE cognoscenti will tell you, a coddle is a boiled fry.
It is a true sign of maturity when you can eat one without making a distasteful remark about the colour of the sausages.
Honest to goodness coddle was on the menu in the Fado Restaurant in Dublin's Mansion House last night, and the huge and well-heeled attendance tucked in with gusto.
Probably thought they were eating a French cassoulet without the beans - so it was acceptable.
Bill Cullen is a living testament to the benefits of coddle. A strapping man, he grew up in working class Dublin in a bijou apartment. Only then they were known as tenements.
Many years on, a successful and rich man, he read Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes and got very annoyed.
As he said at the packed launch of his book about his childhood, "the county I had been raised in had been insulted. We were all very happy in the inner city, we had nothing - but so had everybody else. We didn't know any better." So Bill, while not minimising the material hardships he experienced during his upbringing in a family of 14 during the 1940s, decided to write his own memoirs - It's a Long Way from Penny Apples.
It's a rags to Renault story - Bill is now chairman and owner of the French car distributors in Ireland. Bertie Ahern was enchanted by the book, so he came along to give it his official blessing.
"A very funny book, a great read and a wonderful chronicle of times past," said the Taoiseach, coming over all nostalgic in front of a packed audience of Bill's friends and supporters.
All royalties from sales are going to the Irish Youth Council. After three days, the book had to go into a reprint, and copies are flying out of the shops. Bertie, described by the night's master of ceremonies, David Norris, as "a great Northsider and a great Taoiseach" waxed lyrical about the Dubs being a courageous, fair-minded and determined people" and then he lapsed into reminiscing about the great characters of a bygone city. "I had the great pleasure to meet Bang Bang before he passed away," he sighed.
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And then, copping onto the fact that his audience were not all north inner city stock, he sniffed: "for those of you who are more blessed to live in the more affluent parts of Dublin, I think you should read it".
Bill's Ma was a fruit dealer, his Da worked on the docks. The title of the book comes from the time his late Ma Mary - a central figure in his memoirs and a rock in his life - read in the newspapers about her son borrowing £18,000 to buy the Renault dealership. "God bless you, son, now that's a long way from penny apples," sez she.
