The Harry Potter juggernaut has swiftly created a new star in Termonfeckin's Evanna Lynch, who beat 15,000 other hopefuls for the coveted part of Luna Lovegood in the fifth Potter movie, Order of the Phoenix.
The 15-year-old travelled to London with her dad for the audition when she saw the casting call online. She now has her own fan site, www.evannalynchfans.com, and when the film finally gets released, next July, the wand-wielding Lynch is going to be everywhere.
ROCKING AT RESTAURANTS
I thought rock stars guzzled Champagne and ate cheeseburgers with blue M&M chasers while trashing their backstage dressingrooms. Didn't you? Well, not all of them do, and Alex Kapranos (below) has lifted the lid on the touring rock star's diet in Sound Bites, his frank and often hilarious account of what he ate, and who he ate it with, over a year on the road with his band Franz Ferdinand.
As a former chef, Kapranos knows his stuff and has a healthy appetite for unusual food. It seems there's nothing he's afraid to put
in his mouth - a useful trait in a gastro-adventurer. Bulls' testes in Argentina; deep-fried locusts in Bangkok; chicken gizzards in a Paris cafe; potentially poisonous blowfish in Japan; and, perhaps most hazardous of all, deep-fried pizza in Glasgow. He's downed it all and lived to tell a riveting tale.
There are many laugh-out-loud anecdotes in this quirky little book. You'll find your own favourite, but mine is the revenge Kapranos served up to a pompous hotel manager in Singapore who berated him for daring to eat street food in his pristine lobby. After that night's gig Kapranos invited 6,000 fans back to the hotel and told them: "Bring some fast food with you." And they did. Bold boy.
Sound Bites: Eating on Tour with Franz Ferdinand, by Alex Kapranos, is published by Fig Tree, £12.99. Marie-Claire Digby
EATING OUT AND SLEEPING IN "Property developers reinventing themselves as hoteliers are driving B&Bs, the backbone of the Irish vernacular of hospitality, out of business; and recent new openings such as Venu and Fallon & Byrne mean that Dublin has overtaken Cork when it comes to cutting-edge new restaurants." Never one to mince his words, the food writer John McKenna robustly defended Ireland's B&Bs in the face of competition from "anonymous hotels, pretentious joints and chain developments", at the launch this week of the 2007 Bridgestone guides to the top 100 places to eat and stay in Ireland.
If McKenna, co-editor of the guides with his wife, Sally, were to choose to stay in just one place from the new list, it would be Sinead and Clodagh Foyle's Dolphin Beach in Clifden. "But I also love Heron's Rest in Galway, Sorcha Molloy's little two-room house on the waterfront," he says. And for dinner? "The star new arrival has to be Dermot Gannon's the Old Convent in Clogheen, Co Tipperary, where they serve an eight-course tasting menu at €50 to folk whom everyone else believed only wanted well-done steaks."
The Bridgestone 100 Best Restaurants in Ireland 2007, and The Bridgestone 100 Best Places to Stay in Ireland 2007 are published by Estragon Press and cost €10 each. The 2007 guides are dedicated to Michael Clifford, the Cork restaurateur who died suddenly earlier this year. Marie-Claire Digby
SWISS SWIGGERS
Surprising but true: the little bottle of mineral water that we impulsively buy in the newsagent or filling station costs about twice as much per litre as petrol. Our tap water is likely to be of equal or better quality; filter it if you're fussy. The flimsy plastic of which water bottles are made (polyethylene terephthalate) is manufactured from crude oil extracts, and is designed for one-time use. In the UK, only about 8 per cent of water bottles are recycled, and if our behaviour is similar to that of our neighbours across the Irish Sea, that means we're flinging more than 90 per cent of our bottles away.
There are several reusable water containers on the market, but among the more durable - and certainly the most stylish - are those produced by Sigg. The Swiss company has been making bottles for hikers for nearly 100 years. Each one is pressed from a single ingot of aluminium and is a seamless object. The baked-on inner coating is made from a water-based resin, and is safe for use with fruit juices, as well as water.
Sigg bottles come in several designs: plain, cylindrical shapes in simple colours (our favourite), flattened oval forms, and funky numbers for kids and sporting folk. Sizes range from 0.3 to 1.5 litres, and there are three types of leak-proof top. The seamless construction makes them virtually indestructible, but if someone accidentally hammers a crampon through yours, it can be popped into the recycle bin with your drinks cans. The reusable bottles cost from about €13.30 to €30, in good outdoor shops. See www.sigg.ch for further details. Jane Powers
BRUSHING UP YOUR BRUSHES
The reason I hate painting so much is the mammoth clean-up required afterwards.
The painting itself is satisfying and really quite easy if you just imagine Mr Miyagi over your shoulder, saying: "Show me paint the fence, Daniel-san." Up, down, Up, down. It's great.
But with the painting nearing completion, a dread begins to descend. I recognise the feeling from my last paint job - the realisation that soon I must begin the arduous task of cleaning the brushes. The half-hour spent at the kitchen sink, nostrils stinging from the fumes of the white spirits. The sink clogging up the following day from the globules of paint stuck in the drain. The sheer never-ending nature of it.
The devil on my shoulder whispers evil thoughts about throwing them out ("Go on! This is such a pain. Time is money"). But then the angel haughtily reminds me of what happened that morning when I went into the garage looking for paint brushes: I found 13 of them sitting in old mugs with the bristles rock-hard, the hopeful white spirit long since evaporated. Fit for nothing but the bin or maybe to stir the paint rather than apply it. The shame of it all.
I reckon there is a fortune to be made from the invention of a device you could stick brushes in to clean and dry them and return the bristles to their pristine blackness. I was discussing this with a guy at the DIY store and he told me about a product called Brush Mate - it's not quite clean-brush Utopia, but it's a step in the right direction nonetheless.
Brush Mate is a container with a replaceable vapour panel. The vapour prevents the chemical drying process that normally takes place when paint dries. So the brushes can be re-used without your having to clean them (unless you are changing colour) weeks, months or even years later. There is a tradesman's version (Trade 20) and a smaller model that stores four brushes (Trade 4) for DIY hacks like me. The Trade 4 costs about €30, but I don't even want to think about how much it cost to accumulate the 13 rock-solid brushes in the garage. Available at most DIY stores, or see www.brushmate.co.uk. Michael Kelly