Celestine Cooney – Stylist
What’s your earliest holiday memory?
My earliest holiday memory is sitting in a swimsuit in the rain building sandcastles on a beach in Jersey.
What was your best holiday?
South Africa 2003, myself and my whole family spent Christmas over there. We missed my mum’s Christmas dinner but everything else was brilliant.
The day after St Stephen’s Day, myself and my brothers Peter, Patrick and James went on a road trip driving up the Garden Route along the coast. We stayed in hostels that were old train carriages parked on the beach, all four of us squeezed into one carriage like a little box of sardines.
We stopped off at wolf sanctuaries and ostrich farms. We also got a boat out to another hostel on an island in the middle of a lake. We ate out under the stars, went surfing with basking sharks, visited local markets, laughed a lot . . . and finished it all of by doing the world’s highest bungee jump off Bloukrans Bridge.
What was your worst holiday?
We had a really terrible flight to South Africa but once we got there it was magical. I remember crying for ages on that flight, it was awful. I was crying for so long that my brothers just stopped taking any notice of me at all. They get great mileage out of slagging me for this and even I think it’s funny now.
If money or work were no restriction, what would be your dream holiday?
I’d like to do a cattle run in Montana in proper cowboy style – eating beans out of the tin, wearing the same clothes for a week getting dirtier and dirtier, watching the sun rise and set, being smack bang in the middle of nature, totally surrounded by it all, me and my horse.
What’s your favourite place in Ireland?
My parents’ house in Co Meath at the bottom of the Hill of Tara. Every chance I get for a holiday, I just go home. It’s so beautiful there and my mum is an amazing cook. There are horses, donkeys and apple orchards. I have a really awesome bedroom there so it’s like a five-star hotel and my whole family are staying there with me. I love it.
Your recommended holiday reading?
Books I'd recommend are John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, Hunter S Thompson's The Rum Diaries Roald Dahl's Boy,Jilly Cooper's Riders and Darina Allen's Forgotten Skills of Cooking.
Who would you bring on holiday with you, if you had your pick?
It would be a big villa in the south of France with Heston Blumenthal cooking for the whole week. My guests would be Jilly Cooper, Jim Sheridan, my sister Sally Anne (she would also choose the wine list), Seamus Heaney, Damien Dempsey and Anjelica Huston.
Where will you go to next?
I have a hankering for Tulum in Mexico. Sandy beaches and margaritas.
* Celestine Cooney is a fashion director and stylist. See celestinecooney.com. She blogs at celestinecooneyblog.blogspot.com.
* In conversation with GENEVIEVE CARBERY