and who had somehow cultivated the most extraordinary accents; all plummy vowels, posh sounds and totally mangled grammar.

My most vivid picture of these ancient women places them at my Great Aunt Maura's dining room table, eating tiny buns and sipping tea from fragile china, ignoring the sugar-high children and passing the time of day with graver grown-ups in polite conversation scattered with do be's and not do be's.

They rejoiced in a close blood link to Elizabeth Barrett, the English poet, and by all accounts nothing gave them greater pleasure in their twilight years than chasing down screenings of The Barretts of Wimpole Street, a rather dull black and white biopic of Grandpappy and the gang.

I may be making up the Grandpappy bit, but it sounds about right.

With all due respect to them . . . and making allowances for the conclusions of very young minds . . . I think they fancied themselves a bit, did Nan and Clare.

But in another world and a different Dublin, Nan and Clare were in Cumann na mBan. They were active in the Rising . . .

mostly, as far as I know, in a sort of supply and reinforcement role to the men in the GPO and elsewhere. Stories survive of Clare . . . who had a withered leg to support her diminutive frame and looked a highly improbable revolutionary . . . pushing a pram along the top of Sackville Street and, after exchanging pleasantries with the British troops, reaching under the covers and producing a hand grenade and throwing it over her shoulder.

I don't know if my Great Great Aunt killed somebody that day. I can't even say for sure that the story is true: the generations charged with preserving Nan and Clare's stories . . . including my own . . . have been less than diligent in their task and these maiden aunts exist, now, almost as a comic aside to the main attraction of family life.

I've been in Kilmainham Jail twice in the last month. The first time I was in the prison was when I was about 12 years old . . . the most impressionable age of them all . . . and on that occasion, when I stood in the stonebreakers' yard where the signatories of the Proclamation met their end, the tears came easily and unexpectedly. This week, I was back in the yard, about Capital D business, and again, the emotion rose up in this stillest of terrible places. I never knew that they didn't give them a funeral. Not even a blessing.

Those of you who are wary remembering the men and women of 1916 should go down there. If you're uncomfortable about today's parade, spend the day in the stonebreakers' yard in Kilmainham instead. Sometimes, we suffer from too much history and we are swayed too easily by prevailing tides and trends. Pearse and his fellow revolutionaries might have been guilty of idealism, optimism and foolishness, but they can't be held responsible for the history that has happened since and they deserve to be commemorated and honoured for the awful sacrifices they made for sugar-high children for generations to come.

In the prison museum, I saw that The Irish Times from that weekend reported the Rising as the worst act of insurrection and plain bad manners in our history. I'd no idea Kevin Myers was working there even then, but good luck to him and his shrivelled opinions. This weekend is for recalling bigger men. And women the size of china dolls with brave hearts, bigger than lions'.

The grape Easter feast While the rest of the world chows down on chocolate today, I'll be working my way through whole acres of grapes. I've been stunned . . . stupefied, even . . . by how difficult I've found the whole Giving Up Grapes for Lent thing. Six weeks on, the cravings haven't diminished one seed, and I'm still finding it almost impossible to stand in line in the vegetable shop without grabbing a big handful (99 cent a pound, now; have they no compassion? ) and running out of the shop shrieking with my green bag on my head.

I had hoped that the whole Lenten purge would restore some order to my relationship with my little green nemesis . . . that we might revert to a healthy handful a day, say . . . but if anything, my abstinence has just made me think of new and novel ways to fit more grapes in.

Obviously, I could give up all other food, but in a way, that's too easy (and I'd miss the porridge and blueberries).

My only hope now is that I binge on so many grapes today that it turns me off them for life. Mind you, I'm kind of hoping for the same result with chocolate. God, it's a minefield out there, isn't it?