Sally McKenna

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Sally McKenna likes to tell the story of how she got her start as a professional cook.
It is 1982 and McKenna has just moved to Dublin, newly married – to a brief-less barrister – and broke. A friend asks if she can cook and she says, “Well, I think so”. “Come in and talk to Bill”, he says.
Bill is Bill Hughes, the well-known television producer, at that time cooking in The Carriage, upstairs in what is now Tower Records on Wicklow Street. Hughes is leaving to join RTE and needs  a successor in the kitchen. McKenna's interview/mentoring goes like this:
Hughes: “Sally, say f**k”
McKenna (in an unconvincing, middle-class English accent): “F**k”'
Hughes: “Sally, Say “s**t”
McKenna (in an unconvincing, middle-class English accent): “S**t”
Hughes: “Okay, you're ready”.
She started on Monday morning.

Life has pretty much been like that for McKenna ever since. Just as she made herself into a professional cook with no formal training, she later made herself into a journalist, then a publisher, a designer, a photographer and, in a grander sense, an organiser, the organiser since 1991 of The Bridgestone Guides and, thus, the Bridgestone community.
Like the people in that community, and most especially the women in that community, she can improvise, and she is autodidactic: challenges are simply there to be mastered, so long as one has perseverence, so long as one does the work, so long as one puts in the hours. She navigates through friendship: she's a good friend.

She was born in Nairobi, Kenya, and brought up in Suva, in Fiji, where she remembers eating curry and roti from roadside stalls. The Fijian influence is paramount, and imprinted a broad sense of culture – rather than a narrow sense of colony – that has stayed with her. Like a true Melanesian, she is “bien dans sa peau”: she is comfortable in her skin, and quite likely to go barefoot, or dive into the nearest available water source, which suits where she lives in West Cork, the Melanesia of Ireland. Like the little girl in Suva, her skies are cloudless.

www.lifeskills.ie

Durrus, County Cork
www.bridgestoneguides.com