As freespiral showed me round the garden, polytunnel and pond this morning, we breathed out little autumnal clouds and I was convinced that yesterday's glorious warm weather was summer's final fling. But by the time we reached Cork it was warm and bright all over again.

We have fallen on our feet with our airbnb here: a free parking space in the middle of the city available as soon as we arrived, and the flat is only four minutes' walk from the highly recommended vegetarian restaurant we'd thought we'd try to get into tonight, Café Paradiso, allegedly the best in Europe. 

First stop, the Crawford Gallery for a temporary exhibition - The Nude in Irish Art - which contains not only The Holy Well, a significant Orpen painting that we've been interested to see for a long time, but also a Spencer Tunick photo featuring Himself. We think we found him!  Although there were some interesting pictures, the exhibition didn't tell as coherent a story as I'd have liked about changing Irish attitudes to nakedness. 

Then to the English Market where, thankfully, the Irish cheese festival wasn't starting until tomorrow or we'd have been laden for our journey home. Shandon, the district over the river Lee, felt quite different from the area that used to be inside the city walls. We imagined ourselves back a century outside the old Butter Exchange which later became an arts centre which is now closed. In the rather dusty Butter Museum we discovered how production very rapidly shifted from small-scale rural to large-scale industrial in the 1960s and 70s. It wasn't said, but I rather got the impression that Ireland put more than its fair share of the work that went into building the EU butter mountain.

And that vegetarian restaurant? Definitely the best I've ever eaten in.