Author Archives: martinatyrrell

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About martinatyrrell

I am an editor and writer, an anthropologist and human geographer. I am a mother, a sister and a daughter. I'm from Ireland, but my research and longings have led to extended periods of my life lived in Japan, the Canadian Arctic, the UK and, right now, Spain. I am fascinated by our place in the environment and our relationships with other animals.

52. Talking COVID

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Two of my cousins dropped in for a cup of tea last night. I’d seen Colette last week, but it was a my first time to see Michael since we arrived in Ireland. Our conversation followed the usual pattern – catching up on local news, who is dead or dying, who is having babies, buying houses, getting married, separating. We shared news of family members and talked about the state of upkeep of various family graves.

Soon, however, the conversation turned to Covid and it followed a pattern that I have increasingly noticed when I am in the company of people I haven’t seen for a long time. I’ve had a version of this conversation with friends in Spain, Portugal, the UK, and Ireland. And I had it again last night.

A year or two ago, I remember the conversation revolving around how we couldn’t really remember much of what had happened. ‘Were the kids really not allowed to leave the house for seven weeks?’ ‘Did the elderly really have to cocoon?’ That can’t be right. There seemed to be a collective amnesia, as we returned to normality (or a new normal, as Colette pointed out last night) and the key social elements of the pandemic were forgotten to us. It was as if we were asking each other, ‘Did it really happen?’

But, I have noticed an evolution in the way we talk about it now. Five years out from that first wave, and we are now telling the stories of what happened to us during that time. We recall the days, weeks and months of isolation, of the measures we took to keep ourselves and our families and friends safe. We have started to tell Covid to each other, affirming that these things happened to us. Last night, Mammy and Colette recalled the shopping that Colette and other family members did for Mammy, driving out to deliver it to her front gate. We all talked of the fear we felt, of our minor indiscretions (Mammy drove into town late one night to get money from the cash machine; I drove to our neighbouring village in Spain to pick up an order of ice cream), and of the more major indiscretions of others (the family caught by the police for turning their garage into an inpromptu bar; the couple who drove across the country to buy a boat).

Telling these stories over and over is a form of catharsis. Together once again, we can now laugh about the fear and the loneliness and the isolation. We can talk about the good memories of those times as well as the bad. Through our shared story-telling – telling the stories of Covid to others but, more importantly, aloud to ourselves – we are laying down the folklore of what happened in 2020. All over the world, wherever people meet, we are telling the story of Covid. Not the story of the disease and the illness and the vaccination, but the stories of how we, isolated but together, found mundane but remarkable ways to keep ourselves and our loved ones going.

I wonder in what directions our telling of Covid will evolve? What will I tell my grandchildren twenty or more years from now? Or what will Lily and Katie tell their grandchildren in turn?

Photo by Fusion Medical Animation on Unsplash

51. Alma Mater

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Around this time 35 years ago, I was accepted into St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, now Maynooth University. I still remember the nervous and shy 17 year old I was on that early October day in 1990 when Daddy drove me the 25 miles up to Maynooth for registration and to drop me off in my student accommodation.

This morning I took Lily and Katie to Maynooth, Lily now only a year younger than I was then. So much has changed and, yet, so much remains the same. I took them into Rhetoric House, home of the Geography Department and scene of my encounter with kind John Sweeney. I showed them the swimming pool. They asked if was creepier than the pool in Edenderry. Definitely. The tiny post office remains unchanged, as does Pugin Hall, where we used to pretend we were theology students to avail of the free tea and coffee. The Beatle is still outside the library (a statue of Pope John Paul II blessing two children – George and Ringo). The library itself was full of students preparing for repeat exams, but we quietly strolled around – until I got us lost and we ended up in the fire escape. In my defence, it was the main stair in my day!

The new campus is unrecognisable, but the Arts Block remains the same – so tiny compared to how I remembered it. Even the lecture theatres, which seemed huge, now look tiny. From there to the canteen and sports centre and then the Student’s Union – scene of so much divilment over the years!!

Many of the friends I made in those years remain my great friends to this day. The courses I studied set the trajectory for my professional and personal life, leading me to where I am today. It was a glorious trip down memory lane, as I recounted various things my friends and I got up to. The girls thought I’d gone slightly mad and all we’d gotten up to 30 and more years ago was all rather quaint!

50. Geography

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The deep history of Ireland is written in its landscape. In Donegal, the waves crash against the coast, turning cliff to cave, cave to arch, arch to stack, over aeons of time, crashing endlessly; cliff, cave, arch, stack, each a moment in its transformation into what it will become. Imagine speeding this erosive action up, so that these millions of years, tens of millions of years, hundreds of millions of years, can be seen to pass in a time frame that is comprehensible to creatures as short-lived as us.

Or maybe those aeons of time – the mere blip in the history of the universe that it took to transform cliff to cave to arch to stack – is too vast to comprehend. How about a shorter time frame? From Donegal, we drive inland, through the u-shaped valleys, the hanging valleys, the cirques, the scree, the ribbon lakes of the most recent ice age. Shorter time, easier to grasp. 20,000 years. 50,000 years. Time when our ancestors, not yet here, lived and loved and laughed and adapted to (or failed to adapt to) the changing climate. The landscape here is barren, in hues of grey and purple, still in its post-glacial youth.

Down through Monaghan, the road winds through what the glaciers left behind as they retreated in a warming world. Now, we are getting closer to our time. Only 10,000 or 9,000 years ago. The blink of an eye. The drumlins, those hills of glacial debris, all sloping together, like eggs in a basket, their blunt stross ends facing back northwest in the direction of the retreating ice, their more gently sloping lee ends looking southeast to a warmer world. The drumlins are bright green farmland now, criss-crossed with hedges, stone walls and fences. Cattle and sheep graze on the mineral rich grass. We have made them our home.

From the drumlins we drive across the eskers, the long collection of the Eiscir Riada, dried streams of glacial melt water that left behind the stone and sand and gravel that we drive along and extract and graze our animals on.

And now I am home. In the Bog of Allen. The raised bog, so similar and yet so different to the blanket bog I walked across in Donegal. This too is a remnant of the last ice age, the trapped melt water with no escape from the depression at the centre of the island. As the world warmed, trees grew and died and grew and died, over 10,000 years. Heaney wrote of the bog

Missing its last definition

By millions of years.

They’ll never dig coal here,

Only the waterlogged trunks

Of great firs, soft as pulp.

Our ancestors lived here, buried their dead here, punted their boats here. Archaeologists have found hoards of gold buried here and urns of butter still edible after 5000 years.

In the blink of an eye, we have ripped up the Bog of Allen. Heaney was wrong when he wrote ‘The wet centre is bottomless.’ In my lifetime, we have reached the bottom – digging, extracting, exhausting. And what did we find there? An earlier history told in seashells and calcified rock. From a time before. But to comprehend that, we must step back from this moment, to look across millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of years.

49. Breakfast

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Breakfast is generally the most perfunctory of meals. Quick and practical at the start of the day. On Saturday or Sunday, I like to make pancakes or waffles, which we eat lazily with multiple mugs of tea. But still, it’s the meal that, most of the time, I make and eat at home. I always imagine going out for breakfasts, but I’ve never lived anywhere that’s had much in the way of breakfast options.

Visiting a city is always a great opportunity for sampling breakfasts of all sorts. The memory of New York and Toronto diner breakfasts make me drool even now, and I still get nostalgic about breakfasts in Paris, Sydney, Honolulu, Vienna, London, Sevilla. Eggs, bacon, pancakes, mueslis, yogurts; breakfasts of all shapes and sizes; enjoyed with friends or in my own.

This morning, on the way through Derry, I had one such memorable breakfast. Not at a diner or a cafe, but at a friend’s house, made all the more delicious for the care and devotion my friend’s brother and sister put into making it.

The dining table was dressed with food, like that Christmas scene in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women. Eight of us sat around a table laden with rashers, sausages, black pudding, grilled tomatoes, fried potatoes, baked beans; potato farls, brown bread, toast, brioche buns, pancakes; jams, honey, marmalade, maple syrup; tea, coffee, hot chocolate. Every breakfast I love, all there on the table. I could have sat there all day, gorging myself like the Prince Regent.

Alas, we had to get on the road. Home beckoned. So, with a tummy full of food made with care and passion, I set out, another memorable breakfast to fuel my future nostalgia.

48. Weathering

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We had already decided to stay an extra night, to hole up here, in a house on a granite cliff, on the far northwest coast of Ireland. Better than running the risk of driving across Donegal and down through the country in the middle of a storm. We’d drive to the shop, get in supplies for the extra day.

Mid-morning, Katie called from the bathroom, ‘Is someone using the water out there?’ The shower wouldn’t heat up. A minute later she appeared wrapped in a towel. ‘The shower’s stopped working.’ Our trip to the shop in Dungloe delayed, we spent the next half hour trying to work out the source of the problem. The safety switch on the electricity junction box kept tripping. By a process of elimination, we realised that certain plug sockets also weren’t working. Michael stood on a kitchen chair, flicking switches on the junction box. ‘Shit. There’s smoke coming out of it,’ he said suddenly. I unlocked the door into the terrace in case we needed a speedy exit. My sister has survived two house fires – one in Ireland, one in Spain – both due to junction box fires, so I knew what could happen next

We ran around, unplugging and turning off lights. The smoke didn’t develop into anything more. Time for a sit down and a chat and decide what to do. It was Sunday morning, a bank holiday weekend. So calling out an electrician would be expensive and possibly not resolve the problem in the short term. Better to leave that til Tuesday and a normal working day. The house belongs to Michael’s aged aunt, so we didn’t want to bother or worry her when, at this moment, nothing could be done. And, the storm was still on its way.

We decided to ride it out here, without electricity. The girls raided the house for candles, torches, matches, while Michael and I figured out how to set up the ancient gas barbecue in a sheltered corner out the back of the house. Our shopping plan changed, as we considered what we could eat in the absence of electricity. We charged our phones as best we could during the drive.

When we got back from the shops, we went for a long walk across the island, still no hint that a storm was on its way. Michael lit the wood burning stove in the house and fired up the barbecue out the back. Up at this latitude at this time of year, it isn’t fully dark til 10:30. We sat chatting by candlelight til close to midnight. Michael was last to bed, leaving only a single (and safe) candle burning in the bathroom.

The wind woke me up around 5am, the back of the house, where I’m sleeping, creaking in its path. I was up at 7am, no longer able to sleep, keen to see what the sea looked like. I’m sitting here now by the big window that takes up half of this little house. Waves smash huge and white against the islands in the farther distance. Closer in, the sea is choppy, with gusts of wind dancing across its surface. A group of cormorants sit on the sea just down from the house, being tossed this way and that. The occasional seagull soars on a current of air, feet splayed as it attempts to land on firm ground

I’m glad we stayed. The lack of electricity gives a Wuthering Heights feel to this storm. We’ll leave later today or, more likely, tomorrow, whenever the storm has passed. All I’m missing is my morning cup of tea. For now, I’m going to sit back and enjoy the stormy sea.

47. Ukaliq

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In late 2000, I’d already been working as a volunteer teacher at Levi Angmak Elementary School in Arviat, Nunavut, for some months. Kip Gibbons, one of the teachers who had befriended me, offered to show me how to sew my own mittens. She sent me to the Northern Store to buy ukaliq (arctic hare) fur. I duly went a couple of evenings later and bought two ukaliq skins. On Saturday, I went around to Kip’s house and we sat on her floor, where she helped me to cut the pattern and showed me how to stitch the parts together.

I’ve never been much of a crafts person, so I was delighted to be making my own mittens. It was probably -20C or -25C as I walked the snow-covered streets back to my house a few hours later, proudly wearing my new mittens. I would wear them for years, and still have them today, although there isn’t much call for them in southern Spain.

On the Monday after I sewed the mitts, I wore them to school. In the school foyer, I met Peter 2 Aulajoot, an older teacher, who was always friendly and jokey with me. He chuckled when he saw my mitts. I hadn’t cut them badly or sewed them poorly. But Peter 2 noticed something that I hadn’t. While the fur on my left mitt was mostly white with a little smattering of black, the fur on my right mitt was mostly black with a little smattering of white. They looked completely mismatched. How could I not have seen this?

From that day on, Peter 2 always called me Ukaliq – arctic hare. A few other people picked it up too, but it wasn’t a name I was commonly called. But I liked that name for myself. I’d always loved hares, always got a thrill when I’d see them in Ireland. Now that I was in Nunavut, I saw them more often – including one that lived out past the reservoir and seemed as tame as a pet bunny.

I’ve carried that name – Ukaliq – with me ever since, making the frisson of excitement I feel whenever I see a hare all the sharper. So, yesterday when Michael said, ‘There’s the hare,’ I immediately turned to the window. And there she was. At the base of a granite outcrop beside the house, ears up, alert. She paused, nibbled at a hind paw with her teeth, hopped along and then sat, ears back, looking out over the sea.

I was in a state of awe and nostalgia and joy all mingled together, remembering Peter 2 and Kip and that ukaliq by the reservoir and the person I was twenty-five years ago.

46. Lá Lughnasa

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We drive west from Derry and across Donegal. Katie comments that it’s the first time since leaving the midlands that the land has changed. She’s right. The spare glaciated landscape of Donegal is in stark contrast to the raised bogs and green fields that fill the middle of the country.

It’s the 1st of August, Lá Lughnasa, the old Irish harvest festival. Suitably, it’s also the start of the FrielDays Festival, a celebration of Ireland’s great playwright, Brian Friel. As I drive through the landscape that inspired so many of Friel’s plays, I have ply Michael with questions.

Years ago, I read some of Friel’s plays and went to an Abbey Theatre production of Dancing at Lughnasa. We talk mostly about Translations, the great play about place and the meaning of place and the colonial endeavour to translate our Irish place names into meaningless English names (for instance, how my town Eadán Doire – the brow of the oak tree – was transliterated into the meaningless Edenderry, or my parish Clough na Rinca – the dancing stones – was transliterated into Cloherinkoe). The same colonial endeavour that occurred all over the world.

Michael reminds me of the story and the characters in Translations, places the play within the context of the land we’re driving through and explains certain criticisms of Friel’s historical inaccuracies.

But more, Michael regales me with stories of Friel himself, of various family members, pointing out houses they lived in, houses that inspired characters in the plays, of his own encounters with Friel over the years.

Brian Friel’s plays are brought to life for me as I drive through this place. I want to read Translations now and think I must find a copy when I return to Edenderry.

We arrive at the house out on the island. ‘I keep Friel here, of course,’ Michael says, ‘and Heaney.’ An early collected works of Friel and one of Heaney too. He leaves the Friel on the table for me.

So, here I am now, reading Translations in a place that hums with Friel, where the shape of the people and the shape of the land run through each play. Where better to rediscover these plays?

45. Cruit

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A couple of action packed days and late nights have come between me and writing. I wouldn’t swap these days for anything. I’m in Cruit tonight, back again after three years. This evening’s walk across this island off northwest Donegal was, as always, a delight…

Mt Errigal in the distance

44. Within these walls

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I had only been home twelve hours when I attended a funeral, for a neighbour of ours, from a mile or more down the road. She was almost 97. To be honest, I hadn’t even realised that she was still alive. But she was our neighbour, a woman from my townland who I had known and liked all my life, so I accompanied Mammy to the funeral.

It was a big funeral for a Wednesday morning. I said hello to people I knew in the churchyard – second cousins, a neighbour from my childhood, people from our parish. We took our seats in the church. I watched the other funeral goers file in, recognizing people I’ve known all my life, many indeed, who I only knew within the walls of this church and the Masses I attended every Saturday night or Sunday morning of my life when I lived here.

The woman who died had been a regular Mass-goer all her life. I can still see where she sat relative to where I sat with Daddy and Nana when we took the same pew for Mass every single week.

The priest looked down at the large congregation. ‘These walls hold the history of our community,’ he said. ‘These walls embrace us and hold us together.’

I looked around the simple unadorned little country church. The statue of Jesus, the simple stained glass windows, the confession boxes, even the organist, unchanged for most of the years since my parents first took me here. I looked at the people around me – all a little older now, a few more wrinkles, a little more grey hair, And I felt a tremendous sense of gratitude for the grounding and sense of place that these four walls gifted me.

43. Busy day back

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Between Mammy and the chats and the cousins and the chats and the neighbours and the chats and the tea and the chats and the rain and the chats and the dogs and the chats the coffee and the chats, I just haven’t had time to write anything today.