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.
I meet Sean again when I go out for an evening walk. This time he’s sitting on a camping chair on the canal bank, beside his boat. He’s with a younger man, who’s sitting on the grass. I shout ‘hello’ over to them and they beckon me over. By the time I walk back to the nearest bridge and cross over to the other side of the canal, Sean has pulled another camping chair out from his boat. His buddy is Carl, a Mancunian. The two met only yesterday, when Carl was taking his daily walk along the canal. I sit with them for a couple of hours, shooting the breeze, sharing stories about where we’ve come from and where we’re going to, the importance of listening, and the power of poetry. I bid them farewell and carry on my way.
••••••
‘I started working with papier-mâché during lockdown,’ Jean tells me. ‘I wanted to make art with what was lying around the house.’ I’ve wandered into her studio and find her sitting at a table, surrounded by papier-mâché spheres and abstractly-shaped boxes, everything looking precarious and on the edge. ‘Everywhere I turned, they were talking about tipping points. Scientists, activists. Tipping points are my great anxiety. So I’m working through that anxiety in my art.’ I ask where she’s from. ‘From Indiana originally, she say, but I’ve lived in England for forty years.’ She shows me how her tactile, playful art moves and explains how she makes it. I wish her luck with her project.
••••••
‘Do you mind if I sit here?’ I ask the man sitting alone at a table who looks like he’s working. I’m here to work too, so this could be a good place to sit. ‘The working end of the cafe,’ I say to him. ‘Yes,’ he smiles. I spot a university logo on the paper in his hand. From this angle, it looks like exam grading criteria. ‘Marking exams?’ I ask him. ‘Job application,’ he says. He’s Mark, an academic at a midlands university, grown tired of his job and applying for a position at a university in eastern Germany. We talk about the state of academia in the UK, the Spanish education system and, before long, an hour has passed and neither of us have done any work. I have a Zoom meeting to prep for and he has a train to catch, so we say goodbye and I get on with my work.
••••••
‘I’m at a stage in my life where friendships with women are most important to me,’ Amanda says. She tells me that she’s only moved to Leamington two days ago. She’s a few years younger than me, has a corporate job, but her real passion is healing. I tell her about a book I’m currently editing, and we discuss the power of stories and how we’re only able to tell our stories once we have worked through our trauma. We’re the only two visitors in a small art gallery and we’ve both arrived at the same time. We start out shadowing each other, a little self conscious in the small rooms. But soon we’re talking about healing and friendship, and what a great place Leamington Spa is, and the fact that we’ve both recently been to Thames Ditton. We leave the gallery together, saying goodbye as we walk away in different directions.
••••••
I find it hard to stay strangers with anyone for long.
After almost six weeks in the UK, tomorrow we will travel to Ireland. We haven’t started packing yet and the tiny bedroom we’ve been sharing at my father-in-law’s house looks like a bomb site, after all these weeks of us living out of our suitcases in there. But we’ll pack with care tomorrow, and say our goodbyes, and tomorrow night, all going well, I’ll be at home.
‘Is it ok if we sit here?’ the young woman asks me. I’m sitting at a long table outside a cafe, drinking a coffee and reading. ‘Of course,’ I reply. She sits down with her two young children. She gets a banana out of a bag for the toddler and, before long, her partner arrives carrying a tray with lunch for them all.
A little while passes and a young man joins them. They’ve obviously been expecting him. The three young adults all look the same age – late 20s, maybe early 30s. By the tone and topic of their conversation, I would guess that they met at university. The things the young couple tell their friend about their kids and about parenthood suggests that he is childless.
It’s a happy jokey conversation, although the woman has the lion’s share of looking after the children – the toddler especially, who wants to run here and there and is keen to smash the banana into his face and clothes.
The conversation turns to the cafe. It’s a great cafe in a great location, somewhere I always come to when I’m in Leamington. The three friends like it too, and share what they like about the sandwiches and the cakes.
Then, the young woman says, ‘The coffee’s great too.’ The friend replies, ‘Oh but it’s…[he names whatever the coffee brand is]. It’s awful coffee.’ He’s not drinking coffee. She is. ‘Oh, is it not?’ she asks, and I can hear her doubting herself. It’s not that the taste of this coffee – her subjective taste experience of this specific cup of coffee – is no good. It’s that she now thinks her Taste in coffee is no good. I can hear it in her voice.
Her partner, of course, sides with his friend, because, God forbid he’d be accused of not having good Taste in coffee. He agrees with the friend that the coffee here is ‘no good.’ (I’m sitting beside them, enjoying a perfectly lovely cup of coffee…but more about me later.)
I want to turn to her and say, woman-to-woman, ‘If this coffee tastes good to you, then don’t let anyone tell you it’s no good. Trust your own taste. And, as my friend Bernard Greene would say, F**k the begrudgers.’
For years, I used to apologise to people visiting my house for ‘only’ having instant coffee to offer them. Like I was somehow lesser than for not having fresh coffee and a cafetière or a coffee maker or whatever. And, if someone else made me coffee, I would apologetically ask that they make it weak. Because, let’s face it, the world is full of coffee snobs.
I used to be like that young woman, doubting my own taste in coffee because someone else (a man 99.9% of the time, because women have bigger things to worry about than posh coffee) told me it was no good. I tried liking it. I tried making it. I’d buy a bag of coffee and make a pot or two. But it was just too much effort for a less than satisfying outcome.
I dropped that attitude long ago. I have instant coffee in my house because that’s what I like to drink. That’s my taste and my taste alone. I like it weak. And milky. Is my taste in coffee bad? No. It’s neither good nor bad. It’s just mine.
So, if posh coffee (or wine or whiskey or anything else, food or otherwise) is your thing, then I wish you the very best of luck with it. I hope you savour every moment of it and that it brings you great pleasure. But don’t, for goodness sake, make someone else feel lesser than because their taste isn’t the same as yours.
Now, I quite fancy a chocolate digestive dipped in a mug of milky Nescafé.
There are moments, brief, precious, rare moments, when the thunderous roar of anxiety, and obsessive compulsion, and the abuse of substances quietens, and he and I find common ground. I lean into those moments, for the ten or twenty minutes they last, catching the briefest glimpse of him underneath the sedimentary layers of trauma laid down over seven decades.
This took me back. Today, the girls and I visited the Black Country Museum in Dudley, northwest of Birmingham. We learned all about coal mining in the 19th and early 20th centuries, went down a drift mine, and saw how people lived from about 1850 to 1950. It was all great.
But this is what did it for me. The chair-o-plane. I don’t know what you call it where you’re from, but at the fairground (or ‘carnival’ as we called it) in Courtown in Co. Wexford back in the early 1980s, this was a chair-o-plane (or, as Lily suggests ‘chaeroplane’).
Each year, Edenderry Shoe Company closed down for summer holidays for the first two weeks of August. Daddy was foreman of the warehouse and Mammy worked three afternoons a week in the shoe shop, selling ‘seconds’ (slightly damaged shoes that didn’t make it past quality control) to women who travelled from all over Ireland to buy these stylish and good quality shoes.
During August every year, when the factory was closed, we went on a weeklong family holiday. We tried out a few destinations (always in Ireland) but the one we returned to over and over again was Courtown, a seaside town on the southeast coast, in Co. Wexford. We often bumped into other shoe factory employees there too, also on their holidays.
My parents would rent a mobile home in the same caravan park each year. My Nana Tyrrell came most years and sometimes another family member – my aunt Louise came one year and my cousin Colette another.
We spent our days on the beach, having hauled the deck chairs, the wind break, and the day’s food down what, at the time, seemed like a very long lane to the beach but which now I imagine was no more than a couple of hundred metres. I loved those days on the beach. They felt endless.
And then evening came and, without fail, we drove to the carnival. There was a chair-o-plane, a merry-go-round, swinging boats, waltzers, bumping cars, a huge slide, a ghost train and a huge hall filled with slot machines. My sister and I spent our time out on the rides. She was five years younger than me (indeed, she still is!), so, in the early years, she was stuck on the little kiddie rides, while I went on the chair-o-plane on my own and got Daddy to come with me on the waltzers and swinging boats. That week was always the best week of the year.
Mammy liked to spend her evenings in at the slot machines. One year, it must have been the early 80s, she won £27 on one machine early on in the holiday. It was a small fortune. I remember the coins pouring out of the slot machine and Mammy running to get a plastic tub to put them in. She couldn’t believe her luck. We ate fish and chips and burger and chips every night of that holiday, paid for by Mammy’s winnings.
So today, when we got to the Black Country Museum and we discovered the funfair, I immediately had to go on the chair-o-plane. It brought it all back to me. I couldn’t have been happier. Later, we went on the ghost train and then converted £1.60 into old pennies and gambled at the slot machines. We won nothing, of course. After lunch, Katie suggested that we go on the chair-o-plane once more. She didn’t have to ask twice.
It was just as wonderful as I remembered from 40 and more years ago. I had a grin on my face from ear to ear. I was a kid again, back in Courtown in the 1980s.
The library has become noticeably busier this week, now that schools in England have finally closed for the summer. The girls and I have been feeling very sorry for all these English kids who are still at school six weeks after Spanish summer holidays started. (Irish holidays aren’t much shorter than Spanish holidays. How I relished those long holidays as a child).
With so much going on in the library, I’ve had to move to a different table, this time near the front. I sit at one of two round tables; the other is reserved for signing children up for the Summer Reading Challenge.
All morning, mothers arrive with their kids, mostly in the 5 to 7 age range. There are laid back chilled out mums, frazzled harried mums, mums who’ve been bringing their kids to the library since they were born, mums who’ve only stepped into this library for the first time today.
The young member of staff assigned to the task of signing kids up is great. She focuses on the kids, asks their name and how to spell it, asks if they know their birthday. She finds a point of interest in almost every kid – catches something they say or some object they have – and lets them know she’s their ally. For one kid, it’s Pokémon – asks the kid which is their favourite and then says she likes that one too. For another kid, it’s their favourite colour (green), for another, a book they like. Did I already mention how great libraries and librarians are?
All of this takes me back more than a decade, when we still lived in England and the girls signed up for the Summer Reading Challenge, two years running, if I’m not mistaken. They had to set a goal for how many books they’d read (one six year old this morning said he was going to read six hundred billion million). I can’t remember what the goal was now – five maybe? Or maybe that’s too low. I can’t remember.
Anyway, the point is, Lily was the reader. She’d picked up reading early, read her first Harry Potter book at five. (Looking back now, even I can’t believe that’s true, but it is). So the ‘challenge’ part of the Summer Reading Challenge didn’t really exist for her. But for Katie, it really was a challenge – for her and for me. I despaired of her ever reading. She refused. She wailed. She simply would not read. By the time she was nine, I was resigned to the fact that she was never going to read. I don’t mean she was illiterate, but she was so halting and uncomfortable with reading that I had decided that maybe it just wasn’t for her.
She turned 10, then 11, then 12. Two summers ago, just before she turned 13, she discovered the joy of reading. It started with a graphic novel and then reading a novel by the same author. Once she got going, there was as no stopping her. She now puts Lily and me in the ha’penny place. This year so far, she’s read more than 20 novels. The first place she wanted to go to when we arrived in the UK was a bookshop. Here are her books just for the few weeks we’re here:
The summer reading challenge now? Figuring out how we’ll stay under our luggage limit, thanks to all of Katie’s books!
Lily and I are not long back from a walk along the Grand Union canal. My father-in-law’s house is 150m from the canal, and as soon as you step into the path, you’re in a different world. Gone is the noise of traffic and the urban landscape of this old midlands town, and in its place tranquility, wildlife and history.
Our great Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh wrote of canals. The one that reminds me most of this evening’s walk is Lines written on a seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin
O commemorate me where there is water,
Canal water, preferably, so stilly
Greeny at the heart of summer. Brother
Commemorate me thus beautifully
Where by a lock niagarously roars
The falls for those who sit in the tremendous silence
Of mid-July. No one will speak in prose
Who finds his way to these Parnassian islands.
A swan goes by head low with many apologies,
Fantastic light looks through the eyes of bridges -
And look! a barge comes bringing from Athy
And other far-flung towns mythologies.
O commemorate me with no hero-courageous
Tomb - just a canal-bank seat for the passer-by.
The Grand Union here in the heart of England and the Grand Canal in Dublin that inspired Kavanagh share histories of labour and purpose, of economics and progress, of industrialisation and irrevocable change. Today, they are wildlife refuges through urban landscapes in which wildlife so desperately need refuge.
Here’s some of what we saw this evening…
I’ve been writing today’s blog post all day. It wasn’t very long. Only about 200 words. But when the moment came, I simply couldn’t post it. I felt it would probably offend people, or make people mad at me. Not you out there, who read my blog. But a few very specific people, who I suspect never read my blog.
But what if they do? I ask myself. What if they get mad at me? What indeed? You see, try as I might, I’m a people pleaser. It’s the part of my personality that I like least. I can’t bear to think that people are mad or upset with me, or that they think bad of me. I fear confrontation and conflict. Always have.
The good side of that part of me is that I like people very much. I get a kick out of people. I enjoy the company of people. I want to help out the people I love and also people I don’t know.
But the flip side is that I can get in a knot about getting on the wrong side of people I neither like nor respect.
So, today’s blog was going to be about how good this trip to the UK has been. About how the usual triggers of palpitations and panic attacks have not triggered me this time. I couldn’t post that. Because the triggers might read it. But, while I’m not ready to take that step, I know that a big part of not having panic attacks this time around is because, sometime in the past year, I decided I’m too old for people pleasing.
So, I’m working on growing out of it.
Mmmm…Superman…not what I expected. But David Corenswet’s a dish.
Me in place 