Category Archives: family

85. The real New Year

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The start of September has always felt more like the real New Year. What is the 1st of January other than a dark miserable arbitrary day in the wake of the bacchanal of Christmas, everyone over-fed, over-watered, over-socialised, with not a penny to their names after splurging on presents and outfits and goodness knows what else, and nothing to look forward to but two or more months of cold and dark. New Year’s resolutions at that time of year are born more out of guilt than optimism.

How different is September. The start of autumn, the season of plenty, of apples and wheat, of (in Ireland) bringing home the turf to heat the house in winter. It’s back to school time too. Whether you have children or not, the return to school at this time of year is so ingrained in our culture. All but a few know exactly what it’s like to go back to school. It’s all about newness – a new class, new books, new teachers, maybe a new uniform. It’s a time for moving up and moving on, from one year or level to the next. This is the time of year when many teenagers move away from home for the first time.

This year, like all others, early September feels like the start of a new year. Lily and Katie have (of their own volition) spent the past two days declutterring and deep cleaning their bedroom. Lily has decided to try her hand at selling some clothes she no longer wears on Vinted. She’s sold three items today alone!

With school about to start in a few days, the girls and I have been talking about eating more healthily for ourselves and the planet and so I’m planning some very different meals over the coming weeks.

At this time of year, the weather is still warm enough and the days long enough to put New Year’s resolutions and promises made to ourselves into action. There’s a welcome return to routine after the more free-form and chaotic summer holidays – especially for people with school-age kids.

So, if you’re thinking of making positive changes in your life, don’t hold off until dreary January. Embrace the possibilities for change at this, the real, New Year.

84. Surprising emotions

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Arriving into Sanlúcar de Guadiana last night, I was surprised at just how happy I felt to be home. Just a simple feeling of contentment at being back in my own home.

Our seventy-five days in the UK and Ireland were delightful from start to end. I haven’t enjoyed myself so much or for so long on previous holidays. England was a joy and I experienced very strong positive emotions when I was in Ireland, whereas in the past my feelings have often been mixed. Not because Ireland isn’t great and not because my family and friends aren’t great. It was just me and where I was in my life on previous visits home that made me enjoy being in Ireland on holiday but also eager to return to where I had come from. I didn’t feel that way this time. I enjoyed my time there, and had very mixed feelings about leaving, feeling more torn between the two places I call home than I’ve ever felt before.

So, what a surprise to feel the way I did about turning the key in the lock and walking through my front door last night. Like an exhalation…I’m home. My house is looking a bit the worse for wear after lying empty for seventy-five days and it’ll take us a few days to sweep away the cobwebs, get unpacked and feel properly settled in, but that simple uncomplicated sense of being home was there from the moment I opened the door.

Our lovely friends had been in and left some food in the fridge and our neighbour had hung a fresh homemade loaf of bread on the front door. Still, I needed to buy a few odds and ends this morning, so, after breakfast I threw on something not very presentable that I pulled out of my suitcase and went to the two shops in the village. Ten minutes of shopping took me about three quarters of an hour, from all the people I met, the welcome back hugs and kisses I received, the conversations I had comparing Spanish and Irish weather. I felt welcomed home by my adopted village.

And then, the icing on the cake – collecting Lady from her summer villa (with a swimming pool, no less) and taking her home. Now that our scruffy, dusty, hair in her eyes Lady is back, my little home is complete.

Who cares that our two kayaks are still taking up most of the living room and the suitcases are on our bedroom floors? Time enough moving them tomorrow.

83. Dublin Airport…again

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Organised mayhem

Here we are, back at Dublin airport again, but this time we are the ones departing. After eleven weeks away, we are going home to Sanlúcar. I am returning with mixed feelings – sad to leave this home, excited to return to that home.

This trip to the airport has been preceded by methodical packing over the course of 24 hours. We’re returning with a lot more than we left with – books mostly, and they’re heavy. Irish people, please don’t judge me for the Tetley tea. It’s a compromise and easier to buy in bulk than Irish brands.

Unlike the quiet evening at the airport 12 days ago to pick up my sister, the airport today is crowded, full of hustle and bustle. It seems as if every childless adult in Ireland has decided to go on holidays today, now that the school holidays are over and families are no longer travelling. The crowdedness has made it all a little overwhelming – sensory overload on top of the usual departure sensations regarding baggage weight, and security and so on.

But here we are, and in a few hours we will be home and returning to our own term-time routine.

82. Bog road

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‘Turn on Radio 1,’ Niamh said, as we got into our cars to drive in convoy across Kildare. ‘Sunday Miscellany is all about the bog this morning.’

I led the way along the bog road, through Allenwood and Prosperous, past the road down to Coill Dubh, through a landscape I have known all my life, a landscape so densely entwined with memory and meaning.

It’s impossible to come from the midlands of Ireland and not have the boglands seeping through your veins. This great flat landscape, the fuel source around which our year and our society revolved. The footing and the haping, and tea from a milk bottle and sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper. Cold March Saturdays of the men cleaning the turf bank all the way through to warm August Saturdays of bringing the turf home.

And it’s the poetry and the music – Heaney and Christy Moore and Luka Bloom. It’s the dissertation I wrote as an undergrad and the bog PhD I started in my 20s.

As I drove across the bog, I listened to the radio programme, as Niamh suggested. It was filled with the stories, songs, reminiscences of people from the midlands. Some people, like me, who have chosen to live abroad and have never found a way to adequately describe and explain all that the bog is to people who don’t know it. And some people who had lived in the bog their whole lives, who evocatively expressed what the bog meant to them.

To listen to this as I drove across the bog this morning was moving enough. But today also happens to be the 21st anniversary of the day that Daddy died. And for me, above all else, my memories of the bog, and what the bog means to me, are inseparable from my memories of Daddy.

It was, therefore, a bittersweet drive, with the stories and the road and this particular day, all evoking memory and emotion, and tears running down my cheeks, not of sadness, but of gratitude for this place and all that it means to me.

81. All talk

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So much talking. Our living room filled with family. Oh how we can talk. One conversation, multiple conversations simultaneously. Sometimes quiet intent listening. Sometimes uproarious laughter.

There’s football talk and golf talk. Talk of births and deaths and marriages. There’s politics and the economy and talk of the rising cost of everything from groceries to airport food.

We ask each other about half remembered family stories, piecing them together, sure to forget and likely to have to ask about them again the next time we meet, or the time after that.

The tea flows, and the wine. The plates of ham sandwiches, rhubarb tart, biscuits, cake disappear, and still the talk goes on.

All too soon it’s midnight. The cousins leave, not to be seen for another few weeks or months, having dropped in and lit up our evening.

And still the talk goes on. As we wash up. As we prepare for bed. As we decide to have one more drink. It feels like we won’t ever run out of talk.

79. Summer Reading

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I got there at last. Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety has been sitting on my book case for the past couple of years. I just never got around to reading it. Her Thomas Cromwell trilogy are among my favourite books, and I was keen to read something else she had written. So, when I found this 874-page 1992 fictionalised account of the events of the French Revolution at a book swap two years ago, I knew this was going to be it.

I decided it would be my 2025 summer book. I just didn’t think it would take me quite this long. I started it in Faro airport on 26 June and I finished it a few minutes ago. I was determined not to have to pack it for our return flight.

I interrupted reading it twice – to read a shorter novel and to read a play – and I’ve had less time to read this summer than I thought I’d have. Still, I’ve read it whenever I could and, like the Thomas Cromwell trilogy, I came to care for the characters, to think about them when I wasn’t reading, and to worry about what would become of them.

The French Revolution is not an era of history that I know a great deal about, so I was a bit lost at times in the intrigue and politics, and had to Google certain events to fill in my rather large gaps in knowledge. But that lack of knowledge didn’t take from my feelings for the characters and what fates awaited them.

In the time it’s taken me to read one book, Katie has read seven and Lily five, so I’m going to be lagging even farther behind in our 2025 reading ladder, when we fill it in once we get back to Sanlúcar.

As for my next reading adventure? A draft of my sister’s latest novel, that I’ve promised to read and give my thoughts on as soon as possible. I’ll begin tomorrow.

76. Drombeg

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Drombeg stone circle

I visit Drombeg every time I come to west Cork. And each time, I feel a connection to the people who lived here 3000 years ago. Not some hokey connection, like these people were somehow more spiritual or more vital or more at one with nature than us. No. I feel a connection because they were people just like us, breathing in this same air, looking out over the view of the sea cradled in the V of the valley. These clouds hung over them, this rain fell on them, this wind chilled them, this sun shone on them.

While Newgrange or Stonehenge are huge and majestic monuments, stone circles such as Drombeg and the others that dot the landscape of southwest Cork feel much more intimate and ordinary. As astounding as the stone circle is, with its orientation based on deep astronomy, it is the more intimate and domestic elements of this site that move me. It is knowing that the body of a youth was found at the centre of the circle. It is the rectangle water pit, where water was boiled using stones first heated in a fire. Maybe the pit was used for cooking. Maybe it was used for dyeing or some other purpose. We simply don’t know. It doesn’t really matter. It’s that people – men, women, children – sat and walked and played and loved and argued and laughed here 3000 years ago. Ordinary people who couldn’t imagine that 3000 years into the future people would visit what remains of their home and wonder at what they did.

75. A summer dress

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I remember I was eight or nine years old. Daddy had dropped Mammy, my little sister and me to the train station, to get the train down to Cork. We were coming here. I was wearing a new summer dress. It was so pretty – a pastel flower pattern. It was my first time to wear it. I’d been saving it for a special occasion and this was it. As we waited for the train, I squatted down and sat on my hunkers on the platform. Not realising that the hem was caught under the heels of my sandals, I stood up again as the train approached. I heard the fabric tear. I was horrified. My gorgeous dress ripped across the back, along the hem. I felt so sad. Something had been done that couldn’t be undone. I wished I could turn the clock back just a few seconds. The next week, my dress was mended, but the line where it had ripped and been restitched remained, visible if you knew what to look for. To an onlooker, it might have seemed like a trifling thing. But I never forgot that dress and that instant when I ripped it.

74. Like summer holidays past

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The rain fell sideways as we packed the car this morning. Mammy had moved the car to as close to the door as she could get it. Still, we swopped bags of food and our mini suitcases for water and leaves trailed into the house underfoot.

It was a tight squeeze, five of us and all our stuff filling up the boot and obscuring the rear window. I remember rainy Saturday mornings just like this, in the early 1980s, Daddy hoisting the suitcase, the wind break, the deck chairs, onto the roof rack of the Ford Escort, covering the lot with the blue tarpaulin from an old tent, securing it with rope.

I had the playlist ready for today’s drive to Cork – 80s hits, of course, that we sang along to in between bursts of conversation.

The rain continued – sporadic heavy showers – and wind buffeted the car sideways. We pulled in to the Rock of Cashel for lunch – ham sandwiches made from yesterday’s boiled ham and Brennan’s bread washed down with sweet black tea from a flask. We stood around the picnic table in the rain, the hoods of our raincoats up, as a sudden heavy shower chased away the slash of blue sky that had briefly appeared. I couldn’t have been happier. Few things in the world taste as great as ham sandwiches and tea from a flask on a wet day, memory and nostalgia adding magical flavour to the food.

We reached our destination late afternoon and quickly unpacked the car. My sister started to make dinner and realized she was two ingredients short. Lily and I walked the couple of hundred metres up to the shop in the village square. On the walk back, we were blown down the hill by the strong wind, rain hitting us on the back. ‘This is perfect,’ I said to Lily. A seaside holiday in Ireland isn’t complete unless you get at least one wild night like this.’ The wind, the rain, the slight bite in the air, took me back 30, 40, 45 years, to family vacations here in west Cork, in Kerry, in Wexford, in Mayo.

Tomorrow we plan to go to the beach – in our raincoats, most likely.

73. Squeezing the last drops out of summer

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Autumn is definitely here. It’s raining more and it’s colder. We lit the fire in the kitchen yesterday. And still, the girls and I remain in Ireland, squeezing every last drop out of this long long summer. In the eleven years we’ve lived in Spain, we’ve never been away this long. Usually, we’d be back by now, going to the pool after our mid-afternoon siesta, or taking the dog down to the dog friendly beach in Isla Cristina.

Yet, here we are, still in Ireland, and one final adventure awaits before we return to Spain. Tomorrow morning, we are driving down to west Cork for a week in Roscarbery. It’s one of my favourite places in Ireland – a picturesque village by the sea, with an amazing beach, great walks – a simply lovely place. Because my aunt, uncle and cousins live there, we’ve been visiting Roscarbery since I was a small child, so it is infused with memories from so many different stages of my life.

Our bags are packed, the makings of the picnic are in the fridge, and we’ll be ready to hit the road after breakfast tomorrow. Forecast? Autumn showers and autumn temperatures. It’ll be lovely.