Category Archives: family

55. An Irish culinary twist

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‘That doesn’t sound like Chinese food,’ Katie says, when Mammy tells her about my cousin’s favourite order of chicken balls, chips and a tub of curry.

‘I loved a long tray from the Chinese chipper,’ I say, remembering post-pub grub in Maynooth.

‘The Chinese chipper?’ Katie asks incredulous. ‘What on earth is a Chinese chipper?’

‘A chipper, that does Chinese food,’ I say. ‘The Chinese chipper. The one in Maynooth used to do a long tray – half chips, half rice, with curry poured over the whole lot.’ I can almost taste it as I describe it.

‘They do that in the Chinese here too,’ Mammy says.

‘Why are restaurants and take-aways so weird here?’ Katie asks. ‘You get chicken and chips in the Italian, chicken and chips in the Chinese, chicken and chips in the Indian.’

It’s just an Irish twist, Mammy and I explain. Populist fusion. There will always be someone who’ll refuse to eat pasta or rice or naan. So, to keep everyone happy, the good chefs of these restaurants provide a ‘European’ menu too – though calling chicken and chips or omelette and chips European makes my very European daughter guffaw!

I often wonder what Chinese, or Indian, or Italian visitors to our country must think when they see such weird and wacky menus with an Irish twist and something like a long tray that comes from a planet all of its own.

54. My bedroom

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I don’t know who was the first person to sleep in this bedroom and I don’t know who will be the last. But it was mine for a while and I’m back in it again for a few weeks. I don’t know if my great-grandparents slept in it or died in it; I don’t know if my father and his siblings were born in it. But I know it’s history from 1942 onwards.

Years ago, my uncle Willie told me that his father (my grandfather), Michael Tyrrell, had spent his final months in bed in this room. Willie, Jimmy and Cissie, the three oldest children, helped their mother look after their father through his cancer and he died in this room on 31 March 1942, Daddy’s first birthday.

When I was a child, there were two beds in this room. Hard to imagine now, given how small it is. Nana slept in the double bed by the window and L-shaped to her was Cissie’s smaller bed. As a child, I slept with Cissie a lot. I have memories of that time – of Mammy bringing me breakfast in bed of a fry-up of rashers, sausages, egg, tomatoes and Nana’s soda bread. I remember crying in pain with toothache in that bed too and Mammy bringing me up aspirin or some other pain relief.

Did I stay in that bed after Cissie got sick? I don’t remember. When I was four, a new bedroom was built onto the house. It was supposed to be for me, but I never slept in it. It was too far away from where everyone else was at night, so I stayed with Cissie.

Cissie died from breast cancer when I was six and, for a while, I slept in the bed with Nana. But I didn’t like sleeping with her – I remember she had scratchy toenails! After some time, a new plan was devised. Mammy and Daddy moved up to the room that had been built for me and my sister and I slept in two single beds in what had been my parent’s room. Now Nana had the small bedroom to herself. Cissie’s bed remained there for a few years, but was eventually removed.

In May 1985, Nana died in bed in this room. I remember our cousin Betty, who lived across the road, coming over to clean and prepare the body for the wake. Nana was laid out in the bed. I had turned twelve only a few days earlier and she was only the second dead person I had ever seen (Betty’s father, Garrett, had died the previous year and I’d seen him laid out in his bed across the road). For two days, people visited the house, filing into the bedroom to pay their respects, before coming down to the kitchen or sitting room for tea and beer and endless ham sandwiches and cake.

By the time I was 12, I was well and truly fed up with sharing a room with my seven year old sister and about two weeks after Nana died, I asked my parents if I could have her room. Going to sleep for the first time in a bed so recently vacated by my dead granny felt a bit weird, I have to admit, but I soon got used to it and transformed it into my own space.

The walls of this room throughout my teenage years were covered with posters. I had huge posters of one of the space shuttles, of an F16 fighter jet (thanks to Top Gun), and of an environmental quote from Chief Seattle. There were posters and newspaper clippings of Boris Becker (little did we know!!), Bruce Springsteen, James Dean and so many more – I can’t even remember now. The room was filled with library books, Jackie annuals, and back issues of Smash Hits and National Geographic. There were mementos of the few places I had been in my life, a desk that I rarely used because it was too small and wobbly (I did my homework and studying at the kitchen table). I had my own radio too. It was in this room that I first heard about the hole in the ozone layer (it scared the shit out of me), about Chernobyl (ditto), and where I listened to endless pop music.

I stayed in this room until I left for university and returned to it at weekends and holidays, and then on visits home from Japan, Nunavut, Scotland. I moved back into it again in the summer of 2004, when I came home from Aberdeen to be with Daddy in his final weeks or months (weeks, in the end, but I wasn’t to know that then).

These days, it’s Mammy’s room and has a feeling of warmth and relaxation about it, with the comfiest bed that’s ever been here. I’m sleeping in it while I’m here. I wake in the morning and here I am, once again, in this bedroom where I’ve probably spent more nights than in any other one place in my life; in this bedroom that has witnessed so much of my family’s life.

53. Blame Colette

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I woke up nineteen hours ago, knowing exactly what I was going to write in today’s blog. It just came to me, fully formed. But then I got up, and worked for the day, and went for a walk along the canal with Mammy and Lily and Mammy’s dogs. And then it was time for rosary in the graveyard – the annual gathering of families at the grave’s of our loved ones. Six of my cousins, Mammy, Lily and me stood around our family grave. Our second and third cousins stood at the neighbouring graves, other neighbours at more distant graves. Fr. Maher led us through a decade of the rosary and blessed the graves with holy water. I got a bit giggly with my cousins. The rosary always brings out the giggles in me, taking me back to nights at home here, kneeling on the sitting room floor, my Nana leading the rosary and my sister and me shaking with stifled laughter over some silliness.

When the priest had finished, I went to say hello to the second and third cousins. Seamus is 92 now, Niamh has just had a baby, Michael is about to become a grandfather for the first time. And then it was back to my own gang and down to our house for tea, sandwiches, cake and biscuits.

I don’t really blame Colette for me not writing the blog I was planning to write today. But she is the ring leader of the chat and the stories and the gossip, and if you thought we’d done all the chatting that needed to be done two nights ago, then you’d be very wrong. We’re a noisy bunch when we get together – talking and laughing, sharing stories, reminiscing, enjoying each other’s company. And then it was close to midnight and time for the cousins to leave. Colette couldn’t find the key to her house, so we thought she was going to end up staying the night, likely sharing the bed with me. She found the key in the end – so we missed that opportunity to relive Christmas nights and holidays of old.

In four weeks’ time we’ll all be back here in the living room again, for more tea and sandwiches and cake and chat and laughter. I can’t wait. I’m going to write today’s blog early tomorrow.

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.

41. And tomorrow…home

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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.

38. Chair-o-plane

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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.

37. Summer reading challenge

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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!

32. Gaia says ‘Take the day off’

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Photo by Noah Silliman on Unsplash

I’ve been working hard lately. After a rather worrying nine-month work drought, during which my editing and ghostwriting work dropped to half of what I would normally expect, the last three months have been among the best I’ve had since I started freelancing ten years ago. But, over the nine months of the drought, I watched my bank balance dip to a worrying low. I tightened my belt, carefully budgeted for groceries, dropped a number of subscriptions, cut out weekends away and meals out. But those were only mini bites into my outgoings. The big stuff – the mortgage, my monthly self-employed social security payments, and other such things – well there was no budgeting for them.

I wasn’t alone. Creative industries (and, as an editor and writer, I am in that category) have been hit hard by AI. When we thought things couldn’t get worse, Ebron Skunk’s DOGE slashed funding to US government research that accounts for about 40% of my editing work. Was I worried? Hell yes. Very.

At first, I put the slow-down down to it being summer. August is generally a slow month. But when things didn’t pick up in September, October and onwards, I was well and truly sweating. Work was still trickling in, I was still just about keeping my head above water, but at the start of each month I worried that maybe this month would be the month that I wouldn’t be able to pay my mortgage.

I worked just as hard as ever, saying yes to every editing job that came my way, when before I would have been more picky. I had to dismiss my long-held promise to myself and to the kids that I wouldn’t work on weekends or on school holidays (summer excepted…it’s just too damn long). But I had a whole lot of time on my hands when I wasn’t editing or writing for other people, so I used that time to make contact with potential new clients, to make myself more visible on LinkedIn, to update my website and my online profiles. I had numerous Zoom meetings and phone calls with prospective clients that came to dead ends.

But, in spring, a glimmer of light started to appear down that dark tunnel of money worries. I landed a couple of lovely medium and longer term clients and the one-off editing jobs that are my bread and butter have started to creep up again. I diversified my US work and now have a large ongoing project in addition to almost back to normal flow of one-off jobs. Part of this upturn is down to the work I’ve put in to find work. But I also wonder if clients are starting to realise that what we do as professional editors and writers is far more than what AI is capable of, i.e., human understanding, nuance, humour, and so on.

Since April, every month has been a good month. Fingers crossed, it will continue this way. However, that doesn’t mean I’m out of the woods. I’ve got that bank balance to claw back so that next time a slump comes I’m prepared for it. I’m still not in a position to be picky, so I’m still working most weekends and on holidays. I’m hoping I’ll get to a point soon when I can ease off on that again. I’m 52. I don’t have the energy for this.

Which brings me to Gaia. I’ve been working long hours this past week. I had three deadlines for yesterday. Two of those were really complicated and took far longer to complete than anticipated. When I finally turned my computer off at 9:30 last night I was well and truly ready for a break. But I’m someone who can’t sit still for long. I knew that, if the weather was nice, I’d feel the need to go for a long walk today, to fill up my day with action.

When I woke up this morning it was lashing rain. And it has continued to rain for most of today. No going out. No being active. Gaia insisting that I have the break I well and truly need. I started the morning with 40 minutes of gentle yoga, took the dog for a short walk in the rain, got back into my pajamas when I returned home, and here I remain. I have spent the day curled up in an armchair, drinking mugs of tea and reading the book I’ve been dying to read since the day we got here.

Back to work on Monday but, for now, I am relaxed and at ease and, as I look out the window, I see that it has started to rain again. Thank you Mother Earth.

31. Headstones

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It’s been too wet the past couple of mornings to go walking through the fields, so Hudson and I have been taking a route through the village that takes us up to the village church and through the graveyard.

I love old graveyards. There’s something peaceful and soothing and familiar about them. The silence they offer, with their old mature coniferous trees standing stately amongst the graves. I love headstones that are so old and weathered that they are barely legible and that thrill when I squint or run my hands over the inscription or rub it with grass to better see it and discover that it is the grave of someone who died two or three hundred years ago. There is something timeless and beautiful – an unbroken thread of connection – in seeing someone who was buried only yesterday alongside someone buried 300 years ago.

When I was a child, we visited our family grave at least once a week, usually more. My father’s side of the family is buried in the beautiful country graveyard on top of Carrick Hill, in the shadow of the ruins of Carrick Castle. Back then, there was little traffic on the roads, so we regularly walked the mile from home up to the graveyard – on a summer’s evening, after dinner on Sundays in winter – and we always dropped in to the graveyard on the way home from Mass on Sunday mornings or, indeed, any other time we were driving by. As I grew older and more independent, I would often walk or ride my bike up on my own or with friends, and have a picnic amongst the graves. There were usually other people there too, someone tending a family grave or, like us, dropping in on the way past. So, the graveyard was as sociable place, where we caught up with neighbours and people we might not otherwise see much.

I loved wandering amongst the headstones and discovering the history of the place where I lived through the stories that the inscriptions told. The people buried up on Carrick Hill were the parents, grandparents, great grandparents and all the other relatives of people I knew. I guess it was the nascent anthropologist in me that was interested in family lines and family histories, in relationships and kinship, and in what I could discern about the living from the inscriptions of the dead.

Like many rural graveyards, Carrick tells the history of my family and my community; where people are laid down in death is a reflection of where they resided in life. The Tyrrell family grave contains the bodies of my great-grandparents Eliza and William, my grandparents Roseann and Michael, my great-uncle Pat (his arm buried a few months before he was, after it was amputated due to cancer), my aunt Cissie and Daddy, along with the ashes of my uncle Willie, aunt Vera, and Julian. (I never thought Julian would end up there, but Katie and Lily suggested it and I thought, why not).

Immediately next to my family are the graves of our cousins – who are also our immediate neighbours – the Hickeys, the McGlynns, the Mulraneys, the other Tyrrells. All around the graveyard are similar clusters of neighbours and extended families buried in proximity to each other. The graveyard tells the history of my community and of my family in simple metrics – birth dates and death dates, beloved daughter of, father of, grandson of, sometimes a wife’s maiden name. This simple information weaves together a story of community. The graveyard also tells a social history of status and class, from the small simple headstones of the majority of people of lesser means to the few large headstones and even those who, long ago, were placed in tombs. Although those grave markers are the outward representation of social status in life, beneath the ground everyone meets the same fate.

I’ve never thought of graveyards as maudlin or dark places. At times of death, they are a place where community comes together to pay witness to a life lived and to console the bereaved. At different times in my life, I have found it comforting to sit by the grave of a loved one, and feel an ongoing connection. But, most of the time, they are places that instill in me a sense of peace and that intrigue me in the stories they tell and the histories they reveal.

Graveyard on my morning walk