Category Archives: home

53. Blame Colette

Posted on by
Reply

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.

51. Alma Mater

Posted on by
Reply

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!

49. Breakfast

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
1

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.

46. Lá Lughnasa

Posted on by
Reply

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?

44. Within these walls

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
3

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.

32. Gaia says ‘Take the day off’

Posted on by
Reply
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.