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.
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!
We’ve been looking after Hudson for the past week and we’ll be very sorry to say goodbye to him later today. Is there a better doggy in all of England? I sincerely doubt it. He’s been a joy to look after and a great first experience for us in the world of Trusted House Sitters.
Some friends in Sanlucar are signed up to the Trusted House Sitters app and others to a house swapping app. Both use those apps to travel to interesting places and get their accommodation for free. I’m not yet ready for house swapping – not until I finally get around to installing the new oven that’s been sitting on my kitchen floor for the past six months. Trusted House Sitting seemed like a better fit for us at the moment.
So, a couple of months back, I signed up, paid a small annual fee, got three people to write references for me, created my profile and away I went. This week has been our first dog-sit and I will definitely do it again. We made contact through the app with a couple in a village in the English midlands who needed someone to look after their dog and water a few plants while they were away on vacation. We met briefly by video call and then, last Monday, we arrived.
It has been a perfect experience from start to finish. Hudson is the perfect dog. Giant and gentle, easy going and with (almost) no bad habits (we all have some bad habits after all). He’s a dream dog. The house is like something out of a magazine. A modernized old cottage with an extensive garden that is so easy to live in that, really, I don’t want to leave. All over the house and garden is scattered comfortable furniture where all three of us can find our own space to curl up and read our books. The family photos and grandchildren’s arts and crafts suggest this is a house filled with love. And, there is an amazing office halfway down the garden, where I have been working all week.
The house is situated in a very typical middle class English village, with a decent (if expensive) pub and an amazing village shop. All around are paths and byways through the fields, so there’s no shortage of exercise for Hudson or for us.
Our hosts left easy-to-follow instructions for everything from where to find the doggy treats to how to use the air fryer. A gardener came in one day and a cleaner another. It is no understatement to say that I have been living a lifestyle this week that is so far removed from my normal life.
On this house sit, we didn’t venture far. The house itself and the surrounding are enough of a holiday for us, giving us a chance to experience a different lifestyle. But, already, I’m scrolling the app to look for future house sits in cities or towns that I want to visit and, for some reason, I keep putting in searches in the Alps – I really want to take the girls to the Alps some time.
So now, we will say goodbye to Hudson and to his fabulous home and look forward to more house and doggy-sits to come.
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.
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.
The heatwave has passed for now. It’s windy and the early morning sky threatens rain. I’m wearing my new raincoat that I bought last week in the height of the heatwave. The sales assistant looked at me funny and I said, “Well, this has to end sometime.” It’s certainly ended now.
This week, we’re looking after the adorable Hudson (see yesterday’s post) at his home in a little village in the middle of England, while his human parents are away on vacation. It’s 8am and Hudson and I are out for our morning walk. There’s nobody else around, as we walk for a few kilometres along the edges of arable land and across fields of sheep and lambs, from one kissing gate to the next.
One young lamb is curious and tries to come to us, its worried mother keeping pace with it, probably wishing it wasn’t so curious about this big woolly dog and red-raincoated human (what colours can sheep see?). A field of rape seed is half-harvested, a big yellow combine sitting in the middle of the field, ready to resume its work when the rain lets up. I see something move at the wide fallow edge of the field, heads bobbing up and down. I think it is a couple of rabbits at first, but as we get closer, I see that it is a family of grouse. They are disinclined to leave the relative safety of the long grass for the exposed stubble of the field. I think I should turn back and leave them be. But at the exact instant I have this thought, one flies up from right at my feet, completely invisible to me and to Hudson up to now, scaring me and sending all the others into flight too. They fly the 20 or so metres from the grassy verge into the yet unharvested half of the field. I feel bad for them. Hudson is good, though. My own dog, Lady, would be going crazy for them, but Hudson seems oblivious.
A little farther on, I step over a badger sett. It looks neat and tidy and, therefore, in use, and I get a little thrill thinking that, underneath my feet, a family of badgers is likely settling down for the day to sleep. Towards the end of the walk, we pass a small patch of open grassland backing onto a copse of trees. Two hawks circle each other ten or so metres off the ground over the grassland, crying out to each other. One lands in a tree and the other continues to circle, eventually settling on the branch of a nearby tree. Their cries continue to ring out.
I am reminded of other early morning country walks along English pathways – in the Fens and Cambridgeshire, up north in Cumbria and down south in Devon – and of the hares, the muntjac and the red deer, the red squirrels, the badgers and foxes, the eagles and hawks and falcons and owls, of the times I have been privileged enough to see those animals in person and the times when I have found signs and signals that they have been there and may still be there, watching me, the clumsy human, walking through their home.
Me in place 