It’s a beautiful evening, warm and sunny, and the plan is to go for a swim at The Guillamine out in Tramore. Niamh and her family regularly drive the few miles from their house in Waterford city out to this cove where the swimming is good and, towards high water, you can jump from a high concrete platform into the sea.
There are a lot of people there when we arrive. Far more than I was expecting. Men and women of all ages, with a steady stream of people going down the narrow concrete steps from the car park and back up again.
When we get down to the swimming area, the sea is turquoise and there must be 50 or more people in the water. Niamh’s husband and son go straight to the diving platform.
That’s not for me. Without my glasses, I’m quite lost. I can’t really see where I am and, because I’ve never been here before and there are so many people here and it’s noisy with people splashing into the water, I suddenly feel overwhelmed and scared. I hold into a railing, with people asking if it’s ok to go past me. I let them pass. Niamh is in now, and Lily, and I momentarily think I should just turn back and wait for them up by our towels.
Lily swims back to me and tries to convince me to get in. But I don’t like this. Not one little bit. And why am I here? And this is not for me. Niamh swims over and suggests I enter the water via a hand rail. But I’ve already tried that and I couldn’t do it. She convinces me to try again.
It’s my eyesight. That’s the thing. Because I can’t see anything clearly beyond the end of my nose, I am figuratively, if not yet literally, out of my depth. I follow Niamh’s instructions, and now, in an instant, I am in and swimming away from the shore, away from the gentle waves breaking against the rocks, away from the hoards of people lining up to enter and exit the water.
And it’s glorious. The water is cold, but not too cold. Clumps of bladder wrack float past, dark green and slimy. The saltiness of the sea buoys me up with little effort. How could I ever have thought I didn’t want to be in here? I feel alive alive alive. I think I want to come back tomorrow.
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.
In late 2000, I’d already been working as a volunteer teacher at Levi Angmak Elementary School in Arviat, Nunavut, for some months. Kip Gibbons, one of the teachers who had befriended me, offered to show me how to sew my own mittens. She sent me to the Northern Store to buy ukaliq (arctic hare) fur. I duly went a couple of evenings later and bought two ukaliq skins. On Saturday, I went around to Kip’s house and we sat on her floor, where she helped me to cut the pattern and showed me how to stitch the parts together.
I’ve never been much of a crafts person, so I was delighted to be making my own mittens. It was probably -20C or -25C as I walked the snow-covered streets back to my house a few hours later, proudly wearing my new mittens. I would wear them for years, and still have them today, although there isn’t much call for them in southern Spain.
On the Monday after I sewed the mitts, I wore them to school. In the school foyer, I met Peter 2 Aulajoot, an older teacher, who was always friendly and jokey with me. He chuckled when he saw my mitts. I hadn’t cut them badly or sewed them poorly. But Peter 2 noticed something that I hadn’t. While the fur on my left mitt was mostly white with a little smattering of black, the fur on my right mitt was mostly black with a little smattering of white. They looked completely mismatched. How could I not have seen this?
From that day on, Peter 2 always called me Ukaliq – arctic hare. A few other people picked it up too, but it wasn’t a name I was commonly called. But I liked that name for myself. I’d always loved hares, always got a thrill when I’d see them in Ireland. Now that I was in Nunavut, I saw them more often – including one that lived out past the reservoir and seemed as tame as a pet bunny.
I’ve carried that name – Ukaliq – with me ever since, making the frisson of excitement I feel whenever I see a hare all the sharper. So, yesterday when Michael said, ‘There’s the hare,’ I immediately turned to the window. And there she was. At the base of a granite outcrop beside the house, ears up, alert. She paused, nibbled at a hind paw with her teeth, hopped along and then sat, ears back, looking out over the sea.
I was in a state of awe and nostalgia and joy all mingled together, remembering Peter 2 and Kip and that ukaliq by the reservoir and the person I was twenty-five years ago.
A couple of action packed days and late nights have come between me and writing. I wouldn’t swap these days for anything. I’m in Cruit tonight, back again after three years. This evening’s walk across this island off northwest Donegal was, as always, a delight…
I’ve fallen for this pear tree. In a park full of majestic giant oaks, giant chestnuts, giant sycamores, it is this more modest pear tree that I am drawn to day after day, to sit under to eat my lunch and take a break from staring at my computer screen.
I chose it at random the first day, a little bit off the path and providing just enough dappled shade from the sun. I ate my lunch and then, like Heaney’s threshers in The Wife’s Tale, who “still kept their ease, Spread out, unbuttoned, grateful, under the trees,” I lay down and gazed up through the branches. It was then that I noticed something I hadn’t noticed as I walked past it or under it.
About six feet from the ground, it forks. The branches to one side of the fork are lifeless. No leaves grow, no buds. It is bare but for the lichen that has crept along it. The other side of the fork, in contrast, is heavy with life. The branches sag under the weight of innumerable pears that will be ripe by autumn, food for humans, food for animals, carrying the seeds of the offspring of this tree.
I’m drawn to the perseverance of this pear tree, to its wonky imperfection. Something happened to it – a lighning strike perhaps – that irreparably damaged one half of it, yet the other half carries on steadfast and lively. And I come to see that the damaged part might still have its role to play too, providing balance and stability, helping to anchor the still lively half.
A bumblebee lands on my brightly coloured trousers, resting in the shade of the tree for a moment before going on its way again. There are other insects too, not passing through but living here, making the tree their home. On both forks of the pear tree, I see intricate spider webs and, at the base, a hole made by some small animal. There are rabbit droppings on the ground around me. The tree, as a whole, is a place of liveliness, home to or way point for so many animals, me included.
As I sit up and prepare to return to work, I look around and see, not far away, smaller pear trees and saplings, surely the offspring of this one. The tree, despite its imperfections and its damaged parts, is living its best pear tree life.
I’ve been writing memoir in one form or another for years. Essays published in newspapers, magazines and online, regular blog posts when we lived on the boat, and these more recent offerings. I’ve been working on longer form memoir for some time too – two unfinished memoirs that have now been smashed together into something very different and that I have been working on now for about a year. And then there is my experiment with a fictional screenplay for a six-part dark comedy, every element of which is stuff that happened to me or to people I know, just not in that order, or in that context, or to those people. Unlike my novelist sister, I lack the imagination to make things up, so everything I write is my direct experience. I’ve taken memoir writing courses and I am a member of a memoir-writing group that meets online a couple of times a month.
Despite writing memoir myself, I have never been much interested in reading it, much preferring fiction and certain forms of non-fiction (science writing and nature writing, in particular). In my mind, a good memoir should read like good fiction. I have read the work of some great memoirists, however – Maya Angelou, Joan Didion, Helen MacDonald, Frank McCourt, Cheryl Strayed, Suleika Jaouad, Barak Obama. One of the best I’ve read in the past few years was Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path. It was phenomenally written – lyrical and immersive, rocking along with the pace and timing of a great novel. I loved it so much that the day after I finished it, I popped it into an envelope and posted it to my old walking buddy Martha Main (Hello, Martha!), in Arviat, Nunavut. I was then delighted to find out a few weeks ago that it had been made into a film, staring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs (Hello to Jason Isaacs) and, as luck would have it, it’s on in the cinema in Leamington Spa this Thursday morning and I plan to go.
So, imagine my surprise when, yesterday evening when I was watching the BBC news with my father-in-law, it was reported that a story in The Observer claimed that the author had lied about key facts in the book, and some of those lies were related to alleged criminality. I read The Observer article and then Mammy, my sister and I had a long chat about it this morning. My sister has also read the book and we had both recommended it to various people (she to her book club). We both had the same feeling of discomfort and feeling like the rug had been pulled from under our feet. It was hard to describe the feeling.
These allegations don’t in any way take from the amazing writing achievement of The Salt Path. It remains lyrical and immersive, tender and heartbreaking. But certain key elements of the story now may not be true. And that leaves a sour taste in the mouth. I’m now not sure that want to see the film.
This raises a bigger question about the role and the duty of the memoir writer. One of my favourite essayists is David Sedaris who, admittedly, I have listened to reading his essays far more than I have read his work. His writing is hilarious and heartbreaking, so that I find myself roaring laughing in one moment and roaring crying the next. But he faced a backlash about two decades ago concerning, not the writing itself, but rather its marketing as non-fiction, and the argument that it was insufficiently factual to be marketed as such. Sedaris clearly manipulates and exaggerates the things that have happened in his life for comic effect. But isn’t that what makes him a great writer – taking the ordinary, the mundane, and seeing in it something fantastical and outrageous? And boy, is it effective!
So, I don’t have a problem with how Sedaris writes because I know he’s exaggerating the truth. But that feels very different to what Raynor Winn is accused of doing. She is accused of criminal activity and of misrepresenting her husband’s illness. She presents her version of events as fact. Maybe they are. Maybe they’re not. But The Observer article is convincing enough that it has left a sour taste in my mouth. And it makes me think very carefully about the way I write my memories and the difference between a memory being true to me and a memory being true.
Not The Salt Path. When I inquired after the book at the library, I was told it had been borrowed this morning. Here’s a sequel.
The trees are so big and so green and so varied and so alive. Oaks, horse chestnuts, sycamores, beech. Their trunks are immense and they reach high up into the blue sky. So unlike the scrubby arid trees of the dehesa (savannah) of southwest Spain. Tiredness is causing me to have an out of body experience as I walk through Priory Park. Is this what it’s like to experience the world when high on drugs, I wonder? The giant beautiful trees seem to pulsate around me, my brain and eyes playing tricks on me. Maybe the trees are playing tricks on me too. The tiredness is adding to my disbelief that I’m here, when only a few hours ago, I was there.
We woke up at 3.10am. I slept little anyway, checking my phone through the night to make sure I hadn’t slept through the alarm. Katie had set her alarm too, so it wouldn’t have mattered, but tell that to my subconscious/unconscious brain. It didn’t help that the narrow single bed in the cheap airport hotel was springy and uncomfortable and the room was too hot at first, then too cold with the fan, then too hot when I turned the fan off. Through those few brief hours, I heard other hotel guests arriving and departing, the thunk-thunk of heavy suitcases being hauled up or down the old stone stairs of this hotel without a lift, the wheels squeaking down the corridor outside our bedroom door, a movement-sensing light flooding our room with light through the glass panel over the door.
I am grateful that the airport was straightforward, the flight uneventful, our train to Leamington Spa on time. By the time we get to my father-in-law’s house mid-morning, the effects of the tiny €30 airport breakfast has long worn off and we are starving. While he asks the girls about the flight, I make a bee-line for the kitchen, knowing exactly what I’ll make (the girls and I have been discussing it, fantasizing about it). We anticipate what Granddad will have in stock, and we’re not disappointed. Rashers and eggs and fried tomatoes, with buttered fresh white bread and strong tea.
Afterwards, I rest for an hour, unpack a little and then I’m off again. The girls are sleepy, though they claim they aren’t. But they’re pale and have bags under their eyes, so they can’t fool me. I leave them sitting in the livingroom with Granddad, looking out over his garden at a fat pigeon pecking at the seeds he’s scattered about. I leave the house to the sounds of him telling the girls about a radio he built when he was a teenager, from his dad’s old cigar box. I hear him ask them what components they’d need to make a radio. My Gen Z teenagers have never used a radio in their lives, but I’m out the door before I hear their answer.
While my work life will be decidedly less frenetic in the coming weeks than it has been of late, I have a deadline to meet this coming weekend and I need to crack on. I spend a few hours at the library, meet my self-imposted work target for the day, and head back to my father-in-law’s house again. By now, I am well and truly zombified with tiredness, and the trees pulsate as I walk through them. Perhaps they are really Ents. Perhaps I need a good night’s sleep.
A few nights ago, in the middle of a cozy family viewing of Wicked, Lily got up to get something from the press. ‘Mum,’ she called from the kitchen. ‘There’re ants everywhere.’ We’ve had very few ants so far this summer – just one minor marching infestation that I’d quickly dispatched. I leave the comfort of the sofa to go investigate. To say I lost it would be an understatement. I swore at the ants. I shouted at them. I wished them nothing but back fortune. Our food cupboard had gone from zero ants to nothing but ants in the space of a few hours. I traced where they’d come from and found a line of the little blighters coming in via the top corner of the patio door. The patio door that had so valiantly kept them out last year, but now they’d found a way in. Mid-movie, I now found myself hot and bothered, feverishly swiping ants from around the honey jar, the bag of sugar, the jar of peanut butter. Every time I picked up a can or a jar, I found ants scurrying underneath, suddenly disturbed and running in circles, disturbed by this giant human who has lifted the roof off. The reason I’m so mad is that I know that once they’re in, they’re in, and the only thing that will get rid of them is autumn and the temperature dropping. Autumn’s a long time away.
I deal with the invasion as best I can and return to Wicked, all hot and bothered and the girls bemused by my over-the-top reaction to the ants. The next morning, I get up to find them all over my worktop. The morning after that on a crumb of bread I’d missed when sweeping the floor. Everything is an ant attractant – dishes not washed up immediately after use, the dog not eating her dinner quick enough (she’s a slow eater and sometimes can take a few hours to eat her food, so in summer I have to whip the bowl off the floor if she leaves it for more than 10 minutes). Every day I find them in some new place. And, I know the worst hasn’t happened yet, but it will, because it happens every year. There are two tiny gaps between tiles on my living room floor, just at the bottom of the stairs. Sometime, late July or early August of every year, they come pouring in there. One hot day, I’ll come into the living room to find a procession of ants pouring out of those two tiny gaps. I’ve tried filling the gaps, covering the gaps, pouring ant powder down the gaps. It doesn’t matter. Eventually, one way or another, they find their way into the house.
What bugs me about them (no pun intended) is that their presence forces me into action when I don’t want to do, don’t have time for, or that disturbs something else that I’m in the middle of. I’m not a natural ‘put everything away and wash everything up to sterile hospital conditions’ sort of person. But I live in a country that is, I’m pretty sure this is a scientific fact, 99% made up of ants. At least it seems that way at this time of year.
But now I’m taking a different approach. I’m channeling my old geography colleague Steve Hinchliffe’s work on conviviality, of living with and alongside nature. The ants are here for now. Like they’re here every year. Until it gets cooler. They have a job to do. When they’re not in my house, when I encounter them outside, I’m fascinated by them – their strength, the way they communicate with each other (what they say, I don’t know, but they clearly communicate, one going in opposite direction to the others in their procession), their tenacity, their ability to very quickly break down and get rid of the remains of dead animals and food. I’m grateful for the role they play in the ecosystem as decomposers and nutrient recyclers.
So, why should I feel differently about them when they come into my house? They’re not really doing any harm. They’re just doing their thing. And they’re simply forcing me to tidy up a bit more swiftly and not leave things out on the worktop. I’ve also come to the self-awareness that I’m less concerned about the ants being in my house than I am about what people might think if they came into my house and saw the ants. But everyone has ants at this time of year. I see them on other people’s worktops and floors and I don’t judge them. They’re part of our lives in summer in Spain. So, rather than getting mad at them I’ve decided to be more convivial towards them. Live with them by being a bit more swift and thorough in my cleaning. But I’m still likely to get mad at the kids when they leave an empty yogurt pot lying on its side on the kitchen table!
In late December, I set myself a challenge to walk 200km in January.
2023 had been an exceptional year for me. I was joyful and exuberant in turning 50 and everything about my life seemed to glow. That was until the end of the year, when it felt as if someone let the air out of my balloon. From early December, I felt lost, drained, living in a cloud of cotton wool, from which I neither could nor desired to work, be with other people, or drag myself out of the house.
Happiness and contentment are my default modes. If chemical imbalances play a role in the onset of depression, then I often think that I have chemical imbalances in the other direction. I’m chronically happy. I’m annoyingly upbeat. My glass is always way more than half full.
Except at the end of 2023, when it wasn’t. I had no reason to feel down, and yet I did. A weekend in Sevilla uplifted me momentarily but, even there, I was unusually sharp with my daughters and, at times, felt the strain of being in a city more acutely than usual. Then I came down with COVID and a week in Tenerife over Christmas that was supposed to relight my lamp instead left me feeling even more down in the dumps. I returned home to Sanlúcar COVID-free but feeling flat.
Then one day, in the last week of December, I set out to walk the dog. Not an ‘oh god, I’ve got to walk the dog’ sort of walk, the kind that had become my default over the past year, when I’ve increasingly cited lack of time, but a ‘let’s see how far we can go’ sort of walk, with a backpack on my back, containing my water bottle, a notebook and pen, and my phone to take photos. I walked north, along the path that leads up the river, stopping to allow myself to be enveloped in the silence, to watch a raft of canes drift down the river, to marvel at the orogeny on a wall of rock. The dog, of course, loved it too, walking farther than she had in months. At the farthest point from home, I decided to set myself the challenge of walking 200km in January.
I walked for the first few days of January, recording the distance so that I had a sense of how far I might walk in a certain amount of time and considering how I could make space in my work day for this challenge. On each walk, I was uplifted. The land was brightly green, decorated with patches of wildflowers, yellow and white. It was a balm to the eyes and to the soul. Each day, though my spirits descended again when I returned from my walks, the troughs were not so deep. By the second week of January, I felt like myself again.
Some days I walked 10km or more, one day I only managed 1km. I walked at all times of the day – in cold early morning mist in jacket and woolly hat, bright afternoon sunshine in t-shirt and sunglasses, at sunset, carefully picking my way along rocky paths in the dark; Lady always my faithful companion, the land I walked through nourishing and uplifting me.
By the end of the month, I had walked 201km, along paths leading out in a radius from my house. I became reacquainted with places I hadn’t walked in years, just as I became reacquainted with why I love living here in the first place – the immensity of the land, the stories it tells of the people who lived here before, if only you take the time to read those stories in the landscape, the other creatures nourished by the land, and the river that brought me here snaking through it all; the vastness of the sky, at times a blue so deep as to seem unreal, at times ominous shades of grey, at night the riot of stars a glorious reminder of my insignificance, the Milky Way mirroring the route of our little river.
Over the course of the month, I observed changes taking place – sudden changes brought about by a heavy rain shower, slower changes as grasses grew, the number of lambs in a herd of sheep increased dramatically, the oranges continued to ripen and fall from the trees. I have found one, two, or even three hours in each day to walk. Those hours were there for the taking all along, I just failed to see them. Walking became the fulcrum of my day throughout January, uplifting me, soothing my soul, reassuring me that in the face of such ordinary magnificence, it is only to be expected that happiness is my default mode.
As for February? I’m back on the tracks and trails again, mostly in the lengthening evenings, challenging myself to another 200km. It hardly feels like a challenge. It’s starting to feel more like a drug.
Autumn is in the air. Not in the middle of the day, when the sun beats down from a cloudless sky and the temperature hovers in the mid-30s (˚C). It doesn’t feel like autumn then. But early in the morning when I take the dog for her walk, there’s a discernible change in the air, a frisson of a new season, a hint of something different. It invigorates me and makes my skin tingle.
These mornings it’s cooler, the sun is lower in the sky and there’s a noticeable smell as autumn finds a chink in summer’s armour and stealthily, but inevitably, seeps through. The evenings are undergoing change too, the sky filling with massive billowy clouds in late afternoon, white, grey, ominously black. If we don’t get rain here – and often we don’t – we see it falling elsewhere, sheets of grey connecting sky to land, sweeping across the hills somewhere away in the distance. When it does rain here, it falls in huge fat drops, in showers that are fast, sudden, drenching, and over almost as soon as they’ve begun, filling the air with petrichor*, that heady fragrance of rain after a dry spell.
I get giddy with the turn of the seasons. Each offers new opportunities – seasonal foods to cook and eat, seasonal changes in the landscape to enjoy and wonder at, seasonal festivals and celebrations. I like the change of wardrobe that comes with the change of seasons. After a long hot summer of shorts, t-shirts, dresses and sandals, I’m looking forward to jeans, jumpers, boots and jackets.
Autumn, much more than spring or even New Year, has a feeling of renewal about it. Perhaps it’s because I have spent 37 of my 46 years in formal education, either as a student or an educator and because our year now revolves around my daughters’ school year. Autumn is a time for new books, new pens and pencils, fresh empty virginal notebooks, and the endless possibilities they present. It is a time for stepping up an academic level and the inherent possibilities for learning new things, making new discoveries, and growing intellectually and emotionally.
As I step out these mornings to take Lady on long walks through the countryside, the cool fragrant autumn air that fills my lungs also fills my mind with possibilities for how the remainder of the year will unfold, for jobs to be done and activities to participate in, for writing projects to start or complete, for classes to take and places to visit.
What’s my favourite season? The truth is, I don’t have one. I love them all. My favourite times of year are those in-between season times, when one gets sensory hints of the season to come. Those are the best times of year of all.
*Thank you, Jan, for teaching me a new word this week!
Me in place 