It wasn’t the Christmas holiday I had planned. The Christmas holiday I had planned included mornings out drinking coffee and being sociable, building up my running endurance to complete a 7km circuit, going to Sevilla for a couple of days, writing a daily Christmas-themed blog, board games, jigsaw puzzles, long walks with the dog.
Instead, I worked far too hard in the lead up to Christmas, putting in 14-hour or longer days in a bid to get all my work done before the holidays began. Then, once the holidays arrived, I continued to push myself – Christmas shopping, tidying and cleaning the house, which was neglected owing to the long work hours, and prepping food for Christmas. The food prep, though tiring, brought me great joy – what a delight to be in the kitchen, surrounded by nostalgia-inducing smells and textures, Christmas songs playing in the background. I failed to notice that I wasn’t giving myself enough rest, not taking care of myself.
And then, of course, the inevitable happened. As soon as I served dinner on Christmas Day, my body realised its work was done and I started to feel bad. Nose tingling, head muzzy, throat sore. By the time our guests left on Christmas night, I was hot and shivery. I’d caught what half the village, indeed half the world, seems to have – the flu.
That was a week ago and I’m still not fully recovered. Yesterday, I walked the dog and ate a meal for the first time since Christmas Day. My week has been spent in enforced rest – reading, watching movies, sleeping. Feeling rubbish. I’m definitely on the mend now, and that’s great.
I used to be a great one for New Year’s Resolutions. But not any more. Who needs that pressure during the darkest days of the year? I prefer my reflections and resolutions in September. But today I am making one resolution – to no longer put in those 14+ hour days; rather, to approach my work more mindfully, and not put my immune system in jeopardy.
I have long considered the psychological roots of why I work the way I do. But that’s something to dig into another day. For now, it’s enough to say that I want to do something about it.
Wishing you all a happy, healthy and creative 2026.
Each year, on the first (or sometimes the second) Saturday in December, my family would go to Dublin to do our Christmas shopping. It was a huge day out and we would be up and on the road early, like half of the rest of the population of rural Ireland. The traffic was usually heavy, the weather generally bad, and there was always the anxiety that there might not be any parking spaces left for our red Ford Escort in the Penney’s car park (there was always space). We stuck to Henry St. and Mary St., and the futuristic Ilac Centre, when it opened, traipsing from one crowded shop to the next, seeking out new outfits that we would wear on Christmas Day, and new winter coats for my sister and me, if we hadn’t already got them in one of the drapery shops in Edenderry. We each had lists of Christmas presents we wanted to buy – presents for each other, for our friends and other family members. We’d take a break for tea (Daddy), coffee (Mammy) and cake, and Knickerbocker glories (Antoinette and me) at the Soda Fountain in the Ilac Centre (was there ever a place more fabulous?) and a middle of the day dinner in the cafeteria of one of the department stores.
When I say ‘we’ shopped for this and ‘we’ looked for that, what I really mean, of course, is that Mammy, Antoinette and I did. Daddy’s role in all of this was to facilitate our shopping, first as driver and, once the car was parked, as bag carrier. At first, he’d come into the shops with us, look around, offer his advice on an outfit if we asked. But, as the day wore on, and the number of bags he was lugging in each hand grew, it became more cumbersome for him to come into the shops. With all those bags around his thighs and knees, he simply was too bulky to get around the narrow aisles in between rails of clothes. So, he’d stand outside the front door of the shop, a little to the side, so he wasn’t in anyone’s way, in the December cold, weighed down by all those bags, patiently waiting while the three of us tried on clothes and bought presents and browsed through books or records in overheated shops. At some point, he’d make a trip back to the car to dump all the bags and then return to us to start the process again.
He wasn’t alone. Outside every shop on Henry St. were two or three men like Daddy, all in the same boat, all patiently waiting, bag carriers, while their womenfolk were inside enjoying themselves.
That’s one of my abiding memories of the build-up to Christmas. I don’t remember what we tried on, or what we bought, or what we filled those bags with. That was all just stuff. But I do remember Daddy, patiently and good-naturedly standing in the cold, making sure that we were having a good time. Like always, putting ‘the wimmin’, as he called us, first.
Christmas is my favourite time of the year and I planned to start a series of Christmas blogs on the 1st of December but, like all the best laid plans, I didn’t get around to it. But here I am, finally. Better late than never. Hope you enjoy my Christmas memories and that they trigger some happy memories for you too.
For me, Christmas is all about food. Sourcing the ingredients. Cooking it. Baking it. Presenting it. Giving it away as gifts. And, of course, eating it. So, a lot of my Christmas memories revolve around food and those memories slip to the front of my mind each year as I once again get down to my Christmas food prep.
I’m a traditionalist when it comes to Christmas food, meaning that the foods that fill me with joy are the ones I grew up with and that I watched Mammy and Nana and my auntie’s Cissie and Lillie making from when I could barely see over the top of the kitchen table.
Christmas prep starts for me in the summer. I can’t easily get some of the ingredients I need for my Christmas cake and Christmas puddings in Spain, so I make sure there’s enough space in the suitcase when I’m home in the summer for the mixed peel, currants, and mixed spice that I’ll need. I like to make the cake and puddings in late October or early November, as the earlier you make those boozy fruit confections, the richer they taste come Christmas Day.
For all that I love this early baking, Mammy intensely dislikes it. I look forward to the Saturday in autumn that I devote to Christmas baking; she dreads it and postpones it as long as possible. Some years, she doesn’t even get around to it.
My aunt Cissie (Daddy’s sister) was the baker in our house, making multiple Christmas cakes and puddings for her brothers’ and sisters’ families and for Dr. Hill, for whom she was housekeeper. Cissie died of breast cancer, aged 56, in 1979. And, although I’ve never asked Mammy about it, I guess she just took over all that Christmas baking for her in-laws after that.
On a mid-week night in November, my sister, Mammy and I would go to my Nana’s house in Edenderry. Although we saw her almost every day, mid-week evening visits were rate, so this in itself felt like an out of the ordinary event. Mammy would arrive with her big cream-coloured ceramic mixing bowl, filled with all the ingredients needed to make the Christmas puddings – bags and bags of a variety of dried fruits, breadcrumbs, eggs, spices, a bottle of Guinness and so on. She and Nana would stand at the dining table, side by side, each making their own puddings, while my sister and I helped out by stirring in the ingredients, chopping glacé cherries, or searching through raisins or sultanas for the occasional errant stalk. Two of my aunts and two of my uncles still lived at home (Mammy is the oldest of 11 children), so the house was busy on those evenings.
Mixing the puddings was no mean feat, given the quantities Mammy and Nana were making. I don’t remember how many Nana made, but Mammy definitely made at least one large pudding and usually four or five medium-sized ones, mixing near-industrial quantities of ingredients at once. Once the laborious work of mixing was done, my sister and I (and maybe a teenage aunt or uncle) would get to make a wish while stirring the thick rich mixture. Even as I write this, I can feel the warmth in my Nana’s living room from the turf fire and the spicy smell of all those ingredients mixing together. Finally, they would transfer the mix into heat-resistant bowls, cover them with tinfoil and then tie twine around to secure each lid and to serve as a handle for removing them from the saucepans of boiling water in which they would be steamed over the coming days.
I remember this with nostalgia. Mammy remembers it as a chore, yet another item to tick off the Christmas to-do list. A lot of people were expecting her to make those puddings each year, so I suppose that took a lot of the fun out of it. That was all 30 or 40 years ago and Mammy no longer makes all those puddings, but I think she still feels the residual pressure of it.
This year, I went home to Ireland for a few days in early November. I hadn’t yet made my own puddings or cake. Mammy was bemoaning the fact that she would have to make her puddings soon (she no longer makes a cake) and, in her own words, was ‘dreading it.’ (At this stage, you’re probably asking why she doesn’t simply buy puddings, if making them causes her so much stress. The answer is simple: she knows that no shop-bought pudding tastes as good as the ones she makes). I suggested that we do it together, just like she and Nana used to in the old days.
Unlike Mammy and Nana, who lived only two miles or so from each other, Mammy and I live in different countries. But we have what she and her mother didn’t have – the technology to make our puddings together at a distance. We decided to do it the following weekend. I phoned her on Tuesday to suggest she go through her presses1 to see what ingredients she had in stock and what she needed to buy. I would do the same before doing my regular weekly grocery shop on Tuesday night. On Saturday morning, we would each put what ingredients we needed on our kitchen tables, each make ourselves a cup tea, and set our devices up so we could see each other, ready to start at 12:30.
And that’s what we did. In between weighing the breadcrumbs and butter, beating the eggs, measuring the alcohol (she used Guinness; I tried using brandy for a change), we chatted and got caught up on each other’s lives. We discussed our innovations – since moving to Spain, I now use a wider variety of whatever dried fruits I find in the shop; she has changed her cooking method (tradition, after all, is always evolving). What a delightful late morning we spent with each other. I even called Katie in to stir the mixture and make a wish. We each left our puddings overnight for the flavours to mingle and the next day we cooked them. Here, in southwest Spain and there, in the midlands of Ireland, our puddings are now cooked and sealed and ready for Christmas Day.
Our ingredients may have changed a little, and our mode of communication, but making the Christmas puddings with Mammy brought me right back to all those years in Nana’s house. I suggested we do it again next year and she said she was up for that!
What’s your favourite smell? Freshly mown grass? Fresh coffee? That smell when you nuzzle your face into a baby? Why is it your favourite smell? Do you know?
I was sitting at my desk yesterday morning, the window open to cool the house down before the heat of the day kicked in. That’s when the smell came tumbling in and nostalgia stroked my face like a feather. One of the council workers was strimming the strip of grass that runs the length of my street. And there it was: The smell of exhaust from a 2-stroke engine. There’s comfort in that smell for me and it’s deeply entwined with so many good memories.
We’re living on Carina of Devon. Me and Julian and the girls. The smell of a 2-stroke engine is us leaving Carina to head off on an adventure in the rubber dinghy. Maybe it’s all of us, going ashore to explore a new place or to wander up a river that’s too shallow for Carina‘s draught. Or I’m on my own, the freedom of having the outboard tiller in my hand, setting out to go for a solitary walk or to go shopping or do the laundry. Or it’s Julian, taking the girls across the Rio Guadiana to school. Or it’s all the other yachties we met over the years, the smell and sound of a 2-stroke outboard motor signalling their arrivals and departures from their anchored yachts. It’s adventure and freedom.
Strip that layer away, and I’m living in Arviat. It’s summer, with open sea and lake-pocked land. I have my own quad bike and I zip around town in the near 20-hour daylight, picking my friend Crystal up at 3am, so we can go check the fishing net we’re sharing for the summer, or meeting Frank at 5am to go beluga hunting. His quad has Arden’s boat trailer attached on the back, so I hop on and reverse the quad into the sea under Frank’s guidance; he offloads the boat, as I park the quad and trailer. Or I’m out along the road to the dump, or the road past the reservoir, at twilight or after dark, speeding along way too fast, sometimes alone, sometimes not. In my mind, I’m a badass. In reality, probably not.
Strip that layer away, and I’m living in Arviat. It’s spring, and I’m at the floe edge with Arden. We’ve come by skidoo; him driving, me sitting in the qamutik (sled), facing back towards Arviat, back towards the direction we’ve come from, to shield myself from the powdery snow blown up by the skidoo runners. I’m surrounded by the immense beautiful whiteness of the west coast of Hudson Bay. We’ll stop when we get to the floe edge. Arden will talk to me and teach me, I’ll try to remember everything; we’ll drink tea and eat the bannock Theresa has made for us.
Strip away that layer and I’m at home in Ballygibbon. I could be 10 or 20 or 25. The 2-stroke exhaust is Daddy mowing the lawn. It’s the ease and efficiency of the first petrol-powered lawn mower after years of a small, manual one. It’s me spending summer evenings following Daddy round the garden – at 10 or 20 or 25 – just for his company and the important things we have to talk about – Gaelic football and films and music, a bit of politics and other sports.
When I catch a whiff of 2-stroke exhaust, it doesn’t conjure any one of these times in my life in particular. Rather, it mashes them all up, and loosens something in me, a knot unravels, and a feeling of belonging rushes through my veins. Now, I am here, with a view out my window that’s as green as I could ever have hoped for. And a new layer is added to my love of that smell.
What sound, smell, taste awakens in you memories of a far off time or place? Maybe it’s a memory that’s so visceral you can almost touch it. Or maybe it’s more ethereal, shrouded in a hazy fog. Sometimes, the senses elicit nostalgia that you can’t quite put your finger on – a sense of joy or sadness, longing or release, but to what it’s connected, you don’t quite know. Why don’t you think about that as you drift off to sleep tonight, or as you go about your quotidian day. And if you encounter that sense memory, stop, lean into it, see where it takes you.
At the end of September 1979, Pope John Paul II visited Ireland. He was the first pontiff to visit Ireland (indeed, he was the first to visit most places in the world) and the country went wild. At the time, Ireland wasn’t only predominantly Catholic by religion; our culture was Catholic, the state was Catholic, the education, health care, and justice systems were Catholic. It felt as if the whole country was being blessed by God himself. The Pope said Mass at a number of venues around the country, attended in total by over 2.5 million people. The entire population of the country at the time was only 3.75 million! His first Mass, held in the Phoenix Park in Dublin on the day of his arrival, was attended by 1.25 million people – one third of the entire population of Ireland. I was one of them.
I have fleeting memories of that day. I was six years old. I went with Mammy, Daddy and Nana Quinlan, my maternal grandmother. I remember leaving home that morning, my one-year-old baby sister sitting on my aunt Lillie’s lap in our kitchen. I remember my sister crying as we left.
I remember Daddy parking the red Ford Escort in the field that was Weston air field. I knew Weston, because we always drove past it on our way to Dublin and I always looked for light aircraft flying low across the road towards the runway. I remember a sense of wonder that we were now parked in this very place where the planes should be.
I remember Daddy carrying me on his shoulders as we walked what felt like miles, in a sea of people filling up the road as far as I could see in front and behind us. From Weston, we were directed on to buses that took us directly to the Phoenix Park. I can’t fathom the logistics of getting one third of the population of our small poor country to a field on the edge of Dublin. But somehow it happened. I remember an awful lot of walking.
I remember the Pope’s chairs. Three chairs that my parents and Nana had bought in advance of the Mass. Simple metal frame folding beach chairs, with white plastic arm rests, and woven plastic seats and back. Our two were blue striped and Nana’s was brown striped. Forever after, they were known as the Pope’s chairs. They were put on the roof rack for every summer holiday and stuck out on the lawn for every summer heatwave. I think they’re still hanging in the shed at Mammy’s house.
So, Daddy carried me on his shoulders and he, Mammy and Nana carried the three chairs and food and drinks for the day. Ham sandwiches, I imagine, some biscuits, probably a flask of tea and a bottle of lemonade.
I don’t remember getting on or off buses, or arriving at the Phoenix Park. But I do remember being in our place on the grass. The three chairs set up. We were in the middle of the crowd, facing the huge white cross and altar that had been hastily erected for the Mass, which stands to this day in the middle of the Phoenix Park. We weren’t far from a roped off pathway, separating the area we were in from the next area over. I remember sitting around for a long time before Mass started.
I don’t remember the details of the Mass, but I can still hear the sound of his voice over the loudspeakers. It’s there in my head. And I remember the palpable excitement and awe – whether I picked it up from the crowd in general or from my family, I don’t know.
When the Mass ended, the Pope prepared to travel through the crowd, blessing them from the Popemobile. And here’s where my memory gets fuzzy. Mammy and Nana were going to move close to the rope barrier to get closer to him, but Daddy was going to stay looking after our stuff. At first I said I didn’t want to go with Mammy and Nana. I was a scared for some reason. But as soon as they left, I changed my mind and wanted to go with them. And I don’t know if I did or not. One version of my memory has Daddy calling after them, me running to Mammy, and Mammy holding me in her arms close to the rope barrier as the Pope went past. But in the other version of my memory, by the time I decide I want to go with them, it’s too late, they’re lost in the crowd, and I stay with Daddy, crying and regretting not getting to see the Pope up close and getting blessed with everyone else.
There are things I don’t remember. I don’t remember Daddy’s grief, or the grief of my auntie Lillie and my Nana Tyrrell as we set out from home that morning. Daddy and Lillie had, only recently, lost their beloved older sister, Cissie, to cancer at age 57. What comfort did being in the presence of the Pope offer to my grieving devoutly Catholic father? Or what hope for comfort and grace was there in the others left at home, who would watch the Mass on the television? I don’t remember and it’s not something that would even cross my mind for over four decades.
As a six year old, I was oblivious to all of that. But what stays with me most vividly, 46 years later, is being carried high on Daddy’s shoulders in an ocean of humanity along a road in west Co. Dublin. And the Pope’s chairs.
‘Turn on Radio 1,’ Niamh said, as we got into our cars to drive in convoy across Kildare. ‘Sunday Miscellany is all about the bog this morning.’
I led the way along the bog road, through Allenwood and Prosperous, past the road down to Coill Dubh, through a landscape I have known all my life, a landscape so densely entwined with memory and meaning.
It’s impossible to come from the midlands of Ireland and not have the boglands seeping through your veins. This great flat landscape, the fuel source around which our year and our society revolved. The footing and the haping, and tea from a milk bottle and sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper. Cold March Saturdays of the men cleaning the turf bank all the way through to warm August Saturdays of bringing the turf home.
And it’s the poetry and the music – Heaney and Christy Moore and Luka Bloom. It’s the dissertation I wrote as an undergrad and the bog PhD I started in my 20s.
As I drove across the bog, I listened to the radio programme, as Niamh suggested. It was filled with the stories, songs, reminiscences of people from the midlands. Some people, like me, who have chosen to live abroad and have never found a way to adequately describe and explain all that the bog is to people who don’t know it. And some people who had lived in the bog their whole lives, who evocatively expressed what the bog meant to them.
To listen to this as I drove across the bog this morning was moving enough. But today also happens to be the 21st anniversary of the day that Daddy died. And for me, above all else, my memories of the bog, and what the bog means to me, are inseparable from my memories of Daddy.
It was, therefore, a bittersweet drive, with the stories and the road and this particular day, all evoking memory and emotion, and tears running down my cheeks, not of sadness, but of gratitude for this place and all that it means to me.
I remember I was eight or nine years old. Daddy had dropped Mammy, my little sister and me to the train station, to get the train down to Cork. We were coming here. I was wearing a new summer dress. It was so pretty – a pastel flower pattern. It was my first time to wear it. I’d been saving it for a special occasion and this was it. As we waited for the train, I squatted down and sat on my hunkers on the platform. Not realising that the hem was caught under the heels of my sandals, I stood up again as the train approached. I heard the fabric tear. I was horrified. My gorgeous dress ripped across the back, along the hem. I felt so sad. Something had been done that couldn’t be undone. I wished I could turn the clock back just a few seconds. The next week, my dress was mended, but the line where it had ripped and been restitched remained, visible if you knew what to look for. To an onlooker, it might have seemed like a trifling thing. But I never forgot that dress and that instant when I ripped it.
The rain fell sideways as we packed the car this morning. Mammy had moved the car to as close to the door as she could get it. Still, we swopped bags of food and our mini suitcases for water and leaves trailed into the house underfoot.
It was a tight squeeze, five of us and all our stuff filling up the boot and obscuring the rear window. I remember rainy Saturday mornings just like this, in the early 1980s, Daddy hoisting the suitcase, the wind break, the deck chairs, onto the roof rack of the Ford Escort, covering the lot with the blue tarpaulin from an old tent, securing it with rope.
I had the playlist ready for today’s drive to Cork – 80s hits, of course, that we sang along to in between bursts of conversation.
The rain continued – sporadic heavy showers – and wind buffeted the car sideways. We pulled in to the Rock of Cashel for lunch – ham sandwiches made from yesterday’s boiled ham and Brennan’s bread washed down with sweet black tea from a flask. We stood around the picnic table in the rain, the hoods of our raincoats up, as a sudden heavy shower chased away the slash of blue sky that had briefly appeared. I couldn’t have been happier. Few things in the world taste as great as ham sandwiches and tea from a flask on a wet day, memory and nostalgia adding magical flavour to the food.
We reached our destination late afternoon and quickly unpacked the car. My sister started to make dinner and realized she was two ingredients short. Lily and I walked the couple of hundred metres up to the shop in the village square. On the walk back, we were blown down the hill by the strong wind, rain hitting us on the back. ‘This is perfect,’ I said to Lily. A seaside holiday in Ireland isn’t complete unless you get at least one wild night like this.’ The wind, the rain, the slight bite in the air, took me back 30, 40, 45 years, to family vacations here in west Cork, in Kerry, in Wexford, in Mayo.
Tomorrow we plan to go to the beach – in our raincoats, most likely.
Autumn is definitely here. It’s raining more and it’s colder. We lit the fire in the kitchen yesterday. And still, the girls and I remain in Ireland, squeezing every last drop out of this long long summer. In the eleven years we’ve lived in Spain, we’ve never been away this long. Usually, we’d be back by now, going to the pool after our mid-afternoon siesta, or taking the dog down to the dog friendly beach in Isla Cristina.
Yet, here we are, still in Ireland, and one final adventure awaits before we return to Spain. Tomorrow morning, we are driving down to west Cork for a week in Roscarbery. It’s one of my favourite places in Ireland – a picturesque village by the sea, with an amazing beach, great walks – a simply lovely place. Because my aunt, uncle and cousins live there, we’ve been visiting Roscarbery since I was a small child, so it is infused with memories from so many different stages of my life.
Our bags are packed, the makings of the picnic are in the fridge, and we’ll be ready to hit the road after breakfast tomorrow. Forecast? Autumn showers and autumn temperatures. It’ll be lovely.
Me in place 