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.
I’m at Dublin airport, waiting for my sister to come through arrivals. The airport is quiet tonight, a few families, a couple of guys with bunches of flowers, people hanging around on their phones or with paper cups of coffee.
A group of Spanish teenagers comes through the sliding doors, welcomed by an exuberant Dublin woman who bundles them together for a photo before ushering them towards the exit.
Groups of holiday makers arrive home from warmer climes, tanned and dressed inappropriately for the wet August night that awaits them outside the terminal.
Over the course of about twenty minutes, three middle aged women come through, Eastern European and Asian, greeted with hugs and kisses by their children and their tiny Irish grandchildren.
I could spend all evening here, watching these arrivals and reunions.
Dublin Airport is special to me. The scene of so many of my own departures and arrivals over the years. My first ever solo trip abroad (only my second trip ever in a plane), aged 16, when I went to central France for a few weeks to au pair and improve my French. How scared I was, and how scared my parents were, but I wanted to go and they didn’t hold me back.
Three years later, I was away again, this time to the Netherlands with my friend Louise; my aunt Catherine’s tent strapped to my huge rucksack. Mammy drove us to the airport that morning. We had no jobs, no clue what were doing, but we were youthfully optimistic that we’d find work for the summer. And we did.
I remember a big gang of family and friends coming to see me off when I departed for Japan, aged 22. My biggest trip yet. A year away, and so far away. I remember how we all tried to keep a brave face on things as we sat in one of the airport restaurants, waiting for the moment when I would have to say goodbye and take that lonely walk through to security. And I remember Daddy telling me that it would be ok if I didn’t like it and wanted to come home. We had no way of knowing how much I’d love it and that I’d end up staying for three years. And after that, there would be the multiple departures to the Canadian Arctic; all those journeys starting in Dublin Airport.
I remember the arrivals too. The time I came home from Japan with a shaved head and blue fingernails, and Mammy didn’t know what to think. The first time I travelled alone with Lily in her sling. And all those times I came home at short notice, for Jerry’s, Jimmy’s, Lillie’s, Nana’s funerals, cousins or uncles or my brother-in-law picking me up and often driving me directly to a wake late at night.
I remember the much more frequent arrivals during Daddy’s final seven or eight months, when I flew home from Aberdeen every few weeks. I no longer expected anyone to meet me at the airport. I’d take the bus home or I’d hop on a bus into the city and meet Daddy and Mammy at the hospital.
Tonight, I sit and look at the people waiting and arriving and departing and I wonder where they have come from, why they have flown into Dublin on this particular evening, and what awaits them when they pass through the doors and head for their destinations, each with their own fears and hopes, loves and losses, their own adventures and stories, pasts and futures.
Yep. It was Covid alright. I tested negative late last week, but after a few more days of all three of us having identical symptoms, I decided to test again. If I had it, then we all had it.
There was no messing about with the second test. An immediate strong T line. ‘Half the country has it,’ as everyone keeps telling me. Our Lithuanian friends have been hit with it too. My guess is we caught it in Dublin last week.
We’ve had it worse. Katie, who’s had it five times, has fared best. She’s usually the worst, but this time, she got over it quickly and was back to herself in only a few days. I definitely had it worse the year I had to miss Romería, and I had it way worse the Christmas we went to Tenerife.
This time I’ve had a sore throat and a cough. I’ve felt like the inside of my head is filled with cotton wool and all I want to do is lie around. It’s only Lily’s second time to get it and her symptoms this time are almost exactly matching mine. We felt better yesterday but worse today.
It’s a wonderful opportunity to lounge around in my dressing gown all day, read my book, binge watch The Office (US), be anti-social and not feel guilty about not getting exercise.
But I’m ready to go back out into the world now. I’m going to test again tomorrow afternoon. I’m hoping for but not expecting a negative result.
Last Saturday, I had six hours to kill between an airport pickup and an airport drop-off. I thought about what I could do with our friends from Lithuania, to give them a taste of Ireland. I didn’t want to take them into the city – that’s one version of Ireland, and we’d done that earlier in the week. I thought Howth might be nice. And then a friend suggested the Howth Cliff Walk. I’d never heard of it, but my friend had done it a couple of times and had only good things to say about it. So, I did a bit of research, saw that the car park where we could start the walk was less than 30 minutes from the airport, and decided on that for our ‘taste of Ireland’ day out.
I’d only been to Howth once before, years ago on the Dart with Julian, and then only for about an hour. There were a number of routes we could take on the cliff walk and, after consultation with the girls and our visitors, we decided to tackle the longest and most difficult walk – the 3 hour, 12km Bog of the Frogs walk. And what a walk it was.
We parked the car (for free) close to Howth MarinaI was delighted to see that Yeats had lived here for a time.
I couldn’t have imagined that there would be such a varied rural landscape so close to the city. I mainly took photos along the coastal portion – as we walked along the coastal path on top of the cliffs, with yachts from a sailing club flying past and practicing manoeuvres, a fishing boat dropping lobster pots, and herring gulls, kittiwakes and cormorants swooping high or flying low over the sea. At times, the grey sea blended into the grey sky, creating a mesmerizing horizonless seascape.
At lunchtime, we wound our way down to a small stony beach and, after a delicious picnic (if I do say so myself), we quickly changed into our swimsuits for a quick dip in the sea. The water was warm and we all could have stayed there all day. But we were only half way through the walk and our friends had a plane to catch to Lithuania in a few hours.
A dip in the sea here after lunch was glorious.
The path soon brought us away from the sea, up through birch woods and then up the side of a hill overlaid with blanket bog and heather. That took some effort and, for twenty minutes or so, we barely spoke – our chatty group focused now on getting up the hill and controlling our breathing. But that ended too and then, after a brief foray across a busy golf course, it was downhill all the way and back, once again, into the middle of Howth village.
It was a delightful day out. Just the perfect weather for a walk, a swim, a picnic. The other walkers we met were friendly and chatty. And, despite advice to the contrary on the cliff walk website, the trail was clearly and frequently marked.
Around the clock, the cars whizz by. Breaking the 80km/h speed limit by 20, 40, 60km/h. Early morning is bad – commuters late to work, or timing their commute to perfection only by driving at high speed. You hear them coming at great distance, then drowning out all other sounds as the rush past, leaving a trail of noise in their wake. Sometimes, they overtake each other outside the house – a car doing 120km/h overtaking one doing 100km/h on this narrow little road. Once the commuters have passed, it’s the turn of the lorries. Great, hulking lorries, with ‘Long Vehicle’ signs on the back, made for roads much bigger than this one, they too going at or above the speed limit – lorry after lorry carrying triple, quadruple decks of frightened pigs to the slaughter house a mile farther along the road, or taking goods and supplies to who knows where. Then it’s the commuters again – going in the opposite direction at the end of the day. And then night comes and it’s the racers – joy riding at unimaginable speeds – speeds that I don’t want to imagine. A couple of nights ago, a car stopped in front of the house. It was 9:30 and I hadn’t yet closed the curtains. Odd, I thought. We’re not expecting anyone. Then I thought maybe it was waiting at the bottom of the narrow hill to let an oncoming vehicle pass. But it wasn’t that either. The driver revved and revved and revved the car and then shot away up the road like a bullet. The noise was deafening. I waited for the sound of a collision – with another car, or with the old tree on the bend in the road up at Smith’s house; my heart pounding.
We used to live our lives on this road. Cousins my age lived in the house across the road and in the house down the road; so, as kids, we were constantly going between the three houses. On summer evenings, we’d tie a skipping rope to the gate and stretch it out across the road. Daddy would stand for hours turning the rope, while us kids jumped til it got too dark. Every twenty minutes or half an hour, we’d have to make way for a car to go past.
From an early age, I walked or rode my bike the two miles from home into town, never giving a minute’s thought to my safety because the traffic was limited and no-one drove fast. When I was 12, and started secondary school, I rode my bike, alongside my cousins, to school every day, just like Daddy rode his bike to work every day, and my aunt Lillie and uncle’s Tom and Gerry rode their bikes out to Ballygibbon regularly. The road belonged to the people, not to the cars.
The road was a place for animals too. Our farming neighbours regularly herded their cattle or sheep along the road from one field to another and, on Thursday mornings, farmers from farther afield would herd their livestock down the road towards the cattle mart. We walked our dogs along the road, often not on leads, never giving a moment’s thought to their safety. Lassie, the black labrador my parents gave to me as a puppy for my fourth birthday, got into the habit of crossing the road over to Betty’s house every day for a slice of bread.
There was the summer of 1992, the year of the Barcelona Olympics, when my friend Niamh came to visit from Kilkenny. We wondered how fast we could run, compared to Linford Christie. We measured out 100metres on the road and my neighbour timed us. While Niamh ran her 100m in a handy 12 seconds, I came in at 22 seconds! I wasn’t built for speed!!
I remember a few times in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with my friend Gavin or with Julian, walking the two miles home from the pub in the dead of night. On those nights, with no lights to guide us, I worried only that I might twist my ankle in a pothole or along the side of the road. Meeting traffic was never a major concern.
Not much has changed on this road in the 52 years that I have known it. The signs have improved a bit and the surface on the bridge over the River Boyne is definitely better. Apart from that, it remains the same. The road is as narrow as it always was, with sporadic road markings at best. The same houses line the road – only two new houses have been built in the past 50 years – each house home to succeeding generations of young couples raising their children to adulthood.
The only thing that has changed on this road is the traffic. The road no longer belongs to the people or to the animals. To leave the house now, we must go by car, because it is too dangerous to walk or ride a bike. To walk her dogs, Mammy has to load them into the car and drive them to somewhere else where it is safer to walk. Even driving the car out onto the road is nerve-wracking, as drivers speed up and down the road with little thought for the inhabitants of the houses they pass. Impatient drivers occasionally honk their horns or dangerously overtake when we slow down to turn into the driveway or pull in to open or close the gate. There’s no stopping on the road for a friendly chat with a neighbour in a passing car.
Because of the traffic, the neighbours see less of each other, simply because they stay well away from the road. It’s sad and infuriating to see my lovely townland torn apart by the very road that once brought us all together. Is this progress? I don’t think so.
At Christmas 1989, I was 16 years old and in my final year of secondary school. In February, I would have to complete my application for university – a centralized system in which I would have to list my choice of institutions and courses from one to ten. In June 1990, I would sit the state Leaving Certificate exam and, in August, I would be offered the highest ranked of the ten courses for which I had gained sufficient accumulated points in my Leaving Cert.
Geography and English were my favourite subjects and I imagined I would do a degree in those two subjects, become a teacher, and then come home to Edenderry and teach for the rest of my life. I didn’t know any better. My teachers were my role models for what could be done with a university degree. I loved Geography, ergo, I would become a geography teacher.
But, while at 16, I couldn’t imagine a life for myself outside of Edenderry, in my mind, I was a citizen of the world. From the age of 11, I’d had pen-pals in Singapore, Australia, Malawi, Egypt, Hong Kong, Spain, Greece (by the way, to this day I’m still friends with Aileen in Singapore and Haitham in Egypt), and spent vast amounts of time – and pocket money on stationary and stamps – telling them all about my life and learning all about their lives. And, shortly after I’d turned 16, I made the difficult decision to stop buying Smash Hits every fortnight and instead save up my pocket money and birthday and Christmas money to subscribe to National Geographic. I’d sit at the kitchen table or lie on my bed here in Ballygibbon, and read National Geographic from cover to cover, even the ads, as the words and photos took me on journeys to places and peoples in lands far from my little corner of Co. Kildare.
That Christmas of 1989, my aunt Marian and uncle Jim came up from west Cork to stay at Nana’s house in Gilroy. We saw them two or three times a year, but this time was a little different. Jim was a primary school headmaster and my parents had asked if he could help me with Maths. The Leaving Cert was only six months away and Maths was, by some measure, my worst subject. Poor Jim, he did his best but, he was fighting a losing battle from the start. Not only was I bad at Maths, I refused to even try to be good. My stubborn mental block took years to shift and it is residually still with me today.
Jim, in his spare time, was also a door-to-door encyclopaedia salesman. On the day they arrived at Nana’s house that Christmas, Mammy and I popped in to visit. ‘Come out to the car,’ Jim said to me. ‘I’ve something for you.’ Out we went. He opened the boot of the car and fished out the A book of the World Book encyclopaedia. I was delighted with this and spent the remainder of the visit at Nana’s house browsing through the pages.
At home that evening, I sat on my bed, a mug of tea on the bedside table, and poured over the A book, page by page. It was filled with all sorts of interesting A things – from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to Alexander I, from Antarctica to Austria, from Airplane to Audio-visual Materials. And then I came to page 509: Anthropology.
What on earth? There’s this field of study that I’ve never heard of before, that’s combines some of the bits I like best about geography, and that’s all about learning about people who live far away in other parts of the world. Could I do that? It seemed highly unlikely.
I read and re-read the four and half pages about Anthropology. Among the most renowned were a handful of women – notably Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Elsie Parsons.
And I read that anthropologists did their research by immersing themselves in the lives and cultures of the peoples they studied, learning skills and languages, and then theorized and wrote about what they had learned from those experiences. Surely there were no anthropologists in Ireland! This was far too exotic and exciting!
I thought about anthropology all through the Christmas holidays and, as soon as I the January term started, I made a bee-line for the school career guidance counsellor, convinced that she would tell me she had never heard of this subject or that the nearest place I could do it was somewhere in England. Imagine my surprise when she told me that the only Anthropology department in the Republic of Ireland was in Maynooth – my nearest university! How could this be? How did I not know?
In February, I filled in my university application form, still erring on the side of Geography and English in UCD, but with Arts in Maynooth as my second choice. When I received my Leaving Cert results in August 1990, I knew I had enough points to do Anthropology and Geography at Maynooth.
And did I get my degree and return to Edenderry to become a Geography teacher? Well, I got my degree. And I followed that with a Masters degree in Anthropology. Then I went to live in Japan for three years. Then I moved to the Canadian Arctic. Then I did a PhD in Anthropology, immersing myself for long periods of time in an Inuit community on the west coast of Hudson Bay. Then I worked as an Anthropologist-Geographer in geography departments in Cambridge, Reading and Exeter universities. All thanks to my uncle Jim handing me the A book out of the boot of his car two months before I applied for university.
I was sitting at the kitchen table here in Ballygibbon earlier today. I glanced up towards the bookcase and saw the A book, still sitting there. Coincidentally, today is also the day when tens of thousands of students across Ireland receive their Leaving Cert results. I hope their lives are as unexpected and serendipitous as mine has proven to be up to now.
Today we went to Newgrange and Knowth megalithic tombs in the Boyne Valley in Co. Meath. I’d like to tell you all about the 5000 year old burial and ceremonial sites, the biggest collection of megalithic art in Western Europe, the astronomic knowledge and building skills. But half of us have come down with something (me included). A cold? A flu? Who knows. So, here are some photos of the best bits of today….
There’s nothing quite like a sunny day in Dublin, when you’ve nothing to do but stroll around with friends. And you can see some strange things on an August night…
Chester Beatty LibraryPatrick Kavanagh at the National LibraryOur friends with Oscar WildeZero zero but still oh so goodThe Jeannie Johnson famine ship The famine memorialAnd the same to you!
Only a few short years ago, this summer would have been impossible. But here I am, over fifty days since I left home, and barely a day of work missed. Laptop, wifi, Bluetooth; Word, Zoom, Google docs. These are the tools I need to work anywhere and at any time. In between all the fun summer activities – visiting friends, Wimbledon, Pride, museums, hikes, and on and on – I’ve been beavering away at work. Making space at the kitchen table at Mammy’s house, spending days in public libraries, in friends’ spare rooms and office spaces – I have been working away to pay the bills and fund this wonderful summer.
All summer I’ve been ghostwriting, editing and providing other writing support for clients in South Africa, the UK, Europe, the US, Canada and China, fitting in an hour of work here, a couple of days there, a weekend, an evening, whatever time I can find. It’s been challenging at times, as I’m not following my usual routine of working at my desk, on my lovely widescreen monitor, while the girls are at school. Instead, I’m working from an old laptop, in a variety of different places, at various times of the day, and with all sorts of distractions.
Technology that was almost unimaginable twenty years ago, clunky and clumsy ten years ago, intermittent and expensive even five years ago, is now ubiquitous, easy to access and easy to use. Even with a barely hanging in there laptop, I can work wherever and whenever I want.
I am privileged to have a job that allows me to choose when and where I work, and equally privileged to have access to the tools and hardware that allow me to work in this way. I’m one lucky summer digital nomad.
If you love board games, may I recommend Discovering Ireland or its cousin, Discovering Europe. I’ve been playing this with my friend Niamh since we were both in university. It was as much fun more than 30 years ago as it is now, playing it with our kids.
The object of the game is for each player to get to five towns and then exit by a port, while each player tries to block everyone else from reaching their destination and getting rid of all of their cards.
We’ve played it three times this summer so far. It generally leads to great outbursts of laughter, occasional spilled drinks, impromptu song compositions. And the kids learn a little geography into the bargain!
I really need to add it to our board game collection at home in Sanlúcar.
Me in place 