Eating (in no particular order)

Smoked haddock cakes at home. I bought the haddock from the fishmonger’s truck in Mangan’s parking lot; he comes every Thursday.

A free range chicken roasted in my oven.

 Poached salmon at Alan and Eleanor’s.

 Gristly steak but good company at Fury’s Pub.

 Wexford strawberries from a truck on the road above Broadford.

 Brown bread every week from Eden Deli.

Tea on a Sunday evening at Sheila’s, with ham and salads and tea brack.

 Scones at Ballindoolin. A ham sandwich at the dining room table, and a cupcake made by Zara, split with Esther and eaten standing in the kitchen.

 Fried porridge on a plate with two kinds of salmon and salad for an al fresco lunch at Simon and Erica’s in Tipperary.

 Boiled ham and coleslaw at Nodlaig’s, followed by a great game of Scrabble.

Mature goat gouda from Deirdre’s organic farm shop.

Porridge with milk and An Grianan honey.

 Turbot on a bed of baby courgettes topped by a thin razor clam shell filled with seafood terrine at La Vie de Chateau. Before this there were marinated caper berries, their long stems still attached.

 Paella and wine and lovely company at Niamh and Niall’s.

Street food at the Saturday market in Dublin.

A cheese toastie made under the broiler late one night after an evening at the theatre and a long drive home.

 An Eden Deli breakfast of Niall’s house-cured bacon rashers with poached eggs, followed by ham and leek quiche for lunch the following day.

 Banoffi made by Hannah at Una’s.

Tuna salad for lunch at Larkin’s.

Trip two to La Vie de Chateau: A cherry and almond clafouti with crème fraiche shared with Esther and washed down with Moroccan mint tea with pine nuts floating on the top.

Carmelized red onion chutney from the food hall at Marks & Sparks.

Milk chocolate digestives. Hobnobs.

An Irish grass-fed steak grilled on the barbecue in Tipperary, with grilled zucchini fresh from the garden.

It was raining; I held the umbrella over the grill to keep the steak dry.

One salty French fry from the chipper at Una’s at 11:30pm.

Seafood risotto before the theatre at Just Off Francis in Dublin.

A soft-boiled duck egg from the farm just down the road, with Eden Deli bread to sop it up.

Hummous from Tesco.

Duck confit from Super Quinn, on the recommendation of Simon.

Turnips from Geraldine’s garden, simply prepared.

At the dig at Bective Abbey, a ham and cheese sandwich and powerfully strong tea in a ceramic mug.

A goat cheese, rocket, carmelized onion and candied walnut salad with no goat cheese, no onions, no walnuts and no rocket at Conrad Hotel before a performance at the National Concert Hall across the street.

Exotic and tasteless Chinese tea at Bill and Joan’s, given to them as a gift. Joan dumped out the tea, then made a pot of Barry’s Tea that we drank to accompany their homegrown raspberries. Perfect.

Summer songs

By now I should expect the sort of eclectic concert that I attended in the National Concert Hall in Dublin. What else, after all, could be on a program billed as light summer music in a country whose only classical music station plays the slow movement of a Haydn symphony immediately followed by that iconic American classic Camp Granada (Hello Mudda, Hello Fadda, here I am in Camp Granada), then one of the least rousing numbers from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang? And so it was. The first half of the concert (which took place not in the large auditorium but in a modest side room) was billed as the Classical Mix. It began with Some Enchanted Evening to set the mood, then moved to all the usual operatic chestnuts (Voi che sapete, Quando m’en vo,  and of course that old favorite, The Queen of the Night). As a prelude to this, the main talent, an American who shall to save some embarrassment remain nameless, came on stage, or I should say platform. Oh no! It’s the old I-have-a-cold speech. After explaining in some detail the source of her difficulty (cold, fever, shivers, cough) she called on none other than God Himself (as in, with God’s help) to get her through whatever singing she might be able to manage. After she left the stage she could be heard intermittently hacking from stage right at various points throughout the evening, as if to prove her point.

            As for the rest of the ensemble, it became quickly apparent that this was a family concert, not a public one. The main singer, a soprano with a great deal of stage presence and a very decent voice, was never introduced. Everyone in the audience evidently knew Donna, as the other performers referred to her, already. Had there been programs, some of this might have been clarified, but alas, there were none, although we discovered later that ‘the promoter’ according to the ticket taker in the concert hall, had printed a few for those lucky enough to grab them. At intermission I managed to liberate one from what we knew to be an empty seat so we could at least see what would happen next.

            That would be Act Two, the Motley Mix. Actually, this act was more fun. Once the requisite numbers from West Side Story were gotten out of the way, the rest of the evening’s singing turned out to be toe tapping. There were three Irish songs, then four spirituals complete with embarrassing dialect (I’s headed for the river), these last in arrangements by Mark Hayes that differed very little from those by, let’s say (since they were virtually identical), Copland. There was a very funny aria by a master student (one of three such students, the other two best not mentioned) about a bride preparing for her wedding (‘a tiara, you call this a tiara’) which ranted at one point about the weak dwarves hired to carry her train: give me midgets with muscle, she sang. Since this piece was not listed on the non-program, I don’t know who wrote it, but I’d love to hear it again.

            Next, a group of white singers billed as the Dublin Gospel Choir came on stage and sang Lean on Me and Swing Low Sweet Chariot, thinly but tunefully. After the choir, back to Donna and crew, who finally got around to Copland himself. There was a credible if gimmicky Boatman by the only cold-free professional singer of the evening, a tenor in a white tuxedo jacket and a silk waistcoat with lounge-lizard hair and an Ezio Pinza voice, followed by a full-cast finale of The Promise of Living that hadn’t quite reached the work-in-progress phase; evidently they were rehearsing for the real concert that would take place in South Carolina next March. We were all, of course, invited to attend.

As for the unnamed American, she managed a perfectly reasonable suite of folk songs in a deep mezzo voice that didn’t match the soprano billing (but of course this was only verbally confirmed) so that it wasn’t possible to know if the singing was deep because of the cold or because this was her normal, no-cold voice. In general the idea seems to have been that the American was fronting for what was really an opportunity for singers from her master class to perform in front of an audience. In other words, the main singer was never going to do much singing, cold or no cold. I also saw this phenomenon last summer, when I attended a concert headlined by Dawn Upshaw, who barely opened her mouth to sing during the evening (and she didn’t have a cold) but instead introduced a series of young singers, the final one refusing to relinquish the stage despite the increasingly restive audience. My main memory of that performance was that the endless song set meant I missed my train and nearly didn’t get home at all.           

     

            

The other theatre in Dublin

You enter The New Theatre through a bookshop with a coffee and wine bar along its back wall. As your eyes adjust to the dimmer light, you see a  theatre with a 66-seat house, great lighting, matching seats, a large booth and a stage the size of a bus stop. This has got to be one of the sweetest set-ups anywhere: browse for books, buy a coffee and take your seat for the show. This complex, if such a compact space can be called that, is in Temple Bar, the once tawdry but now too-hip-for-thou area of Dublin between the River Liffey and the Grafton Street shopping mecca. Temple Bar is a magnet for clubbers every night of the week.

            This arrangement—bookstore/coffee bar/theatre—was evidently originally funded by a businessman who had communist leanings, as improbable as that sounds. The bookshop—Connolly’s—did have a strong political section, but it also had fiction, mystery, essays, and, like every Irish bookstore I’ve ever entered, a good selection of books on Irish history. This is one of the very good aspects of Irish culture: any bookstore you walk into, no matter how modest, will have its Irish section. I don’t know whether this is a nod to tourism, but I suspect it has at least as much to do with pride of country as it does with sales to visitors.

            Una and I were at the New Theatre to see a rarely performed play by Brendan Behan. He is an Irish playwright and novelist whose reputation for drunken carousing nearly overpowered his legacy as a writer, in the tradition of so many other hard-living artists here. The play was The Quare Fellow, first produced at an equally small and experimental theatre in Dublin in 1954. One reason the play is not performed more is the size of the cast, which even Broadway would find daunting. As the director’s notes say, there are 28 speaking roles and a hanging. The director, if that’s who was responsible, has wisely cut the roles to 13, still an enormous cast, particularly for such a small stage.

            The Quare Fellow takes place in Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison in the 1950s, on the eve of a hanging. The prisoner to be hanged—the quare fellow—sings to us from behind the set; we only see the light from his cell, never him. The tension of the hanging is palpable among the prisoners. The characters are unsurprising—the gruff old convict with a heart of gold, the newbie who tries to hang himself, the tender youth trying to act rough, the guard who has seen too much—but the play gets under your skin as you are drawn to the fate of this faceless man whose Irish songs reverberate across the theatre. The actors (except for the hangman) are good, all with the standard bios (theatre credits, films, BBC4); one has been acting for less than two years, but the rest have solid credentials. The singer, whose name is Jer O’Leary is the only one with any serious resumé: his deep voice and the craggy face he reveals at the curtain call have been in every Irish film ever made in his lifetime, it would appear from his bio.

            On the way home Una and I daydream about running a place like that, with branches in Ireland and California, as if combining three fast-disappearing institutions under one roof could somehow make them all viable. 

Archaeology

Matthew and Geraldine are archaeologists. Matt is a very old friend of my very old friend Marina’s partner David, although Matt and David have not seen each other for years, the circumstances of their lives keeping them on very separate islands. Matt came to the small island, Ireland, studied, fell in love, married, had two daughters, got a teaching post, moved near the river, joined a bluegrass band, stayed. David didn’t leave the large island. He kept to California, although he moved further north, worked from home, composed music, fell in love, inherited a stepson, moved to New Mexico, settled in the desert. Stayed.

Every July Matt and Geraldine spend the month digging. For the past two years they have had digs at Bective Abbey on the border between the East and the Midlands. This abbey is the second oldest Cistercian abbey in Ireland, after Mellifont, the mother ship of abbeys. It dates from the mid-twelfth century, which puts it in the Anglo-Norman period. The original church was enormous by any standards, a tribute to God and a place of worship for the several hundred monks who lived there. There is a 15^th-century square tower, built for defense purposes, and, after the abbey was dissolved in 1543, there are the chimney and window updates when the monastery became an Elizabethan mansion.

            Geraldine (it is her project) is not digging in the abbey grounds. Instead, she is investigating the residual evidence of life around the abbey. The Cistercians were an order that used lay brothers to do the daily work of the abbey, the tilling, the animal husbandry, the cutting of fuel, the hauling of water. The monks’ job was to pray, but of course they also ate, and this would be courtesy of their less well-fed help on the outside of the abbey, the same pattern we see everywhere in the world, from the tip of Africa to the missions along the El Camino Real.

            The goal is to dig below the lowest surface of human impact. Once they get to virgin soil, they have hit bottom in the best sense of the phrase; they have excavated the entire human impact on the land. The dig includes a number of students, many of them from American universities, who come to get practical experience for the twenty days of the dig. The most conscientious of them wield the shovels and the picks, steer the wheelbarrows across the uneven grass, sift through the detritus tossed by the diggers in search of the odd bone or bit of pottery. As everywhere, there are the usual cohorts of students whose motives for being there are not entirely connected with archaeology. There are the talkers, the poseurs, the ones who brownnose by lending their gloves to the newcomer when Geraldine asks, then, when Geraldine is out of hearing, ask for them back. Besides students there are many volunteers who come, some for the day, some for most of the month. There is a man with his two boys; they are Irish speakers, and it is wonderful to hear them talking in that language that sounds like no other language I have heard. There are dogs running about, and friends who show up right at teatime with no intention of being put to work. Families come, say hi, look in the find buckets, then have a picnic on the abbey lawn. Visitors drop by; someone’ But despite all this the dig gets done, and at the end of it everyone will spend the final day filling in the holes. The goal is to leave no trace, but of course this dig will leave marks just like the ones that are being investigated now, so that in a few hundred years it is easy to imagine a group of academics puzzling over why these clean, straight trenches were dug in precisely the locations they were.

            For my induction into the archaeology brigade Geraldine hands me a bucket, shovel and trowel, points to a section of wall along one of the three main cuttings, and tells me to keep my face straight and my bottom clean, which are the cardinal rules of digging. For the next two or three of hours I scrape at the wall with the trowel, hoping I am not destroying critical evidence. This is the kind of obsessive job that I can throw myself into; I have to keep reminding myself that I can’t stay all week, or even all day, to work on this wall. From the next cutting Matt asks me if I’ve found anything yet. When I admit that I have not, he tells me I will be fired if I don’t come up with anything by tea break. Five or ten minutes later I do find a small shard of pottery, the ribbed decoration along the edge clearly visible. By lunchtime my treasures have grown to include several shards of pottery, a small piece of bone, a nail and a lovely bit of cow molar. These wonders go into a find bucket, numbered with the area of the cutting. The numbers will be recorded on a map, and every inch of the cutting will be photographed. In our cutting the major find was a small bit of broken chisel, about 3 inches long and maybe half an inch wide. The exact position of this plum was measured and the chisel itself put into a plastic bag like the evidence bags the police are always pulling out on cop shows.

            Matt and Geraldine’s two daughters work with them on the site, making this a true family adventure. At dinner they share stories of the various students and volunteers who come to the dig. This dig is Helen’s fifth, although last year she was on the site for only a few days; she was otherwise occupied with watching Americans, presumably young ones in need of a babysitter. She is about to go on a six-month trek in the Ecuadorean rain forest and has just been kitted out with a long list of necessary supplies like instant-dry underwear and collapsible water bottles. Nora is off to university in England in the fall. She is passionate about radio; her dream job is to be a producer for BBC4. She is hoping to do a semester abroad on the West Coast in 2012. Nora is the health and safety point person, a job that involves, among other tasks, showing Americans a picture of nettles and organizing the tea squad. She has prepared a detailed outline of how to prepare the tea, including an instruction for the tea person to stand at the edge of the field near the cuttings and yell TEEEAAAAA. This happens three times a day, at 11, 1, and 3:30.

Tea is served in battered metal pots. It is thick and requires lots of milk. We drink from ceramic mugs—tea is never served in paper cups in Ireland, although the idea of coffee to go is beginning to catch on. There are loads of biscuits to go with the tea. Geraldine said that on this dig she noticed early on that the biscuits were disappearing at an alarming rate. They soon discovered that, in an eerie echo of Cistercian practice with the lay brothers, a woman who was offering a B&B service to many of the students was not feeding them adequately. They were getting cold cereal for breakfast, jam sandwiches for lunch, and a thin mixture of rice and curry sauce for dinner. Later they would see the woman and her daughter dining on lamb shanks. New rooms were sorted out for the students and this Dickensian scenario was quickly rectified, with the side benefit that the biscuits are now lasting longer.

I drive back through Trim, passing the castle and their own beautiful abbey ruins. I haven’t had much reason to take the route that I took nearly every day when I first got to Ireland last year, as I made the 45-minute drive between my tiny lodging in Trim and the house where my mother was born. I had forgotten how lush the roads were, but the route was entirely familiar, as if I had known it forever.

Sunday

As in the States, Sunday here is a confused day. The holy go to church, of course. In this country, church means mass; something like 95% of people in the country, including immigrants, are Catholic. When I arrived last year my cousin told me that a stranger attending a Catholic mass anywhere in Ireland would not be noticed, but a stranger attending a Church of Ireland service would raise eyebrows. And so it is.

Today I went to church in Carbury, which would be my parish if I had one. I cannot swallow the Jesus message, but I am confirmed in the church, having not had much choice as a teenager, and know the ritual. Carbury is not the closest church to me, but the people I know who are churchgoers attend there, and I like the smallness of it.. It’s odd that I can look around and identify a good third of the congregation and greet most of those by name after the service. It’s odder that I am related to several of them. In California, when I took my father to church ten minutes from my house, I knew no one, and was only related to him.

            The sermon today was about Mary and Martha. In the Bible (I know this because the appropriate passage was read from the lay pulpit before the sermon) it says that Martha got impatient with Mary because, while Martha was running about organizing the tea for Jesus, who had shown up unexpectedly, Mary was merely sitting as his feet, listening. The Bible’s version is that Mary was the holier one; poor Martha, like women everywhere, was disparaged for her practicality and her impatience at being left to do all the work. The priest delivering the sermon was an old-school Irish pastor; it was easy to get the impression that we were keeping him from his dinner, which was getting cold while he was forced by circumstance to be in this inconsequential church, reading out the prayers. So I was surprised when he addressed the Mary and Martha parable, and even more surprised when, from the high pulpit, the one signifying the extreme authority of the church, he defended Martha. How, he asked, could Mary have the time to sit at Jesus’ feet if Martha weren’t there in the background, fussing with the cups and saucers? Now this priest might very well have been reading someone else’s text—I suspect that the notion of the minister gnawing the end of his pencil as he writes the weekly sermon died with David Niven in The Minister’s Wife—but the sentiment was very 21^st century.

            After the service the priest did hurry off, driven away in a Mini by a church volunteer, one of the legion of modern-day Marthas who keep the church afloat. A few of the older parishioners hung around in front of the church; most hurried off back to farm work, to family time, some to substantial Sunday midday dinners (meat, potato and two veg followed by pudding) in the local pubs.

 After church I was going to head back to the Slieveblooms for a walk, but the weather was very wet and there had been heavy rains overnight. The walk would take place, but I was not equipped for the wet. You need gaiters, high boots, walking sticks and other paraphernalia that I don’t have here. When the weather calmed later in the afternoon I headed down to Kildare and two major attractions there, the Japanese Gardens and the Irish National Stud. There is no explanation for how this odd duo got together, but the slogan is, Where Strength and Beauty live as one. Actually, there are three sights here, since, tucked into the center of the National Stud is a second garden, a millennial reimagining of a seventh century ‘natural environment’. This is dedicated to St Fiachra, patron saint of gardeners. So there is the small but jam-packed Japanese Garden, a hodgepodge of tunnels, hilly pathways, an empty tea house, a wooden bridge or two, some Western perennials, and lots of water features. We are meant to travel along the Life of Man [sic] from the Gate of Oblivion to the Gateway to Eternity, with many a short stony climb in between. The grounds are immaculate save for the inevitable crisp package tossed into the stream. But the dense foliage, the clipped trees and emphasis on layers of green, which the Irish understand so incredibly well, make for a pleasant walk even in the rain.

            Then there is the National Stud. This institution was founded in 1900 when the country was greatly concerned that its treasured Irish racehorse bloodline would disappear without intervention. Up to this point mares were covered by travelling stallions, which were brought to towns on specific dates advertised on fliers. The mares were brought to these stallions, then taken back to the farm to give birth a year or so later. I suspect there would be many a heated discussion if, after a few weeks, the stallions were found not to have done their duty.

Since Ireland was still a colony when the Stud was donated to the state it was left to the British to continue the place until it was handed over to the Irish in the middle of World War II, when it no doubt became burdensome for the British to maintain it. Today it is still a stud farm, although judging by the small number of stallions dotted around the pastures the government is having as much trouble supporting this endeavor as it is underwriting most of its responsibilities. Still, the idea of allowing the pubic to wander through the fields and paddocks of a real horse farm, watching the stallions graze and seeing the products, if not ever the actual acts, of their activities in the adjacent fields, the foals tottering on their absurdly long and spindly legs, rarely venturing far from their highly protective mothers.

These days the idea of needing to protect the Irish bloodstock is out-of-date. Ireland is chockablock with highly successful breeders who own huge and gorgeous stud farms, particularly in the flat grass-rich acreage of the Midlands. The National Stud is for all intents and purposes a museum, a look behind the scenes for the rest of us, and like all museums everywhere, appears to be struggling for its existence, since there aren’t enough people interested in wandering through a few paddocks on a wet Sunday afternoon to catch a glimpse of a few good horses and their gangly offspring.

The dead

In the pocket cemetery down the road from my house there is a Celtic cross that honors two men ‘who were executed for their love of country’ in the 1798 rebellion; the cross was put there about ten years ago. RIP, it says; God save Ireland. These kinds of markers are found again and again all over Ireland. They are a way of sanctifying what were claimed at the time as outlaw deaths. In the town square at Kildare there is a marker that honors seven men who were executed in 1922; most of the men are 19. These men fought against British colonialism; most likely they belonged to the IRA. Their violent deaths at the hands of the government prevented them from being buried in consecrated ground; when the battles were won, the families found ways to mark their sons’ passing.

In an eerie parallel, this week the worst road accident in Ireland’s history took place in Donegal. A village on the peninsula lost 8 men. Seven of them were under the age of 22. It’s as if the savage wars of an earlier time have been transposed to the roads here, where every road death is national news. These particular deaths, though, have devastated the nation. The pictures of the young men are on the front page of every newspaper. On the radio each of the 8 funerals is covered, with excerpts from the homily and statements of bereavement by the family. Today the Irish Times has a signed opinion piece on the front page underneath a photo of yet another coffin. The driver of the car with the 7 young men in it is the only survivor; he is intensive care, and no one is speculating about how this accident took place. Grief comes first, then blame. The 8^th man, who was in his sixties and was driving the other car involved in the accident, seems to have had so little presence that even his priest suggested that he was a gentle man, as far as he knew him. A bachelor, the man farmed and played bingo. He was returning from a bingo game the night he was killed. The only thing anyone remembers about him that night was that he won €65, which would have been a big take for him. No one said that he never got to spend it.

In Donegal death is still marked, in the traditional manner, by a wake. The hearse collects the remains from the hospital and takes the body to its home, where people come to pay respects until the hearse again picks the body up and drives it to the church. After the service the body is carried on four men’s shoulders to the cemetery. In this overwhelmingly Catholic country cremation is not an option; the number of cemeteries dotting the landscape can make it seem as if the number of dead is also overwhelming.

One morning walk takes me past Drumcooley cemetery. I’m often with other people on this walk, but last week I was on my own, and decided to stop at the cemetery. The day was overcast—unsettled, they would say here—and the cemetery, on a slight rise, was windy and desolate. Gravestones here quickly give up their markings; the weather creates eventual anonymity, tangible proof that time erases all of our memories. Among these pitted headstones, there was the most poignant grave marking I have ever seen: two sticks forming half a cross, stuck in the ground in a bare space in the cemetery. The letters are painted in white paint except for the day, which is a press-down number 5. Shane, says the crosspiece, painted in white paint. RIP died 5^th Feb, reads the vertical strip. Shane’s name is in parentheses: (Shane). How deep must the mourning be for the person who took the trouble to paint this memorial and plant it in a cemetery. If the body was not on hallowed ground, the marker at least would be. 

Chapter 15, in which I ride a horse

When I arrived at Ballybeg, in Tipperary, Erica took me to meet a good friend and neighbor of hers; she and Simon would be away for the week and, since I was staying in their amazing place, she wanted to be sure I had someone to phone if I should run into difficulty.

            Breda has the wiry body of a lifelong athlete, but these days she lives to ride. She has just retired from teaching at the earliest age she can here, 55. When we got to her house she was celebrating her first-place win in a grueling competition that included dressage and cross-country. Her horse is Levi, aged 22. Breda says that their combined age must make them far older than any other pair in the competition. As Erica and I were leaving, Breda suddenly asked me if I wanted to go riding. I said yes before I had time to think about it. My allergies have been very calm this summer, and when would I ever be likely to get another chance to ride in Ireland?

            Tuesday morning I headed down Simon and Erica’s terrifying boreen to Breda’s. She fed me a huge breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon rashers, grilled tomato and toast, and then we headed out to get Levi into the horse trailer and drive off to the woods. Although Breda has two horses, she was leaving Bailey at home today and would walk with me as I rode. This is standard procedure for Breda when she doesn’t know the rider, and goodness knows I hadn’t been on a horse for so long that I wasn’t sure I could manage to stay on, or even to get on for that matter.

            Breda herself only began riding when she was in her 30s. In this island of the horse-mad, it is still unusual for someone to be so involved with horses in the absence of any family background. Still, Breda is obviously an athlete through and through. Her husband Greg is even more active; at nearly 60 he windsurfs, paraglides, skis, plays squash and hikes. Today he is away in Swtizerland on a two-week rock-climbing trip. When Breda bought her first horse (Allegra, who died at 29) she was upset that her riding in the winter was curtailed by the dark; she built a paddock and put lights in it so she could ride after work.

            Once Levi was in the trailer we drove to the wooded area just below one of the most famous spots in Ireland. The Vee is a spot in the Knockmealdown Mountains from which it would seem that you could see across the entire island on a clear day. It’s one of the main destinations for hill walkers here. Our destination was more prosaic: the forest land at the foot of the mountains, now in plantation, as is much of Ireland since its wonderful forests were systematically denuded over many centuries.

            Levi is a dream horse. He has plenty of spirit but seemingly endless patience with a rookie rider like me. But if I was expecting an easy amble rather in the style of the horseback rides on rented animals that were nearly my whole experience with horses, Breda was having none of it. She had me going up and down a few (admittedly very low) ridges, practicing leaning forward, then back, reminding me to keep my heels down, teaching me to hold the reins, to make my control clear to the long-suffering Levi. At one point she had me trot a few times while she called out the cadence of up-hold-down as I tried not to simply bounce in the saddle. I rode for an hour, until I knew that if I didn’t stop I would be sore for a week. When I slid down off the horse my legs nearly buckled underneath me, but the exhilaration of being on Levi would stay with me for the rest of the day.

            After the ride we drove up into The Vee just as the rain started. The view was clouded but I still felt I was seeing halfway across Ireland.

Local entertainment

The Matchmaker is an iconic play by the Irish playwright John B. Keane. Although people don’t particularly know much about Keane, if you mention the play there isn’t a person who can’t name the author. Keane, who wrote about 20 plays in his lifetime, died in 2002 at the age of 74. His best-known play is probably The Field, but The Matchmaker comes close. It is a two-person play about life in rural Ireland in the 1950s, although for some bizarre reason this production included the word computer in the script. The entire play is done as a series of letters between the matchmaker, an elderly country man who is widowed during the play (we never see his wife), and the various objects of his matchmaking. The dialogue is suggestive, lurching toward bawdy, but a child would suffer terminal boredom rather than shock if he or she should happen to be dragged to a performance by her parents.

            Sadly, the boredom would have set in very early in this particular revival at the Tivoli Theatre in Dublin. The Tivoli is on its own in an unglamorous neighborhood in Dublin, across the river from the center of Irish theatre obeisance, The Abbey. It is a worn-down place with an abandoned air. For this production there was no program and the concession area was locked up tight.

            The two actors who performed are as iconic as the play itself. Mary McEvoy and Mick Lally were the couple in a long-running series on Irish TV. Given the subject matter and the density of Lally’s accent, the series would not be likely to have arrived in America; Ballykissangel it wasn’t. But they are beloved by Irish audiences, and certainly have deserved their place in the pantheon of top Irish performers. The play, with its long monologish letters, must be massively challenging to memorize. Lally tackled this problem by not bothering. He sat at a table with the script to his side. Every time he paused and said, Now, we knew that he would turn to the script for prompting about the next section of his speech. Every once in awhile he would remember that he was supposed to be in character and would pump his arms suggestively or make another sort of half-hearted gesture. This would all be bad enough, but I swear the man had been drinking. He delivered his lines in quick slurs, with none of the cadence of Irish speech that makes listening to so much talking such a pleasant experience. To top all of this off, Lally chose to mug for the audience when he went into one of his five or six characters, pulling a fedora down over his forehead and putting on a goofy expression. The friend who invited me said at intermission that she was concerned about my understanding Lally’s accent; it would have been fine if that had been the only difficulty.

            Beside this phoned-in excuse for a performance, McEvoy looked even more brilliant. Since she wasn’t so tied to her table (she did look at the script when the light went off her but she never read her lines), she was able to stand downstage and actually act. One recurring character in particular, a twice-widowed woman who only wanted someone lively to bed her, was especially effective.

            The best part of the evening was the discovery of a restaurant, Just Off Francis, improbably around the corner from the theatre. I sat in the narrow café eating seafood risotto and soaking in Dublin, happy to be in a city for a change.

            Two nights later I was in a car being driven to Mullingar, a town larger and more dynamic than Edenderry but otherwise without much distinction. Una, her daughter Emma and I were heading to the movies. There is an ironic disconnect between the passion the Irish have for cinema and the number of places where they can see them. Films (the Irish pronounce this word as if it had two syllables—fill-im) feed an inclination for the romantic and provide a window to elsewhere, away from this island; in practical terms I suppose they connect those (few) that are still here to those (many) who have left.

            This night out was going to include tea, meaning an early and light dinner, and shopping, Penney’s for Emma and Marks & Spencer for Una and me. The movie we were seeing was Irish produced. It is written and directed by Ken Waldrop. His & Hers is a loosely linked series of conversations with Irish girls and women. The point of view is set with the proverb at the start of the film:

An Irish man loves his girlfriend the most, his wife the best, and his mother the longest.

The first image is of a diapered baby being set down in a crib by male hands. The baby becomes a toddler, then a girl, then a teenager. The girls talk about their fathers (me da, they say here), then their boyfriends, their fiancés, their husbands, their sons, then their fathers again. They become widows, both weepy and resilient. Finally, they are old women on their own. It is a poignant and surprisingly powerful film, and even though the women all speak in relationship to their men, you are never left with any sense of their helplessness or dependence. In fact it is quite the opposite; these women know who they are. This is not a film about inclusion: there are no divorced women, no fatherless daughters, no childless women (or at least none whose identity revolves around childlessness). 

All of the girls and women are from the Irish Midlands, where Waldrop grew up. One, a doctor’s wife and local councilwoman, is from Edenderry. But we don’t know this from the film; none of the speakers are identified in these serial conversations, and they are listed only by name, in order of appearance, at the end. Still, they endure in your memory as they do now on the screen. It is a beautiful film, and a tribute to the women as well as to the man who had the foresight and perhaps the audacity to ask these women to talk to the camera.

radio voices

rain, heavy rain, mist, fog, breeze, further rain, wind, more heavy rain, flooding, showers, thundery showers, persistent showers, persistent rain, wet, damp, rain

Tea twice

The K Club is a five-star hotel surrounded by two golf courses favored, according to the hotel literature, by the likes of Tiger Wood, still a huge hero here despite his recent disgraces. The hotel is a great house on steroids, obviously added onto any number of times until it resembles an unruly Victorian mansion block, with just a few too many turrets, bays, and cupolas. Topping this neat sprawl are several gangly satellite towers that would look more at home on a small government’s intelligence headquarters than on this self-consciously country pile. Still, the hospitality is pure Irish, even though the wait staff appears to be entirely Asian.

 The place is owned by a man named Smurfit, an art collector of some renown who, like all wealthy Irish businessmen, breeds horses. Smurfit is besotted with Jack Yeats; there is a Jack Yeats room in the hotel with a dozen or so of Yeats’ paintings, along with various letters from and tributes to him. Most of the paintings are in Yeats’ exuberant and wildly colored style, but there are two placid seascapes in which the paint is controlled in a very different manner. Two small paintings of horses are the best of the lot. Otherwise the other notable painting on our informal tour was a Modigliani on the wall outside the very smart restaurant (named after a stallion that supposedly is the grandfather, so to speak, of all the race horses in Ireland). The receptionist tells us that, while most of the art is original, there are a few copies of paintings elsewhere in the hotel, for who would expect to find a real Monet in their hotel room?

            Despite the sprawling exterior, the scale of the rooms inside is intimate. This is not your average Marriott. Guests should feel as if they are stepping into a friend’s opulent but cozy sitting room. Even on a sunny day in July there is a fire in the small grate. The chairs are people-sized and the reception desk is tucked away, the person behind it nearly invisible behind the tall counter. The concierge desk is empty this afternoon; given the few people in the public areas of the hotel it is safe to assume that guests are in short supply right now.

We are a motley crew heading to the tearoom, three and a half generations of Ballindoolin residents and me. Esther, the matriarch, organized the trip. Her daughter Trina, pregnant with her third child, has her towheaded overalled toddler William in hand. William is possibly the best behaved toddler ever to be seen in public. He loves going out, and has already developed the calm demeanor of his father, Norman, whom he adores. Zara is Trina’s oldest, and William’s half sister. She is studying fashion design in a university in England but is home for the summer. She is dressed in a light summer frock and black velvet heels and looks entirely at home in these surroundings. I hover at the edges of this welcoming family, happy to be in their presence.

We have our tea on the back patio overlooking the Italianate garden. The food arrives on two three-tiered towers, the cut sandwiches on the bottom, sweets in the middle and scones on top. Esther and Trina are experts on scones and know a good deal about food in general, especially desserts; they run a teashop at Ballindoolin, adjacent to their walled garden. As they taste the various sweets they guess the ingredients. The scones come in for serious scrutiny. Esther says that they have a very high level of fat content. They crumble beautifully, and William has a great time creating a small mountain of scone crumbs that the crows will feast on after we leave the table. Later Trina finds a magazine put out by the K Club that includes some recipes, but as she reads them to us in the car she realizes that the recipes have not been modified for quantity (‘Take four pounds of butter’) and are seriously deficient in other areas; if you followed the scone recipe, for instance, you might miss the fact that flour is required. Esther points out that anyone staying at the K Club would simply hand the recipe to their cook, who would certainly know better, so it really didn’t matter.

After tea we wander down to the River Liffey which passes through the grounds, undoubtedly diverted in its course at some point in the nineteenth century to lend authenticity to the garden. A single swan floats and preens on its surface. Behind us the occasional golfer walks by pulling his golf bag.

No one is in a hurry to leave. Back home Norman will have done the milking, and Esther has already prepared the meal she’ll serve to her garden interns when she gets back. William never fusses, not once; he’ll even stay awake on the car ride home, then slip into bed for the night. I’m content to soak it all in. I take William with me to show him the Yeats’ paintings, knowing he’ll recognize the horses. Esther and I check out the menus at the two restaurants, thinking that we might just be able to afford the table d’hôte menu at the cheaper one; we discuss trying to organize a small group of people to eat there, as the receptionist has told us that we could schedule a private tour of the art with the head barman.

As I make the short drive back to my house from Ballindoolin, I realize that I am extraordinarily relaxed, with a sense of well being washing over me even in the car. This, I realize, is what money can sometimes buy.

Tea twice

The K Club is a five-star hotel surrounded by two golf courses favored, according to the hotel literature, by the likes of Tiger Wood, still a huge hero here despite his recent disgraces. The hotel is a great house on steroids, obviously added onto any number of times until it resembles an unruly Victorian mansion block, with just a few too many turrets, bays, and cupolas. Topping this neat sprawl are several gangly satellite towers that would look more at home on a small government’s intelligence headquarters than on this self-consciously country pile. Still, the hospitality is pure Irish, even though the wait staff appears to be entirely Asian.

 The place is owned by a man named Smurfit, an art collector of some renown who, like all wealthy Irish businessmen, breeds horses. Smurfit is besotted with Jack Yeats; there is a Jack Yeats room in the hotel with a dozen or so of Yeats’ paintings, along with various letters from and tributes to him. Most of the paintings are in Yeats’ exuberant and wildly colored style, but there are two placid seascapes in which the paint is controlled in a very different manner. Two small paintings of horses are the best of the lot. Otherwise the other notable painting on our informal tour was a Modigliani on the wall outside the very smart restaurant (named after a stallion that supposedly is the grandfather, so to speak, of all the race horses in Ireland). The receptionist tells us that, while most of the art is original, there are a few copies of paintings elsewhere in the hotel, for who would expect to find a real Monet in their hotel room?

            Despite the sprawling exterior, the scale of the rooms inside is intimate. This is not your average Marriott. Guests should feel as if they are stepping into a friend’s opulent but cozy sitting room. Even on a sunny day in July there is a fire in the small grate. The chairs are people-sized and the reception desk is tucked away, the person behind it nearly invisible behind the tall counter. The concierge desk is empty this afternoon; given the few people in the public areas of the hotel it is safe to assume that guests are in short supply right now.

We are a motley crew heading to the tearoom, three and a half generations of Ballindoolin residents and me. Esther, the matriarch, organized the trip. Her daughter Trina, pregnant with her third child, has her towheaded overalled toddler William in hand. William is possibly the best behaved toddler ever to be seen in public. He loves going out, and has already developed the calm demeanor of his father, Norman, whom he adores. Zara is Trina’s oldest, and William’s half sister. She is studying fashion design in a university in England but is home for the summer. She is dressed in a light summer frock and black velvet heels and looks entirely at home in these surroundings. I hover at the edges of this welcoming family, happy to be in their presence.

We have our tea on the back patio overlooking the Italianate garden. The food arrives on two three-tiered towers, the cut sandwiches on the bottom, sweets in the middle and scones on top. Esther and Trina are experts on scones and know a good deal about food in general, especially desserts; they run a teashop at Ballindoolin, adjacent to their walled garden. As they taste the various sweets they guess the ingredients. The scones come in for serious scrutiny. Esther says that they have a very high level of fat content. They crumble beautifully, and William has a great time creating a small mountain of scone crumbs that the crows will feast on after we leave the table. Later Trina finds a magazine put out by the K Club that includes some recipes, but as she reads them to us in the car she realizes that the recipes have not been modified for quantity (‘Take four pounds of butter’) and are seriously deficient in other areas; if you followed the scone recipe, for instance, you might miss the fact that flour is required. Esther points out that anyone staying at the K Club would simply hand the recipe to their cook, who would certainly know better, so it really didn’t matter.

After tea we wander down to the River Liffey which passes through the grounds, undoubtedly diverted in its course at some point in the nineteenth century to lend authenticity to the garden. A single swan floats and preens on its surface. Behind us the occasional golfer walks by pulling his golf bag.

No one is in a hurry to leave. Back home Norman will have done the milking, and Esther has already prepared the meal she’ll serve to her garden interns when she gets back. William never fusses, not once; he’ll even stay awake on the car ride home, then slip into bed for the night. I’m content to soak it all in. I take William with me to show him the Yeats’ paintings, knowing he’ll recognize the horses. Esther and I check out the menus at the two restaurants, thinking that we might just be able to afford the table d’hôte menu at the cheaper one; we discuss trying to organize a small group of people to eat there, as the receptionist has told us that we could schedule a private tour of the art with the head barman.

As I make the short drive back to my house from Ballindoolin, I realize that I am extraordinarily relaxed, with a sense of well being washing over me even in the car. This, I realize, is what money can sometimes buy.

Tea twice

The K Club is a five-star hotel surrounded by two golf courses favored, according to the hotel literature, by the likes of Tiger Wood, still a huge hero here despite his recent disgraces. The hotel is a great house on steroids, obviously added onto any number of times until it resembles an unruly Victorian mansion block, with just a few too many turrets, bays, and cupolas. Topping this neat sprawl are several gangly satellite towers that would look more at home on a small government’s intelligence headquarters than on this self-consciously country pile. Still, the hospitality is pure Irish, even though the wait staff appears to be entirely Asian.

 The place is owned by a man named Smurfit, an art collector of some renown who, like all wealthy Irish businessmen, breeds horses. Smurfit is besotted with Jack Yeats; there is a Jack Yeats room in the hotel with a dozen or so of Yeats’ paintings, along with various letters from and tributes to him. Most of the paintings are in Yeats’ exuberant and wildly colored style, but there are two placid seascapes in which the paint is controlled in a very different manner. Two small paintings of horses are the best of the lot. Otherwise the other notable painting on our informal tour was a Modigliani on the wall outside the very smart restaurant (named after a stallion that supposedly is the grandfather, so to speak, of all the race horses in Ireland). The receptionist tells us that, while most of the art is original, there are a few copies of paintings elsewhere in the hotel, for who would expect to find a real Monet in their hotel room?

            Despite the sprawling exterior, the scale of the rooms inside is intimate. This is not your average Marriott. Guests should feel as if they are stepping into a friend’s opulent but cozy sitting room. Even on a sunny day in July there is a fire in the small grate. The chairs are people-sized and the reception desk is tucked away, the person behind it nearly invisible behind the tall counter. The concierge desk is empty this afternoon; given the few people in the public areas of the hotel it is safe to assume that guests are in short supply right now.

We are a motley crew heading to the tearoom, three and a half generations of Ballindoolin residents and me. Esther, the matriarch, organized the trip. Her daughter Trina, pregnant with her third child, has her towheaded overalled toddler William in hand. William is possibly the best behaved toddler ever to be seen in public. He loves going out, and has already developed the calm demeanor of his father, Norman, whom he adores. Zara is Trina’s oldest, and William’s half sister. She is studying fashion design in a university in England but is home for the summer. She is dressed in a light summer frock and black velvet heels and looks entirely at home in these surroundings. I hover at the edges of this welcoming family, happy to be in their presence.

We have our tea on the back patio overlooking the Italianate garden. The food arrives on two three-tiered towers, the cut sandwiches on the bottom, sweets in the middle and scones on top. Esther and Trina are experts on scones and know a good deal about food in general, especially desserts; they run a teashop at Ballindoolin, adjacent to their walled garden. As they taste the various sweets they guess the ingredients. The scones come in for serious scrutiny. Esther says that they have a very high level of fat content. They crumble beautifully, and William has a great time creating a small mountain of scone crumbs that the crows will feast on after we leave the table. Later Trina finds a magazine put out by the K Club that includes some recipes, but as she reads them to us in the car she realizes that the recipes have not been modified for quantity (‘Take four pounds of butter’) and are seriously deficient in other areas; if you followed the scone recipe, for instance, you might miss the fact that flour is required. Esther points out that anyone staying at the K Club would simply hand the recipe to their cook, who would certainly know better, so it really didn’t matter.

After tea we wander down to the River Liffey which passes through the grounds, undoubtedly diverted in its course at some point in the nineteenth century to lend authenticity to the garden. A single swan floats and preens on its surface. Behind us the occasional golfer walks by pulling his golf bag.

No one is in a hurry to leave. Back home Norman will have done the milking, and Esther has already prepared the meal she’ll serve to her garden interns when she gets back. William never fusses, not once; he’ll even stay awake on the car ride home, then slip into bed for the night. I’m content to soak it all in. I take William with me to show him the Yeats’ paintings, knowing he’ll recognize the horses. Esther and I check out the menus at the two restaurants, thinking that we might just be able to afford the table d’hôte menu at the cheaper one; we discuss trying to organize a small group of people to eat there, as the receptionist has told us that we could schedule a private tour of the art with the head barman.

As I make the short drive back to my house from Ballindoolin, I realize that I am extraordinarily relaxed, with a sense of well being washing over me even in the car. This, I realize, is what money can sometimes buy.

Tea

Sunday is a day for walks, and in this area the closest walks are in the Slieveblooms, the hill range that is the Irish Midlands’ excuse for mountains. Hill walking here means trekking up and down the higher mountains; in the Slieveblooms the Sunday treks are called more simply walks. No one should be fooled, however, by the gentle sound of these excursions. What the Slieveblooms lack in altitude they make up for in terrain. This past Sunday I met up with a group of 30 or so people who gathered in the car park in the village of Cadamstown. Our leader, Paul, headed us up a gentle rise. Walking on the spongy grass, we were lulled into thinking this might be a pleasant amble along the Silver River. Paul quickly disavowed us of this by plunging into a plantation area of partially cut timber where we tripped and trudged over the hillocks left long ago by the plows while climbing up the side of Spink Mountain. At one point we passed a cottage, now empty, in which a legendary woman named Maree lived in rough circumstances until her death in her late eighties. Paul told us that Maree was known for offering tea to any walker that passed by her door, and that many of them took advantage of this hospitality, no doubt hearing her stories while they drank. We passed two other cabin ruins even higher on the mountain than Maree’s cottage. These stone cottages must have been nearly inaccessible despite the rather arbitrary logging roads that ran through the mountain.

We stayed off the trails for nearly the whole walk, only picking them up at the beginning and the end. The best part was the walk along the riverbed, although in the States we wouldn’t call this narrow stream a river any more than we would call the Slieveblooms mountains. River or stream, it was a gorgeous bit of water, running fast and spilling over several short falls. We forded it half a dozen times or more, and I was again grateful for my dry and sturdy boots and the ash walking stick that someone had kindly fashioned for me last summer in these same mountains (and mad I had forgotten my camera). By the end of the walk nearly all of us were struggling to lift our exhausted legs over the last few stiles.

Back in Cadamstown I decided to have tea before I headed back. My Little Tea & Craft Shop was housed in a simple bungalow right at the curve of the road as you head into Cadamstown, which is itself a tiny blip of a place with a church, a pub and a very pretty mill ruin. The Silver River runs through the village; there are even three or four picnic tables along its bank. I expected to be the only person in the teashop since it was late for tea, nearly 5:30. But when I entered three men were sitting at one of the four tables, chatting with the owner, a straight-backed thin woman with steel-grey crimped hair. One of the men instantly began a conversation with me, and, in the Irish way, had gotten my background and current whereabouts from me within a minute or so. He guessed that I was from Los Angeles, which was a bit surprising, and surmised that I was a writer. He asked how far we had walked, and when I told him we were out for four hours, he said they had been out for six.

As I waited for my tea the conversation the same man asked me how I would feel, as a walker, if there were a wind farm on the ridge. I told him that since a great deal of the area had already been devastated through clearcutting a windfarm would scarcely make much of a difference and would at least be doing something positive for the environment.

After naming a few other potential schemes for the land, the most unlikely being the building of holiday time shares for wealthy Americans, the conversation turned to Maree’s cabin, where, as it happened, the men had ambled and then gone no further. The man, who as it turned out owned all the land on which we had been walking, said that the tea shop owner, who was of course in on the conversation by now, should open up a branch of the shop in the cabin, carrying on the tradition of tea for walkers. No, she said, I have been in this shop for 26 years and I wouldn’t do anything else. After a bit more discussion about the cabin—he would tear it down, he would open a teashop himself, he would turn it into a romantic rental—the subject switched to the bronze chalice that he had found on the site. It was, he claimed, from the first century, and had healing properties. He next named a sum of money that he had been offered for this chalice that was so astronomical that even a gullible person would be skeptical. The chalice was currently locked away, and he would never give it up. No one had seen it, except the two men who were with him, whom he kept turning to for validation, which they cautiously gave (‘It’s like that you did find something up there, alright’); they and the few people who had drunk from it and been miraculously cured of various ailments were the only ones who knew about its power. What did I think, he asked, but before I could tell him he had moved to another subject. The bemused expressions on his friends’ faces never changed, and only one of the two ever opened his mouth except to put a scone in it.

We all left together, me back to Edenderry and they to their home a couple of hours to the southwest, if even that were to be believed. The teashop owner closed her door as we walked away, with the braggart calling out after me to wish me a safe journey home.

Swallow field day

There appears to be a convention of swallows outside my window. In the cool morning air they are performing their characteristic frantic swoops and dives but in numbers far larger than I have seen before. They are performers flying wrecklessly among the trees: a circus of swallows with no one to applaud them but the unimpressed jackdaws and me.

Have I mentioned the cattle?

Yesterday I realized that I hadn’t seen the cattle for at least a day. The pastureland that surrounds my little house on three sides has been rich with cattle since the day I got here; when I arrived I counted close to 50 head. These are not milk cows. They are male cattle being fattened up on the lush green grass that is especially rich in the Irish Midlands. Most of the cattle are the commonest breed, Limousin. This breed ranges in color from light tan to pure black.  They are stolid and big-eared and, like all cattle, have lots of pals. Cattle are not loners; it is rare to see a cow on its own in the pasture. They stay clustered in groups, and if one animal heads off in a new direction the rest are sure to follow. They are also curious; if there is activity anywhere near them the cattle will lumber along to see what is going on.

When I first moved in to the house the cattle gathered around, pushing and shoving to get a better view. The house had been empty for the past several years, although it is highly unlikely that any of these cattle would have been around long enough to know that. Instead it was a matter of new activity where there hadn’t been activity before. They could stand right at the fence line and peer into the house. The cattle would come so close that I could have reached out the sitting room window and touched them if they were standing at the fence that divides their yard from mine, although they would have shied away if I had tried an aggressive move like that.

After awhile I began to suspect that I was seeing the same cattle again and again at the window. I started to write down the ear tag numbers when they stood there and, sure enough, #226 was the most consistent presence. At first I thought he might be especially interested in the radio; I noticed a corollary between my having it on and his standing there. But since the radio was on most times I was in the kitchen perhaps it was just a coincidence, and he instead wanted to study the human up close. After all, he was the one roaming free and I was the one in the small enclosed pen.

            Early one morning a couple of weeks ago I was wakened by a commotion outside. When I looked out the sitting room window I could see an enormous van parked in front of the pasture next door to mine. I had noticed a farmer over there the day before, an unusual sight in that pasture in which I had never seen anyone, animal or human. This time the small pen at the front of the pasture was filled with cattle, and two men with long sticks were yelling and beating the cattle brutally over and over as they moved them up the ramp and into the van. On my side of the pasture the entire herd was crowded into the corner, just over the fence from the commotion. My cattle were highly agitated, pushing each other as usual to get a better vantage point, but this time in a frantic way; the worry poured off of them.

            When the ramp was raised and the van pulled away, two animals were left behind in the pen. I don’t know why this was. My cattle immediately calmed down and began grazing; within a couple of minutes they were ambling back over the rise in the pasture.

            Last week the pasture was topped, a regular occurrence that simply means it is mowed to encourage new grass. Since there is little grazing grass after this happens, the cattle are moved to a different pasture. I’m hoping that is what has happened to my cattle, and that in a week or two they will be back watching me through the window. Fornow the jackdaws have the field to themselves; at dusk their grey ruffs stand out as they pick at their gleanings.