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The Accordion’s Tale

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I wrote down this tale of an accordion looking for a new life, and I told it at a storytelling event in Belfast last November – the wonderful Tenx9 monthly event. The theme was Small World, and so the story started with a classic coincidence that can only happen among Irish people. But the theme managed to fit so well with how the past and future of this family accordion tied deeply with my own time with it and its new chapter now.

My telling of the story was recorded by the BBC Radio Ulster and broadcast in June 2023. You can listen to it here, or read it yourself below.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0fr7t46

Small World

If you’re Irish, you’ll have more than a few stories of mad coincidences and bizarre meetings with people who are connected, somehow, to you. It takes just a few minutes to make the link.

My story tonight starts with one of those “small world moments”.

My family and I were to travel to Canada in the summer– to visit my husband’s family.  Two days before we fly, I’m running around south county Dublin doing last minute jobs. One of those jobs is to call into my local chemist to pick up all the prescriptions I need for the trip.

I get chatting to the woman behind the counter – as you do (cos if you didn’t what would be wrong with you?).

The woman in the chemist is called Carmel and when I tell her we’re off to Alberta for the summer, her face lights up.

  • Oh I love it out there, she tells me. I’ve been to Alberta and BC lots of times over the last 30 years.
  • Have you? I ask.
  • Oh yeah, my sister lives in BC, she says, in Kelowna.
  • I know it, I tell her, I’ve been through a couple of times.

Then I pause, and next thing, I hear myself saying:

  • Your sister wouldn’t be married to a fella called John would she?
  • She is! John, yeah!
  • I think I just met a friend of John’s there, I tell her. Derek. I was at his house like an hour ago. I was telling him I’m off to Canada and he telling me how much he loves Kelowna! And his best friend lives there.
  • Ah sure I’ve known Derek for years, says Carmel, a big smile on her face. You just met him now? How’s that?

And I tell her that I had gone to visit Derek to hand over to him my family’s old piano accordion so he might find a way to pass that on to a Ukrainian musician somewhere in Ireland.

So let me tell you that story, the real story.

When Ukraine was invaded and waves of refugees started to land on our shores, many of us felt an overpowering need to help them. How would we feel about being washed up in a new country, what might we miss from, what could help them feel a little more like themselves in this exile they never expected.

And something drew my eye to the old family accordion that sat on the floor in its hard case outside my bedroom. That’s all it was doing, sitting there, getting bumped into or acting as a receptacle for laundry resting between the hot press and someone’s bedroom. There was no space for the thing under our bed and it wouldn’t survive the damp in the attic.

Every day we looked at it but we didn’t see it. And sure as heck, no one was playing the poor thing.

My parents bought the accordion about 40 years ago when my brother had his “try every instrument” phase. It lasted even less time than the trumpet and the guitar, and joined them in the family’s attic for years. Fast forward 20 years, and I was living in Toronto and had just gotten all into playing traditional music. Irish. The tin whistle wasn’t challenging enough for me so I thought I’d drag the accordion out of the Dublin attic and bring back to Toronto. It was a beautiful shiny burgundy colour, heavy, with pristine keys and all sorts of buttons and a big bellows. I bought a book of chords, learnt about 3 of them, loved the deep loud sound coming out of it… And that was about as far as I got.

Every couple of years I’d pull it out, fiddle around, knock out a few simple tunes before gently putting it back with a sigh into its velvet-lined box. I carried it from home to home as we moved and our family grew, from Toronto to eastern Canada, to Norway and Italy and eventually back to Ireland again. Back to where it started off and arriving long after my mother – who first bought it in Walton’s off Parnell Square – had passed on.

For all those years, that beautiful thing I never learned to play has been mine, but I have never really been “its”.

And here we were in 2022, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how some Ukrainian, stranded somewhere in Ireland, must be sorely missing a beloved instrument, left behind in a dash for safety. It’s an instrument found in many music traditions, but I was thinking of polkas and eastern expressive laments that might be there to come out of it.

E. Annie Proulx’s magnificent novel, Accordion Crimes, tells a variety of immigrant experiences in the US through the tale of a single green accordion as it passes from owner to owner. I’ve carried my family’s accordion through my own immigrant life (an immigrant by choice, not through exile), and now it was time for it to move to new hands. Hands that might actually respect it and play it!  

I think now, this quiet family member that travelled thousands of miles with us was just biding its time, letting us mind it until it could finally meet a proper musician.

And this is where Derek comes into the story, again – that’s the best friend of the sister in law of the woman in the chemist’s shop!

I found Derek on Facebook, where he helped set up a group called The Gift of Music for Ukrainians in Ireland. They put out a call in the spring for anyone wanting to donate any instruments that were “unused and/or unloved”. The response from the Irish public was overwhelming, and within a few months they had 600 members, people offering free music lessons, as well as vans to drive up and down the country with cellos, harps, pianos, half sized violins and lots of guitars. They have already helped 200 different Ukrainian families.

Apparently Ukrainian children start early – and very seriously – with their musical training. One 18-year-old boy decided to learn guitar from YouTube with a donated guitar, and the video he sent back showed an astonishing talent.

When I showed up at his house, Derek showed extreme concern that my offering to the group was really voluntary, didn’t the accordion have all this history for us, wouldn’t we miss it? To be fair, it did turn out to be a bit difficult to wrench it from the invisible grips of the family. I tried to sneak it out to the car, with firm words at the ready “this is my accordion, this is what I want to do with it”, but still I let my younger daughter have one more go. I watched her right-hand fingers feel the keys, working out a tune she knows on the piano, asking how to squeeze it properly, and did I have to let it go. I did.

After a long chat and assurances, I left it with Derek, and took off for Canada. He has kept me updated on its progress – it went off to Donegal, then Dundalk but neither of those worked out. But now, it might have found its place. It’s soon to make its way down to Dingle in Kerry, to an 11-year-old boy who already plays but who left his instrument back in Ukraine.

I don’t know this boy, I will probably never meet him and the most I can hope for will be a message to hear he’s playing it and is happy. And I hope to eventually get another message that he has left it behind for someone else in Kerry to use after he returns to his home in Ukraine. Back to his own accordion that is – please God – sitting waiting for him there.

I would love to hear him play, and feel no regret I never learned. Will he play be classical or Cajun, folk tunes from his part of Ukraine, or French café style. Hopefully all of those plus a whack of decent Kerry slides into the mix.

The world is a big place, but when music is there to be played, and the instrument of that music passes from one careful hand to another, the world shrinks down to what really matters. For creativity and happiness to come through from the act of performance, and joy to be let free, even – especially – in a time of war and exile.

You can find the Facebook group run by Derek and other great volunteers here – the Gift of Music to Ukrainians in Ireland.

Mothers on Buses

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When I got on the No. 4 bus, near its starting point in Monkstown, it was empty and I could take my favourite seat, upstairs in the top right corner. That’s where you used to be able to look down through the window at the driver’s head below, but it’s now simply the best spot for a panoramic view over Dublin Bay as the bus trundles into town.

At the stop in Booterstown I saw some women with children and strollers and bags prepare to get on. They looked a little stunned, as if they weren’t yet used to the routine of boarding a Dublin bus, beeping their Leap cards, folding up the stroller, finding seats. They split in two and one mother came upstairs with two identical little girls, squeezing into a couple of seats down on the left side. They spoke quietly, in a language I recognised to be not quite Russian, the girls sounding a bit disgruntled. Without thinking, I turned around, stood up and nodded towards my choice seat at the front. The mother – who looked no older than 25 – smiled at me and nudged the squirming girls out of their seats and over to the front, while I went to sit further down the bus.

Sure enough, within a minute of settling into their new spot, I could hear their little voices brighten as they started to take in the city unfolding before them – the trees brushing against the windows, cyclists weaving around cars and trucks, people walking. Around Ballsbridge another No. 4 bus headed towards us and the excitement mounted: “babu babu” I heard – could that be Ukrainian for bus? The number four? The colour yellow? I’ll have to look it up sometime.

As much as the twin girls chattered and exclaimed – as only five year olds do best – their mother stayed quiet and barely moved her head. In the space given her, where her children could be distracted by the world, her thoughts must have aired themselves, her mind set free to loosen its worries.

And as much as her hair was straight and black, her daughters had heads of blonde under their matching glittery grey caps: hair they surely inherited from their father. Wherever their father was, just at that moment, I didn’t want to begin to imagine.

I too have been a mother with children on a bus in an unfamiliar country, in a new home that I was now meant to call home and live my life. I know the sense of dread that I might put the stroller in the wrong place, get off at the wrong stop, misunderstand and be embarrassed if someone speaks to me in a language I don’t yet speak.

14 years ago we moved to Oslo with my husband’s job and our second daughter was born there. Four days after she was born, we had to take the tram to the hospital for a checkup. Even before we left our cocoon of an apartment, I knew we’d be late and could miss our appointment. The February snow was heavy and seemed to blow straight in our eyes more than usual. The tram, when we stomped on board, was packed. I felt exhausted and weighed down by this new little creature I had strapped to my chest. There was no seat free, and not one person noticed me and offered me one. Heads were bent into phones, collars were up and hats were half pulled over faces. I held onto a pole, my legs weak and hot within my heavy coat.

My head started to swim with a feeling of being out of place, not wanted, not helped. I was too shy to ask for a seat or even stare anyone out of one. As some students got off, I fell into a seat. And I started to cry.

I’ll never forget that intense sadness and feeling of displacement, and it’s a chord deep inside me that was struck anew while I sat on that No. 4 bus last week as it made its way through the Spring-green avenues of south Dublin city.

My experience can barely begin to compare with the situation of the black-haired woman and her twins sitting ahead of me. Wasn’t I living in a country I had chosen to move to from another peaceful country, my husband was with me, we both had jobs and an apartment. I had a choice about being there. And freedom.

But it served as the barest frame of reference, to offer me some imagination to grasp what might be going on in the head, and heart, of this young mother, of all the mothers sitting on buses and Luases, pushing strollers to volunteer centres, cashing in Dunnes vouchers, settling babies down in stuffy hotel rooms, in Dublin, Waterford, Berlin, Warsaw, Tbilisi.

And I hope that my tiny action, of sharing my favourite seat might help for 20 minutes even one other mum, and two beautiful little girls. Girls who, I think, will surely be speaking Dublin English within the year.

At Merrion Square, as they made their way down the stairs, clutching hands as the bus swayed, I looked out the window. Even if the young mother were to look at me, I didn’t need to know.

The Wall of Pink Covid Hearts

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I had some free time while in London for work last week (lucky me) and I stumbled across this stunning wall of pink hearts along the Thames. It’s actually a wall of 150,00 individual pink hearts, each one painted on by volunteers just outside St Tommy’s hospital, directly facing Westminster.

Started quietly as a project by, among others Led By Donkeys, it’s now the semi-official Covid Memorial in #London. I’ve seen other modern memorials, in Washington DC, New York or Berlin, but the simple gesture of taking over this public space and its quiet everyday place in the life of the city was almost more moving.

Volunteers bought up most of the pink Posca pens in the country and spent 10 days creating the 8x8cm hearts, surprisingly unbothered by the authorities. People have travelled to London to write their own message on the wall or had volunteers do it for them.

Why 150,000 hearts? That’s the number of people that have so far died in the UK from Covid. The wall might not last, the hearts are starting to fade – all the more reason to visit and take photos.

Read more in this Guardian story https://bit.ly/3FED9TR

Tunes in an Empty Pub

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Never mind a pint. What I’d kill for at this point in the pandemic would be to play some tunes in a pub. To join a few other séisúin-deprived musicians one afternoon, and settle into the snug near the front door, the smoked-up window holding us in and the world out.

For the sake of the afternoon, we’ve been certified Covid-free, and being free of masks would be especially nice for those of us who want to sing, or blow into an instrument.

There’ll be a few fiddles and a flute, a button box, and a banjo, a decent guitar to keep us all in line. A mandolin or a low whistle would be welcome, but I won’t be fussy. As for me, I’ll have my whistle: I’m not the best player, but I’ve learned enough jigs and reels over the years to sidle my way into most sessions. 

We’ll miss the hum of having a crowd inside, the warmth of human laughter and banter. But we’ll survive. A quiet, near-empty pub is something that many a session musician would be delighted to avail of in normal times. That’s because we have music to attend to. And today, it feels like it’s been a long time coming. Playing along to YouTube sessions or old voice recordings on our phones while locked up for the last 15 months – well, it really wasn’t the same.

As we settle in with our pint or pot of tea, there’ll be a bit of chat, enough to feel connected, to catch up and commiserate, all of us nodding that – yes, it has been a crazy time. But the real connection starts when we pick up our instruments and let our minds and bodies move back into the flow: brains and fingers working their magical marriage to find their way into the music.

After a nice warmup set of three reels we all know well, the box player might start into an unfamiliar jig, so we’ll sit back with hands down but alert, listening and absorbing, our minds working to think if we’ve heard it and where, the patterns and feel of the tune seeping into our heads as we listen to it one more time, asking the player “arís!” so we can grab it and play a sketch of it before we feel the shift into the next tune coming up ahead of us. The beat forever moving us onward.

Morrissey’s, The Lark in the Morning, Julia Clifford’s, The Connaughtman’s Rambles, Old Hag you have Killed Me, Jennie’s Chickens, Tabhair dom do Lámh. Reels, jigs, polkas, slow airs, marches, slip jigs, hornpipes, waltzes, mazurkas, slides. And songs.

We’ll bow our heads when a singer airs a song – its story unfolding through words, over the arcs and troughs of its melody, each time repeated afresh while we players band together into the shadows of it, dropping with unspoken agreement into the gaps between each verse, picking up and dropping the tune, and embellishing as we hear it. A combination of detail and mood and creativity that will never be repeated the same way again.

Our fingers now fully loosened and tunescapes unleashed, I’ll get a nod to start a set so I’ll launch into my favourite hornpipe. Towards the end of it, I’ll catch someone’s eye and nod, or smile – as best I can with my lips pursed around the whistle – to show I have one to follow it. Sure, they all know Chief O’Neills and we’re off again, going along with the tunes wherever they take us

A fiddler will lean across the table to me: “What was the name of that one again?” “I know it as the Wicklow Hornpipe,” I’ll say, “I picked it up in Canada”. “Ah d’you remember,” says the guitarist to her, “that’s Delahunty’s, we’d play it after Harvest Home”.

The bit of chat won’t last long, we only have the afternoon: just a few hours to let the tunes out to air, blow out their staleness. We’ll feel satisfied that we’ve brought some life back in to them. And to ourselves and to each other.

At some point, the angelic landlord will give us the nudge to leave. We’ll follow the lead of whoever first pulls their instrument case off the floor and each of us will start to loosen the bow, wipe down the box, dismantle the flute, placing each piece, now tuneless, into its bed of velvet.

We’ll gather our stuff in silence, letting the tunes settle into the scratched wooden tables and tobacco-stained wall, from where the signed photos of visiting musicians watch us as we walk towards the door. Politely taking our leave, heading in any and all different directions: to the Luas, or the bus, bike or car.

“Good night. Slán”, we’ll say to each other as we slip our masks back on. “Thanks for the tunes”.

The Covid 5 and Me

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For the last few months of this pandemic, my world has been shrunk to 5 kilometres. It’s not just me, it’s been the case since Christmas for everyone in Ireland. (In theory, at least). Now that our Covid radius is going to expand beyond 5km after April 12, I’ve realised the number 5 has actually defined my life in many ways.

There are 5 of us at home. Four humans and one dog. That’s 5 living beings, each of whom needs to be fed, clothed, cleaned, exercised, entertained, and kept in line.

The house is small – smaller than it’s ever been – with just 5 rooms in which each of us can be alone. Two kids doing their school day, two adults working on their laptops, and the dog sitting with whomever looks most likely to next go for a walk.

5 days a week we adults are working, though that often blurs into 7 days. No-one I’ve met can switch off at 5 o’clock. Certainly not my husband, an academic who’s never understood the concept anyway.

5 hours of schooling a day, that’s what the kids have been doing on average. For 5 days of the week they’ve attended school through a screen, sitting on their legs twisted under them, pyjama bottoms sometimes worn below the presentable jumper. This lockdown has been a bit easier as they, and the teachers, had a chance to adjust to it, and the social connections have grown a little stronger.

And after school and any homework are done – there’s about 5 hours of leisure. But what is leisure for them now, if it doesn’t include a screen? It doesn’t seem involve them taking out one of the 5 bikes sitting out in the garden. It’s often being told to take the dog for a walk on their own – 5 minutes at least, c’mon. Before the pandemic, our younger girl was playing 5 sports a week – as you can do when you’re only 11. All of that’s been on hold, while her skills have been put on ice.

She had just over 5 months of being physically in school during 2020. As in, sitting at a desk beside other kids and being led through fascinating learnings and challenges and curiosity through the superstar that is an Irish primary school teacher, running around the yard, kids teaming up and learning about life through companionship. Thankfully that has started back again in the last few weeks and we’re all the better for it.

My older daughter, a secondary student, will soon be pulling out her school clothes again, including the 5 mandated uniform masks they got in September. She’s starting to look forward to seeing her friends and moving amongst her peers, but it’s an awkward setup for a difficult age. Getting the news, about 5 weeks ago, that the Junior Cert is cancelled has lessened the stress.

I’ve been incredibly lucky with the outdoor world I have within my 5km. Best of all, I have the sea, which I’ve never loved as much. I’ve learned to visit it in the morning or in the dark evenings when thousands of other Dubliners who yearn for it are safely back home and not spreading their 99-and-coffee laden breaths in a viral cloud over our heads.

5km also gets me to my Dad’s house, making it that bit easier to manage this last year of spending good times with him and caring for him. We’ve seen about 5 consultants in about as many hospitals for his various conditions, and while we’re immensely grateful to not have been touched by Covid, life and sickness continue in the vacuum of different debilitating cocoons. His vaccine is now complete, which will make his world open up that bit more – when more things to do also open up. That is a blessing.

My 5km lets me reach my office building, which I’ve been able to use sometimes over the year, taking dominion over the four empty floors with its discarded post-it notes, forgotten cardigans, fossilised plants and the sanitising stations still unused by my 80-odd colleagues all still happily working from home in other parts of the city and country. At my lovely big desk, I find space I can’t find at home, either physically or in my head. And I feel ever grateful to have a job and enjoy my work.

We’ve been lucky to be within easy reach of 5 decent parks where our dog (our lockdown lurcher) gets a good stretch and we’ve gotten to know some other doggy people: if I’m honest, that’s been the height of our socialising and meeting new people in the last year. I can count on one hand the number of friends I’ve managed to meet face to face all year.

We did make it to 5 new Irish counties last summer, when the 5km thing wasn’t hovering over us. (To be precise, we holidayed in two counties – Antrim and Sligo – and stopped in about 3 others on the way there, for coffee and petrol). Wonderful stays they were, as we might never have visited these beautiful places – our summers are usually spent visiting family or close friends in the 5 other countries we have called home. We don’t know when we’ll get to see them all again, but sure they’re all in the same situation too (apart from my sister in New Zealand who’s gotten away scot-free).

Netflix and all that? I’ve watched perhaps 5 different shows in the last year. The Crown will be on to season 5 by the time I catch up with season 3. But we have still worn out the couch with about 50 “family films”, board games, charades, and Zoom calls with folks abroad: precious time together, when it comes down to it.

Sure look, at least 5km has been better than the 2km we started with last March, though that didn’t last too long. The next thing the government is giving us now is county travel and a 20km radius. And after that… the sky’s the limit. Well, yes, the sky would actually be our limit then. Sin scéal eile – that’s another story.

The Lift in Rome

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I find our hotel quite easily, in plenty of time before I have to meet my father off the airport bus. It’s on a narrow street leading from the back of San Filippo Neri to Piazza Navona, busy with locals and tourists on foot and on scooters. Our pensione is marked with a little 3-star sign on the wall by the solid, studded wooden door. The main plaque lists names on bells of private apartments and law offices.

The door is open and I step into the shadowy hallway. Before me is the staircase, reaching up and around to the top of the building, to where our pensione must be on the 4th or 5th floor. Their website had promised there’d be a lift – and that was the main reason I chose it for myself and my Dad (along with the decent price and promise of breakfast left outside our rooms).

And there it is, just right of the stairs, an old-fashioned lift with a pull-over metal gate and open shaft rising above it. And there on the gate is a sign. My heart sinks. A sign on a lift in Rome can mean only one thing: it’s not working – Fuori Servizio. I puff up the five flights of stony steps to the pensione reception. The girl on duty is calm and seems fairly confident the lift will be fixed today. This is Italy, I’m not convinced and I press her on this before handing over my credit card and committing to this place.

I explain to her that my father – by now on a plane flying out of Dublin airport – is a few months past 80 and has used a walking stick (with shock absorbers) for at least the last decade. “Well the lift’s been broken for a few days,” she says perkily, “but it was a long weekend so this is the first day the repair men are here”. She tells me there are several elderly residents in the building dependant on it, it will surely be fixed. I decide to trust her and take my chances that by nightfall the building will be habitable for my dear old Dad.

After dumping my bag and cooling off in the quirky room I’ve been given (with its lumpy bed and remnants of a fresco on the wall), I head out to explore the streets and be enveloped by Rome for the next few hours.

Around 4 o’clock, I walk in off the street and see there’s activity at the bottom of the stairs. The repair men, who turn out to be just one man with an official-looking logo on his shirt, is now hurriedly packing up from his afternoon of work and heading straight for the door.

Angling for a first-hand update I ask him is it all fine – tutt’aposto? I catch a smile and a Sì before I lose him in a slew of strong dialect, the gist of which seems to be him never having seen a problem like this before and it clearly won’t be his responsibility if it’s broken again tomorrow – domani – (the forethought of which just crept into my mind).

I step into the lift with another woman. Together we try it out, all the way to the 4th floor. We grimace at each other while the clangy metal cage makes its way slowly up alongside the dusty staircase I’m happy to avoid.

At the top, standing outside our pensione, and peering down the lift shaft is an petite, old woman. Dressed in a blue dressing gown she hovers close to her apartment door. “Funziona!” she says to me in delight. It’s working see!

I nod at her and smile back, “Infatti!” Indeed.

 “You know, I’ve been stuck without it these few days. I don’t go out you know – non esco – so I just walk back and forth across this little landing.”

Whether she always does this or just while it’s been out of order I can’t tell. I don’t know how to reply but I’m tempted to mention that at least she has a great view from her apartment of the medieval chunk of wall that juts out and makes up the last part of the stairway – but I decide against it.

“Well, lets hope it’s all still working tomorrow – domani”, I say instead. Her gaze goes back down and over into the darkness. Perhaps she wouldn’t hope that at all. She might have enjoyed this excitement a little more, from her perch at the top of the landing.

Later that evening, after my father and I have caught up over a tasty primo and carafe of rosso at the red-chequered spot a few doors down, I show him through the door of our building. We click the light switch on and while it ticks away we take the lift up to our rooms for the night. As we clatter up beside the stone stairs I now know well, we ascend floor by floor through sounds of voices talking, plates clattering, on and up through piano music on one floor, then more voices and the lift finally trundles open to our landing. There’s no-one waiting to greet us.

We find our way to our rooms for the night. I decide not to tell my Dad about the repairs. Domani.

The Lice of my Life

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My life as a parent can be measured in lice. Those tiny creatures that never show their face but brazenly attach themselves to the hair shafts of humans – usually the smallest of humans – where they decide to chomp down and get cosy. And then, they start to make their own babies. You don’t know they’re there until they’ve really set up camp and it becomes more than just one battle to remove them from your child’s head: it’s a war.

Because my adult life has unfolded against the backdrop of moving between different countries I’ve gained some unique insights into how these little critters are treated– culturally and physically–in different countries. The one factor that stayed the same in each place–the control factor, if you like–was the scalps of my children, or, I’ll admit, in some cases my own.

I grew up in Dublin and I don’t remember ever having lice as a child. Nits we called them (though technically those are the eggs, but I don’t plan to go into any details here). I have no memories of being scratchy, of myself and my siblings having our heads being treated, washed and combed, or of classmates appearing red-faced into school with shorn heads.

My older sister (the unenthusiastic keeper of family lore) assures me that there would have been a “nit nurse” coming into school to keep on top of any infestations. I do remember a nurse coming once a year to checking that our backs were straight, pulling us one by one behind a temporary curtain set up in the school gym for the annual scoliosis check. Would she have had a surreptitious look at our scalps at the same time?

Did I have nits, was it bad? It’s one of those many banal-but-vital questions I never got to ask my mother before she passed away 7 years ago, but she had probably wiped any memories of it herself. I certainly would have, four children later.

So it wasn’t until I became a parent, in my 30s, that I was first confronted with the reality of nits, like so many other unexpected trials of parenthood no-one tells you about in the heady days of pregnancy excitement.

Viking Comb, Denmark

It started when the emails first came home from our kindergarten in Oslo–our 4-year-old needed to be checked for head lice (hodelus) and could all parents please take responsibility and do “the necessary”. I had a quiet word with my non-Norwegian mum friends, rather than embarrass myself more publicly by revealing my ignorance of such basic hygiene matters.

“Get the strongest mixture you can” they whispered. “Or better yet, stock up on the stuff they have at Boots when you’re next back in Ireland. You’ll save a fortune and they use some crazy chemicals that they don’t put in the stuff in Norway”. After getting the basics from the local apothek (pharmacy) and watching a few YouTube videos we figured it out, the next trip to Ireland not being scheduled for several months away, in the summer.

It didn’t take long for me to encourage my husband’s new-found talent for looking through a magnifying glass while deftly holding a fine-tooth comb through the hair of each child while they’d sit on the floor in front of Charlie and Lola or other show that would keep them still, the whitest of our towels over their shoulders, strong floor lamp pulled up close. All household members would be checked, though the ghostly itch would pass around the house whether your scalp was infested or not.

We got into the swing of it and soon began to take in our stride the regular missives from kindergarten, and then school. “Remember”, the school’s communication would offer as a palm leaf, “Head lice is a not a sign of uncleanliness. But just please remind your children to not swap hats and scarves with their classmates”. This being Norway both our kids were outdoors a lot, all year round, and went through many, many hats, scarves, balaclavas, toques, caps, and unattached hoods, some of which appeared in our house from unknown origins.

We made great efforts to not go down the road of mortification taken by the Russian mother who sent her son off our elder daughter’s class with bald head for half the year. No doubt, it toughened him up, but he must have gone through many hats of his own that winter.

In 2017, we moved from Oslo to Florence, in Italy, when our younger daughter was six–the lure of warm sun and more fresh air hoodwinking us into thinking juvenile parasites would be fewer. Instead, the Norwegian nits decided to move with us.

It was our serious bad luck to pick up a dose of lice during our last few days preparing to move out of our Oslo apartment–goodbye visits to friends or the recycling centre were delayed by our full family treatment and hair combing (using up all that precious Boots gear we had left). Over the course of a couple of intense summer weeks between emptying our house in Norway, flying to Italy, fitting in a short holiday, and trying to get a foot down on steady ground before the start of the school year in September, we battled the lice.

Etruscan comb, Italy 160AD

Still, one of the first new words I had to learn upon arriving in Italy was Pidocchi – head lice. It sure sounds nicer in Italian but I soon realised it was a word I’d be using a lot.

We must have appeared like a family of gorillas perched on our hotel beds on the pristine island of Elba that July, the golden beaches and outdoor patios calling to us like sirens. Desperate for something to just zap these critters away, whatever their nationality, I entered the mysterious realm of an Italian pharmacy (part homeopath, part pharmaceutical workshop) and was seriously reprimanded for thinking a bottle of something would help. “No,” said the surprisingly stern young woman in the white coat, “You must take this comb and use it all the time. It is the only thing that will work. Don’t waste your money on some other stuff. And don’t go near chemicals.” It was, of course, rather a beautiful comb, but I didn’t want to tell her I already had a few at home. 

Two weeks, and much scratching, later I had no qualms about asking a different pharmacist, this time in Florence, for the strongest damn stuff he had. “No, I don’t want the gentle herbal stuff, give me the kick-ass killer (with a photo of two smiling kids on the box) please”. A busy shop, it was handed over with no questions asked.

This stuff did the job. But a week or so later, the school term started and one of the first things the other mums were telling me–“oh yes there’s always lice here in Italy, the kids are always getting it”. I braced myself for more emails from school to look out for. And come they did, but we were veterans at this point and sitting outside in our garden under the olive trees to do the job with the conditioner, the comb and the white towel never seemed as painful as it did in Oslo.

Comb from northern Italy, 16th century (Bargello, Florence)

Then there were the Canadian lice, apparently. One summer, while visiting family in Alberta, our elder daughter was kicked out of a hairdresser in Edmonton for having nits in her hair. Which she definitely didn’t. Oh the shame of it. “I’m sorry madam but I have to stop”, said the Kurdish hairdresser, in a steely tone., swinging her own luscious dark hair, and rolling on a fresh pair of gloves to tidy up the area around the chair my unfortunate 11-year-old had been sitting in.

Luckily it was next door to a drug store where I hopped in to pick up whatever kind of kick-ass bottle Canadians use. When I got her home later I took a close look at the hair of both girls. I looked and looked, so did the husband (the real expert) and we saw nothing. At least we hadn’t paid for the partial-haircut, but I had left a guilt-tip.

Now that we live in Ireland full time, and can pop into Boots anytime we like, we’ve seen nary a nit on anyone’s heads. We must have become immune over the years and Irish nits just haven’t bothered to give our scalps a try, pity for us! The same messages still come home from school, now in English, and we check and monitor but we seem to have sloughed off the curse somewhere off the coast of Ireland.

I’m hanging on to our beautiful little nit combs just in case. And to remind us of our scratchy travels.

Nit comb

First Swim in the Sea – in November

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We were putting out our bins, the neighbour and myself, and I asked her if she’s enjoying her daily swims in Dublin Bay. “Emma, it’s lovely these days”, she says. “the water’s 12 degrees!”. “Awww,” I reply, “I really will get in one of these days”. “So you keep saying” she says, and heads back inside. 

It’s mid-November in Ireland–a strange time to think about starting to swim in the sea again. But it’s all I’ve been able to think about for the last few weeks. 

I had some lovely swims in Ireland in the summer but I was done by September and I’ve really just been waiting and waiting for the local pool (my happy place) to be allowed to reopen. But this is 2020, the pandemic has turned many things upside down, and half of Ireland is out swimming in the cold waters–of sea, river and lake–and telling the rest of us all about it.

I never before thought I’d want to swim in very cold water but it’s looking weirdly appealing. Maybe I just have FOMO, or I’m following too many Instagrammers taking morning dips in Greystones and Mayo; they look so happy, and healthy, and tell us all the good things about it: could it really be so difficult to just get into that cold, grey, stringy-looking water? Best of all, they’re socialising, which we can’t do anywhere else this year.

Telling no-one about my obsession, I prepare for it in my head– I’ll put on my togs before leaving the house, maybe take the car as it’d surely be too cold to cycle home after, bring tea or coffee in a flask, and a hat and an easy bra to change into after. As for being in the water, well you obviously just need to brave it for a few minutes to get the minerals and the endorphins, or whatever it is they’re all having. 

At the end of October, I start tracking the tide times for Dublin Bay, but still quietly cycle past Seapoint and Sandycove, just to have a look. All I see are happy people, and tune into their glow and not-quite-smugness. One day I’d swear I saw a bunch of them drinking champagne. At 9 in the morning. 

I hang on the words of my office-mate, a year-round swimmer, who knows about tides and buoys and quieter spots away from crowds. He reckons Seapoint is still the easiest place to start. “Though never mind Covid”, he says, “there are plenty of other things you might pick up down there”, referring to the sewage-related issues that crop up regularly in that part of Dublin Bay.  

He and I guffaw at the Dry-Robers, those 2020 newbies to sea swimming who dress in 180-euro giant coat-fleece things and parade their way afterwards into local cafes and even supermarkets, to the point where one swimming spot was seen to have posters up declaring “no dry robers or dry robe types here”. Another friend tells me her sister, a long-time swimmer, is delighted with the comfort she now has with her robe. I was planning to do this the hard.. I mean.. proper way, no wet suit and an old towel. 

It’s now November and I’m still obsessed with trying this out for myself. Most people I know wouldn’t dream of getting into the sea in Dublin at any time of the year, let alone late Autumn, and I hardly ever swam in the sea as a kid – our summertime family beach in Connemara was cold, rocky and rainy, a pure jellyfish colony. 

But I love the act of swimming, and as a woman in my 40s, I appreciate new experiences more than ever. And with this pandemic, any experiences at all are hard to come by. I want to know what it feels like, whatever other people say, either for or against it. If I’m going to call other people crazy for doing it, then let me see if I can be crazy too.

The spirit finally moves me – and propels me out of the house – unexpectedly on a dreary, rainy Saturday afternoon, after a week of sharp sunshine. This is the day. I cannot wake up yet another morning and not have done this thing that has taken over my thoughts. 

I slip out of the house and tell my husband and kids I’m “going out for a bit”, closing the door before they think to ask me, where exactly? Or worse, hear their shock: “it’s cold and raining, why would you even think of going for a swim?!”

I take the car–one concession to weakness– and as I drive the 7 minutes down to Seapoint, I look for signs that I should just go home. But every light is green, and there is even a parking spot right by the bathing place. It’s drizzling heavily now (as it can, only in Ireland) but somehow that makes it more appealing. There’s quite a crowd and I throw myself into the mass of unknown faces and bodies in various states of goose-bumpy undress, taking on the clearly-tricky task of finding a dry spot under the shelter to leave my clothes on a bench that’s not occupied by someone in a warm coat who’s just there “for support”. I drop my bag on a spare dry spot and pause to watch the scene. I zone in on the obvious regulars – how they efficiently undress, get straight in the water and get out of there quickly. 

Long used to all sorts of pool changing rooms, I hang up my coat under someone else’s, drop my clothes onto my bag, tuck socks into my boots. I brought flip-flops but they seem silly now, considering it’s raining on the slick granite flagstones. It does feel good on my bare feet, my head also bare of a hat, my hair hanging loose as it never can in a pool. The air is cold but I tell myself not to care. Did I mention it was about 9 degrees? But hey, it’s supposed to be 12 in the water!

I head for the steps leading into the water, steps that have been used by generations of Dubliners, the iron hand railing rusty to the point of serious injury risk (though the council mustn’t think so). There are people all around but I focus, I just have to keep moving forward now and be ready for the feeling of that water. Two younger women beside me shriek as they enter the water; I laugh along with them and I tell one of them how much I love her red lipstick. 

I keep going and then it’s just me and the sea. 

The water is a shock of cold on my legs. But instinct–and experience of Irish waters–tells me to pause, to slowly absorb the shock: it can’t get any colder. My heart astonishes me by pumping like the clappers, my breathing races, it’s a pure high. Once I get used to that I slowly move forward, in and further away from the top of the steps. I look back once, to see the lipstick girl having her photo taken by a heavy-coated friend, and I keep going, bending my knees to feel the water on my hips. And then I’m in. The cold has done its worst.

I can feel that my body needed the water, the feeling of immersion, inside my toes and between my legs, under my arms and behind my ears.  I’ve read somewhere that as the body becomes used to the cold of the water, it develops a sort of thick outer skin, like a natural wet suit. 

The waves are kind today, as if they knew I needed help to feel at ease here. Find my own home in it, not that of someone else who says how much it means to them to swim in the sea. My body floats and moves along with the waves, feeling part of their substance and their weight, I feel balanced.

The cold is no longer important. I bob along, move my arms and legs all around me, letting the gentle waves and salted weight of the water hold me upright while I take in the sight of the horizon right at my eye level, the bottom of the Pigeon House towers disappearing into the water. 

I swim on my back, like a seal, past three ladies in bright coloured hats–their familiar way of talking propels them forward more than their swimming strokes do. “There’s a rainbow just appearing there on the right”, I want to say to them, but don’t. Don’t be an eejit, they’re not paying attention to anyone or anything but their routine, their connection, this water accommodating the threads of friendship between them, never more needed than in this second lockdown of the year 2020. 

My brain tells me I shouldn’t stay in the water for long, even 5 minutes might be enough. I pay attention to how my feet feel and will get out when they start to go too numb. But for now I’m immersed and feel that the sea has been calling me – trite as that sounds, that’s the best way to describe it. I needed to let go of myself, my fear, my confidence, my outer skin. It’s a plunge of faith. 

I could see the faith that others had, of how it worked for them. But it’s never the same unless you find your own way to something. Faith can only come from within. A hundred people can tell you to have faith, this will pass, there is something out there, but it’s only when you leap, or let go, or give in, or plunge that you create that faith within yourself, let it spill out, create it yourself and make it real. This is me in the cold sea and it’s amazing. 

I’ve gone over and back just between the two entrance points and that’s enough for today. I’ve been in about 8 minutes. I go straight to the point where the rusty bar ends and grab it to guide myself up the steps, walking up and out of the water, past other newcomers, squealing or business-like in their entry into the cold. Without stopping for a second, finally paying no attention to anyone around me I head straight for the shelter where I hope my clothes and towel are still dry. I am buzzing, my skin, my head, my mind are tingling. As I dry myself I see some blood on my ankle where I must have brushed a rock. My towel is too skimpy and I vow to keep practising getting dressed in public, even without a dry robe. My black coffee is still warm and does the job from the inside. It’s only once the clothes are on that I feel cold, a hat on my head helps already and the thought of a shower at home – especially if I call ahead to get someone to put the immersion on.

I chat to the woman beside me who is, naturally, getting dressed faster and more efficiently than I am, slipping on bras and socks with nary a piece of flesh unwittingly shown. Carefully wording my questions to hide any inkling that I haven’t done this before I ask “Would you come in daily or a few times a week?” and “It’s not so cold today really is it? Even in this rain”. 

“See you again”, she says with a smile she’d give to a fellow regular. “You will”, I reply. 

I will be back, and next time I’ll know the score; how to dump my things, ignore everyone and just get myself back into that seductive cold sea.

Sea – big blue wobbly thing that mermaids live in

Baldrick

The Placenames of Dublin

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If you’re a newcomer and want to adapt to life in Ireland, you need to get to know the names of places. And how to pronounce them. This is for two reasons. One, so you don’t get lost. And two, so you don’t sound like an eejit. (Actually, it’s more so you don’t sound like an eejit.)

But the first step you must take is to not laugh at these sturdy, deeply historic, Irish names, as the locals don’t like that. But laugh my Canadian boyfriend did when I first brought him home from London 20 years ago to meet my parents. Well-known Dublin names, places I’d passed by bus or bike for years, were completely fascinating and hilarious to him. Stillorgan! Ballsbridge! Stepaside! And he was right, they did sound funny. I just hadn’t noticed before.

Brian Lowry Designs

About 20 years later, in 2017, we moved here to Dublin and that Canadian I’m now married to got on his bike to explore his new home – as he has done in every city we have lived. And now there’s no end to the funny names he comes home with (and I’ll explain a few below). You have Bushy Park, Dolphin’s Barn, the Point, Oxmantown and The Five Lamps.

There’s Chapelizod, Ticknock, Coolock, Firhouse and Stoneybatter.

Brian Lowry Designs

And of course, beyond the bike lanes all roads in Dublin lead to the Red Cow Roundabout.

Not long after we arrived, Ian needed to do some immigration paperwork in “town”, at an office on D’Olier Street. He pronounced it as any good Canadian would – “Dole-e-yay street”. Not a chance, I told him. If you get lost, ask for Doleeeer street or you’ll be laughed out of it. To be on the safe side I made sure he knew how to say Dorset (Dore-set) Street, the Mater (The Maah-ter) hospital, and to make sure to not go as far north as Dollyer (Dollymount) Strand or he’d be well off track.

Every country has its own giggle-worthy place names: just look at our larger island neighbour, a nation of wolds and upons, of bottoms and glebes. And then there are the hodge-podge names from my husband’s own part of western Canada, where we often drive through Okotoks and Medicine Hat, apparently known as The Gas City (if not “A Gas City”).

Back to Dublin. A friend told me how one snowy, winter morning a man came up to him around College Green to ask for directions. The poor man, who he guessed was from India or Pakistan, was getting a bit desperate to find his way to an appointment in a place called Insecure. No he didn’t have the letter with him, just an address on Insecure Road. It took a few minutes, and a deep dive into Google maps, for the two of them to figure out it was Inchicore he should be looking for.

Brian Lowry Designs

Head further out from Dublin and you get to Lusk and Rush, Gorey and Termonfeckin, and then beyond “the Pale” you have Inch and Leap, Dripsey and Schull, Effin and Borris. I have a genuine interest in how Irish placenames have derived from the local geographical features, ancient characters, and inaccurate anglicization (as beautifully dramatized by Brian Friel in his play Translations, an Irish-language version of which I was involved in at college). Tourists in their rented cars might wonder how many Ballybegs you can have in one country, but once they understand the meaning (little town), they’d soon figure out why there aren’t actually more Ballymores (big town).

The names of Dublin’s streets, roads, alleys, beaches and crossroads (like Kelly’s Corner) are all part of the city’s long, rich history. They each have their own story, their meaning, what they refer to, how they were named whether by Normans or Danes, Celts, Hugenots or British Army surveyors.

Just make sure you give them the respect, and pronunciation, they deserve, as my husband has been learning to do. And know the difference between your Tolka Row and your Tonlegee Road.

Brian Lowry Designs

–The wonderful illustrations are by Brian Lowry, a Dublin designer who produces prints of these Dublin placenames. You can find him on Facebook.

WHAT THEY MEAN

Chapelizod – Séipéal Iosóid, the church of Iseut/Iseult, a Norman name.

Stoneybatter – Bóthar na gCloch, road of stones, one of the oldest highways in Europe, leading out from the oldest part of Dublin. Read more.

Red Cow – named after a 17th-century inn at this old junction, called The Shoulder of Mutton.

Dolphin’s Barn – from a 12th century landowners, the Dolfyns.

Phoenix Park – from Fionnuisce, meaning clear water. Nothing to do with Dumbledore and his like.

Coolock – An Chúlóg, the little corner.

Stillorgan – Stigh Lorcáin, house of Laurence and a spot now famous for its shopping centre has a lot of history.

Bushy Park – after the local Bushe family.

And D’Olier Street is named after a Huguenot goldsmith who was one of the founders of the Bank of Ireland in 1801. Read more.

THE BASICS

These prefixes and suffixes can help you understand some placenames as you travel around the country:

Bally – baile, town or townland. Ballyclough, Ballycastle, Ballyogan

Ball – can come from Béal (mouth) like Ballina.

Ath – ath, ford. Athenry, Athlone

Carrick – carraig, rock. Carrickfergus.

Drum – droim, ridge. Dundrum.

Letter – leiter, hillside. Letterkenny.

Rath – rath, ringfort. Rathfarnham, Rathdown.

Kill – cill, churchyard or church or wood. Kildare, Killybegs.

A Diary for Bella, our Lockdown Lurcher

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April 14th 2020
Dear Bella
I saw a photo of you today and I think my dream of having a dog might finally come true. No pressure, but you looked adorable in the photo sent by Mary at the rescue group. You’re a lurcher, about a year old, quiet and sweet and housetrained, she said. Too good to be true, I worried.

All the rescue groups have been so busy, I had to nudge them a few times. The two big dog charities had to close early in lockdown as they operated out of shelters. So we’ve dealt with local foster groups instead who operate out of the kindness of people’s homes. Loads of people across Ireland are contacting them to adopt a dog, but they groups are really anxious that people adopt for the right reasons – a dog is for life, not just for Covid.

We’ve been thinking for ages about adopting a dog. Well, two out of the four of us have: Mags, our eldest, and myself. And it was only when Robert – one of those dog-sceptical men – met a gorgeous lurcher recently did he start to think he might cave in and say yes to getting a family dog. As long as it was a lurker… he meant lurcher.

April 17th 2020
Dear Bella
The kids loved the latest photos we got of you today and we also heard you did well at the vet and that you could be ready for us to meet next week!

It’s been over a month since we (humans) were told to stay put, to not go anywhere, work and study and play at home. No-one knows how it will all play out, but I think this could go on for months. We won’t be going to see the family in Canada this summer, and the big wedding there has already been postponed til next year. So it seems like brilliant timing to have a dog in the house, to get used to each other, train you, and train ourselves to look after you.

And when the time comes to go back to work, one of us was always working from home anyway. So we didn’t have to think that through.

All the rescue groups we talked to are so kind, and so careful about the dogs they care for. They had to come and check out our house and garden and family routine to make sure we weren’t an irresponsible bunch who wouldn’t manage a dog once life returned to normal. “If ever it does”, we laughed. One of the groups did their check after lockdown started, and we did that all by WhatsApp instead of meeting them, sending them videos of our garden and house to get their approval and get on their waiting list.

April 21st 2020
Dear Bella
I’m going to meet you on Saturday and probably bring you home with me. We’re so excited, it’s like Christmas! We can’t talk about anything else in the house – not that there was much to talk about anyway.

I just realised today we can actually pick up a few basics we’ll need – like a dog bed and leash, collar and food – because pet shops are considered an essential service and have been open all this time. I also checked with our local vet if they’re open. They were delighted to hear we were taking in a rescue dog but they’d only be available for emergencies and they’ll give you a full check-up when things “get back to normal”.

April 24th 2020
Dear Bella
Seeing as I’ll be coming to meet you tomorrow outside Dublin – and beyond our 2km range – I got a letter from Mary that I can show any Gardaí who might stop me along the way. The letter says I’m out and about for an animal welfare issue. It’s also simpler if I go alone. I’m a little nervous about it, it’s actually been quite nice to stay close to home the last few weeks.

April 25th 2020
Dear Bella,
Driving out of Dublin and into the countryside today felt a bit wild, like I was on holiday. I had my “get-out-of-jail” letter from Mary but I saw no checkpoints on the way. The motorway was full of trucks and lorries, all couriers bringing the homebound people of Ireland their supplies of summer shoes and garden furniture, books and PlayStations.

Mary drove up with you from her farm in Laois and our assignation point was an empty car park outside Naas. She had you out walking on the grass verge outside Pet Stop and I found you there. Your brown eyes shone when I looked at you, you stuck your long head into the crook of my arm and yourself into my heart. I took a quick selfie of the two of us and sent it to the breathless family back home. By the time they called me back with loads of questions, I had already signed off the paperwork (we had to sanitise the pen), figured out how to get you securely into the car, and you and I were already heading up the M7. Mary said I could go home and think about you first, but I wasn’t planning on coming back down again. This was it. You had a home to go to now.

Today will be known as your Gotcha Day. That’s what they call it – instead of having a birthday (as no-one knows when you were born) we’ll be celebrating your Gotcha Day every year on this date.

April 28th 2020
Dear Bella
You don’t know how much we love having you to distract us. And has a dog ever had its every single movement (including the digestive ones) talked about, examined, anticipated so much before. Maybe it’s just because of lockdown, and we were just all so ready to have something new to talk about.

You’re still a bit nervous, not sure of where you are, or sure about us. It will take a few weeks, or months, but that’s one thing we do have.

They say that when you pet a dog your body makes endorphins and it really is true – it makes you feel good and happy. God knows, we could all do with a good dose of endorphins right now. Maybe we should rent you out. Actually, no we won’t.

May 1st 2020
Dear Bella
We saw you run for the first time today out in the field and it took our breath away! Your legs might be long and bony but when they work with those big haunches they’re so powerful.

When we’re out for a walk, people often tell us you’re gorgeous, with your big brown eyes and fawn colour – that’s nice to hear but it’s hard to know what to say. I can’t really say thank you, as I didn’t pick you out of a beauty line-up. You were the dog we got, the one that was available and thought best suitable. And we couldn’t really wait much longer, in case the man of the house might start changing his mind on the dog plan.

May 5th 2020
Dear Bella
We don’t know what kind of life you had before you were rescued from that pound in Wexford and we got to take you home. But I do know that you’re frightened of the sweeping brush and the hoover, and the motorbike down the road. And you’re terrified of the two hurling sticks my husband picked up in Aldi with the hope of picking up a new sport with Aoife, which they’re working on once a day in the field beside us.

Getting the kids out for some kind of exercise feels like a full-time job sometimes. Other parents tell me the same. I don’t know if kids are nervous about the virus, or how to behave or just naturally want to stay idle. “It’s good to be bored” I tell them when I get them off their screens. I wish I had some time to be bored.

May 11th 2020
Dear Bella
You were sitting with us on the couch tonight while we watched the next episode of that old British Bake-Off on TV (we’re finally catching up) and we decided that you’re actually a cat-dog. You’re a lot bonier and about three times as big as a cat but you’re a watcher and a lounger. You don’t bark, you love to curl up on the chair by the window or spread your belly over someone’s lap or up in the air while on your back.

We were warned about lurchers loving couches so maybe we should think about getting another one to fit you. But, actually no: it’s taken so long for my new home-office desk to arrive, (once I had finally found one on a second-rate Ikea site) that I don’t think I’m bothered to shop online for a couch now as well.

May 12th 2020
Dear Bella
I’m really happy to have my new desk set up in the smallest bedroom, though Aoife’s not thrilled about her room being taken over. But it means I have a space where I can shut the door and do my work with no-one else in the room. From the start of lockdown I’ve felt blessed to have my job, to have something to focus on everyday and as it’s education-related, to help other people too. So many people are out of work, temporarily off, or facing really uncertain futures. It’s probably going to get worse. It’s awful.

But back to you Bella. Would you mind not trying to push the door open to say hello while I’m at my desk? My work colleagues have heard all about you, but they might think it a bit weird to see you try to get up on my lap. I know you find it confusing there are other voices in the little room where I am but these meetings with voices is the closest thing I have to an office (and the company of adults) right now.

Next time you want attention try another room in the house, see if one of the kids has finished her homework or facetime check-in with friends – see if they’ll take you out for a walk. That was part of the deal.

May 16th 2020
Dear Bella
I know you love people but would you stop trying to say hello to every stranger you meet. It’s really nice but not everyone wants to stop and say hi these days. People are a bit nervous, of other people, of germs, of human contact.

Even our neighbours on our road – we haven’t met as many in lockdown as I would have thought. Not every community, estate, or cul de sac in Ireland has seen the warm, fuzzy street camaraderie that has touched our needy hearts on the evening news. You were a bit puzzled by the people shouting and clapping out their doors every night, but that didn’t last too long around here. That’s just the way it is.

May 18th 2020
Dear Bella
Today must have been the fifth time we brought you to the off-leash dog park and it’s lovely you get your run in with your new friends – Molly and Ben, Harry and Hermione. But it’s actually been really nice for us humans too. We’ve been able to get to know random people, during these days when we can’t go to the pub, or chat to people on buses or have spontaneous chats with office mates about all kinds of things. It’s a bit like bringing the kids to a playground when they were little and you’d strike up a chat with other parents.

We’ve been able to see how other people are dealing with the lockdown and I think a lot of people already had a dog because they’re on the own, and perhaps quite lonely now, so getting out with their dog helps them deal with some of that. One man comes with his dog and sits on a bench to read his book, the dog staying close beside him and both of them keeping their own peaceful distance and getting the fresh air.

May 22nd 2020
Dear Bella
I realised today that when Mags and I take you out for a walk together, she and I have a proper chat. The kind of chat I think we had stopped having in the last year, and the kind that’s so vital between a mum and her daughter. It’s like having a third presence between us which makes it easier for her to open up and talk about all sorts of stuff. Which is so good, as life can be overwhelming at the best of times when you’re 14. And these are not the best of times. She misses her friends, her routine, and (she might not admit it) school. She’s managing great but it’s just not normal, being at home with her family 24 hours a day, chatting only occasionally with friends, and not knowing when things will settle down.

I had heard that a dog in the house is really good for teenagers, especially girls, and I think your soft heart and big brown eyes are only doing her good. She can give you a good hug when she might think no-one else in the house deserves one. Oh, and I hope you don’t mind showing up quite regularly on Instagram.

Her younger sister still says she wants a cat. But we’ll just have to wait for the next pandemic for that.

May 24th 2020
Dear Bella
We brought you to the beach for the first time today and you didn’t know what to make of it. We couldn’t get you to even dip your feet in the water – the kids thought that maybe the sound of the waves was too loud for you. But two of us went all the way in for a swim and it really wasn’t as cold as we thought it would be. We’ll have to start going regularly this summer. Especially if we can’t go to any warmer beaches, like we might have done normally.

There are loads of lovely places we can go to in Ireland, though let’s hope this amazing good weather will stay when “school” is “finished”. We’re really lucky that we have we have sea and hills and woods within 5km of us. It’s a bit annoying that every other family around is also exploring all these places too so we have to pick the right times to bring you out to enjoy them and have a bit of freedom. And find a parking spot.

May 28th 2020
Dear Bella
It looks like you’ve discovered the trampoline. I was working at my desk earlier and heard a strange squeaka-squeaka out in the garden. Then a thump. That was you jumping down off the trampoline, which doesn’t have a ladder. It’s good to see someone is using it – the kids have gotten a bit tired of it at this stage. It was a lifesaver early in the lockdown and their Dad got them on there once a day as a break from schoolwork. Until he pulled a muscle in his leg. And then they lost interest.

Anyway, you keep at it Bella. At this stage maybe you need some space of your own and that’s where you’ve found it.

June 5th 2020
Dear Bella
Home-school is all finished up now so the kids are happy, though I worry about them having too much time indoors. It’s hard to manage when I’m working myself all day in a closed room. Oh, and the lockdown started a new phase today, still no sign of hairdressers, creches and summer camps opening, but at least your cousins down in Shelbourne Road can start their mad greyhound racing again. Behind “closed doors”, however that’s going to work!

June 15th 2020
Dear Bella
I heard my office is going to reopen in August – just for two days a week for anyone who actually wants to come in. I’ll be there in a flash but my husband will keep working fulltime from home.

As for the kids. Well in September they might start going back to school, five days a week. School is a great – it’s this amazing place where they socialize with other kids, do arts and sports, and learn all sorts of things from teachers who stand right there in front of them. It’s a brilliant arrangement for all concerned.

Aoife was looking forward to taking you on the walk to school each morning with her Dad. You’re really like that as you’ll be smothered in attention at the school gate. So let’s hope you’ll get to experience that before too long.

July 21st 2020
Dear Bella
Well done for surviving your first family holiday. When you got in the car, you probably thought you were heading up to the dog park, but you did so well on that four-hour drive up and down to Antrim. How patient you were to sit for hours squashed in between the two girls and their books, blankets and crisps wrappers. Not a peep out of you, just the odd fart.

You even climbed all over the Giant’s Causeway in the rain. The first time I’ve ever been there and me in my 40s. The whole area was wonderfully quiet, empty of the tourist buses that usually fill the roads with visitors from China, the US, all over. The peace was really nice for us but not great for all the local businesses.

August 4th 2020
Dear Bella
The latest news now is that the pubs are not going to open as planned next week – which doesn’t bother us either way – and that they’ll probably open now on September 1st. That was the same date Mags’s school was due to reopen but the principal finally sent us a message today to say that they won’t be ready by then as they have to follow the government’s advice on how to get the school ready for several hundred kids and teachers. Either way, it’s still obvious that the pubs will open before schools. That’s Ireland for you.

None of these really affects you, you’re just happy to lounge around a lot of the day, sniff around the kitchen, snap at bumblebees and wait for your trips to the park. All of which make you the ideal pet for us.

Live in the moment, that’s what you do. You could teach us all a lesson.

Published in the journal Pendemic.ie in August 2020

The Yellow Room

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I wrote a little poem about this painting, by Belfast artist Gerard Dillon, painted in the 1950s. I bought a postcard of it years ago and it’s moved around with me since. A more Irish scene you couldn’t get.

Yellow Bungalow (1954), by Gerald Dillon. Ulster Museum Collection

(With a nod to Margaret Wise Brown).

In the great yellow room, there was a stove

And a kettle and a cat
And a teapot and a mat
And there were three dead fishes, once filled with wishes
And a sugán chair
And a mind full of care

And a manky red curtain
And the window with no net
The kettle on the boil and the table always set

And my box and its tunes
She’d say they made her heart bloom

And on any fine day, when I’d wish to be away
I’d hear all those villagers muttering whisht

Goodbye room, goodbye chair
Goodbye view, goodbye despair
Goodbye turf, goodbye cat
Farewell Mayo, adieu to all that

Happy Families?

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In an arts and craft shop in Dublin, I spot a pack of Happy Families. It was one of our favourite games when the kids were small, but we either lost our pack during one of our many moves or it’s still in a box in my father’s attic.

I grab the pack of cards, hand over the five euro, and bring it home to play with my own happy family that evening.

I’ve always liked this game because it teaches kids some basic concepts of card-playing: how to sort your cards into groups, hold them up in a fan (if you can), win tricks, memorise who has what, keep a poker face. All good practice for getting stuck into the Gin Rummy and Poker later on, two games popular in my wider family.

My own mother grew up the youngest in a large family where they played a lot of cards. She passed on her love of playing, the subterfuge, raised eyebrows, the patience, and even, let’s be honest, of gambling. Up until recent years, St Stephens’s Day parties at my aunt’s house involved a poker game that was played in the good room once the younger cousins realised it was time to head to the room next door for the harmless (but naturally rowdier) bit of Pictionary.

I don’t remember playing Happy Families as a child. Maybe it was too tame for my mum, maybe I only hooked on to it when I became a parent myself, liking the name of it and its key concept.

To create a trick you need to gather all four members of each family – say, Mister Muck the Farmer, along with Mrs Muck, Master Muck and Miss Muck. From our own set even our daughters could tell how quaint the naming conventions were, how English, (who says Master?) and the names for the families: Cod, Hammer, Green.

The game was devised by London games maker John Jacques Jr in 1851 (who also invented Tiddlywinks, Ludo and Snakes & Ladders). But in truth the game hasn’t changed much over the years, and you can join in with collectors keen to get their hands on older versions. Around 2016, a British games company did create a new version of the game based around family types, rather than occupations. It was hardly modern, and still very English in tone – they tried to target a broader market with the Family with typical teenager, Family getting through Christmas, the Gross Cousins, Disastrous Family Barbecue.

At the opposite end of the scale, a friend once showed me a vintage version he had, a hilariously horrendous packet of Happy Families from the early 19th century. The families were actually nationalities, so the more hard-core stereotypes were right there. The warring Germans, carousing Italians, etc etc. The worst card in the pack, for me, was of course Mrs Paddy, the Irishman’s wife – an astonishing, but no-less-than-unusual caricature of a peasant Irish woman (with a 5 o’clock shadow): pig, pipe, stick and all.

This time round, playing with our new pack I was so happy to find in that local shop, it just wasn’t the same. It seems that we’ve all moved on and the kids, now a few years older, are much more tuned into the ways of the world, having lived in different places and seen so many societal changes, not least in Ireland. Not only did these new cards in our hands feel flimsier, the ideas are just more old-fashioned, with pictures that don’t fit with what they’re learning in school and from friends about modern identity.

Why does Miss Hose have a toy and her mother a pretty dress, if their father is the Fireman? Why is it still four family members of two genders?

We start to joke around –

“Do you have Barker Field, the farmer’s dog?”

“Or Ms Stamp the Postman’s civil partner”

“Or Dr Hammer the carpenter’s academic wife?”

“How about Mr Sheaf, the farmer’s husband?”

“Or the stepdaughter or adopted cousin or live-in boyfriend or ex-partner-coming-for-weekend-custody?”

Of course none of us did have any of those. But I was happy to see that the kids could acknowledge that this old-fashioned notion of the happy family didn’t sit right any more. And without even realising it, they’ve become citizens of a more open modern society.

Maybe we should design our own family card game…

All happy families are alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Courgetti

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I laughed when I noticed the name on this packet I had picked up in Tesco. The spirally courgettes (ridiculously cut up and ready for me to cook, when I could of course have done it myself, but they were on the cheapo shelf) had already gone into that evening’s stir-fry.

Who’s ever heard of Courgetti? I chuckled to my family. They must have made that up. Mixing up their courgettes and their zucchini. Or, actually they mixed up courgettes and spaghetti – and that is a thing now. Tesco did not mess up, or invent the name. Courgetti – courgettes cut up into spirals – have become a standard alternative for many to wheat-based noodles.

Best of all, in the US – where they eat zucchini, not courgettes – they’re called Zoodles!

I buy courgettes in the supermarket here in Ireland, though in Tuscany I would have asked for zucchine and in Canada they’re zucchini. Why the difference?

This thin-skinned summer squash, a younger version of a marrow, the courgette actually originated in the Americas – along with the other members of the Squash family (known as cucurbits) which includes melon, pumpkins and cucumbers. These were all a staple in central and south American for centuries and started making their way to European kitchens from the 16th century on.

The Italian name – Zucchini – is the diminutive form of Zucca (the name for squash or pumpkin). In many parts of Italy a single one is called a zucchina (plural zucchine) and in others (Tuscany, Piedmont and Sardinia), it’s more typically masculine, zucchino (plural zucchini). It became a popular vegetable to cultivate in northern Italy in the 19th century, coinciding with the immigration of many Italians to the US and so the name stuck there. A lovely example of culinary re-introduction. (Note that zucchini is always plural in English, you don’t say I’ll cut up a zucchino. But then, we don’t throw a single spaghetto onto the wall to see if it will stick. Not something you’d see in an Italian kitchen.)

The French word – Courgette – is standard in other English-speaking countries: the UK, Ireland, New Zealand, Malaysia and South Africa. (Australians stuck with zucchini for some reason). Obviously it’s a key ingredient in many French dishes, but it’s actually quite a recent entry into the language, only first appearing in the OED in 1931.

Squash is also used in some countries, that’s what we would be buying in a Norwegian supermarket for example.

The marrow is a trope of English gardening, with weird competitions of marrow-growing featuring heavily in my memories of 1970s sitcoms. I like to think Roald Dahl had fun with this, when his BFG eats his disgusting snozzcumbers (cucumbers being a cousin of squash).

Living for many years with a Canadian the two of us still switch back and forth between the two main names for this bitter but buoyant vegetable, confusing our kids (who don’t even like it). I like to use both names: I’ll fry up thick diagonal slices of courgette (a la Toscana) for my pizza, but one of my favourite things to bake is Chocolate Zucchini Loaf. I could never bring myself to call it Chocolate Courgette Loaf. Yuk!

Tune in another time and we’ll have a look at eggplants… I mean, aubergines… or melanzani.

Irish Creatures on Irish Coins

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It’s true – your children really can open your world a little wider. A treasure, to them, is often something you just never noticed before.

One recent Sunday, at a local Dublin market that has barely changed in decades, my daughter and I wandered into a bric-a-brac stand. Just the place where a 10-year-old might find some pocket-money-sized treasure.

She dug into a box of old coins, becoming more excited the deeper she got, the rustier her fingers. Settling on a handful of coins, the kind owner let her have them for nothing: “I’m actually happy to be rid of those”, he smiled.

Her treasure – an old Irish penny and halfpenny – did not exactly glitter in her hand. But as she looked closely at them, so did I, amazed at their beautiful design and seeing properly for the first time the money my own mother would have handled as a child.

The ha’penny depicts a pig, or, rather, a sow. We looked closely at the little curly tails of the babies underneath their mum, a jumble of clumsy feet tottering together.

And the mother hen on the penny – what a piece of art she is, standing tall as she herds her little darlings entwined around her short legs. The Irish mammy as hen.

Back at home I search online for the story of these coins, so new to me, but so familiar to the entire country from the 1920s to 1971, the year that Ireland went decimal. This system of shillings, farthings and crowns that I never needed to get my head around.

And I’m amazed to learn that the coins were designed by an Englishman, a sculptor named Percy Metcalfe. He was chosen by a government committee set up in 1926 to develop a coinage for the brand new Irish Free State. The currency was to be pegged to Sterling. This made sense, seeing as 90% of our exports would go to Britain for decades to come, but we could at least make our coins look as unique as possible. The head of this coin committee was none other than poet-slash-Senator W.B.Yeats and it was he who pushed for choosing Irish animals; asking “what better symbols could we find for this horse riding, salmon fishing, cattle raising country?“

The committee had three conditions for the coins’ design. They should have a harp on one side, an inscription in Irish, and include no depictions of modern persons.

The lowliest coins, and presumably the ones most commonly used, show the sow of the ha’penny and hen of the penny, with an elegant woodcock on the farthing.

The choice of something as domestic as a hen was deliberate. The committee felt it would appeal to farmers, and particularly to their “wives and daughters”.

As the coins increase in value, so too does their male-ness. There’s the upstanding hare on the threepence (or, thru’penny bit), the magnificent wolfhound of the sixpence and on up to the shilling’s quasi-mythical bull.

The two-shilling (or florin) has a wise-looking salmon, but lording over all these creatures is the royal Irish beast, the horse on the half-crown. Most impressive of all, is the rare 10-shilling, a piece that depicts the death of Cu Chulainn – the ultimate meeting of animal, man and myth; Irish-style.

The new Irish coins appeared in 1928 and were a hit (as much as anything ever is in Ireland).

Maud Gonne was not a fan and declared that “the coins were entirely suitable for the Free State: designed by an Englishman, minted in England, representative of English values, paid for by the Irish people”.

The choice of harp on the obverse was quite revolutionary, being something of a snub to the monarch’s head which was depicted on all other Commonwealth coins. But an even bigger deal for many in Ireland was the lack of any Christian symbol. Some on the committee felt that any religious symbol might annoy the Ulster Unionists or, at the very least, turn the coins into religious medals instead of public tender.

That didn’t stop one anonymous critic (probably a priest, according to the Irish Independent) declaring:

If these pagan symbols once get a hold, then is the thin edge of the wedge of Freemasonry sunk into the very life of our Catholicity, for the sole object of having these pagan symbols instead of religious emblems on our coins is to wipe out all traces of religion from our minds, to forget the ‘land of saints,’ and beget a land of devil-worshippers, where evil may reign supreme

Our own penny and ha’penny treasures now sit, with all their history, in my
daughter’s collection of kopecs and francs, crowns and toonies. I hope that she will manage to keep them safe and share them with her own daughter one day.

Nana’s Gingerbread

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I’ve been running a blog for a few years so maybe it’s no harm if I put up a baking recipe from time to time. I’ll warn you here, it’s no healthy, non-vegan, low-sugar snack but an old-fashioned treat that’s full of butter and sugar.

This is my mum’s gingerbread, which I decided to bake, out of the blue, last week, for the main purpose of giving the house a blast of of sticky sugar and spices for an afternoon.

When I told the kids I was making it they were sceptical. “It’s not like gingerbread cookies” I told them, as they were thinking of the Scandinavian-style cookies we often make at Christmas, in shapes of reindeer and star-jumping men, or occasionally the kind you glue together with icing sugar into a gingerbread house and later smash and eat.

This is a sticky, sugary and soft cake which has to be eaten with a cup of hot (not warm) tea. Of course, the kids loved it, and the husband, as did my workmates, and the under-12s football team after the 10am Saturday morning match. It goes a long way, this one recipe.

I have no idea where my mum got the recipe. I’ll never find out, as she’s been gone now over 5 years. She would have sent it to me years ago typed up in an email, the only bits of correspondence I have left from her during my many years abroad. I baked it during long winter evenings in Toronto and Nova Scotia and a few times, later on, in Oslo.

The instructions are pure Shigs (my mum’s childhood nickname, short for Sighle) – bare-boned and concise, to the point of being vague. Not for her details like size of pan, or method of combining ingredients or even length of cooking time. To be sure, I checked her handwritten recipe in her old recipe book that still sits in my Dad’s kitchen. He suggested I take it with me, but the two of us gasped at the idea.

Did she get it from her own mother, who died before I was born? Most likely. But it’s just one thing on the ever-expanding list of things I’d love to ask her, as I and the kids get older, to ask her about her own experiences of health changes, perceptions of the world, of driving kids to school matches and music lessons and to their sleepovers with new friends, slowly but surely moving off into their own lives.

She might be amazed to see me writing on my own blog, and her recipe but how else can I let a recipe like this die out if I don’t share it?

Nana’s Gingerbread

Looking at the old recipe, I’ve clearly updated it over the years. My key, authentic ingredients here are the treacle and golden syrup – cans of which I would actually bring back abroad after a trip home to Dublin. Sometimes. But you can substitute molasses for the treacle and most countries have their own form of light syrup (or just use honey). Brown sugar is also hard to come by but oh is it worth it!

Ingredients

  • 4oz treacle
  • 4oz golden (light) syrup
  • 8oz dark brown sugar (or light brown)
  • 1/4 pint (150ml) of olive oil or 6oz butter
  • 10oz white flour and 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder
  • 2 oz wholemeal flour
  • Pinch of salt
  • 3 level teaspoons of ground ginger
  • 1/4 pint (150ml) mlik
  • 2 eggs

Method

Preheat the oven to gas mark 3, 180 degrees celsius
Line a tin 8 x 11 inches

  • Melt together in a heavy saucepan the treacle, syrup, sugar and oil (or butter) over a low heat so it doesn’t burn.
  • Mix together all the dry ingredients.
  • Beat the eggs and milk.
  • Mix the whole lot together, pour it into the pan.
  • Bake for 1 to 1-5 hours. Leave in tin to cool.
  • I have a note that says it’s better overdone than underdone, but I’m not sure about that.

Get the kettle on!

At Last, Our First Halloween in Ireland

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This will be the first time my daughters will be celebrating Halloween in Ireland as we’re not going away for the mid-term break. I don’t know what to expect from this celebration, though I’m sure it won’t be the same as when I was young, the mystical memories of which I carried around with me during my many years of living (and parenting) abroad.

For years I’ve been telling our two girls: “ah well an Irish Halloween is the real thing, it’s all genuine there, spooky and authentic. The bangers and the bonfires can be a bit annoying but it’s all good fun with real meaning”. But has it all become commercial and over the top, as I’ve been hearing from friends and colleagues? Or is that unique Samhain spirit, which never really translated abroad, still something a child can feel in Ireland?

Our daughters grew up in Italy and Norway two countries which, like other European nations, are still catching up to celebrating Halloween. It’s seen as another American holiday, one that’s quite like Carnival season (celebrated at the beginning of Lent) but really quite foreign and plainly just an opportunity for kids to dress up with ever-grosser face makeup and expect free sweets from disgruntled neighbours.

But our girls did get a nice taste of an Irish Halloween when they were very little in Norway. The ever-resourceful local Irish mammies of Oslo organised a party in a church hall each Halloween year where apples-on-a-string and other fun and games helped give the local half-Irish kids a blast of their ancient (non-Viking) heritage. One year, I even put in the considerable effort to make a barmbrack from scratch, just to get free entrance to the party.

READ MORE AT THE IRISH TIMES

The Wren on the Farthing

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I love old coins, like this English farthing I found recently in a shop in Carlingford, which had transformed into a necklace. The smallest of pre-decimal English coins, the farthing had a wren on it for many years, chosen to represent one of Britain’s smallest birds.

But in Irish culture the wren is actually a much more symbolic bird. Called a dreoilín in Irish, the little bird is celebrated once a year on the Day of the Wren – Dec 26th, or St Stephen’s Day (known as Boxing Day in Britain). There was a tradition that the wren had betrayed the hiding place of St Stephen, leading to his eventual martyrdom and so a sacrificial wren was to be hunted and punished each year, on the saint’s feastday. It is still celebrated every Christmas, in more somber style nowadays, by Wren Boys in Kerry and near us in Sandymount in Dublin: I’ve never gone to see them as my kids would probably be terrified by them.

Wren Boys

Here’s the song I learnt to sing years ago on one visit to Kerry:

The Wran the Wran the King of all birds,
St Stephen’s day was caught in the furze.
Although he was little his family was great.
Cheer up old lady and give us a trate.
Up with the kettle and down with the pan.
And give us a penny to bury the Wran

The wren’s had a tough old time in Irish folklore, you can read a bit more at this link.

I’m still trying to find out why the English chose it for their smallest coin. Could they not find a bird of their own?

Drizzle and Stone in Monasterboice

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Ireland is such a small country but it’s jam-packed with history.

Driving back down from Carlingford last week, we stopped to look at Monasterboice, the ruins of an ancient monastery which I last visited about 30 years ago. It hasn’t changed a bit since then, nor much at all in the last 1500 years. An old graveyard down a quiet country road, with the remains of a round tower, a church, and some 10th-century Celtic high crosses. The biggest one of these, the Cross of Muiredach, is almost 6 metres high. Stop and look closely and you’ll see why it’s considered to be a high point of Irish stone sculpture.

Our guidebook had it spot on. It is extraordinary to find one of Ireland’s artistic treasures just sitting in a field.

We wandered around in that romantic drizzle you find in this ancient part of the country, close to the Boyne Valley, Newgrange and Tara with their kings and tombs, battles and myths. Even the kids’s patience held out, for a bit. They headed back over the stone stile to the car – the only one in the car park across the road – while we looked more closely at the images carved into the stone, now more worn since the M1 motorway was built nearby a few years ago.

One old OPW sign marked out some of the biblical stories on the cross, and we had a good look up at the full size of it, picking out old reliables like Adam&Eve, Moses, Jesus, Michael, the devil, doubting Thomas. Along the sides was knotwork to equal any in the Book of Kells, and on one side, above your head you can see a hand reaching over you – the Hand of God (or Hand of Ulster). Two cats, or lions, guarding at the bottom.

These crosses, unique to Ireland (but with cousins in England and Scotland) were not actually grave markers but more likely to have been teaching tools for the many people who couldn’t read. It was the Victorians who revived them for their graveyards.

As we left, the evening was closing down around us and we drove back toward the motorway, the big city and the start of a new week.

The old stone stayed where it was.

Jaywalking

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I stood at a pedestrian crossing in Dublin during the week and, like all the other Irish people around me, I walked across the road when no cars were coming. A young student, clearly not a local, was waiting to cross on the other side. He looked confused, as if the rest of us had all seen an invisible green man to tell us we could cross.

“Haven’t you learned to Jaywalk yet?” I wanted to ask him as I rushed past.

A standard practice in Ireland, #jaywalking seems not to be so common in the UK and the word is barely known there. It actually comes from the US, where jaywalking has been an annoyance for years. The word “jay” first referred not to a traffic-weaving pedestrian but to horse-drawn carts (“jays”) and automobiles that were not straying off the correct side of the street. As roads became taken over by cars and walkers pushed to sidewalks, the “jay” began to refer to the foolish person who got in the way of the cars.

Having crossed roads myself in all sorts of places, from Copenhagen to Mumbai, I think we have a fairly sensible attitude to it here in Ireland.

Only 10 countries have made jaywalking illegal, and other countries have varying rules about it. The UK doesn’t have any law about it, whereas in China they’re apparently using facial-recognition to spot jaywalkers.

The lesson? Do it at your own peril, depending on where you are.

(This cool poster was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) program, by Isadore Posoff.)

Gargoyles and Angels in Armagh

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I just spent an entire week in Armagh – at the wonderful John Hewitt Summer School – but it wasn’t until my last day that I spotted an odd detail on the streets. It’s an elegant Georgian/Victorian city and I had already noticed the footscrapers set into the wall next to the fine doorways, but this little flash of bronze seemed both out of place, and clearly meant to be there.

Some of us from the festival – well up for a fresh walk around the town after a week of full-on talks, workshops and performances – took a guided tour from the tourist office. And the first thing our guide drew our attention to was the trail of 22 of these little bronze figures dotted around the streets of Armagh.

The one above is actually biting a coin, as he’s placed outside the Bank of Ireland on English Street (note the typical Northern Irish contrast of names there). And he’s a gargoyle, of sorts. Probably inspired by the creative creatures carved high up in the exterior of the cathedral up the way, St Patrick’s cathedral, and I’ll go off on a tangent here for a minute.

The cathedral dates back to the 13th century on the site of where St Patrick himself first set up a church in the 5th century, which led to the establishment of Armagh as the ecclesiastical capital of the island of Ireland. That cathedral is now Anglican (Church of Ireland) but there’s also a St Patrick’s Catholic cathedral further up the town. And both the Anglican and Catholic archbishops have their seat in the city. Of course. It would be like having two Archbishops of Canterbury, but, again, this is Ireland/Northern Ireland and things are quite particular here.

There are some interesting faces and creatures dotted around the cathedral’s exterior, and it turns out that Brian Boru – last of Ireland’s high kings, killed in 1014 – is buried somewhere in the walls.

So, back to these gargoyles and angels. It was too bad I didn’t have my kids with me to take us on this bronzey hide and seek of Armagh, but I had managed fine without them all week already. The German sculptor, Holger Christian Lonze, who created the sequence of 22 mythical creatures in 2006 placed them in very specific locations around town.

Like this fella holding up a paper outside the old newspaper office.

This one was sitting in an alcove above the Night Safe in the wall outside Danske Bank (on, ahem, Scotch Street).

Others gargoyles include one propped into the entrance way to the Market Place theatre, nervously holding a ticket while waiting for its date, and another with a knapsack on his back as he escapes away from the orchard garden below the cathedral. Sorry I couldn’t take photos of them.

And there are angels. But they all seem to float more vertically and are harder to photograph (no bad thing). One very beautiful angel sounds a horn in the shape of a famous iron age trumpet found at nearby Navan Fort.

This angel below is laden down with books on the wall outside the Robinson Library – one of the most beautiful libraries in the country and which I’ll have to come back and visit, at least to see the original copy of Gulliver’s Travels.

As well as pointing out some of the less obvious bronzes to us and saying hi to the Dean of the cathedral and most everyone else around the town, our tour guide told us a variety of old stories which mostly centred on women who had apparently done very bad things: time for a little revisionism, I wondered to myself.

Armagh also has one of the country’s best planetariums, the famous Armagh Pipers Club, and a number of other festivals for cider, music and more music. It’s well worth a visit, especially with kids.

Here’s a link to Visit Armagh’s page on the gargoyles and angels scupltures and trail.

Evening in Dublin

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You have to love Dublin. 

Where you can take an evening walk by the sea, and as the younger daughter stoops to pet a waggy spaniel you smile at the owner. Who may or may not have been Anne Enright. She did look an awful lot like her (and I met her once at a party in Oslo, one of us more tipsy than the other).

But then we saw the same woman paddling a kayak (minus dog) further down the beach half an hour later. Dodging the seal and the swimmers.

Whether it was or wasn’t Anne Enright, she was enjoying the evening too.

14 Henrietta Street

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There’s nothing like having a friend visiting to get you out and see new things in your own (current) city. And Dublin’s newest historic site – 14 Henrietta Street – which opened just last September, seemed like the perfect choice. It’s contained in just one building, you can see it only by a one-hour guided tour (booking recommended), and it’s in a part of the city I should know better. My father’s uncle, John Prunty, had a shop at 27 Dominick Street – but I’ll be telling his story another time.

This is Dublin’s first museum about its historic slums, which were only finally cleared in the 1970s. The word tenement – used in other cities like Glasgow and New York – refers to an older building split up into smaller flats, with a single entrance. But as these usually sprung up during the 19th century to accommodate the newly-industrial world’s growing city populations, tenements become shorthand for poor slums.

What the Dublin museum has achieved so well is a sense of the social history of Dublin through a sparse and innovative re-creation of this particular house’s history. It was built in 1720 as one of many grand city homes for a single wealthy family (plus servants) and 200 years later, its five floors were housing around 100 people.

The beautiful red and blue (reflected in the museum’s logo), are actually the standard colours used to paint the interiors of the tenement buildings. Reckitt’s blue and Raddle red, they were called, and no doubt associated with poverty.

The restoration work is superb: you can tell that was the case as soon as you walk in the entrance hall, a space which was completely restructured, and had a new staircase inserted. Have a look at the video below.

As the focus is on social history, it centres on the people who spent most of their time in the house – women and children. And that’s not something you see in a museum every day. As we hear about the first occupants – Lord Viscount and Lady Molesworth – we get a sense of their privilege. But also a reminder of class-blind cruelty as we learn of a later fire in their London home where she, by then a widow, lost several children in a house fire.

The gorgeous beech bed made specially for this house has been turned into a screen upon which is projected a specially-written poem, about mothers and babies, by poet Paula Meehan who was born in the Gardiner Street tenements. We are guided deliberately only through certain rooms, encouraged to take our time and sit on benches while we listen to stories – invited to imagine how things were, feeling life brought back into the different ages of the house.

Moving forward in the tour, and in time, we see how the grand rooms were sectioned off during the mid 1800s into one-room dwellings to be rented out to families of 7, 8, 11 people. None are left intact but we see traces of them, lines in the floor remind us of just how small the rooms were.

In the hallway we’re made to think of the smells and noises, the couples and strangers loitering in the darkness of a building whose front door was never locked, on a street, in one block, that housed thousands.

A nursery room starts to echo with street songs that most visiting school children are unlikely to have heard before.

Much of the interior is left feeling unfinished. Each inch of wall was carefully examined by the restorers but patches of peeling plasterwork and wallpaper are there as evidence of the house’s deep history.

The final room is a full replica of one of the final flats that remained before the house was shut down in the 70s. Inhabited by one person, it feels almost comfortable and it’s hard to imagine 10 people living in the same space. The family of this woman gave many mementoes to the museum, and they are of course continually collecting oral histories from everyone connected with the Dublin tenements.

Five floors of stories and memories and imagination, with immense care taken to preserve and interpret it, from grand drawing rooms to desperate poverty in the basement, this is one absolute gem you shouldn’t miss in Dublin.

The house has a great website and Facebook page with snippets of history. And they are of course on Instagram.

The architects’ site, Shaffrey, has more lovely photos.

The Italian Chippers of Ireland

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Today, May 22, is national Fish and Chips Day in Ireland, when you can get a takeaway meal at your local chipper for half price. But… it only applies to the Italian chippers, as these are the original chippers. They might display a sticker like this in the window to show they’re part of the crowd.

Names you see around the country, like Borza, Libero, Aprile, Macari or Romayo are a marker that you’ll get a decent meal – if you’re into huge portions of fried food, as many Irish people never seem to tire of.

The first chipper in Ireland was started by Giuseppe Cervi who – sometime in the 1880s – mistakenly got off the America-headed boat at Queenstown (Cobh) in Cork and walked all the way to Dublin where he eventually started up a fish n chip shop . He might have picked up the idea of fried fish from England, where it had been popular since the 1860s with greater availability of fresh fish inland. One story says that Cervi started frying up potatoes by accident, thinking he was frying chestnuts. His chipper in what is now Pearse Street was a big success, and his wife Palma was known for starting the phrase “one and one”, still used for ordering in Dublin today as she would point at the menu and ask a customer what they wanted – “uno di questo, uno di quello?”

The majority of Irish chippers we know today were founded by families who arrived in the 1950s – amazingly – from around the village of Val di Comino, in south of Rome. The ties have remained in place and if you travel around that area now you might find Irish-registered cars and some auld fellas playing bowls in the piazza speaking with a broad Dublin accent.

Whether Irish chippers serve up better food than British chippies is a debate for another day. But today, help yourself to a half-price fry-up if you pick the right place. Don’t even think of heading to the famous Burdock’s down by Christchurch, Dublin’s oldest-surviving chipper (1913). It might be world-famous… but it’s not Italian.

Here’s the full list of chippers taking part.

There’s also a full-length documentary on Italian chippers by Nino Tropiano, I haven’t watched it yet.

Ancient Palermo

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I spotted a few of these trilingual signs last week when we were in Palermo. Written in Italian, Hebrew and Arabic you can find them on some of the streets in the old Jewish area of this fascinating city.

In April 2017 the signs were defaced by vandals who blacked out the non-Italian names. It didn’t take long for some civic groups – and the mayor himself – to get involved in cleaning them up and ensure this bit of local heritage was not muddied. Apparently the Hebrew isn’t even really correct, just a quick transliteration of the Italian name. An indication that the signs (and the idea behind them) are a modern, and public, labelling of the area’s heritage.

Palermo is really ancient, founded by Phoenicians – that is, the guys who came before the Greeks. Jews were part of the huge mix of people and they lived just fine under the various rulers of Sicily, like the Normans and the Arabs. At one point Palermo had 300 mosques. But it all changed in 1492 when the Jews of Sicily were forced (by the new Spanish rulers) to go into exile or convert to Catholicism. The population never really recovered.

Here’s a link to an Italian story about the signs if you’re interested.

And a link to an interesting NYTimes story.

Besotted by Bassets

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It’s becoming a saga – this business of our family not yet having a dog. My elder daughter and I spend a lot of time discussing breeds and looking at other people’s dogs. Like this little fella we saw last week in Sicily while out for a passeggiata with friends in Catania.

I would call this dog Dachshund, or a sausage dog. Dachshund meaning Badger Dog in German. I guess there’s a reason for that.

“Che bel Bassotto” my friend called him.

“A Bassotto?” I asked. “Then what do you call a Basset Hound?” He didn’t know but I went home and looked it up. In Italian, Bassets are also called Bassotto or just “Basset Hound”.

Bassotto comes from the French “bas”, meaning low. And Basset Hound comes from the same kind of root – Basset meaning “quite low”.

But these two breeds are not really related to each other (according to another quick Google search); the droopy eared one is English and the cute sausagey one is German.

And – for the record – neither of them is related to a Beagle. Which in Italian is called “un Beagle”.

To confuse me even more, my younger daughter points me to her Italian Donald Duck comic book (which she still reads weekly) and points out the gang of bumbling bad guys – in Italian they’re called La Banda Bassotti. Meaning, the Dachshund gang.

“Ah those guys”, says my husband, “when I was a kid and read those comics they were called the Beagle Boys“.

And sure enough, these guys have a pet/guard dog called “Ottoperotto”. Who is a Dachshund.

Never mind all these cute beagles, bassets and sausage dogs. We might just make do with something simpler, like a labrador.

(You can check out an earlier post I wrote about how Italians love their dogs, whatever the breed)

(Oh, and the word besotted? That’s not connected. It comes from to become a sot (a fool, or drunkard).

Good Friday in Toronto

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I took these photos in Toronto around 2005, put them in an envelope and found them again a couple of months ago.

They show the Good Friday procession in the city’s Little Italy district. With lots of shots of the marching band and the women and the crowds. But, alas, it seems I didn’t take pictures of the focus of attention – Jesus dragging the huge cross, the centurions wearing helmets, the women in shawls. Those images have stayed in my memory, even if not on film, but finding these photos in a box have helped to jog my memory.

Like New York, it’s a city of distinct neighbourhoods, but with a clear difference. Toronto’s city villages were populated with new arrivals from Europe, Asia, Africa and the Caribbean much later in the 20th century, than the US. It feels more like a mosaic than the American melting pot.

We lived at Queen and Bathurst, close to the vibrant, globally-epicurean Kensington Market and right between two neighbourhoods – of Portuguese and Italians. With, apparently, half a million first and second generation people from Portugal and Italy living in Toronto, we had a lot of great bakeries and old-men bars around. And the day when there was a World Cup match between Portugal and Italy… well that was a sight.

Every year Toronto’s Little Italy hosts a Good Friday Procession, apparently the largest Catholic procession in North America. We decided to check it out one year, expecting… what, exactly? The Italian-Canadian version of an Irish-American St Patrick’s Day parade? A quiet display of people in odd hooded hats ringing bells?

We didn’t expect this huge, solemn, 3-hour long event that was clearly a cornerstone of this neighbourhood and the communities living there for over 50 years.

I don’t know which part of Italy most of these communities came from: no doubt, from the south. The parts where women still wear black today. But even if they have moved on, these 1960s emigrants still did, still holding onto the old ways.

I remember standing in that crowd, feeling the stillness and deep feeling of devotion among the people participating and watching from the side as they lined along the tramlines. No-one had a camera or did anything other than just watch. I looked carefully at the faces of these local Torontonian men, women and children who chose to dress up and walk the streets for hours as a centurion or a Philistine. Year after year. The Jesus taking very seriously the carrying of the cross, berated and shouted at. Each one marking this day of sorrow just as their parents had before them, and their grandparents before them, back in Italy.

My husband and I were so dressed in normal, bright colours among the crowds of black-clad women and men. I towered self-consciously over them with my discrete camera. The 1990s Irish woman among the Italian women still dreaming of 1960s Puglia.

10 years later, when we lived in Tuscany, we never came across anything quite like this show of devotion – that went beyond just the religious. Where the motherland is part of your religion.

Read more

Here’s a link to a lovely collection of photos of the Procession by a local photographer, from the 1960s to today. There’s also the wonderful film of another Canadian Easter story with a more French Catholic twist, Jésus de Montréal.

Coming home was the hardest move

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At 8.20am we leave the house to walk to school. I’m still processing the question my daughter asked me the night before: “Mummy do you feel settled here?” A few minutes into my long-winded answer, I think she regretted asking. How can I sum up what I’ve been analysing in my head this whole year and a half: how is life since we moved back, after living abroad for more than 20 years?

The short answer is: we’re getting settled, it always takes time, but this has been the hardest move we’ve ever done.

As we leave the house, the traffic is right there on top of us, and hovering above that is a pall of stress I feel in Dublin, which feels more like a big city than I remember from when I was growing up. A bus crawls past and it’s sporting an ad for a world-class theatre show, reminding me of one thing we love about choosing to live in a creative, top-class capital city; in a country that has seen such changes while I lived away.

One year here and the feeling of strangeness has mostly gone. My accent merges in with all those around me, making me almost nostalgic for when I was the foreigner, the Irish person in the room.

KEEP READING THIS STORY, IN THE IRISH TIMES

An Irish Mamma abroad

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During my years abroad, I became a mother. I’ve been back in Ireland now for a while. Yet still I stop and look around me when I hear a child shout “Mummy”. I forget that in Ireland that’s what kids calls their mothers. Up until recently, I was the only “Mummy” in a blowing gale of “Mammas”. Mummy or Mamma said loudly in the playground, quietly on the bus, thankfully at the school gate.

There are many ways to refer to your Mother. According to the New York Times anyway. Here’s a screenshot from their recent dialect quiz for the British Isles.

Mummy

That’s the basic word we use isn’t it? “I want my mummy”. But then you have Yummy mummy and Mummykins. And even “mummified” – a term many other mothers might agree they’ve felt on occasion.

For most of my life as a mother, my kids have called me Mummy. But I was usually the only one around, all the other kids were calling their mums Mama or Mamma.

Mor

This is the superbly solid Norwegian word for mother and a large part of my identity during the 7 years I lived in Oslo. I was a mor. Solid and strong? I tried to be.

Even the way you say the word is great. Mor is pronounced to rhyme with “moore”, just add a bit of a Kerry lilt on the R. To me it’s a word for a large, serious-looking, wise woman, who has full control over her family (in all directions) but probably also runs a large company. My second daughter was born in Norway – she and I were under the care of a jordmor (midwife), a word that literally translates as “earth mother”. I never once saw a doctor during those 9 months (including the free home checkups afterwards). I was in the best of hands.

From Colm O’Regan’s book Isn’t it Well for Ye? The Book of Irish Mammies

Mama

This is what little Norwegians call their mother. “Mama, mama, se på meg!” (Mummy mummy look at me). Typically heard in a playground and nowadays heard more as the modern child tries to distract their mama from her phone screen.

Those were the first words my 2 year old learned – “se på meg” – look at me, see how brave I am, think what I can do. Because in Norway kids are left to explore and experiment. I learned there to be a mother that could relax and am forever grateful for it. If the kid fell off the monkey bars – chances were the ground was designed to be soft enough to manage the impact. “Opp igjen” (up you get).

Mamma

Like Mama – but it’s got two Ms. Mmmmmmm.

We moved to Italy when my girls were 6 and 9, and they had to quickly add in that extra “m” to the Norwegian “mama”. The longer sound was almost more precious, less practical. But it was beautiful. Mam…ma. They’d rarely call me Mamma, it was how they referred to me to other people.

“La mamma” – the mother figure that is Italy. Just the sound of it is stronger, more obvious and public than the slightly nervous “mum” or “mom” of English speakers.

For example: “My mamma cooked for 20 people yesterday and she’s going to mind the kids at the sea for most of July”.

versus

“My mum’s going to have a word with my dad about minding the kids on Saturday night”

Mamma mia!

Yes they do say it, often shortened to just “Mamma!!” One of my daughter’s school friends used it all the time. Driving them both home to our house one afternoon, she was being shown all the wackiest photos from the Guinness Book of Records in the car:

“look at this one”–“mamma mia”. “And see the size of that one”–“mamma”. As we drove past about the Madonna carvings stuck in the wall of our country road, I could only smile.

Mammy

Living in a country where your kids only speak your own language at home, you have to make a conscious decision about what you want them to call you. While every other child around us called their mother “mamma” or “mama” – I got to choose what my kids should call me.

My husband has his “mom” and I had my “mum”. But I was an Irish woman abroad and I thought I’d get them to call me “mammy”. This is a word that brings to mind a hard-working, hard-done-by but devoted mother, a superhuman status comparable to the Jewish mother. Or, of course, Mrs Brown and her boys. I thought I could elevate myself to the level of Mammy by suggesting I’d be called a proper Mammy, not just a Mummy.

What was I thinking? It only occurs to me now how at odds it seems with the “mammy” of the American south, the matronly older black servant of plantation days. It would have sounded odd to any passing American mum in the streets of Florence if they’d heard a child yell “mammy can we have a gelato?”

No-one in my family growing up was ever called Mammy. We weren’t inner city or deepest country. Like it or not, I’ll just never be a mammy. It never took off.

Emma

One morning when she was about 4, my elder daughter decided to stop calling me Mummy and started to use just my name. You might think she mixed the two together: Emma and Mama sound similar, but she was old enough by then to know the difference.

And then she started calling her father by his first name too. Maybe she picked up from a German friend, we never got to the bottom of it.

“Don’t!” I’d cry. “You are one of only TWO people in the entire world who can call me mamma, mother, mum – whatever. But not Emma. Everyone else calls me that.”

This went on for a year or two, long enough for her younger sister to start doing it too. And then it just stopped and I became mummy again. And I was happy then.

Mum

After a visit last summer to my husband’s family in Canada, this same daughter picked up on all the “moms” she heard her cousins and friends use. When we came home (and she started big school) she called me “mom” for a while but now she’s settled for just Mum. That’s what big girls call their mother. And I’m a little sad.

From Colm O’Regan’s book Isn’t it Well for Ye? The Book of Irish Mammies.

Mother

I talk regularly with my daughters about my Mum, or Nana, as they called her. We keep her in the conversation, don’t shy away from her not being here but keep her memory alive. We only ever called her Mum, as did my Dad. She was never “mother” except when I hear “you look just like your mother”.

My mum’s mother was known as mama (pronounced with a broad Irish Aaa). I never knew her as she died long before I was born. But I have her baking trays and Christmas pudding recipe.

My mum mothered us, never smothered us. I didn’t really get to mother her, but I’m trying to mother my Dad now we’re home.

Look up the word mother and you’ll find hundreds of related words. The most special words in the language. The most difficult.

Nurture, protect, cherish, tend, raise, parent, pamper, cosset – that’s an awful lot for one person to do. But we do.

Seriously, Lads!

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“Ah come on Lads!”

So declared my 9 year old daughter to the other kids in the local playground this weekend – the bigger one that has the cool sandpit construction setup. “Lads”, she says, “let’s have the water flow a bit first and then see if it’s stuck.”

I smiled when I heard that: there’s my girl.

She’s not addressing the group as “guys” – the word I’ve been hearing all the time in Ireland since we moved back last year – as in, “guys let’s work on this together and then smash it up”. As a handy word guys is fine (and dandy) to use in Canada and the US. But I have to say I don’t like how this G-word seems to have taken over speech in Ireland, at least big chunks of the country. I get annoyed every time I hear a parent/coach/teacher shout “hey guys can you all come over here?” We had our own words before – since when did a cute fella become a cute guy?

Guys is not a strong word: even in North America it’s considered slang and not advised for professional use and has also been experiencing a gender-focussed backlash (see this Salon article) and in my own experience there it was considered a male word (unlike, say, folks, the charming y’all or even the unsubtle peeps).

The word for addressing a group of people in Ireland is lads. It’s not perfect, to be honest, it doesn’t really cover the girls but does anyone say “lads and lassies”? It’s fine, let’s just leave it.

Ah Lads!

Living abroad for most of her life, this same sandpit-managing daughter of mine had to learn a lot of her everyday English from me. All of her daytime and weekend-socialising hours were spent with other kids in a different language. So at age 4 she would be shouting “dere!” to her Norwegian playmates and by age 7 “ragazzi!” to the Italian classmates. I wouldn’t have told her to say “lads” when she was with other English-speaking kids, most of whom would be American or English anyway (and mostly girls, not boys) but she must have picked it up somehow.

If I had been a hard-core Irish-parent-abroad, I might have insisted on the family using “yous” or “yis” or “ye” when addressing a group. But I have my limits.

Sorry if I’m being a language curmudgeon, I know it’s supposed to grow and adapt. But here’s something we Irish should think about – the use of “guy” actually comes from Guy Fawkes. The very one who gets bonfired every year in the UK in that weird English (and anti-Catholic) tradition. Seriously lads!

The tooth fairy is dead. Long live the tooth fairy.

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It’s the end of an era. The tooth fairy is no more. The family myth was foiled yesterday morning by the youngest in the family. An upper tooth had fallen out at school and even though it was lost on the way home, she went ahead and left a book under her pillow (a habit our kids have/had was to leave the tooth inside a book). The only problem was, she didn’t tell us she did it because she wanted to send a signal directly to the tooth fairy. When that magical creature did not show up next morning, the game was up.

My daughter’s distress as the myth crumbled during my pre-breakfast dismal admission of subterfuge caught me by surprise – “so that tooth that fell down the armchair… you really did find it 4 years later didn’t you?”. And her distress made me remember just how young she is. When you’re only nine, why wouldn’t you want to hang on to that kind of belief for a little longer? Indeed how could you, at that age, even get your head around a concept like suspending belief, of not going along with everything your parents tell you about something unseen?

Charlie and Lola discuss the Tooth Fairy

When the real story was revealed to her, it was like a switch – and quite a painful one – from one of those pillars of childhood to an unfamiliar adult one. With no going back.

Many parents choose not to “deceive” their children with modern myths, like this tiny winged creature who takes charge of every baby tooth across the world. (Just do the calculations.)

Watching her be so upset, I wondered if we had done her a disservice. When her father and I chose to take the path of mythical beings – familiar to both of us from our own childhoods – we realised it was all or nothing. And that sometime it would end. When I was a child I remember the truth dawning on me slowly, from hints and comments of friends and older siblings, but it didn’t upset me. And I thought it was worth it.

My husband and I have chosen a mobile, rootless, family life for ourselves. We have adapted and made up some of our own traditions as we’ve moved our children from Canada to Norway to Italy to Ireland. We probably thought that Santa, the Tooth Fairy and just a hint of the Easter bunny would bring some stability from our own family backgrounds. And they have indeed proven to be a constant in our lives as we have moved language, friends, schools and houses.

What has been amazing to watch is how our two intelligent children have managed to go along with their parents’ official version of all these myths, for years, all the time ignoring what their friends around them in whatever country believed.

In Norway, for example, where we lived for most of their early childhood, everyone around us would expect Santa Claus to knock on their door and say “hallo” before handing over the presents – on the evening of December 24th, a full 12 hours earlier than us. But there was never any question in our house that Santa would graciously come, unseen, down the chimney (though we didn’t have one) during the night while we slept. And he certainly wouldn’t have looked like our neighbour in a red suit. What a notion!

Unlike the routines of Christmas, teeth can get lost at any time of the year. Anywhere. And so the tooth fairy has been our constant companion, moving and travelling the world with us.

We came up with a way to ensure the tooth fairy could always find us by explaining that a red light would show outside the window of any child that had lost a tooth that day. A red light that’s invisible to human eyes, of course. 

This fairy has been especially good at currency conversion depending on where the local pickup/drop-off needed to happen. The conversion isn’t totally accurate, but we wouldn’t expect her to carry change. 2 euro does not really equal 2 dollars (Canadian) nor indeed 2 British pounds nor 20 kroner (Norwegian or Danish). But this worked out to be a handy on-going maths and retail exercise for the kids, who always expecting the amount to be rounded up.

The most global adventure we dragged the fairy on was when our elder girl lost a tooth while we were visiting friends in Oxford during one big summer trip. She wanted to hold on to the tooth for longer so it came with us to Dublin – our next stop – and for some reason she wanted to get it all the way to her other grandparents’ house in Canada before finally agreeing to put it under her pillow and to trigger the red light there. She was thrilled to wake up to a two-dollar coin (a Toonie) the next morning and now she always associates that coin with that day.

Our younger, more rational, child (who I had thought was the one more likely to smell a rat) asked questions like: How does she carry all that money? Why only money and not also a present? Why doesn’t she come to grownups? The older sister would tell her that the fairy takes away all the teeth and builds up a great big store of them – but we’ve never figured out why.

A few times during our couple of years living in Italy, it came up that Italian children sometimes expect a tooth mouse, not a fairy, to come and collect their dental indiscretions. But we never heard much talk of it, and it doesn’t seem to have the same superstitious punch as the northern European tooth fairy.

So now, the tooth fairy has made an abrupt departure from our life but our girl has been assured that 4 euro (yes it’s gone up) will still be paid out for each tooth. She has yet to face up to dealing with the Santa issue, but she’s smart – it is only 3 weeks to Christmas and I can see why she’d let that conversation slide.

An old parental-guidance letter is doing the rounds again on social media this Christmas season, which begins with the words “Dear Daniel, you asked a really good question. Are mummy and daddy really Santa?… The answer is no, we are not Santa.” The letter goes on to explain that Santa is the spirit of Christmas, the magic and love and spirit of giving that is kept alive through parents. He lives in our hearts, not at the North Pole, and is there to teach young children how to believe in something they can’t see or touch.

Shall we go along with that advice, and stay close together as a family as we let the hard beliefs of childhood fall behind us and move on? I think we will.

A cartoon Tooth Fairy man in a tutu.

One cup of family baking

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It’s a slow family Saturday morning in Dublin. Our eldest daughter has offered to make one of our favourite breakfasts, waffles. Norwegian waffles.

We have a standard recipe (with its secret ingredient*) but I’ve never written it into my recipe book. Instead it’s bookmarked on the iPad at Norwegian food site Matprat.no. I could of course find one in English but this is more fun and reminds us of our old home in Oslo where we lived for 7 years. Our daughter traces down the list of ingredients and measurements with her finger.

And the questions start.

  • What does ss mean again? (it’s a sugar spoon/dessert spoon)
  • What’s 4dl? Is that the same as millilitres? (It’s 400 ml, use the measuring jug)
  • Should the flour be plain or self-raising? (plain)
  • Can you take over? (sigh)

I’ve lived in a lot of places over the last 20 years (the US, Canada, Norway, Italy, now Ireland) and in each one I’ve been preparing food for myself, the husband and eventually for our kids to eat. Not only does each country have its own cuisine, but also different cooking techniques, tools and measurements.

I am neither a serious foodie nor brilliant at numbers so I feel I’ve done quite well to adjust to all the different methods. I’m a decimal kind of girl. Grams, kilos and litres suit me fine, and the best cookbooks include them as well as pounds and ounces. I would have grown up with both. Moving to the US was my first wake-up call. The American use of cups and spoons for measuring is ingenious and it meant that for a few years I got by without buying a decent weighing scale. But when I’m on this side of the Atlantic and baking from my US days, I still get stuck when I see a recipe call for “2 sticks of butter” as that’s how they package (what they call) butter over there.

Liquid measurements are all over the place. There’s the British (and Canadian) 20oz and American liquid pint (16oz) and little-used dry pint (um, 1/8 of a dry gallon). This makes a difference when you’re working through a recipe like festive rum and liqueur eggnog from your Joy of Cooking, my first cookbook. I’ll just take a litre, or liter, thanks.

My husband is, thankfully, brilliant at numbers (and we’re training up our younger daughter for this level of mental maths) and he’s used to my panicked shouting over the years from the various kitchens we’ve had, for on-the-spot conversions. “How many grams will 6ozs be?” or “If I double the sugar is that 7/8s of a cup?” I have of course been able to Google conversions for the last 10 years but it’s just not the same.

Our usual moving box marked “Kitchen” carries most of the basic tools for international baking: my two basic weighing scales, (the nice digital one is only for good occasions), my trusty nested cup measurements (bought one rushed New York lunchtime away from the office) as well as the plain plastic baking bowls I somehow picked up at the convenience store next to our hotel in Hawaii. I’ve managed to keep the same brownie pan, long hand whisk and the little stone that keeps brown sugar moist in the jar. Electrical aids like blenders have come and gone as we moved from one country’s electrical system to another.

I’ve managed to master all types of cooker (gas, electric, induction or just temperamental), though I still struggle to remember that boiling an egg in sea-level Dublin takes less time than at my in-laws’ house 1km above sea level in Calgary. Or is it more time?

Now that I’m back in Ireland I love to hang around the baking aisles and enjoy the long-missed offerings like caster sugar, golden syrup, several types of brown sugar, self-raising flour, proper oats and other heavy things I couldn’t smuggle back abroad with Ryanair. And let’s not forget the butter! Nothing nowhere compares to the golden taste of Irish butter – the only foodstuff I’ll admit to bringing back to Italy.

There’s also that staple – bicarbonate of soda, poetically called bread soda in Ireland. When I first moved to Norway I needed to find some to make a batch of my (Darina Allen) scones. I was finally enlightened by a woman dressed in 19th century peasant costume. She was doing a live demonstration in a smoke-filled hut at Oslo’s National Folk Park, baking lefse (a delicious potato-based pancake) and she explained that the stuff I really need was hjørnsalt, a traditional Norwegian raising agent which originally was the powder from a deer’s horn. I tried it out but then had to find something resembling like buttermilk to go with it – any Irish baker abroad will sympathise with that ongoing quest.

From country to country my favourite cookbooks have come with me, as well as the orange-coloured notebook I bought at the Bay in Toronto just after my eldest was born. In it I’ve been slowly recording the recipes that work best for us as a family, copied in by hand from books, websites, friends, aunts. And even more useful are the back pages where I’ve written down the party food menu for the kids’ birthdays in three countries: what a gift it’s been to see the names of the friends who came, kids and their parents. Memories we’ll keep for the next chapters – and recipes – in our lives.

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*And The secret waffle ingredient? A good pinch of ground kardemomme, or cardamom.

 

This story was published in the Irish Times on 20th November.  

Cross your arms and eat your pastry

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A Danish pastry shop is one of the world’s great wonders. Especially for travelling families.

Our 9 year old was tired and very grumpy. I knew if we kept walking through this part of Copenhagen we’d find a fantastic bakery. We kept walking. We turned a corner and there was the magical sign.

“See that, that’s the symbol of all Danish bakeries. Trust me, they’ll have goodies”.
“But that’s a pretzel, can I have a pretzel?”
“No they don’t really do those here, it’ll be sweet”
“Okay then”. 

Day saved.


What we call a Danish pastry is a Wienerbrød in Denmark, named after the Viennese style of baking that came in during the 19th century. In 1850 the local bakers went on strike, and new bakers were brought from Vienna, along with their tasty, buttery, puffy pastry (with origins in Persia via Turkey and France). The Danes added their own jams, custard and chocolate to them and aren’t we lucky they did?

The shape is called a Kringle and one theory is that it comes from a 7th century monk who rewarded children with a doughy pretzel for saying their prayers. The crossed part represents folded arms and the three circles represent the Trinity.

A lifetime of needles

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I’ve been scrabbling through old boxes of folders and files, the ones that hold the history of my little family’s health through the years of our peripatetic life. Having moved to a new country three times in as many years, you would think that I – the mother – would have kept tidy the folder of “important family paperwork”.

Never mind the kids’ artwork and sports medals, what I really need to find quickly is their vaccination records. I finally find the random bits of clipped together, each one showing a list of dates, signatures and stamps from doctors and nurses who administered these life-saving injections into the thick skin of my precious babies’ legs and arms.

It seemed a lot simpler for my own mum who would just reach up the bookshelf in the front room of the Dublin house that is still the family home. In the back of her Doctor Spock book she recorded all our vaccinations, episodes of mumps and those other pesky poxes we used to get back in the 1970s.

The first of my own daughters was born 12 years ago in Ontario, Canada, but we moved around to two other provinces in eastern Canada during the first two years of her life. Childhood vaccinations in Canada are done at 2, 4, 6 and 18 months and so her yellow record card has tracked all her different visits, from health clinics in three towns thousands of miles apart from each other. The names and locations of these clinics mark the course of our lives over those two years, triggering memories of places explored, friends made, dinners shared, winters survived. This card is our only record of her early vaccinations – as each province had a slightly different schedule (see below). What’s even more amazing is that I’ve managed to hang onto it.

I don’t remember much from each of her injections, she was a tough baby, except for the last one, in New Brunswick, where I remember being generally fascinated with our impressive, charming GP who was mother to 17-year-old quadruplets: two boys and two girls, the girls becoming our (interchangeable) babysitters.

A few years later we moved to Norway and our younger daughter was born there. Naturally enough, as a country that often tops the top-everything lists, they’re big into public vaccinations. That was totally fine with me. For some reason they run on a different timeframe:  6 weeks, then 3, 5, 12 and 15 months but that wasn’t a problem as we (thankfully) didn’t go anywhere during those years. Not until she was 7 years old and we moved to Italy.

Now, this kid isn’t as tough as her big sister.

A year into our new life in Tuscany we learned there was a local outbreak of meningitis; a nugget of information I might have missed if I didn’t regularly read the local paper, or keep in with other international mums on Facebook. After checking Norway’s vaccination schedule online, and having my old GP there email me our records, I realised that she had never been vaccinated against Meningitis: a slight panic ensued.

Her big sister had had it done, as it’s part of the Canadian schedule at age one. It’s also done in Ireland and the UK – these being of interest as we might plan to move there some day, and I was starting to realise I needed to have all this straight in my head. Our GP in Florence – who we trusted and could easily talk to – advised us to go ahead and get the vaccine done. It wouldn’t be complicated, she said.

This meant I had to order the meningitis vaccine through the village pharmacy, and with so many anxious Tuscan parents doing the same, this took a couple of weeks. Once it came in and I had handed over 90 euro (the one time I’ve had to pay for any of this), I physically carried the vial that contained minute traces of this vile disease which was already killing off several young people around Tuscany up the stairs to the GP’s office next door. The pharmacist had looked at me blankly when I asked for the skin-numbing plaster which had saved this baby many tears for earlier needles. Turns out that was a purely Norwegian invention, and in Italy this was going to be done old-style.

We were the last appointment of the day and being the kind-hearted village doctor she was, la Dottoressa was well past schedule. Her kindness quota already used up, she quickly got tired of waiting for my needle-shy daughter to bare her upper arm. She cajoled and smiled and argued with her until she finally enlightened her in accented English that “if you don’t get this injection you could get a horrible disease which can make your ears fall off”. My daughter was so surprised, the point of the needle slid quietly in, but the tears when they came, were ever greater.

In the car driving home, my girl was untypically quiet. “Mummy, can we please not move country again and not have to get any more needles we missed from last time?”

So now, in 2018 we’re living in Ireland. I gather together all these records and memories to share them with our local health clinic. Hoping that the girls are both on track and haven’t missed out on some major public health issue their peers are already immune to.

Our older baby – who charmed all those Canadian doctors – is now in secondary school. As in many countries, she is getting her HPV vaccine – an amazing, potentially life-saving injection that didn’t even exist when I left Ireland as a young woman 20 years ago. This is not the year to imagine the reality of any woman getting cervical cancer in Ireland, after the scandal of the faulty cervical check programme brought to light a few months ago by some amazing women who are dying of it, and partners of women who already have.

For myself I’ll admit that I’m grateful that my own women’s health issues have been dealt with outside Ireland. And now that my daughter is at the beginning of her journey with women’s health, I’m not going to pass up the chance of her getting a vaccine that has been proven safe and able to reduce the risks of getting this cancer later in life. In an atmosphere of trust misplaced and betrayed I have to take a leap of faith that this is the right step, better prevention than cure (or in current cases) even diagnosis.

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If you’re interested, or you’ve lost track of your own vaccination records, there’s a fantastic tool to compare the schedules of different European countries.

https://vaccine-schedule.ecdc.europa.eu

A Neighbour’s Kiss

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We’ve been to lucky to set up our new home just outside Florence, a rental apartment carved out of a beautiful old villa. It’s 15th or 16th century, says our next-door-neighbour who introduced himself on our first day. Cinque o seicento. I’m not sure which. Luciano is in his mid seventies, more of a grumpy charmer than a flirt, good humoured and, soon, ridiculously complimentary of our children who can be a little noisy, even by Italian standards. Think, Walter Matthau with a twinkle in his eye and that’s Luciano.

Our gardens run alongside each other, but his is much neater and with a much-better view of the Duomo, down below us in Florence. We often hear him in his garden, pottering, talking loudly to his wife in a way you soon learn is normal for Italians.

I know that he’s the one responsible for leaving a plastic bag for my daughters on our hallway door. This bag contains some of the little plastic figures that are part of a tokens campaign at the big Florence supermarket. These figures are hot currency at school and our neighbour seems to realise how valuable they might be to an 8 year old.

It’s not surprising he keeps his gesture anonymous — the first time he knocked and delivered his offering in person he was mobbed. It was one of those rare moments when my children were actually shocked with gratitude. They even gave him a hug, un abbraccio, something they wouldn’t normally do— he is an old man, who often smells of too much lunchtime wine.

It’s been a couple of weeks since his last door-handle dropoff, so I suggest to my girls that they bring something over to him as a present. Not necessarily to remind him to clear out his grocery bags; more to thank him for his kindness.

In a rare rush of baking last night (this is Italy, who bakes?), I made a cheesecake. I suggest they give some of it to Luciano. Oh they’re all over this idea and have to be persuaded to give him only a third, not half the cake. They want to go to his apartment together and give it to him, my husband and I are not to come with them. This is their thing.

They also decide to make something for him. They attack some sheets of coloured paper and produce a little origami box and a paper swan. As we write out a card none of us can remember the name of Luciano’s wife. We don’t see so much of her, not as much as we hear over the hedge.

With cake and presents in hand, our daughters head out the door, across the cool terracotta floor, to the older couple’s apartment across the hallway. We stay near our door to listen in as best we can.

The wife — with ultra-red hair and dark mascara, also in her mid-70s, childless — hears the bell and her voice echoes from inside their pristine home. A home which has never — and never will — host a grandchild. Chi è? she asks sharply, who’s there? Siamo noi, the girls voices tumble together, it’s just us. She pauses, then realising they’re genuine, she opens the door. Her voice softens. Buonasera. Then another pause while she goes back inside to get Luciano, who is surely the main recipient of what they hold in their hands. After a few seconds, his deep bass voice joins hers and my girls are swept inside with obvious whirls of hugs and exclamations — che carino! ma che bello! siete cosi gentili!. “You’re so good!”

We can only picture the scene from our side of the hall, our hearts pounding to listen in to this moment of independence.

Just a few minutes later we hear the other door close, and they come back in to us.

Their faces are glowing. Alive from realising how one kind thought and a bit of creativity can spark absolute joy in a surprised, older receiver.

Did you remember to tell him to put the cake in his fridge? No, they smile.

I kiss my younger girl’s head and I can smell the perfume of the older woman. I kiss it again and the smell is gone.

An Old Dictionary

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Our 9 year old needs an Irish dictionary for school. She’s been in school in Dublin for a year now and has managed to catch up really well with learning Irish. All the other kids started when they were about 5. Even if you speak another language, which she does (Italian), Irish is not necessarily a no-brainer. It’s about as un-phonetic as you can get which makes it hard to pronounce, has a complex grammar, and it’s not like you hear it spoken on the streets every day.

We were out at the weekend and wandered into a charity shop in Dun Laoghaire. They had a few dictionaries in their books section and two of them were basic Irish pocket dictionaries like this. They’re meant for school use – sure where else would you be using it? This edition was dated 1993 but I figured that was recent enough, it couldn’t have changed too much since then.

I bring it to the man behind the counter, taking care not to let her start rummaging in the little baskets of plastic jewellery on the countertop. He hands the book back to me, saying there’s no charge. “I always give dictionaries to the kids for free”, he says. “You know, they need them for school, so why should they pay?”

I should have asked him if he knows what ever happened to Sean and Melissa. I wondered what happened there.