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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.

——–

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.

 

The Red and the Green

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England and Ireland – they’re different. As a child I’d always grasp this when I looked around a street in Dublin or London and saw a postbox. Irish postboxes are green and in England (and Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) they’re red.

To the Irish eye, this English red can seem brash, a show of strength and a reminder of how these boxes were once found all over the British empire, built to work as nodes in a vast web of communication. The green of an Irish postbox – built in the same shapes and sizes, standalone pillars and stuck into walls – seem more humble, bringing a sense of ease, gentleness, nature.

The red of England (thought by some to represent the dragon’s blood of the cross of St George) is everywhere you look in the UK: London buses, phone boxes, Beefeaters, the Red Arrows, Red Ensign, the England jersey, Virgin. Even the Irish Guard – the British Army regiment served by Irish citizens and official guard of the Queen – have bright red uniforms.

Understandably, when Ireland gained independence from Great Britain in 1922, the new Irish government went mad turning things green: postboxes, buses, phone boxes, soldiers’ uniforms, and on to today with St Patricks’ Day* beer and our sport heroes, known as the Boys/Women/Girls in Green.

As for postboxes.

They were introduced in England by Anthony Trollope – novelist and yes, post office worker – after he saw the idea in France. Once penny postage was introduced in England in 1840, the postal service took off and postboxes were put in place in the 1850s for people to avoid trekking to the post office and to take pressure off postal workers.

And here’s the thing. English postboxes started off as green. This was to make them blend “pleasingly” into the landscape. But after a few years it was decided they didn’t stand out enough so red was chosen as a good strong colour and in 1874 someone went around the country (and Ireland) to paint them all red.

Ireland got its first postboxes in 1855 (in Belfast, Ballymena and Dublin) so technically these were green, then red, and then green again after 1922. Many Irish boxes still show the marks of old Empire: ER (Edward Rex), GR (George Rex), VR (Victoria Regina) and the scripts of the Irish P&T and An Post. But look very closely and you might still see a hint of red paint peeking from underneath the green.

 

English postboxes are coloured “pillarbox red” (or RGB 223, 52, 57) and the Irish ones – well they were painted whatever green was available when the paint job was done.

During the 2016 commemorations of the 1916 Easter Rising, some postboxes in Dublin were painted red–and people noticed the difference.

My romantic side likes to think how of the many letters and parcels sent back and forth between Ireland and England – catalogues for silk dresses, newspapers, books, and letters between families. But think of how many stories of poverty and loneliness and despair were also communicated.

Inside and out, how much history between two countries can you fit into one old cast-iron box?

*The green is not really connected to St Patrick – for centuries the colour most associated with him was blue, but green has been the dominant colour of Irish nationalism since the late 18th century.

 

The view from the roof

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I took this photo in 2000 from the rooftop of my workplace near the Flatiron building in Manhattan, on 19th Street between 5th and 6th. We worked long hours at our vibrant little web agency, and we’d often pop up to this rooftop for some air, a chat, a look at this view and to remember why we were in New York. Standing on the roof we were 17 stories up, at the level of the water towers and the birds – we were floating high above the streets in this vertical city. Down below us, New York and its people, from all over the world, flowed on through the streets, underground, up and down buildings. Living their lives.

On September 11th 2001, my boyfriend (now-husband) and I stood on another rooftop – 4 stories  up on our apartment building in Brooklyn. We scrambled up the fire escape when we heard that something was going on. We had been listening to the radio while getting ready to go to work but the signal had died: our local NPR was beamed from the twin towers, and this was long before mobile internet. We stood on our rooftop and on the skyline a few miles away we watched another plane calmly, quietly fly straight into the second tower, and soon after, the whole thing collapsed in on itself. It was completely quiet around us on that beautifully sunny morning and I looked down over the edge of the roof to the street below. Instead of scenes of panic, people of all nationalities walked or drove down the street with their groceries. Living their lives. And that continued during the days that followed, people moving forward, not being afraid. And that will never change.

(I shot and printed this photo myself. It’s been hanging on the wall of all the houses we have since lived in, from the US to Canada to Norway to Italy and now in Ireland).

Back to the schoolroom in Ireland

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Arriving back at school last week, our youngest nudged us away from the door on her first day – “I’ll go in by myself”. I took this as a good sign as we start into our second year of school in Ireland.

A big pull for us to move here from Italy a year ago was to settle our daughters into what I’ve long claimed to my Canadian husband is an excellent education system.

With three years of school experience from Norway and two from Italy, has it worked out for us here? For the kids definitely yes, but the system (or lack thereof) has been difficult for us to slot into.

As people told us before we moved, “you can’t go too wrong with any of the Irish primary schools”. They could have added, “if you can get into one”.

Here’s the full story as published last week on the Irish Times.

The ups and downs of returning to school in Ireland from Abroad

 

 

The Irish for Brexit

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“Brexit” is now a universally-known word and it is used as is, with no local translation.  Brexit is Brexit in every language. Every language, but one – Irish.

The word Brexit was first coined in 2012, eight months before David Cameron announced he would be holding a referendum on the UK’s exit from the EU. The word was a natural successor to the word “Grexit” – the suitably-classical sounding name used to describe one solution to Greece’s massive debt issues. It’s not a technical term:   but it’s a nickname – or actually a portmanteau – that has stuck, referring to the whole process of the UK leaving the EU.

“Brexit” won out over some weaker, and unpronounceable, alternatives, like “Ukexit” and the biscuity-flavoured “Brixit”. It was added to the OED in 2016 by which stage offshoot words were appearing: brexiteer, to brexit as well as Bregret, Bremain and remoaners. A child in Germany was even christened with it, according to the Express anyway.

Take note that the term Brexit is not fully accurate – it is not just Britain that plans to leave, but the entire UK (which consists of Great Britain and Northern Ireland), though some of those individual elements voted to stay. I won’t get into the politics here. Really I won’t.

Names for possible EU-exits by other countries have thrown out some fun word-play. Here are some of my favourites:

  • Nullgaria
  • Fraurevoir
  • Full (for Hungary)
  • Quitaly
  • Luxgettouttahere
  • Forsakia
  • Byerland (for Ireland)

So why haven’t other languages decided to adapt a local version of Brexit? Why didn’t, say, the French come up with their own word , as they usually do? What about languages that don’t typically use an X or where “exit” doesn’t work?

Could it be because Brexit was not meant to be a long-term thing? That it would be done and dusted quickly and easily? Or because only one country is likely to want to really pull out of the EU (even if they are still figuring out how, when, and even why)?

So how about the Irish – why did we bother to translate Brexit? First, some background:

The Irish language is spoken across the island of Ireland, north and south, and the Republic of Ireland is officially a bilingual country. I am far from being a fluent speaker, but I paid my dues and did the 14-odd years of it at school, (and yes I did do honours for the Leaving, to my credit).

As a race, we’re known to be contrary – and as our own language was suppressed for several centuries by the English invader it’s no surprise that we like to adapt concepts to our own linguistic viewpoint. (You could say it’s making a statement, but who would actually notice, except us?)

So in the Irish language, there are in fact two words in use for Brexit.

The main media outlets in Ireland (which are English-speaking) of course use Brexit – and you should be aware that it’s probably more in the news in this country than even Britain, and more Irish people know what’s going on with the latest negotiations (or lack of) than many people in Britain. Why? Because no other country, even the UK itself, will be as directly affected by the exit when/if it happens. (A quick recap: trade, citizens’ rights, education, banking services, and the small matter of the Northern Irish border.)

As a bilingual country, Ireland has a thriving Irish-language media: one dedicated TV station, several radio stations, plenty of print and online publications.

And the Irish-language media chose not to use Brexit but came up with their own word: Breatimeacht.

“Breatimeacht” is the official Irish word used on the Nuacht (News). It’s a clever portmanteau that works well:

“na Breataine” = Britain

“imeacht” = leaving.

Irish-language guru Darach Ó Séaghdha, author of Motherfocloir and founder of the podcast, has written:

“some critics have pointed out that translation offers the opportunity for correction – it’s the UK that’s leaving, not the geographical entity of Britain. This has led to Sasamach being more popular in some quarters (Sasana, England, amach, out).”

This secondary word – Sasamach – is now being used (first coined by @tuigim) and I think it’s quite brilliant. Sasana (which stems from the word Saxon) refers to England, not Britain.

If you’re getting confused at this stage about UK/England/Britain/British Isles, here’s a handy quick guide:

Source: Wikipedia/Terminology of the British Isles

The Irish word for an English person is “sasanach” and it’s a word that has appeared in many songs and poems over hundreds of years, often referring to how said Englishmen should best be booted out of Ireland.

Songs that evoke this kind of carry-on:

So – Sasamach is now doing the rounds to mean Brexit, as “amach” means out, so roughly speaking it’s a more forceful “Brits out”.

(Now, technically speaking “amach” means the process of moving out. Once you’re outside the word is “amuigh”. Maybe the word will need to change, in English too, but at this rate there’s no sign that they ever will be fully out.)

Language problems have started to plague other elements of Brexit in the last couple of weeks: the White Paper published in July was translated by the Foreign Office into 23 languages (including Irish) and the quality of translations was widely criticised, causing more British bemoaning about their level of language learning.

And for the Irish? Does our deliberate transliteration of Brexit mean we want it to happen, or not? Or are we just continuing our centuries-old habit of pushing around the confines of language?

The Child of Prague – Patron Saint of Climate Change?

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Ireland has been going through a heatwave these few couple of weeks. This is, of course, not natural. There have been lots of internet jokes and chatter but the oddest one is people asking the Child of Prague to make the heat stop. I’ll try to explain.

The Infant Child of Prague is a little statue of the infant Jesus holding an orb and it’s a staple of the traditional Irish mantelpiece or wall – placed close to a picture of the Sacred Heart (Christ pulling back his cloak to show his heart) and a photo of JFK (beloved Irish-American president). 

This image of the Christ child has obscure origins but is definitely linked to the Carmelite church in Prague in the 16th century. You can read the whole story on its Wikipedia here. It was hugely popular in Ireland during the Great Famine (1840s) and that tradition might have come from the Spanish Armada washing up (16th century) on Irish shores, mixing it up with their own saint who was the target of food-related prayers, Santo Nino de Atocha.

Whatever its history, nowadays it’s still often the target for Irish prayers for good weather, especially the night before a wedding when the family will stick it out in the garden. If its head falls off that’s good luck. According to this BBC story, even Protestants in the north are partial to hedging their pre-nuptial bets on it.

One Dublin woman made the news with a cake in the shape of the statue, almost as creepy as the original.

So this week on Twitter, people are venting that they’ve had enough of this heatwave and the Child should surely make it stop, ideally before it starts to melt in the heat (its outer coating is of wax).

The Beaches of Dublin

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Dublin, and the whole of Ireland, is currently melting in an amazing heatwave. The beaches are as busy as they ever get, blankets out, old bottles of sun lotion tossed around, feet gingerly dipping into the water to cool off, 99 ice-cream vans at the top of the path.

My family and I actually started to spend time – and fall for the charms – of Dublin’s beaches back at the end of last summer, when we moved here from Italy.

“Like a decent pub, an Irish beach is full of chat: people talk to each other from their picnic blankets, teenagers make a show of not having fun, parents yell at (or shout for) the children they’ve lost track of. Skin tones can vary wildly but with prolonged sunshine such an obviously rare commodity here, you can feel the genuine joy-which is even better with a 99 in your hand.”

Here’s a link to the full piece I wrote in last week’s Irish Times.

The Truth about the British Isles

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It’s a bit of sport for Irish people to watch how a successful Irish person – like Saoirse Ronan – is called British by the media. Over the years I’ve had to explain many times (even to English people), that we are not British, or part of Britain, or the UK. But we are in the British Isles, though not the British Islands. More complicated is Northern Ireland which is part of the UK, but not part of Britain. But it’s also in Ireland but it also depends on your point of view…

This week, the best female chef in the world award went to Clare Smyth. Born in N.Ireland she lives in London, where she got the job to cater the royal wedding (their royals, not ours, though I am also technically Canadian so they are mine too…)

The Guardian, 20 June 2018

In most papers (Irish Times, the Telegraph, Northern papers) she’s “Northern Irish”.
In the Irish Independent she “Irish”.
In the Guardian she’s “a Briton”.
And in other local papers she’s just “Antrim-born”.

(Quick tip – you’ll only offend Irish people if you get things mixed up. Though the Scots might not like it, or the Welsh, or some Manx, or whatever people from Guernsey are called…)

If you’re still confused, here’s a nifty diagram I think is excellent.

And you can read a really detailed explanation on the British Isles in Wikipedia.

With Love for the Women of Ireland

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Mná

That’s the Irish word for women (pronounced with a long awww sound). Women, plural.

When you’re one woman, you’re a bean (pronounced ban). With another bean, you become mná. You become something new, part of a group, and granted a totally different word.

If you’re a tourist in a pub you’ll quickly learn it’s the sign you’re looking for. The Ladies: a word women only use nowadays for the loo.

As a sidenote: the men’s loo is Fir. That’s the plural of man (fear), pronounced “far”, as in “far better off”.

Mná

Ireland to me is about the women. The last place I lived was Italy, where it’s all about the mother, where a woman is still often defined by her relationship to her children, her man (and where about 150 women are murdered every year).

You see the Madonna everywhere in Italy, she’s always beautiful.

But you don’t have to go far in Ireland either, like on a stamp, or as a plaster statue in a grotto of a church,

Like the grotto where 14-year-old Ann Lovett died in childbirth 34 years ago, a story that was recently brought out of the shadows again by a brave female journalist.

Mná na hEireann

The Women of Ireland. This is a thing, a type of rallying cry popular during Mary Robinson’s presidency: who was, FYI, the first of our two women presidents. Some snicker at the phrase, but there’s a lovely song of it (sung here by Kate Bush whose mother was Irish) and it’s a handy moniker:

 

Martin Turner, Irish Times cartoon May 20 2018

Mná na hEireann

Irish women have always seemed strong to me. From the women who reared me, to the ancient queen we named our daughter after.

But it’s astonishing how much Irish women have had to put up with, for so long. And it’s frightening to see just how much we still do, in 2018. Two women murdered in Dublin in the last week, a health system that has been failing to look after us with no sign of being fixed, and of course the abortion issue. Women’s bodies are on full display for everyone to discuss these days.

Art by Lucy Moore (lucymoore93)

Mná na hEireann

But these Irish women are fighting for change, and they will not let up. I’ve been truly amazed by them, saying what they think is true, and fair, on Twitter, on the telly, holding hand-painted posters on street corners, discussing, sharing their stories, showing and asking for compassion.

We’re not going to stay quiet, not with the strength in our numbers. Not a single bean, but mná.

Tá

The word for Yes. It rhymes perfectly with Mná.

Tá for Mná

“Yes for Women”. The Irish version of the Yes that will hopefully, in this week’s abortion referendum, cause a sea change for women’s health.

“If we valued women as full human beings, we would not be having the debate you’re having in Ireland.”

So said the fabulous Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Dublin last week.

Grá

The word for love – how beautifully that fits.

Tá for Grá for Mná

Love for the women, not just the Irish ones. Love among the women for all the women.

I’m just one woman, one bean, but when my daughters grow up the three of us together will be Mná. Among all the other Mná.

Here’s a good overview on the BBC of the Irish abortion debate of the last 30 years.

Ireland’s time of reckoning

Watching the Eurovision back in Ireland

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The week of May 7th saw the lead up to this year’s Eurovision song contest – and Ireland’s strong entry (for once). It suddenly hit me that it would be quite exciting for me and my family of foreigners to watch it here, having followed it before from Italy and Norway – and with my Canadian husband now a big fan. I wrote this piece for publication in the Irish Times the day before the competition final.

After many years abroad, it’s my first year back home in Dublin and Ireland has made it to the final of the Eurovision song contest. Finally! On Saturday I’ll settle down to watch it together with my family of foreigners. We’ve never really followed the X-Factor or TV dance-shows, but every May we more than make up for it, wherever in the world we happen to be living.

This year we’ll have the huge luxury of turning on the telly in the corner and being able to flick back and forth between RTE and BBC. We won’t have to magically conjure up Graham Norton through the laptop, playing his brilliant commentary over the poor-quality picture of our local Norwegian or Italian TV, putting up with a two-second delay.

I loved to watch it as a child, and now it’s even more fun with my own kids, though no-one enjoys it more than my husband: he grew up in Canada and once he finally caught on to it, he’s been boring his nonplussed friends back home with explanations of its appeal.

Read the full story on the Irish Times online.

San Marino’s entry needed robot backing singers – that’s how small the country is

Getting back my vote

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Sometimes I have felt like a citizen of the world. But at the end of the day, I am an Irish citizen. That doesn’t mean I’ve been able to vote there over the last 20-odd years I’ve been away as I’ve simply been gone too long. I have tried to take advantage of any rights I’ve been given to vote in the other places I have lived.

There’s a very important referendum coming up here on May 25th and I’m very happy that I just sent off my form to be added again to the electoral register. My vote is my voice, and it’s only a few years until my children will be able to do the same.

You can read the full story here, in my latest piece for the Irish Times.

 

A very Good Friday

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About 20 years ago today I was home from London for Easter. I was really excited to finally show two friends around Dublin for the weekend, where they had a few days before heading off to the greener west. Obviously the first thing we had to plan was which famous Dublin pub to head to for the evening. And then my mum intervened: “but sure all the pubs are closed, it’s Good Friday”. I’d never noticed this fact before, even though it happened every year. What a backward country, I thought, but my friends had the foresight to see it for what is was – a strong, even charming, tradition. And they insisted they were happy to play pictionary over tea instead.

And now today, in 2018, we have arrived in the modern age. The pubs are open on Good Friday for the first time in 90 years. The government voted on it in January though not everyone is happy about it.

A couple of towns have seen their pubs band together, declaring they will keep the tradition and stay shut, and the locals are fine with that. One pub in Dublin is donating all their proceeds to charity – I would happily have gone there.

We went out for lunch in our local – a very low-key local place that few tourists would venture into but which they would probably adore for its (very) soft couches, quiet hum, community feel, and the well-cooked beef in the carvery. Today it was busier than usual.

I looked at the other punters around to see if they were choosing to abstain anyway. The many old ladies were drinking fizzy orange or tea or water, but maybe they always do. And two young lads near us were drinking full pints of Ribena (blackcurrant squash) while plenty of others were having beer or wine. The pint in the photo was my husband’s, mine was the fizzy water.

When vetted on the issue, our waitress (Maureen, according to my Dad) said she thinks the change feels  strange – “it’s tradition, you know”. She figures the public were pushing for it, though the government liked to say it was for the “tourists”. But either way, there’s expected to be an exodus over the Northern Ireland border today, to the sweet tune of about €20 million. The opening hours there are still quite restricted so they must really need a drink two days before Easter. Perhaps to line the tummies before all that chocolate.

Still, at least the car park at the local church was jam-packed as we passed it on the way home. Or were they all just going to confession?

 

 

Time to quit Facebook?

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Ah Facebook – we love you and we hate you. I’ve been thinking about deleting my account after the creepy revelations over the last couple of weeks. But then I stopped to think about the role.

I wrote this story last week for the Irish Times Abroad section because, like it or not, it has been a lifeline for me while living away from my homeland for over 20 years.

FULL STORY

I have been tempted to join the hordes who are abandoning Facebook this week in fierce protest at the revelations of data leaking in the Cambridge Analytica story. For many people this is the final push to get off the platform they love and hate, and I’ve been considering quitting it for years.

But do I want to totally sever myself from Facebook? I have to pause and really think about that. I try to be a savvy user; I keep tabs on my privacy, never log in anywhere else through Facebook, avoid all quizzes and games, and only become friends with people I have met (and liked) in real life.

I looked at my profile today and after scrolling through many precious photo memories, I discovered I joined in 2007. My husband and I had just moved from Toronto with our brand new baby to eastern Canada. We didn’t know anyone so it’s no wonder I joined up. The very first message I got (according to the archive right there on my account) was from an old London friend saying “Hey! Welcome to the world of Facebook! So glad to be back in touch! How are things??!”

And that’s really the reason I’m still there. To be in touch. Like many people away from home it can be a lifeline for staying in contact with family and friends, watch the lives of those you don’t live near, and meet new people in the place you’re in now.

One of the first photos I posted on FB, during a trip home to Dublin

Facebook has been fundamental for this generation of Irish people abroad and the complicated webs of family and friends in Ireland and elsewhere. An Irish friend who has lived only a few years in Norway says: “As someone who lives abroad, I wouldn’t dream of leaving Facebook. It connects me to home, allows me to keep in touch, and watch the children I knew as babies and toddlers grow up through the photos their parents post.. it’s a diary, a way of seeing where and who I was over the years.”

In many places, Facebook has taken the role of the pub or Irish club for groups of Irish in any one place. The Irish Government has recognised this by providing financial assistance to some diaspora Facebook groups (though not anywhere near where I lived).

There are a hundred things I dislike about Facebook – the lack of useful support, the negativity and bullying, sense of isolation felt by many, addictiveness, the never-ending ads and the sense we all recognise of immense time wasted as we scroll deeper into an infinite rabbit hole. And now this latest news makes us feel rightly used and ticked off.

In fact I think the cons of Facebook in my life might outweigh the pros. But when I have felt the good effects, they are really powerful and they might be enough to keep me on it.

Having lived abroad the site has been my only way to keep in touch with many people in my life, giving me a sense of continued friendship and sense of belonging, a record of the online tribe I have built around myself.

As a young mum raising my kids in foreign countries I was lucky to have my sanity and practical needs met by connecting with other international mums through a local Facebook group – first in Oslo, then in Florence. All of us shared a common bond of being far from family and we all had different issues – I watch from the sidelines the threads on dealing with Italian mothers-in-law but I could join in with opinions on local school issues.

These were two supportive communities where you’d feel free to ask, or share, help, about urgent-but-minor things only we were concerned with, like finding a doctor for a Sunday house call, the local name for a medication, or family-friendly places to visit. I’ve made face-to-face friends who have been a real and positive force in my life. Not everyone needs that kind of online connection, but it has worked for me.

Thanks to Facebook I have gotten to know cousins I hadn’t seen since childhood Christmas parties, somehow my being abroad made these and other Irish connections more special. One old Italian friend tracked me down after a 20-year gap and within a few months we had visited her in Sicily and our kids became real friends.

Through a Facebook friend who has thousands of connections, I recently discovered a Rome-based enterprise that hires refugees to harvest and make juice from unused oranges from the city streets, and within a few minutes I had connected them with an Oslo-based group that does the same for uncollected apples.

Now I’m here in Dublin I was really happy to discover a Facebook group for Italian mums in my area; it may or may not produce some Italian-speaking playmates for my kids but it is a connection to women I have more in common with than some of the mums at the school gate. I’ve also been spending time in some very active groups of returning-Irish emigrants, and I feel some of that general culture shock I’ve had, being among Irish people again, with all those fiery opinions and colourful language.

Maybe all this connecting is not enough to justify sticking with this disgraced and all-powerful platform. Maybe I should pull myself out of the echo chamber I have surely built for myself, download all my data and keep a nice finite record of the last nine years of my life. Maybe I should contact each person I consider a friend and get their email address and go back to group emails. Maybe by even staying friends with them I’m unknowingly compromising their privacy by not being fully on top of my own privacy controls.

But is there an alternative platform out there, one that can continue to give us this sense of connection we’ve had from Facebook, especially for those of us who will always feel abroad?

 

Link to the Story on the Irish Times website.

 

We went to the parade… and no-one died

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Last week I needed to figure out what we should do for our first St Patrick’s Day in Ireland (full story in last Friday’s Irish Times). I asked around for tips and a fellow mum told me she was at the Dublin parade last year and it went fine: “it was busy,” she said “but no-one died”. She was the one who told me that our best bet to avoid the crowds (and their stepladders) was to stand at the beginning or end of the parade.

The parade was due to start at 12pm on Saturday. As is normal for us, we left the house about 10 minutes before that. It was really really cold, almost enough to put you off going out and by the end of Saturday night we had snow in Dublin again. But our Norwegian-raised kids decided to buy an ice cream before catching the bus into town. That caught the eye of the bus driver: “Jaysus girls, it’s soup you need on a day like today, not ice cream”.

It turns out we were well in time. Walking around St Stephen’s Green towards the end-section, town seemed to be free of traffic and strangely quiet. We saw the Lord Mayor’s coach had already finished its run, and the horses were being used for a photoshoot.

We asked one of the (many) gardai standing around if we’d be in time to see the parade. “Sure it’s only half past one, they won’t be down here by now. You’ll probably catch the whole thing.”

And sure enough we did.  And it was brilliant. It had started up at the top of O’Connell Street and that was where the serious crowds were. By the time it had snaked around Dame Street and St Patrick’s Cathedral I thought they’d all be dog-tired and freezing by the time it reached us. But every performer put in a great effort right to the end, with lots of cheering from the crowd.

 

Saint Patrick is a bit different from ones I’ve seen before.

We got to wave to Liam Cunnigham, from Game of Thrones. The main guest of honour – Mark Hamill – had already hopped out of the blue car at this stage. Must have had a good reason to do so.

There were all sorts of creative floats, the type that have been a mainstay of the Irish parades for years now though I’ve never seen any of them before – from arts groups like Spraoi, Dowtcha puppets, Bui Bolg and lots of community associations.

But I was almost more interested in watching the watchers.

These army veterans were charming, waving at the families watching from the flats above.

 

Women cyclists marked 100 years of women’s votes in Britain and Ireland.

I’ve never seen a real US college marching band before and there were 13 bands in this parade, including a few from Ireland and Australia. There’s a two-year waiting period for a band to be admitted to the parade and it can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to get them all here.

 

Family and friends of the band members seemed to be traipsing along beside their bands, all 3km of it.

Everyone around us – whether locals, people up from the country or tourists – was excited and happy, and dressed up in any bit of green. Plenty of people were going about their business and ignoring the parade. And the streets were quieter for a couple of hours while the pubs were packed with the rest of the population that was watching the Ireland-England rugby match. It all felt very relaxed, normal, festive and fun.

And then it was over.

Temperatures were plummeting further as we spent an hour at Merrion Square at the festival’s fun fair – what we call a “mini Tivoli” in our family. Definitely not on the same scale as the Copenhagen experience but great for kids who don’t often get to these things.

We had no drunken encounters, saw lots of green and many smiling faces (Irish and not Irish), felt no sense of panic or worry, the buses kept running. Yes it was really freezing.

But no-one died.

 

Dear Saint Patrick, it’s complicated

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Ah glorious Saint Patrick! Once a year I’ve thought about him, or ignored him, or celebrated his feast day to the hilt, around the world from Hawaii to London, Warsaw to Montreal, Rome to Oslo. And now we’re here as a family in Dublin, and imagining what it’ll be like.

Read the full story – the “before”- in the Irish Times of March 16th. The next post will be the “after”.


 

Like many Irish living abroad I’ve had an on-off relationship with our national holiday. It’s the one day of the year when you can dip into that pool of Irish identity that you always know is there, but which you might choose to disconnect from for the rest of the year.

When I lived in New York, more than 20 years ago, I chose not to dip into the Irish scene. I never went to the St Patrick’s Day parade, perhaps seeing it as a local Irish-American event and somewhat removed from the country I had deliberately left only a few years before. I was actually more curious to watch the others nationalities – like the Poles or Haitians – when they paraded down 5th Avenue and lit up the Empire State Building with their colours…..

Read on