Animals Archives - wash your language

Irish Creatures on Irish Coins

January 12, 2020 by EmmaP Leave a Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Besotted by Bassets

April 30, 2019 by EmmaP Leave a Comment

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).

Of mice and murder

September 16, 2016 by EmmaP

The mice of Fiesole have a plan.

MONDAY

I’ve been waiting three days for the local hardware shop to open. Three days since we came home from holiday and discovered our house had been done over by a gang of mice (definitely a gang). So as the bell tower in the piazza rings out four times, I’m here waiting with one other customer for the door to open. I want to buy mousetraps*.

Along comes the owner – I don’t know her name yet but she’s the young, busy, bustling, bespectacled type that makes you feel at ease and she has a Florentine accent you could spread butter with. We bustle in after in.

I love this shop, in fact I love all Italian hardware shops. It’s covered from floor to ceiling with stuff, and all of it is useful. There are wonderful things in plain sight which you didn’t know you needed, and others you desperately need and only she can find for you (and at a good price). In fact the shop is called a Utilità (meaning Usefulness, well in this case just Utility) which is one of the several cool names for a hardware shop, another being the even more lovely word, Mesticheria.

In this, or any, Italian hardware shop, you can step in and embrace the visual jumble, browse the mugs and tablecloths, mango slicers and egg timers, Beatles mugs and non-stick pans, fresh-cut keys and shoe polish. Or you can just enjoy asking for something specific and watching the owner – who grew up in this family business – disappear into the back, under the counter, or up a ladder to where you thought only the wicker baskets were hanging.

As it turns out, many people come in just for a chat, it being right on the main street – the narrow part where the German camper vans have to squeeze through with confusion.

“Oh, that’s a real stink of someone’s bad cooking oil!” she says as she gets herself behind the counter. “Is it from the Indian restaurant across the road?” I ask. “Oh no, they use the right oils, there are always lovely smells coming out of there.”

Foolishly, I let the other waiting woman go first, she is of course a local and I become frustrated when I can’t completely follow the train of their conversation. My Italian isn’t always so awake after lunch. She passes over some cash and it disappears into an envelope, something is scribbled on a piece of paper: it must be to do with the town dinner in the piazza on Friday night.

Not quite the Fiesole shop, but they all look like this

The shop door has been left open to let in air (and pungent oil smells). In the doorway a man has partly lodged himself, craning backwards to talk to someone further down the street or, judging by the volume, across the road. Maybe even the Indian restaurant owner. Living here in this country of talkers, I try my best to start up similar types of chats with the shopkeepers I meet everyday – about the earthquake all the way down there in southern Tuscany, the school schedule, their elderly father, or mine. The doorway man disappears after a few minutes without having come in for his full chat or his packet of nails.

I can tell right away I’m not the first person to come in looking for help with mice murder. The hardware lady’s tired expression gives her the appearance of a local miracle-worker – why do they all think I can sort out their household problems for them, why can’t they just get their houses in order? – and sure enough she tells me she’s all out of traps, the old-fashioned kind, the gluey ones and the little tent ones. In fact, she tells me – “Fiesole is full of mice”.

But she won’t have any more traps in till the end of next week. “Oh Dio!” I say, and mention that I’ll be in Florence tomorrow and may have to take my custom there; she surely understands the urgency. She digs around and shows me all she has left – a packet of terrifying poison tablets – but she isn’t really suggesting I buy them. “It’s much better you buy a trap that ensures you can see the dead mouse, not just guess that it went off and died its (horrible) death somewhere else.” I nod my head. Certo.

She keeps talking before I have the chance to tell her that we have, sort of, a cat on the case. We have in fact started brazenly inviting the neighbour’s cat in for a few ganders around the house and it’s becoming quite fond of one particular floormat and some of the Lego. But she’s already noting in her order book which traps she needs to get in and she tells me I should really get the tented one – “put them in this location at this time of day, make sure you touch them with gloves or your smell will put them off.“ Will the mice guess from my smell that I’m not Italian? I wonder to myself.

“Why do you think there are so many mice around these days?” I ask her. “It’s not really turning cold yet.”

“I don’t really know”, she answers. Then she fixes her eyes on me and states, “Si stanno organizzando”. I take this to mean they’re getting themselves organized, plotting something. She says this with seriousness. And of course she must be right.

As I run back to the car empty-handed, I look around me, imagining the mice mini-gangs of Fiesole and its neighbouring hamlets who are busy setting up a network underneath these streets, the ancient groves and crumbling walls, and the decaying old basements and ill-fitted kitchens, plotting a way to finally take over the three hills of Fiesole.

They’re organizing!

WEDNESDAY

I go to another hardware shop down at the bottom of the hill, in the Cure area of Florence. It’s a bigger shop and there are several people milling around the counter but I’m beckoned forward, the husband of the couple will help me. I tell him I need some mouse traps.

“Fine. Do you want them alive or dead?”

“Um, dead.” (Should I want them alive?)

“And are they small or big? Small like this?” – his hands relatively close together. “Or big, like this? Like a cat?” Oh no, I react, they’re not quite so big. “Right, those are the mice you get from the river.” I assure him we live right at the top of the hill, relieved that we decided against living down here.

He disappears into the back of the back, even though the front of the shop looks like it would have everything. He comes back a minute later with some fancy-looking metal traps, with little teeth on the edges. They’re made in Germany. Of course they are. He tells me the wooden ones are no good. I know that already.

As he rings them up, the customer beside me who’s buying serious lengths of waterproof fabric takes notice. “How much are those?” she asks. “1 euro 80 each.” “Fine, I’ll take a couple of those too then, thanks.”

FRIDAY

So far I’ve caught one little mouse and I’m learning that different cheeses make no difference, nor does chocolate or honey as recommended by some. It must be all about the placement.

Now I’m off to Florence to the really serious hardware shop down near the market.

And a weekend of murder.

*Note to readers: I offer no apology for my topocide. Having learned in several previous cities that I cannot live with a mouse in the house, I have found it best to do them off the quickest and surest way there is.

The Life Domestic

June 9, 2016 by EmmaP

There’s a sign tacked on the wall outside our local pizzeria.

“Found. Gray (domestic) rabbit. Call this number”

And added underneath by someone: Already eaten!

Here in Tuscany rabbits are indeed a regular, and tasty, part of the menu. But the writer of this notice knows that a pet is a pet – hence the care given to mention that the bunny hopping around his house is “domestic”.

In Italian the word for “pet” is “un animale domestico” (a domestic animal) or “un animale di compagnia” (companion animal), this latter sounding only slightly less technical, giving some indication of the emotional value and importance of this human-animal bond.

Italy is a very public society and as no pet is a better companion than a dog, you see dogs everywhere here. They accompany their owners into shops, cafes, church services, on the bus and in the laps of car drivers.

These dogs were left to wait outside the famous butcher’s Falorni in Greve in Chianti – maybe their cones were a foil against the amazing smells during the 15 minutes their (German) owners were inside.

Eating out for lunch or dinner there’s often a dog – of any size – under a table or yapping close by.

And one local gelateria even offers ice cream for dogs.

Ice cream? I'd love some too! — “Ice cream? I’d love some too!”

I was at a children’s sports competition recently and along with half the parents of Florence I was crammed into the stands, indeed sitting on the concrete steps of what was probably the emergency exit. One woman left just after her daughter’s performance – she inched along the row, mobile in one manicured hand, the other holding the leash of her dog, the little yapper left to navigate his own way through the pedicured feet around him.

I can’t say much about the place of cats (or rabbits) in the family home, having come across few. A notable exception was seeing one in the supermarket once, a big furry gray thing ensconsed in the arms of its owner as he moved along the aisles.

Dogs are treated much the way children are – you don’t see them cuddled and spoiled all the time, they’re just along for the ride, even if that includes having their photo taken against the Ponte Vecchio. I haven’t done a spot check of how many Italian dogs have social media accounts (see #puppiesofinstagram) but I suspect overall it would be odder here than in other countries – many of these animals are still more for domestic purpose than simply objects of affection.

There are lots of ideas out there about how different languages interpret the bark of a dog. Scientists believe dogs can understand each other but people have different ways of hearing their bark: but what they seem to have in common is that they speak twice – such as “hav-hav” (Hebrew) or “wan-wan” (Japanese).

My husband and I have been living too peripatetic a life over the last 20 years to justify having a pet of any kind (apparently), but my 10-year-old and I are shameless dog people and share the habit of commenting on every dog we see on the street (or restaurant), especially older dogs who we’d love to adopt. At a recent lunch with friends in the country, my ears perked up when their neighbour mentioned her dog had just had 15 pups. Marking my interest she tried to convince me it would be a good idea to take one home – “well yes”, I told her, “I do have the time to walk it every day, yes we have a garden, yes half the family would love one, but it’s a really nice rented apartment… we couldn’t possibly”. “Oh! but it’s a dog”, she cried. “This is Italy, dogs stay outside!”

And indeed they usually do, at least in the countryside. Over the last couple of decades dogs have started to live more indoors, especially as city apartment-dwellers increasingly like to keep lap dogs like pugs and poodles. But many dogs around our small Tuscan town, are clearly less considered as pets than for traditional jobs like guarding, or weekend-hunting. And they stay outdoors – making sure they let us know they’re there, with a good old barking fit at 4am or 4pm. The ever spot-on Italy observer Tim Parks thinks this Italian need to keep the dog outside might be a hangover from people’s lingering collective memories of living under the same roof as cows and chickens.

The word “domestic” comes from the Latin word “domus” which means house, specifically the house of an upper-class Roman. It entered English as “dome”, or stately building. To me it feels like a formal word, indeed often with negative connotations. It can be associated with the mundane (domestic affairs), with servitude (domestics) and even with aggression and violence (domestic violence or abuse). This last is in fact an ongoing issue in Italy where societal norms deal badly with issues of partner violence, underreporting of abuse is low, and after some horrific high profile murders the media is currently talking of a nationwide emergency of “femicide”.

Un animale domestico – that’s how you say it in many languages. In English the term domestic animal is seen as a more technical term, referring to an animal that is not wild, but serves people and is dependant upon them. It’s even a legal term, have a look at this legal case I found about whether a camel should be considered wild or domestic.

But domestic animal just doesn’t sound as cosy as what we say in English – pet. What a lovely word that is! Just saying it makes you think of an animal that is not only domesticated but truly an emotional companion, for walks in the rain, sitting in the windowsill (tugging at the lace curtain), or just for being there to stroke/pet while you sit together (and watch the cricket on the telly).

The word pet actually came from the Scots Gaelic peata, tame animal, and its softness lends it associations of affection and caring. In Ireland, where it also came straight from the Gaelic, it’s used everyday as a charming appellation for children and friends (“ah sure listen pet, she was just chancing her arm”).

Down the road from our house is a farmhouse down off the road. We can look down over the high garden wall and say an encouraging hello to the unfortunate mutt that lives there. He’s left to himself all day long with a small scrap of garden between the wall and his owner’s house, his dirty mess left all over the ground and with little company. He can’t stop his tail from wagging sadly even as he keeps up the pretence of barking ferociously at you. A weary, empty bark.

In December we visited the cathedral of Lucca and I was taken by how many people were drawn to, (and drawing), this sculpture – the very beautiful funerary monument to the young Ilaria Caretto, carved by Jacopo della Quercia in the stunningly early date of 1406. At her feet sits a dog, not unlike a pug you’d find today in a flat in Kensington or Madrid. It may or may not be her dog, but it’s certainly intended by the artist to represent fidelity and undying love.

What more could you ask for in a pet?