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First Swim in the Sea – in November

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sea – big blue wobbly thing that mermaids live in

Baldrick

The Placenames of Dublin

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

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

Brian Lowry Designs

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

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

Brian Lowry Designs

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

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

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

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

Brian Lowry Designs

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

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

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

Brian Lowry Designs

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

WHAT THEY MEAN

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

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

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

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

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

Coolock – An Chúlóg, the little corner.

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

Bushy Park – after the local Bushe family.

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

THE BASICS

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

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

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

Ath – ath, ford. Athenry, Athlone

Carrick – carraig, rock. Carrickfergus.

Drum – droim, ridge. Dundrum.

Letter – leiter, hillside. Letterkenny.

Rath – rath, ringfort. Rathfarnham, Rathdown.

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

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.

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

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!

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.

———

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

 

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

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.

 

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 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.

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

The pipes, the pipes are frozen

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Last week Ireland was hit by a winter storm called Emma. Imagine sharing your name with a storm system, or “severe weather event” as it was strangely referred to in the news.

In all my (six, long) winters in Canada or (seven) winters in Norway I never came across a couple of windy, snowy days that had a name. Sure why would anyone bother? It’s snowing and blowing and freezing all the time in both countries, for months on end. There was no fancy name for the Oslo blizzard that blew while my younger daughter was born one February, or any cute moniker  to describe the Christmas we spent dog-sitting (and dog walking) at a friends’ house located on Toronto’s minus 20 lakefront. Nor is there any way to train your leg muscles to forget the thigh-high piles of snow to be climbed over to get into your downtown office… for days or weeks at a time. Or the snow shovelling, or walking on ice, or keeping pipes unfrozen.

Those long-born habits of mine all faded into one big blur last week when I started picking up on the slightly-panicked warnings about the impending “Beast from the East” and Storm Emma last week. We were warned of “minus 7” degree temperatures, that we should stock up on food because by Wednesday the country was being told to all stay indoors for a couple of days. The entire country. Oh but especially Dublin, because round here we’re not so used to really bad weather. That’s for the folks down the country, the ones who have to deal more regularly with the lambing and the narrow local roads and more likely downing of electricity and Netflix for a few days.

No, all my hard-earned familiarity with snow and ice conditions went out the window. Transport would stop, shops would close. There were red warnings, yellow warnings, the emergency people on the telly were telling us – in plain English and equally clear sign language – that we had to be prepared: we must stay inside. Would we need to await their approval to build a snowman?

I found myself reverting back to the nervous Irish woman who found herself in the thick of a real Canadian prairie winter back in 1998, when her boyfriend first brought her home to his family for Christmas. From my first breath outside Calgary airport – which made my lungs freeze – to the “good sport” who joined in the minus-18 sledding fest after Christmas lunch (see photo) and to the subsequently-invaluable experience of finding my car not stopping properly at a red light, I learned to respect and love the snow. Jump forward several years and I have two kids who grew up in Norway – one of whom spent two winters in a forest kindergarten (they even built their own latrine) – and who go far beyond me in terms of understanding the nature of snow.

By Wednesday the schools were closed. Fair enough, the wind was picking up a bit but I don’t remember many (ahem) snow days in Norway and Canada. The day before, some of us school mums were getting into a bit of a tizz about the shelves emptying out at SuperValu. The bread and milk were, naturally, nearly all gone but also dwindling were the loo paper, the firewood and… the potatoes.

On the radio news the Taoiseach (prime minister) was bombarded with more than the usual questions: “Can you tell us Taoiseach when the snow will be gone?” It hadn’t arrived at that stage.

That night I went outside to look at the snow that had started falling. There was something wrong with it – it was all plasticky, like mushed-up styrofoam. It didn’t melt in my hand.

On Thursday morning we knew this was S-day. I was actually feeling a bit panicky. What if someone needed to get to a doctor? What if the snow didn’t come after all? And then we realised we had no running water in the house. The pipes had frozen during the night. Well even minus 2 is below zero and the pipes are on the roof.

Very luckily for us we could move up the road to my Dad’s house, where we ended up having a cosy few days that were like Christmas without the Christmas part. Stronger together, we’d be snowed in, with sausages and veggies for soup in the fridge and flour in the press.

The weekend was a blur of ipad time, tea and chats, fresh scones, tackling some boxes of old photos, short walks and a couple of hacking coughs. Shovelling snow out on the footpath – a mostly useless job as the car was going nowhere – we met neighbours we’d never gotten around to meeting before.

The kids weren’t too pushed about getting outside and it took us a while to dig out from the attic any of our old Norwegian snow gear (oh, how weeks of my life had centred around drying, mending, finding, swapping, buttoning up that stuff). But for most Irish kids this was clearly a huge event they’ll remember for the rest of their lives, and it was lovely to watch them with their homemade sleds made out of trays and rope, plastic bags, or some super-fancy wooden sleds you might see hanging on the wall of a Norwegian cabin

And by the time about 40cm of snow had fallen, the country had shut down. You couldn’t drive or take a bus, or walk to the pub, which was probably closed and you might slip anyway. The island cut itself off as flights were stopped, nurses and doctors slept at hospitals, major events were cancelled. A friend of a friend had been heading from Oslo to the Corofin trad festival and the message went around – “anyone know of any sessions near Heuston station in Dublin?”

There were some nasty stories of looting and stupid behaviour but many, many more stories of communities coming together to help each other out and because there’s never this much snow people went mad for the snowmen – of nuns and tea parties and presidents and also igloos.

And there was the sledding grandmother down in Cork:

I ventured out for a walk to the now-open SuperValu on Saturday. One woman navigating through the slush coming towards us shouted out to the air, “Try Lidl for milk!” As the local supermarket, the place had never seen so much foot traffic: from fancy ski boots more used to Saint Mortiz, to the woman with two rubber bands around her boots: a brilliant idea I’d never seen before.

The news on the telly was fun to watch. So was Twitter and Instagram, where the hashtags were proudly in Irish – #sneachta and #sneachtageddon – presumably to claim this wing of #StormEmma as separate to the bit that must have hit the UK. We didn’t hear much about that. There was far too much to enjoy about this one.

As the country started coming back into operation – first buses were tentatively on the road by Saturday – my kids watched in bewilderment as the news told us that the red line of the Luas (Dublin’s tram) would just be running “from Red Cow to The Point”. They’re real places, I explained. Word went around the internet (no papers were to be had) that the bishops had granted dispensation from Sunday mass.

By Sunday we went out and about, for a change of scene, to the refuge of a museum along with many weary-looking tourists.

School opened, with no big fanfare, on Monday morning. You could see the green grass glowing again. Water shortages were put in place around the country though our own water returned as silently as it had left us. We still have a wonky gutter to fix.

And one thing I really noticed, which I always missed especially in Norway, were the birds. They were everywhere, those Irish robins and thrushes and blackbirds, picking away at the ground, happy to see Spring was there all along.

Dreams of an Irish Dog

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That’s the original title I gave this piece which was just published in today’s Irish Times online. I’m delighted to be getting lots of positive responses to it – I think my thoughts on moving home to Ireland after 23 years abroad hits a nerve with anyone living away from home (and there are a lot of us).

And I’ll be writing a story every few weeks for the Irish Times about how we’re adjusting to life here. A bit like this Turf story I already posted after Christmas.

Here’s a link to today’s Irish Times story.

And here’s how it starts:

“Will there be a school play I can be in? Do they have scouts in Ireland? Can I have my own room? Does this mean we can finally get a dog?”

Our kids were very excited when we told them last spring that we would be leaving Italy and moving to Dublin in the summer. They had visited Irelandmany times, for Christmas, birthdays, funerals; they knew the parks and libraries, and they felt like they could really live there. And when we knew my husband’s contract in Florence was due to end, it seemed like the right time for us to decide to give Ireland a go. Finally.

I left Ireland 23 years ago and I have lived abroad for longer than I lived there. I grew up in Dublin, but I’ve been a “grown up” in other places. Having met my Canadian husband after college in London we moved around with his career (US, Canada, Norway, Italy). So, out of the four of us, I was the only one qualified to know about what life in Ireland would be like. Or thought I was.

“Cause you gotta have turf”

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The turf arrives at our door one Saturday afternoon. By turf, I mean the rough-cut sods of peat that burn pungently and cosily in an Irish hearth – the stuff of dreams for any Irish person far from home. Turf in Ireland does, naturally, also refer to the ground smashed by the hooves of heavy horses, another important trope of the Irish psyche.

We live in semi-suburban Dublin, not in a housing estate but in a little workman’s cottage that is old enough (or at least its chimney is) to be suited, indeed it should be crying out, to have turf burning in it.

(Not actually our house, but similar)

We won the turf in the raffle at the school Christmas fair. We were late getting to the prizes table and I passed over the other option available – a couple of bottles of expensive-looking wine – for this black stuff. We have enough Italian wine at home, I insisted to a surprised husband. Clearly I was subconsciously looking for the chance to indoctrinate my family of foreigners to a very real, pungent Irish experience.

Real Irish Turf

I grew up in Dublin but I’m secretly a bit of a “culchie”, as are many of my generation – our parents moving from the country to Dublin, with various levels of cousins lingering in Monaghan or Clare. Summer holidays in Connemara come back in an instant with the smell of seawater and a smoky turf fire. Sods of peat are still hand-cut out of the bog in some parts of the country, this is serious land-connection stuff here and very Irish.

It’s the smell of turf that does it. Mention a turf fire to anyone and their eyes will drift off. Combine that with a hot whiskey, an uncomfortable seat, a good chat and maybe a slow tune played on a fiddle (well maybe that’s more for the visitors), and that’s the closest you’ll get to Irish hygge.

So our 5 bags of the loose, crumbly black stuff arrive at the door from the school dad, and I let the foreigners in the family deal with the transaction. I keep myself in the kitchen working on the dishes, where the mother of the cottage should be. And then I realise we haven’t told the kids.

– Who’s at the door? – asks the younger daughter

– It’s the people delivering our turf.

– What’s turf?

– It’s for the fire.

– It’s for a fire? I thought we weren’t going to use the fireplace – says the elder child nervously.

– Well your mother won it in the school raffle, it’s here now.

The polite Canadian husband greets the dad with his delivery.

– This is great, thanks a lot. So how do you actually light it, how do you use it? Does it smell a lot?

This stuff is very rough-cut, not the kind you easily find in the… shops, or wherever it comes from in Dublin. We don’t actually find out where he got it from, his peat bog in the back garden? The husband hauls it bag by bag through the narrow hallway out to the back yard and finds space for it in the plastic fuel shed usually used for coal.

– Did you fit it all in? I ask.

– I did, he says. (He’s learning)

And that’s where it stays. Later, I go out alone to have a look and a whiff. It’s ragged stuff alright, very natural, organic even, and untidy looking, guaranteed to stink out the neighbours. Oh but it’ll be worth it.

Photo collection of Maggie Land Blanck

The slight air of contraband that hung over the door-step transaction reappears when we mention the turf delivery to our friend the landlady.

– Oh but you can’t burn real turf in Dublin, she says. Not these days. It’s only supposed to be smokeless coal or briquettes.

This being Ireland we investigate the rules and then the ways in which they are usually interpreted. This little cottage is crying out for an old-fashioned smell and we don’t know the neighbours so well, in fact there’s noone on one side (though a Christmas wreath appeared for a few weeks on the door down the otherwise overgrown path). So where’s the harm?

We call in a chimney sweep called Tim – a surprisingly young man, no cockney accent. He has a look at the fireplace, it’s actually a stove, and he says he can’t get in to clean it fully, it’s not his type of chimney. But he still manages to knock a load of dirt out and doesn’t charge. And he says we can burn the turf, no problem.

Now we just have to give it a go and use it.

There’s no hurry though. Spring is soon here but this being Ireland you can’t beat an old turf fire in the middle of summer.

Penny Farthings

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The Penny Farthing – named after the two coins, one being bigger than the other. These bikes were the speed demons of their time – the 1870s and 80s. Men (mostly) used to whizz around country roads, often keeping their legs over the handlebars so they could fall off more effectively. They were properly known as “ordinaries”, to distinguish them from the “bone shakers” that came before and from the new “safety” bikes that came after them, the ones with rubber tyres and brakes which became modern standard bikes.

This little charmer now sits along the Drumcondra Road on the northside. I passed it a week later and it was facing the other way – that’s just mild vandalism for #Dublin.