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The Accordion’s Tale

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

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

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

Small World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Wall of Pink Covid Hearts

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

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

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

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

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

The Lift in Rome

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

———

*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.

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).

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.

 

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

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.

Winter in Venice

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It’s so obvious that it didn’t even occur to me. Venice is a city for walkers. Visiting it for a few days last December with our two kids, we discovered this was a huge plus: no cars or buses – or even scooters – meant that we could all walk down streets and alleyways together, letting them run ahead, watching out for canals to trip into, though many are walled off.

Visiting in winter it is a little less busy and it really is cold, but Venice sure looks gorgeous and like our experience of Florence in winter, it is definitely more of a local town.

The streets and alleys and bridges are narrow and especially in busy areas you find yourself moving along with the flow of foot traffic. It’s a clichè of Venice but so true: it’s easy to get lost. On my last visit, during Carnival 20 years ago, my friend and I really did get caught up in the side-alley slinking and disappearing of characters dressed in cloaks.

Being a city of walkers means you have to do everything on foot and this influences the fabric of the local society and relationships between people. For one thing, you have to know where you’re going – addresses apparently mean little in Venice, and Google maps has had little success mapping actual street addresses. If you go to someone’s house they often need to come out and meet you at a meeting point. Another point, and this is noted by the writer Donna Leon (in her detective novels and her lovely book of essays on “her” Venice) is that people can shield their identity, and their homes, from acquaintances as they only ever meet in half-way public spaces.

I was fascinated to watch the locals move through this flow of people, you could tell them from their elegant but sensible clothes, fur hats and beautiful gloved hands, and from their more deft, quicker movements (and sighs of impatience). Many pulled along a wheelie bag – for groceries – or had a little rucksack on their back. Supermarkets were small and pokey. People have to shop every day because everything you buy has to then be carried home. If you want a larger item – a washing machine or your christmas tree removed – you have to hire help or get a boat to bring it as close to your house as possible and then of course up all those flights of stairs.

All around this watery city you see delivery men pushing an empty wheely cart one way, or in the other direction full of milk cartons, newly-fixed espresso machines, boxes of fish from the market. Postmen push wheely trollies, the fire brigade whizzes around on the water, there are no bicycles or scooters and even few baby strollers. Where is everyone? Are they all withering old ladies stranded at the top of a palazzo, remembering the golden age?

It reminded me of my four years living in New York, another very public place – whether walking or on the bus or subway you are face to face with your fellow residents and in New York you really do look at each other.

If you don’t feel like walking (or if your fingers freeze off) you can take the bus – it’s a boat of course and it’s not cheap but it definitely gets you around the city, letting you see it from the waterfront views, especially along the Grand Canal. These were the public – i.e. grander – original entrances to the Renaissance palazzi, and worth contrasting to the quieter, more secretive entrances and alleyways you find when exploring on foot.

This is a city with about 50,000 residents – and it’s decreasing every year. More and more locals are priced out by non-locals buying up property in the historic core, much of it as investment or at most temporary acommodation.

In Venice one of the many problems created by the infamous cruise ships is that the visitors don’t spend their money on land-based food and lodgings. Only 20% of these visitors actually get off the ship, the rest presumably enjoying videoing the view of San Marco from the water. Another problem is the increased number of homes owned by non-Venetians, sending prices up to cut out the locals.

Walking through the city you can sense the discarded everything that lies below – beneath the streets, in the water. Most cities do sit on top of their waste (ask any archaeologist) and here you do start to feel it everywhere; crumbling masonry, stained stone and wood, closed-up shopfronts, signs marking high-water or acqua alta – periods when certain areas might be flooded by local floods. But then there’s a surprise bit of art on the street or a glimmer of light through a craftshop window through the fog.

And the magic is there. We got a sense of a different twist of it on a blustery afternoon at the beach, the Lido. A strange choice, but when you’re a kid, a beach is a beach. Wandering through the closed-up beach huts of the Hotel des Bains we found our way to the entrance of this iconic old spot. The hotel is now closed up and according to the guardedly-chatty Polish security guard, the new owners don’t know when it will be cleaned up and reopened.

The Hotel des Bains was the inspiration, and setting, for Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella Death in Venice. When I was about 19 I sat in an arty cinema in Paris and had my first “big film moment” when I was captivated by the lavish Visconti 1971 film of the book: lapping waves, obsessions, melting makeup and bar-perfect Mahler. After our trip here I finally read the book and Mann’s prose captures the sickness of the whole city, even, you might say, of civilization.

“Such was Venice, the wheedling, shady beauty, a city half fairy tale, half tourist trap, in whose foul air the arts had once flourished luxuriantly and which had inspired musicians with undulating, lullingly licentious harmonies. The adventurer felt his eyes drinking in its voluptuousness, his ears being wooed by its melodies; he recalled, too, that the city was diseased and as concealing it out of cupidity, and the look with which he peered out after the gondola floating ahead of him grew more wanton.” (Thomas Mann, Death in Venice)

I ask our 10 year old her how she enjoyed our weekend in Venice. “I really liked it… but I don’t want to go back”. Why not? “Because it’s sinking and I don’t want to make it any worse”.

I tried to reassure her that we did our bit, trying to live as locals: shopping for groceries at supermarket and markets, sampling smaller pastry cafes, restaurants, buying warm hats and gloves from an Italian (chain) store when heading to the Lido, even renting ice skates from the man running the charming temporary ice-rink at Campo San Polo.

La Serenissima – she’s still there, just getting a little older.

Italy in Winter: Syracuse

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Winter is an amazing time to visit Italy, especially to the places that are lower down the tourist must-see list. Here is the first in my series of photo posts from winter trips we’ve done in Italy, when everything can feel more local, more authentic, more glowing and even sometimes more freezing than you might expect.

This week I was working on a translation a website for a hotel in Sicily (“a magical place where you can dive deep into a world of myth” etc etc). One section of text was about Syracuse and I remembered the golden afternoon we spent in that beautiful city a few years ago. It was October which is, fair enough, not quite winter but the sun had that autumnal, almost-winter luminescence. I dug out the photos from our trip and here they are.

Syracuse – or Siracusa. Yes there is a city of the same name in New York state but this one in Sicily is that bit grander. It was founded by the Greeks on the east coast of Sicily and it was actually the capital of Italian Greece (Magna Grecia) for quite a while and at one point was the same size as Athens! A few notable people were born there, like Archimedes (yes, that one) and Santa Lucia/St Lucy who died here around 300 AD in a horrible way: suffice to say she’s the patron saint of eyesight. In fact December 13th, Lucia’s feast day, is celebrated in Syracuse in great style and indeed in many parts of northern Europe too – not least Norway and Sweden. I once found myself celebrating the day while processing with a bunch of Swedish women and girls in white robes in the Florence branch of Ikea, one of the stranger experiences of my life.

I have to admit I didn’t know much of all this history when we visited, I was just absorbing the atmosphere and keeping small people from having tantrums. And now, after living for two years in Tuscany, I’d happily go back and appreciate it better, compare it to the other places I’ve come to know; like many other Italian city centres it’s a UNESCO world heritage site. And I would taste the flavours of the food more carefully (almonds, pistachio, citrus, seafood) and pay closer attention to the dialect.

The historic core is on an island called Ortigia and the centrepiece is the fabulous Duomo (cathedral) and its surrounding area.

The beautiful cathedral is most interesting in its details

And for its history. It was built on a Roman temple to Minerva, acted as a mosque for 200 years – during the fascinating Arab period in Sicilian history – and the Baroque form you see it in today is due to its being rebuilt during the early 18th century after yet another earthquake.

The piazza really is at the heart of Syracuse.

 

This fountain of Diana is worth a visit, it’s early 20th century and nicely modern.

Not unlike Venice, this intriguing city is full of alleyways, strange facades, curious faces.

Golden streets, tobacco shops, lotto-playing dogs? Yes, this could be anywhere in Italy.


We found this amazing sunken garden off the beaten track, on the mainland before you reach the main historic core of Ortigia. Part of the huge archaeological park that’s centred around the 5th century BC Greek theatre, this bit is off to the back and casually called the Latomia del Paradiso, or Quarry of Paradise. This is where the stone to build the city came from and other, later purposes for such a unique space included gladiator bouts, horse races, ox sacrifices and in 413 BC (yes, BC) it housed the 7,000 prisoners of war from the Syracuse-Athens war.   

Like many other experiences in Italy, magical moments are made when you find yourself wandering around a vast, incredibly ancient, barely-signposted or even safety-controlled space. The sharp-eyed man at the ticket office was chatty, warning the girls to put on some mosquito repellent, as if we were heading down, down into a Roald Dahl story.

Some old helmets were conveniently left lying around the stage – last used, who knows when? No-one else was around so we got to try them out, as well as the fabulous acoustics from this modern stage.

In terms of family memories from our day in Syracuse – highlights were the three separate trips to the souvenir shop to replace the snow globe that kept falling on the ground, discovering octopus in the risotto, more gelato, and popping into a pharmacy to get antihistamine for insect bites.

But that’s the great thing about taking lots of photos – you can always conjure up the ideal family day out in hindsight.

That really wasn’t boring – visiting Florence’s museums with kids

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I’ve been writing a monthly column about family life in Florence with tips on making the most of the whole city, not just the obvious attractions.

For the English-language Florentine magazine I was asked to give tips on how we navigate the amazing artistic treasures of the city – amazing but still dusty, old and (let’s face it) boring. I could write a whole book on the subject, and maybe I will, but this is quick starter in less than 600 words.

Some of my tips:

Ask questions

Why does David’s hand look so big? Why do you think this picture is so famous? Is that woman laughing or crying? Why did he paint that snake like that? You will be amazed at what they’ll come out with, and that’s what they will remember. 

Patterns and symbols 

Look for key historic and religious symbols. If you read up on some of the commonly-depicted saints, your tougher-skinned kids might enjoy spotting the torture devices that usually accompany them. 

Read the full story and ideas on the best museums in the October issue of The Florentine.

Rollerblading in Florence

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I’ve been writing a monthly column about family life in Florence with tips on making the most of the whole city, not just the obvious attractions.

For the September edition of The Florentine I tried to capture the haven we have found in the Cascine park, rollerblading along the (mostly) smooth paths under the wonderful shady trees.

As September afternoons begin to cool down and the evenings shorten, my daughter and I often feel the need to get outside after school. Living up the hill in Fiesole, it’s not easy to go for a quick bike ride here. What we crave is flatness and the only place in Florence to really get that is the Cascine park.

We are drawn to this park all year round to wheel along the straight, smooth paths, enjoying the greenery, the space and the people. From rollerblading men in Lycra to five-year-olds with crooked bike helmets, if a Florentine has wheels to spin this is where they come.

Here is the full story in the Florentine magazine, September edition.

 

 

Pure lykke

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It was a moment of joy – lykke – when I found this old tin of Norwegian skincream in yet another half-opened box from our shipment of stuff in our new house in Dublin. This is the second time we’ve moved country with kids and of course, all our worldly possessions were put into boxes (or last-minute suitcases).

Much of our belongings were shed, some of them was lost along the way (our towels?) and a fair amount is still unsorted rubbish. But when I saw my youngest’s skin starting to react to the damp Irish climate, I really hoped that I had saved this magical lavender-scented cream we used in Norway, the only one of many that actually worked and which was never used during our 2 years in the mild air of Tuscany. “Is that the nice-smelling stuff you’d put on me before I went out to kindergarten?”

It’s so Norwegian, I love it. I read somewhere that the recipe came from some nuns on a remote island in the north, and just the name is such a joy – Lykkelig som liten, Happy as a youngster.

There’s something about Elba

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What do you know about the island of Elba? Probably that it’s where Napoleon was exiled and has some nice beaches. Anything else? Well, after a trip there both this summer and a couple of years ago I can gladly tell you that it’s a summer paradise. You might not have known that it’s actually in Tuscany, just off the mainland and one of the most popular holiday spots for the good citizens of Siena, Florence and Pisa. My article in July’s Florentine magazine tells how my own little family went from being beach novices to experts thanks to our first visit to Elba. But I also long to visit in the spring or autumn and enjoy more of the nature, less of the visitors.

Less fancy than the Amalfi coast and quieter than the holiday towns along the Tuscan coast, Elba is a jewel of an island. The waters are clear, with few unwelcome sea creatures, the light is strong and beautiful as it reaches the different types of landscapes. Even though it’s just an hour-long ferry ride from Piombino, it can feel a world away. Some areas have restricted development and many of the villages retain their old atmosphere.

Elba is actually the 3rd largest island in Italy after Sicily and Sardinia and it’s part of the “Tuscan archipelago”, a national park of seven islands. It’s quite cool to spot just over the water the tiny islands of Montecristo (not easy to visit) and Giglio (car-free, beautiful beaches and now famous for the crash of the Costa Concordia in 2012).

As well as arriving by ferry you can fly here (on very tiny planes) from Florence, Pisa, Milan and (oddly) Switzerland – which will explain why staff in shops and restaurants often start speaking to you in German.

East-West

Elba is all blue sea and beaches along the edge and hills on the inside. It doesn’t take more than an hour or so to drive all the way around it. Generally, the western part of the island is quieter, less developed and retains more atmosphere in its villages. Traditionally an agricultural and mining centre, the island started being developed in the 1950s, when the main coastal road was first built. The busier areas are in the centre and eastern parts, around the main towns of Portoferraio, Procchio and Cavo. The big resort beaches (and noisier night-time towns) are Marina di Campo, Lacona, Fetovaia and Porto Azzurro.

Elba’s coastal road winds around many edges of hills and it can be hair-raising for novice drivers not used to Italian driving styles. There are bus services but it’s easier to get around with your own car. Plenty of cyclists seem to enjoy the length and condition of the roads and there are many hiking trails. And as for water-based activities, well lucky you if you have your own yacht! But there are plenty of options for hiring kayaks, diving gear and all sorts of one-day trips.

Bakery in Marciana Marina

Towns

Elba might not offer the same insane abundance of artistic heritage found in the rest of Tuscany, but it has plenty of history – Etruscan, Roman, Medieval, Napoleonic – and some interesting archaeological sites and museums, churches and other spots to explore. The towns are worth spending time in and not just for picking up some beach towels at the markets. Here are a few we’ve enjoyed, away from the beach towns. Bear in mind that you often need to park just outside the centre and walk up, and that the lunch hour (between 1 and 4pm) seems to be strictly enforced.

Marciana Alta is the older, sister town of the seaside spot of Marciana Marina on the north shore. It’s a real Tuscan hilltown with a ridiculously-long history (founded in 32 BC), charming narrow streets, cute boutiques and it has a particularly nice terrace lined with cafes overlooking a fabulous view down to the sea. Follow the road up above to the fortress where they do archery and falconry demonstrations in summer. And if you take the main hike down from the top of Monte Capanne (see below) you’ll end up in the back streets of the town. Not far away is the even cuter town of Poggio.

Marciana Alta

 

Marciana Alta

 

Marciana Alta

Capoliveri

This handsome town dominates the southeastern part of the island and is a very pleasant stop for lunch and shopping. It also has one of the only theatres on the island (which doubles as a cinema) that hosts some interesting festivals. I really liked the dedication written on the outside wall: “to the Elbans around the world”.

Teatro Flamingo, Capoliveri

Pomonte on the west coast is a small village with lots of its old features, and it has all the basics (butcher, market, cafes, excellent pizzeria) and it’s a good location near the popular beaches of Fetovaia, Chiessi and Cavoli.

Pomonte

It also offers a shipwreck beach, called Ogliera. Look out for the crowd of diving boats gathered around the spot of a 1972 wreck, or you can swim the few hundred metres from the beach and touch the boat at 12 metres deep. More info here.

Pomonte/Ogliera

Beaches

With my stubborn Celtic skin and historic curiosity, I am not a natural beach person but Elba’s 40 or so beaches offer such a wonderful variety – sandy to rocky, very-public to almost-hidden – that it’s hard to resist them. It can be smart to ask the locals for their recommendations as some of the best ones are reached only by boat or by leaving your car on the upper road.

All the beaches are free: even if some seem to be taken over by umbrellas and bars, the strip right at the water is free and you will find even a very small public section. Have a look at my Florentine beach article for tips on how Italian beaches work.

Here are a few favourite family-friendly Elba beaches:

Sandy beach – Procchio

Often overlooked for more popular beaches along the north shore, this beach right in the town of Procchio is perfectly nice and great for small kids. In between the bagni (sectioned-off areas) after the sailing club there is a good-sized public beach. The water is clean and shallow and you could easily forget the world during an afternoon here.

Procchio beach

Rocky beach – Palombaia

When driving south along the coast road between Cavoli and Marina di Campo, park the car along the edge where others are parked and down another small road to the right you’ll find some paved steps down to this small but lovely and quiet beach. There are a lot of steps down but unlike other off-the-track beaches, this path really is easy and doesn’t involve brambles, confusion, and a steep uneven path that might put off some kids.

Palombaia

Other beaches to mention are: Patresi, Cavoli, Sant’Andrea, Le Tombe, Capo Bianco, Zuccale.

Drinking Water

When you get thirsty on Elba you can spend money on bottled water from the corner shop. Or you can do like the locals and fill up at the local water source – and some of the fresh spring water here is wonderful. To find the closest fonte, ask the locals or just keep an eye out for cars parked randomly along the road (and people carrying bags of empty plastic bottles).

This is the fountain just outside of Marciana Alta, heading towards the fortress.

Some of the fountains are nicely-decorated, like this one down a path near the pizzeria in Pomonte.

Hiking

There are tons of trails for beginner and serious walkers, there’s an excellent list on the InfoElba website.

Pomonte, trail up towards Monte Capanne

With friends and kids we tackled Monte Capanne which is – at 1,019 metres – the highest point on Elba. The easiest day out would be to take the cableway up and down, but we decided to take it up and then hike back down. With our bunch of kids and hot temperatures it took about 3 hours, but it felt great at the end and was definitely one of the summer’s best-earned ice-creams.

Monte Capanne

 

Monte Capanne

Here’s a link to the cableway/cabinovia which is a standing-only version of a cable car. It’s not for the very faint-hearted and the 8 year olds in our group were nervous as they dangled high up over the mountain, but they were very proud of themselves once they’d gone through the experience.

Napoleon’s Villa

The French emperor – born in Corsica, just over the water from here – was indeed exiled on Elba in 1814, the island having been under French possession since 1801. For the 300 cushy-sounding days he spent here, he lived in this beautiful villa, with a chosen guard of 600 men, and essentially acted as governor of the island. He did a lot of economic and social reforms for the locals (long before the hotel industry took off 150 years later), and is fondly remembered all over the island through statues, cafe names and an annual commemoration and parade in May.

Marciana Alta

Napoleon’s villa is near Procchio and though it is, unsurprisingly, quite rundown, it’s worth visiting for its location and to get a sense of the life he might have led here (and the Demidoff family who lived in the villa later on). Napoleon escaped from Elba, caused more havoc back in France and Waterloo and was eventually exiled more effectively to Saint Helena in the south Atlantic, expiring there in 1821.

According to a contemporary writer: “Though his wife kept away, his Polish mistress visited. He apparently also found comfort in the company of a local girl, Sbarra. According to a contemporary chronicler, he ‘spent many happy hours eating cherries with her.’”

Most of the furnishings are reproductions or equivalent pieces but you can get a sense of the comfort.

Elba Info

Ferries: There are two main ferry companies – Toremar and Moby – which seem to be interchangeable. There are different ways to buy tickets but in my experience the price is the same, either buying online or from the Biglietteria (ticket office) right at the port.

Local specialities: Regular readers know that I don’t claim myself to be a foodie. So for Elba I’ll just say go for fish! Plenty of good options on the menu and fresh fish at the markets. We often passed a cute local hole-in-the-wall place in Marina di Campo but never got to try it – Aclipesca. Wine – the local speciality is rosè and the sweet dessert wine Aleatico goes down nicely. Here’s some more info on Elba wine.

Markets: Each morning from Mon-Sat there is a market in a different town so you might find the same vendors in each place. Procchio also hosts a food market. Here is a list of markets.

Aquarium: There is a small aquarium just east of Marina di Campo and it’s not a bad spot to spend a rainy afternoon with the kids.

Shopping: Prices for basic goods are higher than on the mainland so you could do as many Italians do and stock your car up at a supermarket on the mainland (except for ice cream and chocolate, speaking from experience). That said, it’s good to consider supporting the small local businesses on the island that rely on seasonal business, and there are plenty of food shops, cafes, restaurants and petrol stations. The main towns for nice boutiques are Marciana Marina, Portoferraio, Capoliveri and Marina di Campo.

Other links

Here’s a nice weekend visit described by Georgette at GirlinFlorence.

And the excellent food writer/photographer Emiko Davies has some tips on the Tuscan coast in general.

That wasn’t so boring (part 2) – Video Renaissance

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For a completely different family art experience in Florence – and a perfect way to cool off – check out the Bill Viola show at Palazzo Strozzi. It’s only on for two more weeks, closing on July 23rd.

Hang on, you say. Go to see contemporary video art? By an American (albeit with an Italian name)? In the city of the Renaissance?

This is the 2nd in my series on visiting Florence’s cultural sights with kids. The 1st was on San Miniato al Monte up on the top of the hill.

Why visit an exhibition at the Strozzi?

  • Palazzo Strozzi is literally a cool building which since the 15th century has been one of the most public palazzi in the city with an airy courtyard and a monumental size that kids love.
  • They specialise in interesting exhibitions of contemporary art that usually have a connection to Florence, to the Renaissance and to the building’s spaces.
  • With your ticket you can borrow a Family Kit for free, full of clever ideas to move kids through the show, one piece at a time. It’s in English! You just need to give them a piece of ID.
  • You can also borrow an audio guide, which is usually very good, and portable stool.
  • Each show is carefully designed – the exhibition staff get stylish new locally-tailored outfits and the kit bag is created anew for each show.
  • Check the Strozzi website for other family activities, like group workshops and tours.
  • If the show is popular (like the terrific Ai WeiWei earlier this year) you can buy advance tickets online, like a family ticket, and skip the queue.
  • The main exhibition is upstairs and all the extras are usually downstairs, worth including if you can.
  • Later this year there’ll be a Marina Abramovic show, which is bound to be thought-provoking.

The Family Kit

This is a bag (beautifully made by local leather maker Il Bisonte) usually containing sketchbooks, pencils, props like a flashlight, and other elements to make kids think, invent, and explore the exhibition and the space. Each exhibition has a different kit but it’s always well thought-out and has a lot to offer (and which other Florence museums could really pay attention to).

It’s meant for kids over 3 and the youngest can at least scribble with pencils and paper. There should be something for every age group in it. Boys and girls!

My two girls sketching at the Ai Wei Wei show (it was winter)

I’ll say it again, the kit is free! The kids might not use everything in it but it will be enough to let them see that they can find their own way into enjoying the art on show.

You can actually view the family kit guidebook on the Strozzi website. Useful before or after your visit.

There is also a “Drawing Kit” which the grownups can borrow, and view in advance on the site.

Viewing video art with kids

I’m an art history graduate, but video art has never been at the top of my list. Really… never. Typically at an exhibition you’ll find a video piece mixed in with paintings, sculptures, and other random pieces and when you encounter a video piece, maybe a projection in a tented-off corner, you have to make a conscious choice to stop and take the time to view it: for 3 minutes and 20 seconds, or, God forbid, 30 minutes! And with kids? It probably won’t have any kind of story and who knows what strange and scary images might appear.

But with how this exhibition was presented, I was really impressed by Bill Viola. What I learned here was how the elements of time and movement (and sound) are central to video art, making it a different but complementary art form.

Unlike so much fast-moving imagery that our kids see in animated movies and video games –where patience is not necessary, and parental hovering is often required – I love how a child who can get into this show will see and think about how the same medium, moving images, can be used in a completely different way.

Each room here contains just one artwork – typically the video piece along with its referring Renaissance painting.

Photo Palazzo Strozzi

The Family Kit made all the difference with slowing down our passage from room to room. As well as a notebook and pencils it had a fan to blow wind on your face, a flashlight, textiles to help you feel textures – to be used alongside the relevant artworks.

In the case of this show, I thought the images were all appropriate; there was no obvious violence or sexuality, and even though images included ideas like a person being engulfed by fire, my kids could see right away that it was of a different nature: a visual trick, or a different way of telling an idea. It was only after leaving the show that we noticed many of the figures were nude – but it seemed no more disconcerting that any number of paintings or sculptures at the Uffizi.

There is definitely a historical-religious element, not just the Christianity that is so central to Renaissance art, but other elements of spirituality and expression. You might need to explain or discuss some of the stories, but you’d be surprised what stories the kids have already picked up.

These are big life (and death) issues on show here, and not much that’s funny. But many kids will really relate to that and it can only make them think.

Disclaimer: my younger daughter (8) skipped through most of it with my husband, she was a little unnerved by the darkened rooms and slow-moving images. She had enjoyed the Ai WeiWei show.

Who is Bill Viola?

Bill Viola was born in New York to Italian parents. He lived for a few years in Florence in the 1970s and was involved in avant-garde video and performance art – like invading photos taken by tourists around town: an early photobomber.

Viola was also very taken by how images from the Renaissance permeate not just the museums but also churches, streets and houses. He gives the example of an old woman on his street who would leave flowers every day at a street corner altar with a Madonna, an act that had been happening for hundreds of years.

Photo Quotidiano.net

He’s one of the world’s leading video artist, is practically mainstream, and was described early on as an electronic painter. As I mentioned I’m not a video art fan but I found this work all so relevant to Florence, to our world, and very moving.

“He confronts death and the tragic anguish of life.. with projection rather than representation” – Anna Morettini, Director of Etrillard Foundation

The Strozzi Exhibition

The first thing the Viola show gets right is its size. 14 rooms are devoted to a few more than 14 pieces, making it easier to concentrate. It’s bared-down, simple and easy to see what the main focus should be and to move on. There are other pieces at locations around the city but the Strozzi is the main show.

The second thing is the concept – this show was built around Viola’s relationship to and inspiration from Renaissance art. And the inspiration, if not specific then at least stylistic, is placed in the room beside his piece.

The pictures below were taken by me with my iPhone – they’re like stills and cannot convey the movement and depth from experiencing the video in motion. But they give you a sense of the painterly quality of the works, how they give us room to discuss together how they related to the earlier paintings.

As Martin Holman in the Florentine says:  “Viola does not restage these older images. Instead he demonstrates what happens when they are absorbed and transformed in the mind”

If the kids follow the little guide in the kit, they’ll get a quick background to each work.

Here are the key pieces we enjoyed.

The Visitation

Viola’s piece recreates the meeting of the pregnant Mary with her cousin Elizabeth, slowing it down and making it even more ambiguous.

Bill Viola Studio

When he first saw Pontormo’s painting, Viola wondered what the artist had taken to create such colours.

Pontormo, The Visitation

The Family Kit includes a fan, to let you feel the breeze that you can visibly see in the video version.

Catherine’s Room

The room containing this meditation series is so lovely. Any child can see quickly the visual relationship between the 14th century St Catherine in the lower part of this painting by Andrea di Bartolo going through the motions of her day. In the four separate Viola videos, a woman is shown to us in her own private space, it could be a convent, or a prison, while the seasons changing outside the window.

Andrea di Bartolo, Santa Caterina

Bill Viola Studio

These video pieces open themselves up in a way that painting or photography is not able to, offering another dimension into the subject or the atmosphere or the story around the story.

The Deluge

Talk about knowing the ending in advance. My daughter insisted on sitting out the full 30 minutes of this – watching the people and bustle around this building build up very slowly until the expected flood happened. The last 5 minutes or so did drag as the street and building dried off. But when you think about it, there’s nothing quite like sitting in a room with other people watching flickering images on a screen…

It was interesting to see Paolo Uccello’s wierd but much-loved Flood fresco juxtaposed against it.

Emergence

This is the exhibition’s “brand image”, seen on billboards, bus tickets and airport baggage carousels.

This may or may not be the lifeless body of Christ coming out of the tomb and then lowered to the ground by two emotional women. Or they could be midwives, present at a birth. My kids were mostly amazed by the colour of the man’s skin.

Bill Viola Studio

The slow-motion contortions and positions of the three persons move slowly into recognisable positions from well-known paintings – from Piero della Francesco to David’s Death of Marat. And we talked about how they seemed to dance.

Masolino da Panicale, Pietà

David, the Death of Marat

 

Adam and Eve, Man/Woman

I loved these pieces – first of all because the amazing Lucas Cranach paintings were right there on the wall (borrowed from the Prado) and are so very beautiful in themselves. And around the corner was Viola’s take: two single narrow vertical screens, one of a man and one of a woman, each of them individually evaluating their own mortality, the woman heading towards acceptance and happiness, the man fighting against his ageing body. One could say.

Bill Viola Studio

Just as the man and woman examine themselves with a light, a child visiting the exhibition can pull the flashlight out of the kit and do the same thing.

My daughter didn’t get into this exercise and, not surprisingly, preferred the younger and more perfect Adam and Eve.

Lukas Cranach, Adam and Eve

The Martyrs series

When you read the description of these four pieces, placed on the four walls of one room like a Greek cross, they sound pretty gruesome. Each scene shows a person going through a movement through fire, air, water or earth. But my 10 year old and I were entranced by the four-sided elegiac flow of individual bodies going through what should be ordeals but which were almost a dance.

 

Kids will also enjoy the behind-the-scenes videos downstairs, which show some of the stunts, photography setup and studio “tricks” needed to create the flooded house or a submerged man.

Photo Bill Viola Studio

 

Not everyone in Florence wants to see contemporary art in such an historic city. But I say, bring it on! Those of us living here are happy to show our kids more of the world and of art than golden haloes and marble saints (wonderful as they are) and exhibitions like those put on by the Strozzi and this year’s Ytalia sculpture exhibition around town (upcoming blog post) offer something different.

The show was full of beauty, wonder at the human form and imagination, homage to many artists of the past (not just Renaissance) and an age-old questioning about man’s and woman’s place in the world and the wonder of life. I was also struck by the way women were portrayed in such a positive, human way.

And after all this life and death, you can’t go wrong with a nice cold sweet gelato!

Swimming pools of Florence

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I’ve been enjoying contributing to Florence’s wonderful English-language monthly magazine The Florentine with some stories about family life in Italy.  My latest – in the July issue – gives a taste of the outdoor city pools around Florence, which many visitors and even residents are not so familiar with.

From Costoli with its big diving board once tackled by my daughter, to the beautiful Pavoniere pool in the Cascine park in the west, these pools offer an easy way to beat the heat all summer in Florence.

Here is a link to my story in The Florentine.

If you’re travelling with kids to Florence you might want to check out some of these pools for an inexpensive afternoon to cool off and get to see how the locals live.

Costoli has one big pool for serious swimmers, a wonderful deep diving pool, and a smaller pool for kids. And of course a bar.

You can read more about how my daughter beat the local boys to jump from the top!

Functional changing room area

With the inevitable turtles

The “Magnificent Le Pavoniere” in the Cascine park is a lovely pool and restaurant during the day, nightclub by night. There is a playground adjoining it and of course plenty of space in the park outside for rollerblading, or you can enjoy the Tuesday morning market, the biggest in Florence.

 


It’s called Le Pavoniere after the peacock motif you see in the mock temples around the pool. Classy!

Hidron pool is further out from Florence, in Campi Bisenzio, further west from Ikea and the airport and not far from the huge shopping centre I Gigli. You can reach it by bus but it’s easier by car. In winter it’s a great indoor pool/water park and in the summer this fabulous outdoor pool is open – no slides or anything fancy, just a lovely big, relatively-shallow pool. I guess this nice little bar opens sometimes?

This gorgeous pool, Rari Nantes, is right on the south side of the Arno river just east of central Florence. Unfortunately it’s not usually open to the public, but reserved for members, waterpolo players, and swimming classes. My kids did a June intensive course here and I got to enjoy a bit of sun and views while waiting for them (in the bar).

The (Wet) Stones of Florence

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Florence made world news this week when it was announced that the city is to start hosing down church steps with water to clear away the tourists who have a pesky habit of sitting down to eat a quick lunch.

This was big news around here, and most everyone thinks that the whole idea is ridiculous and won’t solve the problem, that after five minutes of Tuscan sun, the water will have evaporated. Even my 8 year old – when polled – was quick to point out that the city streets simply need more benches and other places where anyone (not just the nonni, or granddads) can sit in a civilised way.

“Operation anti camp-out“

Dario Nardella, the trying-hard-to-be-popular mayor, opened his “anti bivacco” campaign (from bivouac, referring to the camped-out picnickers) and declared that the steps of Santa Croce and Santa Spirito would be washed down once or twice a day, to push off the tourists. Won’t that be a waste of water, he was asked. “Well it’s part of the regular cleaning service’s supply” he replied, “and there’s no harm in giving the sacred steps a good clean while we’re at it”.

The underlying reason for this treating of tourists like cats, is that it’s not proper to sit on the church steps, a sacred place. It indicates “an increase among those who don’t respect our cultural heritage”, according to the mayor. Well, if you have 12 million people visiting each year, maybe you should take that more seriously and improve the city in many other ways. Italy’s ex-Prime Minister Matteo Renzi made a huge impact when he, as Florence’s mayor, pedestrianised a huge section of the city centre. That has been great for tourists, but the locals are still grumbling about it. 

Street food?

Overcrowding and rubbish in Florence are more evident than ever. But why is this picnicking a problem now? In a city that has been “welcoming” visitors to admire its amazing cultural treasures for several centuries?

Five years ago a new city law permitted the opening of a greater number of sandwich shops, kebab joints and other food options for tourists who might not have time or funds to sit down and eat properly, paving the way to more street-consumed food. 300 extra businesses have opened in that time, mostly in the historic centre and most visibly around via dei Neri which runs between the back of the Uffizi and Santa Croce and where you can find/blame the NY Times top sandwich spot all’Antico Vinaio and its many imitators.

Pause and observe the Italian street scene. With the understandable exception of ice cream, you will not see Italians walking and eating at the same time. That’s what a cafe or restaurant is for, and where, not coincidentally, you are exposed to social interaction.

The city has regretted the proliferation of the street food issue, taking measures to curb it and clean up the city, to ensure that Florence does not lose its status as a UNESCO world heritage site. They recently banned the late-night sale of alcohol from places other than cafes and restaurants, and also famously refused McDonald’s to open beside the Duomo.

Grand tourists

A bigger question that comes to mind is – does this city actually welcome visitors? I would say not particularly well, and friends of mine (who know me to be of an overly tolerant nature) would be quicker to wax lyrical on the topic.

The good citizens of Florence have a reputation for intolerance, even within Italy. “The Parisians of Italy” someone once told me when I lived here as a student, referring to their snootiness and preference to stick to their own and be unhelpful. I don’t like to generalise, there are all sorts of people everywhere, but I’m not the only one with an opinion on this!

I’ll give you two examples.

Yesterday I was walking near the synagogue – a beautiful 19th building that doesn’t often make the top 10 tourist sites of Florence – and watched a young American couple approach the armed soldiers  out front and ask in English “is this the synagogue”. A non-soldier with them answered gruffly – “over there, number 6”, nodding to the other side of the large gate, seeming to hope they might go away. He could have also told them that it wasn’t actually open, that if you stood on tiptop and looked over the gate you would see there was a wedding going on. But he let the tourists keep walking and read on their own the ‘closed’ sign on the door, and then walk away, considering their options on how best to complain about this online.

Florence’s Grand Synagogue, built 1882

Last week I was on a bus and a woman called from the footpath to the driver in English, “does this go to the stazione?” “No”, he barked, and took off, exuding that feeling of annoyance from someone who doesn’t want to have to start speaking English beyond the limited amount that he knows. I think that this is what often causes the gruffness you see here, the lack of confidence to speak to people as well as you might want to – as well of course as the general intolerance of being asked questions, often rudely or in a language you don’t recognise.

The bus did of course go to the station and my guilt for not intervening followed me home up the hill. I speak Italian, imperfectly, but I find I am treated with more respect than most short-term visitors. And it’s worth mentioning that almost all the school parents I know are desperate for their kids to learn better English than they ever did, they recognise its usefulness.

Aside from language issues there is much lament among tourists, and residents, about the poor quality of public facilities in Florence, like bathrooms, water fountains, benches, easy access to information, museum opening hours, children’s activities, confusing websites. Even finding your way out of the Uffizi is still as complicated as it was 20 years ago, unless it’s closing time and they’ll happily show you out.

Hose ‘em down Dario!

Two days into the new hosing routine, is it working? I scanned the local media and there’s a mixed bag of opinion: it’s short-sighted, other measures are needed, it’s a waste of water, a bad image, and there are questionable rants online about handbag sellers and other “scourges” of the city. All agree that it’s daft, more benches are needed, as well as other options than the expensive cafes catering to tourists in the main piazzas.

One shop owner on via dei Neri claimed, somewhat jokingly, that the mayor had stolen his idea: he’s been throwing out buckets of water on the street for years to push off the annoying visitors sitting on the footpath. (Look closely and you’ll notice he’s selling tourist goods.)

La Nazione. The quote from the Prior of Santa Croce says that an intensive education programme is needed for school groups and visitors.

The local sandwich makers are trying to adapt, like this sign on one door asking customers to think about where to eat – with some inventive hashtags. They’ve also written it in English too, if the visitors can figure out what the “sagras of the churches might mean”.

Another sandwich shop on the street has jokingly put swimming rings on display as a “counter measure”.

Florence – they love the tourists, but they don’t really love them.

Do as a I say, not as I do

Up where we live, away from the rubbish-strewn historic centre, I had lunch yesterday with a friend. We took out sandwiches from a local restaurant (which I will keep nameless, to avoid inviting more hordes) and we sat with others on the wall across the street, where cushions have been set out for the many daily customers. Almost all were Italian, not a tourist in sight, and as well as a full rubbish bin, there were quite a few paper wrappers and used cans strewn around the road and field over the wall. Just as at all the viewpoints up in the hills where the locals drive to in their mopeds for sunsets with friends and lovers.

At least we weren’t sitting on a church step. Then we’d be in double trouble.

If you’re interested in more food waste issues, check out my blog post on the slow rise of doggy bags in Italy.

Here are some of the news links about this story if you’re interested.

Guardian news story

Firenze Today video interviewing sandwich shop owners

La Nazione: The mayor watching the first spraying down  

 

Nothing Phoney about Bologna

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On my first visit to Bologna, as a poor student visiting from Florence ca. 1993, I visited some Irish friends and we stayed up all night, walking the long, meandering streets eating and drinking. Before we knew it, morning had arrived and I left soon after, not having visited a single museum, church, shop or market. But Bologna left an impression as a lively, tasty, interesting, real city and in the last couple of years I’ve been trying to visit it some more.

Last weekend I brought the husband for the first time, the kids staying behind with friends, and we got to explore all those streets and alleys by bike (a rare treat for us). Below are some shots of places we did get to visit, a little sense of what we saw in about 24 hours! There’s an (unusually) excellent visitor website called Bologna Welcome with loads of tips and routes and this being a young and studenty city, you’ll find plenty of visual material on Instagram.

And the word Baloney? Bologna sausage in North America is pronounced baloney, a corruption of the original pronunciation. As a term for “fake” or “low quality” it came into use in New York in the 1920s, rhyming nicely with phoney.

Bologna seems to hold great esteem among Italians all over the country – which is quite an achievement – and has a few well-known nicknames.

La Dotta (the learned one) referring to its university which is the oldest in the world and still fills the city with students, making it a very lively city with a sense of modern life living with history you don’t get in many “museum piece” Italian cities.

La Grassa (the fat one) as it’s famous even in Italy for its fantastic cuisine, offering Bolognaise sauce to the world, as well as tortellini in broth. You can’t go too wrong with the restaurant offerings here.

La Rossa (the red one) as most rooftops and porticoes are a lovely red but referring also to the strongly communist direction the city has mosty followed since the war.

These days Bologna is only an astonishing 30 minutes by train from Florence. As the rail hub for central Italy, I spent many long regional trips in and out of it 20 years ago but now it’s all fast trains and underground platforms. We’d almost forgotten that its train station was the target of an horrific terrorist bombing in August 1980, probably by neo-fascists, in which 85 people were killed. Italy’s often bloody recent history is something you’re never too far from, living here.

I spotted this in the window of a student bar/squat. A mafia version of Monopoly.

Bologna’s history is as long and interesting as any Italian city and even though it seems so close to Tuscany, it is as separate from Tuscan history as you can get, as the city was aligned with the Papal states rather than any of that Medici crowd.

 

The most famous landmark in Bologna is the wonderful Neptune statue by Giambologna, but it’s covered up for renovations at the moment – that’s it to the left of this cafe.

The historic centre is one of the largest in Europe and feels very circular, partly as there is no obvious river running through it. There are many towers to see, some of which you can climb. These two leaning beauties are  known as the Due Torri, a serious landmark if ever I saw one.

The porticoes cover about 38 km of the city streets, and I’ve heard that the locals don’t usually carry umbrellas.

Food is really the thing in Bologna.

There are any number of fantastic trattorie, restaurants, aperitivo bars. This place is a heaven for eating well. You’ll find plenty of info online about local dishes, recommendations.

We found the Mercato di Mezzo very handy – a small renovated covered market in the middle of things, and I have to admit that the pizza we had at RossoPomodoro (“Neapolitan style with the heart of Bologna”) was probably the best I’ve ever had in Italy! Just look at that beautiful oven!

I don’t usually take photos of my food, but this was exceptional! A white slow-risen pizza with little sweet yellow tomatoes (datterini gialli) and slivers of hard ricotta. Actually we just really need to get to Naples.

And we had extraordinary gelato at this little place we stumbled on, Galliera49 . We joined the queue once we noticed all the locals patiently standing around.

The main piazza is dominated by the Basilica of San Petronio – its size is a surprise when you walk in and then you learn it was meant to be as large as St Peter’s in Rome, until the building money started being diverted to building the university instead (or maybe for St Peter’s itself). The church asks visitors for €3 to pay for a paper wristband to allow you to take photos, a good idea for basic fund raising.

The chapel of frescoes by Giovanni da Modena (the €3 entrance is completely worth it for this chapel alone) contains some of the most amazing and scary images of hell: amazing what they got away with all those years ago.

 

 

My husband is a bit of an astrology nut and was entranced by the sundial running through the church – turns out it’s the longest in the world and was built in the 17th century by Cassini, famous these days for being the name of a space probe heading towards Saturn, even having a Google Doodle made in its honour. And it works! We waited until 13 minutes past 1 (we had no kids with us) and got to see the beam of sun projected through the small hole in the roof hit the meridian. Great excitement!

We also visited Santo Stefano – a charming church complex made up of several churches from different periods and which was definitely the busiest tourist attraction that day.

The Town Hall, just off the main piazza, seemed mostly busier with people grabbing free wi-fi than visiting anything interesting, but we had a poke around this charming spot and stumbled on a show of drawings by the great Italian artist, illustrator and theatre designer Luzzati.

 

I taken by this impressively high-profile plaque outside the town hall in memory of the many Italian women who die every year, victims of domestic violence.

Worth a visit is the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAMbo), a dynamic centre housed in an old flour factory which attracts interesting exhibitions, like last year’s David Bowie show from the V&A. Excellent cafe and bookshop too. Good for an aperitivo.

Other art spots include the Palazzo Albergati which had a wonderful Breughel show last year and has a Mirò exhibition until this September. I’ll just have to go back for that!