By
noeleenm on August 10th, 2007
Last night we had a midnight feast…
We didn’t set out to have it, unlike Kasia’s birthday which we celebrated a week after Jan’s, and unlike the dinner we’ve planned for Sunday week for no other reason than it seems like a good idea - and Gail and Jan have been nagging about it.
Since Kasia’s birthday, she’s been to Belgium to visit her parents (her Dad works there and her Mum had gone for a holiday), Jan went home with Leti to receive his Degree, and Gint went home for nine days to Latvia. It was this latter event which serependitiously triggered our midnight feast last night.
Gint arrived home late last Monday night and had to go straight to work on Tuesday morning. By last night he was so tired that he went straight to bed and only woke up at midnight to get something to eat. I had gone to my bedroom around 10pm to work on e-mails for the flood campaign, and came out to check that everything was locked up for the night when I discovered Gint in the kitchen. I had hardly seen him since his holiday so sat down to hear about his travels and, of course, he insisted that we try a bottle of something that was balsamic and herbal and 45% alcohol. I had enough sense – or cowardice – to say ‘no’ to this but instead started grazing my way through the chocolate sweets filled with liqueurs that he had also brought back from his trip.
Then Jan arrived in and joined Gint at the drink – just to be sociable – with the occasional foray into the chocolates – just to be sociable. He was swiftly followed by Kasia, finishing her late shift at the hotel, who spat out the balsamic drink saying it reminded her of medicine her mother used give them when they were small, but was easily tempted by the chocolates.
By then it seemed like an awful pity that Alba had come in and gone to bed before Gint’s emergence from his slumbers so Jan and Gint went up and woke her to come down and join us. She was on antibiotics, she announced, and couldn’t drink, but the chocolates…
At two o’clock in the morning we finally all went back to bed, having decided it was just a little too early for breakfast. I’ve still only the vaguest notion of what Gint did on his holidays, but the bit I heard was interesting enough to make me want to hear more. He visited someplace that was sacred to the Druids, if I got it correctly, and I think it was in the middle of a forest where the birds didn’t sing, and there was something in there about hollows lined with stones, and as soon as I get to sit down with him over a mug of tea I might get it right yet…
It will have to be soon. Kasia’s going home to Poland on Sunday for a few days – where she’ll again see her parents – and Alba is finally getting to go home to Spain for her holiday at the end of September. And on Sunday I spent the evening in my niece’s home in Ashford at a family get-together. They had just returned from a holiday in the Appennines in Italy, and we saw slides of the most fabulous scenery imaginable.
All their stories of their travels are being woven in my head against the background to a wonderful book I read last week, which was set in Nova Scotia and is called ‘The Birth House’, and through the descriptions of Jenni Diski travels in Antartica (and in her head), which I’m totally absorbed in at the moment. These two books – and G. K. Chesterton’s ‘Fr. Brown’ stories, which I was re-reading in the middle – formed another kind of midnight feast for me, this time for my imagination.
Sometimes, though, I think it needs to go on a diet just as much as my body. Does anyone know how you can tell when your imagination has become obese?.
Posted in Books/films/theatre, Czech Republic, House Family, Ireland, Latvia, Poland, Spain, Wine and Some Spirits | Comments Off
By
noeleenm on July 10th, 2007
On Saturday night we celebrated Jan’s 28th birthday with a strange mixture of familiarity and newness. The familiarity comes from the tradition, now quite well established, of celebrating birthdays together in the house – a properly laid table, varied food (from ‘Let’s Eat In’, which delivers excellent Indian, Chinese, Thai or Italian food in our area) and drink, all spiced with talk and laughter… But on Saturday it came also from a feeling of ‘deja vu’, as four of the seven people present had celebrated before together around the same table with the same feeling of contentment.
When Jan brought his Leti to meet us at the beginning of last year, Gint was also living in the house, as well as me. Elke and Michele are now back home in Italy, but Gail, from County Monaghan, almost made it, which would have made us five of that original party together again.
Instead we had Kasia from Poland, and Alba from Spain, with Alba’s Irish boyfriend, Derek, to add in a new flavour to the mix. Spanish vied with English at the table because of the two girls - and Jan who has learned to speak Spanish quite well. At one point, though, it almost caused war as Alba and Leti got deep into nostalgia about the things they miss about Spain.
Staying out late, fiestas, and hot sunshine were all being yearned for causing Alba to give a great sigh and say that she would have to go back soon. Derek innocently said that he would enjoy it, and almost fell off his chair when Alba rounded on him to say: ‘No-o-o! You’re not coming!’ Seeing all of our faces she went on to try to explain, backed up by Leti, that she didn’t mean she didn’t want him in Spain – just that she needed badly to go back and just talk Spanish all day long (Derek doesn’t speak Spanish) with family and friends. The spicy food was needed for quite a while to heat up the atmosphere again at that end of the table, but Derek – a good-tempered lad – got over it quickly, to his credit.
It underlined, though, the difficulties a couple from different cultures, and especially with different languages, can experience. Something – even a tone of voice – that is quite normal in one culture can be seen as very offensive in another. Add to that the likelihood of misunderstandings when one, at least, is speaking in a foreign language, and it’s a minefield. What surprises me most, I think, is that so many couples survive it so well!
The birthday boy and his girlfriend were doing very well, at least, despite both speaking English most of the time, although Jan is studying Spanish as well and Leti is intending to learn Czech. The expressions on their faces, though, when Leti presented Jan with his birthday gift – a red tie to go with the red dress Leti will wear at Jan’s graduation ceremony in the Czech Republic later this month – didn’t need translation.
Earlier that day, Jan and myself had talked of birthdays. He was born at around 11am, he said, and looking at his serious, thoughtful face, I realised how important this day is to him. He feels about birthdays as I do: it’s your own very special day, a celebration of the person that is uniquely you. Oddly enough, I had been reading a novel that centred on an astrologist being murdered (and, no, she hadn’t given someone a bad reading…), and obviously the whole thing of star signs provided a background to the story.
Apparently, it’s not only important to astrologists which star sign you were born under, but also which star was in the ascendant (if I remember correctly). To work this out, they need to know the time of your birth, as well as the date.
Strangely enough, the information this provides seems to be used by the astrologer to predict what kind of person you will turn out to be, more so than what your future will be. Perhaps those two things are so intertwined that you can tell a lot about someone’s future once you know what kind of person they will be? You may not know what fate life will deal them, but you know how they will be likely to react to – or even change – that fate.
Now someone who knows about astrology (and I don’t, as must be blatantly obvious) might tear their hair out at my interpretation of what I picked up from this novel. Maybe I just picked up this bit about the date and time of your birth influencing the kind of person you are – and not the rest, if it was there – because it’s what makes us the kind of people we are that really fascinates me.
Are we really influenced by the date and time of our birth – and the stars above us then? And how much of who we are comes from our genes, from the people who went before us, and how much from the people and the ways among whom we grow up? How much influence do traumatic events have on our lives – even those we block out of our conscious minds?
I was fascinated by the Enneagram when I first came across it. For those who aren’t familiar with it, it’s a system whereby people are divided into nine broad personality types, depicted in the form of a nine-pointed star, with each point representing a number. Each of these personality types is heavily influenced by one or other of the points next to it, known as their ‘wings’. I’ve never been quite sure whether I’m a number Four, with a strong Five influence, or a number Seven.
Four is the dreamer, and Five is the academic that likes to live in an ivory tower and observe life. Sometimes the numbers are depicted as countries and Seven, the other number in which I see much of myself, is sometimes depicted as Ireland – with our tendency to overindulge in drink, food, talk – and to avoid confrontation with unpleasantness.
I have found the Enneagram to be extraordinarily accurate in character description. It is believed it was first used by Sufi priests and later by the Jesuits, to identify personality types and thus encourage them to fight their dark side, and encourage them towards developing towards the light.
But it talks about the kind of people we are – not what made us that way, which is what fascinated me about theories of being influenced by the stars at the time of our birth.
Beliefs are such strange things. At Jan’s birthday dinner, Kasia (who is a devout Polish Catholic) announced that she and I were both going to the Irish Mass the following day, and invited anyone who liked to come along. Nobody accepted the invitation but it sparked a discussion about belief – or lack of it – in God, and belief – or lack of it – in organised religion.
The strange thing is that so many young people seem to find it incredible that anyone can believe in a God of Goodness (Derek seemed to have particular problems with this because of the state of the world) and, worse again, in a church – or churches – founded on the teachings of a Man who proclaimed himself to be the Son of that God. Yet they can believe in Matrix-like scenarios or horoscopes or a thousand other things that seem to me twice as unlikely as a Being who is the essence of Good.
I also believe in a Being who is the essence of Evil. I just don’t believe he capers around with horns and cloven foot… And I believe that one has to choose between those two extremes. I also believe that the saying: ‘The easiest way for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing’ is a challenge. We have to choose. And we have to do make that choice count for something.
I looked around the dinner table that night and thought about the different personalities in these increasingly dear people who come to our house. And what had made them that way…
…And I prayed that my God of Goodness will walk with them all through their lives, whatever name they may choose to give Him.
Posted in Czech Republic, House Family, Ireland, Latvia, Poland, Spain | No Comments »
By
noeleenm on June 15th, 2007
The Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults training course is over, the General Elections are over, the appointment of a new Government is over – even the good weather is over, at least temporarily.
It’s a soft grey day today, and it feels like the beginning of a weekend in November, rather than the middle of June.
Since my last April post right up to General Election day in Ireland (which also happened to be the final night of our CELTA course), I was so busy that stories of a changing Ireland just got squeezed out of my schedule. Then, in the immediate aftermath of the Elections/course, I went on an ‘after-school’ binge of being out of doors in the sunshine and air I’d missed so much in the previous weeks.
I’ve climbed Bray Head in the evening, absorbing air, beauty, and bird-song in a heart-gladdening mixture, and gardened at the weekends, with dollops of talk and laughter and catching-up with house-family and family of origin and friends in between. That the end of all this busy-ness coincided with the return to our house of a beloved ’son’ – Jan from the Czech Republic – added to the contentment.
Our ‘family’ seems to be going through one of those patches where it gathers other people up as well – Alba’s parents from Spain, briefly, and her Irish boyfriend, more long-term; Kasia’s friends from Poland, also briefly; now Jan’s girlfriend, Letti, who has come to stay in Ireland (not in our house, but hopefully nearby) for a few months; while Gint, our longest resident, has been increasingly busy in his new career laying timber floors.
For me these past few weeks have been a quiet ‘honeymoon’ period in a very busy life, but already things are moving again. I was lucky enough to do well in the CELTA course, and luckier again to be offered two nights a week teaching English in International House, where I did the course. It started last Monday, and it’s nervewracking, stimulating, and fun!
With the election of a new Government, and the appointment of new Ministers, it’s time again to pick up the battle to keep our floodplain free of high density building. With the Green Party going into coalition with Fianna Fail, and a Green Minister for the Environment, we need to make the most of these few weeks before the Government goes into its summer recess.
…Especially as the otherwise excellent flood defence proposals being put forward seem to suggest that, with these in place, there is no need for the floodplain to be preserved… With the news of drought and flood from Australia over this past week, and the extreme flooding much nearer to home in Donegal in the past few days, it’s hard to believe that anyone can seriously moot this argument any longer – but they do.
So, on with the warpaint again and out with the English language text books, but in between there will be some time for working in the garden, walking in the hills, and coming home to Gint, Kasia, Alba, and Jan in this changing Ireland of ours…
Posted in Czech Republic, Flooding, Friends, House Family, Ireland, Latvia, McManus Family, Poland, Spain | No Comments »
By
noeleenm on March 30th, 2007
The days are falling in so fast around me this month, albeit longer, brighter days since the hour changed, that I hardly know where to begin…
Most of my waking hours are taken up with the CELTA (Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults) course, with occasional prolonged bursts of anxiety and activity about the flood campaign, which is recorded on http://www.braywatch.com/. Even more occasional bursts of activity – I’ve no anxiety to spare regarding this – centre on the more mundane business of living, such as shopping, cooking (as in throwing together sandwiches, much of the time), getting Fred through his NCT, organising house and garden maintenance, paying bills, and working to pay those bills. And sometimes I even get to talk with my family and friends by phone or text, and sometimes, blessedly, I get to sit down with the people with whom I share my home…
It tends to happen quite late at night, when I don’t have to rush anywhere else, and I’m too tired to even go to bed, or on Sundays when I’ve the whole day off both work and course. So, sporadically, I’ve gotten to know the new members of our house family.
Kasia is very slim, with a narrow bone structure, and the complexion of an Irish cailin, which is particularly noticable as she colours her hair red. A guest who came to reception in the hotel where she works the other day announced happily: ‘Well, you’re Irish anyway!’, and was quite surprised when Kasia explained placidly that in fact she’s Polish. She comes from a traditional Catholic Polish background, and talks with quiet pride of the influence the late Pope John Paul II had on the emergence of freedom in their mutually beloved country.
Not so surprisingly then, she went to Mass the first Sunday she spent in our house, but got confused, as she recounted later, when the lay Ministers of the Eucharist were invited up to the altar just after the Consecration, the most sacred part of the Mass. It was the family Mass, where the small children listen to the Bible readings in the side chapel in simple story form, while the adults listen to the traditional words of Epistles and Gospel. The children are then invited out onto the altar, with their ‘minders’, for the Offertory and Consecration, and the Ministers for the Eucharist join them in time to recite the Our Father altogether.
From Kasia’s point of view, what she saw was children going out onto the altar, and, later, the adults joining them. She was up there, too, when she realised that a lot of adults still seemed to be sitting in the congregation… Murmuring apologies, she sidled down off the altar and back to her seat, with a face to match her Irish hair.
She told me all of this, as I cried with laughter, when she asked if I thought it would be okay if she went to one of the other Christian churches the following Sunday? I thought at first that she was too embarrassed to go back to the Catholic church, but she explained that it was simply that in her town they only have Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches and she was fascinated by the churches, mainly of the Protestant faith, that she has seen in Bray. I assured her they would make her very welcome, and tried to give her a potted version of the differences in ritual between the Church of Ireland, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Catholic churches (with Quakers, who don’t have a public place of worship in Bray) thrown in for good measure.
No mishaps occurred on her next visit to church, but she seemed to miss the familiarity of our form of worship, so I think it’s possible that she’ll return to Mass – with a strong grip on her seat.
Kasia has a quiet, dead-pan sense of humour that is very funny, but Alba - the other new member of our house family – comes into the house like a gale of fresh air, hugging and kissing and regaling us all with her tales of the day, good and bad.
From Valencia, Alba has the dark skin and hair, and the tempestuous temperament, we associate with southern Spain. Everyone who crosses her is the villian in the melodrama of her life (as is everyone who makes war or causes the innocent or powerless to suffer, which I like very much about her), and everyone who treats her with the enthusiasm she showers out on the world is just short of being her very best friend. She even out-dramatises Gint, who watches her with laughter, and happily alternates between playing her leading man and the moustachioed villian of the piece!
In the past week though, Alba has put a cunning plot in place in our house. She announced on several occasions that she has put on too much weight since she has come to Ireland because of the amount of bread we eat here, particularly. As Alba is tall, this weight is negligible, if it exists at all, but her beating of her bare, navel-pierced midriff as she announced it had Gint’s eyes out on stalks. So she has gone on a strict diet, and has joined a gym, where her personal trainer is dark, good-looking and worth perspiring over anyway, she informs us.
But – because Alba has a thing about wasting food in a world where many people starve – she insists on bringing home bread and cake that would otherwise go in the bin of the shop where she works. And, as she’s on a diet, we all eat it.
Now, I can hardly get off the chair after a meal, especially since I’m not getting time to walk these days. Gint at least is exercising, and nothing seems to make Kasia fat.
I was amused to notice, too, that Alba has stuck her diet sheet to the fridge using fridge magnets already there. One, broken, announces the House Rules and originally said:-
‘If it’s dirty, clean it,
If it’s dropped, pick it up,
If it’s broken, fix it,
If it’s hungry, feed it,
If it’s sad, love it.’
Having come into close contact with the kitchen floor tiles at some stage, this magnet broke across the middle, and Alba separated the two pieces to catch each corner of her diet sheet. It’s broken right across the middle of the second last line.
Somehow I have to find a way of resisting Alba’s combination of idealism and single-mindedness regarding diets. If I didn’t have a strong feeling that he’d remind me of one of my grand-nephews, I’d even think of having a look at her personal trainer…
Posted in Flooding, House Family, Ireland, Latvia, Poland, Spain | 1 Comment »
By
noeleenm on March 12th, 2007
Okay, I got one post up already today, and the discipline of getting it up quickly is probably very good for my habit of writing long, long posts…
Now, though, I’m going to try to put up a hotch-potch of news because so many things are happening at the moment in my life that I’m dizzy.
Our house is full again, with the warmth and noise and life that brings. Kasia from Poland (whose surname I can’t remember but she says the English translation of her first and family names are Kate Fox) and Alba from Valencia in Spain both moved in yesterday. Despite the fact that we’ve had a couple of weeks with those two rooms empty, I still found myself dragging my friend, Thomas, across to bleed the radiators before they came, and frantically putting back together the freshly defrosted fridges. When will I ever learn to be organised…?
Gint has decided to stay on, despite van parking problems, having kept me entertained with stories of his search for a new house. There’s the ‘cat man’, the ‘don’t open that wardrobe!’ house, the ‘bed-is-high-above-the-window-and-it-makes-me-feel-like-a-prisoner’ (which I don’t follow at all) house, and he has developed several routines around them. I hope he will be as good at laying timber floors as he is at acting…
The flood campaign has suddenly become active again, despite the fact that we’re still waiting for a decision from the Oral Hearing by the Planning Board into our objections to building massive high rise apartments and shops and restaurants and even an hotel on the floodplain downriver from our homes.
Flood defence proposals, which we have been promised for twenty years now, are back on the agenda for the meeting of Bray Town Council which takes place tomorrow night. We desperately need this protection (the Dargle River was very, very high several times over the past few weeks, causing a lot of anxiety in our community), but the problem with the present proposals is that they’re being tied in with the granting of permission to build on the floodplain.
We’ve asked to see the proposals, and have a chance to discuss them with our community, before Bray Town Council votes on whether or not to approve them. Let’s see what happens to our request…
In the middle of all of this, my new car, Freddie, went for his NCT (National Car Test). I’d had him serviced, got his emissions and lights checked out, and even had his engine hosed down so that he’d be clean and ready for the Big Day. The garage, at the last moment, pointed out that his registration plates were a little faded, and so I ended up, on the morning of his test, bringing him to the garage again to have new plates fitted. Then I checked he had a clean hanky, had washed properly behind his ears, and set off for the Test Centre.
I was in the middle of studying my notes for the TEFL class while Freddie was being tested when I heard a couple of women who were watching the cars being tested from the viewing area remarking on ‘that car that seems to have water coming out of it’. I looked up to see them pointing at Freddie, who now had two mechanics under him, pointing torches up at his innards. Then one of the mechanics, seeing me looking out the window, came over to the viewing area, invited me to come out and supplied me with a hard hat, and showed me oil haemorraging out of Freddie’s innards…
They wouldn’t even let me drive him home until he had First Aid to stop him ‘bleeding’ all over the road. Apparently, the hosing down was a little too thorough and knocked a piece of rust off Freddie’s sump. He’s now repaired, getting ready to do his re-test – but this time he can go with no hanky and I’m damned if I’m checking behind his ears.
The funny thing is our tutors at the TEFL course keep telling us that we mustn’t have any other projects going on in our lives at the same time as this course, as it’s too intense… I arrive at classes glassy eyed with all that’s gone before, but the good thing is the course is so interesting that it takes my mind off the horrors waiting outside.
And it’s nice to have the house full again.
Posted in Ireland, Poland, Spain | No Comments »
By
noeleenm on February 13th, 2007
Yesterday was Gint’s birthday. He celebrated it by buying tools for his new enterprise, arranging to have business cards printed, and, in the evening, attending the second in a series of classes run by Wicklow Enterprise Centre on ‘Starting your own Business’. The course was especially designed for non-nationals who want to work for themselves in Ireland.
When he came home from the course, we celebrated it in a more traditional way by sharing a bottle of wine, and he told me some of the stories of the people who are doing the course with him. One student from India is proposing to start his own software company. A Polish lady wants to start up a trucking company, with her husband doing the driving while she looks after the admin side of the business. An African gentleman (Somalia?) is a qualified mechanic and wants to work at his trade here, but may have problems getting a visa. Someone else wants to hand-make leather shoes.
And Gint has temporarily postponed his original business idea of importing very solid, and very handsome, timber garden furniture into Ireland from his native Latvia, because of the heavy freight costs involved and the shortness of Irish summers, in favour of setting up on his own laying timber floors. He loves timber, and is at his happiest working with it. At the beginning, he will probably get more jobs laying light laminate flooring, but hopes to progress to his idea of Nirvana – laying solid wooden floors, particularly parquet flooring.
It was great to hear stories of people with enterprise and enthusiasm, willing to work hard to make a life for themselves. Many Irish people went away in years past and built up lives on dreams and hard work: now it’s our turn to provide the fertile field for entrepreneurship, it seems.
I wonder sometimes is it easier somehow for people from any country to build up a business away from home and its distractions of what all the friends are doing (often down at the pub) and the limitations sometimes imposed by being boxed into what people expect of you. Abroad you are no longer defined by your background, except that part of it that is truly you, and loneliness provides at least plenty of time to work, which in turn can provide the opportunity to integrate.
It’s a time of new beginnings in our house. Gint is looking for another home because he now has a van (replacing ‘Baby’ in his working life, if not in his heart), and parking has become increasingly difficult in our area. Wojtek has moved to his new house, with room to spread his DJ equipment – and to build on an increasing commitment to his girlfriend. Maria, at this time, should be wandering around the West of Ireland: we’re waiting to hear from her.
Soon, when I know the results of my application to do a Celta course (a Cambridge certified course in teaching English as a foreign language) over the coming months in Dublin, I will be advertising rooms in my house again, but this time just till the autumn. Then I hope to go abroad – depending on my results from the course, if I’m accepted, and on the decision from An Bord Pleanala (the Irish Planning Board) on our community’s campaign to stop high density building on the floodplain downriver from our homes. I will not walk away from that until it’s resolved.
Hopefully, though, I’ll become a traveller again for the winter, living among strangers in a strange land as the young people who have lived in my house have done over the past few years.
Birthday dreams – they’re a funny business!
Posted in Flooding, Germany, House Family, Ireland, Latvia, Poland | No Comments »
By
noeleenm on January 4th, 2007
Christmas was fun – but busy!
The first chance I got to write anything was a ‘thank you’ letter to a friend, which I wrote at what seemed to me like dawn, but was in reality near nine o’clock, on the day before New Year’s Eve. I was up early to say goodbye to Renata and Pavel who were returning to the Czech Republic. It’s always hard to say goodbye, but I consoled myself with the fact that, for Pavel, this is his second time to stay in my house. The world is getting smaller…
It still seemed strange, though, when the house had been so packed for so long, to sit in quietness.
We (Renata, Pavel, Maria, and myself) cooked for seven on the 23rd December, with Gint laying the table, opening bottles of wine, and muttering over the washing up afterwards. Wojtek was excused from duty as he had to go to work immediately after the meal and was allowed to sleep till then – until we discovered we were unaccountably short of dishes and he went scuttling up to his den (politely referred to as his bedroom), to emerge carrying a precarious load of dirty dishes! He has earned the nickname ‘Bear’ because of his ability to hibernate, a useful skill if you work nights and study during the day, but sometimes the area around his bed is only just short of gnawed bones and a pot of honey…
Renata and Pavel had hunted fish (thank God they don’t have Wojtek’s hoarding habits) in our local Saturday street market, but couldn’t locate carp, the traditional fish dish for much of Eastern Europe. Instead, they were advised to use salmon and brown trout. Apparently, it was delicious – once they had finally given up on the white wine sauce which was supposed to accompany it. The sauce had been chosen from one of my cookery books and the recipe in English, with its very different vocabulary, proved a little too much in the long run. But Gint ate it anyway…
The traditional accompaniment of potato salad, which Renata and Pavel had worked on all day, had ‘eating and drinking’ in it, as we say in Ireland, and more than made up for the disappointing sauce for our Czechs, Polish and Latvian fish eaters. Maria is allergic to potatoes, so she had plain basmati rice with her fish, while I turned my rice dish into a mushroom risotto. We all shared a big green salad, with a very nice vinaigrette sauce (prepared by Maria) - and we all shared white wine!
This decidedly unIrish main course was followed by a very Irish Christmas pudding, made in County Wexford, and custard. I find a lot of visitors to our country have never met custard before (it’s rather like caramel, but usually served hot), and it met with mixed reactions. Renata, for instance, is convinced that every sweet food is sweeter in Ireland, sometimes too much so, but everyone liked the pudding – except Maria, whom I had completely forgotten is allergic to nuts also. Luckily, she tasted them at her first tentative (she has learned to be tentative about food) mouthful, and stopped before any damage was done.
We exchanged our Chriskindel gifts, ranging from scratch cards (which, if you scratch off three matching numbers, wins you the amount named) through calendars and DVD racks to a beer glass that twinkles with different coloured lights everytime it is raised! Now, far be it from me to name a Chriskindel, but the person who was responsible for choosing these twinkling coloured lights on the beer glass is the same person who was shocked to discover we use coloured lights - as opposed to simply white – on our Christmas tree! And she was relieved to find that, at least, our Christmas tree lights don’t twinkle…
Poor Wojtek had to go to work then, but the rest of us finished the night lounging about the fireplace, talking, drinking wine, and building dreams in the embers. We were joined at some point by Gail, who had been Christmas shopping in Dublin till all hours!
Maria set off early the next morning for Germany and her family and friends there, but the simple meal planned for that night for the rest of us meant we could rest a little before I set off for an afternoon tea party in my nephew, Stephen’s house, with 22 of my sister’s children and their families! Mary’s husband, Noel, celebrated his 73rd birthday on Christmas Eve, while his grandson, also Noel, celebrated his 14th birthday. Stephen and Marie, his wife, have established a tradition each year of celebrating both events early enough to leave time for all the little ones to be back home safely in bed in time for Santa’s visit later that night. It’s always a warm, talkative occasion for all of us, apart from the delicious meal.
From Stephen’s, I went to the 8pm vigil Mass for Christmas Day, which was very beautiful. Tall Christmas trees (with white lights!) form a background to the altar, the choir sang sweetly, and our old traditional Crib, that I have known since I was a child, gathers crowds around after Mass. I missed Elke and Michele, though, who accompanied me last year.
At 10pm we finally sat down at home and eat a very untraditional meal – for either Ireland or Eastern Europe – of pasta in a blue cheese and brocolli and walnut sauce. But it was delicious, and we could all eat it. We followed it happily with mince pies and ice-cream, and Renata placed the Baby Jesus in the crib, before we all crept over to the fire to dream some more…
Wojtek had a wonderful Christmas Eve also, he reported later, with four Polish couples sharing a traditional meal – and gifts – far from home. He was better off far from home the next morning, as many (between 20 and 30) of my extended family call then for our traditional Christmas drinks and exchange of gifts, causing quite a din when we’re all together.
A quick escape down then to my sister’s house in Wicklow town for an Irish Christmas dinner, with vegetarian fillets substituting for meat on my plate, Brussels sprouts and carrots and potatoes and delicious sauces, followed by homemade Christmas pudding with cream and brandy sauce. We opened our gifts, poking happily into each others presents as well as our own, before setting off for my niece, Sally-Ann’s, house in Ashford, and yet another Christmas tea, with Christmas cake and every other sweet thing featuring on the table.
Around the table, and in the living room, young Martin and his little foster sister, Saoirse, featured. Martin is ten now, while Saoirse celebrated her first birthday earlier in December, and they are crazy about each other – with good reason. Saoirse played to the gallery all night, and we were happy to be her audience, while Martin offered learned discourses on the space ship he was building, in between giving and returning hugs and kisses to his little sister.
I stayed overnight in Mary and Noel’s house, returning to our own house to spend time with the resurrected Gint (Renata and Pavel had gone to Belfast and were staying over there) before going to Bernadette’s (another of my sister, Mary’s, daughters) for yet another ginormous family reunion. On Stephen’s night, all 22 of that family have a very festive Christmas tea in Bernadette’s and the Chriskindels brings big gifts for the little ones. Mary does Mother Clause and it’s a great night for the small children – and for the adults.
The rest of Christmas passed in a blur of eating and drinking and talking and lounging about – with friends, with family, and with my diminishing house family.
Gint set off for Italy, to visit Michele, on the 28th, Wojtek made occasional guest appearances in the house in between parties, and Renata and Pavel and myself kept up our tradition of eating anything but traditional Irish food by visiting an Italian restaurant – Il Palazzo – in Bray for their last night here, on the 29th.
On the 30th, I went to lunch in another of my nieces’ homes – this time the daughter of my other sister, Sally, who died fifteen years ago, and whom I still miss. Luckily, many of her qualities, and mannerisms, are still to be found in her two daughters – Edel, in whose home we were eating, and Trish, who came to lunch also with her two children, Shauna and Darragh. Edel’s little girl, Hannah, was six on New Year’s Day, so we were starting her celebrations as well as catching up on each other’s news.
I thought on New Year’s Eve I was going to spend the evening alone as one of the very bad storms we’d experienced over the Christmas built up throughout the day. Normally, my generation of our family come to our house on that night to share a meal and talk of family news and memories right through midnight. This year my brother, Pat, and his wife, Judy, weren’t coming because Pat still doesn’t feel up to going out late since he had a mild stroke last Christmas. My sister, Mary, and Noel, came from Wicklow though, picking up our sister-in-law, Angela, on the way. Our other sister-in-law, Marie, came on foot as she lives nearby, and Mary and Noel left her home afterwards. As both Mary and Marie had the remains of bad colds, the laughter that seemed to go on all night caused bouts of coughing that made the house sound like a hospital ward!Â
Pat phoned his good wishes through though during the evening, as did many of the family, with members of my ‘house family’ texting in their good wishes, like Grant from South Africa and Daniel from Spain, who is now living in London. Earlier in the Christmas I’d had e-mails and texts from other young people who have lived here. Nayra, who transformed a photo of me on the back of her Dad’s motorbike last year in their home in Fuerteventura by adding a Santa hat to each of us (I’ll post the photo next time I get to write a post, but more of that anon…), Lucia whose poetry has won prizes and who is now about to publish her first book of poetry, Roberto who became a Dad to Itxasa last September, and Jan, who has just discovered he is about to become a father also…
The coming of babies is appropriate, and joyful, news for Christmas – but the quietness of Bethleham was something I just didn’t get time to experience this year. That’s why tomorrow morning I’m setting off for France for an initially companionable and probably hilarious weekend with five friends as we celebrate my 60th birthday in Carcassonne, but followed by a further week in the little Mediterannean village of Collioure by myself, where I’ll explore, rest, listen to music, be quiet, and build up my energy again for another year.
When I get back I intend to post photos of our Christmas in Ireland, and of France. Meanwhile, I wish for all of us – all of the people who have lived in this house and all of their families, including new babies, as well as all of the people who read about this house – a blessed and peaceful New Year.
Posted in Canary Islands, Czech Republic, Germany, House Family, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, McManus Family, Poland, South Africa, Spain | No Comments »
By
noeleenm on November 2nd, 2006
I’m back…
Back from New York, after a really good holiday; back from the Oral Hearing into building on the flood plain; back from a trip to Belfast, Carrick-a-Rede Bridge and the Giant’s Causeway…
…And so much has happened that I’m going to try to ease my way back by posting photographs of New York; referring you to http://www.braywatch.com/ for news of the Oral Hearing; and posting photographs of Northern Ireland.
It seems like a thousand years since my last post on 4th October, just four weeks ago, and much has happened in our home over that time between, and during, what felt like my occasional visits there.
Magda has moved on to another house, to share with a friend from Poland. Rasa, from Lithuania, has taken her place, and has just found a new job. Maria has changed jobs, and has had her sister, Katherin, to visit for a few days, and now her friend, Tanya, is with us for another few days.
Pavel’s girlfriend, Renata, is due to arrive on 16th November for six weeks.
Wojtek continues to work by night and go to college by day, and still says he doesn’t mind because he loves the DJ and Music Production course so much. Survival is helped this week, though, by the Hallow E’en mid-term break.
Gint is talking of going to the States to work…
All of them (Maria, Katherin, Rasa, Wojtek and Gint) went to a disco in Temple Bar last Saturday night, and I’ll post photos of that, too, when I borrow them from Wojtek.
So, be patient with me, while I try to catch up…
Posted in Germany, Holidays, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, USA | No Comments »
By
noeleenm on October 4th, 2006
This is the last piece I’ll be posting until at least week beginning October 16.
On Friday, I’m flying out to New York for a holiday postponed since last year when one of the friends with whom I’m travelling was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Now, surgery, chemotherapy, and a lot of prayer later, she’s joining us with a mop of short feathery hair, and a smile as wide as a rainbow. We’re all looking forward to this holiday.
We arrive back in Ireland on Saturday, 14th, and on Monday, 16th, the Oral Hearing by An Bord Pleanala (Ireland’s planning authority) into our local authority’s decision to grant permission to put high density construction on the flood plain downriver from our homes will begin…
These Oral Hearings are very like court cases, with the Planning Inspector acting as judge, and each side presenting their case. We have been told that the hearing is likely to go on for at least a week because of its size and complexity: it impinges on two separate local authority areas and two separate applications were submitted for each area – four applications in all.
No doubt the developers’ side will be represented by barristers, hydrologists, engineers, and all the power of expensive PR, including computer generated graphics.
Our side will be represented by local people, with a town planner as our only real professional. It’s David versus Goliath but we’re convinced we’ll win because the proposal to build where they want to build is so crazy – and so unnecessary.
‘David’s team’ met up again last Monday night to discuss strategy and pool our strengths. Among the other people (other than our immediate community, I mean) objecting to this scheme are an engineer, an architect, and a group of retailers from our traditional Main Street, who have commissioned a damning traffic study as well.
I sat in a corner and tried to concentrate through a streaming head cold that had my head, ears and throat aching, and every bit of liquid in my body pouring out through my eyes and nose.
The only thing I can be grateful for is that it has happened now and hopefully I will be healthy again by Friday morning and the long haul to the States.
Because of the meeting on Monday night, I saw none of ‘the family’ until last night, when I was relieved to find that Maria’s cold, at least, had greatly improved. She went to her training on Monday, and yesterday was out on the streets asking people to sign up to a commitment to donate a regular sum to a recognised charity on a regular basis.
She loves the team she’s working with (all young and multi-national), enjoyed talking to people on the street (busy Mary Street in the heart of Dublin city), and got two new donors to sign up!
“Were they men or women?”, enquired Wojtek.
“Men”, admitted Maria. “I find it easier to ask men.”
Wojtek grinned.
We were all comparing notes in a steaming kitchen as we went about our various meal preparations – all except Magda, whose working hours these days seem to absent her when most of us are at home.
For Wojtek, on the other hand, this all being together at mealtime is something he has enjoyed more over the past few weeks because the adjustment in his timetable has brought his clock more into synch with the rest of us.
“I used to come home early from work in the mornings and there was nobody up, or, if they were, they were still half asleep”, he explained. “And then in the evenings when everyone else was eating I was still in bed till I had to get up to go to work.
“It was so bad that sometimes I’d keep smiling at customers at night to get them to stop and talk to me!”
He has survived his first nights back at work well, helped by the fact that yesterday’s classes were cancelled, due to his tutor’s illness.
Gint is not working today and has agreed to do another ‘anti-flood’ job while he’s off. He will silicone around the double-glazed patio doors leading from my bedroom into the garden. They’re too wide for the flood guards I bought for the front and back doors, so the engineer who sold the flood guards came up with this temporary solution. He maintains that the double glazing will prove strong enough to hold back the strength of the water provided there isn’t a little gap through which it can make an initial break.
“Don’t forget to fill in the little hole for condensation”, he added.
Please God, none of this will be necessary. We’re again enjoying crisp dry weather and if this lasts through the next very high tide warning (6th through 9th October), at least I’ll be home to deal with the problem myself come the next crisis.
When I was repeating instructions to Gint about putting the flood guards in place if he got a call from a neighbour to say the river had broken, and giving him the telephone number of my nephew, who is an electrician, in case of emergency (because power is one of the first things to go in a flood), he demanded to know was he in charge then while I am away…
“You’re chief flood officer”, I prevaricated as the others listened, grinning.
“Then I can bring in beautiful women and have wild parties and…”
“Of course you can’t! You have an important job to do. You can’t be distracted by beautiful women.”
He was still muttering something along the lines of ‘glamorous sidekicks’ and ‘James Bond’, when I left the kitchen.
I had planned to write posts in advance for this time away from Ireland and away from my computer, and actually started to do so but ran out of time and steam.
The plan was, though, to write retrospectively about holidays I really enjoyed. One of those holidays (two, in fact) were spent walking along the Camino de Santiago, and to refresh my memory of place names along the way I picked up one of the books I really enjoyed about the camino experience.
It’s called ‘Pilgrim Snail’, and it’s about the 2,000 mile walk Ben Nimmo did from Canterbury to Santiago de Compostela, busking along the way with his trombone, to raise money for the memorial fund of his girlfriend who had been murdered while working for charity in Belize.
It’s a wonderful book – funny, touching, very visual and even aural. Ben is into trad jazz and the blues, and when he describes playing his trombone in old churches, and on mountainsides, you can hear the music…
Among his favourites were ‘Summertime’, ‘Danny Boy’, ‘Misty’, and – ‘The Last Post’.Â
I know, as someone with Girl Scouts in her blood, I should remember its haunting melody and its lovely words more often at times when I’m as stressed as I have been over the past weeks:-
‘Day is done, gone the sun,
From the hills, from the lakes, from the sky.
All is well, safely rest,
God is nigh.
Posted in Books/films/theatre, Germany, Ireland, Latvia, Poland | 4 Comments »
By
noeleenm on October 2nd, 2006
This weekend was the last of Wojtek’s holidays. For the past two weeks he has been attending his DJ and Music Production course each day – and coming home more and more exhilarated by it!
Tonight, though, he goes back to work, and working through the night while studying during the day – no matter how much you love what you’re studying – is very hard indeed.
To his great delight, he has found a soul mate in Maria, from Germany. Maria also loves the type of music Wojtek enjoys. My description of it – ‘rap’, ‘hip hop’, etc. – as ‘monotone’ didn’t go down very well with either of them. And, when I asked to have the characteristics of ‘hip hop’ for instance explained to me, Wojtek told me that it’s something you can’t explain, you have to feel… Hmmm.
Today I went looking for a word I have lost, which I came across in one of Robert Crais’ books, describing a white man who talks like a black man. I feel it describes Wojtek when he talks about his kind of music.
I didn’t find the word, but I came across instead a review of a book called ‘He Talk Like a White Boy’ by Joseph C. Phillips, giving the other side of the coin.
Phillips’ description, quoted in the review, of how he tried to get to know rap made me laugh out loud – “As an illustration of my lack of commitment, I soon decided that playing an album all the way through didn’t necessarily mean I had to be in the same room while it played.” – and print a copy of it off to bring home to Wojtek!
Even though, like Phillips, hip-hop and rap do nothing for me, I still enjoy immensely Wojtek’s love of the music, and his excitement at creating and changing it. Whatever ‘different beat’ gives that kind of buzz to someone, I’m all for it…
Maria’s eyes were not so bright all weekend, though, because the damp Irish weather we’re experiencing, in between warm bursts of sunshine, has caused her to come down with a head cold.
It was Maria’s first complete weekend with us, and she alternated between trying to cure her headcold with Lemsips and warmth and rest, ensuring she has everything in place for her first day of work today, talking to her family and friends on the phone, and taking photographs of her housemates and surroundings so that said family and friends would have some idea of the kind of place and people among whom she is now living.
She was delighted, and justly so, to have landed a job, as well as a home, so quickly after her arrival in Ireland.
Her new job is as a fund-raiser for a professional company who raise money for charities by appealing to people in the street. She will start off today in training and then will work on Dublin’s streets, but later will have the opportunity to travel to different parts of Ireland with the fundraising team.
My first concern was that she wouldn’t be working just on commission, but she assured me she will get a basic pay. I explained I was worried because I don’t give to professional fundraisers, and I know I’m not alone in that, feeling that I want my charitable donation to go direct and entire to the charity in question. So I’ll give directly to a charitable organisations I support, and I’ll give to volunteer collectors whom I wholeheartedly admire, but not to someone who makes a living out of it.
Knowing one of them now makes me feel uncomfortable about that, especially as I’m aware that charities need all the money they can get, and they probably have to resort to using professionals to keep up their work.
Maria said that they were told the money they collect goes direct to the charity: their job, in fact, is to try to get people to sign a pledge to send a fixed amount of money on a regular basis to one of the charities they represent – very well-known charities, incidentally.
The fund-raising company’s fee, they said, is paid from last year’s budget in each case. That, for me, immediately raised the question of why had they money left from last year’s budget if they’re in dire need of funds? Surely, it’s because they deliberately keep some money over for this, so what’s the difference if it’s from last year’s collected-on-the-streets donations or this year’s?
But for once I kept my mouth shut on the subject, feeling that Maria, brand new in Ireland, brand new in our house, brand new at this job, and with a head cold, has enough to contend with without engaging her in an ethical discussion about her job.
It has been great to see how well she has settled into the house, now even able to follow Gint’s rapid-fire conversation, sometimes with strange grammatical twists and often with the most outrageous statements delivered completely dead-pan. Newcomers to the house tend to end up peering rather worriedly at him, but Maria is now laughing along with the rest of us at his antics.
Gint didn’t have a lot of weekend to share because he was working on Saturday, as well, and yesterday he mixed and laid cement to give an even base to the entrance to our back porch.
He will be chief ‘flood officer’ while I’m away, with full instructions on what to do if he gets a phone call saying the river is breaking its banks. We had been warned though by the company who sold me the floodguard gates for front and back that the surface must be completely even to get a correct seal. Thus, Gint’s work at the back gate yesterday, with much: “Ouch, I’m getting too old for this”, as he crouched to spread and smooth and level the cement.
This morning there’s a footprint in it, and Im quite sure we’ll all be asked to produce our shoes to be measured against it…
Despite Gint’s working hours, all of us except Magda – who was the only one of us working right through the weekend – had a glass of wine together on Friday night, and on Saturday night Gint and Wojtek went to a disco together, Maria opting out because of her head cold.
They had also talked about going to Glendalough on Sunday, feeling that Wojtek will never, ever have another weekend off again, but the combination of the weather and the disco conspired against them.
Today, like the seven dwarfs in the Sleeping Beauty, we each shouldered our picks, or our laptops, or our rucksacks, and headed off one by one singing…
Have you ever heard “Hi he, hi ho’ sung in rap?
Posted in Books/films/theatre, Flooding, Germany, Ireland, Latvia, Poland | No Comments »