By
noeleenm on July 31st, 2008
It’s almost a year since I wrote this blog, and so many things have changed in that time. As I write, Tibetan peace flags are blowing in a San Francisco wind outside ‘my’ room, and mellow jazz is playing on a local radio station. An orange coloured cinnamon and clove candle is burning on my windowsill, a bamboo style mat takes up one-third of my minimally furnished room, and – besides the bed – most of the rest of the space is taken up by the long relaxed body of Finn, a black Airedale/Labrador mix, who is one year old, with a pup’s attitude to play but the wisdom of ages in his steady brown eyes.
The house is home to an Irish woman, Ciara Kinsella, a talented mural painter who has lived in San Francisco for twelve years now. Finn belongs, body and soul, to her, but, if Ciara is busy and there’s any chance of a walk or play with someone else, Finn has been known to be fickle, -which is why he has a paw resting casually on my foot as he sleeps.
For half of July, and all of August, the house and Ciara and Finn, as well as tall Trace, their American ‘room-mate’, have become home to me, too. Mary, who is French, would normally form part of this circle, but she’s gone back to France till the middle of August: this put paid to my guilt-reducing intent to practise that language with her.
Why the guilt…? Well, last September I started a four year degree course in European Studies in Dublin (the reason why this blog hasn’t been updated since August), and the third year of that course (2009/2010) will be spent studying at a French university, as part of the Erasmus programme. As I’m studying French for the first time, spending a summer there, practising, would have been a sensible – and fun – thing to do. It would have been even more sensible to have chosen Spanish, which I speak quite fluently, as my language of choice for the degree. Especially as it’s as easy to speak Spanish as English in San Francisco.
Instead, I chose to learn a completely new language, but – when I discovered that there is no upper age limit on a J1 student visa, enabling Irish students to travel and work in the United States for the summer – I fell straight into temptation. France is close to Ireland, easy to travel to, and better known to me. The United States, other than New York, was an unknown, magical and mysterious land, divined from films and T.V. In size it’s as big as continental Europe (which is almost on my doorstep – begone conscience!). It’s the land where so many of my ancestors emigrated and found refuge. It’s still a land of diversity, both in geographical terms, and in terms of culture. Even its climate varies…
When I arrived in the United States on June 23rd, I expected it to be hot, and it was - Boston was humid, occasionally producing quite spectacular thunder showers; Chicago was cooler, living up to its ‘windy city’ title, but with soft, warm winds and blue skies that were a delight to the senses; Los Angeles was hot and dry; and Las Vegas was scorching, literally.
…But San Francisco… I was warned to bring layers of clothing for summer here in the city because of the mist from the Bay, but nobody told me that the layers should number preferably around ten, and that you sometimes need to wear all of them together!
Yet, I’m glad – immensely glad – that I chose to come here for the longest period of my stay in the States. San Francisco is compact, easily traversed by public transport, and it’s friendly. Here people talk of ‘community’, rather than city or state: they measure neighbourhoods in terms of people, more than property, despite the fact that very few people can afford to buy homes in the city. Having a family might mean having to move further out, where space is more affordable, but people live for years in rented accommodation, rather than make that move: that’s why rent control (a ceiling on rent rises that benefits tenants) is so important here.
The city is full of murals, too, and jazz, and giant agapanthus plants outside buildings that rarely resemble their next door neighbour, even if there’s hardly a foot of space between them. Beautiful ’painted ladies’ – gorgeous old narrow houses that are called ‘Victorians’ here, but don’t in the least resemble Victorian houses in England or Ireland with their intricate detailed colour and decoration – are side by side with modern apartment blocks. And from the tops of all the hills of San Francisco – and there are many! – you can see the Bay and/or the Pacific Ocean, provided you don’t get run down by a cable car in the process of staring. The Golden Bridge, Alcatratz, Fisherman’s Pier, and Pier 3, as well as the cable cars, are all well known icons to tourists, but places like the little streets around the Mission, the small grove in Presidio Park where the spring was sacred to the Native Indians, and the old white timber San Francisco Fire Depot, built in 1893, that looks more like a small church, in Pacific Heights, are things that you only discover when walking the streets of the city, with a dog at the end of a lead.
There are so many stories in San Francisco alone, that it’s hard to tell them all, never mind the stories of the other parts of the States that I’ve seen so far, and those I heard on the Amtrak train that carried me across this vast country, from Chicago to Los Angeles. It’s a bit like – on a very different scale – walking into a grocery store here and being overwhelmed by the choice of food. …But I’ll try…
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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 August 9th, 2007
Last week I was arrested in the middle of the kitchen by a radio interview with Jocelyn Bell Burnell. I had never heard of the astrophysicist till then, despite the fact that what was essentially her work won, in 1974, a share in the first Nobel Prize in Physics ever awarded for work in astronomy. The prize was awarded jointly to Antony Hewish, Jocelyn’s supervisor (she was working on her Ph.D. at the time of her discovery in 1967) from the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, and Sir Martin Ryle, also from Cambridge.
Having listened to the story of her discovery, it was easy to hear, and to understand, the indignation in the interviewer’s voice as he asked Jocelyn Burnell if she hadn’t resented bitterly the fact that she was not included in the award. Her response, in a soft Antrim accent, demonstrated a pair of feet as firmly planted on the ground as her eyes were drawn to the skies…
She pointed out that it was the first time a Nobel Prize had recognised astronomy as a branch of physics, and said that “politically” it was wise to give it to her supervisor, rather than herself, a lowly research student, as well as a woman. It was more important that astronomy was recognised, seemed to be her argument, than Jocelyn Bell Burnell. She then added, practically, that the campaign by people like Sir Fred Hoyle, the eminent British astronomer, to have her share in the award, did her career a lot of good anyway!
It was a fabulous piece of radio journalism. Jocelyn Bell’s story is truly fascinating, and she has the real teacher’s ability to make very complicated things seem very simple.
Her father was the architect for the Armagh Observatory, and Jocelyn spent a lot of time there as a child – the beginning of her interest in astronomy, she says. Amazingly, she failed her 11+ and was despatched to a Quaker girls’ boarding school in York, where she discovered her love of physics.
She graduated from the University of Glasgow with a B.Sc. in physics in 1965, but described her choice of physics as isolating her from many of her fellow students. The women students seemed to resent her choice, she says, while the male students engaged in a ‘ritual’ of foot-stamping, whistling, and cat-calling everytime the lone female physics student entered the lecture hall – and this was in the ‘liberated’ 60s…!
At Cambridge, preparing for her Ph.D. dissertation, she helped, physically, to build a giant radio telescope that was, she explained, “about the length of 57 tennis courts”.
“It was a very useful exercise”, she added. “I’ve been quite handy with a screwdriver and other tools ever since.”
The real object of the exercise was to use a newly discovered technique called IPS – interplanetary scintillation (and don’t ask me what that means) – to study quasars, but Jocelyn, who had sole responsibility for operating the telescope and analyzing the data, under Antony Hewish’s supervision, began to detect a regular signal coming through that nobody could explain.
“It was more regular than the tick of any watch”, she explains now.
She had discovered pulsars.
Throughout all of the consequent fuss, including newspaper reporters who were delighted to find a woman scientist at the heart of a ‘Are we receiving signals from little green men?’ story, Jocelyn Bell kept her head, emerging from Cambridge with a Ph.D. in 1969.
She continued to keep it throughout the controversy surrounding her exclusion from the Nobel Prize in 1974, through the birth of a son, through the break-up of her marriage, and through an outstanding commitment to education (particularly through Open University), as well as to astrophysics.
Towards the end of the radio programme, the interviewer asked her if many scientists believe in God. “A good number”, she replied, “but you hear more about those that don’t…”
She went on to explain that she felt she was lucky to have been brought up in the Quaker faith because it taught its followers to ’search for the truth’.
It was a fabulous documentary. I was glad I picked it up on the radio…
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By
noeleenm on July 13th, 2007
Today I’m back to looking at stars, albeit on the internet as the weather is so bad at the moment you can’t see beyond a blanket of grey cloud above us. It was the weather that set me off on this trail today. The river was high and full and brown and threatening, and I wasn’t sure what time high tide was due, so I looked up the tides on the Irish Times website. To my relief, high tide this morning was at approximately 10.26am, just the time I was crossing the bridge on my way to work. Next high tide in Bray will be around 10.44pm today.
Floods are never far from my mind these days, particularly with this continuous downpouring of rain that we’re experiencing right now in Ireland, and the catastrophic floods that have already occurred in England recently. All over Ireland ’minor’ flooding is occurring too, and by that I mean property is being damaged. I wouldn’t wish flood damage on my worst enemy, but at least it’s better than the loss of life that occurred in England, and that could very easily occur here in Bray, if flood defences aren’t put in place very soon.
On Monday a delegation from our flood campaign group is meeting the new Minister for the Environment, John Gormley of the Green Party, to discuss proposed flood defence works, and the importance of the floodplain as part of that protection. It’s probably the best, and most important, thing that has happened in the campaign since Pizarro’s applications were turned down by An Bord Pleanala.
…But, while I started this post by talking about stars and then went on to talk about floods, this morning my concern about floods, and consequently tides, brought me back to looking at stars. I say ‘back’ because the stars have fascinated me for a long time. I don’t study them in the sense of sitting looking at them with a telescope – in fact, the awe stars evoke in me when I look at them on a winter’s evening from the beach, or in summer from a country road late at night, comes close to fear when I see stars too close up. So I look at them with the naked eye, feet firmly planted on earth, and I wonder like a child…
Today, remembering a conversation I had with Jan earlier in the week about tides (he wanted to go to the beach at high tide and then return there at low tide to see the difference), I went on to look up again exactly what causes a spring tide. It’s caused, of course, by the gravitational pull when the sun, earth and moon are all in alignment, so it happens every new moon (when the moon is directly between the sun and the earth) and at full moon (when the earth is directly between the sun and the moon). Its name has nothing to do with the season of spring: it comes from the verb ‘to spring’ because of the force of the tides then.
But, while looking all of this up, and happily meandering off to look at how the earth orbits the sun and the moon orbits the earth, and what other planets revolve around the sun in our galaxy – all of which I find totally fascinating – I came across a website that presents tremendous visuals of all sorts of physical phenomena. It’s called Exploring Earth. I particularly like the model of earth’s yearly revolution around the sun, which demonstrates why our summer is Australia’s winter, for instance, and the simulated views of the night sky from Chicago, Illinois, at midnight, once a week over a year. I would absolutely love to see a model like this showing the night sky from Dublin, Ireland.
One of the most fascinating of all for me though is the simulated voyage from the sun past all nine planets, showing each planet’s average distance from the sun. (For convenience, the planets are lined up in the same direction.) It’s a good desk-bound alternative to the old London Planetarium voyages through space (changed by Madame Tussaud’s in 2006, apparently, to a celebrity based Auditorium), or to the fabulous Space Show in the Hayden Planetarium in the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
By the time I’d finished, I’d stopped worrying about how the position of the moon, and the height of the tides, could affect our community, and just enjoyed the wonder. Soon enough, I know, as we continue to argue our case for flood protection works and an open floodplain, it will turn to fear again, but for now it’s simply awe…
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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 July 2nd, 2007
My car, Fred, has broken down – again and again and again. My feet, particularly my left foot, has broken down in sympathy. My friend, Gerti, maintains that life is trying to tell me something – “Like, rest, Noeleen!”
Fred’s problems have ranged through the exhaust coming off, the alternator needing to be replaced, and, ultimately, a blown head gasket – and that’s just in the last three weeks. My patience with Fred finally blew along with the head gasket. I’m now trying to source another, more reliable, old car. …Maybe like my Sweet Caroline… (Even in cars, you see, women are more dependable.)
My foot problems started with a pain in my right instep, spreading out into the toes of my right foot when I tried to walk any distance at all. Then my right foot eased and my left foot produced exactly the same symptoms, but this time it continued to get worse. Driven to the doctor (in both senses), he said it could be a small ’stress fracture’ due the sudden onslaught of activity that followed my three sedentary months as I struggled through work and evening course. Like a child out of school, I climbed Bray Head, dug the garden, and generally refused to come back indoors until I couldn’t see any longer at around 11pm.
The other thing it could be, he announced, was arthritis. Arthritis! That couldn’t come on so quickly, I bleated. Yes, it could, he said mildly, so he sent me for x-rays, and over a week later I’m still waiting for the results. I’d moan about that except that I know, with our wonderful health system in Ireland, there are people waiting for far longer for far more important things than x-rays of their feet for a tiny fracture or arthritis.
Today, though, I went to the chiropodist, who said she believes it may be Plantar Fasciitis, which apparently is the thick connective tissue which supports the arch of the foot. She said, like the doctor, that it was probably brought on by the sudden transition from a particularly sedentary lifestyle to a very active one. I looked up Plantar Fasciitis on the web, and the funny thing is it seems to be a condition (mostly affecting runners) that causes pain in the heel. I have no pain in my heels at all. It’s going forward onto the ball of my foot that’s causing me problems: the pain then moves forward from my instep and splays out into my toes. So I can walk about my home or the office or the classroom without any great problem. It’s only when I have to propel myself forward that the pain kicks in, causing me to plant my foot in such a way that it’s causing my back problems, too. …The joys of aging…
But the chiropodist gave me a very simple treatment for it. (I love professionals who give simple practical advice – I always trust people who don’t feel they have to dress up their knowledge in esoteric rituals to impress). She told me to get a can of cooked beans or anything else that takes my fancy, put it in the fridge to cool it – and then roll it under my foot so that the coolness of the tin eases the inflammation while the rolling movement massages the plantar fascia!
I can even eat the baked beans afterwards…
The chiropodist also said, though, that the problem was being worsened by very dry skin on my feet. Again I waited to be prescribed some fancy cream. Instead, she advised me to put Vaseline on my feet – “the way you’d ice a cake” (she’s obviously never seen my baking) – and then to wrap my feet in clingwrap and cover the whole lot with old socks! I’ll do it, gladly, because the idea of having arthritis made me realise just how spoiled I am with good health all my life. Not being able to climb hills and dig gardens, or only being able to do it in pain, has me lying awake at night in horror at what I might lose.
Even now, over these last weeks of hobbling, I’ve been living off the memory of those few climbs up to the top of Bray Head in glorious evening sunshine, and re-arranging the garden with the aid of Jan’s strong back. And if I’ve to roll every tin of beans in every supermarket in Ireland, and sleep every night with cling-wrapped feet for the rest of my life (despite the danger of the washing machine, which is also giving trouble, breaking down and bursting into flames and having to emerge into the arms of the fire brigade in clingwrapped, old socked feet), I’ll gladly do it to get back to that glorious life again.
…But this time I’ll do it more slowly and with a little more gentle preparation…
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By
noeleenm on June 22nd, 2007
Today I was visiting Wicklow.com and discovered that Alan was not only writing about a campaign that has touched my heart and conscience, along with the hearts and consciences of millions of other people around the world, but he has an Adsense advertisement for it up on his site, and is encouraging other bloggers to do the same. It’s the Darfur campaign.
One of the most interesting posts I’ve read on the subject is called ‘Genocide and Apathy are Best Friends’. Written by ”a youthful male”, called M.Lee, from Denver, Colorado, Behind the Teeth has the facts about Darfur and its terrible conflict, and it’s written with passion.
Take a look at it, then click on one of the links below the post, and try to make your voice heard too for the people of Darfur.
…And thanks, Alan, for reminding me of it…
Posted in Ireland, Sudan/Darfur | 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 April 13th, 2007
On Wednesday, 4th April, An Bord Pleanala – Ireland’s Planning Board – decided unanimously to refuse permission to Pizarro Developments to build on the floodplain downriver from our community. Their decision was posted on the Board’s website at http://www.pleanala.ie/DCT/217/S217906.DOC on Tuesday last.
Pizarro had submitted four applications for the same site, two for an area of the site that extends into our neighbouring ‘county’ of Dun Laoghaire/Rathdown, and two to Bray Town Council. One of the latter was for high density construction on the floodplain, rezoned by our Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, and Labour councillors as Town Centre.
An Bord Pleanala took the view that all four applications should be considered together, as they are inseparable in reality. The reasons given for the unanimous decision were that:- 1) the flood defence works promised ‘in lieu’ of the floodplain, which both Bray Town Council and the developers maintained would render the floodplain unnecessary as a safety measure, have not yet been passed (nor even seen) by An Bord Pleanala, nor has an EIS been carried out on them; 2) no road layout has been worked out for the area, nor has a town traffic management plan been put in place, despite the fact that the proposed development included over 3,000 car parking spaces; and 3) “adequate provision has not been made for active open space” and therefore the development “would seriously injure the amenities of the area and of future residents and would be contrary to the proper planning and sustainable development of the area”.
For our community, who have fought this lunacy for two years now, it is a huge victory of David over Goliath. We know almost certainly there will be further battles to be won before we are truly safe from the greed for development of this land at all costs, but – perhaps – at long last sanity will prevail and the buildings will be moved back to high ground, with the park and playing pitch, and the extra space required by An Bord Pleanala, preserved alongside our river. If not, we will fight on…
As John, one of our core group, remarked: “The thing about fighting Goliath is that he’s so big a target he’s almost impossible to miss!” John is a wheelchair user and was a potent presence at the Oral Hearing into Pizarro’s plans – and our Council’s acquiescence.
Most of what needs to happen now depends on our politicians finally admitting that they got it seriously wrong, and that they need now to compensate for that fact. We need our local councillors to return the land to its original safe zoning, and to finally put in place a proper Emergency Plan in case of flooding. And we need our national politicians to commit to paying for these flood defence works so that the integrity of the floodplain is not compromised.
Next month a General Election will be held in Ireland. It’s a time when politicians tend to listen to David…
Posted in Flooding, Ireland | 5 Comments »
By
noeleenm on April 6th, 2007
It’s funny the lessons you learn when you’re trying to teach…
A couple of weeks ago, one of the tutors in our CELTA (Certificate in English Language Teaching) course started the class by telling us a story. It was a tale of when she’d first gone to Budapest, where she taught English for a few years, but, as she spoke, she sprinkled the story with four verbs that none of us had ever heard before – like ’sprongling’. At first, most of us thought we were mishearing her, then we began to grin as we realised how cleverly she was making us see what it is like to be a student, even with a good command of English, trying to understand what the teacher is saying. ‘Worse again, being expected to work out what part of speech the unknown word is and how to use it in other sentences!
By the end of the lesson, because she is a good teacher, we were all happily ’sprongling’ around the classroom, and even supplying it in its Past Perfect Continuous form on demand.
But I hadn’t really learned the lesson…
A week later I was preparing to teach grammar. It seemed to me to be quite complex, so I prepared all sorts of charts on the tenses, and drilled the students thoroughly in them. I was amazed to find that they didn’t seem to need the drilling, though, and flew through the exercises I set them. During the ‘post-mortem’ the tutor looked at me and asked: ‘Why did you spend so long on the grammar and so little time on putting it into context?’ I explained honestly that I had felt it was going to be very difficult for them, and that was why I’d spent so much time making sure they understood the tenses.
‘But at this stage those students have spent years in school learning grammar, Noeleen’, she pointed out, gently. ‘They probably understand structure and form better than we do – it’s practice in how to use it they really need.’
I had been looking at the lesson through my eyes, not the eyes of the students who need to know that empathy means ’the power of understanding and imaginatively entering into another person’s feelings’ much more than they need to know that it’s a noun.
Posted in Ireland | No Comments »