By
noeleenm on June 30th, 2006
“You must focus”, said Fred the Frenchman, with only a slight Gallic accent and the emphatic slicing of hands to distract me. He was talking about my blog.
Fred is a marketing expert, married to an Irishwoman, and works in our local hotel, the Royal Hotel & Leisure Centre. He manages their website, sends out zillions of newsletters by e-mail, and is in the process of compiling a booklet on Activities in our area for the hotel’s guests.
But he doesn’t like writing…
“I suppose it’s harder in another language”, I said, to be fair, even though Fred’s English is extremely fluent.
“It’s not zat”, he waves the comment away, eloquently. “I hate writing in French, too.” Oh…
Fred was looking for a writer – someone who actually likes trying to build sense and beauty with words – and he knows my work because I used to write a lot of the text for the hotel website, and because he knows my blog.
He wanted short pieces (around 50 words) for his booklet on the various activities available around Bray.
“No”, I said firmly. I know I’d end up being fascinated by the things people do, collecting enough information on each to write a book, and then not be able to charge for the length of time it took, if he only wanted 50 words. “No, no, no.” (Sometimes I can focus quite well.)
“Would you proof-read what I write then?”, he continued, relentlessly. “Yes”, I said, promptly, glad to be able to agree to something. “And, if you see something you don’t like, you could re-write it…?”, he wheedled.
“No, yes, no…” I hate dealing with marketing people. “If something is wrong, I’ll correct it”, I buttressed my defences. “But I’m not getting into re-writes.”
He slid the cut-and-paste of his draft booklet across the table where I’d been innocently drinking coffee (and studying SEO techniques!) when he came along.
I peered at it through half-closed eyes, trying to remain uninvolved, until he came to the page on Walks… It was blank, other than the headings: ‘Wicklow Way’, ‘Glendalough’, and ‘Bray Head’. I was undone.
“If you want, I’ll do something on those walks for you”, I said, feebly. “I know them well, and I love them.”
The trap snapped.
I hardly felt the pain because Fred had gone on to try to straighten out my plans to market my blog, including: “Every piece you write for me will have your signature, which will give a link back to your blog!”
And: “I am the webmaster for a site called http://www.afi.ie/, which is for French people living here in Ireland. It has a Google ranking of 5. Let me zee how I could organise a link to your blog from zat…” Fred doesn’t play fair.
“I’m still only agreeing to proof-read, and to write the three short pieces on the walks”, I reiterated, desperately.
“Yes, yes…” He leaned forward, waving a finger in the air: “You must send out newsletters! And you must write and get yourself interviewed for e-magazines – they are always looking for material.”
He suggested www.wicklow.com/news as the e-magazine to start with (I discovered when I visited them that they are in blog format, and have just started a blog hosting service, too), but when it came to newsletters…
“What on earth would I write about in newsletters?! I already write my news in my blog. And who would I send them to, anyway?”
I will not attempt to repeat the lecture I received on the subject. Suffice it to say that it ended with the words: “I love online marketing!”, as he sat back with a satisfied sigh.
Checking him for signs of scales or a second head, I replied slowly: “I hate marketing”, but added, in a spirit of one-upmanship: “But my comfortable length for writing an article is around 1200 words.”
The sound of a Frenchman’s head banging the floor when he faints is no more suave than the sound of any other nationality’s…
Seriously, though, Fred was extremely helpful, and coming on top of a phone call from my IT guru, Peter McCourt, with his usual practical enthusiasm and advice, and the tips on commercialising your web site that I’d been studying from evrsoft.com and StevePavlina.com, (whose article on ‘How to Make Money from your Blog’ is 7,300 words long!), I was left with a lot of food for thought.
…But where to start…?
“You need to focus!”, Fred said, waving an admonishing finger and raising an interrogatory eyebrow at the same time, as only Frenchmen can.
“What is your blog about? Who will read it?” Or, as he said in his own interview on wicklow.com: ‘You must define and package your product and know your market.’
“It started off as a blog about an Irish woman looking at the changes in the Ireland she grew up in, through her own eyes, and through those of the young foreign people with whom she lives”, I defined. “And about their cultures, too – a kind of two-way mirror. I tell those stories.”
“Yes, but it changes. It doesn’t just stay with that.” I admitted the truth of it, as I remembered the new categories I have added in the last month.
Later, I tried to work out why I have focused less on my present house mates…
Some of the reason is undoubtedly that we all have different timetables in our house just now, so I simply don’t see as much of this group as I did of people who worked roughly the same hours, and often cooked and ate together. Wojtek works nights. Dong Kwang (who is still away camping) works evenings (4pm to midnight) on a fairly regular basis. Grazine works 11am to 8pm, but usually goes out with Eddie for the evening then.
Only Gint and myself work roughly the same times (he starts a bit earlier, I finish a bit later).
In addition, I seem to be out of my home a lot more, often going straight from work. When we started our flood plain campaign, we usually held our core group meetings in my house. Then John, who is a wheelchair user, joined us and I realised how wheelchair unfriendly entry to my home is: we changed to meeting in Adrian’s, or Billy’s last night, where the meeting ended at 11.30pm.
Enroute to the meeting – coming from work – I had called to a local pub to talk to the owner about advertising on our flood plain web site. On the way home from the meeting, I came across a young man lying, apparently drunk, on the side of the road. Another driver had stopped and called the Gardai, and I blocked the other side of the young man’s body (who refused to wake) with my car in case someone would run over him. The police called an ambulance when they came.
I ended up eating my dinner, alone, at 1am. I might have done that over the past year, too, but the earlier part of the evening would have seen my house-mates tread their way through animated discussions in our living room about the flood campaign – and would have continued the discussion over the next days with me. Jan, Pavel, Gail, Daniel, Elke, and Michele knew almost as much about the SWAP campaign as we do ourselves. And Gint still regularly offers to ’strongarm’ the opposition.
Reading this post back worries me more about the state of my life, and my neglect of the people I share my home with, than it does about the blog’s focus. Maybe that’s why I’m a writer, and not into sales and marketing.
…But maybe, too, trying to analyse why I’m losing the central theme of my blog will help me to focus on being careful about the central part of my life – my home, and both my families.
…And maybe there’s something in this marketing stuff, after all.
Posted in House Family, IT friends | No Comments »
By
noeleenm on June 28th, 2006
It was a harsh wind, indeed, that shook the barley in Ireland’s fields in 1920.
The execution of the leaders of the 1916 Rising was a grave mistake by the British. James Connolly, one of the last to be shot, was brought to Kilmainham Gaol on a stretcher because he was already dying from wounds received in battle: Connolly had to be tied to a chair in the Stonebreaker’s Yard to hold him upright while they executed him.
News of the executions, carried out over several days, sent shock waves around the world. The leaders of the Rising had been mostly teachers and poets, including Padraic Pearse, and Joseph Mary Plunkett who married his Grace in prison just hours before he was executed. The harshness of the summary justice meted out to them provoked international protest – but, more importantly, it turned what had been the apathetic, and sometimes downright hostile, attitude of the Irish people themselves to the rebels to sympathy, and, finally, to rebellion also.
In 1918, Sinn Fein – the political wing of the Irish Republican Army – won an overwhelming mandate in the General Elections in Ireland, then still part of the United Kingdom. The result was two-fold. In 1919, the Anglo-Irish War began, as poorly armed Irish men joined the IRA in a mainly guerrilla war against the English presence in Ireland, manifested by their police force, the Royal Irish Constabulary. In a parallel move, Sinn Fein set up the First Irish Dáil (Parliament), declaring it to be the true Government of Ireland.
The British Government’s response was to advertise in Britain for men willing to “face a rough and dangerous task”. From the men who answered the call, many of them ex-soldiers (although in Ireland it was always claimed that they were mostly ‘the sweepings of England’s prisons’), a force was created to back the RIC. They were called the ‘Black and Tans’, because the response to the recruitment drive – and the pay of ten shillings a day – was so enormous that they had to be dressed in a mixture of British army and RIC uniform.
Alongside Cromwell, the Black and Tans became the most hated name in Irish history because of the brutality of their ‘reign’ in Ireland.
It is against this background of the Black and Tans in Ireland that the film, ‘The Wind that Shook the Barley’, which won the Palme d’Or in Cannes, opens…
It stars Cillian Murphy as Damien, the young doctor who changes his mind at the last minute about going to London, and instead joins his brother, Teddy, and the young men they grew up with, in fighting the Tans around their West Cork village as members of an IRA ‘flying column’, as these guerrilla units were known. He is convinced to stay and fight by the wanton brutality he sees inflicted by the Tans, rather than his brother’s arguments, but it was the torture of his brother by the British that set off the first exodus from our local cinema, according to Gail, with whom I went to see the film. I didn’t notice them leave. I had my eyes fast shut against that scene, but didn’t shut out the sounds of his cries, nor the sounds of his comrades singing what is now our national anthem to give him support – and to defend themselves against his agony.
It is a very harsh film, despite the beauty of the West Cork countryside, despite the lament in the song from which the film takes its title, sung with tremendous power by an older woman of the village at a young boy’s wake, and despite the attempts to refuse to be brutalised by their own reprisals.
…And it became harsher…
There is a naturalness in identifying with the oppressed, particularly when the people at the rough end of the brutality are your own people, and you’ve grown up hearing its history in song and story. But when the issue of how to deal with informers comes up – and the informers are also your people, and very young, frightened people – reaction becomes more complicated. And when that extended through the Treaty that divided Ireland into 26 counties of the Free State, with six counties still remaining in British hands, and all of them still subject to an oath of loyalty to the British King, then it becomes very complicated indeed.
There is a scene in the film, after the news of the Treaty was broken, in which the men and women of the local IRA debate the action they will take – to endorse the Treaty or not. It is powerful, thought provoking, and very honest.
It builds on a theme introduced earlier in the film, as to whether the local Irish (as distinct from Anglo Irish) landowners should be given preferential treatment, because they provide the money for arms. Some of the leaders of the IRA unit believe they should: they are realists. Others believe this is totally wrong, repeating the injustices of the English landlords: they are idealists, socialist as well as republican.
This division yawns even wider when the Treaty is discussed, with some believing they are selling out their people in the North, and their dead comrades, if they accept a compromise, while others believe it’s the best they can get, and must – realistically – be accepted.
One of the men who argues strongly on the republican and socialist side uses a phrase that they are changing “only the colour of the flag, and the accentsâ€, if they accept, and for me, in today’s Ireland, that carried a resounding ring of truth.
The final depiction of the division of this small West Cork community into those who fight on the Republican side in the ensuing Civil War, those who fight on the Free State side, and those who refuse to take up arms on either side against men with whom they had once fought side by side, is heartbreaking.
…And that this film was made by an Englishman – Ken Loach – shatters one of Ireland’s biggest stereotypes of all…
Posted in Books/films/theatre, Ireland | No Comments »
By
noeleenm on June 26th, 2006
They say that people who don’t have off-spring of their own have the highest ‘a-a-ah’ factor when it comes to babies and very small children. I’m a case in point. I find myself smiling at utterly unknown children in their buggies, or holding my breath as they stagger uncertainly, but determinedly, slightly ahead of their parents, in the focused way that toddlers do when they first discover the heady freedom of being able to move under one’s own steam in a self-chosen direction.
They’re fascinating and beautiful, and often comical, as the young of most species are, and they evoke in me not only wonder and tenderness, but the fierce sense of protectiveness that is normal in a grown-up of either sex. …But not all adults feel that way…
What is it that allows some people to badly neglect, or even intentionally harm, little children? Is it that they lack imagination enough to feel the terror of vulnerable, defenceless little beings? Is it that they’ve been damaged themselves so much as children that hurting someone weaker than yourself becomes somehow the terrible norm of their lives? Or can it be that some people are truly evil…
And if the ‘repeating the cycle’ theory is true, then why is it that some people who survive terrible childhoods become even more fiercely protective of children than those who have never had a hand or voice raised against them in real violence, while others go on to reproduce their own childhood nightmares in their children?
It’s a question I’ve never had a chance to examine at close quarters, thank God. I grew up in a home where adults were the protective walls that surrounded us: you might try to escape them sometimes to get into mischief, but you knew, without thought, that once you had slipped back behind their shelter, no one could harm you.
What started me thinking in these last few days about children who are hurt, and the adults they become, was reading Robert Crais’ latest novels – ‘The Last Detective’ and ‘The Forgotten Man’.  Very well written, they are two of a series of ten detective novels (I haven’t read the others), featuring Elvis Cole and his partner, Joe Pike. The background story of the characters’ lives builds gradually over each novel in such a way as to become equally important as the fast-moving plot of the individual book. Each story is enriched and explained by the unfolding characterisation of Elvis Cole, in particular, whom Robert Crais created, following the death of his father, “using elements of his own life as the basis of the storyâ€, according to his web site.
Both Elvis Cole and Joe Pike come from ‘dysfunctional’ families. Elvis has never known his father, and his mother – who seemed to suffer from a psychiatric disorder – continually abandoned him without warning. Joe’s father was a drunk, who beat his wife and child on a regular basis.
‘The Last Detective’ opens with the kidnapping of the young son of Elvis’ girlfriend, and ‘The Forgotten Man’ opens with the police informing Cole that a murder victim has just claimed with his dying breath that he was Elvis’ father… Children, families, and the enormous importance of blood family – no matter how terrible that family – are the real motifs in both books. Murder, and ‘who-dunnit’, are incidentals, as they are in most good detective novels.
Incidentally, I was unsurprised to discover, while surfing Robert Crais’ web site, that he screen wrote the television series, ‘Hill Street Blues’, and was nominated for an Emmy for his work. It has the same grim realism, laced through with occasional heart-stopping tenderness, as his books.
I knew someone once – a gentle and caring young woman – who had grown up in a home that was made dysfunctional by alcoholism. She had not been physically beaten, but she felt her childhood had been stolen by the consequences of the abuse of alcohol within her family home, and its resulting secrecy, shame, and crippled relationships. Part of her answer was to join ACOA, a “Twelve Step, Twelve Tradition program of women and men who grew up in alcoholic or otherwise dysfunctional homesâ€.
Like Alcoholics Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, and Over-eaters Anonymous, it is based on acknowledging the past in a safe, supportive environment; recognising how present behaviour is rooted in that past; and facing the future by replacing the crutch of addictive behaviour with faith in a Higher Power. I have no doubt that someone who is a member of any of those programmes would explain them a lot better than that, but, if I explain it badly, it is from ignorance only: I have a huge admiration for people who climb those twelve steps from hell to healthy behaviour.
Captain Frank Furillo (played by Daniel J. Travanti) from ‘Hill Street Blues’ fought his addiction to alcohol right through the series, with the help of the AA. Chris Cagney (played by Sharon Gless) in ‘Cagney and Lacey’, another television series for which Robert Crais wrote, also battled alcoholism.
Crais refers often in the two novels I read last week to ‘the child within’, a phrase I became familiar with through my ACOA friend. It means that within each adult there still lives the child, frightened or adventurous, that was formed in our earliest years.
We are lucky, beyond measure, if that child still looks out at the world with wondering eyes, expecting love.
Posted in Books/films/theatre | No Comments »
By
noeleenm on June 23rd, 2006
I wanted to write tonight about midsummer celebrations, especially the ‘midsummer’ concert I attended on Wednesday, 21st June, two days ago…
But first I went wandering around the web looking for references to the custom of lighting bonfires on St. John’s Eve, which exists in many rural parts of Ireland, especially the West. On Ireland’s east coast, around Dublin and north Wicklow, at least, we light bonfires at Hallow E’en: during the summer our only fires are barbeques or campfires. St. John’s Eve, I had been told, is inextricably linked with midsummer celebrations, but I wanted to check whether it falls on midsummer’s eve or if midsummer is the following day.
St. John’s Eve is 23rd June.
So why were we attending a midsummer concert on 21st June when the web is full of references to midsummer being celebrated on 23rd June?! Was this another instance of Ireland and the UK celebrating Mother’s Day mid-Lent, while the rest of the world celebrate it on the first Sunday in May? …And of Gint being totally confused by Ireland regarding Easter Sunday as the ‘big day’, while in Latvia, he says, it is Easter Monday that’s really important?
Well, in the long run, it had a much simpler explanation…
We were celebrating the summer solstice – the longest day of the year – which can occur “anywhere from June 20 – 26″, according to a fascinating article about midsummer and St. John’s Eve on a site called ‘Canada First’.
The article starts off with the story of the Greek, Eratosthenes of Kyrene, who noticed, that the sun was shining straight down into a well in what was then Syrene, during the summer solstice of 246BC. He had come from supervising the great library of Alexandria, 500 miles to the north, where shadows were falling at an angle of about 7.2°. Knowing that the earth was round, and knowing the circumference of a circle to be 360°, Eratosthenes calculated from this that the circumference of the earth had to be roughly 25,000 miles. The actual figure is 24,901.55 miles. Wow!
It continued its exploration of how midsummer and midwinter solstices are celebrated all over the world, and the significance behind the way they were celebrated.
I like this site, I thought, despite its glaring omission of Newgrange, and went back to its home page to find out what it was all about.
Imagine my delight when I discovered that, at first glance, it seemed to be about reforming immigration, which I, naively, took to mean making it easier for strangers to settle in another land. Imagine my disgust when I found it is actually a site promoting racism – Canada for the Canadians, in other words, for the Caucasian people who have been part of the rich developed world for so long that sharing with less fortunate people (other than through donations to keep them safely in their own countries), is unthinkable.
Don’t get me wrong – I am not attributing racism solely to North Americans. We have become adept at it here in Ireland, as we grow richer. Thank God, at least, we’ve taken up some much more likeable elements of North America too…
The concert in Christchurch, a beautiful Church of Ireland place of worship here in Bray, was in aid of our local Cancer Support Centre. The main performers were the West Michigan Concert WINDS, a very fine community band from Muskegon, Michigan, USA.
They were in Ireland on tour (and a little holiday!), and were warmly received by a local audience, despite some initial problems with acoustics. Their friendliness, professionalism, and the variety of their music more than made up for it, though. This extended to their featured soprano, Mrs. Linda T. Mysen, and to the Dixieland Band, made up of nine members of the full orchestra.
Watching the latter perform, especially, I found myself trying to match each musician to the names listed in the programme, followed by that musician’s instrument and his or her ‘day job’!
The group that followed them was a very good example of how we’ve taken up some American customs to good effect. ‘Beating Time’ is a group of fifteen Irish women who sing Barbershop. Now, that style of singing is, to me, quintessentially American, and the songs they sang were also as American as the Stars and Stripes, not to mention their silver tail coats.
They sang beautifully, with perfect tone and harmony, and with their whole bodies, faces lit up with the sheer joy of good music. They brought the church down.
Ross Scanlon, a young tenor who has just completed his secondary education here in Bray, also brought the house down with his interpretations of songs like ‘Fields of Gold’ and ‘Bring Him Home’ and ‘She Moves through the Fields’. This local lad will go far, said the compere, and nobody there on Wednesday night would disagree…
Listening to the American band performing, as one of their last numbers, a most beautiful and very unusual arrangement of ‘Amazing Grace’, I thought again how very much a ‘grace’ it is to be able to perform music, with the voice or with another instrument.
It reaches across oceans, hearts, and minds. …As sport does…
When someone performs well on the concert stage or on the playing pitch, even as an amateur, we don’t care what country he or she comes from. We don’t ask whether this person is a certified public accountant, like the oboe player in WINDS, or an elementary teacher, like one of the tuba players, or a warehouse supervisor, like one of the trombonists. We just acknowledge the gift.
Sometimes the gift comes in much plainer wrapping, though. It takes time and effort to find what each new Magi brings to our land.Â
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By
noeleenm on June 21st, 2006
It started with a bottle of wine…
Wojtek announced the other day that he had been telling his Hungarian friend, Zoltán, about our house family’s occasional wine (and beer, and ‘Rabid Dog’) drinking sessions.
Zoltán liked the idea, and said that he had brought back a bottle of wine from his recent trip home, and would we like to share it. Well, it would have been rude to refuse, wouldn’t it?
Yesterday he came down to watch the World Cup with Wojtek, bearing a bottle of ‘Tokaji Aszú’, and we agreed that we’d enjoy it together after the matches ended. (Ecuador lost to Germany, but will still go through to the second round, and Poland beat Costa Rica, so go out with their pride salvaged to some extent, at least.)
I have met Zoltán before, quite briefly. He’s a quiet (at least in English!), serious guy, whose face lights up when he smiles. Wojtek and himself shared a room in a previous house and Wojtek claims to have taught Zoltán twenty new English words every night, and forced him to practise them.
He has done a good job, although Zoltán still comes to visit armed with a dictionary (as well as a bottle of wine) that he describes as a ‘pocket dictionary’. It resembles ‘War and Peace’, unabridged.
Last night it came to the table with him, but he decided, sensibly, following a toast in each of our languages (Irish, Polish, Latvian, and Hungarian: Grazine was out with Eddie and Dong Kwang was at work), that it was about time we learned something about his language, too.
He started with the fact that nobody is very sure where the Hungarian language came from: it bears a greater resemblance to Finnish, for instance, than to any of the Slavik languages of the countries surrounding Hungary.
For me, that anomaly was deepened by the fact that when Zoltán speaks English, he has – for some phrases – a marked French accent. “It is poss-ee-ble…”, he says, softening the ’s’ and drawing out the ‘e’ with quite Gallic charm.
He refused to be distracted by my attempts to find out why, though, and insisted on concentrating on his own language.
The toast brought on this language revolt mainly because of my efforts at repeating it in Hungarian. I thought I was reproducing ‘Egészségedre’ (Good Health!) quite well – especially after the fifth time – but Zoltán was quite perturbed at the assault on his language.
He explained that the Hungarian language has 14 vowels. “We lost six”, he explained, seriously, as I choked: apparently, all five letters once had four different forms (all pronounced differently) in Hungarian.
Zoltán believes it is because of this multiplicity of vowels – and their sparseness in English – that English speaking people have difficulty with the subtleness of sound in Hungarian.
It isn’t only English speaking people, either, I realised, when he wrote the vowels down – a, á, e, é, i, Ã, o, ó, ö, oâ€, u, ú, ü, uâ€. In Gaelic, we have ten – a, á, e, é, i, Ã, o, ó, u, ú.
“How many letters do you have in your entire alphabet?”, I asked. “42″, he said, nonchalantly.
In English, there are 26, but in Gaelic there are only 18, I confessed – but that’s counting only one form of each letter in our vowels, I realised later. Each of our vowels has an accented form also.
Neither is it counting letters that change their sound by adding the ‘buailte’, which used to be indicated by a dot over the letter, but is now (for ease of printing) shown by the letter ‘h’ following it.
Nine letters take the ‘buailte’ in Gaelic – b, c, d, f, g, m, p, r, t – which would bring our alphabet to a respectable 32 (if you count the other form of the five vowel letters), but they only take the ‘buailte’ in certain circumstances – for instance, following a possessive pronoun, ie. ‘mo ghra’ or ‘my love’.
So do they count as extra letters…?
As the level of wine in the bottle went down, my grasp of what Zoltán considered to be different letters diminished too. Apparently, the letter ‘y’ is a foreign letter in Hungarian, appearing in words imported from other languages, such as English. But it is also used following g, l, n, or t in Hungarian words (it appears in the name of the country – Magyarország), in much the same way that we use the ‘h’ in Gaelic. ‘G’ followed by ‘y’ produces a totally different sound (which Zoltán had me reproducing by clicking my tongue against the roof of my mouth before uttering the ‘g’), than the ‘g’ alone, for instance.
By the time they had moved on to ‘Rabid Dog’ drinks, this time made with orange juice in the absence of a red-berried juice, and Zoltán had moved on to explanations of the difference between the pronunciation of ‘d’, ‘dz’, and ‘dzs’, I was begging for mercy, and asking to be told instead about Hungarian wine.
The wine Zoltán had brought with him was the classic ‘Tokaji Aszú’, a sweet dessert wine from the region of Tokaj. It’s a golden straw coloured wine, produced by the addition of grapes affected by ‘noble rot’. This collection of grapes is known as ‘aszú’, according to winegeeks.com.
I resorted to them today because my head was too full of the effects of sweet grape juice last night to follow Zoltán’s explanation of its meaning. While I was there I discovered their definition of ‘noble rot’ as “a mould that attacks the skin of the grape, thinning and dehydrating it and causing high levels of residual sugar”.
The sweetness of the wine depends on how many ‘puttonyos’, or hods, of the crushed ‘aszú’ are added to the base dry wine, resulting in a designation of 3, 4, 5 or 6 – according to the bottle of wine we drank, and according to Zoltán: according to winegeeks.com, the highest is 7. I’ll leave them fight it out among themselves…
Â
I couldn’t find Egri Bikavér – the red ‘Blood of the Bull’ wine from the Bikavér region – which Zoltán told us about, on winegeeks.com, but I did find it mentioned on another site, which I’ve now mislaid.
It told the legend of a young Hungarian girl whose father gave her a bottle of this famous red wine from the Egri region, when the Turkish Sultan summoned her to his palace, with dishonourable intentions. The father told his daughter to explain to the Sultan that this was the blood of the bull, and that it would make him strong and powerful.
The Sultan, unused to alcohol (although I don’t know if he rubbed his right ear), fell fast asleep after drinking the wine, and the maid’s virtue remained intact.
With no dishonourable intentions whatsoever, I found the ‘Tokaji Aszú’ affecting me in the same way.
As I fell asleep, though, I smiled, imagining the comic-strip ‘zzzz’s (for snores?) forming above my head, and wondering how a Hungarian would read them…
Posted in House Family, Hungarian, Wine and Some Spirits | 1 Comment »
By
noeleenm on June 19th, 2006
Peter (the Finn) found a room, a proper room as opposed to my half-finished attic. Isn’t it strange how, so often, when a seemingly unsurmountable problem is resolved in some way, the original, wished for solution often presents itself later?
The best example of this kind of thing that I know is when a couple who have tried for a child for years decide to adopt, and then the woman becomes pregnant. It seems to be, again, a demonstration of how worry can actually block a positive outcome.
Peter was desperate for somewhere to live, but just before he was due to come and see the attic someone offered him a proper bedroom – desperation gone, solution comes through.
I’m glad, much as I liked the sound of Peter. This way he’s got somewhere comfortable to stay while the laws of hospitality were still upheld, and yet we have enough space to breathe easily in our house – and continue to get to know one another.
A new rhythm has established itself in our ‘family’, around the World Cup. Only Grazine has successfully remained outside its spell.
Wojtek has four nights off in a row right now. South Korea has done quite well in its group. And Gint is the only one in the house with a television.
The result…? Wojtek and Dong Kwang’s big room has turned into a football stadium for the three lads, and the results of the matches can be heard in any part of the house.
It has infected me to the extent that I – a sporting illiterate – now know roughly how each of the countries of my friends are doing. With almost all of the 32 teams having played two matches (with one more to play in this first round), Poland has no points so far: we don’t talk about this in our house.
Ecuador, though, has six points, along with Germany, in that group!
South Korea has four points, as has Switzerland, in their group, with France coming behind on two points.
Italy and the Czech Republic are in the same group, Italy leading with four points to Czech (and Ghana’s) three. I’m glad I’m not watching these matches with Jan and Pavel, and Michele and Elke…Â
I feared a visit from the Gardai last night, investigating the noise, when South Korea equalised with France to hold them to a 1:1 draw in the 81st minute of the match. France had scored their goal in the 9th minute, and during the 72 minutes in between only gasps and prayers and imprecations were emitted from the room.
The sounds were coming up to me in the attic, where Peter’s ‘near miss’ had finally set me to wallpapering. I was listening to Bach as I pasted and papered, and I must be the only person in the world who will always associate his music with South Korea and football from now on!
At half-time – or just before or after a match – there is a general stampede to cook, eat, go to the bathroom, and do any of the other necessities of daily living.
During one of those intermissions I had started to cook rice, and appealed to Dong Kwang to take a look, as I always burn it.
He peered into the pot, looked incredulously at me, and said: “Is that rice?!!” It reminded me of Elke and Michele’s attitude to Gint’s pasta. Maybe buying rice with the brand name ‘Roma’ wasn’t such a good idea…
Apparently, in South Korea short grain rice is always used, as opposed to the long grain rice I favour. Normally, I buy whole grain rice, but last night I had ‘easi-cook’ because I hadn’t been able to find anything else in the supermarket: the spelling says it all…
When Dong-Kwang got over his horror, though, he was very predisposed to teaching us uncivilised westerners how rice should be cooked.
Cover it with water, allow it to boil very hard, uncovered, for about ten minutes, and then close the lid and cook it on a very low heat until it is done. This took about twenty minutes last night, but Dong Kwang checked it after ten minutes and every few minutes thereafter.
And there lies the real secret of why I burn a lot of my dishes…
Wojtek, who was peering into our lesson as he drank a can of beer, asked Dong Kwang to tell me about the Korean martial arts that he studied.
Kung Fu and Judo, if I remember correctly, are from China, he said, and Karate is from Japan. But Taekwondo is a traditional Korean martial art, and it is this that Dong Kwang learned and taught in the army.
Much of it, he explained, depended on concentrating all of the energy of your mind and body into the move you are about to make. This is why practitioners of Taekwondo (including Dong Kwang) can break timber, and even bricks, by chopping them with their bare hands.
“Confidence is very important”, Dong Kwang went on. “If I think ‘I wonder if I will be able to break it’, then I cannot. I must believe I can do it.”
The importance of this ability to focus, and concentrate, was borne out by the fact that I realised that I had completely forgotten about the rice Dong Kwang was stirring in the middle of his lecture – which turned out delicious, even for ‘easi cook’. Left to me, it would have been stuck to the saucepan. I wish I wasn’t so easily distracted…
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By
noeleenm on June 16th, 2006
We may be having a Finn come to stay with us now. Only for three weeks, but still…
I don’t really want another person in my house. It means giving up my dormer ‘guest room’, but this is reminiscent of the two German girls who ended up staying in my house overnight. Peter (the Finn) is in danger of finding himself sleeping in his car, it seems. …Never a good idea, especially if you need to do a day’s work after it…
It started with a phone call from Karen, one of my many – and beloved – nieces. Peter is the maintenance man where she works, and he was told a few weeks ago that he had to find somewhere else to live because the landlord’s girlfriend’s little sister needed a room!
Now Peter is leaving Ireland in a few weeks anyway because he has a good job lined up in Latvia. But he has to find ‘a bed and a shower’ meanwhile.
Getting a room in a house for just a couple of weeks is almost impossible, and staying at a hotel is far too expensive.
So Karen thought of my home.
I explained that – apart from wanting to keep a spare room for family/friends – my ‘guest room’ is not ready for guests yet. It uses an attic stairs, so the only way of ‘closing’ it when you’re upstairs is by dragging a sheet of timber across the opening!
In addition, half of the room is decorated and the other half is not. When my house was extended, the very clever architect didn’t show any kind of spec for the attic. Naively, I just presumed that my old attic would be extended.
By the time I could climb up to see, I found that the builders had simply built the extra attic space on top of the old roof within…
About a year ago, I got other builders to remove the old beams and open up the entire attic, but I still haven’t managed to finish decorating it.
I’ve built in cupboards, stained beams, and bought wallpaper – but the wallpaper is still neatly in its wrapping, and the floor has rugs, rather than a carpet, and there’s an open space when the ladder is down and…
Yet it’s surprisingly comfortable – light, airy (with a big dormer window), a bed I built myself, and lots of space.
When Janeth came to stay, I gave her my bedroom and I slept in the attic, and it took me a while to come back down again because I found it so peaceful up there.
I explained all of this to Karen.
“He’s desperate, Noeleen”, she told me. “He just needs somewhere to sleep, and a shower.”
So Peter the Finn is coming tomorrow to be shown the attic, and to choose between it and sleeping in his car. I wonder how good maintenance men are at putting a ‘door’ on the opening to an attic ladder…? Hmmm.
The only real disadvantage I see (having talked to Peter on the phone this evening and liking ‘the sound of him’) is that he’s going to be working too hard, clearing up all his work before he can go on to Latvia, that he won’t have time to talk to us about Finland.
Hearing people talk about their countries and their cultures and their beliefs is so utterly fascinating – especially when they are far from those countries and cultures and are looking at them against the backdrop of my land – that I cannot understand racism at all.
Apart from the fact that I think it’s morally appallingly wrong, especially in a nation like ours that suffered so much emigration, I truly pity people who haven’t discovered the sheer fun – and often comedy – of sharing life with people who are different from oneself.
It shames me, then, when I hear the young people in our house talking about encountering racism here.
Last night I was talking with Eddie, Grazina’s boyfriend, for a while as she got ready to go out. They had arrived together bearing a Lithuanian cake, which Grazine promptly indicated that I should try.
It was a lovely looking concoction, made up of crisp cereal pieces, like butterfly wings, and covered in a sugary confection.
“What is it?”, I asked. Grazina and Eddie conferred in Lithuanian and then checked the label together to no effect. Then: “Vait!”, Grazina told me, and flew off up the stairs.
Eddie didn’t bother to wait. He lifted his arm in a flying aeroplane movement and went: “Buzzzz”.
“Honey”, I guessed, as the door opened and Grazina burst back in with her dictionary in her hand. “Honey!”, she announced, triumphantly.
I was glad. The only other thing it could have been with that mime was diesel.
Eddie and I picked happily at the honey cake while Grazina went upstairs to shower and change, and we talked meanwhile. He has an ex-wife and a daughter in Holland, and he proudly showed me a photograph of his daughter – a pretty, smiling girl.
“She will come on holidays in July”, he beamed.
Only his mother remains in Lithuania, and Eddie, unlike Gint, is not homesick. He works on the buildings, and enjoys the life here on the whole, but:
“They not like us here”, he told me.
“Who?”, I asked, with a sinking feeling.
“Irish”, he said, matter-of-factly.
It’s difficult to tease out a conversation like this between two people who don’t speak each other’s languages – me, not at all, and Eddie, not enough for debate. (”I too tired after work to study English, but I speak Russian and a little bit of German” – a lot more than me.)
He had enough English though to say that he – alone, once, if I understood him correctly, and another time with Grazina – had been refused entry to a couple of local pubs. He is convinced it was because they were foreign, and the truly terrible thing is I couldn’t honestly say that he is wrong…
“That’s against the law”, I said, angrily, and then thought to myself how ridiculous a comment that is… How do you argue your rights if you aren’t fluent in the language of that place: not having a language is like not having a voice, and the deaf people of all our cultures have found long, long ago how wide open that leaves you to discrimination.
Eddie also had enough English to make the old male complaint about women taking so long to get ready, but when Grazina did eventually come down, and they announced they were going to Eddie’s place to eat, she refused flatly to take the rest of the cake with her.
“It was delicious, but I’ve had enough”, I protested, trying to get her to take it away. She plonked it firmly back on the table. “Tomorrow!”, she announced, pointing at me.
They say feeding others is a way of expressing affection, and it’s something I’ve definitely noticed with Grazina. If she arrives with any kind of sweet thing, and I’m around, I’m force-fed – mind you, she doesn’t exactly have to bruise my arm…
It’s Grazina’s way of giving a hug, I think, in the absence of words with which to make friends. The trouble is, I’m already having a great deal of trouble fitting into my clothes. If food equals love, I must be the most beloved person on this planet.
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By
noeleenm on June 14th, 2006
A very cold wind blew in through my door on Monday, waking me with cruel speed from my ‘lazy-days-of-summer’ mentality.
It pushed open my letterbox and reformed on the mat in the shape of a bill from the Town Planning firm we engaged to prepare SWAP’s Appeal to Ireland’s Planning Board. The bill totalled 8,277.43 euro.
That’s an awful lot of money for a small, working class community such as ours: it will take a lot of car boot sales, table quizzes, and plastic duck races to raise it.
Just over one-sixth of it is Value Added Tax, which goes to the Government, but which we still have to pay.
We are appealing the decision of Bray Town Council to grant permission to Pizarro Development Limited to put high rise buildings on the flood plain downriver from our homes. Permission was granted by our Council’s Planning Department subject to proposed (but unseen by our community) plans for engineered flood protection works being passed by the Office of Public Works.
The decision was enabled by the majority of our local Town Councillors rezoning the flood plain downriver from our homes for high density building, against all international best practice, and despite having themselves seen the reservoir it becomes for us in times of flooding.
…But, no matter how crazy or irresponsible either of these decisions are judged by An Bord Pleanala (the Planning Board), we still won’t be able to claim back the money it has cost us to employ the professionals we needed to negotiate the extremely complex planning process (never mind the extremely complex dual application) involved. We know from life experience that this flood plain is vital to our community in times of major flooding. And all the expert reports that we have seen since simply support that belief.
Yet, if we don’t have every piece of paper required, with every ‘i’ dotted and every ‘t’ crossed, our application – despite being right – will be thrown out.
We can’t afford not to employ professionals the way this application is being pushed through the planning process. And we can’t afford to leave any door ajar – so we’ve had to pay for two appeals (because Pizarro have made two applications for the one site) at 210 euro each, and two requests for oral hearings at 95 euro each – on top of our town planner’s fees.
The planning process has been designed to favour the rich (including our rich Government, with its 1,422 euro of tax on the bill), and, to be honest, when that bill arrived on Monday, it frightened me, as well as sickening me at the unfairness of the system.
I would have stayed at home, worrying over it, talking with the rest of the core group by phone, except that I’d committed to go to a Mass, followed by ‘a cup of tea or a glass of wine and some nibbles’ in our local parish for the 25th Jubilee of Fr. George’s ordination to the priesthood.
Now I like Fr. George. He’s laconic and gentle and a very fine priest. So I went…
It was a good decision.
George talked about when he was due to become a Deacon, and he panicked and asked if it could be put off for a year. Then he found himself teaching little children about God’s care for us using St. Matthew’s lovely Gospel:
‘Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?’ Mt: 6:26.
He went back and said he’d changed his mind, and went on to use that Gospel at the first Mass he ever celebrated as a priest – and again last Monday night, 25 years on.
The Beatitudes (Matthew 5:1-11) with its lovely ‘Blessed are the poor…’ declarations, and hymns like ‘Be Not Afraid’ all went on to reinforce this message of faith and trust.
It was incredibly consoling, and I felt it was speaking directly to me.
The following day I was telling one of the Green Party councillors (who support us) about the bill, and her reaction was uncannily like what I’d been hearing the night before:-
“Don’t give up because of money. It will come. It’s a just cause. Trust in the universe.”
And, tonight, in the middle of writing this, an e-mail came from Elke, talking about her plans to go and work in the UK in a week or two. She says:
“I am sure I will know what to do once I am there, right in front of my future” … “Like Zadie Smith says: ‘This is me, walking down a narrow road to end up exactly where I am meant to be’.”
Is somebody trying to tell me something…?
Posted in Ireland, Italy | No Comments »
By
noeleenm on June 12th, 2006
When I lived on the coast of Ecuador, the most obvious influence on the nature of the people there was the climate.
If you live in a very hot, fertile land, where you can plant something like a coconut tree any old time of the year and it will grow, where animals don’t have to wait for spring to give their young a chance to survive when snow and blizzards come, then it leads to a fairly laid-back attitude to life in general.
In northern Europe, on the other hand, if you didn’t sow in spring, nurture in summer, and harvest in autumn, then you were quite likely to die of hunger in winter. …Not so much now, when we’ve learned to create micro-climates with greenhouses and artificial light and heat, and we import and export food all around the world in hours instead of months – but it has certainly shaped who we are… It has made us nations of worriers.
Surely it’s no accident that the countries that are far enough away from the equator to have this discipline bred into them have become the ‘developed nations’? Heat is soporific – and extreme cold all year round, on the other hand, must surely be simply disheartening.
I was put to thinking about this by the Irish equivalent of a ‘heat wave’ which we’ve been experiencing here for more than a week. In Ireland, that’s a long time! Our average temperature in June is normally around 15 degrees, but, for the past ten days, we’ve been enjoying temperatures of around 20 degrees, sometimes rising as high as 25 degrees…
If you happen to live in a sunny climate, that might not sound very much, but here a lot of people are staying indoors, with doors and windows wide open, because they can’t endure the heat!
It’s had a strange effect on our lifestyle. The ’siesta’ was never a part of Irish life, but in the intense (for us) heat of the middle of the day now, people are quieter here. They are either indoors with a cold drink, lying in a sun-lounger or a deck-chair, or attempting to work, without any great energy, while casting envious glances at the weather outside.
…And having the World Cup on television during our afternoons and evenings hasn’t done anything for our gregariousness either… Lying comatose in front of a television seems to be just as attractive for football fans in warm weather, with an open window beside them and a cold beer in hand, as in winter, with the heating up and the curtains drawn against the cold world outside.Â
It’s particularly noticeable in our house this week.
There’s a quietness lying over the house, as we each find a comfortable spot to laze in.
For Gint, it’s the aforesaid open window as he watches the World Cup. He still doesn’t seem to have noticed my glazed eyes when he gives me a play by play recital of each game.
For Grazina, the long bright evenings provide extended time with Eddie.
Dong Kwang is working so hard, between study and paid work, that he’s ‘bug-eyed’ every time I see him: fortunately for his work ethic, 20 degrees is merely comfortable at this time of year.
Wojtek is still working nights, and consequently missing much of these lovely long days. Although he has managed to see at least some of the World Cup, as Gint informed me when he pointed out the exact branch on our pear tree where he swears that Wojtek tried to hang himself when Poland was beaten by Ecuador. It’s just as well Janeth has gone: he might have tried to hang her instead.
And I am rotating between the hammock – or a deck-chair if I need to write – in the back garden in the day-time, and just inside the patio door of my bedroom where the evening sun reaches till near 10.30pm these days…
Sunshine is bewitching…
…But it’s a ghostly enchantment, when it’s very, very hot. Nobody talks much. Nobody moves much. Mirages are easy to believe in – even ghosts – in this dreamy, hazy world of drifting people.
I used never associate ghosts with sunshine. Apart from anything else, in a seaside town like ours there’s almost always a stiff breeze to lift the heat. In my mind, ghosts go with Ireland’s shadowed twilights, children coming home at the end of a day out playing and frightening each other with their stories on the way. Or with firelight and story-telling, often turning to ghost stories in the countryside in which my brother-in-law grew up, with no electric light on the dark roads lending them menace and imagination and fear.
Yet this feeling of dead heat (pardon the unintentional pun) leaves a body dreamy and disinclined for effort, and so leaves the mind to ramble down – ghost roads.
This feeling co-incided last week with one of my ‘book benders’. As alcoholics go on the drink, I occasionally go on a book binge, reading literature’s equivalent of meths. if I can’t find anything else, and reading book after book – usually when I should be doing something else entirely – until I gorge myself to satiation point. It can take a long time.
Luckily, in the middle of all the ‘meths’, I usually come across at least one or two equivalents to vintage wine, and, at the very least, I always find something new and interesting.
One of the latter, if not necessarily one of the former, came last week in the shape of ‘Firecracker’ by Sean Stewart, published last year. I had never come across his writing before, although, according to his bio, he has written seven previous novels, and “wrote much of the innovative web game associated with the film A1″.
The central character – Will, a Texan – sees ‘ghosts’ to the extent that he had to give up driving because he kept swerving to avoid dead people, whom nobody else could see… His way of identifying the dead from the living – apart from knowing some of them – was that he always saw the dead in black and white, “leached of colourâ€. The novel was funny, imaginative, and very evocative of the kind of dreamy, half-awake state produced by ‘dead heat’.
I don’t know if I would have identified with the book as much if I had read it in cooler weather: I don’t know if Stewart’s writing was powerful enough to bridge that gap between the outside world and the world we inhabit when we bury ourselves in books.
I do know that if this heat lasts much longer, I’ll be afraid to look at anybody around this house in case they’ve turned into monochrome.
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By
noeleenm on June 9th, 2006
For an article of clothing that’s not worn so much any longer, hats feature quite a lot in English idioms…
We talk about ‘wearing different hats’ when the same person is operating under different sets of strictures in, say, two different jobs. And in an era when most couples in Ireland got married before they lived together, it was fashionable to wear a hat to the wedding. So, when someone looked like they were getting into a serious relationship, the question: “Should I be taking down the good hat?” (which usually lived in a box on top of the wardrobe) was clearly understood!
I found myself thinking about both idioms this week, firstly because of a row last night at our SWAP core group meeting, and secondly because of two e-mails I received from the Czech Republic during the week…
The row happened over our proposed protest letter. It’s still not up on www.braywatch.com… This is not because of lack of help from John Muldoon, but because a) I haven’t had a chance today yet to look at the amended files John updated when I’d run out of ability, and b) we had a SWAP core group meeting last night, and most of the rest of the group felt the letter should be addressed to our local TDs and our Euro MPs, rather than the leaders of the various parties.
This means changing the letter I wrote, changing the text on the web page, and changing the code behind the lot. So I threw a tantrum and suggested that the person who insisted it needs to be done this way should make the changes in text, talk with my IT friend (who is his friend also), and come back to me with it ready to go – very soon.
Rows happen at our meetings sometimes. They’re the result, I think, of the stress and tiredness induced by trying to fight very big money and lots of resources with a very little resources – and money that has to be raised through car boot sales!
But they’re also the product, I think, of a group of people becoming more and more confident of the strength of the bond between them to withstand widely divergent outlooks (men are definitely from Mars, for instance, when it comes to fundraising) and ideas that wouldn’t even have crossed our minds a year ago.
We’ve grown up a lot over the past year, in terms of refusing to accept what ‘the authorities’ say is good for our community, but we’re growing up so fast that sometimes there’s a danger that we’ll leave the rest of our community behind. It’s hard enough having to do a crash course in planning laws, PR, fundraising, negotiations, hydrogeology, and politics, without having to try and relay the newly gained knowledge, in an understandable form, to our neighbours.
And yet that is vital…
We’re all having to wear too many hats. We have to find a way of getting more people to wear them, comfortably, starting – we hope – with ‘training’ a group of neighbours to go out on an information and fund-raising blitz around the neighbourhood.
Our neighbours know just as much as we do about flooding, but most of them are nervous that they won’t be able to answer questions on the enormous development planned (how many storeys next to the river? how high is the wall around the car park? where will the roads come in?), how exactly it will affect our homes (what’s an alluvial flood plain?), and the whole planning process (how long will it be before we hear whether our appeal to the Planning Board has been successful? will we have an oral hearing?).
Â
I was re-reading ‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’ the other night (like jig-saws, a great way of relaxing!) and the part where Harry fools his friend, Ron, into thinking that he’s given him the Lucky Elixir, and so overcomes Ron’s nervousness about the big Quiddich match, rang true with me. If we can’t lay our hands on several bottles of Elixir of Luck, we could probably do just as well with fooling our neighbours into thinking that’s what we’re giving them. When I think of some of the utter balderdash that’s being propounded by our local authority, and the developers, to promote the present scheme, it makes me realise just how valuable a commodity confidence is – even when totally misplaced – in an argument.
In the middle of all the discussions, it was a relief to find that both the Czech lads who lived in my home had decided, independently, to write…
Pavel wrote to tell me that he hopes that his girlfriend, Renata, will be able to come to Ireland for a month or two in winter to improve her English – and that he will visit for a couple of days while she’s here. He says that he’s working hard, and enjoying it, and that he’s having “a lovely time in the evenings and at weekends with Renata and with my dog”… Aaah.
Then Jan wrote today to say that he will probably move to Spain in September to live with his Leti, while she attends university there.
It looks as if the lovely hat Janeth brought me from Ecuador – made by indiginous Indians – might come in very useful, after all…
Posted in Czech Republic, House Family, IT friends, Ireland | No Comments »