Last Post

By noeleenm on October 4th, 2006

This is the last piece I’ll be posting until at least week beginning October 16.

On Friday, I’m flying out to New York for a holiday postponed since last year when one of the friends with whom I’m travelling was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Now, surgery, chemotherapy, and a lot of prayer later, she’s joining us with a mop of short feathery hair, and a smile as wide as a rainbow. We’re all looking forward to this holiday.

We arrive back in Ireland on Saturday, 14th, and on Monday, 16th, the Oral Hearing by An Bord Pleanala (Ireland’s planning authority) into our local authority’s decision to grant permission to put high density construction on the flood plain downriver from our homes will begin…

These Oral Hearings are very like court cases, with the Planning Inspector acting as judge, and each side presenting their case. We have been told that the hearing is likely to go on for at least a week because of its size and complexity: it impinges on two separate local authority areas and two separate applications were submitted for each area – four applications in all.

No doubt the developers’ side will be represented by barristers, hydrologists, engineers, and all the power of expensive PR, including computer generated graphics.

Our side will be represented by local people, with a town planner as our only real professional. It’s David versus Goliath but we’re convinced we’ll win because the proposal to build where they want to build is so crazy – and so unnecessary.

‘David’s team’ met up again last Monday night to discuss strategy and pool our strengths. Among the other people (other than our immediate community, I mean) objecting to this scheme are an engineer, an architect, and a group of retailers from our traditional Main Street, who have commissioned a damning traffic study as well.

I sat in a corner and tried to concentrate through a streaming head cold that had my head, ears and throat aching, and every bit of liquid in my body pouring out through my eyes and nose.

The only thing I can be grateful for is that it has happened now and hopefully I will be healthy again by Friday morning and the long haul to the States.

Because of the meeting on Monday night, I saw none of ‘the family’ until last night, when I was relieved to find that Maria’s cold, at least, had greatly improved. She went to her training on Monday, and yesterday was out on the streets asking people to sign up to a commitment to donate a regular sum to a recognised charity on a regular basis.

She loves the team she’s working with (all young and multi-national), enjoyed talking to people on the street (busy Mary Street in the heart of Dublin city), and got two new donors to sign up!

“Were they men or women?”, enquired Wojtek.

“Men”, admitted Maria. “I find it easier to ask men.”

Wojtek grinned.

We were all comparing notes in a steaming kitchen as we went about our various meal preparations – all except Magda, whose working hours these days seem to absent her when most of us are at home.

For Wojtek, on the other hand, this all being together at mealtime is something he has enjoyed more over the past few weeks because the adjustment in his timetable has brought his clock more into synch with the rest of us.

“I used to come home early from work in the mornings and there was nobody up, or, if they were, they were still half asleep”, he explained. “And then in the evenings when everyone else was eating I was still in bed till I had to get up to go to work.

“It was so bad that sometimes I’d keep smiling at customers at night to get them to stop and talk to me!”

He has survived his first nights back at work well, helped by the fact that yesterday’s classes were cancelled, due to his tutor’s illness.

Gint is not working today and has agreed to do another ‘anti-flood’ job while he’s off. He will silicone around the double-glazed patio doors leading from my bedroom into the garden. They’re too wide for the flood guards I bought for the front and back doors, so the engineer who sold the flood guards came up with this temporary solution. He maintains that the double glazing will prove strong enough to hold back the strength of the water provided there isn’t a little gap through which it can make an initial break.

“Don’t forget to fill in the little hole for condensation”, he added.

Please God, none of this will be necessary. We’re again enjoying crisp dry weather and if this lasts through the next very high tide warning (6th through 9th October), at least I’ll be home to deal with the problem myself come the next crisis.

When I was repeating instructions to Gint about putting the flood guards in place if he got a call from a neighbour to say the river had broken, and giving him the telephone number of my nephew, who is an electrician, in case of emergency (because power is one of the first things to go in a flood), he demanded to know was he in charge then while I am away…

“You’re chief flood officer”, I prevaricated as the others listened, grinning.

“Then I can bring in beautiful women and have wild parties and…”

“Of course you can’t! You have an important job to do. You can’t be distracted by beautiful women.”

He was still muttering something along the lines of ‘glamorous sidekicks’ and ‘James Bond’, when I left the kitchen.

I had planned to write posts in advance for this time away from Ireland and away from my computer, and actually started to do so but ran out of time and steam.

The plan was, though, to write retrospectively about holidays I really enjoyed. One of those holidays (two, in fact) were spent walking along the Camino de Santiago, and to refresh my memory of place names along the way I picked up one of the books I really enjoyed about the camino experience.

It’s called ‘Pilgrim Snail’, and it’s about the 2,000 mile walk Ben Nimmo did from Canterbury to Santiago de Compostela, busking along the way with his trombone, to raise money for the memorial fund of his girlfriend who had been murdered while working for charity in Belize.

It’s a wonderful book – funny, touching, very visual and even aural. Ben is into trad jazz and the blues, and when he describes playing his trombone in old churches, and on mountainsides, you can hear the music…

Among his favourites were ‘Summertime’, ‘Danny Boy’, ‘Misty’, and – ‘The Last Post’. 

I know, as someone with Girl Scouts in her blood, I should remember its haunting melody and its lovely words more often at times when I’m as stressed as I have been over the past weeks:-

‘Day is done, gone the sun,
From the hills, from the lakes, from the sky.
All is well, safely rest,
God is nigh.

Posted in Books/films/theatre, Germany, Ireland, Latvia, Poland | 4 Comments »

A Hip Hop Weekend

By noeleenm on October 2nd, 2006

This weekend was the last of Wojtek’s holidays. For the past two weeks he has been attending his DJ and Music Production course each day – and coming home more and more exhilarated by it!

Tonight, though, he goes back to work, and working through the night while studying during the day – no matter how much you love what you’re studying – is very hard indeed.

To his great delight, he has found a soul mate in Maria, from Germany. Maria also loves the type of music Wojtek enjoys. My description of it – ‘rap’, ‘hip hop’, etc. – as ‘monotone’ didn’t go down very well with either of them. And, when I asked to have the characteristics of ‘hip hop’ for instance explained to me, Wojtek told me that it’s something you can’t explain, you have to feel… Hmmm.

Today I went looking for a word I have lost, which I came across in one of Robert Crais’ books, describing a white man who talks like a black man. I feel it describes Wojtek when he talks about his kind of music.

I didn’t find the word, but I came across instead a review of a book called ‘He Talk Like a White Boy’ by Joseph C. Phillips, giving the other side of the coin.

Phillips’ description, quoted in the review, of how he tried to get to know rap made me laugh out loud – “As an illustration of my lack of commitment, I soon decided that playing an album all the way through didn’t necessarily mean I had to be in the same room while it played.” – and print a copy of it off to bring home to Wojtek!

Even though, like Phillips, hip-hop and rap do nothing for me, I still enjoy immensely Wojtek’s love of the music, and his excitement at creating and changing it. Whatever ‘different beat’ gives that kind of buzz to someone, I’m all for it…

Maria’s eyes were not so bright all weekend, though, because the damp Irish weather we’re experiencing, in between warm bursts of sunshine, has caused her to come down with a head cold.

It was Maria’s first complete weekend with us, and she alternated between trying to cure her headcold with Lemsips and warmth and rest, ensuring she has everything in place for her first day of work today, talking to her family and friends on the phone, and taking photographs of her housemates and surroundings so that said family and friends would have some idea of the kind of place and people among whom she is now living.

She was delighted, and justly so, to have landed a job, as well as a home, so quickly after her arrival in Ireland.

Her new job is as a fund-raiser for a professional company who raise money for charities by appealing to people in the street. She will start off today in training and then will work on Dublin’s streets, but later will have the opportunity to travel to different parts of Ireland with the fundraising team.

My first concern was that she wouldn’t be working just on commission, but she assured me she will get a basic pay. I explained I was worried because I don’t give to professional fundraisers, and I know I’m not alone in that, feeling that I want my charitable donation to go direct and entire to the charity in question. So I’ll give directly to a charitable organisations I support, and I’ll give to volunteer collectors whom I wholeheartedly admire, but not to someone who makes a living out of it.

Knowing one of them now makes me feel uncomfortable about that, especially as I’m aware that charities need all the money they can get, and they probably have to resort to using professionals to keep up their work.

Maria said that they were told the money they collect goes direct to the charity: their job, in fact, is to try to get people to sign a pledge to send a fixed amount of money on a regular basis to one of the charities they represent – very well-known charities, incidentally.

The fund-raising company’s fee, they said, is paid from last year’s budget in each case. That, for me, immediately raised the question of why had they money left from last year’s budget if they’re in dire need of funds? Surely, it’s because they deliberately keep some money over for this, so what’s the difference if it’s from last year’s collected-on-the-streets donations or this year’s?

But for once I kept my mouth shut on the subject, feeling that Maria, brand new in Ireland, brand new in our house, brand new at this job, and with a head cold, has enough to contend with without engaging her in an ethical discussion about her job.

It has been great to see how well she has settled into the house, now even able to follow Gint’s rapid-fire conversation, sometimes with strange grammatical twists and often with the most outrageous statements delivered completely dead-pan. Newcomers to the house tend to end up peering rather worriedly at him, but Maria is now laughing along with the rest of us at his antics.

Gint didn’t have a lot of weekend to share because he was working on Saturday, as well, and yesterday he mixed and laid cement to give an even base to the entrance to our back porch.

He will be chief ‘flood officer’ while I’m away, with full instructions on what to do if he gets a phone call saying the river is breaking its banks. We had been warned though by the company who sold me the floodguard gates for front and back that the surface must be completely even to get a correct seal. Thus, Gint’s work at the back gate yesterday, with much: “Ouch, I’m getting too old for this”, as he crouched to spread and smooth and level the cement.

This morning there’s a footprint in it, and Im quite sure we’ll all be asked to produce our shoes to be measured against it…

Despite Gint’s working hours, all of us except Magda – who was the only one of us working right through the weekend – had a glass of wine together on Friday night, and on Saturday night Gint and Wojtek went to a disco together, Maria opting out because of her head cold.

They had also talked about going to Glendalough on Sunday, feeling that Wojtek will never, ever have another weekend off again, but the combination of the weather and the disco conspired against them.

Today, like the seven dwarfs in the Sleeping Beauty, we each shouldered our picks, or our laptops, or our rucksacks, and headed off one by one singing…

Have you ever heard “Hi he, hi ho’ sung in rap?

Posted in Books/films/theatre, Flooding, Germany, Ireland, Latvia, Poland | No Comments »