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Archives for November 2019

Fastnet Race


Posted in: Cork, Ireland, Reading etc.

When I was 10 the Fastnet Yacht race was a disaster and a lot of people died. I don’t really remember much in the news from when I was young but I remember this and the Whiddy island disaster because they seemed local catastrophes and my parents spoke about them. Along with the Tuskar Rock air crash which happened the year before I was born, they were background disaster news which was local to us. Even then, like all Cork people, I was a Cork partisan.

So, on that basis when RTE put out a radio documentary about the 1979 Fastnet race, I was curious to have a listen. The first thing that struck me was that many of the voices on the radio were old men who sounded just like my father – all restraint and composure and very Cork . These are people you don’t hear so much on the radio here – it’s mostly Dublin voices of all ages. And I heard some names I knew because this is Ireland, and my father used to sail a lot, and one of the people speaking was a colleague of a friend.

And I was surprised how very terrifying it was and somehow the calm, low level way these (mostly older, mostly men) spoke about it made is seem somehow more terrifying. I was fascinated. Highly recommended if you think you might be at all interested.

In a highly competitive field, I think that recommending a radio one documentary may be my most middle aged move yet.

Drama


Posted in: Boys, Michael

Michael and I were late for his drama class last weekend. He was very grumpy as we sprinted across town and, on questioning revealed that all he had eaten all day was a bowl of cereal. No wonder he was grumpy as it was then four in the afternoon. I stopped off in a vile take-away pizza place and bought him a slice. Although normally I do not approve of eating on the street, these were desperate times and I said to him, “You can eat it as we jog along through town.” He was about half way through his slice and about to take a bite when it was pulled out of his hand by a daring seagull who flew off with it grasped triumphantly in his jaws. What can I say? Tough town. The moral is, of course, that one shouldn’t eat on the street.

The Death of Olga Bracely


Posted in: Cork, Family, Ireland

A couple of years ago, I rescued a ceramic hen from Cork . She was a feature of my childhood when she would be brought out on special occasions to sit on boiled eggs. My father slightly resisted her departure to Dublin but the house in Cork is so full of stuff that he yielded and let her off to the bright lights of Dublin.

When I got her to Dublin, my family felt she needed a name, so she was called Olga Bracely after the character from the Mapp and Lucia books although in character she was much more a Mrs. Mapp type than an Olga Bracely as the latter, despite her great name, is in fact a lovely individual whereas my hen clearly had a very difficult personality.

Until this week, she sat on the shelf above the sink superciliously surveying her domain. Sadly, though, the other evening I stuck something up on the shelf leading to a domino effect which broke a picture frame and knocked Olga Bracely to the ground where she was smashed to smithereens, only her head and tail remaining intact. They are currently sitting forlornly on the shelf but they may have to go. Alas. Call me craven but I just don’t think I’ll mention it my father.

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Olga Bracely in her prime

Supporting the Arts


Posted in: Reading etc.

Mr. Waffle and I went to see a one man show called “The Fetch Wilson”. It wasn’t bad. It was in a new arts space which turned out to be a slightly damp room above a pub. To be fair, it was upstairs from a much nicer room which was showing “Kissing the Witch” and you could buy tickets for a double bill but I didn’t feel able for two and a half hours of theatre, an hour and a half of which was a staging of an Emma Donoghue short story. Admirable, I’m sure but I plumped for the “darkly comic” one man show. It had its moments and it was, to be fair, far, far better than “The Bluffer’s Guide to Suburbia” which is unlikely to be bested in the worst play of 2019 competition.

The woman on the door told me that this theatre company are doing a Christmas special and I think I might force Mr. Waffle and the children to go. Something to look forward to.

Cork


Posted in: Cork, Family, Ireland, Princess, Siblings

I was in Cork at the weekend with herself. Nothing really happened but here we are in November and I have committed to posting every day. It’s only the 11th and I’m exhausted already.

I took herself to the cemetery to see my mother’s grave and almost missed it because the enormous overgrown hydrangea bush nearby, which is a handy marker, had been chopped down by somebody in an excess of enthusiasm. We went at dusk and it was quite beautiful. I couldn’t help feeling that had she known, my mother would have been delighted to be interred in such an interesting cemetery.

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My father and my aunt were pretty remarkably perky. I made herself consult with my father for his live take on the rise of fascism for her history essay but as he was only 15 in 1940, it was a bit underwhelming – he just summarised what we knew already – but he did comment that his views were formed in part by the papers his aunts and uncles took: the Daily Mail and, oh God, the Express. I can only rejoice, I suppose, that he himself is a Daily Telegraph reader.

We went out on Friday night for my sister’s birthday which was a bit disastrous as both she and my brother were quite ill and herself was exhausted. We ate our way around Cork over the weekend. After our ill-fated dinner on Friday night, herself and myself had a satisfactory breakfast in the Crawford, then picked up lunch ingredients in the Market and in the evening she had chips and Tanora from Jackie Lennox’s; the following morning we had breakfast in the Nano Nagle cafe (aside, is it too early for the return of Hanora as a girl’s name?). All in all a culinary tour de force.

How was your own weekend? Much food?

Funeral Season Continues


Posted in: Ireland, Travel

I was up in Belfast last week for the funeral of the mother of a good friend of mine. Mr. Waffle persuaded me that it would be better to take the train than the car and in many ways it was (no parking problems, environmentally sounder, less tiring etc.). It did mean, however, that I was dependent on a Belfast taxi man to get me from the station to the church for 10 am.

A perfectly correctly behaved cyclist went past us and the taxi driver said, “I hate those bloody cyclists; they keep weaving in and out and disobeying the rules of the road.” Could I let it go? I could not. We had a robust exchange of views on the way to the church. In fact we parked outside the church and I could see the hearse being unloaded and still he wouldn’t let me go. I was forced to concede that perhaps we could all learn something in the hopes of getting out before the coffin was carried into the church.

The funeral itself was a nice one. A lovely church (St. Patrick’s, Donegall Street); nice music and readings; and the parish priest knew the dead lady well and is a close friend of her son’s so gave a really good homily pointing out that she had been baptised in the very same church in 1930 and gone there all her life. The priest was also careful to welcome people of all faiths and none which we never bother with in the South. The fact that the deceased had brought up six children through the Troubles was also touched on. My friend does have some slightly hair-raising stories like when he was a little boy, he ran to get his ball from under a car and everyone started roaring at him and a soldier ran over and grabbed him – there was a bomb, apparently, or at least, a bomb scare.

I then went for a brief wander about Belfast before heading home on the train. It struck me as pretty depressed (although I suppose nowhere is at its best on a rainy Tuesday in November) and a lot less busy than Dublin or even Cork, and quite pricey too. I don’t quite know why that should be – is it the Brexit uncertainty, the absence of an Assembly, the collapse of industry or just maybe November rain? Poor Belfast.

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