Stranger meeting

Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,—
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell. 

We're last farmlet in the County and the last [only] still inhabited home up the scruffy, bucketty, grass-centred, bohereen on which we live. Car traffic up the lane is either determined . . . or lost. I was on the stoop surveying the yard hmmm, far too wet to mow, I'll sit down again, when I heard a very quiet car. The driver was reversing s l o o w l y down again having met the gate above us beside the ruined cottage. He turned out to be both lost and determined.

Young chap sprang out of the car with a glittering eye [but no grey beard] and announced that he was a) 24 b) from Ballinabranagh [=almost Kilkenny] c) Fianna Fáil d) running for the CoCo elections in June. It was mid afternoon at the tail end of lambing, so I daresay he'd knocked on the doors of a lot of empty houses, and he was determined to talk. I R retire, it wasn't actively raining, so I was prepared to accommodate his needs. Three planks of Young Dan's platform are a) mental health b) rural buses c) housing for young ppl like him and Dau.I. Here he is [L], with his future empire as backdrop.

The links say that The Blob has had rather a lot to say about all three of these topics and I was happy to give him both barrels of my exec summ. I suggested that, if we had a society rather than an economy, rural transport could be solved by the local community. The public health nurse and the postie could do something for the mental health fallout of loneliness and isolation, and someone could take Old Colm in for his doctor's appointment. The trouble with the ubiquity of personal cars is that it sets the baseline of being able to get anywhere at a moment's notice. Even if few folks over the age of 25 actually want to spring in their car to get more butter, let alone go for spin. 

It's not for nothing that my mother held onto her own wheels long into her pension and called her car SS Independence. She also did a good bit of heavy community lifting taking the old or infirm into town. In her younger, "married woman" kids-at-school, days she'd been a cog in the Meals-on-Wheels machine in Plymouth, Hazelmere and Harlow. Old Sonny, across our valley, benefitted from a volunteer driver service getting him in for dialysis. I guess I'm saying that, with planning and fore-thought, having a bus service once or twice a week might make carless rural living sustainable and kinder to the community carbon footprint. We're still mullocking along with one car now that I have no work to go to even it means one or other of us being marooned for a few days up the hill or in town on Costa na Déise.

Mental health is another matter entirely. It's easier for an old chap like me to get a triple by-pass than for a young fella to get adequate help for his despair and suicidal ideation. But a hanging in the garage is just as fatal as a myocardial infarction. Good luck with that, young Dan. As for housing, that doesn't seem to be solvable without a revolution. My neighbour, TD, and very briefly cabinet minister, Mary White was a County Councillor for a number of years. Her experience was that you had to focus on One Achievable Goal. As a Green she pushed to keep recreational vehicles off the county uplands . . . with limited success before retiring from active politics. A word from the wise to young Dan: (mental health OR housing OR rural buses) NOT (mental health AND housing AND rural buses).