Remembering his birthday

"The past is a foreign country,
they do things differently there"

. . . the opening lines of LP Hartley's The Go-Between, a story about coming of age and betrayal of innocence looking back 50 years to the antics of a younger self. It's not surprising that it should come to mind as I think back to 0130hrs on 9th December 1975. We lived in a tiny garden flat which turned its back on the sea at the end of Dun Laoghaire's East Pier. I was woken from sleep by The Beloved reporting that she had a frightening pain in the small of her back. I mobilised the tiny amount of book learning that I'd acquired in a year and a half of Biology 101 at college and decided that she might have ruptured a kidney.  Accordingly we got dressed and walked along beside the silent railway to the nearest hospital for a second opinion. I think the night porter had a clearer idea of what was going on than me, but the nurse and then the doctor told us that such back pain was a common enough indication of labour, which in its turn was a not altogether unexpected situation after 36+ weeks of pregnancy.  We I had booted it by leaving home, because we could no longer call an ambulance to deliver Herself to her chosen maternity hospital 8 miles away to the NorthWest.

The hospital where we had washed up had no maternity ward, not even a qualified midwife and so an "inter-hospital transfer ambulance" had to be located and mobilised from a third also distant hospital. When it finally arrived and we inched the incipient mother aboard, it was nearly 5am.  But as I stepped boldly up after her, the para-medic told me firmly that IHTAs were strictly for patients and I should make my way after them as best I could. 

We were about three years from owning a car and I didn't even have a bicycle at the time, so I went home, scooped up a wash-bag and nightie, inhaled a cup of tea and walked up the street to wait for the first bus into town.  It was full of bus-drivers and -conductors on their way to work: jolly and joshing and ignoring the scruffy student at the back of the bus. That was the first of 11 bus-journeys that I took that day.  When I arrived at the maternity ward, I handed over the over-night bag but the meaty hand of the matron on my chest prevented my getting any closer to the seat of the action.  Accordingly, I phoned The Beloved's mother and set off on the rounds of what seemed at the time to be necessary visits.  The different country of that past had no e-mail and no mobile-phones; indeed telephones were rare enough in those old times. What could nowadays be sorted with a tweet or a calling-all-cars txt had to be done in person.

First I went and hunted down The Beloved's BF and broke the news between her classes in UCD Medical School, which was then still in Earlsford Terrace where the National Concert Hall now stands. Then I took the #10 bus out to the main campus of UCD to report to TB's English teacher that, because of her prior engagement, she would not be leading the small-group discussion on the Metaphysical Poets as scheduled for that morning.  By the time I got back to the edge of the maternity ward at 11am, I was told that The Boy had been delivered about half-an-hour before and that mother and baby were doing well but still unvisitable. I stumbled out into the fresh air again feeling like a million dollars . . . and a really hot cup of tea. Maybe that's what I did next - I can't remember.  I know I was back to the hospital in the mid-afternoon when The Boy was pretty much dried out, his grandmother had arrived and we all took turns passing the wee scrap around [7lb13oz; 18 inches stretched] and feeling just delighted in his presence. After hours of acting the go-between, I could for a short while just be.  The next 18 years are another story.

Maroon

Tramore Trá Mhór = the big strand  is really not wheelchair accessible. It has been a resort and holiday destination since the 19thC but the houses are mostly perched on ledges up the bluff which marks the West end of the long sandy beach. Half the streets require a steep trudge uphill, unimaginable to negotiate if pushing a wheelchair. There has also been a silent war as new houses struggle for a coveted sea view: which inevitably occludes someone else's. On a couple of occasions, we've 'taken' a recently refurbished upside-down house where the entrance and living room are under the roof and the bedrooms on two floors further down the cliff-face. One result of this design is an enormous picture window overlooking a)a steep ginnel of 19thC fisher-cottages b) the dodgems and other amusements c) the full length of The Prom d) the full sweep of the beach e) Brownstown Head beyond:

On the last morning of October, I woke before dawn and fossicked about making a pot of tea. The quiet was shattered by a distant explosion, followed a minutes later by another. My assessment was "maroon" the rocket that goes up to summon enough people to man the life-boat for a 'shout'. This was informed by my experience living in a garden flat [whc prev] opposite the East Pier in Dun Laoghaire in 1975. In those days, a maroon was still the standard way of calling a crew - as it had been in 1875. In some senses 1975 is recognisably the same as now: television, washing-machines, Manchester United, 747 Jumbo jets, baked beans. But comms have changed utterly: in the 1970s you could wait 5 years to have a telephone line installed . . . five months if you were a doctor or the apparatchik of a political party. Our Dun Laoghaire flat had a shared payphone in the hall but most ordinary homes didn't -- hence the broadcast-by-rocket call to oars for the RNLI.

Nowadays crews are mustered by txt or WhatsApp; so my explanation of the pre-dawn explosion in Tramore is a hopeless anachronism. All was revealed over the next 4 minutes when I clocked a series of star-burst rockets going up from the far end of the Prom followed 1.second later by the >!BANG!<. It is illegal to import, hold, sell or use any other fireworks without a licence: specified in Section 80 of the Explosives Act 1875, as amended by the Section 68 of the Criminal Justice Act 2006. I guess the perps had calculated how long of a pyrotechnic interval they had before the Gardai could send a cruiser from the barracks just uphill from our AirBnB.  The same evening the Dublin Fire Services handled +500 emergency medical call-outs. But bonfire collateral damage was less than usual for Halloween because material got a good hosing from torrential rain the previous night

Christmas twig

I was taking, I suspect, the high moral ground about Christmas songs.  Must be less Tannenbaum judgmental!  The first Christmas we spent together was two weeks after The Boy was born back in the 1970s. We'd rented a tiny garden flat over-looking the East Pier at Dun Laoghaire and had very little left after the rent (£60 pcm, as you ask) was paid.  But things were much simpler then and the spuds, carrots and cheese we lived on didn't cost much.  On the 23rd we hadn't a tree, partly because the only ones left were motheaten-scrawny and mostly because there was no room - it was either a tree or a table to eat the dinner off.  So on the morning of Christmas Eve I sneaked out into the garden and sawed a small branch off a shrubby tree that had struggled out of the cinders and broken bottles to a meagre existence up against the back wall.  I brought this back inside and jimmied it up so that, if you squinted, the twig looked like it was growing through the wall from outside.

We were the first of our circle to try a spot of reproduction and our friends had been generous to the infant: some stuffed toys and a few plastic knick-knacks, as well as some very gratefully received small clothing.  The toys were looted and re-purposed as tree-ornaments and I think we may have cut some other stuff out of cartridge paper.  I know a red plastic key was detached from a teething ring and hung up and some unlikely creature finished up on the highest point to act the fairy.  I won't belabor the point but our humble make-do Christmas had something in common with an earlier event where a manger was re-purposed as a cot.

Red Key still with us

So that became our tradition: wherever we were in the run-up to Christmas I went out and cut a branch off a tree somewhere and strung it up in a corner of the living room.  The tree's roots were sufficiently developed that the lost branch could be replaced with a few month's photosynthesis during the following growing season.  This is not true of the misfortunate, exploited noble fir (Abies procera) which is the usual Christmas Tree, and has a single use life-time. It is a metaphor for all that is wrong about our current economy - buy something; use it once; throw it away; buy another; money is made and bugger the planet. For several years since we moved up the mountain we've left the twig up (it's all good fun until someone loses an eye) after the decorations have been boxed up  . . . and it's been still up the following December. But I'm getting old now and I've passed this baton down a generation.  Accordingly, during a gap between the blustery showers yesterday, Dau.II went out with a pruning saw and, in consultation with her mother, brought back a horizontal hazel (Corylus avellana) branch.  It's still got catkins, so is wholly suitable as a regenerative metaphor for the turn-of-year.  We're waiting for the return of Dau.I today to decorate it.

Stick it to the man, dessert edition.

RIYC?? In the early 90s, a couple of friends of my sister left the Woo of Findhorn to settle and make a living in Ireland. They bunked with us for a few weeks. But as soon as they got some gig work, they left our spare room and rented a teeny tiny flat in Dun Laoghaire. One Saturday a few weeks later, we piled into the car for a surprise visit to our new pals K&L. For a jape, we paused at the garden centre at the bottom of our rural Northside lane and bought a massive sack of spuds as a house-gift. They were delighted to see us, gave us tea and we all went on a promenade along the East Pier. That Winter, The Boy got well into D&D and wanted to attend a session in Dun Laoghaire after school on Tuesdays. K&L, well obvs, offered to give him a bed for the night and make sure he brushed his teeth before going back to school in the morning. And it was so.

For a while L was working the night shift as a waitron in the Royal Irish Yacht Club. It was a club, for rich people, so the tips didn't appear as a golden rain and the management paid only minimum wage. But, at the end of the shift, the staff could take home any unsold desserts as a gratuity. "rrrr, thank ye for my wages, marster". K&L, whose ancestors had left in the 20thC and 19thC respectively, worked real hard at re-anchoring their dynasty in Ireland. But it just didn't come together in pre-Tiger Dublin and so they pulled the plug and went on to British Columbia. When we went to help them pack for leaving, they presented us with a neat stack of 6 RCSI dessert bowls. L had never been in a hurry to return the receptacles for her dessert 'bonus'. I guess I was, wearing my épater les bougies bonnet, happy enough to fence her loot.

After they left, K&L borned and raised a chap together who was about the same age as Dau.I and Dau.II. And then, just before Christmas 20 years ago, K had a heart attack and died. We were bereft, it was as if his heart was too big for this world. The only time the three kids met was when L came back to Ireland with her Boy and his father's ashes to scatter at the Home Place in Tulla, County Clare. On that trip L revealed that the sack o' spuds which we'd dumped on them as a joke a decade earlier had been a lifesaver. After the rent was paid that month, they had literally no money left for food. Morto, I was! At the time I was on a crazy tax-free EU-funded gig in TCD and would happily have given them a pound of rashers and a cabbage as well as the spuds! And son-of-K&L? He turned out well.

Buoys

Amazing what you can learn from the TV - or from DVD boxed sets because we don't have a TV in the house.  We were lent a box of boxed-sets of Numb3rs a few years ago, and enjoyed it at least partly because of the touch of scienciness.  The conceit of the series is that one brother is an FBI dude and the other is an academic mathematician who helps out with fluid dynamics, epidemiology, topology, engineering, cryptology and whatever-you're-adding-yourself.  The difference between science and scienciness is that, in the former, the insights don't come so thick and fast, the expertise is a little more focused and it takes a lot longer to wrap it all up. I still think it's better than, say, Desperate Housewives or Mad Men because in among the tidy plots and soap-opera development of personal relationships you can learn something that might be useful outside of The Box.  I've forgotten all the clever mathy details but now know that, and this was news to me at the time, many nautical Americans tie up their boats to "boo-ees", while all my life I've been rhyming buoys with toys or indeed boys.

A friend of mine went on business to Boston a few years ago and arranged to stay the following weekend with friends whom he hadn’t seen since college.  After breakfast on Sunday they suggested that taking the kids to one of the sandy beaches of the North Shore might be a nice way to fill the morning. He agreed with enthusiasm thinking that a few gusts of fresh sea air would clear his head both of a busy week and last night’s drink.  When they arrived at the coast he, along with every member of the family, was presented with a large black plastic bag from the trunk of the car to fill with tide-line rubbish.  The hangover was making him a little cross-eyed because he forgot his usual impeccable manners and indignantly refused to spend even a small part of his hard won leisure cleaning up the detritus of strangers.

I can see his point.  Even five bags of trash transferred from foreshore to landfill is insignificant compared to the quantity of plastic that is reputedly being trundled slowly round the ocean by the North Atlantic Gyre.  Furthermore much of the brightly-colored stuff you see on the beach seems to need rubber gloves to handle.

On the other hand, there’s lots of good stuff to be found on the foreshore if you’re not squeamish about picking it up. I salvaged a cabin door from the rocks beside Dun Laoghaire’s East Pier in 1976 and re-purposed it as a garden table. In the 1980s, I picked four or five serviceable wooden fish-boxes out of the storm-wrack.  After cleaning all the sand out, and soaking in bleach over-night to reduce the pong, they were just the right size to shelve four rows of standard-sized paperbacks.  Shortly after that, much to my regret, fish-boxes were suddenly all made of plastic, which are useless as book-shelves ; but they make excellent  tomato planters – the drain-holes are integral to the design of both functions.  In more recent years, I’ve salvaged hundreds of fathoms <a word to remember on Talk Like a Pirate Day> of rope.  This is often found clotted with fish-nets, driftwood, buoys, seaweed, seagulls.  It is sensible, therefore, to go down to the sea with a good sharp knife, so that you can trim off the perfectly foul and untangle the rest.  To salvage a lifetime’s supply of clothes-line by solving a puzzle is restful and challenging: better than sudoku because it’s three-dimensional!  The fish-net itself is usually so knotted as to be not worth the trouble but I have some fine sections in the garden which the beans to climb up each summer and I’m ever hopeful to find enough to make a hammock.
How green would that be?  Swinging gently in a summer breeze, teasing out an increasingly long line of recycled cordage, saved from the sea (where it was a mere hazard to shipping) to be re-incarnated as a swing for the children.

And the buoys?  I have an ever-growing collection.  They are now hanging, like multi-coloured grapes, as an artistic installation in the garden.  What else can I call it but  “Fruits de Mer”?

Which gives me an opportunity to share an appalling if apposite and personal joke:
Q. What do you call a man with no arms and no legs in the sea?
A. Bob!  (eeee how we larfed)