8 Kilogrammes

The iconic Ben Bulben seen from the ward windows

We're still here and feeling very grateful for the huge out-pourings of support and get well messages especially all over Twitter and Facebook.Also the ones called in to Elizabeth from friends, rels and people around our superb village. (She brings me a check list each day and calls them out to me. It's great!) They're all much appreciated and make me feel very cared for and looked after. Thank You.

That big screen in my "private" room (OK,
single bed bay) which became the place to watch
the World Cup England game

This end, I am behaving myself, taking all the meds and willingly submitting to all the treatments and investigations, so I am recovering fast enough for the doctor but slowly by my own normal standards for just a 'cold' or a 'man flu'. They all tell me that a pneumonia is another whole species of 'sick' and I now believe them. My thing was the accumulation of fluids on the lungs and in the tissues generally (mainly the ankles due to gravity). I am here 8 days and have lost 8 kg now, which is a whole new lease of life on the breathing.

Telemetry

As I go through the recovery phase, I also move around the place and gain and lose technological gear. At my most wired, when first in here, I counted 15 lines and wires including the 10 leads connected to my chest and extremities from the heart monitor, the oxygen or nebuliser line, oxygen saturation to a handy finger tip, blood pressure, fancy spiral "push" for my diuretics, etc. I get some of these tests still but that is at the periodic nurse's rounds.

The 'Airvo' oxygen pump.

I am now in the 6-bed, lower intensity bay and have just one machine 'permanently' connected to me, that being the "Airvo", supplier of heated and wetted oxygen to my nose. This is a fine piece of kit now that I have the heat turned down. When the nurses first gave it to me it was a hot afternoon and I just wanted to go lie down on some cold concrete or something. The air-con was on, so my bod was comfortable, but then I got this 'desert' wind coming into my nose, heating my head up and making me sweat into the pillow.

Hospital jewelry. My drip line

Ah well, we put up with it, and it was only the next day when I happened to comment, that one of the nurses said "Oh, you don't have to have it THAT hot, let me turn it down a few degrees!" Bliss. The only other brush with new tech lately was when I was done CT scan. This is a fancy-pants X-ray machine shaped like a thin flat do-nut which they slide you through. The X-ray 'gun' or receiver whizzes round your chest as you slide, 'salami slicing' an image which is then much more useful diagnostically than a straight chest X-ray.

I will hear nothing bad about the food, which has been
excellent throughout.

So, pretty much it is all going well and I can't imagine I will be  in here too long. There is only one question I would LOVE the answer to and I don't think I will ever get that one due to the total lack of engagement with the docs for 6 years. How did this huge "aggressive" pneumonia creep up on me so sneakily. In the morning I felt as right as rain and was actually doing 3 hours of heavy work (beef muck) without a bother on me. 3 hours later, early evening, I suddenly couldn't walk 30 yard without leaning on a fence gasping for breath. It is as if something hit a trigger point and just let go, like a modern car deciding to pre-emptively slow you down to 56 mph because it has detected a brake-bulb blown. Whoa! You need to get some help.

Sorry about the pics in this one - taken on the Android so not of the usual quality.

24 Years and Matching China

Happy 'newly-weds', 3rd November 1993.
Oldest niece (Kat) does the honours as
Flower Girl.

I have generally tried to keep these posts to a regular rhythm of posting on Tuesdays and Fridays and this one would, in normal circumstances, have come out yesterday. This weekend, however, two nice events conspired to shove me off course, Liz's and my 24th Wedding Anniversary and the Village Tea Party. In these days of Social Media (mainly Facebook) it is the done thing on Anniversaries to rake out some old pics and post them up on your "timeline" so that all your friends can chop in a suitable comment in lieu of posting you a 'Happy Anniversary' greetings card, though I must admit we never did send many of those out.

Liz and Kat in the limo looking drop-dead gorgeous
(in my unbiased opinion, of course)

An excuse, anyway, to dig out the old (pre-digital) photo album and remind myself (with delighted amusement) of how happy that day was and how drop-dead gorgeous was Lizzie in THE DRESS with her floral 'tiara', her basket of flowers and the signature pearls. Still IS gorgeous, of course.

In the Grounds of Malahide Castle

We are also remembering all the happy family and friends surrounding us. In some case with these we lost contact a bit while we lived in the UK and (as was normal) failed to write "snail-mail" letters or phone each other but have now happily made good friends again with each other and caught up since the arrival of Facebook. For me, FB came along just as I was leaving work and moving over here, so it has been lovely as a way of staying in touch with the UK side, as well as looking up all 'the Irish lot'.

Always good to let the OH know where you've vanished to,
 especially on an Anniversary

They are too many to mention but I will just pick out such as Billy Thuillier, who was my Best Man on the day and Kat (now Thackray), oldest niece, who is that sweet little Flower Girl in my pictures. She is, of course, still 'sweet' even though she is now all growed up and elegant and 'sophistimicated' an' all. A huge Thank You to all involved in that day and who have been such a support to us since and now are sending your good wishes to us through Facebook etc.

The Hall set out with all the posh new matching china and the
renovated kitchen, ready for the Tea Party.

The Village Tea Party, then, is an annual event held in the 'Village Hall' (sometimes known as the 'Memorial Hall' or by all manner of modern handles like "Resource Centre", "The Centre"). The Hall team lay on the facilities and all the groups in the village come along, bringing their own food and drink. These are usually the Active Age group, the Ladies' Club, The management and staff of the Pre-School, the Parent's Association of the National School, the Foróige (Youth Club) and is open to any clubs and Societies who want to come along - Drama Club, Irish Dancing, Yoga or what ever. They also set up a table for "waifs and strays" - anyone who wants to come but is not particularly affiliated to any group.

Tarte aux Blettes (Chard/apple/pine nuts/raisins pie)

When Liz worked at the Centre spanning across 2 winters, she was heavily involved in organising and setting up the 2015 and the 2016 ones and got quite a reputation as a genius organiser who thought of EVERYthing. This year the Centre has undergone extensive renovations including exterior insulation, a brand new, bigger, modern-design kitchen and, as there was money left over in the budget, a whole new set of 100 places of new crockery. Liz was very involved, too in submitting the bids and grant applications for all this generosity.

I love our pig area at this time of year with the pigs gone and
the beech leaves starting to fall.

They asked Liz to come back and organise this year's Party so she was very happy and proud to be laying out all the tables with the matching crockery from the lovely new cupboards in the pristine new kitchen. We even got a mention in the short 'Thank You' speech given at the end by Committee member Tom C. "....oh and before I close, there is just one more thing I need to tell you about. We have here tonight 2 people who are celebrating a Wedding Anniversary; their 24th! Take a bow Lizzie and Matt" (suitable red-faced stand-up and hugs).

Gorgeous George leads the charge but the geese are rather
confused by this new arrival in the orchard

That just about covers it for this one, but I have a few more photo's to use up, so I will sneak them in here at the end. First the geese investigating a left-over Hallowe'en pumpkin.

Next up  those young chickens, all coming up to 'make your mind up time' - do you want to lay an egg or shout Cock-a-Doodle-Doo? We love these three black and gold birds who are teasing us by being identical and also 50/50. We hope they are hens. Either way they are HUGE so we wonder.... big eggs or big oven-ready (rooster) carcasses?

Then there is this lovely tote-bag issued as fund-raising, promo, 'merch' (-andise) by the team behind the Irish Passport podcast which we love and which I mentioned in the last post.

...and my new favourite farming-garment of choice. I found this nautical-style sailoring smock brand new in the wardrobe, still with labels on. We are rather ashamed to say that we think it must be a gift but neither of us can recall from whom it came. Who ever you are, many many thanks. I love it. Especially as the weather turns cold, it is deliciously wind-proof.

Finally, one last pic of the bought-in ewe lamb 'Oveja' being the Spanish word for 'ewe'. She is standing on the right of this picture and we think she is now meaty enough, so she, sadly, is booked in on he final journey to see our friend Ignatius G (Victualler) of Castlerea on Monday morning. Her brother (Pedro) is as big but seems to be keeping to his side of my 'deal' - I told him he could stay if he got all my ewes pregnant and didn't start attacking me.

And that really is it. Good luck now.

Pods and Poetry

Sheep after a shower. 

Friends of the Blog will know that we are both, separately, quite keen on the Social Media, veteran users of Facebook and Twitter and, more recently, receivers of that recent format "podcasts". Some of my readers are, I know, not well versed in these formats, so a quick description may help. Please bear in mind that I am not very good as a computer 'nerd' anyway and do not even own a smart-phone so I'd ask you to read these and smile indulgently if you know better and I have it all wrong. This is the blind leading the even blinder!

Dahlia. Some kind of 'Bishop' relative

Twitter is that fast-paced space where you can rattle in , using no more than 140 letters, what ever is in your head. Maybe a good thought has occurred or something amazing has happened, or you might be "re-tweeting" (sharing on) a good link or a picture that someone has put up. You collect as many followers as you feel the need for and people will follow you if what you are putting out pushes their buttons. I currently follow around 500 people and 500 follow me - not the same 500 but there is quite an overlap. I'd be a fairly minor user at this rate, mainly because I use Twitter from this computer under the stairs, so I can only get to it for small parts of the day in between activities in the real world. Twitter is mainly enjoyed by city types who can go round all day with smart phone in hand, walking into lamp posts etc.

The podcasts were originally a way of listening to bits of radio programmes which you had missed when they were first aired. Radio stations (like BBC Radio 4, particularly) would save the pieces digitally and you could go in much later and download them to your machine to listen to. More recently all manner of specialist media companies have sprung up just to do interviews for saving and releasing as pod casts (pods). This especially around the Donald Trump win and presidency and USA politics, but we have found plenty of other subjects on offer - Brexit, food, science and "how stuff works" and so on.

Cider apples looking promising. 

My most recent find, which actually came through Twitter, is a farming pod called Rock and Roll Farming. It has precious little to do with R+R bar the guitar-break introductory music. It is presented by one of my Twitter friends, Will Evans and he gets to interview for an hour all manner of farming great-and-good, plus people who have made a mark on the Social Media sphere; "famous" farm twitterers or people involved in big farming projects (Farm Safety campaigners, factory farming, experts on the current contentious area of badger culls against Bovine Tuberculosis and so on).

I find those pods fascinating but I should hasten to say that I don't necessarily agree with or believe all the opinions stated and no more would Will expect me to. He comes at it from the point of view that the 'pro' and 'con' camps in each area (usually farmers and 'townies' but sometimes organic vs non-organic or other splits) need to talk to each other sensibly and respectfully till we find common ground. Will puts the question to them in a form like "what would you say to the non-farmers, to convince them that....." . Some of them, though, are dyed in the wool commercial boys, trained in all the corporate wisdom and only able to see that they can make a living IN the system. I don't know how they will ever  'convince' we small-holder, trying-to-be-organic and eco-friendly types. One big Lincs arable farmer, defending the use of Glyphosphate said (and I quote) that "Glyphosphate is the safest chemical in the world" (!!!!). Quite a claim and not one likely to win any admirers as a sound-byte. The badger-cull guy was also frustrating in his one-track only-solution argument. Ah well. They all have the same rights to express their views as I do and fair play to Will for putting it all 'out there'.

Stumpy's chicks growing fast

As an amusing aside to all this serious discussion, one of Will's other guests set a ball rolling which I have been having some fun with back in Twitter in the @SmallHolderIRL account where I do most of my rabbiting. This was a farmer who has since been all over Twitter but who started, jokingly, following a boozy pub night with some fellow farmers, deciding to 'tweet' about his farm life in Haiku format. He became @FarmingHaiku and tried to do a Haiku every day for about 18 months most of which, he says, were absolute rubbish.

For the unfamiliar, Haiku is a very short style of 'poem' where you try to express an idea or a high thought in only 17 syllables, across 3 lines in a 5-7-5 format. They do not need to rhyme. You are also meant to avoid similes and metaphor because you are all about simplicity and directness of expression. Metaphors would introduce another image between writer and poem. Besides, with only 17 syllables you'd barely have room. They suit Twitter as they are short.

Lovely Birthday lunch with Sue and Rob at the
Golden Eagle in Castlerea (Hester's). Barman even
wrote 'ROS' in the beer head to celebrate our county's
recent win in the Connaught GAA champs.

I decided to try a few within the small-holder account and quite a few people found them amusing and came back with Haiku(s) of their own. Some examples of mine, which are nothing special were...

Early morning hen. Tapping at the window pane. You HAD your breakfast!

Meet the need to knead. The dough alive in your hands. Baking smells to come.

Timed to perfection. Golden dome of bread is here. Warm from the oven

Loud farmyard noises. Clamouring for their breakfast. Morning livestock rounds

Getting a bit braver with the sourdough. This a date and pecan
wholemeal loaf (with rosemary and cinnamon).

All good clean fun, I guess. They are actually quite difficult to write or, more precisely, to pare down to the right number of syllables. You try it and see.

Break Through

I am currently struggling with my camera/PC link (mainly due to having nearly 16 Gig of pics on the camera card, which takes the PC more than 10 minutes to riffle through looking for new ones it has not seen before! It gets fed up looking and times out declaring, like a teenager sent to find their school uniform in a typical bedroom, "Nope.... It's not there"). This post may get published sans pictures and I will edit some in at a later date. If you are reading it now like that, then do come back in a day or two and check them out.

Kitchen looking from 'old' to 'new'

We reached a major landmark in the kitchen extension project on Sunday, finally breaking through the inner wall to reveal the true size of the new room. You may recall that the wall here was the traditional Roscommon blend of boulders and concrete (at least down here on the ground floor - upstairs this changes to modern cavity blocks telling us that this rear extension was built in 2 stages) 11 inches thick inside of which we, when we rebuilt, we added standard studwork framed with '3 by 2' timber, infilled with 3" insulating foam but then covered with half inch plywood and then the plaster-board. The ply being to let the wall take the weight of any shelving we might decide to put in there and load to the gunwales, as we do. Total wall thickness then, 15 inches. No mean wall.

...and from new to old

You may also recall that we had kango'd our hole from the outside inwards but left all the stud-wall intact (with a sheet of MDF across the window) so as not to fill the kitchen with dust and rubble. Eventually though, we were going to have to make the new end (door/windows unit) draught-tight and lock-able and then cut out our aperture through the stud-wall. That was, as I said, Sunday's game. We also made the concrete step which rises you from the old kitchen. 3" or so up to the new.

Our replacement suite

You can now stand in the kitchen and see the full size of the the new space. It was (and still is) 8 feet wide but was, up to now, only 8'3" long. A bit 'bijou' and hence Liz having to do all her bakery prep, bread-kneading etc in the Dining Room as well as us having to store a lot of kitchen gear, bakery stores and crockery in there too. The extension adds 11'9" to that length giving us a new dimension of 20 feet. I don't think we have ever owned a room with a 20' length in any house.

There is icing on this cake and a cherry on top, too! The icing is that we now have a big area of glass looking out at the garden, the raised flower bed and the big pond, plus at sunsets in Summer. OK, it also looks out at the car-port and the various piles of wood, pallets and straw bales there-in but every silver lining has a cloud. We have never had a window looking out that way up till now (except the old kitchen window which was always a bit 'tunnel vision' buried as it was 11 feet down between house and Tígín). It is also nice when I am walking the dogs or working out there to be able to look in, see the kitchen light on and wave to anyone in the kitchen. After a couple of weeks with the west window aperture boarded up with that MDF it is also amazingly light in the new kitchen now that we have the acres of glass.

I treated my chain saw to a new chain for the 'Doris' tree

The 'cherry' is undoubtedly the cat flap. Cat-folk will know that cats can be very demanding of being allowed in and out and you spend a good part of any day hearing the pleading 'miaow' and getting up from what you are doing to open a door for the animal. If it's raining they tend to get you to try all the doors in succession just in case it might not be raining out of the 'next' one. They will also happily use the house as a corridor, miaowing to come in the front door, then striding through the house and straightway asking to be let out the back. Or asking to be let out and then sprinting round to another door to be let back in.

The tree looks much diminished now
it's all cut up.

We have 4 cats at present so all of the above is four-fold. Each cat has its own way of making its demands known. Blue will scrabble and scratch at the aluminium threshold at the bottom of the front door. Soldier seems to fling himself at the door like some kind of DEA policeman on a drugs bust and hangs by his front claws from the window panel with his chin just high enough to look in accusingly like the "What? No Meat?" character in the war-time cartoon. He has destroyed the paintwork and scratched up the wood quite badly. If we can ever break him of the habit it will take quite some filler, sanding and painting to get the front door back to its glossy red of 5 years ago.

Messing with the bottom slice of tree.

Up to now we have not been able to do a cat-flap - both the front and back door are good strong ones with fancy panels which would not take a shop-bought cat flap. The new kitchen 'end' though has flat panels (all be it 3 cms thick) so we installed one and are now getting the cats used to it. All 4 quickly learned how to use it and that it is always open, even when humans are asleep or not indoors or (Heaven forbid!) saying things like "No - I just let you in the other door...you can bloomin' well wait!"

No more need, soon then, for our in house 'scoring' system which we use to decide whose turn it is NOW to let the cat in/out. We started with a simple "Please, Liz, I have a dog on my lap" - if you had a dog on your lap you were exempted from cat doorman duties, making coffee/tea or what ever. This then got a bit more complicated if we both had a dog, and a whole Poker-score system evolved. A dog on your lap AND a kitten on your shoulder trumped a mere dog. A single cat trumps a single dog. A cat and knitting trumps any combination not containing knitting. I'm on the phone/email/Twitter/Facebook carries some weight but not much. Ultimately, if all else is equal then a simple "I did the last one" settles it.

Our dogs never do "lying in a heap". None can stand being
in contact with another to sleep - so 3 dogs, 3 beds!

Possibly, just possibly, all that will go away and all the cats will exclusively use the cat flap. There will be no more need of humans attending doors, upstairs windows (yep, they quickly worked out that you can shout in through the main bedroom window from the new kitchen roof; you just leap onto the cattle-race wall and from there up the Tígín north gable, then walk along the ridge of that building and descend to the roof at the south end. Wait on the kitchen roof though - a half asleep human might knock you off the window sill when they open the window for you). What could POSSibly go wrong?

New Twins for Nanny

Nanny and the new kids, not yet 48 hours old here, under the
IR heat lamp.

A text from our good friend Carolyn tells us that her 'Nanny' goat has just landed twins. The timing of these new babies is correct for full term, going off the dates Carolyn has in her diary for when 'Billy' (they do like original names over there!) was with Nanny but they are tiny. Charlotte, currently working full time in Dublin (missed the birth again, Char'!) , juggles some holiday entitlement and races down to assist. One (curiously the larger of the twins) is struggling a bit, is very sluggish, breathes huskily, needs help getting onto a teat and starts to 'scour' (diarrhoea).

Those 2 kids.

They are put under a heat lamp to keep them warm. The vet is called in a hurry and the kid gets 2 injections, an anti-scour dose and electrolytes. 48 hours on he is much better - a bit 'drunk' but trying to do some clumsy bouncing around. Mum is doing a good attentive job but is (understandably?) very wary of cleaning the poo-ey end of the scouring one.

Charlotte steps in to clean him up a bit but Nanny seems to be thinking of abandoning him; Charlotte guesses that it is the new, cleaned, human smell off him putting her off so she smears a bit of the local Nanny 'flavour' back onto him and Nanny re-adopts him. Phew! It's all go in that Maternity Unit. As I go to 'print' everyone is still with us and it's all looking hopeful.

Sibling bonding. The twins nuzzling each other.

Followers of this blog who were with us a year ago will recall that this 'Nanny' is the same goat who spent last winter with us while C+C were moving house and were temporarily without an adequately fenced field to house the pregnant Nanny and her new beau Billy. Nanny gave birth to the big singleton kid 'Henry Óg' under the trees in our East Field. Billy was not, in that case, the sire. Nanny had been pregnant when purchased and collected by Charlotte and I from over by Kiltimagh (Co. Mayo). During the course of 2016, the humans sorted out some field fencing and we shipped the goats to their new home in the summer. Nanny is a lovely, sweet, animal and we have kept 'in touch' with her since, so we are delighted that she has now kidded successfully again.

Meanwhile a new venture for us, trying to organise a bit of a get together of the members of the Facebook group "West of Ireland Smallholders" of which I am co-admin. Pictures in this section have nothing to do with that event; they were just pretty frost scenes from our recent cold snap. Once a 365-er... always a 365-er? Anyway, there are 250 members in the group but these are spread very thinly right up the western half of the country, all the way from Buncrana (Donegal) down to Baltimore (Cork) - a distance of 600 km, or 8 hours driving. It was never going to be easy to get many of them together; would you drive 4 hours to a pub in the middle for breakfast and a chat, then 4 hours home? Nor would I.

Ewes with frosty backs get a bit of breakfast

In a post/thread on the group which was originally about still-born goat-kids some posters got into discussing how we on the group should meet up properly in 'real life'. This happens a lot on the Internet and can sometimes be easy enough to organise but our lot seemed to be fluffing around in "we should do lunch" style and nothing concrete was being set down. I decided to set up a 'straw-man' with a suggested date, time and venue which people could then either accept or argue with different suggestions. I went with today at 11 for 11:30 at Hester's 'Golden Eagle' (pub) in Castlerea which is easy to find, and sells very good, honest "pub grub" and breakfasts at comfortable prices.

Frosty bog-land view to the North from our East Field

My suggestion met with the expected mild flurry of interest as well as a smattering of counter-suggestions and some apologies for, as expected, distance, lack of transport, prior engagements, livestock issues, busy-ness etc. There were enough positives, though, for us to go ahead - we thought we might get a few takers even if there were last minute blow-outs, which there were - one poor friend had fallen badly and smashed a knee while racing to rescue laundry from a hail storm and another had "emergency dentistry" scheduled for the very time we were getting served our breakfasts.

Our willow tunnel. 

In the event, it all went off rather nicely. Half a dozen of us sat down for a chat at 11 am over tea and coffee before segue-ing gently into ordering breakfasts or sandwiches according to taste while the tea and coffee kept coming. It was lovely to meet the new faces and to put real 'people' to the Facebook versions and the chat meandered in a lively fashion around goats, pasture improvement, Tr*mp, Br*x*t and a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, pension arrangements, newspapers and even music. A very pleasant morning's event. Hester's had done us proud (as expected) with the food and drink.

We are not sure where we go from here. Should we make it monthly and see if the numbers build? Should we start to move it around the patch - let someone from a distant corner of the 'West' organise one and start to get a network going? Should we possibly say that, No, we only attracted 4 people so there is not really a demand for this even though people talk a 'good game' on the net? My instinct is to sit back now and see if there is any ground-swell of support asking for a repeat and promising to come to another one. Watch, as they say, this space.

Slow News Day

365 this week has focused on local colour
in the form of gardens, planters and
hanging baskets. 

On the very few occasions where friends, knowing I have this blog running, and are thinking of starting one up, ask me for tips and suggestions, my main advice is always this. Make sure you have something to say - a story you need to tell or an opinion you are burning to express. The other side of that coin is, of course - if you have nothing to say then shut up. There is nothing worse to read than a blog post which says "I'm bored" or "Nothing much happened". I know how much easier it was to write a 'good' post while we were building the house than when I was in Kent working, walking the dogs, eating and sleeping.

This advice might also be followed up with instruction to stay within what ever rules you have set for yourself. Some of what I do is really part of someone else's story and it would feel wrong to go into any detail on stuff which they should be describing themselves or want to post in Facebook or Twitter or some other favoured medium. Or it involves friends who, for perfectly good reasons, do not want their picture or any details of their comings and goings put up on the internet for "everyone to see". It is not everyone's cup of tea.

Orange montbretia - grows like a weed in all the hedgerows
around here. 

Following my own advice, then, most of what I have done since the last post is out of bounds or, unless you want to hear about a dog needing ear drops or a cat needing wormer, is not exciting enough to make a post out of. Even my pictures this time are just 365 pics. So, I will keep this one nice and short and hope for a bit more inspiration by my next 'due date', Tuesday.

A lovely old tumble-down barn.

Good Luck Now

These pink-wrapped silage bales are done by farmers as part of
a campaign to raise awareness of breast cancer. They pay extra
for the wrap and the difference goes to the charity. You do not see
many round here but I spotted these tucked into the back of a
farm yard. Fair play that farmer. Proud of you. 

Farewell Clara Bow

Clara Bow cleaned up for inspection by potential buyers

Readers of my previous post will recall that I alluded to a "hard decision and a life-changing move" described in this one. If you've been anywhere near my Facebook or Twitter feeds you will know by now that this referred to a decision to sell, at last, the 2CV, my precious, loved and cherished friend of 13 years. It was quite a wrench; not quite losing an arm, but up there somewhere in 'momentous'. She has been a big part of my life, a major hobby, maybe a part of my identity; certainly more than "just a car".

Back in the UK, 13 years ago when we first bought the car, she had the UK registration of C 692 BOW and was quickly named "Clara Bow" after the 20's Hollywood silent-film starlet and party animal. If you can recall any of those flickery black and white films of damsels being tied down to railway lines by the villain and rescued in the nick of time, then that damsel was quite often Clara Bow. Her story since then has featured many times on this blog, adventures to far away (or not so far) 2CV Club camping events and 'rallies' but for the last 2 years she has languished in our car port on a SORN (Statutory off road notice) ticket.

I had struggled to get her through the emissions part of the Irish 'NCT' (MOT) test and got fed up with spending the €55 NCT fees (and €28 re-tests) so that by the time I sent the carb off for a complete re-con (€240) I had already decided that I would SORN her to save the tax (€199) and insurance (€400+). We were sure to find something else to spend the cash on, like fencing, livestock feed and similar. She had become an expensive hobby too far. I nursed a vague plan that if the law in Ireland ever changed (ha!) to make this 29 year old bus a "vintage" or "classic" it might be exempt from emissions tests and tax.

Off she goes with someone other than me at the wheel

Black mark for the insurance boys here, by the way. Readers may know different but we could find no insurer willing to cover a car older than 15 years at more than Third Party. We use FBD for the house and for the Fiat and they are problem free and excellent BUT would not play ball on the 2CV. Not even 'Fire and Theft' and certainly no fully comp. Even the 3rd Party premium was €400+. There was no sign of the cosy discounts I had used in the UK (Thank you "Footman James"!) for agreed car value and for limited mileage all agreed through the car club.

Disappearing down the lane and out of my life. 

Ah well, to cut a long story short, selling used cars here is commonly via the huge, on-line classified ads website DoneDeal.IE. You assemble a wee collection of photos of the car including detail shots of not-rusty foot wells, 'new' carburettor, clean tidy engine bay, sound chassis etc and upload them with an honest description of the car and the asking price. My ad quickly accumulated 400+ views and more than a dozen 'saves' and the same evening 3 buyers who wanted to come look. These included a couple of lads from west Cork, a 4 hour drive away!

The car actually sold to a man from Moate, down near Athlone (1.5 hours) who came up to look, decided it was good enough to be drive-able (I was cautioning use of a trailer/transporter or at least an 'A' frame or tow rope in case) and then came back yesterday with a garage-man chum who had green trade plates and could drive it legally (apparently!) even though it was untaxed, un-tested, uninsured (by me) and SORN'd. He checked it over, dribbled a bit more oil in, emptied a gallon of fuel into her from a handy Jerry-can, tested the lights and happily hopped in, keen to get going with my buyer in convoy in a very nice, new, big Citroen saloon (new DS?). My bloke handed over the cash (and, of course I gave him his "luck money" in return by local tradition) and we signed the paperwork and off they went. It was lovely to hear that unmistakable engine note 'fart' off down the lane and I was very envious that it was the garage guy about to enjoy the hour and a half drive back down to Moate, not me. Ah well.

A final view as Clara disappears over the brow.

So now I am one of those people who "used to own a 2CV" and when I look out of the kitchen window, there is no longer that blue, familiar 'nose' pointing back at me from the car port. I must comfort myself knowing that at least now I can replace the 'big' camera and buy some archery gear without it costing anything (ish). Also I have solved that niggling guilt thing that a 2CV should be out on the road giving that superb driving pleasure to someone. It should not be a museum piece gathering dust in someone's barn. Well, now mine, I hope, will. Enjoy her, man from Moate. He was good enough to text me later that day to say that they had got the car safely and seamlessly home and it was now resting in his garage. A garage? Luxury. Clara will not know herself!