Half Way There

New feature in the nearby village - this splendid stone unveiled
on Sunday.

I was posting last time about the Celtic Festival, 'Lughnasa', the start of the Harvest. This used to be held on the morning of August 1st but inevitably got hi-jacked by the Christian church and now moves with the 'last Sunday in July' and is famous locally for the huge (10,000+) "pilgrimage" hike up local Holy Mountain, Croagh Patrick or "The Reek" (764 m or 2507 feet in old money). Down in Kerry they have the popular 'Puck Fair' which has to do with crowning a wild goat caught for the occasion among all the more usual modern show/fete attractions.

Castlerea's brass band play us in. 

Here, you'll know that archery instructor Con, holds his Lughnasa Celtic Games but for our nearby village of Lough Glynn, a much more local and recent celebration. They chose that Sunday to unveil the new Centenary Garden, memorial to the signatories to the "Proclamation of the Republic". My UK friends may not know this piece of Irish history and, being no historian myself, I would hesitate to describe events here - if you would like to know more then go off and research Easter Rising or 1916 Ireland.

There was a good turn-out of local politicians. On the right is
one of our TDs (=MPs), Michael Fitzmaurice (Independent)

Very (and inadequately) briefly, a huge step in the journey of Ireland from British Colony to Independent State took place at Easter in 1916 when a small band of Irish men and women rose up under arms and took over some bits of Dublin, most famously the GPO building. From the steps in front of the GPO they proclaimed the new State and themselves as the 'provisional government'. Obviously there could be no hope of these few revolutionaries winning this one and the British Military crushed the uprising quickly enough including shelling the GPO with Howitzers.

The CE scheme which Liz helps to administer, gets the credit here

The 'rebels' surrendered and were carted off to jail. It is widely said that most of the country were not involved and thought that all the events far away in Dublin were just the acts of 'poets and dreamers'. Then, however, the Brits made a bad move and executed all 7 signatories to the proclamation plus 9 other leaders. Suddenly those "un-involved" folk were very much involved - these lads (and lasses) might be poets and dreamers but they are OUR poets and dreamers. A huge movement kicked off which put Ireland through dozens of events and stages, a War of Independence and a Civil War and the establishment of the new fledgling state in 1937. There, see! 100 years of very complex Irish history in 2 paragraphs. HUGE apologies to anyone reading this and shaking their heads in disgust and disbelief.

Chivers and Chip are getting curious

Anyway, what ever the case with the following events, this year is the Centenary of that Proclamation and our village did it proud. A marching band from Castlerea played it all in (and stayed around to play the hoisting of the tri-colour and the National Anthem), The MC made a short speech, the beautiful stone was unveiled, an aged Monseigneur did the blessing bit, 2 local school children read out the Proclamation itself, 2 of the 'Tidy Towns' committee ladies hoisted the flag and a local lass sung, very well and unaccompanied, popular local patriotic song "The Woodlands of Lough Glynn". An impressive turn-out lined both sides of the road (at least 200 including 5 local politicians) and clapped, cheered and sung the National Anthem appropriately, before the event broke up for photographs and a goodly spread of refreshments in a marquee set up at one end of the garden. We thoroughly enjoyed the event.

At the "smutty sausages" with Sue. 

Our other main event over that weekend was  a 'Sausage Fest' over at Sue and Rob's. They have a decent sized, powerful meat-grinder and sausage stuffing machine which we have been planning to use shared between us to make sausages and Sue had checked her freezer(s) and found a mountain of pork joints she had forgotten about.

We got quite good at it with time and produced
some quite professional looking 'links'.

If you have never done sausage making then you may not know what a rich vein of 'toilet' humour lurks there what with the need to keep everything wet and slippery, to carefully slide huge lengths of sausage skin up (we used natural gut, rather than the modern 'plastic' stuff) and then to draw full sausages off the end of the filler spout, squeezing the continuous bead of meat into individual sausage lengths. Well, there is if you have that 'naughty school boy' inside you trying to get out. We had a great laugh with it all, almost crying with laughter at some stages. Phnarr phnarr, tish tish. We got the job done though - pushing about 15-20 kg of mix through the two sizes of 'blade', making 2 different mixes (Cumberland and a Lincolnshire with added apple) and stuffing half of each into skins all in about 90 minutes. Teamwork.

Beef is the traditional Lughnasa fare.

We broke for a lovely lunch (Thanks, Sue and Rob!) of baked spuds, salad and (of course) both flavours of sausage, followed by 'Millionaire's Shortbread' and then had a masterclass in goat milking. I struggle with that, being unused to the small teats on a goat (compared to the good 4 hand fulls on a cow! ) but Rob assured us that they were as slow and rubbish as we now are originally. They used to take an hour for each of their 3 goats with the bucket getting sent flying by the animal's hoof, or Sue getting impatient with the goat. They now work as a team with one of them sat either side of the milkee doing just one teat each and taking no more than about 15 minutes per goat. The goats have also learned to love this process and stand co-operatively as long as there are a few bits of fresh carrot in their bucket of grub. They get about 9 litres from the 3 animals (total) per day.

365 Picture - a dog walker in Creevy townland.

But why my 'Half Way There' tag? In this house, July 31st may have been Lughnasa but for Liz and I it marked an important milestone on the 365 photographic project, our photographic record of the village's (and surroundings's) everyday life captured by local photographers. The project had launched on 1st Feb 2016, so 31st July was the half way point. It is going OK but it has, of course, had its ups and downs. Most importantly, we have not missed any days. We have a dozen or more contributors so we now have around 700 pictures. You can see some of these by clicking on the links to 365 "Year so far" from the village website (LisaculInfo.ie) where there are also a couple of thematic albums (Bio-diversity, the Village Play etc) up there on photo sharing website 'Flickr'. My role is as 'backstop' to make sure that there is at least one (preferably 3 plus) shot(s) for every calendar day, so I was delighted to pass the half way marker and start taking August pictures - it feels a bit like the run-in to the end, even though that (31st Jan 2017) is ages away and 700 more pictures.

Live 'Trad' Music.

Live music at the Village Inn, Lough Glynn

I have always loved Irish music. It is one of the reasons I love this country and its culture and people but I have always hankered after finding "real" music. Finding a music session laid on for tourists with the musicians paid for by the pub is easy enough; go to any pub in a decent sized town and you will see a chalk-board outside proclaiming "Live Music" or "Seisún ceoil anocht". We went to plenty when we were courting and living in the UK but back then when we came to Ireland I, at least, was a tourist. They were nice enough and I also went to a few proper concerts where Christy Moore, for example, was doing his thing but I still dreamed that one day I'd happen upon a genuine spontaneous 'session' in some pub or other. Anyone could turn up with their instrument(s) and just join in.

An army of instumentalists fill one end of the pub - flutists,
squeeze boxes, guitar, fiddle, bodhrán, penny whistles and
a banjo.

Well, we may not be quite 'spontaneous' (the pub announces them as being every Tuesday through July and August but "all musicians are welcome") and John Deere Bob tipped us off rather than us just happening upon them, but we have come pretty close at the Village Inn in nearby village, Lough Glynn. This being Ireland, they don't start till 9:30 pm but they do go on till 01:30 (on a legal bar extension, this is not some dodgy, clichéed "lock-in").

2 squeeze boxes and 2 penny whistles kicked it all off, the
banjo player turned up later.

The start is a bit low-key; at 10 pm when we got there the line up was just 2 squeeze boxes and 2 young ladies playing penny whistles but these were soon joined by a superb banjo player. Then at more like 11 pm all manner of other musicians arrived - flutes, a fiddle, a guitar, harmonica and bodhrán (hand drum). There were 12 of them in the end plus contributions from singers not at that end of the pub (which they filled). The format seemed to be that you arrive, unpack your instrument, the land lady brings you a drink, you wait for a pause to tune up and then just everybody knew all the tunes/songs. Nobody needed sheet music. One player would be invited to kick off a song or group of tunes and you could see everyone clock it, work out what their own part should be and dive in. On the livelier, foot-tapping stuff all 12 would be giving it their all, but then when a more sensitive passage was the order, players would pause or go really quiet to let the main featured instument do his/her thing

As well as the tunes (jigs, reels, airs etc), there were songs including one beautiful un-accompanied song by Landlady (Tina), "Bright Blue Rose" originally by Mary Black. Also what are known as "Recitations", a word which everyone seems to say with a kind of delicious loading and the announcement greeted by ironic cheers from the pub customers as a whole. These are long stories or doggerel poems on all manner of subjects, funny farming tales, long 'shaggy dog' stories about local characters or (last night) a moral tale about the dangers of over spending during the 'Celtic Tiger' years and having to pay it all back now we are back in the economic doldrums.

John Deere Bob and Liz enjoy a photo Liz has taken on her
phone. Sorry about the 'finger on lens' beginner error - this
was not my normal camera. 

There is even one old boy, a local character who likes to get up and do a rather random, clumpy dance, a bit of Irish Jig crossed with clog-dancing. The whole pub has taken this guy to heart and he is cheered, woop-wooped and wolf whistled as he launches into it full of beans but then gradually slows (he is quite an old lad) as he runs out of breath, till the 'muso's eventually take pity and come to a crescendo halt and he can go and sit down again. It is all excellent fun and and the atmosphere is definitely within that well known Irish must-have, "great craic".

We had actually been to a couple of these sessions a few years back, when we'd only just finished the build but then they seemed to dry up and we've not been able to find a similar event locally for ages. Well, now, for a few months, we can and JD Bob tipped us off, so we offered him a lift. Liz agreed to drive, so it even meant I could enjoy a couple of pints of Guinness (another reason for enjoying Ireland, though I've had remarkably few pints in the 3 years we have been here).

Red currants ready soon but we need to
fend off those turkeys.

Meanwhile, back at base, what else have we been up to. We have settled the new guinea fowl in with baby turkeys #1 and #2. #3 and #4 are thriving upstairs in their brooder crate with the 'electric hen' warming plate as 'mother'. We had another big pulse of interest by bees in the swarm box and I thought for a while that we might be getting that beekeeper's bonus, a free colony. There seemed to be enough bees going in and out to represent a new swarm moved in or at least some house-hunting scouts from elsewhere looking for a home. We have now looked inside during a lull and now think it is just opportunist robber-bees, robbing out the old, hard dry, set ivy-honey from the old frames with which I loaded the 'bait lure'. You should not really allow or encourage 'robbing' or your stronger hives may start attacking weaker colonies but we only have the one hive, so I am happy to leave the bees to clean up the old comb so that I can re-use it all spruced up.

Quick and cheerful 'Spanish Tortilla'. A long way from the
real McCoy but a good way of using up eggs. 

Then today we had a bit of a flap on when I saw a small but roaring cloud of bees coming up the 'allotment' moving south, away from the hive. Swarm on! I raced to fetch Liz and we donned bee suits as the bees moved up across the pond, past the car port and down towards the driveway. They went, we think, across the lane and into the feilds opposite but we do not now think that this was a bona fide swarm. It was too small - maybe 500-1000 bees in a spherical-ish cloud about 10 feet diameter. We think this might have been a new queen out on a mating flight - they will generally go a-wooing accompanied by a group of (hopeful) drones and a retinue of protective workers hoping to decoy any swallows or house-martins trying to pick off their queen. Safety in numbers.

Either way, it is an interesting development because our original queen is/was wing-clipped, so she aint flying no-where. We wonder has she faded or got lost and is now being replaced by a new queen, or possibly the hive is doing that natural, painless thing, a "supersedure", where the old and new queens are both allowed to lay eggs in the hive for a while, till the old, exhausted queen is 'removed' by the workers. Talking of new breeding females, we think we have now found our third breeding 'yow'. This lady comes with a young (June 2015) ram lamb at foot. We have agreed a price though we've not even seen the sheep yet. We just need to get that trailer tow-hitch fixed to the 'new' car, and we can go collect them. More on this story when it happens.

Hot Nuts?

We knew 'Tim' was sick, but did they need to drop him
outside the funeral parlour?

It was only  2 months ago (20 posts) that I was singing the praises of our ever trusty and reliable little Fiat Panda. How quickly things can change. 'Tim' seems to have taken exception to our plaudits and decided to stack up in very short order, a rake of problems which are starting to test our faith in 'him'. That's the contract, aul' fella. Stay reliable, good, cheap to run and free from faults and you are a 'keeper'; start turning all cantankerous on us and you get pensioned off.

It was a lovely (if hot) day so we decided to do a small job
in the front drive.... this turned into a couple of hours of
sweaty blackthorn-bashing.

The problems Tim decided to try our patience with were, in quick succession.....

The pale blue hatching shows the bit of 'view' which was
obscured by the blackthorn thicket. 

1. Drinking fair amounts of radiator water, leading us to suspect a head gasket leak but we could manage that (we thought) as 2 litres every month or so was do-able. If you read the last post you'll know we came unstuck on a mission to Roscommon and had to be recovered back to Lough Glynn.
2. First turn of the key in the morning, you expect the healthy "whinny" of a starter motor spinning the engine over, followed by the 'vroom' of a successful fire-up. We had a sudden change to the 'thunk' of a servo cutting in, followed by silence. It became a lottery whether you'd get the whinny or the 'thunk'. That problem seems to have gone away by itself. 
3. With the possible water leak fixed by the addition of the modern version of 'Radweld' - it is called 'Blue Devil' and costs an arm and a leg per bottle, so we assume it is not just Radweld re-badged. Touch wood, it seems to be working - we were off on a test drive - an hour or two round Charlestown, Knock and Ballyhaunis. It seemed fine but then in Ballyhaunis we became aware of a worrying metal-on-metal grinding from the front left corner. This seemed to be at wheel-speed rather than anything engine related, so I guessed brake pads (worn down?), discs, wheel bearings, drive shafts etc. We stopped to inspect but then drove home carefully and every time we picked up speed it went away. I took the car down to local tyres/exhausts/brakes place, Keith Revin in Castlerea and they, today have confirmed my brakes thing, so we are into new discs and pads on both front corners. 
4. My 'Hot Nuts' title I will explain later.

It was St John's Eve, so we were allowed
 to burn the blackthorn branches. 

As a result of all this we have, as I said, started to distrust young 'Tim' and are quietly looking for a possible replacement. That is not easy in Ireland at the moment because, with the economy being banjaxed, everyone is hanging onto their old cars and not replacing them, so there are few good used cars on the market. We want to come up to a few years newer but with basically the same size and style of car; not necessarily a Panda. We are on 04 reg and worth about €1500 and we are looking for maybe an 09 or a 10 reg. We have a couple of local dealers looking on our behalf, both of whom sucked the ends of their pencils and muttered stuff about having to tap up their Dublin contacts. Dublin seems to be the place to go at present, if you are looking for a used car. Out here in the sticks it is a used-car desert. Obviously we could have done without this spend just now, but hey, cars do not last for ever and the Fiat has done 11 years and 7 of those were very good ones for us.

Meanwhile, the weather has been kind and 2 days back we found ourselves hungry for some heavy duty gardening. We decided to tackle a thicket of blackthorn growing just inside the gate on the left which was growing out from the hedge and obscuring our view from the front gate up under the larch trees. It was sweaty work but, being St John's Eve it was the only day it is legal in the Republic to have a bonfire, so we could look forward to a nice relax in the evening burning all that while cradling a cool beer or wine. We used the trailer as a big wheel barrow to move it all round to the East Field. A very pleasant afternoon's 'serious' gardening.

A chamomile lawn? Well, maybe not.

We are always amazed and delighted by the way that bits of ground, paddled to a brown, bare muddy oblivion during the 'wet season' manage to recover in spring, greening over and turning us back to respectable 'lawn'. This is generally good old grass but this year, for no reason we can see, the brown mess inside the goose orchard gate has come back as (I think) 'stinking chamomile' (Anthema cotula), the feathery leaved 'daisy' which we called "Stinking Mayweed" in Sussex. Now, I know this is not the real 'lawn chamomile' of Mary Wesley fame. That is a sport of this plant found and developed in the 30's called 'Treneague' which never goes above 6 inches and does not flower. These guys, if I did not mow them off, would easily top 24 inches and flower like mad, but I am enjoying the fact that I have a 'Chamomile Lawn' of sorts.

Male turkey, 'Tom' caught NOT displaying. Liz
jokes that it is like catching your Dad in his
pyjamas. 

In the birds dept we are not holding out much hope for the broody geese who are now through the likely times for the known-start-date eggs but with no apparent result. The Elderberry Buff too, seems to want to come off the eggs for an hour or more at a time, sometimes twice a day, for a dust bath and a wander about scratching. feeding, drinking. She is always back on them sitting tight by evening, so we can lock her up, but that seems a lot of not sitting to us for a successful incubation. The turkey eggs in the incubator, we don't know after the long power cut where we tried blankets and mugs of boiling water but we are not sure we kept them warm. Tom, our turkey cock has now relaxed here and does not spend all his waking hours in full display mode

Lovely mugs from our craft-genius neighbour, Carolyn. 

But those 'hot nuts', I hear you ask. Just an amusing ribald comment by a garage guy. The 'metal on metal' grinding noise at the front of the Fiat today turned out to be badly worn (maybe 'bare' would be a better word) brake pads which, even if you use the brakes a bare minimum will still get a lot hotter through friction than brake-pad on metal, on the short run to Castlerea. The keen young lad who stepped up to do the investigation rattled them off the wheel studs with his air-gun and then dropped the first one out of the socket into the palm of his hand.

New tyres for the trailer (which has 2CV
wheels) have to come from my old chums,
2CV specialists ECAS in the UK. 

The shout of "OWWWW! They're flippin' ROASTing!" echoed round the garage and soon attracted all his colleagues over to try them out and join in the fun and banter. The lads were all impressed by the heat off them and, being the kind of place it is, they were all happily riffing on me having 'very hot nuts'. Ah well, maybe you had to be there. Anyway, the good news on that one is that they can get the replacement discs and pads by Monday and if I show up at 08:30-ish that will give the nuts a chance to cool down by the time they open (at 09:00) and they will sort me out as a first job for €125 all up. There's handy.

Silence of the Lambs

Today the lambs went off on their final journey, bound for the slaughterhouse. It's never a happy day and it's one we dread but we cope with it and readers will know our arguments around the ethics of this stage of sheep keeping and lamb production so I wont go into that now.

This time it nearly came off the rails but for a very valid and unrelated reason. Our 'sheep-man', Kenny was back from his broken collar bone, he had inspected the sheep and declared them finished and was all lined up to help us catch them, load them into his trailer and haul them for us to the butcher, Ignatius G. Then a young lad and farmer he knows over in Mayo was tragically killed in a farm accident involving silage machinery over the weekend and he was suddenly tangled in the funeral and in helping the wife left behind with three young children and a farm to run on her own. He was, understandably, suddenly all 'up in the air' in his planning. I was waiting on him Sunday afternoon till he texted me saying we'd do it today (Monday), and then waiting on him again till 11 am when he texted to say he'd have to let me down today.

I sympathise - it can't be easy but my butcher had now been waiting all morning for my sheep and now it was 11 am and I had no transport. I phoned Ignatius to apologise and he saved the day by offering to nip up and collect the sheep in his own trailer. I met him in Lough Glynn and guided him home. He reversed the trailer into the top end of the cattle race forming a cul-de-sac and Liz and I were able to quickly call the sheep up from the far corner of the field and then bribe them across the yard and into the race, and then trailer, with a bucket of food.

That, specifically, is the bit of this job I don't like; it feels like such a betrayal. The sheep have only known this calm, gently spoken, quiet human to be the bringer of food and water and the tickler of ears. They have come to trust me and quite often nuzzle around my legs as we walk, in a group, to the food troughs. Suddenly, after 4 months I am opening the gate wide and encouraging them across the gravel of the yard where they have never been and into a trailer which they may only vaguely recall from the day they were delivered. They trust me though they are a bit confused and nervous.

Lichen grows vigorously on the hawthorn. 

Then with a creak the trailer gates and doors are closed and they will not see me again. My job is done, my responsibilities towards them are realistically over. Liz and I hang onto the almost cop-out story that we did our bit to the best of our ability and gave the sheep the best possible life while they were here, but the betrayal thing still nags a bit. I prefer the spring time when everything is new and young and has a future. These autumn 'harvests' can be quite trying. Now we just have to get used to NOT being shouted at by hungry (or at least cheeky!) sheep every time we show our faces in the yard or return from a trip in the car. The Silence of the (departed) Lambs?

Brawn cooling.

Talking of 'harvests' we are some way into processing the pig products. We have 'done' the brawn - an unavoidably gruesome process which I will let you look up if you need to know what I mean. It involves a lot of cheek meat. We also roasted the pig's ears as a treat for the dogs. These are now gone, scrunched and schlurped deliciously as only dogs know how. Also in process are the pig's trotters. This is an old fashioned recipe which recalls jellied eels and other less-affluent city market stalls but which was much loved by Liz's Dad.

Some Tete a Tete daffs put in an early bid for Spring 

We have tried it before but not really knowing what we were at we produced an almost inedible, tough, flavourless gelatinous 'ick'; not one of our most successful cooking efforts. However we now have "the POARK book" and have found a nicer looking recipe involving a mango chutney glaze with tomato purée, cider vinegar and garlic so watch this space.

In the tubs out front (actually old 'cauldrons' we inherited from the TK days) we notice we have tete-a-tete daffs shooting out of the ground already ("Well! That's not Right!" objects John Deere Bob in tones that suggest we are cheating in some way; he also says this about the fact that we still have that goose laying eggs in December).

Sheep movement paperwork

With the sheep now gone from the field we can invite mini-horse Cody back to use our field for the winter. He's been confined to Carolyn's yard since he took on one of our ram lambs, but has now pretty much lawn-mowed his way through all their grass, so he's welcome to our acre and a half of sheepy aftermath.

A Proper Session

Monday 16^th sees us all mainly ‘swerving hard work’. It feels like that kind of a day.  We played indoors with Mum and Dad on the computers, catching up with the finances, whacking some kitten pictures up on Flickr and cracking off a soda bread loaf and a couple of yeast-bread loaves, breaking in Dad’s new loaf-tins. Mum and Dad declare these breads “Very nice”. The soda bread is so delicious they have eaten most of it already.

Mum was maybe a tad more productive, constructing a couple of IKEA flat-pack CD rack/shelf units and Domestic-Goddessing bathroom and downstairs. Other than the indoor stuff, Dad was supervising chooks who DISGRACED THEMSELVES by climbing onto one of the raised beds (only the one with Dad’s seedling leeks in it!!!!) and laying it waste with their scratching. Dad’s own fault really - we've been saying for a while we should fence them "out" of that bit. He even have the wire sitting in the shed, but heh, mañana and all that.

As Dad describes it, the campaign to “try to make the 6 year old Westie bitch, Deefer, (that’s me!) learn to love the new kittens. Deefs is a natural "only child", (says Dad) fiercely jealous of anything that might come between her and her Dad, and also with a divil of a killer instinct when it comes to vermin and prey animals. We have worked our way through new (cat-friendly)dog-Coco, Charolais cattle and then chickens, all of which she got used to, bored by, and is now hearing our instructions not to kill. She's now on rabbits which are still worth a chase round the outside of the run and a shout at though the wire and we, foolish humans, have now introduced another prey species and this one IN THE HOUSE!” That sounds about right, Dad!

 
“There is no doubt at all that Deefer” continues Dad, “left to 'play' with kittens unsupervised, would do that shake-rat thing and we'd have two corpses in a few seconds. We are therefore trying to give her 30 minute sessions with her on the lead in the room where she can look, sniff, hear us trying to instruct her and see us doing "we love this kitten... it is a member of the family... it is a pet... part of our pack... it is not vermin" at her”.

On Tues 17^th July, the main event is undoubtedly that Mum and Dad find, at last, a proper Irish Traditional music session. This is happening (and does each Tuesday night) in the Village Inn pub in Lough Glynn and was told about to us by John Deere Bob who goes to it most weeks even though he is Teetotal. It was, after 25+ years of searching and chasing down tips, finally a real traditional session, not some kitsch laid on for tourists and not a formal 'gig' where you go to see a specific band or person. It’s just a motley collection of blokes and a couple of young girls in a pub, grouped at one end of the bar behind a balustrade thing. It started off fairly 'formal' (probably because the team from the “Comhaltas” National Archive were there video-ing), so each of the regulars got their turn on camera if they wanted - as I said, mainly old boys dressed in dark suits, some with old venerable hats on (flat caps, but also a baseball hat), ties, black shoes and in one case wooden soled clogs. One had a superb Dubliners style bushy beard and a pink, Father Christmas face. The two gals were young teenage local 'celebs' having won the Roscommon Fleadh (Music Festival) with their squeeze box playing, but were demon penny whistlers too. As well as music there are “Recitations”.

The 'recitations' were something to behold, tales of missing home and eventually returning, tales of ganders which were no good at stud, tales of some Cockney trying to fool 'Paddy' in London that his ass (as in donkey) was actually his brother etc. The musical group even indulged a couple of local 'characters' ("a bit-een simple" was how one of them was described by our own John Deere Bob after the event) by allowing them to sing or 'clog dance'. To be fair, one of them was a good singer and parodied a well know song by bringing in local JCB contractor Noel R (Our own “Poetic Plumber”) who everybody knew and changed the lyrics to suit all the local landmarks, towns and pubs. The other was a bit of a dire singer and his clog dancing was the subject of Mum reporting to have been  "in awe" when describing it to friends. Loud, certainly but having a rather loose relationship with the rhythm of the reel. 

After the National Archive people packed away their kit it all went a bit more random and the group was joined by several more including extra bodhrán players, spoons and a bloomin' good banjo player, young lad. Mum and Dad report that it was just an absolutely meltingly brilliant event which they wouldn't have missed for anything.

Also on that day, Dad strings a length of chicken wire across the kitchen garden to fence the chooks out of the raised beds. He also clears the felled elder round to the shredder heap. This is now getting rather big and ‘we’ need to hire a shredder to process it through into suitable path material for the kitchen garden, between the raised beds.

Working Dog

On the 28^th, out of nowhere we get a day with some sunny bits in between the rain showers, and it's actually quite warm. For Dad it’s a chance to break in the enormous felling axe, splitting the 'rounds' of the sawn up Leylandii and generating oodles of nice logs for when Summer's over and it's wet and windy again (!)

Local old boy John Deere Bob seems to have adopted Mum and Dad as new residents worth cultivating and is now our most frequent visitor. His only 'car' is the old John Deere tractor which he put-puts around the village on, into the local bigger-village (Lough Glynn) to the Post Office, and into nearby town Ballaghaderreen for his shopping. Mum and Dad are working away mid morning-ish and we hear him chugging up the lane and we pause to see will he turn in or is he off to see near-neighbour Una, one of his other tea-stops. If he slows and turns up the drive, Mum nips to get the kettle on and find the fig rolls. Bob parks the tractor in front of the house and shuffles in in his farmboots and black Thinsulate hat, sitting in 'his chair', settling down for a good aul' chin wag.

He's a real charmer with twinkly eyes, a quiet soft voice and a lovely laugh. He has a deep knowledge of things local, things rural and Irish History. He loves to compare notes on history books with Mum , who is also versed in these things (no good to Dad! Even UK history whizzes over his head like pensions and VAT, barely clipping the ends of his hairs!). They talk of the Civil War and the Uprising, and of T.D.s (= M.P.s) and politics, constituency changes, but also of local stuff like the 1901 and 1911 census data etc. He usually passes comment on whatever jobs Mum and Dad are doing. In Dad’s case today, he gives us some tips on how/when to use the splitting axe and what types of wood to burn in the range and on the fire. He checks our progress on extracting the horse-drawn hay-rake and tells us all about the soil and the 'sausage-turfs' we found there. He tells us of raised beds and vegetable growing techniques. Then he goes away again, checking his watch and deciding to chug gently on, on his rounds on the John Deere. Lovely old bloke!

Mum and Dad head for county town Roscommon to explore, just because they've never been. The town centre has an Easons (good book shop) but not much else to attract them back - rather too many pubs, clothes shops, betting shops and boarded up abandoned lets. It smacks of a place where the landlords did not react quickly enough to the dip and as a result now have nobody paying them rent instead of letting the poor hard pressed shop keepers away with reduced rent. No. We will keep passing through as it's on our way to the In-Laws, but we'll stick to the 'by-pass' and the business park bits.

There is a lovely patch of sunshine in the evening, so we're out on the new (concrete) sun deck to watch the sun sink.

Friday 29^th sees us up early. Mum is urgent, up-and-dressed by crack of sparrow's and saying "I want go to a garden centre NOW!" She'd found a promising one out Boyle way (Co. Rosco still but only just) called Ardcarne, 25 mins away in the car. It turned out to be wonderful and Mum and Dad rattled gently through €80+ in fairly short order taking in some special offers on fruit bushes and the "knackered and half dead" racks (They aren't called that by the shop, but Mum and Dad delight in buying unpromising plants cheap knowing they can rescue them due to being good experienced gardeners. New and properly priced stuff also found its way onto the trolley - a dahlia, more roses, some Iberis sempervirens, a yellow flag iris for the bit we'll leave boggy and various seeds and bulbs. All this retail therapy is a happy result of buying a garden which is part chest high brambles, nettles and weeds, and part former cattle yard but in no part clean cultivated tilth.

Mike the Cows drops by with his young son Fintan to nosey on our progress and talk lumber-jacking and logging, fences, the village, holidays, Dublin Prices, getting his kids to a Westlife concert and all manner of other subjects. Mum, Dad and Mike looked a right aul' group of rustics putting the world to rights; Mike in his farmer boots, torn jeans and big ol' beer belly, Mum in battle-scarred waxed jacket and green wellies and Dad in even more disreputable Barbour 'gillet', painty, buildery tan-coloured jeans and (gasp) sandals and socks (highly illegal but Dad was in a rush to get out there). Mike can talk for Ireland but he's always a good laugh.

And so to Mum's big long meaty ribs and noodly stir-fry. The red wine's called "Working Dog". Last night we were not, for once, working like dogs.