Turning on and tuning in in Ireland

We are in gracious, pretty DubIin after a smooth crossing from Cornwall. I’ve come to love these great car ferries that trundle us across the seas, even more, I think, now that I’ve been in a helicopter that transformed a three hour voyage into a fifteen minute trip.  On the ferry it is like being back in the womb, gently rocked and with a choice of sleeping or reading or snacking from the café with the sea all around.  By the time you arrive you are properly gestated.

Speaking of reading, I have downloaded on to my kindle a book highly recommended by son Mungo.  It is about psilocybin and LSD research – how it was once respectable – indeed  Bill Wilson, founder of AA wanted to explore LSD use for helping alcoholics in the 1950s. Timothy O’Leary, however, scotched all that when he urged young people to “turn on, tune in and drop out” just when the US government wanted them to head off to Vietnam. The medical benefits of psychedelics were outweighed by its challenges. The book is a fascinating read  and suggests at one point that the mind and the ego as they mature stop having naive encounters with life but use a sort of shorthand developed through experience.  I am reminded of a folk rhyme

“There were three jovial huntsmen

As I have heard men say

And they would go ahunting

Upon St Davids Day

 [……..]

And all the night they hunted

And nothing could they find

But the moon agliding

Agliding in the wind

The first he said it was the moon

The second he said nay

The third he said it was a cheese

With half o’t cut away

The first huntsman is a proper adult with narrow adjusted vision and gets it right, the second is probably drunk but the third is open to myriad possibilities like a child.

When you travel, I think, you are inevitably like the third huntsman with the laces of the mind all unloosed.  The old saw that “travel broadens the mind” is actually spot on.  I experienced this in an uncomfortable way when we stopped at the Wexford Irish Agricultural Museum, partly because we couldn’t get into our air bnb until after two o’clock.  Before continuing I must state that the only pharmaceuticals that had passed my lips that day were my old lady’s cocktail of medicaments. No gin, no magic mushrooms.  But perhaps because of reading the Pollen book’s personal accounts of tripping my mind was open to anything.

The first place we went to was a barn full of old carts of all sorts – some with low sides for tossing potatoes in, some adapted to carrying churns or hay and one with elegant metalwork and benches for people.  But what caught my attention was the great wooden curved shafts that all of them had for attaching the horse.  I stroked one shaft  and tried to lift it. I couldn’t and suddenly I was overcome with pity for all the horses that had been enslaved by these carts, heavy when empty and how much heavier when loaded with people with whips  and potatoes in the back.  I remembered the Aesop’s fable that I read so often to Ethan from the pop up book. How the horse was tricked by man into servitude. It seemed so sad.

But the next room was worse.  It was full of farming implements - blades and prongs and things like corkscrews for grubbing survival out of the grim earth.  There was a huge stone bead with a chain through it for “crushing clods” I couldn’t even lift its handle.  The pity of life before petrol.

I think if there had been even one effigy of a jolly ploughman with his pitchfork it might have seemed different but I pressed on feeling great sorrow for the past.

The next gallery contained the story of the 1845 Potato Blight which starved a million and sent a million more in ”coffin ships” to Canada and the States.  There were three bowls of potatoes which Grant later said he thought were fake. ‘I didn’t touch them” he said.  I didn’t either but to me they looked real.  For a start they were sprouting a bit, which added a melancholy touch.  The first bowl was stacked as high as my down jacket in its pouch. It represented the pile of potatoes a child would eat every day The second and third piles were as big as compacted sleeping bags and represented the adult rations.  The consumption seemed enormous until one realised there was probably

next to nothing else.  And when the potatoes rotted the bowls would’ve been empty.

It was an excellent museum and my trip through it taught me pity and humility but it was troubling too.

When we went to the archeological museum next day I double knotted the laces in my brain.  There were paths there down which I had no intention of travelling - namely the bronze age bog man who lay in his glass case – only his squashed top half with a little ear all crinkled like mine and real hair.  He’d been murdered three times – strangled, stabbed and bashed on the head. I chose not to care about him. It all happened so long ago and god knows why.  I also got slight gold fatigue from beholding artefacts from umpteen hoards.

But Dublin city is as fair as the song says and I’ll save her for tomorrow.

A perhaps foolish (and Scilly) boat trip

We are on the Scilly Islands (or Isles of Scilly as the locals prefer them to be called).   The main Island is called St Mary's, and today I am going "off island" to visit two other Scillies, Bryher and the abandoned Samson. Grant doesn't fancy it so I go down to the quay alone. It is a cloudy, windy day and we cut across the dark waster on our small boat. Rather to my alarm everybody except me gets off at our first stop, Bryher, and I go on alone to Samson, now the home of only seabirds. The boatmen seem less perturbed than I am at the thought of leaving a solitary old lady on an abandoned island for four hours. "What if it rains" I ask. "It probably won't" says the deckhand as he gives me a helpful shove over the side of the black dinghy on to the sandy beach.

I have to say there is a lovely Robinson Crusoe moment when the boat pulls away leaving you alone. After tramping around for a bit, I climb up to a a cluster of rocks and am, all at once, so glad to be here with the sea all around and the wild flowers. It is beautiful with crying gulls and the whisper of waves below. I decide to write longhand in my diary.

"There are pathetic lichen covered remains of cottages that were inhabited until the 1850s when poverty drove their owners off. They used to live on pilchards when they could get them. The next leasee decided deer were a better bet and built a long white rock wall enclosure but the deer got out and disappeared, they say. Where to?  The sea? Now shoulder high bracken fills the deer meadow.  It is windy here but not forlorn because of all the flowers, foxgloves, wild orchids, stinking iris and coltsfoot. Thor ground is slightly spongey and I wish I had more than sandals between me and it. I tumble once and lie looking up at the sky through a web of fern leaves. The clouds are darkening above but it feels protected down here amongst the vegetation.

I had my Man Friday moment after about two hours of tramping only there were ten of them, laconic Dutchmen who'd come in canoes. I think they were a bit sorry to see me too. There are prehistoric tombs here.  What on earth did they do in the mesolithic times, I wonder, and then think not much more than what I'm doing now which is very peaceful and blessed.

It's coming close to pick up time and I'm now hoping that I'm at the beach the boatmen said they'd pick me up. I'm a bit disoriented after all the walking and the tide has changed the look of the place. Cleverly I spot a footprint and put my sandal in it and it fits so I relax a bit. Appparently Harold Wilson meanly once held a press conference here so the camera men would have to walk a wobbly plank with all their gear, to film him. Lady Wilson died this week at a hundred and something. They both lived on the Scillies in the end.

There have been heaps of shipwrecks here. In the museum you can see bits and pieces  that have been picked up and one cove is called Bead Cove because you can still find beads in the sand from one laden ship. From where I am sitting at low tide you can see pointy black rocks all around. One small mistake in a storm and that would be it. The great Torrey Canyon tanker was a more recent casualty and had to be bombed in the end to get rid of it.  Meanwhile the Cornish coast and its birds got all oily.  The museum has all sorts of evocative stuff including a heap of little clay pipes that even children smoked.

The Scillies attract some families with children and buckets and spades but it's overwhelmingly old people who like to come here. They are unperturbed by shortfalls in the internet and the lack of a disco or two and relish the serene, even sedate ambiance of the little grey cottages streets. We had a very good meal in a hotel last night and every table was full. Between us silver haired lot we must have clocked up tens of centuries of living.  We were a merry bunch just the same and chatted to each other before G and I set off up the hill to Bylet, our B and B. The others were residents and paying two hundred and fifty pounds a night.

A word on B and Bs so far. Their breakfasts are all magnificent. I had haddock and eggs today.  Each place, however has its own feel. Penzance Whiteways was a little melancholy with plastic flowers and a kind landlady, widowed and wanting to retire but unable to sell the pace even though the price is a steal - two hundred thousand pounds.  Penzance itself seems a little hard pressed - several charity shops and perhaps not so many tourists. Our B and B in St Mary's has fresh flowers everywhere and seems a happy place.

I feel very windburn andI fancy a little snooze in the heather out of the wind but I don't want to miss my boat. I have a can of water with a resealable tat. No plastic bottles any more....."

I got quite anxious when there was no rescue five minutes after the time arranged. Could there be more than one person with my foot size? Is there indeed another beach where I ought to be? Is 999 what you ring in an emergency in the UK?  It always used to be.  Then - praise the lord, the little black dinghy hoves into view to take me Bryher for an hour before going home to St Mary's.  Despite the lack of sun my face is burning hot.  I had a marvellous cup of tea and a crab sandwich in a cafe on Bryher and felt rather pleased with everything before crowding into the little bouncy boat to go back to St Mary's.

Getting to Pembroke, a helicopter and High Noon on the longest day

I have just visited the Menywod which is Welsh for Ladies.  We are in Tesco’s in Pembroke before setting off for Ireland.  It’s a four hour journey so I pray for a fair wind.

Yesterday was the summer solstice and the longest day, which was just as well because we had the longest journey from The Scillies.  It began rather thrillingly with a fifteen minute helicopter ride back to Lands End.  We were the only passengers and felt like royalty. We gazed out of the huge windows on to all the little Scillies inhabited and not inhabited and I tried to take a photo or two but they had the zebra syndrome of being exactly what you’d expect so I snapped my I  pad shut and just enjoyed the dark sea surface with its puffs of white and thought I wouldn’t last long in that, lifejacket notwithstanding.  Then I whipped the I pad open again because I saw the helicopter’s shadow on the sea which seemed bold and a little bit mysterious.

We landed gently and all too soon and were shuttled back to our car. I tripped and fell on the way out and G said “Fuck” sympathetically as I lay like a drunken old biddy in the gutter and the driver offered to get his first aid box out. I tentatively rose and breathed “No need” thanking my stars for good bones and vowing to get lighter before coming another cropper.

The drive was long and tedious.  We had to get to Pembroke Dock where we were overnighting.  Some kind of pop festival had choked all the lanes on the motorway and there was a lot of stop starting.  With the help of the satnav I gave G progress reports.  ETA was 8pm but gradually deteriorated.  We got sick of the motorway and decided to go to Cheddar – G for the cheese and me for the Gorge.  Both lived up to expectations and we obediently followed the Satnav as it took us from there down winding roads through farming country.  Our ETA was now 9.30 and we rang our B and B which went by the alarming name of High Noon. A kind and slightly accented voice was sympathetic and said it was OK.

The Welsh houses round here have a secretive look. Little windows and flat inexpressive facades, but High Noon was quite different and did look a bit like the wild west with coloured bulbs hanging from the eves and our anxious landlady waving from the front.  (We were getting tired and had made a few false turns – one of which entailed removing sandbags to get through) It was ten o’clock by then but the gentle Israeli couple who ran the place made us a cup of tea and the bed we slept in was the best I’ve ever known.  In the morning we had a middle Eastern breakfast with pita bread and luscious eggs in cumin and tomato sauce.

There remained the mystery of why High Noon?  “It was the previous owners”, said Neri.  “There was a big picture of   Gary Cooper but we took that down.”  Instead they have an enormous fishtank full of little tropical fish and one big one which kisses the glass from time to time like it's posing for a selfie  “What’s that one called?” I ask.  “Oh it’s a cleaner fish” said Neri’s husband, a nut brown, kind man .   “We must probably pay him”  I felt sad leaving High Noon with its Picasso prints and merry lights.  It had seemed very unWelsh.

Bells,Boatwatching and all the Volunteers

Sarah is eager to take me up to her bell tower and I am keen to go.  The idea of small Sarah swinging ecstatically on a bell rope like the Hunchback of Notre Dame is delightful. We get up early because we are going to meet John, the Master of the bell tower and another bell ringer  called Joan, who together will “ring up” the bells for an afternoon wedding.  I have no idea what this means but count myself lucky to be about to witness such a thing

It is a bit of a dreary morning with a nasty little wind blowing. “I hope the bride’s got her veil nailed down” says Sarah as we pass through the strange gates into the churchyard.  There are two gates under a little roof, each of which has a corner chopped out so as to accommodate a long slab of stone with a cross on it.  “For the coffin bearers to rest while the mourners settle themselves down in the church” says Sarah.  She also points out a leaning gravestone with a poem about the three year old beneath who died in agony following the ingestion of a stone.  The grass is tall and damp and we hasten through into the church.  In a little while Joan arrives and opens the tower door for us. There is a narrow circular stone staircase that winds round and round with a rope for holding on to.  We go first to the room with the ropes hanging down and charts of numbers. Apparently it costs 140 pounds to have bells at your wedding – twenty each for the bell ringers and twenty for the watcher who climbs a stepladder and peers out of a little window in the rope room ready to signal when the bride is near and the bells need to tumble. After this we go up more little triangular steps to see the bells themselves, six of them sober and dark in two rows.   Somehow they looked moody and lonely to me, and a far cry from the joyous pealing they will be putting out in the afternoon.  The last bit of the climb was to the roof which was very windy and commanded a view, very useful for spotting enemy incursions in the warlike days of yore.

We return to the rope room to wait for the Master, John, and then Joan gets a phone call to say he’s overslept and will be half an hour late.  It turns out he’s a member of the volunteer First Responder team and was called out at 4am and fell into a deep sleep after the emergency.  First responders go to anyone in trouble in the village and assess whether to call an ambulance from Plymouth, which has to cross the Tamar on the ferry if required.  Millbrook seems to run seamlessly because of all its volunteers doing this and that.

When John comes he’s full of sparkle despite (or maybe because of) his night of drama and I get to see the preparation of the bells two by two.  Alas there is no leaping about a la Quasimodo but it is fascinating none the less. The purpose of the exercise is to get the bells stuck in an  upside down position all ready to drop and ring out when the bride comes.  The two ringers have the ropes looped round their hands and with each pull the bell gets higher and they let a bit of rope go.  Both ringers seem to do their work effortlessly, just bending their knees and pulling the velvety part of the rope called the sally along with the hempen bit.  The sound makes me feel slightly tearful, strange and ancient and obedient to the ropes. Once locked into position the ringers rest and we go down the steps to the bottom.  Since we arrived the flowers for the wedding have come and each pew has a little bunch on the end.

Our next mission is to visit the Coastwatch Station high on a clifftop, also run by volunteers (including Sarah of course)  Their job is to keep a sharp eye on all boats and ships visible out at sea, record their names or descriptions and co-ordinate rescue if anything happens to anyone.  There’s a helicopter, which can be called in to winch up casualties.  I never know how to do justice to views but this one is vast and the little boats are tiny as ladybirds. There is a magnificent telescope and a radar to help with identification.

“Ah Sarah” says the woman volunteer in her smart uniform. “Thank you so much for the spoons. They raised twenty pounds!” It seems she’s also something important in the Women’s Institute where Sarah is giving a talk on our Great Aunt Bobby who was a policeperson in a munitions factory in WWII.  Sarah takes the opportunity to report the closure “until further notice” of the village doctor’s surgery and dark suspicions are exchanged. In the event it turns out that some mad person had more than once put superglue in the lock of the place.  I comment to Sarah about how news gets about.  “Yes,” she says it’s predigital.  You don’t need the internet to know what’s going on here” Everyone is their own carrier pigeon.

The last thing we do this day is attend the village hall for the film club’s monthly movie which is “Filmstars don’t die in Liverpool”.  It’s all about a love relationship between a young man and a fifty plus actress. Most of us audience are into our seventies and like the film a lot.

I’m impressed by all the facets of this village life that I have been privy to but hope Sarah behaves herself because there’s no question that everyone will know if she doesn’t.

Millbrook village, bees and Grenfell's anniversary

My sister Sarah has found an amazing place to live. It is in Cornwall – just - on what is called the Rame peninsula.  Devon lies across the wide Tamar river and you can gaze across at the naval metropolis of Plymouth. with its warships and tall buildings. Sarah points out three proud towers, clean and white with contrasting bands of primary colours.  It is just a year since the terrible Grenfell Tower fire in London.  “That’s the same cladding” says Sarah. “It’s got to come off” I wonder how the residents sleep at night especiallynow as the heartrending  programs go to air on this tragic anniversary but apparently there are ferocious fire precautions in place and much better ways of escaping.

 On this side however Millbrook village is all drystone walls  and little cottages and hedgerows full of foxgloves and meadowsweet.  One curious thing though; about mid morning there is a distant rattatat of gunfire as the naval recruits train on a range nearby.

Sarah takes me on a tour of the village and we buy strawberries and bread and clotted cream, spreading our purchases around the few shops, each of which is a cornucopia of gourmet items amongst which I see pickled winkles and Cornish new potatoes alongside old fashioned Bisto powder for thickening your gravy.

Sarah is especially proud of the Rame Centre which is tiny and staffed by volunteers (including her) and manages to combine a tiny library, a twice weekly post office, a credit union, an Internet cafe, an outlet for local art and craft and a grape vine bearing useful information about where everyone is.  We want to see the house Sarah is hoping to buy and need the key from the estate agent. “Oh, he’s going to a funeral this afternoon but you might just catch him…”

We go to a black bee apiary where I learn that there’s actually no need to find and kill an ageing queen before installing a new one because the bees themselves deal with the problem and I hear about treatment for the verroa mite which England has but not yet Australia.  I foolishly leave my handbag behind there with my passport in  it and Sarah calls me a wally and drives me back to get it.  I say “Praise bee” to the apiarist

but he doesn’t laugh.

On Saturday we are going to the village hall and today we are going up the bell tower where Sarah is learning to ring the changes.  She says its good for the tummy muscles. Rather her than me.

Backtracking a bit to Malvern.  Before we left we had arranged to meet brother Michael for a meal at The Cottage in the Woods,  known for its marvelous views of the three counties that stretch out below the Malvern Hills.  I’d been there before with mum and the food, though expensive had been top class and matched the crisp quality of the starched napkins and salubrious air. We wanted something special because the three of us had not met for years. The napkins etc were just as was, but the food  was pretentious and awful. We didn’t really mind as we were there to talk but even talking , it turned out, was problematic.  Michael told us afterwards that a gentleman at the next table had leaned over to him “Keep it down a bit” he’d said. I wish I’d heard so I could have been very rude to him.  There is nothing worse than a place so up itself and inhospitable.

I was sad to say goodbye to my dear friend Judy and have learnt now not to refer to the probability of never meeting again. Anyway who knows.

A birth, seasons and getting older

 There is a moment on my return to England when I first feel the English air.  It is usually happens on entering the grim walkway coming off the plane where there’s no aircon and the raw breeze sidles in through the joins in the tube.  It is  cool and moist and conjures up the life I abandoned all those years ago. I wonder if all migrants feel there’s just a whisker of treachery in swapping countries when they come back under a new passport.

Anyway it has been a wrench this time to leave Sydney because a little grandson, Callan, was born just a week and two days ago and to leave him in his sweet newbornness seems a shame.  But our six week trip has been long planned and I know it will do me good to stop doing complicated knitting and listening to audio books and have an adventure or two.

Before setting off though, we all got together to add Callan’s name to the Births page in Grant’s big American Bible.  It is a huge volume full of pictures and has a page for signing the Temperance Pledge in it.  (Nobody  in the family, however, has ever taken this drastic step.)

We discovered we’d not been attending to the Marriages page properly and Ed and Jun couldn’t recall the date of their marriage in Tokyo.  Grant, who was wearing a Mongolian gown and for some reason, a colonial pith helmet, went into his records to sort that out, and Ed left handedly smudged the entry in the august volume.  Finn and Fredi put their more recent wedding in too and we drank to little Callan’s health with flutes of Moet et Chandon.   Caiden,, Callan’s three year old brother (and I’m already realising the confusion those two names are going to cause in my aging brain)abandoned all his nice Japanese decorum and cavorted with his wild Australian cousins up and down and round the Marrickville flat.

It was a happy afternoon with two of  my in laws being there as well. Noriko, Jun’s mum had been at the birth and Helen, Fredi’s mum was still recovering from her fiftieth birthday party from the night before.

DAYS LATER

I’m in Malvern now after three days in London with  Julia and Frank and perhaps for the first time I was an old person along with them.  Frank is fifteen years older (and Julia a bit less) than me, but I am 72 so in a sort of way we are all in the same boat now.  He and Julia both, while frail, have the beauty that old age often confers and it is very good to be with them.  Frank works fiercely  at his painting just as he’s always done and Julia and I talk  of all sorts of things.  I have promised to make a steak and kidney pudding and so we head to Sainsbury’s to get the fixings.  I am a little nervous as I have been told that since her stroke she’s not a good driver but I quickly see that’s not true.   She’s slow but ever so careful and sure of what she’s doing which I certainly wouldn’t be in the London traffic where the roads require, from time to time, that one driver pull in to the side to let the other one by.

I made a cauliflower soup which I wasn’t ashamed of and my pudding was OK but not my best on account of steaming it in a slightly too small steamer.

Frank took us out to a superb breakfast before I left.  I had avocado on toast and two perfect orbs of poached eggs on top.  I told them about the snarky connotations of “smashed avocado” in Oz but I don’t think they got it. In England an avocado is an avocado is an avocado.

I caught the train to Malvern Link and as I waited for Judy to pick me up in her new electric car I had a moment of grieving interruptus.  It is over two years since mum died but now I am in her place again and she’s not here. Tears well. But it is very beautiful in early summer in England. Roses load the branches of the bushes in the country gardens and a blackbird sings with a delicacy that is strange now to my Australian self. Fumitory and valerian break out from rocky walls and everything seems new and energetic with the ancient Malvern Hills green and lovely in the background.

It crosses my mind that seasons don’t confront in Australia.  They remind one of eternity if anything.  Young and old alike are trivial in their context.  Little dry flowers last forever.

 Here the seasons seem close and personal.  Spring is young and blooming and calls up an awareness of one’s own late placement in the life cycle.  But its mockery comes with an uplifting sense that no matter about ageing and frailty the show will go on and there will be spring after spring and I’m glad of that.

We had a rather horrid curry in a restaurant in the Link.  It was Monday which is not the best day here to go out for a meal.  Bearing in mind the unsatisfactory steak and kidney pudding I made for Frank and Julia, it seems my attempts to reciprocate great hospitality have fallen short.  Never mind. It’s the thought that counts isn’t it.