Old mill

The Girl and I, with some friends from my non-profit, journeyed south to Kilkenny some time ago tour places that were using sustainable energy. We looked at a community for the mentally handicapped that used a bio-digester to make heat and electricity, as well as a factory that used a waterwheel.

Along the way, though, we also saw this old mill, now an ivy-covered skeleton. It reminded us that sustainable power is not a hip new fashion. Virtually all energy used was once sustainable, whether it be from the muscles we replenish by eating or the wood we can regrow, from sailing ships to waterwheels. Almost all the energy we used to fashion our lives came from our world's daily energy salary, before we discovered a trust fund under our feet.

I expect we will restore a world of water mills world one day, but I would like to see us do it comfortably, while resources are plentiful, rather than in haphazard desperation.

Storytellers

I interviewed an elderly couple some months ago, and they described they way they and their neighbours passed the long evenings.

"... people would visit each other’s houses and have dances, and do the reels and the Irish dancing. and the women would drink tea and the men would drink porter. And they would have a seanchai – a storyteller – and he’d be spinning great yarns and tales, some of them the old, old stories. 

Some of them might be two thousand years old, really stories from prehistory -- stories of Kilcullen and Meave, stories from long long ago. Seanchas is the Irish word for old, so a seanchai (shawn-a-kee, they pronounced it) was telling the old stories.

[We had a] turf fire, very warm, and the people gathered around listening to the seanchai telling his story. A lot of ghost stories, as the Irish are really into ghost stories. And the children were supposed to go to bed but were allowed to stay up, and would listen to the seanchai, their eyes wide like saucers."  

Photo: a storyteller on fair day. Courtesy  of Irishhistorylinks.com.

First daffodils

February in Ireland does feel like slowly emerging from a tunnel, as the deep darkness of the long subarctic nights slowly recedes, and our early morning and late evening bus rides see sunlight again.

The gothic landscape slowly takes on a slightly less grim appearance in the cold grey light, and in the bogfields around us, great ponds slowly retreat into greenery.

Here and there below the trees, the squishy underfloor breaks open like an egg, and the first flowers appear, racing to build a bulb beneath them before the trees above them bud and the ground grows dark again.

Ash Wednesday

Catholic or not, we all need something like Ash Wednesday in our lives, something to remind us that we are not gods of infinite potential, but flawed and funny creatures in our brief days in this world.

The old butcher

The village near our house is basically an intersection, with little besides a pub, a church and a petrol station -- but it does have a butcher, as does almost every village here. As expensive as meat can be, it was all the more prized when people were poor and communities were more self-reliant.

Village butchers were highly valued for centuries. In their 1816 book "The Experienced Butcher," James Plumptre and Thomas Lantaffe wrote that "...you want to seek cleanliness and civility, the greatest recommendations of a tradesman, and no more than butchers. The real nature of their business and the prejudices of the world make these qualities more particularly requisite in them."

I was listening to one of Radio Televis Eireann's archives the other day, hearing an interview from a quarter-century ago with butcher Thomas Kieron, then-owner of a shop in a small town in rural Ireland. He complained that they could no longer put pigs-heads in the windows, as it would frighten customers -- "People cannot tolerate the idea of what they are eating," he said, "yet they can turn on the telly and watch people getting blown up... I find it most peculiar."

When asked about the then-new trend for health foods, though, the local butcher really got his dander up.

"And now people have the audacity to start talking this rubbish about other foods being better," Kieron said. "Where could you get a simpler, more straightforward meal than a bit of meat, potatoes and vegetables from the farm, cooked perfectly for your children. What about all the people who are said to be so beautiful today, slipping into Christian Dior dresses? Not all their own weight, but a fraction, so they can wear underwear. And you have this lady, nice and slim, but what happens if she gets a little dose of pleurisy or pneumonia? How can she lose a few pounds weight? She'd be in a shroud. You have to have a bit of meat on you."

Photo of a Dublin butcher in 1946. Courtesy of Irishhistorylinks.com.