Christmas memories

Our internet has been flickering on and off, so we've had only occasional posting. Whatever your faith or traditions, enjoy your holiday, everyone. 

Mary O’Sullivan: Christmas was a very big event then – now it’s a big event commercially, but then it was a big event from a different perspective. It was the time of year when – we talk about spring cleaning now, but then it was the Christmas cleaning. In the run-up to Christmas the dishes were taken down off the dressers, all the cobwebs were knocked down and windows were cleaned and the whole place was whitewashed.

My father was born on a farm about a mile from the village, and had a significantly different upbringing to my mother in the village, and my father used to say that Christmas on a farm was a very big event – this was before electrification, in the era of the tilly lamp. People didn’t just hop into the car and go to town – most people wouldn’t have had a car, just a horse and trap if they were lucky or a donkey and trap. So they would have only gone to town a few times a year, and going before Christmas was a major event.

On Christmas Eve there was the lighting of the candle – a big red wax candle, put into a jam jar filled with sand, ringed with holly and lit by the youngest member of the household. Then the neighbours rambled in.

The concept of rambling went out with the advent of television, but it was how people entertained themselves in the 20s, 30s, 40s. They walked to one another’s houses at night time and talked about what had happened during the week, weddings, funerals, wakes and local affairs, and someone would get out an accordion and tell stories and sing songs.

Ray O’Sullivan: Christmas Eve was a fast day, and all we could eat was salted ling fish, and it tasted terrible. People dreaded the thought of it from about October, but it was nearly like a penance. It used to hang in the fishmongers and you got the smell off it.

Christmas Eve was like good Friday is now, (with all shops closed - BK), and that was just in the mid-1970s and 80s, and it’s funny how quickly things have changed in such a short time.

The O'Sullivans were interviewed by RTE radio about the Christmases of their childhoods, December. 2009.  Photo: The canal outside our house a few winters ago.

Christmas on an island

"It is wild and gusty today. People are gathering green branches and to decorate the windows – ivy and other evergreens. The houses have been without a daub of whitewash since last summer. There was not a crumb of lime to be had in Dingle since the trains stopped running. Many another item is not to be found, and no means of procuring it.

I am writing this on the Saturday before Christmas; Christmas Eve is tomorrow. The people who have gone out to the mainland have not yet returned yet on account of the bad weather. ‘Maybe,’ the children say, ‘the bad weather will ruin the Holy Night.’

The people of this village have made a trip to the hill and a sheep for nigh every household has been slaughtered. I suppose those who have such delicacies will share them with the neighbours; the established custom here is for everyone to share, except that we are seeing many changes in the world now, where there had been none for a long time."

-- From the diaryof Thomas O'Crohan, on Blasket Island, 1922.

The sound of an engine in the distance

"Most people had a pony or donkey, but young people walked. The only motor car in the area was owned by the solicitor, and he drove it to see people who were making out their will, and once people heard the motor-car, they started talking about the person as though he were dead already. 

There were two motorbikes in our area, one owned by the priest, and the other owned by the doctor -- and when they passed late at night, we knew by the sound of the bike which one it was passing. As soon as they heard it in the distance, people were in a panic as to who was badly off."

-- Recollections of Aine Aherne, of Nohoba Kinsale, County Cork. The car belongs to my neighbour.

P.S. Blogging has been a bit light lately. Sorry. Christmas and all.

Field behind our house

Ferguson coda

After some days talking about the tragedies in my old neighbourhood of Ferguson, Missouri, this blog will return to its regularly scheduled programming tomorrow – traditional crafts, sustainable skills, and older ways of life in rural Ireland. Before we do, though, I wanted to tell one last story about the protests, one you'll never read anywhere else.

For more than two decades I’ve been friends with a couple in St. Louis – I met her when we were teenagers, him shortly after, and kept in close touch with them as they married, raised two kids, and a few years ago found God. When the protests started, the husband decided he would go visit the protesters – not to join a conflict, but to be a friend and witness for people in a dangerous situation. My other friend, his wife, made dozens of sandwiches for him to bring, just to hand out to people who needed something to eat.

Some nights grew tense, as protesters faced off against rows of heavily armed police and were sometimes dispersed with tear gas. On one such night, when a protester needed a place to stay for the night, my friends invited him to sleep on their couch. My friends are white and the young man was black, coming out of a flashpoint of racial tension – but they let a stranger stay in their home, no questions asked.

It doesn’t fix everything, because nothing does. But a million decencies like that can make a civilisation, or rebuild one.

Photo: Courtesy of Wikicommons, Ferguson as you'll never see it in the media -- the way it looks on a normal day.

Ferguson: just the beginning

KMO: The embers have cooled, and by the time this goes out another week or so will have passed. I wonder what you think the lasting cultural impact of Ferguson will be. Michael Brown become as much a household name as Trayvon Martin two or three years from now, or will this be overshadowed by events to come? I’m asking you to go out on a limb, since some people will be listening to this a few years from now.


Brian: Unfortunately, we’re living in such a flickering society that it’s hard to say. When people got their news from a tangible object like a newspaper, or from conversations with people they knew, and it fundamentally changed the way people dealt with one another – a news item could have powerful repercussions across a community. Now, most people I talk to are social only in the sense that they stare at glowing rectangles all day, and connect with a lot of other people in their subcultural bubble who are also staring at glowing rectangles.

If you read books like Bowling Alone, and many studies in the same vein, it shows what a deeply-knit social structure my country used to have, and doesn’t anymore. To some extent you still have that in Ireland, at least among the older people, but Ireland is changing too as it becomes prosperous and Americanised – the young people are slowly losing the traditional songs and storytelling and pastimes, in favour of staring at glowing rectangles.

I don’t want to sound holier-than-thou about this, because obviously I blog and keep up with all these acquaintances over social media. It is, however, fundamentally changing the way we think; news now just appears on screens and disappears, and blink in and out of our minds, so I don’t think these events will linger in the public consciousness much. But it should. Because as we go further into some very difficult times – difficult because of fossil fuels, weather disasters, outages, shortages and other things like that -- and specifically for Americans because their empire is faltering visibly – people in general, and Americans in particular, will see some difficult times ahead.

What impresses me when I talk with elderly people here, and try to learn some of their traditional ways myself, is that Americans still have it really, really good. There’s no reason for most Americans to be suffering right now; they’re just not used to having less. But they are having to live with that, and Americans right now are some of the most frightened people I’ve ever met, frightened in a way that people in most other countries are not. And that’s a very serious thing.

Most of the economic relationships – their rudimentary means of getting food, shelter, warmth, water, security and so on – the basics of life – are vertical, to strangers in distant and possibly unaccountable institutions, rather than horizontal, to family or neighbours nearby, or singular, things that they can provide for themselves. We grow up warehoused in schools, and most young people are aware of it and don’t appreciate the squandering of their early years. But it prepares us for the life that many American children will live, as cubicle plankton in office jobs. We didn’t grow up with many real skills to provide for ourselves, and most of us didn’t know anyone else who had them either, so that kind of life was difficult to imagine.

When I talk with elderly people here, or people from any traditional society, who grew up before wealth or electronic media, I find their lives were fundamentally different. Most security was accomplished through social pressure and shame, rather than armed men wearing uniforms. Young men grew up occupied with chores and hard labour, rather than the opportunity for mischief. People were able to provide for their own needs in many ways, that we were not raised to be able to do.

People had deep relationships to other people around them, so that the person who runs the shop might have also helped dig your father’s grave, and might have helped you with your first communion. These many threads of relationship in every direction wove a quilt of community, which cushioned the weight of the world. So people might have been poor, but they were incapable of feeling poverty the way Americans do now, for their lives were not spent floating idly upon a sea of strangers.

There are lots of things like that, which I mention in the American Conservative article, that I don’t see many people talk about, in any political group. People talk about big things like the war, but not the million little things that make up people’s lives. Right now many Americans are terrified of each other, paranoid of authority but completely dependent on it, and convinced that everything is the fault of these vast conspiracies controlled by these people on the other side from their own, and filled with flamboyant stories about how terrible those people are. It runs through political groups, races, religions, all kinds of divisions. It’s an extremely unstable situation.

Here in Ireland recently there was a presidential election, with seven parties running candidates, and they had prime-time television debates between all of them. People in my office building would talk very freely about how they supported this or that candidate, and would argue jovially about it. Even in this country, which endures a revolution, a civil war and a decades-long guerrilla war in the lifetimes of people still alive, people were not so divided that they couldn’t open up about their opinions in a very friendly way.

But when I talk with a lot of people back home – again, Tea Party, Republicans, Democrats, Green Party and so on – it’s not that people felt strongly about their point of view. It’s that most people were incapable of arguing even their own point of view, because they couldn’t believe how anyone could believe anything else. They don’t even have an argument, and it’s difficult to bring up most subjects without having somebody explode.

With many things declining, it’s important for most Americans to understand that it doesn’t have to blow up. They are still wealthy enough that they could cope very well with less, but most of my countrymen have never had to do so and have no model for how this could be done. In the case of Ferguson, it started over what has become tragically common, the shooting of a young black man. So the story entered around my country’s deep and unresolved problems over race. But it could be something else next time, but unrest is likely to hit more and more places in the coming years.

I’m hoping that the kind of thing that I do – studying old crafts and values – could, in some small way, bridge different groups, like traditionalists conservatives and ecological liberals, and use some of the lessons of the past to help us prepare for a difficult future.

All text from KMO's C-Realm podcast. Photo courtesy of ABC News.

Ferguson: poverty then and now

My interview about the situation in my old neighbourhood, continued. 

The third thing that I was able to bring was that I’ve lived in rural Ireland for about a decade – I wrote my first magazine cover story about peak oil a little more than ten years ago, and have been writing about things like that ever since.

My contribution has been to research older traditions and crafts from a low-energy past, and to see how they could be useful to us in a low-energy future. That kind of knowledge is useful, because I was able to look back on Ireland the way it was a few decades ago, and compare it to poor and high-crime places in America today.

When violence happens in places like Ferguson, liberal Americans I know attribute it to poverty. But no place in America is poor compared to what Ireland was like a few decades ago, and it didn’t have those same problems. When my wife was growing up here in the 1970s, the average GDP-per-capita was lower than that of Gabon in central Africa. A lot of her neighbours didn’t have electricity or plumbing or cars, and some still drove horse- and donkey-carts.

Yet it was also a highly educated society, and a healthy one -- a doctor friend of mine here did a study on health in Ireland, and found that people were healthier then than they are now that Ireland’s been prosperous, and healthier now than in the United States. The crime rate was also lower then than it is now, and lower now than it is in the United States—a little over one homicide per 100,000 per year, as opposed to five for the USA and 100 for East St Louis. And that seems surprisingly common for traditional societies, to get by with little violence and little need for policing.

In the USA, though, we’re seeing more and more policing, and staggering levels of violence compared to most Western societies. In the article I proposed some reasons why that might be, and they are cultural. So those were three things I thought I might be able to add to the conversation.

Ferguson: Anger McNuggets

My interview on Ferguson, continued. ... 

... the second thing I noticed about the news from Ferguson is that it went out to a million little media outlets and blogs, each with their own spin and designed to cater to an audience with their own ideological bubble. And that’s normal these days – that’s the case with any piece of news. The insularity of those bubbles are new.

It used to be normal – and still is normal in a lot of other countries – for people to know their extended family and neighbours, and perhaps to be part of fraternal and professional organisations that took people from all walks of life. In my own country today, though, there’s been a huge transformation that no one talks about.

Many of the people I talk to increasingly connect to the outside world through these little glowing rectangles, and when they interact with other humans, it’s with people staring at other glowing rectangles, usually of the exact same subculture, class, race, politics, hobbies, and the same church or lack thereof. They all watch many of the same television shows -- and many people I know, more and more, don’t socialise with anyone outside their bubble. And many studies back this up.

They hear media specially designed for their own bubble, and I find that when I talk to people, they don’t have any common language to even begin to understand each other. And I’m often disappointed to see how many people live in some other world than I live in, as their views just get more and more extreme and amplified as they bounce back and forth across their echo chamber.

Almost everyone I know in my native country, from all religions and races, struggles to get by, feels disappointed with their government and their country, and despairs of the future. And everyone looks for whose fault it is, and most decide that everything that’s going wrong is the fault of this conspiracy of people who are frothing-at-the-mouth insane, idiotic, and filled with this inexplicable hatred.

Acquaintances of mine who are with the Green party and the Tea Party, Democrat and Republican, Atheist, Catholic, Evangelical – most people think this same way -- it’s just that everyone thinks they’re one of the only ones that think this. Everyone thinks they are one of the few who took the red pill, that see through the lies of the mainstream media, and that are completely different than the rest of the sheeple. And most people talks about politics in the same way, by circulating memes or stories about crazy, hate-filled morons on the other side.

I’m from a Christian conservative background myself -- I know people active in the Republicans and Tea Party, and of course I still write for Pat Buchannan’s magazine. But I never liked the vaudeville acts you’ll see on Fox News – that doesn’t resemble what the word conservative used to mean, back when it meant something more honourable.

And I was interested in science and ecology from an early age, I volunteered for environmental causes, knew people in Earth First and other radical groups, joined anti-war protests and the Green Party – all things that people don’t find conservative, for some reason. So I’m connected to people from all different backgrounds over social media – my main contact with the USA from rural Ireland -- and when something like Ferguson happens, I get all these different versions at once.

More Tea-Partyish acquaintances will forward headlines to me that say things like “OMG! Left-wing loon thinks government needs to kidnap Christian children!” and Green Party acquaintances will send me headlines like “Outrageous! Right-wing preacher thinks gay people should be burned at the stake!” Some of these headlines are hoaxes, of course – no one actually said that, or if someone did they are not typical of their group. But that’s not the point of forwarding such things – it plays a social function in their bubble.

Most of the web sites where Americans actually get their news are not in the business of delivering news to people. Neither were the newspapers that I used to work for – they were in the business of delivering people to their advertisers – but there, at least, they needed the support of a number of companies with different interests in a geographical community. Now web sites and other media deliver most of the news, and they are in the business of generating outrage, so their stories can go viral and everyone can keep circulating these anger McNuggets.

Many of my American acquaintances – again, liberal or conservative or whatever – depend on this outrage drip for what I call their NABA NABA fix – N-A-B-A, for Not As Bad As. Everyone is deeply invested in being able to say they are Not As Bad As those crazy, hate-filled morons on the other side, that we can all laugh at and hate together. Everyone hates the people who are extreme or closed-minded or racist, but that’s always somebody else – it’s never them.

 So with any issue, I would get lots of contradictory information – but in this case, I happened to be from the area, and was getting first-hand information from people who were there, and had some basis for gauging the accuracy of what they were saying.

Ferguson: Not what you think

This is a continuation of the transcript of the interview I did for the C-Realm podcast last month. I was asked about the American Conservative piece I wrote, and explained a few things I noticed about the media coverage surrounding my old neighbourhood. I realise this is a touchy subject, and a bit unusual for this blog, but as a native I might have a few useful thoughts. Back to our usual subjects after this week. 

Kaller: When I wrote about Ferguson, though, I didn’t write about any of those things – and I got some criticism from people who thought I was skipping over things like the difficulties of being black in America. But I’m not the person to write about that – I’m not black and I’m not in America. Others have written about it eloquently, and I don’t have anything to add. I could, however, add a few things that other reporters could not, because of my background.

First, I’m from the area, unlike almost anyone else reporting on it, and I was not only hearing from the same media reports as everyone else, but was hearing reports from lots of friends and family on the ground. I’ve given talks in St. Louis with people who have been helping lead the protests, I have friends who went out to spend time with protesters, I have cousins who worked for the county and had their office computers hacked by Anonymous – from people close to the situation on many sides.

Almost all the reports described Ferguson, in one way or another, as “the inner city” or “a black neighbourhood” against white police – they chose that angle. Race is important, of course, but in focusing on that, they gave a misguided idea about what Ferguson is like -- it’s not a desperately poor, inner-city neighbourhood. It’s racially mixed, working-class but not especially dangerous.

East St. Louis, on the far side of the city and the river, is perhaps the highest-crime city in the USA – and possibly the Western World -- with perhaps 100 homicides per 100,000 people per year, and with 50 violent crimes per 1,000 people per year – which is off the scale. But Ferguson has one-thirteenth that crime rate.

Describing Ferguson as this hellish ghetto served everyone’s purposes, no matter where they were on the political map -- depending on where they were people could condemn the rioting thugs from a distance or pity the poor black people from a distance. But no one was thinking of it as something that could happen where they live in the coming years.

The violence and military occupation isn't something that always happens to someone else -- it happened where I grew up, in a normal neighbourhood, and could absolutely happen in your neighbourhood next time. That's an important detail, and most news reports didn’t appreciate that.

Ferguson: bubbles and bias

In this blog, I usually write about traditional crafts and ways of life, and I don’t usually delve into anything too political. Today, though, I’ve been watching my old neighbourhoods in flames on the global news. I thought an interview I did last month for the C-Realm podcast on events in Ferguson, Missouri would be quite timely right now. The transcript has been made and published with the permission of KMO, who runs the C-Realm. It does not purport to be a perfect word-for-word transcript, but instead captures the gist of the conversation. 

KMO: … I deliberately avoid any reference to the current news cycle, because I want to create things that will be of interest to people a few years down the line, people who avoid a rehash of what’s in the news. So now it is the first of October, and I’m just now getting around to airing an episode that talks about events that got started on August 9, 2014, when, in Ferguson, Missouri – a suburb of St. Louis – a police officer named Darren Wilson shot and killed a young African-American man named Michael Brown. He shot Michael Brown six times, twice in the head. All that is undisputed by anyone; what is disputed is what led up to the shooting. Nobody claims that Brown had a gun of his own, but some witnesses say that Brown kept advancing toward Wilson, other eyewitnesses say he had his hands in the air …

Something else that is not in dispute is that people responded very badly to the Ferguson Police Department’s behaviour after the shootings, so much so that the protests that followed might not just have been about a white police officer shooting a black man, but might have a lot to do with how the police had been very secretive and obstructionist with their documents, and very stingy in handling those documents to people who were trying to get a handle on the incident … I have laid out a few facts that are not in dispute. What is in dispute is what is illustrated by the events of August and September in Ferguson, Missouri … 

Brian, welcome to the C-Realm podcast. You write for a variety of magazines and other outlets, including Mother Earth News and Grit, and about the time things were getting crazy in the news cycle around Ferguson, Missouri you published a piece in American Conservative about the topic. You have a particular vantage point most journalists don’t enjoy – you grew up in the town right next to Ferguson, Missouri. I want to know what you think the media coverage of Ferguson indicates.

Brian: Sure. I grew up in Florissant, Missouri, about a kilometre from the edge of Ferguson – both of them started out as small Missouri towns that got enveloped by the post-war suburbs of St. Louis – and I had a big Irish-American family with lots of cousins, most of whom still live in the area. I rode my bicycle through there as a child, went to my first school dance there, and I had my first gig as a radio DJ at the community college, right across the road from a building that got burned to the ground by rioters in the last few weeks.

We’ve lived in rural Ireland for the last decade or so, and when everything started happening in Ferguson I was on holiday in Scotland with my daughter, taking a little boat around some rocky islands, without phone or internet service. It was only after I came back that I saw that my old neighbourhood was the leading story in Ireland, the UK, across much of the planet; for a while it was bigger than Gaza, bigger than Ukraine, and the images were hard to tell apart sometimes.

The media’s coverage was fascinating to me, because it was like the film Rashomon, a Japanese film by Akira Kurosawa where a court is trying to reconstruct a murder, but every witness tells a different story that makes themselves look good. In the same way, every blog and news outlet told a different version of what was going on, one that suited whatever their audience wanted to believe. I’ve been a reporter for city newspapers -- I still write a weekly column for an Irish newspaper here, as well as articles for Mother Earth News, Grit, American Conservative, First Things, Resilience, and so on – so I knew what the media is like, and come away with a realistic picture of how it works.

Most Americans I know believe very strongly that the media are biased, and when I said that different media outlets were publishing different versions, most people assumed I was talking about a conspiracy. But genuine conspiracy-theory situations are quite rare in the real world, while bias is unavoidable and not automatically bad.

People say the media are biased when it’s a bias different than their own. Anyone in the American media – talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh or television stars like Jon Stewart – all complain about the media, but the media are never themselves; the media is always someone else. And they can all say the media are biased, because bias is whatever you’re opinion isn’t.

But when you write a news article, by definition you’re cramming a complicated situation into a few paragraphs, and by picking and choosing one detail over another you’re choosing what you think is the most vivid and realistic version of the truth. The problem is not that the report has a bias; the problem is that most Americans I talk to are getting only one perspective on any subject -- the one that suits their fancy -- rather than looking at a situation from many constructive angles.

Other writers made many important points about Ferguson -- that local police officers, in gear and attitude, more and more resemble soldiers occupying our cities; that the people of Ferguson were made prisoners in their own homes, that many black men in America say they experience constant harassment from police, and so on. I saw some articles writing about how this article from a net neutrality standpoint, saying that this article was downplayed on searches inside the USA – if that’s true, that’s extremely serious for democracy, because that’s how people get their information these days. All of those are important.

When I wrote about Ferguson, though, I didn’t write about any of those things – and I got some criticism from people who thought I was skipping over things like the difficulties of being black in America. But I’m not the person to write about that – I’m not black and I’m not in America. Others have written about it eloquently, and I don’t have anything to add. I could, however, see a few things because of my background that other reporters could not.

 ... to be continued tomorrow.

Published at Grit

Grit magazine has just published a compilation of some of its favourite articles from the past year in one volume, Grit's Complete Guide to the Woodlot. With articles on splitting wood, chainsaw, wood-burning stoves and much more.

It also has one of my articles, on coppicing and pollarding wood. Check it out, and maybe consider buying a copy.

Childhood in old Ireland

"We children all decided to go to church before hunting mushrooms and cycling home. It wasn’t our usual church, and we heard stories later on about strangers in the congregation – which turned out to be us."

"These days, children don’t have to think much about games given to them – we made up our own. We played spin the top, marbles, hoop the hoop, hop scotch, conkers, kick the can, scut the whip, jackstones, and box the fox. Hop scotch has survived to some extent, but only among girls."

"In springtime we went tree climbing and bird nesting. It was a great thrill to finally see a nest and the baby birds in it. In all my life I never remember a boy vandalising or destroying a nest."

"With games and occupations that spanned the four seasons, we never had a thought for such phrases as 'I’m bored.' We hadn’t enough hours in the day for all we wanted to do. Even when the dark evenings closed in we played 'Battle In, Battle Out,' and 'Jack jack show the light..'"

"People hadn’t much money but times were good. You could dress up and carry your handbag up O’Connell Street and not feel frightened. … There were no shutters, drunks or drugs. Everyone was out walking on every corner, and no one ever felt afraid. I would walk down the street coming from a dance at twelve. A few lads might fight but they never broke a window."

"When there was breaking news all the boys on street-corners rang bells shouting “Stop Press,” and everyone stopped to hear what the news was."

"We walked everywhere, and everyone was fit by today's standards -- no one had ever heard of dieting." 

-- Memories of elderly Irish about life in the mid-20th century, from No Shoes in Summer. 

All Souls

"Pishogues. Nothing but bleakness; not even a scrawny dog was left, not even a burnt thistle. Nights were treacle-black, they haunted little children and big men alike. Dogs stayed under the range with their heads down; outdoors was for spectres and hooved creatures with strange powers. Children of the long-legged day would look out petrified at the wild sea."

-- Irish poet Evelyn McClaffrey, describing the country nights here in winter. 

Moving to an island

I heard an archival interview recently with a couple that moved from the city to one of the islands off the coast of Ireland decades ago, and were introduced to a very different world. All their neighbours, they discovered, lived in isolated self-sufficiency, taking care of their own gardens and animals, and few people used phones. Yet they had a powerful sense of community, helping each other out through the year and sharing whatever they had when a neighbour stopped by.

When they first moved there, they tried to send out invitations to a gathering, and found it took weeks; they had to walk to each house in turn, since no one used phones. At each house people would invite them in and insist they stay for dinner, and pile their arms full of whatever was ripe. At the time the rhubarb was ready, so they walked away with bushels of rhubarb from each house.

A tank of petrol lasted them months, since people had cars, but there was almost nothing to do with them.

Kim chee at home

Originally published in the Kildare Nationalist newspaper.

Few peoples on Earth are as devoted to their national dishes as Koreans are to kim chee. Few Irish have had this amazing dish, but few things have a richer or more powerful flavour, and it can be made easily at home with everyday ingredients. I don't feel compelled to stick reverently to their ingredients, and I've been able to adapt it to whatever is ready in the garden at the moment.

Kim chee can be best described as a kind of Asian sauerkraut, a spicy pickled cabbage with ginger, garlic and other spices. It’s made with the same process that creates dill pickles – the technical term is lacto-fermentation – using a salty brine to preserve the food and give it a tangy bite. It can keep for as long as a few months, but can be ready in as little as a week.

To make kim chee, you will need:

• A kilo of cabbage from your garden – Chinese cabbage or bok choi is the traditional choice for Koreans, but regular Irish cabbage will do just fine, or even leaves from other brassicas.
• 60 millilitres of salt.
• 15 millilitres of grated garlic – if you don’t have a garlic press or hand grater, just run it through the smallest holes of the cheese grater.
• Five millilitres of grated ginger
• 15 millilitres of chopped hot pepper
• 100 grams or so of chopped radishes
• 100 grams of scallions or chives

To start, chop the cabbage into quarters, remove the cores, and slice into strips about five centimetres wide. Mix the cabbage and the salt in a large bowl, and with your hands massage the salt into the cabbage for a few minutes. Some people like to use gloves for handling the salt again, especially if you have sensitive skin. Then find a plate smaller than the top of the bowl, and place it on the cabbage to keep it in the salt. You might want to put some jars on top – I used pickle jars evenly around the edges – to weigh it down. Leave it there for about two hours.

At the end of that time, the cabbage will be soft and sitting in a brine of its own juice and some salt. Take the cabbage out and drain in a colander, and clean the bowl to use again. Then you make the kim chee paste, mixing the grated garlic, grated ginger, and chopped pepper together in a bowl. Some recipes, I find, call for using flour to thicken the paste -- I've tried it with and without, and haven't found it to make much difference.

Some people put in a bit of sugar at this point, some a bit of soy sauce, some a bit of seafood flavour like fish sauce or oyster sauce. Chop up the radishes and scallions and add them to the mix.

Finally, mix the vegetables and paste with the cabbage, and massage them together as you did with the salt. There are hot peppers in there, so some people like to crack out the gloves again at this part. Pack the cabbage into a clean glass jar – I used a pickle jar – pressing down until the brine rises to just barely cover everything.

Leave a bit of space at the top, and seal the lid – not too tightly, though, in case gas needs to escape. Check every day or two to loosen the lid just a crack, to make sure it’s not going to explode, and then when the gas has escaped tighten it a little again. Let the mix stand for at least a week, and give it a try.

This recipe uses only minimal spice compared to the Korean original, but if it’s still too much, use less next time. The best thing about this recipe is that, when people here grow cabbages, they tend to use the head only and throw the outer leaves away – they are tough and would not be good to chew. Kim chee, though, can be made from some outer leaves of cabbages, and so less goes to waste.

The Postman

After Mass I talked with our postman, who lamented the changes he was seeing in Ireland.

“People used to gather together every night around here, and in the village, and now they’re all watching the telly,” he said. “It’s getting way too commercialised.” “With the older people I can do what I always used to do, and just open the door to their home and walk in.

‘Hello Paddy,’ I would say, and they’d say ‘Tom! How’re you keeping?’ I ask if they need anything from the store, so when I would bicycle to the houses around here I would bring some food or newspapers too.

We’re all going to be old someday ourselves, God willing, so it’s just respect.”

Why don’t you deliver the post by bicycle any more, I asked?

“Ah, they’re making me take a car,” he said. “And people get big deliveries these days, to a house full of stuff. Not the same as the old days. But the older people still greet me the same as always.”

The old pharmacy

For many decades chemists – what we would today call pharmacists or druggists – created their own materials; they ground, distilled and filtered chemical essences from stones and herbs, using the elegant glassware that has served as shorthand for science ever since. From 1847 until 2009, the chemist for the neighbourhood around Trinity College was Sweny’s, mentioned by James Joyce and since then a place of pilgrimage for his readers.

When it closed its doors as a pharmacy five years ago, they tiny shop – smaller than some toilets I’ve seen -- was purchased by a group of volunteers who maintain it as a kind of volunteer, miniature museum to Joyce, to Old Dublin and to the chemist shops as they once were. The volunteer behind the counter said a group gathers there several nights a week to read the works of Joyce --- a section of Ulysses, a section of Finnegan’s Wake and so on – and then all go out for a pint at one of the local pubs, also looking very much as they did centuries ago.

On the counters lie books of many Irish poets and authors, and all along the walls sit the same bottles as fifty or a hundred years ago – lovely crafted, grooved and embossed glass with labels like “Spirit of ammonia,” “Liquor of digitalis” or “Essence of mercury.”

“The ones with the grooved sides are the poisons,” the man said. “They had to go to the cellar with a candle, and pick a bottle in the near-darkness, so they needed to know poisons at a touch.” 

Dairy boys

In 1978, Irish radio interviewed a man who grew up in a Dublin dairy, in a family whose daily routine was ruled by the needs of cattle udders and local babies. About his early life in the 1930s and 40s, he said:

"The noise of wheels on cobbles, the crunch as it turned to clay outside our lane, the sound of the tumble churn, the jingling of harness, hobnail boots, the smells of horse sweat, cow dung, new milk, wet grass, sour milk, buttermilk, bacon and porridge.

Our house was like a railway, people coming and going at all times ... Even when someone died the blinds were drawn but the door stayed open. The 'boys' who did the milking were kings of the neighbourhood, all wearing the same clothes like a uniform."

Photo: Boys gardening in an Irish school, courtesy of www.irishhistorylinks.com

Vertical gardening

This article originally appeared in the Kildare Nationalist newspaper, County Kildare, Ireland. 

Most of us would like to grow some of our own food, for several reasons. For one thing, we wouldn’t waste our precious fuel supplies bringing apples in from New Zealand. We’d be able to select crops and breeds suitable for our climate, rather than have every apple in stores from California to London be the same few breeds chosen for long shelf life. Finally, we’d have the best-tasting and healthiest kind of food, food that doesn’t know it’s dead yet.

Most of us, however, have only limited space. Many of us live in estates or other such houses with small gardens, surrounded by walls or fences that limit light and warmth. Our towns are a maze of similar walls – the sides of houses and sheds, stone garden walls, wooden fences and other such boundaries, and we each live on a small plot in the middle of the maze. What could allow many of us to grow more food, however, is to think of the third dimension when planning our garden, and to emphasize crops that climb up.

Vertical gardening could be done with many of our human-made structures. Your house or apartment building has sides, as do your sheds, shops, schools, churches and highway overpasses. Not far away you likely have telephone poles, fences, walls, signs, gates and, of course, trees, any of which might be covered in productive garden plants.

Beans and peas might make a good start – they grow easily in many temperate regions, make beautiful flowers, add nitrogen to the soil, and offer a high-protein, easily stored crop. Tomatoes and cucumbers climb up sticks, although they like some warmth, and depending on your situation might need a poly-tunnel, or might do fine with just a south-facing wall.

Japanese wine-berry has both looks and edible berries, as do grapes – if you can grow them here – and kiwis. Roses other thorny plants not only provide shoots, flowers and fruits, but a natural security fence against human or animal intruders.

If you want to give this a go, first pay attention to what kind of climber you have. Some, like ivy, sink their roots into bark or masonry, and should probably have a trellis if you are putting it on the side of your house. Roses and other scramblers, which have hooks or thorns that latch onto other plants and allow them to pull themselves upwards, would also require support. Twiners like wisterias twist their tendrils around trees and other structures, while beans whip their shoots around looking for something to latch onto.

The hedgerows that line the countryside are a good example; they might serve first as boundary lines between fields, but they can be as productive as the fields themselves – and in all seasons, not just at harvest time. Hawthorn shoots and dandelions for salads and nettle and bramble shoots for tea in springtime, then linden leaves, then elderflowers, then rose hips and blackberries, with sloes going into winter.

Such hedges of climbing plants add variety to fields that would otherwise go sterile. Each plant adds its own chemicals and removes its own nutrients from the soil, so fields of monoculture need to be continually fertilised. Single crops provide our bodies, too, with a single set of nutrients, and only at certain times of year. They also encourage a glut of certain animals, like pests that eat our crops, and offer no homes to the birds and insectivores who would eat the pests. 

Boundaries like hedges offer fields a needed balance, a wild river through human land that can soak up our excesses and give us a reservoir of food and fuel for lean times.