The turn of the year

The Girl looking at the neighbours' horses

The seasons turn differently for all of us. My family in Missouri are seeing the last 40-degree (100F) days of an unusually harsh summer, while acquaintances Down Under are seeing the close of a winter. Here, we saw our breath for the first time yesterday, and the leaves are beginning to turn.

These days feel like a countdown; we are drying herbs for tea and seasonings, pickling vegetables, brewing wine, and checking the miles of hedgerow elderberries inching closer to ripeness. The increasingly rainy weather means time is running out to get peat for fuel from the bog; we have enough, but tractor pull wagons past our front gate laden three metres tall with peat sometimes, the father driving and the rest of the family standing and holding the sides. Even though it is still summer, we all feel the oncoming darkness.

I have mentioned how strange it feels -- for one unaccustomed to it -- to live on an island less than a thousand miles from the Arctic Circle, kept mild by a Caribbean current but at latitudes that elsewhere see polar bears. Summers for us mean light in the sky as early as 3 am and as late as 10 pm, long stretches of sun that cause our crops and weeds to grow so rapidly we can’t keep up. Unfortunately, it means that winter brings months of brief, dim light over a Gothic landscape.

Yet the temperature never ranges widely, from a median fifteen (60F) in the summer down to five degrees (40F) in the winter, and the weather only gets rainier. The Irish are well used to the damp and chill; old people tell me they walked to school barefoot in all seasons, which sounds like a standard exaggeration until I see it borne out by historical accounts and photos. Even now the Irish keep their rooms and offices at temperatures far below what most Americans would tolerate.

When the temperature hits 25 degrees, though, (70 F) some of my co-workers turn red, sweat profusely and lunge for the air conditioner – they actually have air conditioners here -- to turn the ambient temperature back down to 15 (50 F) or so. To someone who grew up in 40-degree summers, this seems ridiculous, but we were simply acclimatised to heat as the Irish are to the chill. Even in Missouri or the Deep South, moreover, everyone once lived without air conditioning, and society did not collapse.

Window in a pub near our home

Older homes in St. Louis don’t look ideal for the heat – they look like brick kilns – but they could be sealed off from the sun as Mediterranean homes are today, and instead of verandas they had porches. American homes built in the last few decades have tiny vestigial porches, but on homes built before cheap energy, they served a vital function, allowing people to work and live in shade and a breeze tunnel.

Before World War II, in fact, St. Louisans sometimes slept on their porches in the summer, or on balconies, or in rows of blankets on the grass of Forest Park. You can see a bit of this in the film Rear Window; during the heat wave, a couple sleeps on the fire escape, and the plot hinges on the fact that everyone keeps their windows open. You might think that nothing could be more dangerous than sleeping outside in St. Louis, but crime rates were lower then than now – and that in the middle of the Great Depression, when some people faced genuine starvation. Criminals find it difficult to raid a neighbourhood in which someone is always outside, and everyone knows everyone else.

Similarly, old neighbourhoods in almost any warm city had a range of features to cut down on heat. Some Arab countries feature lattices, which create shade themselves and could host climbing plants that shade further. Awnings draw attention to a window or door and offer protection from the sun, rain and snow, as do street-side trees. Southern homes had jalousie windows allowed air to pass while still offering shade, while Mediterranean homes have shutters that can be closed in mid-day, and many such buildings were white to reflect heat.

Almost all men and women once wore hats, statements not just of fashion but of profession and, most importantly, protection from the sun; hence the wide brims of European sun hats, cowboy hats, Asian bamboo hats and Mexican sombreros. Hats disappeared quickly in the 1960s, however – perhaps victims of changing fashion or the counterculture, or perhaps of the newly widespread office jobs and air conditioning.

Walk through endless miles of strip malls and asphalt in the USA today, and you notice a stunning absence of any basic features to make heat bearable using any method except air conditioning -- no awnings or trellises, no whitewashed roofs, few shutters or trees, and few hats or kerchiefs.

Nor do most modern cities feature amenities for winter; those same awnings would do wonders for keeping snow off the walkways, and those same trees and lattices would break up the wind. Insulated buildings, straw bales or firewood piles around walls, blankets in the attic, close quarters, sealed-off rooms, rows of black bottles in the southern windows – all of these and many more would reduce our winter expenses.

Just as importantly, we could adapt to far less heat in winter, even if we don’t have to walk barefoot in all seasons. A US organisation recommends an indoor winter temperature of around 22 degrees C (around 72F), but the British keep their homes at 17 degrees C (62F), and a few decades ago kept them at 12 degrees (53F), according to the UK’s Building Research Establishment. I don’t have statistics for this country, but I would guess it to be colder still. I’m getting used to it.

Most importantly, just as we can wear sun hats in summer, we can wear thermal undergarments in winter. Growing up I knew long johns mainly from old movies and cartoons, the favoured campfire dress of cowboys and prospectors, or what Mickey Mouse or Tom and Jerry always fell into on a washing line. As Kris deDecker of Low-Tech magazine pointed out recently, thermal underwear is an amazing heating resource, and recently developed fabrics allow us far better insulation than people had a few decades ago. A single layer of thermal underwear, he calculated, equates to four degrees of thermostat heat, letting you save you up to 40 per cent in heat energy.

The elderly people here remind me how little heat we need, just as other places remind me how much we can tolerate, both goals far beyond my current limits. My family lives with more heat than we truly need, I admit, but we live with about ten degrees less room heat now than when we first arrived in Ireland, and several years from now, one way or another, will live with less still. As with so many of our projects, we never feel like we are truly adapting, so slowly do the changes come. Then we look back several years, and realise how much we’ve changed.

Still runnning

While most cars on the roads here average several years old, as it would be across most of the West, a surprising number of our neighbours maintain cars from the early-to-mid-20th century -- these were parked at a gathering in a nearby town.

Our neighbour down the canal raises cows and his farm seems perpetually muddy, but after he got to know me he brought me to his barn where, two metres from the calves, he lifted a tarpaulin and revealed a row of mint-condition cars from the Prohibition Era, like a secret treasure.

Summer Bounty

For a single blessed week, it was warm and dry here, and I could bicycle across the countryside wearing shorts. The climate remains so consistently chilly here that people do a Don Knotts double-take when they see someone wearing shorts. Nor do they have any tolerance for warmth; the first day the climate rose above 20 degrees -- say, 60 degrees Fahrenheit -- everyone in my office turned red, panted and dripped sweat, and lunged for the air conditioning.

Still, the garden has overflowed with riches; strawberries and kohlrabi, rocket and broad beans. Our weekends have filled with sowing, digging, pruning, trimming, pickling, weeding and other projects. Our pantry is filling with flower heads and herbs drying from the ceiling, elderflowers brewing and jars of radishes pickling.

Enjoy your midsummer.

The canals

Built 250 years ago by armies of barrel-chested Irishmen fed on meat and beer, they became one of the country's great natural resources. Within sight of my front gate lies the rusted husk of a barge station, where teams of horses drawing carts of peat - dug from the bog all around us -- on rails from the bog up to the canal. From there the peat could be pulled by horses, in boats this time, to provide the urban centres of Dublin with heat in winter. 

Today, as I ride my bicycle along the canal, I pass the derelicts of old canal boats, some with literal trees growing through them. In the coming years, this is a resource the Irish will have to remember that they have.

I wish more governments would begin such projects now. Employing armies of otherwise struggling young males could substantially reduce the crime rate, as happened during World War II. It would provide wildlife with a haven and families with sources of fresh water and fish, as it does for us. It would create infrastructure that could continue to serve Iowa or Alabama a millennia from now.

London

Well, I’m back from London Book Fair -- I was supposed to go last year but, as some of you might remember, the eruption of an Icelandic volcano cancelled all air travel here for a while. This year my day job sent me there on business, and when my colleagues went home I stayed for a holiday.

The first night after the Fair, I headed for Picadilly Circus for a performance of Lillian Hellman’s 1934 play “The Children’s Hour.” I was also fortunate to find a hostel in the middle of Picadilly, only a few blocks from the theatre. I love hostels, excellent Spartan accommodations for tightwads in an expensive city.

I wanted to see this particular play; to my knowledge, this was the first time it has been performed since I’ve been alive. I’ve never had a chance to see the 1936 version with Miriam Hopkins, Joel McRae and Merle Oberon, but I did love the 1962 version with Shirley MacLaine, James Garner and Audrey Hepburn. This production carried a surprisingly prominent cast of Ellen Burstyn, Kiera Knightley, Elizabeth Moss and Carol Kane, all famous television and film actresses who proved their stage presence here.

The next day I took London’s open-top bus tour, drank coffee and oxtail-flavoured crisps on the banks of the Thames, and visited the Garden Museum – a small but beautiful volunteer exhibit across the Thames from Big Ben. They have a collection of gardening instruments from centuries past, finely-crafted instruments whose names most people would once have recognized – dibblers, spudders and netting shuttles.

I recommend the Imperial War Museum to London visitors as well, particularly for its focus not just on the guns and machines, but on neighbourhoods and families. In its depths English rooms from the 1940s are recreated – books, music, utensils – just as it would have been in the Blitz. In the middle of the living room was one of the cages families would hide inside, and along the wall are the stories of the children – native Londoners and refugees – who were evacuated and who stayed. I appreciate learning about war through the eyes of most people who see it, rather than through political speeches or generals’ memoirs.

I was not able to see the one museum I most wanted to, however -- the Natural History Museum. Hopefully I can return soon and see it properly, with The Girl.

I cannot highly enough recommend London’s transportation system; between the Underground, the buses and the very walkable streets, you can go anywhere quickly and easily. Locals complain about the Tube and the crowds, but I would rather have a system with a rush-hour crush than none at all. I was left wondering how, and how long, such a system can be maintained.

Photo 1: Big Ben across the Thames.
Photo 2: The West End at night.
Photo 3: Garden implements from decades past.
Photo 4: The artillery guns outside the Imperial War Museum.

Irish movies

It’s St. Patrick’s Day again: downtown parades, green felt hats, plastic orange beards, pennywhistle-and-accordion music, and television repeats of The Quiet Man and Darby O’Gill and the Little People. If you want to see Ireland on screen in some other way this year, though, you can check out any of dozens of great Irish films: some bright and sweet, others dark and dramatic, and many little-seen and under-appreciated.

A list of “Irish movies,” of course, could be defined many ways. It could mean the stereotypical “Oirish” films that annoy the Irish themselves – the two mentioned above, for example, or the deeply weird Finian’s Rainbow. It could mean films set somewhere else but shot in Ireland – usually the Wicklow Mountains near us -- for the scenery: Excalibur, Braveheart, Zardoz, Saving Private Ryan, the 2004 version of King Arthur. It could mean US films that use Ireland as a backdrop for American romance (P.S. I Love You, The Matchmaker) or family drama (Da).

You can see comedies about colourful characters in Ireland’s villages (Garage, Waking Ned Devine, War of the Buttons) or its towns (The Van, The Snapper, Once, Circle of Friends, Eat the Peach), dramas set in the country (Dancing at Lughnasa, The Field) and the slums (My Left Foot, Angela’s Ashes, Veronica Guerin, The General). Some modernised old legends (The Secret of Kells, Into the West, The Secret of Roan Inish), while others exposed sad chapters of history (The Magdalene Sisters, Evelyn).

A number of films have focused on Ireland’s rebellion against Britain (Michael Collins, The Informer, The Wind That Shakes the Barley) or “The Troubles” with Northern Ireland (In the Name of the Father, Cal, Omagh, Hunger, Bloody Sunday, The Boxer).

It could mean creations of the Irish film industry, whose films often leave all these stereotypes behind and deal with life in modern urban Ireland (Inside I’m Dancing, Intermission, Once).

Most of the films above were critically praised, although I haven’t seen them all myself. I have seen and particularly recommend the ones below – if you like movies, check out the titles and see if anything appeals to you.

Light meat:

Waking Ned Devine: An elderly man in a remote village wins the lottery and dies of shock. His neighbours conspire to maintain the pretence that he is still alive, so that they can all receive the winnings and divide them among themselves.

The Secret of Roan Inish: An unashamedly mystical and sentimental film by John Sayles, about a young girl in rural Ireland discovering an old legend.

The Commitments: An ambitious young music fan in 1990s Dublin tries to hammer a motley group of musicians into a soul band. Set in the slums of Dublin and with a bittersweet ending, this still makes the light category for its gentle humour. If you liked The Full Monty or Billy Elliot, you’ll probably like this.

Dark meat:

The Wind that Shakes the Barley: A keenly-observed film about young men drawn into the Irish Revolution, showing how early idealism leads to stark choices.

The Informer: John Ford’s 1929 film shows 24 hours in the life of a revolutionary sympathiser, and how a single act of desperation leads to a tragic chain of consequences.

The General: The biography of one of Dublin’s most notorious gangsters, who laughed at the police for years until he ran afoul of the IRA.

Photos top to bottom: The Wind That Shakes the Barley, The Secret of Roan Inish, Waking Ned Devine, The General.

Note: Blogging is more-or-less weekly for the moment due to technical difficulties.

Brigid's Well

This is St. Brigid's Day, to commemorate a saint who built a learned and peaceful community here as the Roman Empire was experiencing its own Long Emergency. Her church was supposedly built under a great oak, so Cill (temple) + Dara (oak) = Kildare. Brigid's Well, not far from us, has drawn penitents for perhaps thousands of years, and the branches of the surrounding trees are thick with rosaries, flowers, photos of loved ones and other signs of devotion.

Quite a year

I don't usually get into politics, but some people have asked me about the perhaps confusing news coming out of Ireland right now. I dealt with some of it in a previous post, and in the upcoming AmCon article. For now, here's a summary of recent events for anyone interested:

2005: We move here to be near my wife’s family. In unrelated news, Ireland voted best place to live in the world.

Summer 2007: Election leaves Fianna Fail (rhymes with tall) party -- which has dominated Irish politics since the country’s founding -- short of a majority. Ireland has a parlimentary system like the UK, so people vote for one of several parties, and if no one has a clear majority, two or more parties must form a coalition, and the major coalition partner picks the Prime Minister. Fianna Fail asks the Green Party to join them in coalition, and in a controversial move, the Greens accept.

Fall 2008: Economic crash bursts Ireland’s bubble. Fianna Fail ensures all of nation’s banks, placing nation in unprecedented debt.

Winter 2009: Ireland sees worst floods in 800 years.

April 2010: Volcano temporarily shuts down air travel.

September 2010: Fianna Fail Taoiseach (TEE-shak, or Prime Minister) Brian Cowen appears drunk in interview – makes the news across the world.

November 2010: Irish government is bankrupt, asks for bailout. Massive protests fill Dublin, offices of Dail (Congress) members vandalised.

Late November 2010: Ireland sees worst snowstorms in living memory.

December 2010: New budget cuts services and pensions and raises taxes. Fianna Fail widely blamed – their poll numbers drop from around 45% to 14%.

Monday, Jan 13: FF leaders begin to question the Taoiseach’s leadership.

Sunday, Jan 16: A faction of Fianna Fail breaks away and calls on Cowen to step down. Foreign Minister resigns.

Tuesday, Jan 18: Fianna Fail votes on whether to retain Cowan as leader, attempt to oust him fails.

Wednesday, Jan 19: Four of the 15 ministers (like US Cabinet members) resign.

Thursday, Jan 20: One more minister resigns. News reports that Cowan is attempting to pack his cabinet with allies. Green leader John Gormley tells the Taoiseach the Greens will not support his ministerial appointments.

Saturday, Jan 22: Cowen announces he will resign as head of his party but remain head of government.

Sunday, Jan. 23 – Green Party pulls out of government. Only seven of 15 ministers left. Coalition ends.

Monday, Jan. 24 – TDs (like Congress members) hashing out new Finance Bill – as soon as that is complete, the Dail will dissolve and a new election will be set.

Today – Finance Bill set to pass; new election at end of February. Fianna Fail votes for new leader, Cowan will stay as Taoiseach until after election.

More on the story here, here, here and here.

It's dramatic, but only in the way the USA's 2000 election was dramatic, and on a smaller scale. We're still working, the police still function, no one's shooting and the lights are still on. It could be a lot worse.

Good news

If my writing's been a little sparse lately, it's partly because I've been busy writing the cover story for the next issue of the American Conservative magazine.

The article, "The Wreck of the Irish," deals with the meteoric rise and fall of Ireland's boom, and its lessons for America. It's not online yet, but I just got my copy in the very slow Irish post, so it should be on newsstands where you live soon. I'm not going to tell anyone what to do, but if you checked it out, it wouldn't hurt my feelings.

Like a storm overhead

Thursday morning it began. In the wet darkness before dawn I rode from our rural home to my day job in Dublin, listening to news on the bus speakers – a team of international financial experts had flown in to meet government leaders, and reporters demanded to know why. Six days of revelations later we have a bankrupt economy, a bailout that could top a hundred billion euros, a broken government coalition, a new planned election and a severe emergency budget. And yet everything looks the same.

That morning I felt worn out from the previous day’s work. I had taken a day off work to borrow a friends’ trailer and pick up straw bales from farmer near Maynooth, as he was the only farmer I could find that still makes the human-sized bales, now that everything is done with machinery. I wanted to stack the bales into a night soil composter, seeing if I could get the right carbon and nitrogen ratios to create the high temperatures needed to kill off pathogens.

I also took our old refrigerator to the dump – I wanted to make it into an underground cold-box, but couldn’t find someone to drain the Freon from the tubes in back, and didn’t want the chemicals seeping into the groundwater. Finally, I loaded up the trailer with mulch from the pile where the county shreds its Christmas trees, and spread it between our garden beds.

On Friday our bank admitted that its value had dropped from a high of 22 billion down to 300 million – a decline of 98.4 percent. We are withdrawing most of our money until this passes, and stocking up on more food and propane than usual. I absorbed the news riding home in the darkness, writing a letter to a local teacher – my non-profit is working with a local school to get teenagers to interview elderly residents, collecting information on the skills and resources people here had a few decades ago.

Saturday marked an emergency meeting of the government, we heard as we went to the Farmers’ Market. Later that day my Girl rode her horse around the pen under a grey winter sky, with our neighbour’s daughter the same age. The Girl took her first bad fall off a horse a few weeks ago, and I told her how proud I was that she was riding again. Today, her friend fell the same way, and while I ran in and carried her to her car, she was also shaken but unharmed.

Sunday we all listened to news pundits speculate on the IMF loan, and all agreed it would mean higher taxes and less money for health and education. But no one really knew.

For me, though, Sunday was the day I ringed the row of lilandia evergreens that border our property. While I have taken some down with a chainsaw, we realised that the barbed-wire fence behind the trees – the only thing separating our garden from dozens of hungry cows in winter – is getting old and easily broken. We think the cows recognise the rows of trees as a barrier, and that cutting them down now would encourage them to push through the barbed wire. At the same time, we need their roots to stop taking nutrients from the soil so we can plant native fruit and nut trees. My solution was to chop the bark off all the way around the base of the tree, killing it without felling it, and we can fell them at our leisure later this winter.

Sunday The Girl and I placed cloches over our raised garden beds, and draped fleece over them to keep the frost out. Finally, we planted a rowan sapling in the hedgerow by the canal, filling a gap behind our rows of loganberries and raspberries.

Monday morning The Girl woke me even earlier than usual, so I could kill a mouse. He crept in the warm house one day, hopefully when we left the door open, and for weeks had left our mousetraps devoid of their peanut butter but unsprung. Finally The Girl reached to get the cat’s food and the mouse jumped up at her. It was very considerate of him to wait for me in the plastic bag, and I made sure the cat was fed.

That day the government split apart. For a few years now the Green Party had ruled in uneasy coalition with Fianna Fail (rhymes with tall, but looks like a bad pun), perhaps Ireland’s equivalent of the Republican Party, and with a few independents they form a ruling coalition. Since the Greens had to concede a great deal of their platform to compromise, they have been a few years of continual controversy. With the onset of the bailout they announced they were washing their hands of the coalition, effectively a vote of no confidence in their senior partner. Their actions force a general election early next year, and everyone takes for granted that this is the end of Fianna Fail’s long dominance.

That night The Girl and I watched one of her favourite programmes, the documentaries of David Attenborough. We read about trilobites and velvet worms, and then I let her watch the Marx Brothers make jokes about the Depression.

On Tuesday, the offices of at least two TDs – like MPs in Britain, or Congress members in the USA – were vandalised. After centuries of being among the world’s most famous victims of poverty, the Irish had experienced one of the world’s most remarkable economic booms, the Celtic Tiger. For a magical few years, the population of some villages quadrupled, and land values increased more than that. Hundreds of thousands of Irish built new homes, including us. The natives here were intensely proud of becoming an economic powerhouse, and while most expected that it would end, few expected it to implode so spectacularly.

On Wednesday the government announced its new budget, increasing taxes and tariffs and cutting social services. That day I met The Girl’s teacher for the annual parent-teacher conference, and bought new socks for the winter – Ireland saw an unusual cold snap last winter, and climate change experts say we could get more in the coming years.

We took off work for Thanksgiving – of course it is an ordinary day for everyone else here, but I am an American and wanted to honour it. I am grateful for the life we have, and for our great fortune.

This is what the Long Emergency feels like. It feels like screaming headlines and breaking-news interruptions and haggard pedestrians and foul moods at the office. It feels, for a while, like the end of the world. But while it happens there is still birdsong and rustling leaves, frost across the fields and fog at twilight. It feels like a storm overhead and far away, thrilling and mournful and dangerous, and we scramble to take shelter from it. It can kill many people and destroy our plans, but then it passes, and the landscape looks much the same.

It will happen to you too sometime. Maybe your money will be worthless one day, having gone from work to wealth to metal to paper to stocks to derivatives, into a realm of such abstraction that it blows away on the next breeze. Maybe all the jobs in your city will disappear one by one, the young people migrating in caravans to rumours of work far away. Maybe the electricity will go off more and more often, or the store shelves will slowly go empty. Maybe people around you, fed stories of apocalypse for two generations, will think it the end of the world.

But we can’t do anything about it. That’s something that many of us, raised on fictional stories in which people change the world, cannot accept – real things are slow, last longer than our lives, and are out of our control. People have immense power – we have scoured the surface of the planet like a forest fire, created cities that rise like mountains from the shore, and set events rolling that will not dissipate for millions of years. But as a person, each of us has very little ability to change anything.

And this is the good news about the day the world ends -- it never comes, or if it does it's like any other day. It looks like a day thick with things to do – animals to be fed, bedtime stories to read and chores that don’t wait for the next news report. For those eagerly anticipating the Rapture or the Singularity or the 2012 whatever, this is the bad news – nothing will reboot your life and take away your problems.

And after the storm passes, a few things that are forever changed, and we become accustomed to them. Soon we joke casually about the events that we feared -- the terrorist attack, devaluation, election, outage or shortage – and accept it, and forget that anything else was ever normal.

Until the next end of the world.