This morning my neighbour died but I do not know this yet. It is a cold bleak drizzly day with a miserable wind complaining out of the north-east. I had slept like a piece of lead piping dropped down a well and am compos mentis again it seems and convalesced enough to work at something or other, although it does not seem important what. I take this indifference as a warning but ignore it anyway. Two friends text me and tell me their cancer operations are done. I shiver. It looks cold out there in the garden. I put on a heavy leather Liverpool pea jacket over my dressing gown and grope for the concrete path, holding my tea mug to my cheek like a plague posy. The shame of my hypochondria accompanies me in reproachful silence through the back door.
But now the concrete path takes over and leads me with the firm guidance of an in-house nurse who is well-used to incontinent nincompoops and dodderers. We walk together between bedraggled tiger lilies reduced to toothless cats by the night wind and here and there step over the collapsed wreckage of green hollyhock towers. The wind tries to get inside my coat like a homeless ocelot, pleading and threatening by turns. I pull leather around me, feeling the crust of yesterday’s influenza in my eyes, still in my sinuses today, prickly, and myself prickly too and irritable with the vile morning and the vile weather. I let the wind slide by me like a beggar, ignored. I refuse to meet the eyes of poverty. Let the poor blow off somewhere else to make bad weather and beg for love and sunshine.
How is it that June was flaming Mediterranean but that for all the rest of the past two years I have been expecting Noah to come trundling over the horizon with his ark on a donkey cart looking for the inland sea of Erin as his starting point for a biblical regatta? Even the Bog Lakes on top are sprouting mermaids!
My courgettes are scarcely able to slide themselves out of the flower’s womb before they begin to rot. Only grass and lettuce thrive as a breakfast for Beast and Man. I shall be a Beast Man if I sink any deeper into this bog.
What would it be like to live where, instead of the cow with the crumpled horn that now stares me down over the ivy ditch like an angry hag, it was strong black garbed women carrying wicker baskets of fresh loaves across a sunlit square that greeted my eyes in the morning, and the
smell of coffee and peaches and jasmine on old old walls. And instead of the basilisk glare of the donkeys braying for attention I could be greeted by the sound of bells from a Catalan basilica or a stolen Moorish palace ringing across my breakfast table, as I drank sweet Arab coffee and dunked my croissant, studying the architecture of passing women and beautiful buildings, as I once did 40 years ago but now with the leisurely appreciation of experience and not the panting hunger of youth.
You read this blog and comment from far away places, warm places, places where the stones are worked with artifice into cathedrals and living tombs and great statues and delicate carvings and majestic paved squares where well-heeled crowds surge back and forth to the wine dark tide-pull of a fermenting civilisation. You comment about my green wet land of pre-history. Well, it remains pre-history still for nothing moves here but cattle and the stealthy land raids of herdsmen plotting in their outhouses how to filch with the speed of a slug another inch of bogland from their neighbours. And the stealthily abrasive grindstone of the weather and inherited memory glaciate the landscape down to uneventful grass and bog and farmer’s gossip. In the end handfuls of sand. But each grain cunningly etched of course.
You would like to come here? From the snail-decked land of Gaudi and the pillared Toledo halls and the Alhambra echoing with the wisdom of long-banished philosophers, and thinkers beaten to death by the heavy crucifix and burned, and scent of orange blossom and jasmine and olive, and all things moving and alive, and terrible and delightful, your hot-blood paradox, land of Goya, land of Velasquez, land of Franco and the Inquisition, Torquemada and oranges. The swallows visit you there. Why do they return to scrag and reed beds and a mouthful of midges? This is not an inspiring morning. Where on the bog this morning is the rosy warmth of global warming? The hot breath of a dawn that replaces bog orchid with amaryllis and finger sized tulips and shakes the bog flats into a counterpane of embroidered floral fantasy? You want to come to Sligo?
The concrete path takes me on past the collapse of summer to the potato patch. They wave their yellow and green and black flags at me and wink their pretty pratified petals, jumping around in the wind like football supporters, some black-faced and vomiting, some aren’t-you- the- muscley-A-Alpha-male, some supremely and quietly proud and silent ! Big unblighted roosters! What will happen if I do not harvest them? Will they tuck themselves up and wait till next year and rise again, hale and hearty, or come creeping in stinking of scab an
d the old disease, the bog-family inheritance? Does the hand of God reach out to the immigrant failure with even handed compassion? Or should Walter have left them to the Indians in the New World?
The concrete path rocks slightly beneath my feet on its uncertain future. In the Stolen Field the cow with the crumpled horn notices the sudden clamour my passing produces in her world, and approaches the ditch for a hobnob. She has waited long. Is this what she was waiting for? A Messiah has come? Her head over the wall, her huge bulk rises like a whale from the ocean of sour weeds that is her world enclosure.
She fixes me with her eye, large, cold, disappointed, enquiring, like a jaundiced judge too long on the bench. I speak to her, but there is no need for words. Beside the cattle crush he
r calf waits like an auctioneer, curious, already the small man, bullish and perfect, tall as the old grass. They belong to the Stolen World. I am on a different side of the ditch.
Rain beats suddenly across my face, like a duellers slap. The donkeys, back by the house, have seen me. They bray bread and the bog arena echoes mournfully with their castrated sadness like a Jumbo Jet full of pilgrims landing for Knock Shrine.
I turn. Goodbye cow, somebody else’s. Goodbye Stolen Field. Somebody else’s. Goodbye the sun drenched squares of Spain and the ambulatory shapes of Spanish women. Somebody else’s. The concrete path mutters comfortingly. Don’t worry. Come along. We know where to go. Breakfast. Porridge. Grey like me and the Curryaun skies. Yum! This morning my neighbour died. But I do not know this yet.
But now the concrete path takes over and leads me with the firm guidance of an in-house nurse who is well-used to incontinent nincompoops and dodderers. We walk together between bedraggled tiger lilies reduced to toothless cats by the night wind and here and there step over the collapsed wreckage of green hollyhock towers. The wind tries to get inside my coat like a homeless ocelot, pleading and threatening by turns. I pull leather around me, feeling the crust of yesterday’s influenza in my eyes, still in my sinuses today, prickly, and myself prickly too and irritable with the vile morning and the vile weather. I let the wind slide by me like a beggar, ignored. I refuse to meet the eyes of poverty. Let the poor blow off somewhere else to make bad weather and beg for love and sunshine.
How is it that June was flaming Mediterranean but that for all the rest of the past two years I have been expecting Noah to come trundling over the horizon with his ark on a donkey cart looking for the inland sea of Erin as his starting point for a biblical regatta? Even the Bog Lakes on top are sprouting mermaids!
My courgettes are scarcely able to slide themselves out of the flower’s womb before they begin to rot. Only grass and lettuce thrive as a breakfast for Beast and Man. I shall be a Beast Man if I sink any deeper into this bog.
What would it be like to live where, instead of the cow with the crumpled horn that now stares me down over the ivy ditch like an angry hag, it was strong black garbed women carrying wicker baskets of fresh loaves across a sunlit square that greeted my eyes in the morning, and the
smell of coffee and peaches and jasmine on old old walls. And instead of the basilisk glare of the donkeys braying for attention I could be greeted by the sound of bells from a Catalan basilica or a stolen Moorish palace ringing across my breakfast table, as I drank sweet Arab coffee and dunked my croissant, studying the architecture of passing women and beautiful buildings, as I once did 40 years ago but now with the leisurely appreciation of experience and not the panting hunger of youth.You read this blog and comment from far away places, warm places, places where the stones are worked with artifice into cathedrals and living tombs and great statues and delicate carvings and majestic paved squares where well-heeled crowds surge back and forth to the wine dark tide-pull of a fermenting civilisation. You comment about my green wet land of pre-history. Well, it remains pre-history still for nothing moves here but cattle and the stealthy land raids of herdsmen plotting in their outhouses how to filch with the speed of a slug another inch of bogland from their neighbours. And the stealthily abrasive grindstone of the weather and inherited memory glaciate the landscape down to uneventful grass and bog and farmer’s gossip. In the end handfuls of sand. But each grain cunningly etched of course.
You would like to come here? From the snail-decked land of Gaudi and the pillared Toledo halls and the Alhambra echoing with the wisdom of long-banished philosophers, and thinkers beaten to death by the heavy crucifix and burned, and scent of orange blossom and jasmine and olive, and all things moving and alive, and terrible and delightful, your hot-blood paradox, land of Goya, land of Velasquez, land of Franco and the Inquisition, Torquemada and oranges. The swallows visit you there. Why do they return to scrag and reed beds and a mouthful of midges? This is not an inspiring morning. Where on the bog this morning is the rosy warmth of global warming? The hot breath of a dawn that replaces bog orchid with amaryllis and finger sized tulips and shakes the bog flats into a counterpane of embroidered floral fantasy? You want to come to Sligo?
The concrete path takes me on past the collapse of summer to the potato patch. They wave their yellow and green and black flags at me and wink their pretty pratified petals, jumping around in the wind like football supporters, some black-faced and vomiting, some aren’t-you- the- muscley-A-Alpha-male, some supremely and quietly proud and silent ! Big unblighted roosters! What will happen if I do not harvest them? Will they tuck themselves up and wait till next year and rise again, hale and hearty, or come creeping in stinking of scab an
d the old disease, the bog-family inheritance? Does the hand of God reach out to the immigrant failure with even handed compassion? Or should Walter have left them to the Indians in the New World?The concrete path rocks slightly beneath my feet on its uncertain future. In the Stolen Field the cow with the crumpled horn notices the sudden clamour my passing produces in her world, and approaches the ditch for a hobnob. She has waited long. Is this what she was waiting for? A Messiah has come? Her head over the wall, her huge bulk rises like a whale from the ocean of sour weeds that is her world enclosure.
She fixes me with her eye, large, cold, disappointed, enquiring, like a jaundiced judge too long on the bench. I speak to her, but there is no need for words. Beside the cattle crush he
r calf waits like an auctioneer, curious, already the small man, bullish and perfect, tall as the old grass. They belong to the Stolen World. I am on a different side of the ditch.Rain beats suddenly across my face, like a duellers slap. The donkeys, back by the house, have seen me. They bray bread and the bog arena echoes mournfully with their castrated sadness like a Jumbo Jet full of pilgrims landing for Knock Shrine.
I turn. Goodbye cow, somebody else’s. Goodbye Stolen Field. Somebody else’s. Goodbye the sun drenched squares of Spain and the ambulatory shapes of Spanish women. Somebody else’s. The concrete path mutters comfortingly. Don’t worry. Come along. We know where to go. Breakfast. Porridge. Grey like me and the Curryaun skies. Yum! This morning my neighbour died. But I do not know this yet.
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