I have been putting it off for a while, or rather meant to do it for some times and somewhat forgot; Well over twenty years now in fact. But the other day, the idea of going on a wild goose chase, travelling to the north west of the island to witness the wonderful ballet of Barnacle Geese, had been resuscitated by my friend Jonathan Shackleton. I must have mentioned it in one of our conversations, and as he was soon to be heading back to Antarctica for another few weeks’ round as a guide and lecturer, time was ticking, and by the time he’d come back, they would probably be gone back to Greenland. He rang me a couple of days before to confirm, and Sunday last, we finally went.
Service please! ( photo shoot at The Forge – Meath).
You’d be thinking, with a title like that, we are going to get another kale smoothie or a healthy drink for guilty January… Not a chance! “The Juice”, is the French slang word for “busy”. It can be used in two different ways: “I am in the juice”, meaning that you are very busy, loads of work, bang-bang, can’t talk too much but you can manage, you are in control… On the other hand when you say ( and this could be very Breton) “ I have taken a juice”, means that tunnel vision has taken over, you have lost that control and start focusing on the one thing, while the situation around you gets more and more critical. Right now, I can only think of three professions where “Juice intake” can have various consequences. If you “take a juice” while at the helm of a plane, you and your passengers better hope that your co-pilot spots the symptoms early, or it could have a dramatic outcome. Same with air traffic controllers I guess. If you work in a call centre and start to feel overwhelmed by the volume of people treating you like a human carpet, you might want to take five, before you tell someone to go eat a lemon, which could get you an early P45 ( the end of employment form in Ireland). Then they are the cooks and the chefs; “Taking a juice” is just not an option, even if you might hear stories, it’s not ok… The phrase “it happened to all of us” is not ok… That sentence of fake empathy echoing “it’s not your fault… It’s not your fault” … You don’t know what it feels like, but I know… It happened to me once, eighteen years ago; time to face your demons Franckie Boy, time to share it with the world…
I am your Indian, the black moon rambler in a field of rye, your witness cherishing your words. I am your Indian, the Armorican who sees your pain, the sarrazin child who will drink with you the silver chalice of life until the lees will touch our lips. I am your Indian, your scout who listens and feels free by being given a gift; a bond, your ear, your heart. I am your Indian, together and with each other, we will find the unreachable peace.
Today is a special day, my event horizon, November 6th… How could I ever forget this date that will probably start to fizzle out from now on, like the sleeves of my old favourite woolly jumper from Donegal. November 6th, when I closed the door on childhood and adolescence to start another, like a young flightless guillemot jumping off a bottomless cliff, I had to take the plunge, take control of my life at last and become my own man, sticking my middle finger in the process to all the critics and detractors who discouraged me…
I went a bit nuts today; I went to the woods in search of inspiration for a cake I wanted to create for a long time… I also wanted to find myself, drifting and surfing on long gone memories when we had a family, when we spent October Sundays harvesting chestnuts in the forest back home. I love that descent into darkness, I feel great again, knowing that the clock will go back to its original solar time. I feel restored, in harmony with nature. We didn’t have Halloween, but we had the great “Legends of Death”, gathered from all around Brittany by Breton writer Anatole Le Braz, Anatole “The Great” or so it translates. The first time I read the book, I was 17, and after a couple of chapters, I went to sleep, or rather to bed, I don’t think I closed my eye lids that night… “Samhain” the Celtic origins of Halloween, when the wheel turns, welcoming the darker side of the year… I am aware that a lot of people feel depressed at this time of year, I get it, I sympathise and I don’t go on too much about it. I asked a Scandinavian friend of mine once, on how they deal with six months hardly seing the sun? She just replied: “we live in each other’s houses, we are very sociable folks”. I was humbled… What a great attitude…
October 1992, all aboard! We were heading for Cherbourg to catch the St Killian II bound for Ireland. We checked the weather forecast on TV at lunchtime after the news, just before leaving; weather’s fine for sailing. The excitement was palpable when we all met at the Korners’ homestead, my friend Sergio waiting for us with a huge smile of trepidation as he welcomingly opened the front door.
I am not a big fan of Sundays, but I must say that I do enjoy the first part of the day, until at least 1 or 2pm. After that, I find it heavy and boring. After getting up and discussing the mysteries of the universe and other existential topics around breakfast, I always make an effort to dress nice, have a shave, even if it is my day off, and maybe use the more expensive eau de toilette for the day that’s in it; nothing. I realised that every time, I am re-enacting Sundays of the past, where imaginary family members would knock at the door and we could all have a wonderful, worriless and merry afternoon. But of course, they never come, or very rarely and despite my enjoyment at getting the dinner ready, you know, for later with “Blue eyed girl and the Seven cats”and “Doggy Woggy acting as a Dominical commis chef watching my every moves.
“Boxin the fox”: Irish slang for “stealing from an orchard”.
It was the end of September 1991; I was saying my goodbyes to county Donegal where I had worked for two months on a Rhododendron removal project, on the hills… “Slán Tamall Mín an Lábáin agus An Earagail “. Goodbye until later! I stepped onto the bus bound for Dublin after hugging a couple of newly made friends. It felt like yesterday when I landed in Ringaskiddy in co. Cork; I had got a free ride on a school bus trip, back from Brittany, all the way to Sligo; I hitchhiked the rest to Donegal Town, and now I was heading back the long way around. I crossed “The North” for the first time, Enniskillen and the intimidating British Army checkpoint – now long gone – before Belturbet in County Cavan. What a ride!
I do often come across a bit of ignorance from our mainland European gourmands regarding Cheddar. A cheese named after a little village in Somerset, UK; a few miles from Wales. It also refers to a very particular type of cheese making. Unlike camembert from Normandy, the name Cheddar is not really protected so it can be found well outside its original region of production and therefore, due to obvious historical reasons, is found in all shapes and forms in Ireland. Shape wise, it is mostly square, rectangular, white or red (due to a carotene type dye); not really exciting, I’ll give you that, but then again, neither are a lot of main brands of Camembert, chalky, dry versus “boing-boing” plastic. “Tomaytoes-tomatoes”, same difference my friends! The truth is, real cheddar is a bit like some famous French cheese, from Auvergne, like Salers, Cantal or Laguiole. They are not covered with cloth, but their texture and taste can be pretty similar. I even have a theory that they might be related through old French monks’ migrations to England, the same way Wensleydale is related to Roquefort… But that is a debate for another day.
It was a few years ago to the date, August 2010 in Dublin airport. I was picking up my Uncle and his wife for what was going to be their first visit in Ireland; the second time only I was going to meet him. This was a special moment, a reunification after so many years of tears and sorrow, questions unanswered and self inflicted silences. By hugging each other in the busy terminal, we were finally making peace on behalf of our own stubborn late mothers, unaware of the tragedies that had unfolded before our time, keepers of only a few pieces of a puzzle, fragments of broken lives; this jigsaw was going down!
Hungry Breton 