I’d reduced it all down, simplified it. Two outfits: nondescript. Two kinds of food: bread and rice. I kept the shutters closed. I left the house only at night. I hoped no one would notice my disappearance, my decision to live in a small way.

I maintained a lively interest in the things inside these four walls. I stared at the television and sometimes I slept on the red rug in front of it. I stared at the radio too and enjoyed a steady internal conversation with everything I heard. I read one bad book and one good book every three days.

When I went out in the dark I wondered why I hadn’t taken this decision years ago. I admired Virginia creeper shimmering in sodium light and walked mostly looking upwards: at the moon, the fleeing clouds, the sheen of slate roofs clamping down on other small lives.

It was three weeks. I stopped opening letters; a pretty, quaking, pile of bills collected in the hall. I smirked at them while striding about in one of my shirt-and-trouser uniforms. It was fantastic – exhilarating, even – to be free of all the shit. Still, I diverted my phone to voicemail, what if someone died?

I was pushing rice about on my plate: Day 23. You called. The phone glowed startlingly on the long, clean expanse of table. I listened to the message sent from your linty right-hand pocket. The clock ticking: tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. You ruined my small life.

The things I did

The first thing I did was bring him cheese, two kinds: Emmental and Mature. I took off all my rings, my watch and bangle, I tied my hair back, I cleaned his fridge.

I cleaned his fridge with a toothbrush and bicarbonate. There were little mounds of snow but I took away the creviced grey, the crumbs of yellow yolk.

The second thing I did was bring him song, three kinds: for lying down to, for standing up to, for dancing to.
I put them on a disc and on a key. I brought sleevenotes in full colour.

In full colour, I wore the dress of azure swallows, the sapphire stones, stockings with trellised flowers. I stood in a flattering light.

The third thing I did was bring him words, four kinds: long, short, sharp, pitiful. I rolled the wheelbarrow to his door. I piled the words in neat stacks, they blocked his letterbox, some fell through.

Some fell through, put out their inky feelers and scuttled down the hall. Floccinaucinihilipilification, wow, screw, supplicant.

The fourth thing I did was stop bringing: I paused.

I paused with the points of a large silver box prodding my arms, blocking my view.

The fifth thing I did was bring him ears, five kinds: dog, cat, elephant, my left, my right. The specimens were hoary, wrinkled, mummified. Mine were scented.

Mine were scented, with cilia reaching for his breath. “This is what I want,” he said.

Floccinaucinihilipilification

Girl Uninterrupted

I saw you today, I had to look three times, and hard,

At the way you were fearlessly moving forward,

Tongue in cheek,

Toward a future noisy with motes and speckles,

They’re violently present, a rash of them.

 

You must pedal through those light shafts too,

They’ve got the contrary speed and slice of lightning bolts.

One wants to cauterise your lips,

Another, to catch your wheels, upend you.

They are all the things you can’t imagine yet circa 1890-1910,

A gunship on the Liffey, a mistake in Sarajevo,

The Emergency,

Motherhood?

 

You’re looking beyond them though,

You’ve fixed your eye on something that pulls you forward,

Your bib billowing, your hair shearing back,

The white silk of your thigh, bare above your stocking top, unmolested by modesty,

You won’t be stopped.

 

This is how a girl can be:

Singular, free, hungry, unafraid.

I haven’t written poetry in a long time and don’t make any claims as a poet but I saw ‘Young girl riding a tricycle along a seafront’ (circa 1890-1910) by JJ Clarke at the National Photographic Archive’s ‘Small Lives’ exhibition and couldn’t respond to it in any other form. I did look at the photograph three times, it clamoured for attention amongst the many other fine and moving photographs depicting Irish childhood 1880-1970. The exhibition continues at the Archive on Meeting House Square until June.

You can view JJ Clarke’s 76 photographs here at the National Library’s digital archive and a larger version of ‘Young girl riding a tricycle’ here

It is evening on a summer’s day but cold and grey, more like February. I’ve been walking the stone fields above the cliffs for hours. Below, past the crocheted terraces of stone wall, I see the village, the curve of harbour, a trawler heading for landfall from the murk. I am almost deafened by the wind. It whips in my ears, its sound is billowing flags. A fleck of spume catches on my lip, I snare it with my tongue: salt.

I’m afraid to stand on the edge and look down. I drop to my knees and crawl forward. I am utterly alone. I see it in a series of ever widening aerial shots: me on my belly on the flat rock; me a dark curlicue in a grey field; me a shadow on a cliff-edge in a stone world. The camera bag vibrates, my coat sleeves fill and lift, my hair is a cat-o-nine-tails. I think I might be taken – by the height, by the wind – down into the medieval plague cathedral of scorched rock.

It won’t last. The wind forces the thought between my lips, an invitation to chew or choke. I swallow the stone cold fact of it. The scarf he gave me, tongues of flame in orange chiffon, licks the updraft.

They say the young men here won’t learn to make these walls anymore, so I take photographs to catch the way light filigrees through the limestone mosaic. At the fort that tips the promontory I lean myself in – kissing distance – and bring the lens up close to catch the warp and weft of overlapping slab.

I walk up and down the fields of stone. I stick to the grassy channels that run between the rocks. I am looking for the path back but the ways are labyrinthine. That thorn tree, didn’t I pass it before? An old ankle injury twinges, I feel the bone slide, I stop and force it back.

That’s when I see the slit: a stone, unsheltered, open below the skies. I peer down at it, a perfect vulva, two layers of whorled lacy lip – deep inside, a wink of dark water. Beneath a lowering sky, I place the little tripod straddling it and lie on my stomach once again, I want to snatch an image of this earthy thing. It takes many positions, odd angles but I’ve captured it, I think. The whipping wind grabs a trail of flickering scarf and drops it in the crevice. I lean to look at the stain of water rushing through the fabric. I undo the rest and push it in, flame by flame, until it disappears to darkness. My fingers return wet and cold.

I straighten and turn. I will attempt to find the path again. I raise my eyes. Some distance off, on a hill sloping toward the horizon, a standing figure: a man. A watching man. He doesn’t call out or wave. He doesn’t move at all. I wonder if he knows it’s here. I wonder if he’s seen everything.

It’s 3.30am and I’m standing with my face pressed against the kitchen window. I don’t know why I’m drawn to stare out into the dark, maybe because it seems to answer back. Next door, someone’s watching TV, their window blind flickers in shades of grey: ash, then slate, and back. The big spruce blocks the moon and stirs gently against the night. I see the outline of the ruined window box with its broken geraniums perilously balanced on the roof of my daughter’s playhouse.  A pipe is dripping outside. Tomorrow that will stop; the pipe will be connected to a sink. It’s the last week of the builders.

But that’s not why I cannot sleep. In fact I don’t really know why I can’t sleep, or rather, I can’t be sure. I’m trying to diagnose what’s causing these long stretches of insomnia. The cause of shorter bouts in the past has been stress, working late, too much coffee, but none of that applies now. Yes, I’m living in the midst of major building works but I’ve adapted to the worst of it – the dust, the builders’ daily arrival at 7am, the endless fetching and boiling of water, the absence of a functioning kitchen.

The most dramatic change to my life though is that since the beginning of July, I’ve been trying to write a novel. It’s something I’ve wanted to do all my life and it’s something I’ve left so late it may well be too late. Still, I’m reasonably undaunted by the cruel odds because in very many ways, writing has begun to bring me the deep satisfaction I’ve long sought. It’s as if I’ve finally discovered the secret code to myself and have opened a hitherto undiscovered vault. I must be the slowest of slow learners, but I’ve been fearful too.

And, I am an innocent lambkin gambolling about in this dangerous world of writing. It doesn’t matter that one way or another I’ve written something every day of my working life, this is different, this is fiction. I’m waiting for it to do its worst to me and I know those shocks will come. It always happens when you move to a new country – a terra incognita, in this case – you don’t understand the ways and customs (oh, you think you do) and there are some realities you don’t perceive at all until it’s already too late.

For years, I secretly sniggered at the juncture in book page interviews where an author would talk about characters springing to life. I’d roll my eyes and think how pretentious it was. I secretly wanted to believe but couldn’t. Later, any lingering romantic notions I’d harboured about writing were scuppered by one author interview I conducted myself where the writer archly, and quite crossly, told me that writing was all craft and that the inspiration stuff was piffle.

Imagine my shock then in finding that, on opening the vault, I’ve managed to release a ceaseless parade of characters – they crawl out of the fog on their hands and knees, rub their eyes, stand up, and begin to walk about. It’s the ascent of man meets Terminator meets the mystical bog road in Patricia Lynch’s The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey. I have more characters than the demands of story require, I have characters that have nothing to do with the story I’m working on at all, they just hang about looking for a gig. Weirder yet, inanimate objects have begun to develop voices. In the room I use for writing the whiteboard wants to talk to the wall of post-it notes – the whiteboard’s a clever optimist, the wall of notes, a dullard. I can’t sufficiently explain how discombobulating this is when it’s first experienced. Of course, I do know that it’s my own incontinent mind generating all this burble, this chorus of voices, but how it happens both bewilders and intrigues me. It’s as if all the half-thoughts I’ve ever had are now rounded, full-bodied, three dimensional; I’m letting them out when I never did before.

But while some characters begin as real people: Designer Suit Guy, Willum Trevor, the I-Love-You Man (who’ve all enjoyed a life on Twitter which I’m exploring as a short work medium), they soon standoffishly distance themselves from their instigators: they want no truck with imitation or derivation. Others – a slight, curly-haired girl who wears a parka, a pale boy in an ill-fitting suit, a repellent toad of a man in a much-washed shirt – march on stage, fully formed, battling for space, waiting for me to be true to them.

What I am attempting to report here is the wondrousness of what I’ve found in the territory of the liminal because it has surprised me more than I’d ever have believed possible or probable. It makes me gasp at how I’ve managed to be that TV team player all these years, serving a vision not my own while ignoring repeated inner urgings to unbend my will, make my own path. And there’s a price to pay for going against your own grain, a wearying, edgy feeling of not being a true fit, of being an imposter. I’ve been a lone wolf in sheep’s clothing.

How the places come about, is much less mysterious to me: all of them I’ve seen, or approximations of them, either in dreams or in life. And yet, and yet, in their particulars they are all new – the characters see the places through the filters of their own experience, their own personalities – one character is a rationalist, a reporter of reasonably objective fact, the next charges everything with a subjective, not entirely reliable, yet interesting view. And that makes me see the places anew, stops me in my tracks, forces me to follow the trail of breadcrumbs left behind.

And of course none of this is to say I can do credit to the mystery of what I’m experiencing, the gap between my teeming subconscious and my mundane conscious may be unbridgeable. That’s the terrifying thing – I know it’s in there but do I have the rigour or the intelligence to mine it properly? So it is this that brings sleepless nights, I think. Maybe in six months’ time the grind of it will have worn me down, it won’t feel magical or like channelling anymore, it’ll be as mundane as knocking out 800 words of script. For now though, it’s like falling in love – music is truer, colours sharper, and everything I see seems to want to translate itself to me.

The thought processes have begun to shove other things aside too – embarrassingly, three times recently I’ve failed to unearth the first names of people I know, I’ve completely forgotten to fill out forms for various child-related activities, I’ve stood in the supermarket asking myself what I came for. I’ve gone from my characteristic natural dreaminess to outright preoccupation; whole hours can disappear in what feels like a ten minute span. I wonder too if what I’m finding absorbing, almost compulsive, transmits itself as selfishness to those around me. I wonder about that a lot.

And of course, it hurts too and it’s not just the niggling pain brought on by doubts but a certain level of mental churning in trying to process the torrent of thought, a desperation to catch slippy ideas before they slide out of view, a feeling of serving a set of harsh masters, myself and the characters. It’s made me feel at times both demented and depressed. I’ve come to a standstill twice. When unable to think forward I’ve imagined the characters sitting around on the floor of a draughty limbo, chins on their knees, fiddling with their shoe laces, waiting for instructions. That stasis is an uncomfortable experience to live through, increases the preoccupation, and is inevitably self-defeating. The more anxious you become the less likely you are to see a way out but when you’re five chapters in and you’re only at base camp, the North Face sneers down at you. Despite the fact that you’re using all you know, everything you’ve got, you’re aware of your puniness in the midst of this gargantuan task. And all the precious, hoarded things you bring to it: your sharpest memories, your greatest loves, all the chain of sadnesses from your own life, the recurring images that are part of your habit of mind can, some days, seem sterile, hackneyed, hopeless.

The fixing of it will only come when it comes and will not be chivvied. Once, it only required the unpicking of a poorly written sentence three pages back. Rewriting that threw forward a solution – then, the words flew down, arranged themselves and sat happily once again. It took seven days to see that solution though. I’m reminded of what my friend, an editor, told me: the book will teach you how to write it. This seems true to me now, not as an abstract concept but as a reality.

It’s three weeks today since I wrote even one word of the novel. Children returning to school, the builders, the endless deliveries of tiles and skips and cement blocks, the difficulty of preparing food in camping conditions, mean being tied to the house. Last week though, I went to the room to print off some school notes. I unlocked the door, smelt its familiar smell, nodded to the Whiteboard and the Wall of Confusion. Sitting down behind my desk I notice there a hurriedly scribbled note I’d made about a character. Unaccountably, my eyes flood with tears, I feel a rush of relief to be here again. I’ve been missing it. This is my life now.

I wrote this post as a guest contributor to the Anti Room blog here

Stuck again. Hoping this will help neurons fire.

Writing Exercise 4:  In which Hansy considers the photograph…

How I’d imagined him seemed vaguely comic to me now. Left to itself the imagination fills in the missing pieces and all in its own image. But empathy, fellow-feeling, they’re stubborn, and though I could now see that he was utterly different to me, I still clung to the belief that inside we were alike. That the clockwork of dominant genes, the mechanism of him, was the mechanism of me.

Those coffee stains below the eyes though, even in monochrome, they were mine too. Our pale faces, his and mine, and that genetic bruising that looked like tiredness or sorrow.

It made me want to think about whether you grew into your face or your face grew into you. To laugh and never look happy, to be informal yet always seem stiffly aware of the flow of life’s seriousness beneath. It reminded me of a photograph of me as a two-year-old, one that Effy loved to snigger at. I’m in the garden of the first house, a rainbow dress, red Mary Janes and I’m pointing at the camera, or rather I’m pointing at my mother behind the camera ignoring, in the left of frame, my father’s outstretched hand. But it’s my face that’s the focal point, a mixture of fear and wonder probably, but the solemn look of someone believing their soul is about to be stolen.

By the time my face gets to those formal school portraits – remember the ones where you lined up outside the classroom and got called in one by one – it’s morphed into the face of a child psychotic. The darkness spreads up from the coffee stains to my eyes, making them black not grey, and the look is now one of rebelliousness, violence. My hair scraped back till my temples ached, the green ribbon all askew, my arms folded grimly on the desk, I’m a cornered, captive creature. And so it was in every photograph afterward. Sometimes, a smiling mouth, but always the gravely serious eyes.

And he had it too. Something of the same attitude and bearing. Spare like me but taller, he looks at camera with an out-thrust chin. Ostensibly the look is frank and fearless but really, a barrier, a gauntlet thrown down.  His eyes are genuinely dark though, and the dark below gives him the aura of an ascetic saint or a candlelight scholar. There’s a slight turn of the body away from camera too, a sort of carelessness, like he’s just arrived or might leave at any moment. His clothes look as if they’ve blown onto him, the wing of a shirt collar caught in his baggy jacket, the droop of his wrinkled trousers over those ugly hobnail boots. He hadn’t even bothered to run a comb through that rumpled thatch of black hair. You’d wonder why the photographer didn’t arrange him better, although maybe he didn’t dare to.

 

Photograph: Found Photograph with Embroidery by Maurizio Anzeri (from the Versions and Diversions exhibition at the Temple Bar Gallery). More about the artist here

Inching toward getting a more detailed vision of what this place looks like.

Exercise 3: In which Myles hears a noise…

It had been one of those long evenings. Long for being quiet, which he liked. He’d sat by the big end window half watching television, half keeping an eye on the tents across the field. The German couple who’d arrived that afternoon had lit a small campfire before their tent; he could see the girl’s fine narrow face caught in its light. They’d asked, in fairness, most campsites didn’t allow fires anymore but this early in the season, there was no one much to mind. Galvin, who owned the place, wouldn’t care as long as the money was right and no noise disturbed him at his house further up the lane.

The lake, shaped like a dog’s leg, was narrow here and it glowered in the fading light beyond the tents; cold, unfriendly, grasping its feed from the mountain streams and stippled with angry little waves. It could look so different under a blue sky or the mackerel clouds of sunset, but its most familiar mood was this greyness. He didn’t mind that. He’d grown up looking down at the puddle of it in the valley below and he saw it with an accustomed eye. He knew all of it. He’d told the Germans where to find the kayaks pulled up on the sandy beach, a short walk through the forest behind his caravan.

His own favourite place was further on where a grassy bank ran right down to the water’s edge. The place where his father always took him swimming as a child, the place where he’d almost drowned the first time he’d ventured there alone. He remembered the surprise of it, how his feet suddenly lifted and he’d flipped forward till his own white face met the swaying weeds below. On a hot day though, wading through there before dropping to swim, he loved the touch of those wavering grasses about his feet and shins, intimate, like walking through warm hair.

As dark closed in he could see the glow of the yard lamp at his parents’ house a mile below the crest of the mountain. His father would be out having a last look at the calves before settling down to watch some 24 hour news channel. It used to be his job when he still lived at home, to check on the scuttery calves, aye, and to get the cows in for the milking morning and evening too. No more of that. His mother rang him nearly every day but he hadn’t spoken to his father in half a year.

He was setting about making his evening meal, nothing fancy, a pot of pasta with a few handfuls of grated cheese, when he heard the noise. He stopped to listen, no deer would come this close to the van and a dog wouldn’t be stupid enough to stumble about out there in the low pine brush. It sounded like the regular pace of steps though, maybe those mad Belgian lads with the dome tent who’d been drinking themselves into a stupor for the last three nights. Only a drunk could be impervious to the rub of the thousand tiny branches.

He opened the door and the yellow light from inside lit the steps and another foot or two before bleeding into the night. The vast wall of forest sprang up before him, dark against dark. He waited for his eyes to adjust, then he could see the opening where the forest path began and the leaning tree damaged in last year’s storm. It was windy now too, he saw the leafy silhouette of the little mountain ash shimmer and flounce; the pines groaned and creaked. There was no one out there. Somewhere, probably on the far shore, a fox cried.

 

I’m not stuck this time. I wrote this short piece just for the joy of expressing a thought arising from the pleasure of perceiving light through closed eyes.

Exercise 2: In which Effy has a dream…

Of course there’s no sound, just the familiar pfff of tinnitus. Not seeing is more troubling. Is it a dream where my eyes can’t open? A dream with rules? Through the shutter of my eyelids, a yellow light, directly above, and in an eight-part grid. When will the dream story begin? Can’t I command it?

I’m horizontal though. So, conscious of bed, but I can’t move my feet; cotton beneath my heels just the same. Plastic or something sticky beneath my back, unpleasant. Bare back, why? A shade blocks off the yellow light. Ah, now it returns. A breeze or the after-draft of someone walking briskly by.

A cold sliver in the back of my left hand. I know what that is, a needle. I have a picture to go with that. I see my warm, risen, blue vein and the tiny ridge the needle makes inside. Does my blood pour and fill a plastic vial? No, something colder floods in, pulsing. There’ll be a bruise.

I hope I remember enough of this light to paint it. I can say I was given it in a dream. Filtered through my eyelids it’s sometimes yellow, but sometimes a purple corona with a mauve heart or a cerulean corona with an indigo heart.

Smells. Far off, a smell like dinner or no, is it tea? Sausages. Closer to, disinfectant and maybe, urine. Ugh! Wait, Hansy’s perfume! Lime, sandalwood, musk.

Lips on my forehead. A brush of curls.

So, two weeks later and I’m writing for a few hours almost every day. As you might expect, problems occur. You couldn’t call it writer’s block, it’s more that mood or train-of-thought disappear and it’s difficult to get back on track.

A friend, writer June Caldwell, gave me some good advice and that was to put a character in a situation unconnected to story and write about that. In other words, when unable to go forward, go sideways. This jump-start technique gets the writing going again, frees things up, lifts the gloom.

Following, a few paragraphs I’ve written about the character Hansy. Beyond its usefulness as an illustration of process, I don’t necessarily assume that anyone other than myself will find this interesting. In the manuscript itself Hansy appears in the first person and is not yet at home in the flat described below.

Exercise 1: In which Hansy considers tidying her bedroom….

She pulled back the heavy damask drapes. How long had it been since she’d done that, maybe six months, maybe more. A drift of dust motes streamed into the light. Outside, and from this angle, the garden and the street beyond looked surprising; still drab of course, but newly revealed. She could see the crooked wrought iron gate and the stairs that led to the basement flat. There was no tenant downstairs now, no scrape of chairs, no smell of hickory bacon. It was damp and dark, the stairwell littered with sweet wrappers and petrifying condoms and works made from sawn-off Coke cans. She often heard the junkies there at night, they spoke in groans: was it pleasure or pain?

She gathered the ancient amber quilt tightly about her. It had been her father’s. Hansy could smell childhood nights off it – measles, nightmares, accidents with her mother’s perfume. She longed to pull the curtains closed again and waddle back to her rumpled sheets: the familiar fug of bed, the scurf of dead skin, to lie against the warm bulk of the months old pile of jeans and coats occupying the empty half of the double bed.

But where to begin? The slide had slid so far the task now seemed monumental. How quickly I’ve acclimatised Hansy thought, realising that she couldn’t remember the room tidy, ordered. But things had accreted; there weren’t enough shelves, wardrobes, cupboards to contain the sprawl. The dressing table beneath its film of dust had become a work station: two laptops, a camera, a tangle of wires all competed for space with a hairbrush furred with curly wisps, five broken cigarettes, a scattering of matches. A stream of spilt moisturiser spread an oily puddle across a photograph of her sister causing a crazy green and pink corona effect about her head. It settled around the base of a cup containing 7-month-old coffee, the milk skinned and thickened. She’d been drinking that coffee when she’d heard. She shuddered and blinked away the unwanted pictures.

To the right of the bed, just past the little hillock of discarded shoes and before the sea stacks of listing novels, stood the clothes horse. It was nothing more than two curved mahogany uprights spanned by a bar. Simple and elegant she’d thought, not that she could see it anymore. Hansy felt a certain reluctance to relieve the clothes horse of its burden; she loved the way the orange and flowered dress lay across the swallow-patterned blouse, the flash of the carmine satin dressing gown beneath the soft mauve of an angora cardigan. Really, if she could, she’d live amongst flowing banners of such patterns and textures – gingham, polka dot, tartan, floral, silk, lace, grosgrain, tulle – even the words were delicious. Stowed in a wardrobe they’d never give her a daily dart of pleasure. And anyway, who was to see that she lived like a streel?

Her phone began to hum; it was on silent so as not to wake her and vibrated like a wasp in a jar. Who could be phoning at 9am on Saturday she wondered and anyway, where was the phone? She made no attempt to find it but stood rapt and listening till it stopped. She heard it make another little hiccough: a voicemail. Tomorrow, she thought, tomorrow I’ll listen.

 

The last time I tried to do this was nine years ago. It was summer too. It was summer and I’d just finished a TV contract, a six month spell of eating, breathing, living, work. I was skidding into summer with no plans made, no holiday booked and the vague feeling of dizziness that comes with living life at the remote level of an automaton. Deprogramming is required in such instances – a deliberate weaning off news radio, newspapers, television, phones, list-making. It takes about three weeks to decompress every time; to get out of the hyper-alertness that comes with vast amounts of information-churning in a low-staff, no-time environment.

To be honest, and it’s been said to me, there have been times when I’ve been no fun on holiday. This has always occurred when I’ve gone directly from a ferocious work schedule into the dog days of holiday. What to do with all this useless time? What to do about the compulsory having of fun? To the antsy, wired me it can be an assault of inertia:  suffocating and overwhelming.  I’m ticking. I’m still looking for reliable news in English or where to get a dependable internet connection or an International Herald Tribune that isn’t a fortnight old. Given time, I come down from this. I come down realising anew that the monstrous, work-addicted, easily-irked me has been left alone at the controls for far too long.

Now, I’m not without insight into this – it’s a pathetic way to live, of that I’m aware. To get to the stage where you’re too hard for holidays is a big slice of your soul to sell for a 6 month contract. Equally, I fully accept that other people do not experience work in this way. The only conclusion to draw is that the part of my head that does output is the all-or-nothing department and everything gets pulled into its slipstream. It’s a design flaw, it could even be labelled neurotic but it’s a habit of self that I’ve come to accept. In fact, it’s the most steady aspect of myself that I can remember right back into childhood: it is my core.

So, nine years ago, in summer, thinking all the above, I sat down to write a novel – to let the work-addicted, obsessive, cussed self do something genuinely useful, genuinely productive, for a change. Something, as I then thought, that would stop me having the itch I couldn’t scratch. Two weeks and about 10 pages in, I began to feel tired and sick, sick and tired. It couldn’t be, or was it? It seemed calamitous news at the time, I was pregnant with my fourth child. It wasn’t self-subversion – what a callous and self-deluding let off that would be – but something genuinely, shockingly, not on the plan. Now, I would have four children under ten years of age. I confess, I sank. I sort of gave up. I saw that first scan of my daughter, bean-shaped and beating inside me, and I knew, with a rush of love, that she would have me body and soul for the next two years. I walked down the corridor of the Coombe Hospital that day, heavy-footed and with a sense that some giant hand had moved me on the chessboard. It was a sense of futility, of cruel fate: like billions of other hapless women since time began, a rogue egg had been my undoing.

Looking back now at those nine years gobbled up in a miasma of mothering and working, I wouldn’t be without any of the four interesting, funny children I’ve helped put on the planet. They have been delightful daily – more delightful than not in fact, even at their most truculent and tantrumy. The bean, the brown-eyed girl, is now eight and with her, the giant hand sent the sunniest, most irrepressible little tyke.

So here I am at the place I started, crashing into the summer after a frenzy of work. This time though, I’ve laid some groundwork. There’s this blog which, begun in unemployment, was always intended to be a limbering up process. I wanted to see if I could write any kind of personal narrative consistently. I wanted to test some suspicions I had that the tyrant could most happily boss herself.  And that has been the revelation – the now-and-again writings here provide weeks of satisfaction and a kind of peace that I haven’t known from any kind of work; an easing of the itch. The chemistry of the last two years of my life has pushed me here too – losses and consolations too personal to write about in this guise but ones that rearranged some internal connections. Now, I have a room of my own, a window over a narrow street, a smell of wood and of baking bread. Here, I am going to try, once and for all, a task too long postponed. I go fearfully but not in dread.

I found myself thinking a lot this week about what used to be called the feminine virtues. Who used to call them that, the Victorians? I dunno. What I do know is that this invisible code still governs much of how women behave in the world, much of how they’re perceived too.

This evening, serving dinner, I looked at the dish of chicken and basil and automatically decided that the smallest, coincidentally slightly singed, piece of chicken would be mine. This action brought unbidden a picture of my grandmother to mind. She’s sitting at the periphery of a crowded farm kitchen, the men (her sons, her neighbour’s sons) are just in from treshing or making hay and are tucking into a dinner of beef and gravy and potatoes.  Over there where she is, she’s squirreled the chipped side plate and is making her tired, ever-so-covert way through one small potato with a little butter and salt. This mental picture is embroidered by my own imagination of course but I do know, via my mother, that my grandmother did indeed do such things. She had eight children, and another six mouths at dinner meant short rations for someone. That someone, inevitably, would be her.

Now, I’m not like that, am I? I just wouldn’t give anyone the meanest bit of chicken in the dish. It’s courtesy: it’s a host/hostess thing, it’s not an absence-of-enough thing and besides I’m quite sure that no child will want the singed chicken, no more than they want bruised apples or to have to pinch a vein of blue fungus off the side of a slice of bread. I’m uncomfortable with the idea of self-denial or self-sacrifice for its own sake. Whenever I notice the host of a dinner party doing similar, and I have, often, it always makes me squirm. When doling out free food, lovingly prepared, to others, who more than the cook deserves a handsome portion? I guess this makes me conflicted.

A line from Byron’s Don Juan that’s been a reliable irritant for all the years I’ve known it is “Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart, Tis woman’s whole existence” yet it’s still a line I often think about. I wonder if it’s a truism but largely only when I’m not thinking what a load of nonsense it is. Or rather, I would wish it so. I would wish it so because the evidence of my own eyes, and my own life, tell me otherwise.

What is it about being a woman that makes us want to please? To do the stuff that no one else will, to please? To become the centre and the mainstay of family, to keep everyone happy? To love and not to count the cost of all those increments of love? To nurture and support men, children, cats, dogs,  goldfish or random strangers down-on-their-luck? If you don’t believe in altruism there must be some trade off but I’m damned if I know what that is. The once-upon-a-time trade off, the one we’re hardwired for, is that for all this love and toil, you get a roof put over your head, a cave, I think, and edible game killed on a fairly reliable basis. But though we’re past all that now, we women still behave like as if we owe someone, somewhere, something.

I know I’m being somewhat glib here. Teaching love, showing love, is important. Children (endlessly self-centred) need to be taught that there’s something beyond self, that there’s pleasure in giving as well as receiving, don’t they? That to look after and be looked after is the loveliest thing? When we finally leave home, whether we’re male or female, it’s part of what we seek: to find a stranger, not tied to us by blood or obligation, who will love and care for us wholly for ourselves.

Yet everywhere I’ve looked recently I’ve seen women operating as super-efficient nurture-bots: working, child-rearing, meal-making, planning parties and days out, supervising education and homework, providing the warm towels and crisp clean sheets that are so lovely at the end of a tired day. Some of the time, I am that woman: seeking news of someone else’s day, taking joy from their successes and feeling sadness at their setbacks. When I’m that woman, my own life is so suppressed, so forgotten, that the how was your day question will strike me dumb. My day? It’s hard to waste breath on its quotidian round of repetitive chores and irksome responsibilities, its mental checklists and bills screaming to be paid. When I’m that woman, I’m utterly lost. That everlovin’ woman is the good woman, the embodiment of the feminine virtues, the woman whose floor you could eat your dinner off. She’s the public woman the world will judge on the basis of her successful career, clean house, well-behaved children, healthy well-judged table, crisp linen and assiduousness relating to birthdays, Christmas, Halloween, Easter and the organising of family holidays. She is a pursuer of lifestyle and, believe it or not, there is approbation going for this simulation of living.

When I’m not that woman (a largely middle class construct, I think), I choose real life. I choose take me or leave me. I choose to magnificently inhabit my own skin by being human and flawed and disinterested in housework. I want to come out of the closet and say I care a hundred times more about a good poem or a great book or seeing art or listening to music than I do about being a good woman.  I want to teach my children to be passionate about life and how to use its minutes and hours well in finding fulfillment. I want to show them how to live without being either selfish or selfless.

And yet, and yet, no matter what I say here, somewhere inside me there’s a good woman default setting that I can’t override. Seemingly operating at a subconscious level, she speaks out or does things before I have time to stop her. She’s acquiescent, considerate and kindly, anxious about other people’s hurts and even more anxious about how she should fix those hurts, she is the sum of the services she provides to others. I despise her, I admire her, I’d like to throttle her.

If, like me,  you’ve ever had occasion to work in a business which requires one to have some acquaintance with hype, spin, marketing or gilding the lily (gilding the nettle sometimes too), you’ll have used the word ‘unmissable’. I heard it used recently to describe a bleak radio competition which offered listeners the chance to see a very minor musical talent try their best to fill a room. Often, in fact, such competitions are launched as a kind of advertorial aimed at filling the godforsaken room – a low-rent way of helping some party achieve their bottom line.

One of my first paying jobs as a wannabe journalist was selling advertising, copywriting, ad-designing and lastly, reporting (as a special treat) on a tiny trade newspaper. It was the kind of workplace that doesn’t exist any more. A health-and-safety-free zone – it had sagging floorboards (some areas had holes covered over with lino – you had to know your office geography) and in the dank basement, accessed by a stairs with listing bannisters, a wheezing tea lady/cleaner who daily wore the same grubby floral housecoat stretched over her ample whistling bosom. There was also a whippet-thin, hyperactive spinster receptionist/bookeeper and a jolly old gent of the golden age of Irish ad men who whiled his day away in a flurry of shag tobacco, furiously pipe-smoking and phoning ad agencies where a new generation of ad man was bemused to be addressed as “Old chap” or have a phonecall concluded with “Very good, at your earliest”.

As I write it now, I see what a colourful place it was – a quaking damp house full of characters and all presided over by a proper, no-nonsense editor who’d worked on Fleet Street and had ended up here through a terrible accident of marriage. But I didn’t think of it as colourful then, I thought of it as dreary. I was the giddy youngster of the office with a head full of books and music and boys. In the hour between 5pm and 6pm on Fridays I spent a good quarter of my meagre wage on finery for the weekend and would be in despair when we went to press late and I had to miss that hour of shopping. So, they were tolerant folk at that little newspaper and it was here I began to learn about using superlatives.

As I remember, we operated on a two week cycle, I would get a list of businesses and phone numbers and it was my job to ring up marketing managers and business owners and try to entice them into buying advertising space at competitive rates. Inside the tiny work-related region between my ears, I cared not a jot whether these jocose men bought space, but still, I marched dutifully through the listings, did my repeat calls, sent faxes and employed a surprising number of adjectives in the drawing up of ads for razor wire or concrete reinforcement.  Of course, at first I didn’t use superlatives: the subject matter, I felt, couldn’t be redeemed by such, it was just too dreary.  This earned me a taking-aside by the editor and a brisk red-lining of my copy. She also inserted words like “ingenious” and “revolutionary”. These were words I’d only applied to Joyce or Beckett heretofore and I remember a little private bristling at the bullshit of it all.

By the time I left the little newspaper I was fully acquainted with the art of jemmying superlatives into copy. I’d also worked for the first in a line of doughty women bosses who mentored me, gave me backbone and provided a very clear road map for how to be unapologetically muscular and female within the world of work. On the day I left, the old gent spent his lunch break in town and, on his return, engaged in a particularly frenetic session of tobacco scattering and paper rummaging. The reason for this was revealed when it emerged he’d bought a wholly appropriate parting gift for me, a hardback Oxford dictionary. On the flyleaf he wrote “May you never be at a loss for words, and always range them in proper order. Best wishes for your future career/s. With pleasant memories of a time shared”. (That dictionary is still the house dictionary and a treasured possession)

Little did I know then that in the years that followed I would spend many woman-hours spewing out superlatives about television and radio and personalities and celebrities, while believing hardly a word of it myself. For sanity’s sake, I cordoned off one little area of my working life where I could deploy superlatives, or their opposite, in an honest way. I have always loved books and reading and, since early on in my career, have been a sometime book reviewer. Here, where superlatives are called for, I have always been able to use them justifiably and pleasurably, without the concomitant guilty feeling that I was selling someone, somewhere, a pup.

And so to superlatives like “must-see”, “unmissable”, “unforgettable”. I’d call them pressure superlatives and they fill my head with conflicting desires. I know rationally, that I should heed none of them, that they are, like as not, written by some humble hack like myself who’s sold their soul or, at least, let it out on a timeshare. But the thing is, these words seem to squirrel their way round the rational part of my brain and unerringly find the auto-sensate part that wants to see everything, feel everything, do everything. So this week, drowning in work, there came the prospect of going to three different events, all of which were billed unmissable. Two would involve travel away from home, the third, an early start. What to do! The thoughts of missing something, of relying on the reports of others when desperately wanting to filter something through my own head inspires a state of near panic. Soon though, it becomes clear that no matter how I juggle and strategise I cannot manage even one event. The thought that all the prospects would definitely be tiring, if only possibly interesting, weighs in to win the day. The desperate itch to match over-work with over-entertainment subsides. And so, curled on the sofa with my daughters snuggled against me we made plans for a weekend of shopping and hot chocolate. They were glad to have their oft-absent, oft-absent-minded mother at home on a Friday night and a Saturday night and a Sunday night, and said so. Then I wondered about living so much in my head, not being intentionally selfish, but with the same result. Where else could I make such a difference, or provide such animal comfort, by the mere fact of my quiet physical presence? It is this that’s unmissable.

[Postscript - Many years later, research for a TV documentary brought me to a nursing home on a leafy south Dublin street. There, in the TV room, I spotted a familiar face and mien - the old gent, now positively ancient, still clad in a tweed jacket with elbow patches! He remembered me not at all but still had his jolly, chuckling way. When I told him I used to work with him he said "Oh really darling, ha ha ha, how amusing!".]

Recently someone said something to me that made me question the whole premise of what I’m doing with this blog. It wasn’t an ill-intentioned comment and it was certainly couched in the kind of vagueness that makes you realise you might be hearing a home truth, obliquely put, from which you ought to draw conclusions if you have the courage. My initial response was a typical straitening of the spine and squaring of the jaw which would normally be a prelude to argumentativeness and all because the word ‘nostalgia’ was used.

Now, I know what nostalgia means in the ether of how we live now. It’s a condition of mind suffered by old fools in thrall to the past. It has a debased currency aced only by sentimentality (which is a condition endured by people who buy reproduction furniture, like Pre-Raphaelite art or shop at Times Past). Really, beyond the taint of blithering idiocy it suggests the laziest of flaccid thinking. In the realms of berkitude it is only equalled by the fervently religious who believe this life is a vale of tears and pray, as my father would have it, “for the Lord to take them”.

Cue self-justification aimed at you, dear reader, and at the unseen commenter.  Really? Well, but self-justification is as bad as the rest, isn’t it? As suspect as nostalgia? Instead, I’ll attempt illumination. What’s written here you’ll have to judge for yourselves. The original intention (didn’t I write it somewhere?) was to try to understand the ‘now’ through the filter of experience, not experience on a vast scale, but my own experience which is all I have to offer you. It goes to my central understanding of what a blog is: one voice among the teeming many. Maybe not even an original voice, but an attempt, at every time I write, to be as honest as I can be within the confines of non-fiction.

I do not assume that anything I write here is especially startling or important. It is not academic or authoritative. I do assume though, that if I do it right, if I concentrate, if I play out all the tropes that interest me, it will touch you, whether you’re twenty years my junior or twenty years my senior, that in the arc of all the many variants of the crucible of experience, there is commonality.

Being as literal as the day is long however, and whenever I’m in trouble or bewildered (often), I’ll reliably turn to either books or words. So imagining that I knew what nostalgia means now, I decided to find out what it means in the classical, back-to-roots sense. It derives from a conjunction of the Greek ‘nostos‘ (homecoming) and ‘algos’ (pain/grief), you could say colloquially, a pain for home or, with poetic licence you could push it to home is where you bring the pain of experience,“the place where / when you go there, / They have to take you in”. At one point in history it was considered a disease: the disease of homesickness. Neuralgia: a ghost pain of the nerves. Nostalgia: the pain of home.

Is that me? Is that what I have, the disease of homesickness? Do I want to crawl back to the humble place where I began, like a mole, blind above ground?

Maybe it’s overly painstaking, another flaw of the literal-minded, that when I write here, I always want to explain where I’m coming from, literally! Where I come from is a small damp place in the middle of nowhere, near a cemetery and a power station and a bog. It is not a perfect place and I was not perfect there. It was standing shin-deep in the cool of a tawney stream, it was also the first place I ever saw a grown-up cry. It was here I learned belonging and love but it taught me about difference and exclusion and loneliness too. Here, I learned to talk to myself; here, I grasped the rope of my life; here, I first became aware of my own consciousness, my otherness and not-the-sameness. Is that akin to rose coloured spectacles, to nostalgia in the commonly understood sense, to sentimentality?

The truth, I think, is that home is inside us. That is how my damp bungalow is your dusty clapboard in an American summer or Marie Claire’s Tuscan farmhouse with scorpions on the wall and wild boar snorting in the scrub, or Eric’s flat overlooking a Prague courtyard in the silence of the old ghetto. Home is the past, the past is home. It’s where you acquire the instruments to dissect the present and divine the future, faulty though those instruments be. And the irony is, once you leave there, you can never go back because even though innocence can be reflected upon by experience, it can never be recaptured.

And memory, what about memory? Proust’s madeleine, the thing, once roused, that keeps you going over and over the same territory looking for the inspiration that’ll keep you going forward aright. Surely it’s not just me who thinks that important? Surely I’m not the only one with a happy childhood who made pain there just the same?

One of my recurring nightmares is one about a house, my house of the subconscious: downstairs is warm and inviting but the chill begins on mounting the stairs. I feel a rising sense of calamity each time, how could I have thought this would do? The second floor has dripping walls that smell of fungi and sagging ceilings and joists pulling out of spilling mortar and fissured walls. The curtains rot and come away in shreds, the chimney breast oozes sooty gobbets, and there amidst it all, is a bed, turned down, its sheets certain to cling and perfect for winding. The pain for homecoming, the pain of homecoming. Home: the place where pain begins.

(‘Song: Memory, hither come’ by William Blake here)

I’ve written here before, I think it was after seeing the film ‘Up in the Air’, about how I hate the euphemism “change management”. Wikipedia has an excellent definition of it that is uncannily faithful to the drear spirit of the idea  - “Change management is a structured approach to shifting/transitioning individuals, teams, and organisations from a current state to a desired future state”. I prefer my own definition that goes something like – change management is a structured approach to bullshitting, hoodwinking and herding you toward unwelcome change that you’re probably not going to like and is most likely not in your own best interests ( And I hate ‘transition’ made into a verb. It’s a sure sign of imminent dishonesty).

I understand though why organisations and corporations feel the desire to manage change. Change is dynamite. Humans love consistency: we love the knowable, the workable, the familiar – the comfort and consolation of it. So much of our mayfly’s span here is governed by cruel mutability – accident, disease, death, acts of God – that our resistance to change is a charming, lovable and deeply human trait. It’s a sign of our hopefulness in face of random fate.

All my life I’ve had a particular love for the ordinary familiar. Not that I can’t be moved by the extraordinary unfamiliar but I do happen to think that God is in the small things and by God I mean what most dependably lifts me out of the quotidian, what makes me think, what brings me joy. The green marbled lino on the kitchen floor of the house where I grew up, the school desk carved with the legend ‘Suas do gúna Úna’ (by some ancient schoolboy), the hole in the floorboards beneath the desk in one of my first jobs, the light in the snug of The Stag’s Head the night I fell in love with a boy I’d previously disliked (I see us both now: the delicious shock of mutual recognition), the rocking chair that hosted night feeds and was later usurped by two small boys spellbound before Postman Pat.

Constancy and familiarity in the wider environment are important to me too. Where I live now is on the route much travelled by my family on all our trips to Dublin during my childhood: I remember being taken early from school and lying on the hot leatherette of the car’s back seat and seeing the tops of Victorian houses float by – trees, lamp posts, sash windows, roofs – zip, zip, zip. This was Dublin to me, otherly, shabby, so unlike the place I came from. I still love this other Dublin of my childhood wondering: alleys, mews, subsiding buildings, unreconstructed shops and pubs tending toward the tasteless and the kitsch, the top floors and high windows of the old city. I find myself looking up, up there is continuity, up there is a way of making sense of ground level change.

An odd trick of perception happens to me though when I travel abroad, when I’m away from the familiar. When I’m somewhere where I have no bearings, I am filled with the irrational belief that everything is in flux. It’s partly inspired, I suppose, by a fear  of being lost (and I have been lost in one or two scary places). I recall a taxi journey from JFK to central Manhattan, looking out at the people in the passing cars and wondering at the fact that they knew where they were going. I know that were I at this particular point on the Van Wyck Expressway again, I’d never remember its particularity. I don’t even believe in the people I see in the other cars – they’re shades like myself not people making routine journeys along an oft-travelled route. I recall too being surprised, and yet unsurprised, that Washington Square was still where I left it the night before or, years previously, in Italy, that port-side Trieste was the same place in morning fog or crisp sunlight.

While I enjoy the discombobulating sense of rootlessness in an unfamiliar place, it is only in the familiar place that I think I really can perceive meaning, that I get a sense of understanding my own internal geo-coordinates as well as those of the wider world. The photo at the top of this post is of a busy crossroads not too far from where I live. The place is Ballybough (Baile Bocht – town of the poor), a place that’s perceived as grim and gritty and isn’t at all associated with the beauties of Victorian Dublin, yet I love this almost-ruined place, the rise to the unseen city centre beyond, left to the docks, right to the North Circular ending at the Phoenix Park. When I’m stopped at this junction I’m nearly home and it reminds me of a story, based on landmarks, I used to tell the children to keep them awake on the gridlocked journey home from childcare (them) and work (me).

In case you’re wondering though, I do know that change is important and inevitable. I also know resistance is futile. Let’s get that one out of the way. The older you get, the more you perceive change, the more you’re aware that certainty is temporary at best: the rocking chair fell apart, the school desk went to storage, the old office where I worked was gutted and modernised, the marbled lino lost its marbling, love ended.

Since moving here to Wintry Villas three elderly neighbours have died: one, unasked, guarded my parking place with the help of his ferocious dog, one was a genteel old lady who loved the young people and one was a dear, close friend – the only real friendship I’ve had with someone more than 30 years my senior. That friend was C, the guardian of our little neck of the woods, the keeper of memories, the human newspaper of record. It’s 4 years since she died and her house stands empty still. When I open the curtains each morning, it’s her house I see but it’s her garden that touches me most. At this time of year, the daffodil shoots push up all around her lovingly tended little patch of lawn, they tell of regeneration but also of fracture. Soon, another family will live there and C’s orange flowered curtains will flap over the edge of a skip, her life will be cleared away.

So, yes, plenty of recent changes have made me sad, have reduced my store of joy, some have been so monumental as to be unthinkable a mere two years ago. The shock waves eddy still. I’ll write about it some day but not yet. I can feel it perking though and it’s changed unchangeable me. I read an article last week about how our likely emotional response to any event is predetermined by neural development in the first year of life. I was thinking then that self-change and self-improvement are impossible (I always like to be let off the hook) and in any case, I believe more in improved understanding than I do in improved self. Whatever about going about changing the self though, events can change you. I’m acutely aware that while outwardly I am the same person with the same passions and the same preoccupations as ever, inside something has taken vital wires and plugged them into different sockets in the telephone exchange of me. The impact of change, so often perceived as external, has caught me all unaware. It is both frightening and exhilarating. What can it mean? A giant leap forward, a diversion away from the main path, a retrograde step into flawed perception? How will I turn out when I’m finished? Or, more puzzlingly, am I headed for a “desired future state” or not? (I proceed cautiously and with a healthy amount of suspicion.)

[Flowers below from C's garden 10.04.2011]

“Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead”. (The Dead from Dubliners by James Joyce)

Looking back now, I can’t remember much about the last five weeks that doesn’t include snow. Snow, news about snow, snow again, news about the economy, more snow, Fianna Failer’s indicating their intentions not to stand at the next election, icicles hanging from the gutter, news of water shortages, snow.

Life became indoorsy with central heating gamely battling the many draughts of Wintry Villas and a constant round of ferrying kindling and coal from bunker to grate. The relic of a servant’s bell beside the mantel reminded me of the Marys or the Anns who must have lugged coal through this house a hundred years ago – like me, smudged and black-handed. My head was filled with white winter. The winter I was seeing and winters past: the presence of winter snow in Joyce’s The Dead, in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s paintings and in film (Let the Right One In, The Savages, Fargo, The Shining).

There’s something about snow though that makes you think, that makes you philosophical from that first waking in a bedroom full of ghost light to seeing the familiar garden and street beyond transfigured, made-new. Yes, I know it’s only weather, but why talk about that here? Snow is, in and of itself, mystical: blindingly white, pure, cold, crystalline. It comes in plopping flakes or graupel or sullenly in sleet. It is magisterial and whimsical and, in Irish terms at least, has a heretofore unknown capacity for many moods. Other Irish snow I have known, came half-heartedly, timorously, determined to only throw down its skirts for two days or three before becoming porous and shrinking away. I have childhood memories of scraping a centimetre of snow off cars or walls – the difficulty of making a snowball or a snowman with such a mean precipitation.

This time though, from late November and through much of December, the snow was, as in The Dead, general all over Ireland and it stayed and froze and stuck and fell again. It laced, it filigreed, it trimmed, it blanketed. There was so much of it that children almost, almost, grew blasé. But how could you really stop wondering at it? You didn’t need to be a child to see how different it made everything: amidst all our Irish economic woes, our political woes, our smarting outrage at all that had happened recently and is yet to unfold, it brought a swathe of thoughtfulness, a caesura, a pause. It said stay indoors and huddle close. It said cook and watch the kitchen window run with steam. It said look outside and see the children’s slide a piste, the washing line a snow umbrella, the spruces quake and droop with heavy white. It said this: this is what matters, beauty can touch you, can transport you, is a wonder and, if you’re lucky enough to have food and shelter, this is all you need.

And then again, it said come outside. The first morning of it, I woke at 4.30 and opened the front door to see the stilled, beauteous world. I’m only an amateur photographer but I have a tiny handbag-sized Canon that I bring everywhere. I bought it because I tired of describing beautiful things with words alone. It was intended to help me catch what I could see so as I could think about it again with the aide memoir of an image. So, thermals on, wool dress on, hiking boots on, duvet coat on – hat, gloves, scarf, the whole shebang, I headed out to the squeak and crunch underfoot. There was the three quarter moon backlighting every snowy twig and leaf. There was the mundane Victorian street, a pale highway to the palace of Jadis soundtracked by the dull rumble of the odd respectful car proceeding gingerly along its icy surface. Since you cannot take photographs with gloved hands, 15 minutes of trying to take photos sans tripod in low light resulted in acutely painful maulers which only hummed back to life another 15 minutes later at the all-night shop thronged by taxi drivers and prison warders – all stamping feet and blowing hands and sniffling and grousing about the chill.

I came home in a state of wonder and it never left me for all the weeks of the snow. Later, a drive to Meath, a walk beneath the festive lights of a mystic city centre at pub closing, a meander to Christmas-shop in the midst of a mini-blizzard all brought new sights and sounds to marvel at. It must be the country roots in me but I even enjoyed the steady, contemplative work of clearing snow from the front path and pavement: the lightness of the new fallen and the greasy stubbornness of the freezing layer beneath, the sheet ice that needed chopping and chiselling – a kick on the shovel and a wallop of the heel of the hand.

Still, knave that I am, I complained about the snow like everyone else, I did! I grumbled about the panic-buying at the supermarket (all stocks of Oxtail soup and drinking chocolate gone) and the bad back did not not appreciate the shock of the odd near fall or the deep step mistaken for the shallow one. I whinged about the diesel gelling on the car’s fuel filter and the near miss I had whilst driving on a slippery road. I narked at the children for the constant traipse of snowy boots through the house and the damp heaps of scarves and hats strewn about the hall. I fumed about the near impossibility of completing Christmas preparations against these new odds and then I worried about water restrictions. I mention all this by way of illustrating my own faithlessness to snow and also to suggest I am not just a woolly-minded romantic but also a cranky pragmatist (you will believe that, won’t you?).

It all ends sadly, of course. The magical lock-in of Ireland began to lift on St Stephen’s Day. Here, the first herald was the drip-drip of an icicle returning to water above the back door. The day after, the dirty snow began. Like myself after a night on the tiles, the snow lost its glint, its glad rags looked tattered: its hopefulness ebbing toward despair. At the winter sales, the citizenry all bore the mark of dirty snow on their mud-spattered legs and shoes as they tried to dodge the sludgy heaps and the murky puddles and you couldn’t but be moved to be reminded of the mutability of all beauty. It seemed timely too, that as beauty retreated into slush, yet another prominent politician announced his intention to retire and radio reviews of the year reminded one yet again, of all the reasons to feel aggrieved. Here came mundane reality: dirty, besmirched, banal.

And yet, and yet. Early on in the national wake-up call someone responded to a particularly grim (rightfully so) Irish Times column by Fintan O’Toole by commenting that they had just come back from a walk in the mountains and wished to report that there was still beauty. And so there is and it costs nothing. The mountains free of snow are just as beautiful, the canal free of ice is a shimmering ribbon, the winter branches stretched against the sky still form a crazy mosaic. In the words of Patrick Kavanagh’s poem, The Hospital, the human lot is to “record love’s mystery without claptrap” and “snatch out of time the passionate transitory”. On New Year’s Day 2011, that is enough for me. I have everything I need.

During the fall, Doyle's Corner

Statue of Irish Volunteer, Blackguire Bridge

Snowy branches and moon that first morning

Snow-laced railings

Snowy trees in the park

Dublin Spire with snow

Christmas Tree O'Connell Street with GPO portico

Snowy Howth, Christmas Day

It’s almost not respectable any more to love your own place. Ideas like nationalism and patriotism have fallen into disrepute being nowadays associated with jingoism and the most radical, virulent elements of the right. To say you love your own place implies that you think it’s better than other places, that you’d like to make the whole world in its image, that you’re unutterably stuffy and provincial. Quite apart from anything else, in a global age the micro is passé.

Sometimes though, unexpectedly, a great wave of patriotism passes over me. I realise that inside myself (as opposed to anywhere else) there is a place called Ireland. This sense of an Ireland of the spirit is all bound up with a jumble of images and memories like the first time I saw the sea at Salthill when I was about 7 years old: the surprise of it, its expanse at the end of a wind of unremarkable suburban streets. I remember too the famine drills still rippling the end field of the farm where I grew up or in Dublin, at dusk, the daring thrill of walking across first floor ceiling joists in a new housing estate and seeing through the gaping blocks the rows of identical houses spring up beyond. I recall the news of new atrocities from Derry or Belfast, a backdrop to the serving of 70s stews and Instant Whip, and my parents talking about it in that veiled language that grown ups use when they want to prevent children being frightened or absorbing ancient biases.

The men in mohair suits, the death of Dev, Richie Ryan, Liam Cosgrave, Charlie Haughey all troop past in the march of my childhood. They’re mixed in with the discovery of history: the day the desiccated old pipe-smoking school master said “This is a subject called History. We haven’t done it before”, and began with the Stone Age. Later, there was the school trip to Kilmainham Jail and the actual pain in my 10-year-old heart about the 1916 executions – the thoughts of James Connolly being tied to a chair to face his firing squad.  In the 80s, when I was a student and discovering all the reasons to hate nationalism and Irish politics, I was chased out the door to vote (for anyone) because, as my mother put it, “Your own people suffered to win you this right, you ungrateful rip! And women threw themselves under horses too!”

In the time when I grew up there was no possibility of foreign holidays but there was the whole of Ireland. My parents, in an act of militant carvanning, made sure we saw the sights of our own place – Kerry, Cork, Clare, Galway, Sligo, Mayo, Donegal and Wicklow – every summer a new place for playing Black Jack for matchsticks. It was a good thing: Yeats and Sligo and Lissadell; Daniel O’Connell and Kerry and Ryan’s Daughter; Lough Dan and Parnell and Avondale – you get the picture. Everything joined up: who we are and who we were, how the places entered art and history.

When I finally stopped being unemployed (another recession, another time), I got the shtart at RTE and was lucky to spend some years working on various programmes on Radio 1. Getting out on the road, as it was known, was more easily accomplished in radio (try bringing a whole TV studio set anywhere) and my childhood working knowledge of the country came in handy when driving far and wide with a bagful of notebooks and a knot in my stomach about finding enough interviewees by 7am the following morning. People were always wonderful and never seemed unduly perturbed by a whey-faced researcher turning up on their doorsteps at 10pm insultingly wondering if they were interesting. I mention this by way of illustrating how journeying through the country for work made me love it even more – eating doorstop sandwiches at Gort Mart, walking along the quays at the crack of dawn to the RTE Cork studios, a comedy dousing by ferocious waves on the ferry to Inishbofin, learning for the first time what battering was at a sean nós céilí at The Armada on Spainish Point.

All of this, all of this and more, came back to me last night when I saw the ISS photograph of Ireland by night – a sudden rush of love for our little patch of twinkling dark on the vast dark hemisphere. I saw the huge flare of Dublin there and the bright points of light of all the rural towns. Somewhere down there, beyond the last village lamp-post is the little place where I grew up. It’s the place I go back to in all my daydreaming, the place that began to teach me who we are and were.  As we tremble on the brink of bust I looked at Ireland and felt sorry for her but there’s no sense in that. Who I really feel sorry for is us.

Photograph of Ireland at Night posted via Twitpic here by @Astro_Wheels (Douglas.H.Wheelock) from the International Space Station. Help for the photographically inept (me) from @anniewestdotcom

When I was a child, I loved Hallowe’en. The house where I grew up was opposite a cemetery complete with a large set of celestial gates which creaked and slammed with an ominous clang. From my nightime window I could see dark upon dark: black swaying sitka trees in shadowy relief against an inky sky. Thrown into relief too were the audible punctuations in the stilly night, the call of a vixen, a donkey braying, our own cat going a mating. In that long ago country night, it wasn’t hard for me to believe in the existence of the supernatural, to think that out there in the darkness was a mysterious mirror world, close but untouchable.

At Hallowe’en that parallel world grew closer. The turf was stacked, the hay was saved, the nights drew in and the kitchen window resumed its propensity to weep streams of condensation all day long. Our neighbour’s son dragged out the story of the banshee at the old bog tree and terrified me and his sisters anew with visions of this streely harridan combing her knotted tresses while squatting birdlike on a decaying tree stump. She terrified me. I was happy about having no O or Mc in my surname until I thought about my father’s surname in Irish, O’Nuallain, and realised with dread that the banshee could, by her own demented rules, easily come to squat on our roof to foretell a death. It was she who made me kneel between my mother and father’s seats in the car whenever we drove anywhere on a wintry night. The back seat of our old Austin 1100 seemed a place where the dark could easily snatch a child away.

It’s said that Catholicism still had a stranglehold on Ireland back then (the 60s and 70s) but where I grew up the ancient rites of the pagan world were still powerfully present at Hallowe’en, St Stephen’s Day, and again in May when we had a May tree/May pole. The Church holy day of All Saints (November 1st) was a time to think about deceased family members and to pray for their eternal rest but it was also a time when the spirit world drew close pulled by the magnetism of our warm fires and vigorous aliveness. Ducking your face into a basin of water to grab an apple with your teeth was a game and a test of skill but you could also perhaps spy a ghostly face, not your own, in the ripply water. The face could be a foretelling of a future lover or a visitor from the spirit world. Equally so with mirrors or any sort of walking about in or around midnight on October 31st. I could never decide which was the scarier prospect, meeting a ghost or seeing some embodiment of a future lover because this would not be a boy like the ones at school but some fullgrown man that you were destined to meet and love.

More than anything else though Hallowe’en lived in my imagination fanned to life by stories and darkness and superstition. Every year my father bought my brother and I sweaty plastic masks – devils or monsters or leering witches – beyond that there was no buying of dressing up materials. You wore your mask and wrapped yourself up in a blanket or a sheet or one of your mother’s old maternity smocks. We traipsed to maybe four neighbouring houses so disguised, giddy with a mixture of fear and greed, and were given sweets, nuts and apples to add to those already at home. We never said “Trick or treat”, it wasn’t in our vocabulary but later, when we moved to Dublin the plaintive cry during ‘going round the houses’ was “Help the Hallowe’en party”. It wasn’t till we moved to Dublin either that  I saw sparklers or fireworks or bonfires or heard bangers or smelled stink bombs.

For my own children, Hallowe’en means greed but very little in the line of delicious scares. If they had their way, every year would involve a different costume bought off-the-peg at M&S, a different expensive latex mask, a new high of struggling to keep up with the Joneses. They’d like to disport themselves as tarty witches, half-Cheryl, half-Lolita because that’s the look on the streets these last 5 Hallowe’ens or so. They’d like to live in the house that lined its drive with pumpkin lanterns and had its garden smothered in spray-on spider web. They’d love me to be the kind of mother who dispensed full sized Mars bars and pricey Juicy Drop Pops or plastic gee-gaws into the copious (specially purchased) sacks of the hopeful Trick or Treaters who pass by here.

Last time I thought about it I figured that a full-on Hallowe’en – house and garden trimmings, full regalia for dressing up, the stash of sweets and other gunk, the drinks for nearby neighbours and friends who traipse around after their children – must, really must, cost the bones of a grand or more. Now that’s a crime of extravagance in either good times or bad. So much money spent aping the Hallowe’en of Elm Street or some other asinine Wisteria Lane, so many miles away from an authentic Irish celebration. Never having had the kind of disposable income that could provide this kind of largesse Hallowe’en has always been a simpler affair in my house. This year though, I’m going to try to rehabilitate story-telling as the central part of what makes Hallowe’en special. I’d like to gift my daughters the delicious fears, the scary imaginings: direct contact not so much with the spirit world but with the ancestral experience of Hallowe’en. To think about spirits and ghosts, magic and divination is to exercise the imagination and it is as important as any other form of exercise. To imagine the otherly is to encounter the otherly inside oneself: the pagan heart of human creativity.

Following a walk on the beach at Dollymount today my children returned home full of stories about black waves, a foul smell and piles of black gunk on the sand. It was, allegedly, “eew”! We went back this evening and took some photos. It certainly looks extraordinary. The sludge piles are seemingly the result of dredging work carried out by Dublin City Council to deal with the rise of ectocarpus an algal bloom which is presently to be found right across Dublin bay. This Irish Times article by Olivia Kelly from May 22nd details the causes of the algae which flourishes in warm weather but also, interestingly, when the “nutrient content” of the water is high. The arrival of the algae coincides with Dollymount losing its Blue Flag status as referred to in this Irish Independent article by Fergus Black from June 6th.

Photographs by Stephen

When I stopped to think about it, I realised that although I was familiar with the phrase ‘lifelong learning’, I didn’t know what it meant in an organised or official sense. I did a swift search on the topic and see that it refers to adult education and night classes – that’s what it means in an official sense. It is to this educational sector that the term belongs.  It’s like saying that ‘dissociation’ belongs to psychiatry and ‘nausea’ belongs to medicine or ‘Au’ belongs to the periodic table of the elements and chemistry.

This is all a very long way of saying that I have my own private, subjective understandings of all the above, and sometimes these internal meanings bear only a passing relation to the mainstream understanding of the terms. ‘Au’ will reliably get me thinking about Latin, ‘dissociation’ instantly triggers ideas about boredom and ‘nausea’ relates more quickly to abhorrence than it does to any dim recollection of morning sickness or three days puking in Cairo.

My understanding of lifelong learning is rather straightforward though. I saw a TV documentary during the week about the buyout of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America during which one of the contributors stated that no corporation can stand still, that if such an organisation isn’t growing, it’s stagnating. It seems to me that the idea of lifelong learning, the real heart of it, is about growing and not stagnating. It’s a lot less toxic too than what Bank of America bought into with the acquisition of the elite Wall Street brokerage firm.

I’ve referred to it here on the blog before but one of the losses unemployment makes me feel most acutely is the loss of access to learning. When you’re in the midst of your everyday job you mightn’t notice that you’re learning, but you are. A colleague’s recommendation of a film or a book or a play, someone else’s recounting of a good night out, even a bracing exchange of political views springing from last night’s TV – all learning. That’s quite apart from the challenges that work itself presents and I suppose that’s why the workers of Mediastan do it for often lousy wages and short term contracts: it’s the endless, captivating variety.

So thinking such thoughts, on Saturday I gladly closed the door behind me and headed off to the Dublin Writers Festival. One woman, one day, six hours of writers and books and other adults – bliss! I don’t believe in hero worship, never have, I see my own flaws and know that they’re replicated throughout our species, so while I believe heroes exist, I don’t believe in the worship of same. Still, when Prof. Declan Kiberd takes his seat on the podium alongside Sarah Bakewell and Ruth Padel ahead of the talk entitled ‘How to Live’, I find myself drifting back through the years to Theatre M, UCD and undergraduate English. As with Proust’s madeleine there’s one significant thing that triggers this memory rush: Kiberd takes off his watch and places it on the table in front of him as I’d seen him do at the university lectern many times when I was only a girl and, with his heroic guidance, discovering ‘Ulysses’ for the first time. All at once I am in learning mode again, all eyes, all ears, delighted to drift like thistledown on the updraft of new ideas.

The theme of the talk works sweetly: all three writers have recently produced work that looks at how writing from other centuries has relevance in contemporary times. Bakewell’s book is about Montaigne, the original blogger, whose entire oeuvre was a sixteenth century instructional on how to live written from his intensely personal perspective. “The ordinary is the proper domain of the artist. The extraordinary can safely be left to journalists and poets” says Kiberd quoting Joyce before going on to argue persuasively that Ulysses offers a manual for living a more complete and humane life. Ruth Padel, poet, conservationist and novelist, is the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin and through the prism of her reading of Darwin’s letters and work, one sees that Darwin’s true virtuosity was in reading and interpreting the world – he wasn’t a scientist by training, he was a seer, a thinker, an understander. Padel reads from her novel Where the Serpent Lives about a confrontation between one of her characters Richard and a female king cobra “Looking down at his feet like a boy confessing to a broken rule, Richard stood immobile for what seemed like a very long time. He concentrated, as only a scientist or poet can, on precise names for the leaves he was looking at. He felt her eyes upon him. He was in the hands of the living god, of neurosynapses in a reptile brain”.

By the end of this talk my eyes had brimmed and cleared and brimmed again such was my joy and relief at being in the presence of ideas once more.  I went home with a bagful of books bought with money I can’t afford but vital if I’m to survive this recession with my head intact. This is what I understand by lifelong learning – some of life’s greatest consolations and liberations can be accessed through reading.

Back when I was one of Declan Kiberd’s students, my dad used to drive me demented with his regular commentaries on all he had learned at “the university of life”. These sermons caused me to sigh and roll my eyes – how could admonitions like “never leave down a scissors in long grass” or “Christmas presents are mutual bribery” possibly be as useful as finding out the meaning of ‘ineluctable’ or feeling the fear and reading Finnegan’s Wake anyway? After I graduated and was splendidly unemployed my father used to shake his head in a cod- rueful manner and tell me that my glorious education was now complete.  Of course, I didn’t get what he meant then, I didn’t understand that reading about how to live can only be truly assimilated by living, that, as Declan Kiberd said, “You may forget what you read but the bits of reading that remain are ratified by your experience”.

I hope I have years of learning ahead of me. I don’t ever want to drift into that formless state called retirement, I don’t want to go on cruises, I want my eyesight to the end and interesting people to talk with and wonderful books.  In my humble way I want to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”.

[More about Sarah Bakewell's work here. More about the Dublin Writers Festival here]

[I also watched the excellent film Up in the Air in recent weeks. In it, George Clooney plays the role of  Ryan Bingham, a corporate downsizer who uses the carrot of lifelong learning ahead of the stick of involuntary redundancy.]

In the week gone by I had dealings with my own frailties. “Not again!” sez you.  But, I’m afraid, it is so and it is true.

People like me who have a sometime career in TV must do the thing which is called pitching.  It is as cruel a thing as the Broadway cattle call or the modelling go-see or the open audition.  Facing the dread odds of (a) other people’s/the competition’s talents, (b) the lottery of what might or might not work and (c) the available small pool of TV production monies one must gather one’s persuasive abilities and sell/pitch your idea to someone who’s in a decision-making position – a TV commissioning editor or a film funder.

Now I do know that there are far, far worse things in life than pitching and being turned down. It’s not nearly as disheartening as thinking about the last decade in Ireland or indeed, the world. But the thing about that one little idea that eventually slinks its way onto your TV screens is that its been through a lot of lives before it makes its way to you.

It starts with someone like me sitting at home, my desk lit by the chilly iridescence of a blank Word document, racking my brain for what’s called “a brilliant idea”. Of course, this kind of hopefulness hardly ever pays off. No one ever opens a clean page, has a light-bulb moment and trots out a perfect one-page pitch. By the time I get to the chilly page, I’ve already spent weeks in a combination of fruitful, labour-intensive research and largely fruitless but comforting displacement activity. So work mixed with a long Facebook discussion on the worst love songs ever or work mixed with a whole two hours spent in front of Come Dine with Me or America’s Next Top Model. Then there’s work mixed with long walks or work followed by staring in a preoccupied manner at the new releases in Tower Records. The bastard thing about it all though is that even when you’re having the craic on Facebook or wondering if you should buy the new Villagers album, you’re hauling around the horrible boulder of the wannabe idea.

This is why, when you’re sitting at the computer about to commit to print the fruit of weeks of thought, the boulder has become an immense edifice – it’s now like a giant new strain of flu that is, you hope, impregnable to attack from any kind of anti-viral (aka the commissioner’s fault-finding jab). The idea needs to be not only as original as possible (within the largely commercial parameters of TV), it needs to be the right time to have such an idea and it needs to be defensible to any imagined interrogation of its core concept. To get it right you need to have done the work, thunk the thoughts, written it down in a clear, attractive and attention-grabbing manner, and have all your stars aligned in their most propitious astral arrangement.

By now I hope you will see why I compare pitching to auditioning: luck and timing may have as much to do with your likely success as all the time you’ve spent researching and crafting the top two paragraphs of the pitch. I’ve spent a lot of my working life pitching but I’ve never regarded it as a science. I’m resistant to the notion that I must sell an idea like as if I was a door-to-door mop salesman or a car dealer or any other kind of person who talks about ‘closing’. It’s not a matter of feeling snooty about these kinds of sales techniques but thinking of pitching as a mechanical thing just makes me feel queasy. It reminds me of an early newspaper job I had selling advertising space to the building industry – its joylessness, its sole kick in the sale.

For good or ill then, I’m the other kind of idiot. Through dint of thought and effort, by the time I get to the commissioner’s desk I’m in the grip of temporary insanity – I really do believe I have a brilliant idea and that this idea should hit our TV screens with singular urgency.  In fact, the vision thing is all I really have to sell: the idea has infected me and I hope to pass on the infection.

Preparing for the pitch

Generally, in the world of TV pitching, you don’t know what the opposition is up to. Oh, you hear things  – you might know that another company is working on something for the same time slot or that X is still hawking their fashion series but you don’t actually know the detail. Last week though I experienced a new and select kind of torture. This time, I pitched to three people in front of 20 observers, 8 of whom would also pitch. What I had done in the past, behind closed doors facing either one commissioner or a panel, I now had to do as a sort of self-presentational public performance.

A lifetime ago I decided that my TV career belonged behind the camera. There were very good reasons for this decision not least of which was an inherent dislike of addressing crowds or worse,  remembering a whole spiel that must be delivered more-or-less verbatim. Off-the-cuff talking to groups, I’ve done, but this ‘you’ve got 5 minutes, now talk’ malarkey, well I’m just not cut out for it. All the monsters from my early school experiences of misremembering or disremembering or freezing rear up in the steam from the numerous cups of coffee I need to inch me toward this armageddon.

In the end, defying a very strong urge to cut and run, I get through it. I feel the whoosh of adrenalin, like the human equivalent of that surge you feel from a jet’s engines before it blasts down the runway for take-off. The surge is almost uncontrollable and the inner voice is going ‘Oh, oh, oh fuck’ but I get the idea out there coherently accompanied by a good dollop of  my own passion for the subject matter. I am neither the best or the worst performer on the day and the relief when I’m finished is such that I’m just glad to be alive and not to have had a fit of some kind. And no, no one thought my proposal was a work of staggering genius, nor were they gagging to get me to sign on any kind of dotted line. The reality of pitching just doesn’t live up to the legend that ends with “and they signed me up there and then”.

My experience with successful pitches is that the pitch is only the first step in a conversation that may or may not end in a documentary or series on TV. Still left to prove is whether the pitch can be developed through several stages including further testing of its thesis and its costs – this process alone can change the idea fundamentally: it is now a combination of your work and the broadcaster’s input. Later, there may be a need for an almost complete script or a fully fleshed-out treatment which is an intensely demanding exercise in imaginative forecasting. If the whole project is based around a presenter, particularly a new one, the broadcaster may not feel the presenter is right and the entire project founders at this juncture (months down the line from the seemingly successful pitch).

So, to get through a long career in TV you need a thick hide or should I say, you need to be able to lie to yourself and others that you possess this kind of toughness. It’s a discombobulating process divorcing yourself from a beloved idea you imagined could truly fly but it has to be done, because on the morning after optimism you have to open another blank Word document and begin again.