We popped along to the Fleadh Cheoil in Ennis this afternoon. The Fleadh is “the world’s largest annual celebration of Irish music, language, song and dance”, according to various promotional websites, and it’s quite believable having experienced the throngs today.
We were in Harrogate for the week, so checked out our favourite places and revelled in the order and comfort of our house.
Favourite places in Harrogate:
We went to Carlow (south-east Ireland) for the weekend of the 10th June as there was the http://festivalofwritingandideas.com/ on, and quite a few interesting-sounding speakers.
The first talk we attended was with Mary Robinson (former president of Ireland, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, eco hero, etc.) and Louise Richardson (VC of Oxford University). They were both extremely engaging and inspiring. Most of the audience questions focussed on their gender, which was a bit annoying really, but as they noted, nowadays there never needs to be a ‘first woman to…’ label attached to anyone growing up as it’s all been done!
Next up (after lunch) was Rap ‘n’ Slam, a session with three separate performers. First came Lemn Sissay, who’s a reasonably famous poet from Manchester. He gave a very strong, confident and dramatic performance which was ideal to start.
The next performer was Emmet Kirwan, a playwright from Dublin who I hadn’t heard of before. Apparently he does a lot of voice-over work in Ireland, in addition to having written and performed quite a lot of material. He was absolutely amazing – when he stepped up in the small family chapel at Borris House to read, I thought he seemed like a bit of a cheeky schoolboy type. This impression was quickly dispelled when he launched into his material – a section of Dublin Oldschool being the highlight for me. The words and their rhythm were perfect (the ones I could understand, that is) as he took us through the streets of the capital in a drugged-up haze using the Dublin vernacular.
Finally, there was the very shy-looking Sam Coll, who didn’t seem like he was that keen on being on-stage at all. He stood staring at the pages of his open book, muttered something from Hamlet, then began an epic reading from his novel The Abode of Fancy, barely pausing for breath. I don’t really know how to describe it or him, except to say that I’m fairly sure he’s a proper eccentric genius. I definitely need to sit down and read his debut novel anyway, if the snippet we heard is anything to go by.
That was it for Saturday – we took the rest of the day off.
Sunday started for me with a talk on the Border with Colm Tóibín, Garrett Carr and Fintan O’Toole. Garrett Carr hasn’t long released his book about walking the Border from east to west, Colm Tóibín wrote one years ago about the journey in the other direction, and Fintan O’Toole is my favourite journalist in Ireland. They spoke movingly of the pain and horrors that have accompanied the Border, as well as providing some lighter anecdotes and political commentary regarding the current travesty of democracy that is ‘Brexit’. Seriously, if your interest in the subject extends beyond getting your opinions from the side of a red bus, Fintan O’Toole’s columns in the Irish Times provide a perspective and analysis that’s often lacking in England at least.
The final item in the schedule for us was Artemis Cooper and Edmund White discussing their biographies. They both had plenty to say, and Artemis Cooper’s stories about Paddy (Patrick Leigh Fermor) were particularly entertaining. They both had disturbing admissions about some of the things they’d done to get the inside scoop on their subjects (sneaking down in the middle of the night to copy letters they’d been told to leave alone, getting a student to befriend a ‘target’, etc.).
All told, an excellent weekend at a very civilised festival. Not too busy, but plenty to see.
The main room has been plastered now – the external walls were dry lined first to help out a bit. It looks much smarter, but we now need to wait another week for the plaster to dry before we can get painting. Flooring is the next big ticket item – the main room’s floor apparently slopes as much as 3 inches from one side to the other, which might prove challenging.
The electrician came and finally moved the sockets to where we’d originally asked him to put them, which means that a putting up a curtain rail is once more viable.
Some of the turf cutters will be gathering the fruits of their labour this weekend, but that might change if the rain keeps up. Haven’t been up to look at our turf – I’m guessing it hasn’t stacked itself at all.
We’re only half-way through turf-stacking still – it’s hard work, unfortunately. We’re getting better at it, but at the moment it’s unlikely that either of us would be up for participating in the destruction of this vital habitat further next year. Purely on environmental grounds, obviously.
Nothing else particularly exciting to report – we’re looking to get some plastering done very soon, after which we’ll hopefully get some flooring in. At the moment the main bedroom has the laminate we put down ourselves, which is fine. The office room has legacy laminate which is ok-ish. The rest of the house has this black cardboard-like stuff I put down to keep the dust at bay – it’s called Antinox and can be bought for €5 per big sheet. It’s waterproof and quite nice to walk on, but definitely isn’t a permanent solution.
The builder is “too busy” to finish the work he abandoned many weeks ago now, so not sure how that’s going to work out. If he’s not careful, we’ll get other people to do the work and knock the cost off his final bill… hopefully it won’t come to that, though.
Otherwise, I chased a hare down the road in my car the other day (not deliberately) – it just wouldn’t run into the hedge for ages. It was a massive one, so would have kept the crows busy for the whole morning if it hadn’t finally taken evasive action.
Looking to buy a nice big shed very soon, but we need groundwork done first… yet more money, but worth it to get a lot of the junk out of the house, and to have somewhere to put all the turf we’ve worked so hard (intermittently) to dry. I’ve found a nice 5m x 3m steel one, so that’s high on the shopping list right now.
We now have a bed and a washing machine. Tremendous improvement all round.
The washing machine took me ages to find – I wanted one that would work fine gravity-fed from the header tank 3 metres above it. Most modern washing machines specify a minimum of 1 bar of pressure for the feed, as that’s the least that a mains water utility company will deliver. Water from a well really doesn’t do that – 1 bar of pressure is 10m of head, which is very tricky to achieve in a single-storey cottage.
Anyway, the washing machine is really good (so far). It’s made by a New Zealand company called Fisher and Paykel, and works via direct drive so it’s very quiet (no belt or anything to contend with). An online company was selling off ex-display models, so that’s what we got. Unfortunately they missed a couple of components out (the manual and an inlet cap), but the former was available on the internet, and the latter from Homebase, so worked out fine.
We’ve continued to work at stacking turf but we’ve not made much of a dent in it yet. It rained yesterday for the first time in ages, but hopefully it’ll remain dry now to avoid putting ourselves under too much pressure.
Here are some pictures of the bog I took this evening – I was lining up shots of bog cotton against the bog wall and noticed that a rainbow had photo-bombed the frame so that’s in some of them too.
Due to popular demand, there are fewer shots of bits of turf this time 🙂
As soon as the turf has been cut by the machine, it’s sitting in long snakes in the wind and sun, forming a crust on the outside. It then needs to be divided into sods, as shown in my previous post. That was what the other turf cutters did almost immediately, but with one thing and another, we’ve been a bit slower. V did a lot while I was away at the weekend, thankfully, but there was still plenty to do.
Unfortunately, the delay meant that this evening when I went up on top of the bog where our cut turf was laid out, I found the remaining turf quite unyielding to the “pizza cutter with long handle” device that a friendly local leant us. It’s an old angle grinder blade welded to a metal pole – clever stuff. Some time later, I’d cut most of our turf, but there’s still some to go… it really didn’t glide through.
The weather was pretty good for working this evening at least – a mixture of sun and hail (!). A cuckoo called persistently in the distance as I hacked through the turf – apparently in Ireland their “host” species is often the meadow pipit, which we’ve definitely seen around.
The cutter arrived yesterday… I was sat minding my own business in the house, then heard a tremendous rumbling noise approaching. At first, I thought it was a helicopter landing, but having dashed around to the back of the house in my flip-flops, I saw the giant turf cutting machine in all its splendour. It rumbled on for hours, and produced plenty of turf for the winter:
We moved in officially on Monday. Things are quite basic to put it mildly, but we’ve made it. We’re still short on a few things that many would consider fundamental (like flooring), but the roof is sound, there’s electricity, the stove works, and we haven’t run the well dry (yet).
The first night’s attempt at sleep didn’t go so well – the futon mattress isn’t the same as a proper sprung one, especially when you’re dealing with aches and pains from moving stuff around. After that experience, we added the Bongo cushions to the mix and it’s bearable now.
Due to cash flow issues (it’s pumping out a lot faster than the well water is), we’re on a real economy drive for the foreseeable future. There’s a shop called Home Store & More where we picked up a couple of fabric wardrobes for about €8 apiece, and we’ll be attempting to fit our bedroom’s laminate flooring ourselves. How hard could that be?
I installed a couple of security cameras to keep track of what goes on when we’re out/away – so far the answer is: nothing much at all, at least human-related. The cameras trigger recording on motion and sound, so I’ve had to tweak them to avoid them going off all the time with birdsong for a start. The camera I put in a tree is especially prone to this.
Last night the camera I put under cover of the well roof triggered from a local cat (I’m guessing the one that signed its name in the cement all those months ago):
This morning it decided to inspect the security a bit more closely (which the camera didn’t cope well with):
Hopefully it’s happy with everything now, as otherwise it could get a bit annoying having my phone buzz at all hours.
Lots of things to do, and a long snag list for the builder to consider. Apparently the reason we don’t have a new bathroom window to replace the one he broke last year is because he needs to order one and it takes time. Another impossible-to-foresee situation, I suppose.
We can’t really use the kitchen sink much at the moment without a bowl in it as the sink’s drain pipe just goes outside and straight onto the juncture of wall and muddy ground. We need a French drain all around the house, but I might rig up something until then. At least the bathroom sink/shower/bath drain down into the ‘proper’ drainage pipe (which goes under the driveway and into a special grey water treatment appliance known as the D.I.T.C.H. We still haven’t found the septic tank, but at least it looks like the toilet’s output isn’t into that same ditch.
We worked hard on the house again today, then went for a walk in the ‘garden’. It’s so undulating that it’s like a workout on a stepper (probably, not that I’ve ever tried that to be honest).
This time next week we should have moved in properly. V has cleaned the spare room for storing all our junk, and also cleaned all of the bathroom. I’ve been chipping away at the main bedroom still – “scrape and fill” is my mantra. One of the walls still isn’t dry – I’ve burnt two bags of logs and getting on for 10kg of coal making the heating work well, but the dampness is taking a long time to shift. The dehumidifier is still taking its 7 litres a day out of the air… it’s clear that years of neglect can’t be turned around in a few weeks.
Anyway, here are some pictures of part of the land we don’t normally visit – straight down the track to the far corner. It’s a brilliant time of year to be walking – the gorse is out in bloom, skylarks shoot out of the grass when disturbed, and the cow pats are starting to harden.
The photos of cars are from what transpires to be a vintage car rally that went past the road at the end of our drive – I thought the traffic was unusually heavy!