Reckles
Yesterday we spent some hours helping in my ma’s bog, stacking or making reckles.
Calm, invigorating, backbreaking work. The Bog is a very peaceful place to be.
The sequence by which the turf will co-operate is kinda fascinating and when you turn it it’s curious. Lumps of pink granite in some sods.
All hail to the Hardy Mayo women!
Was having a raucous natter to a fella whose a shop in Cabra about how he deals with the high level of junkies and the like robbing his shop.
Let’s call him Barney since I never asked his name. Barney produces a sizeable baseball bat.
“What’s dat?” He says.
“A baseball bat?”
“No, he says, “it’s an argument diffuser”
He tells me he keeps nine knives behind the counter, so I ask to see them and for a demonstration of how he employs them.
“Well,” he says,” When they demand money, I say hold on and I’ll get it for you now, I reach over here lift them up (he demonstrates with serious looking meaty implements.. and emerges with two huge knives above his head)… “and I tell them take it out of that (or take the change outta that.”
In a lengthy conversation he and his employee explained you cannot seem a soft touch or they’ll come back and rob you repeatedly.
He kept employing the word mill as a verb as in to mill. I mill them he’d say mean he’d give them as severe battering as he could manage with his various tools. I give them a milling. We mill them.
He said he never calls the guards prefers to deal with them on his own terms, which are once for all don’t come back.
On my way back from Phibsboro last night I was wandering up the road and something seemed odd in the skyline. All the telly aerials are gone from the chimney pots these days, I realised.
There’s also begun a tradition of dedicating bridges to people, hence there are two small bridges on the road to Cabra – the left hand side of one of them is dedicated to the hunger strikers, the right hand side of the same bridge is dedicated to those who died for Irish freedom (or some such quote. Both erected by local (Cabra) Sinn Fein office if I recall properly).
The other bridge further down is less obviously dedicated to Liam somebody who was a hurler, born and raised in Cabra who died in the Munich Air Disaster. Both bridges, in fact all bridges, have a sign saying if a vehicle strikes this bridge phone Iarnród Éireann (Irish Rail) and a local 01 number. One of them sure enough has a railway below it, the other basically had a marshy water logged streak and no rails, so I was rather curious as to why Iarnród Éireann would have anymore interest in a vehicle striking this bridge over say a local post box or lamp post or driving over my foot.
Nearer to home is a pub where a fella was shot recently in a gangland type related murder. The very next building to the pub is an established funeral home. Co-incidental rather than deliberate one imagines.
Well it is encore a beautiful day in Dublin. A bella Bloomsday at that. I have mowed two small lawns in Joycean manner, an up the hill down the hill bumpety arrangement with a strimmer that gave pause for consideration and went on for considerable duration without unpleasant consequences except the vow, once rich, there will be a lawnmower in this here Northside shed. I wrote racing news for much of the day. I cooked a rural egg in an urban pan and have just consumed 4 gluten free craftsman sausages with some perplexment as to whether they’d ever be cooked.
The Small Male has gone to Malahide Castle on a jaunty with his nimble Aunty who possesses extraordinary enthusiasm for learning yo-yo tricks. I hope to see Mary Mc’s mam in the vicinity of the Botanic Gardens who is without question Dublin’s finest. You could conclude we are having a splendid time. I think recession has shifted meteorology in these formerly drowned parts.
I still have yet to establish an acceptable coffee agreement in Cabra the dog and tattoo population are abundant. Tonight the house will shake with Green Day. Small male taking a dim view on many Irish matters, spreading his Vancouver is superior gospel, except in the area of swearing where he’s naturally made up with such abundant company.
Yesterday I purchased my 164th football (soccer). There has to be some reward for this provision, endless bloody provision of balls. Seemingly one can never have too many balls.
A bella day in Dublin, such extraordinary warm weather, with The Spire shining silver up and down that blue, bright blue, blueness.
Lovely day catching up with amigas. Delight, delight, delight. And more to come yet.
And an eye test! And glasses now back on the face! Who knew? Dublin the centre for affordable eyewear. Paid 15 euro for an eye test.
There’s a very nifty city bicycle program in operation. They look like solid bikes and are affordable to rent. The traffic however you’d have to ride among is less appealing. Buses galore, and just looping endless vehicles. I used to cycle all over Dublin way back, but that was pre the boom.
I was fairly certain we would escape The Match which was inescapable yesterday on the streets of London when we landed at the maison of my 80 yr old Aunt. I had bemoaned earlier that day to Keith (who was most certainly watching the match ) and Jasper (more committed to going out clubbing) that i was already sick of the World Cup and it hadn’t barely started.
“So we’ll be watching the match at 7.30” says she, me Aunt.
“You like the World Cup?”
“Well we’ve got to, it’s our boys, we’ve got to see them thrash the Yanks.”
The Small Male who was absolutely on for The Match crashed out for the entirety of it and was unwakeable. The poor boy had repeated his tradition of always throwing up as soon as he gets on British Rail.
My Aunt’s commentary on the match, complete with Northern chastisement, was rather fun, especially since it didn’t relate to football. John Terry, The England manager didn’t have a “lotta bottle”. Today a man on a train assured me the manager is called Fabio something or other.
Best of all she lost all interest in the match and snapped it off when she declared they weren’t going to win and instead she regaled me with tales of my grandfather’s lean towards communism and tales of the working class community she grew up in followed by heated debate on outrageous sexism therein. I had to look up the score on the BBC this morning since I was so confused by the actual match, distracted by the legs and high theatrical gesticulating.
Today in Dublin, blah and supine from jetlag and boat train boat I took in chunks of the German/Australian match and found myself rising to the occasion. The occasion being incapacitation.
The train buzz is now a bump over a buzz. Bit like the promising idea of cuddling, say, a hedgehog.
On a train buzz perhaps because of soon being in the company of my favourite viaduct or p’haps because my son does not share my enthusiasm to visit the London Transport Museum. I acquired, in an unplanned venture, a slim history of CN Rail in or around Prince Rupert I think. It’s self published, inscribed by the author, including a sellotaped xmas card she sent to the reader.
Scooped a copy of Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, which for some reason I associate with trains, the opening at least.
Anyway I am drifting off into warm Jimmy Knapp moments. Also, soon, I’ll be on the boat train, a route I spent half my life riding. Am glad to share it with my son. I’m actually relieved to be avoiding a plane/airport by taking it, despite the 800 percent longer journey time. We have conversation and books and tea to fill the time.