A congealed mess of memories

So, I think that we have just taken our last trip to our beloved West Cork for this year. I think. I am not sure. I am not saying for definite… but I think. And I think mainly because autumn is busy with my One Woman Shows. But that’s not to say that I won’t suddenly take a figarie and decide that I actually need a final dose of Ahakista before the year end… but for now I am back at home here in Dun Laoghaire where my garden needs attention and I have a family of kitties to play with… along with work to do.

The final trip to Ahakista, last weekend, was mainly to facilitate me judging the annual festival Dog Show, which is a wonderful, funny and happy event. It is my kind of dog show where the breed (or lack of it) is irrelevant and it’s all about the doggos personalities (and indeed that of the owners too). In the end I was the MC and the judging was left to the experts.

Because we only decided mid-summer to return for the show, our usual accommodations were not available and so we got a room in a Guest House in the village of Durrus which is the gateway to both the Sheep’s Head and the Mizen peninsulas. We travelled differently too, as himself had a job in Cork city on the Thursdaty night and so I travelled down by train to join him in the city where we stayed overnight and hit the road for the (relatively) short trip west on Friday morning.

We had all the time in the world and so we decided to take the scenic route along the coast and stopped in Clonakilty for a mosey around the market and have a spot of lunch and then we headed out towards Rosscarbery.

As we drove, we passed a sign for ‘Reenascreena’ and I remembered that that was where I had a holiday back in about 1994.

I remember very clearly how I felt back then, when I booked a house in ‘the middle of nowhere’ so that my daughter and I could have some time away from life and just relax. At that time, I was (as it was called back then) an ‘unmarried mother’ and was living at home in a house that was fairly crowded – my parents, my brothers and my uncle and me and my daughter. It was at times reasonably stressful. I had a busy and demanding job too. So, I thought some time out would be a good idea. After booking the house, I realised that my then 7-year-old daughter would likely get fierce bored with just her Ma for company and so we invited her bestie to come too.

Then I wondered if I might also get bored (or just go mad) with just two 7-year-olds for company and so invited one of my very few single friends to come too.

The house I had booked was an old farmhouse and it had 5 bedrooms and so then I thought, sure I might as well fill them and invited himself (who was then just a friend I met on a work trip the previous year). Another friend from that trip and his girlfriend also joined us. What started out as a quiet ‘time out in the middle of the countryside’ break for just me and my daughter, turned into something of a week-long house party.

It was after that week in West Cork that myself and himself ‘got together’… so unknown to me then, it was a week which changed everything.

As we passed the sign I roared “Reenascreena, Sherwood…. Let’s see if we can find the house we stayed in” and so he made a very late turn and off we went up a boreen as we both wrestled memories to try to inform our progress.

We found the village pub and he remembered seeing road bowling for the first time. We drove on in what we thought was the right direction as we both attempted to extricate memories from our overloaded brains. And that’s when it got rightly muddled.

“Remember there was a field with long grass that led to a river?”

“No, that wasn’t here. That was in north cork on another holiday years later.”

“Oh”

“Remember the farmer was called Finbarr and he gave the girls rides on his donkey?”

“Finbarr? Don’t remember that.”

“Was this where we saw the cow give birth?”

“No – that wasn’t here, cos we had the other two by then. Dunno where that was”

By now we had encountered road resurfacing which diverted us to another boreen full of potholes and bends. I continued to try to shake my memories out, to help our so far fruitless search. And I kept saying the same thing.

“When we get home, I must look out the photos from back then.”

Because I was realising that my memories had all congealed into one large blob of Irish holidays with kids and I could no longer distinguish one from another.

“The photos will help.” I offered as we abandoned our search and headed back to the coast road towards Leap.

I have yet to pull out the big box of photos from those days. It’s the kind of activity I think is best suited to a rainy Sunday when delving into a box of memories is a delicious way to pass hours and hours.

As I pondered this looking out at the beauty of West Cork I realised that my more recent memories never made it to physical photos. They are on various hard drives and on my phone where every so often I try to make folders to organise them. But who the hell is going to access an old laptop to see them? Precisely no one.

So, I have begun to furiously make photo books – just simple no frills, photo size books where I am grouping photos from my current phone into a book that I can put in a box for a rainy Sunday somewhere in the future. The first ones should arrive any day now.

Thank you Reenascreena – for a lovely life changing holiday back in 1994 and for a meander around your boreens last weekend. Your tiny windy roads full of diversions, dead ends and pot holes were the perfect metaphor for my memories which are equally full of holes and cul de sacs. But the photos will help.. once I get them off the ‘devices’.

Now I have to get a new box into which I will throw my photobooks so that some day in the future someone (could be me or my kids or my grandkids) will take them out and wonder about how life was back in the olden days.

Have you got a box of old photos? And do you print out your photos from your phone?

Oh, and if you need your dog show MC’d - gimme a call!