Tag: Irish

About writing, Journalism

The advantage of owning a language

by clareodea2 Comments on The advantage of owning a language

As an Irish person, I sometimes find myself in awe of how articulate the English are. I’m talking about the really clever ones, usually with cut-glass accents, deftly crafting arguments in flawless phrasing on television – my main point of contact with the English. It’s not only the ideas they are expressing, it’s their absolute mastery of the language. Well it’s almost as if they owned it.

You do hear affectionate remarks about the original use of English by the Irish, shaped as it is by the ghost of the old language underneath, but people in a position of security can afford to give generous praise. Part of me suspects most of this positive spin comes from Irish writers who have taken the compliment and run with it.

Now there could be a post-colonial, 800-years-of-oppression explanation for this respect, after all generations of my ancestors variously feared, loathed, mimicked and looked up to the English – but how would that explain the very similar reaction I observe with some Swiss Germans towards “real” Germans.

When it comes to live debate, Germans, with their natural command of the language, outshine their Swiss-German counterparts. Pit the Swiss finance minister against the German one and it’s like watching the receptionist take on the CEO. Swiss Germans only speak German when they have to, the rest of the time the cling to the comfort of their dialect.

Or maybe this is nothing to do with linguistic superiority and everything to do with superiority of numbers. Yes the Swiss can beat the Germans at football in theory, just as the Irish can beat the English but it takes a very lucky day. In the same way, the teams of leaders and thinkers from more populous countries have the advantage of being drawn from a much bigger pool.

Do the French-speaking Belgians feel the same about their big showy neighbour? Do they look at the French and sigh, giving up all hope of ever competing with their confidence and academies, their glorious language?

My best guess is that small neighbour complex is one phenomenon found all over the world, borrowed language syndrome is another and one should do everything possible to avoid having both together.

About Ireland, About writing

Green light for return to Ireland

by clareodea8 Comments on Green light for return to Ireland

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In the author description of Douglas Kennedy’s latest book Five Days, we are told that the writer divides his time between London, Paris, Berlin, Maine and Montreal. Is he serious? You have to wonder what kind of lifestyle that involves. A lot of fridges to clear and restock.

Most of us are confined to one geographical base at a time but that doesn’t mean we don’t dream of other possibilities. Last year I met an Eritrean refugee who risked his life crossing the Sahara and the Mediterranean, mournfully reconciled to living in Switzerland, while longing to go back home.

A lucky few have holiday homes and can shuttle between two different lifestyles and even climates. Wealthy Northern Europeans love to buy up properties in Spain, France and Italy. You can only admire their good sense.

This year I will be ‘dividing my time’ between Switzerland and Ireland, leaving Switzerland in August, ten years to the day since I arrived here to live, and staying on in Dublin until Christmas. The germ for this idea came around a year ago and the trip has come together thanks to a little serendipity and perseverance.

Last summer I had a conversation with my sister about my wish to live in Ireland again someday. Working out when my youngest child would be independent, I reckoned I could possibly arrange something around the age of sixty. This reflection shocked me to the core and started me thinking.

A short time before that on a flight from Dublin to Geneva I met an Irish woman who had lived in France for 20 years. She was married to a Frenchman and they had four daughters together. She told me she had twice moved with the children to Ireland for a school year, staying in her old family home. She was able to keep up her small travel business from Dublin and her husband, a teacher, used all his holiday time to visit them.

Moving forward to the end of last summer, one of my colleagues went to Florence for six weeks to do an Italian course, thanks to a creativity fund in work. I found out more about the fund that supports employees wishing to pursue various projects.

Now it just so happened that I had a very active creative project in progress – writing my first novel. I looked at courses in the Irish Writers’ Centre and found one that would be ideal for me. Everything was telling me to seize the moment.

My funding application was finally approved last week and I went ahead and booked the flights. What I have gained is the most precious thing of all – time. Time to write, time to spend with friends and family, time for my children to get to know their origins and time off from being a foreigner.

Wish me luck!

Short stories

Family Resemblance

by clareodea2 Comments on Family Resemblance
The Lustre Jug by Walter Osborne (1902)
The Lustre Jug by Walter Osborne (1902)

Walter shook out his umbrella in jerking movements. “What a day,” Louisa said, stepping back to let him into the hall. She noticed he was wearing galoshes; Christopher would find that funny. In ceremonial style, Walter carefully arranged all his wet things on and around the coat stand and removed his sketch book from a damp leather satchel.

“Have you explained everything to them?” he asked, smoothing down his tweed suit. “Of course,” Louisa said, determined to be pleasant. She’d forgotten how blatantly he skipped social niceties.

“And they will cooperate?”

“They’re good girls Walter, you needn’t worry,” Louisa replied, her gaze criss-crossing his unlovely face. He was so like their father today with his bristly hair and manner. An image of the old man flickered in her memory, seated in his study, tilting his head so she could reach his cheek for a goodnight kiss. The last child of his third wife, even she could sense he was weary of playing Daddy by then. So different, she imagined, to Walter’s home life twenty years earlier.

A thump sounded from the dining room followed by muffled giggling and shushing. “Shall we?” Louisa said reaching for the door handle. She had issued strict instructions to the girls to stay in the room until she entered. Christopher agreed that it was time they stopped charging to the front door like hooligans every time there was a caller.

Nora was standing by the mantelpiece holding the lustre jug, her cheeks glowing pink, while Peggy and Maude sat straight-backed at the table. “It’s not broken,” Nora said, holding out the jug. Louisa took it from her eldest and touched her cheek gently. “Come and say hello to your uncle Walter.”

The girls lined up and shook hands with the visitor, looking angelic in their Sunday pinafores. Louisa was pleased to see the children were in awe of him and she hoped the feeling would last, keeping their behaviour in check.

Louisa waited for Walter to take charge but he stood as if in a daze, holding the sketch book to his chest. “How would you like to begin?” Louisa asked when the pause grew uncomfortably long. “Or would you prefer some refreshment first?”

Walter’s lips were trembling. “Could you ask them to sit at the table again? Perhaps they could gather at the corner and study something together?” He was almost whispering. The girls looked at their mother. “Here take this,” she said, pressing the jug back into Nora’s hands. The children followed his directions and Walter pulled out a chair for himself, positioning it by the sideboard.

Louisa glared a final warning at the girls and turned to Walter with a smile. “There. Should I leave you now?” Walter hesitated. “She’s just like my Gloria,” he said, staring at Nora. Louise looked and in that instant saw the resemblance and understood the loss for the first time. She squeezed his shoulder and left the room.

Inspired by The Lustre Jug by Walter Osborne (1902)

Journalism, The everyday

Cats and kings on Twitter

by clareodeaLeave a Comment on Cats and kings on Twitter

I’m not just a late adopter, I’m a reluctant one. If I’d been around in the 1920s, I probably would only have only learned the steps for the Charleston in 1931. It took a social media course at work for me to finally ‘join the conversation’ through gritted teeth last May. Turns out, like many arranged marriages, it was a good match after all.

Some see the service only as a glorified link-sharing platform or a place to let off steam, but it is much more than that. Twitter is a fantastic shortcut to good quality information. Through Twitter you borrow the eyes and ears of the people you find most interesting, important or fun. I think of it as a never-ending group discussion, like sitting around with a bunch of people making scrapbooks from a pile of global content. They’re pasting news reports, research findings, events, reviews, blog posts, videos, photos, personal observations and witty one-liners into their scrapbooks, pointing out each item to you as they go along. It’s a way of sharing passions and you can join or leave the feast at any time. For me that’s been invigorating, it has fed into my work on the journalism side as well as my creative writing.

Without Twitter I would not have:
1. Entered a flash fiction story for the National Flash Fiction Day Anthology yesterday because I wouldn’t have heard of it without following Irish writer @NualaNiC (Nuala Ní Chonchúir)
2. Interviewed @AlaindeBotton in Basel on Wednesday (all arranged last minute on Twitter, more about that next week)
3. Written articles about women’s issues in Switzerland in response to Anne Marie Slaughter’s @SlaughterAM having-it-all essay.

Twitter is all things to all (wo)men. The Twitterati I follow fall into three broad categories – news, countries and writing.

Twitter is a fabulous resource for people interested in a particular region or country. It has helped me feel much more present in Ireland. From small things, like hearing a pub I used to work in burned down, to big things like the current abortion debate, I get a sense of being around again. Don’t worry there’s lots of good stuff too, like the pictures of sunrises in Sandycove posted by @blathnaidhealy.

On the ground
There’s a thrill to be had following a dynamic developing story on Twitter. You don’t have to wait for the reporter to come out of the court for his or her piece to camera. Follow the right person (like BBC Africa Correspondent Andrew Harding @BBCAndrewH at the Pistorius trial) and you can get the action line by line as it happens.

Of course with an unfolding story, information has to be handled with care. One tweet during the Boston manhunt said it all (I’m paraphrasing here): “Faced with this barrage of confusing and conflicting information, I just wish there was a printed summary of all the verified facts available the next day.”

There’s so much to say about the writing community on Twitter that I’ll have to put it in another post. For emerging writers Twitter is Open University meets support group. Check it out for yourself!

About Ireland

Post visit stress disorder

by clareodea3 Comments on Post visit stress disorder

One thing my family does quite well is emigrate but the experience has changed fundamentally through the generations. When my grandmother’s siblings emigrated to the US in the 1920s and 1930s, they knew they would only cross the Atlantic once. Visits home were unheard of for most long-distance emigrants of that era. When my uncles emigrated to Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, the trip back to Ireland was still expensive and they mostly came back once a year – until they found English wives and then less often. Even my older cousins who emigrated to the US and London in the 1980s baulked at the price of phone calls and visits were infrequent.

I can only imagine to what degree they suffered homesickness and loneliness in their new homes. Ultimately they were forced to let go. For better or for worse they built new lives for themselves.

Mine has been a very different type of emigration. Ten years ago I left Ireland to come and live in Switzerland and now new family ties keep me here. The trouble is I haven’t left Ireland behind, I can’t and I don’t want to. All the time that I’m forging a new life here for myself, I’m carrying around an ailing version of my old one. Through email, phone calls, skype and texts and regular visits I try to keep up contact – but it is an imperfect and fractured kind of contact. I try to stay close but people are having crises I know nothing about and I am having a crisis I never get to explain.

The truth is I come back from visits to Ireland like a bag of cats, suffering from a kind of post visit stress disorder. Instead of being happy that I got to see one aunt, a friend who lost his mother at Christmas, my niece and nephews, my mother and sisters, and a college friend back from England (all in three days!), I am tormented by guilt and regret over the other people I didn’t get to see or speak to, some of whom I didn’t even tell I was coming (more guilt). The long visits are even worse because we all have the mistaken impression two weeks is a long time. Arrangements add up and people say “sure we’ll see you again before you go” and next thing I know I’m squeezing in appointments like a greedy doctor and I’m using my mother’s house like a hotel with free babysitting.

I like to imagine that one day, when my working life is through and my children are established in their own lives, I will end up in an old folks’ home with my sisters, close cousins and friends. We will hang out on the porch, enjoying warm Irish summer evenings (it is a fantasy) and we will talk, talk talk. We will finally get to catch up on all those missing years and belatedly support each other through every past triumph and disaster and all the humdrum days in between. If I find myself feeling nostalgic about post visit stress disorder – not impossible, I can develop nostalgia for almost anything – all I’ll have to do is book a flight back to Switzerland.

Short stories

Circle of Stones

by clareodea3 Comments on Circle of Stones

On her way across the green in the middle of her estate, Julie stopped and looked around her. She was due to leave for Cork with her mother in a few minutes and she wasn’t supposed to be outside. She gave up the pretence of walking somewhere purposefully. There were some children out playing, doing stunts on their bikes with an improvised ramp. They paid no attention to her. Julie knew every family in all the houses in this part of Chestnut Glen. She had sneaked out here because she wanted to say goodbye to something – she wasn’t sure what. All the kids her age were either still in bed or off doing their Saturday jobs.

This is it, she thought. I’ve let them take over and this is where it’s brought me. She sat down heavily on one of the small boulders, dropped there in a rough circle not by a glacier but by the developer of the virgin estate back in the 1960s.

Cork. The only person she knew there, apart from her mother’s awful cousin, was her first love from Irish College three summers ago. What sweet letters Marty used to write. Those few weeks away on the west coast had been exotic, enchanted. Not only the language was different – the air, the sky, the rain. Marty was staying with a neighbouring family. They used to walk home from the dances together, the boys from his house, the girls from hers. She remembered his pale face in the grey light of dusk. For a moment, she let her imagination take off. Dreaming up rescue scenarios had become her favourite pastime.

Somehow she would bump into him in Cork, and he would be filled with concern for her plight, realise he still loved her and decide to help her out. Marty would have matured beyond his years, he would have a proper job and his own place to live and they would set up family together. No, she didn’t like the last bit. The baby didn’t fit well into that picture.

Better if she stole some money from her mother’s cousin and escaped. She could rent a caravan somewhere by the sea in Wexford. There she would lay low and wait to turn eighteen, as long as the baby didn’t come first. She would turn up at the local hospital, a mysterious case. The staff would be intrigued. A nurse would take pity on her, offer her a room. They would become friends – and the baby, the baby. Julie felt the muscles across her swollen stomach tighten. It’s not looking good baba, she whispered.

If I had a giant camera, I would zoom out, Julie thought. First you would see this circle of stones in a field surrounded by houses, then up and up, the surrounding suburbs, the coastline, the hinterland of farms. Then Ireland surrounded by clouds and swirling blue sea, farther and farther away until the world looked quiet and harmless and nothing mattered anymore.

It was time. Julie walked slowly back towards the house. Her bag was packed, the adoption agency papers inside it. She would remember that walk; find echoes of it throughout her life. Each step leading her away from something open towards something closed. She recognised it when she walked down the aisle ten years later and the bitterly cold day when she walked into the doctor’s office to get her biopsy results. The moments when you realised the world was turning and you just had to walk with it.

About Switzerland, The everyday

Swiss crimes against tea

by clareodea14 Comments on Swiss crimes against tea

Image courtesy of podpad at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

When it comes to tea, different cultures have different ideas about what is appropriate and what is criminal adulteration. As an Irish tea drinker I am not a tea lover in the gourmet sense. I would never dream of owning a collection of fine teas. I shudder at the thought of accidently consuming Earl Grey. It’s got to be pure black and preferably one of the classic blends that have been sold by the Irish market leaders for generations. This is what we are talking about when we say we’d love a cup of tea.

Living in Switzerland over the past decade I am now wise to the dangers of tea crimes in everyday life here and can avoid the worst. For the uninitiated:

Crime number 1 – Hospitali-tea: Beware of a Swiss person, or French or German, offering you a cup of tea. If you listen closely you will hear that they are saying: Would you like a tea? Can you hear the broad sweep in there? It could mean literally anything, from lemon and ginger to a fruit berry concoction but almost never means a regular cup of black tea. The worst thing is when you are caught off guard and say yes gratefully to the offer of tea only to be presented with a cup of perfumed water which could not be further from the actual beverage you were gasping for.

Crime number 2 – Austeri-tea: You may work your way through the different brands of Schwarztee/ thé noir as systematically as you like, they all share the same unforgiveable weakness – weakness. Put the tea bag in and you will be drawing a pension before it draws to the right strength. Needless to say you can forget squeezing out a second cup.

Crime number 3 – Traves-tea: Sometimes, despite the best laid plans, you are going to have to order a cup of tea in a café or restaurant because it’s just what you want at that moment more than anything else in the world. Let’s ignore the fact that the French-speaking Swiss waiter will sometimes bring a can of sickly sweet iced tea because this is a more popular drink, the biggest problem is that you will be served a cup of hot water IN A GLASS. The water is not boiling hot and it does not contain tea. No, the tea is in an individually wrapped tea bag on the saucer. Good luck cobbling together a cup of tea with these raw materials.

Crime number 4 – Duplici-tea: In my book a cup of tea needs a decent splash of cold full-fat fresh milk before it is complete. This is considered an eccentricity in this part of the world, very Miss Marple. Tea here is served with no accompaniment apart from sugar and if you have the temerity to ask for milk you will be given one tiny container of UHT creamer. I don’t know what this milk-like product actually is, some kind of cream/milk hybrid, but it does not belong in a cup of tea, even in minute quantities.

Crime number 5 – Atroci-tea: A proper cup of tea belongs in the brown and amber part of the colour spectrum. The final crime against tea in Switzerland is not only that it is weak but also that it lets down the eye. When the milk is added all you have is an insipid grey brew which is about as appetising as all the other grey foods we like to consume. Oh wait, there aren’t any.

Disclaimer: Although black tea is my special area of prejudice, I have to admire how knowledgeable the Swiss are about the medicinal properties of various teas. A new mother in hospital will be served breastfeeding tea, babies with conjunctivitis have their eyes cleaned with cold black tea, children with stomach ache are given fennel tea and in every supermarket you can buy cough tea, bladder tea and, most importantly, calming tea.

Image courtesy of podpad at FreeDigitalPhotos.net