A to Z 2025 – Ireland (They order these things differently in France!)

I confess I am not a great fan of autobiographies that begin at the beginning and follow a temporal path up to the present day – not that the person might not have some interesting stories, facts and opinions strung on their necklace. It just doesn’t appeal as a structure. On the other hand, in my last, extra year at school in Oxford, retaking an A-level and adding a couple more, I was allowed out of school on my recognisance and saw a fascinating Exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery. The Artist had laid out and photographed every single possession of a single person – for example, all the cutlery was laid out in one shot, all the shoes in another. This more thematic approach appeals more and although I am not arranging the objects which I have chosen to tell my story in chronological order, I hope that my writing will be sufficiently interesting to keep your interest Dear Reader, and that on the journey from A to Z, you will assemble an impression of my life and who I am…

Ireland

I cannot track down the origin of the phrase in the title of today’s letter “I” – but it certainly denotes my rapid realisation when I moved to Ireland from England in 1995 for what would be a ten year sojourn in the Emrald Isle. You see, if I had moved to France, I would have expected everything to be different, starting with the language and then the culture, the cuisine, manners, customs etc. Moving to Ireland where, except in a few bi-lingual Gaeltachts (Gaelic speaking areas), everyone speaks “English” – a reflection of a centuries long occupation by the English. However, I soon discovered that the Irish are as foreign in their ways as the French!

The first thing that was noticeably different was the way of death. When somebody dies in Ireland, the word goes out and family and friends from all over the country will arrive by late afternoon, having dropped whatever they had planned for the day – something quite accepted in the workplace, the only exception being if significant relatives have to come from abroad. The same evening, the body will be taken to the church for a service and left there overnight. In this, the church (Catholic for the most part) has triumphed over the wake, where the body would be kept in the home and “drink would be taken” and reminiscences of the deceased shared over the body. No reminiscences are allowed at the church service or at the service on the second day whence the body is taken to the burial ground – I can only assume that sharing reminiscences (other than a sanctioned Eulogy), is considered threateningly secular by the church.
By contrast, in England, funeral services are often held at crematoriums, two or even three weeks after a death and I imagine that an Irish person coming to England would find that equally strange and wonder why we wait so long but in truth we don’t have a choice – there is a huge backlog at the crematoria which is the source of the delay. At the first Irish funeral I went to, the village postman, whose mother had died, told me he had been going to such funerals all his life. Still, until this one, he had never appreciated the power of support that this immediate gathering of relatives has for the bereaved. I can’t help wondering how the long gap in England between death and funeral affects the English psyche – I suspect it makes us ever more detached from death, just as cremations with the body suddenly disappearing behind curtains does not have the same emotional affect as a coffin being lowered into the ground…

The way of death was just the first of many differences I noticed whilst living in Ireland, such as the difficulty in inviting people round for dinner and of course there was the landscape, which as a landscape artist (occasionally) was of especial interest to me. Barbara and I lived 35 miles outside Sligo, the county town, ten minutes walk from the Atlantic Ocean breaking on fossil-infested rocky ledges where I would go to fish and once had an encounter with an otter…

Incidentally, my sister Helen in Nova Scotia, tells me it is almost time for “Spring Planting” – nothing to do with gardens or allotments but the time when it becomes possible to dig graves in the winter-frozen ground and so, many funerals take place…