AND so I return home to West Cork for my annual dose of quality time with the family. I’ve come to love this time every August when I combine a bit of remote working with a bit of a holiday to enjoy some downtime with the family in the townland I love so well.
I’ve been doing it for a few years now, spending the days based in the Mix Coworking hub in Clonakilty and the evenings and weekends touring around and visiting old haunts.
Life speeds up when smallies arrive, at a sometimes frightening pace, and it’s easy to forget the important things when you’re in the washing machine of work and the never-ending Making Of The Plans.
And so I’ve come to view these mini staycations as vital touchstones for my kids. They get to enjoy open-ended time with their loving grandparents, a privilege I had myself growing up and one that is so important for their development.
And they have established their own little favourite spots, too, over the years, that make holidaying here so enjoyable. It’s all the stuff I remember from being a kid and more.
Endless beaches and salty chips, rainy day visits to Kerrs bookshop, raids on the toy shop for Pokemon hauls, swingball sessions in the garden and endless games of tag as the sun goes down over Camus.
One of the things that has become important to me too, is that the kids get the opportunity to develop a sense of some of their own heritage.
This year, we made the trip to Myross cemetery near Union Hall to visit my own grandparents’ grave and they got a sense of the many generations of O’Donovans going back for hundreds of years in the area.
It’s one of the most striking and beautiful places in the country, overlooking Oileán Bhríde or Rabbit Island, you could be fooled that time has stood still and you were in the Ireland of monks and monasteries.
We stopped off in Nolan’s coffee shop along the way, and ducked in for a sneaky cappuccino to evade the wasps outside. It’s a place where I spent many an hour as a kid, where kind uncles stood tightly-packed at the bar and sang songs, and kids slithered around between them brandishing bottles of coke and 13p bags of Tayto.
I had a lovely warm chat with the owners, who wouldn’t have known me from Adam, but within minutes knew exactly who I was, and most of my family on both sides. These are the kinds of connections I miss so much when I’m in the city and they become all the more meaningful the older I become.
Of course, there are new connections too. When we were packing our car outside the Super Valu in Clon our neighbours across the road in Dublin coincidentally pulled up right next to us.
A Cork woman and a Galway man, exiles like ourselves, both taking the time to visit with family in Clon with their young son. You couldn’t write it. Ireland has changed and the places I spent most of my time growing up have too. Ardfield, Clonakilty, Union Hall – in some ways unrecognisable, in others exactly the same. And that’s why those of us who were privileged enough to grow up here just can’t stay away.
It’s just global weirding
OF course, it would be remiss of me not to mention The Fecking Weather™.
We had a great week here the first week we were down, with plenty of pleasant days, but there were still some odd moments – torrential almost hailstone-like rain on one day, really hot and humid another on another then getting so chilly in the evening we needed to put on the stove … And then there’s the storm that we’re due to see a little piece of later in the week – who knows what whacky weather that’s going to bring.
It all points to the Global Weirding effect, as the New York Times is calling it, which will mean less predictable weather in general, more localised extremes and just a general air of strangeness, all due to climate change.
Of course, there is a tendency to put your head in the sand at the terrifying prospect of a global climate meltdown, which is why I’d like to recommend Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie, a brilliantly pragmatic and optimistic book about the dangers of climate change, but which details really hopeful and data-centred ways we can fix it.
It turns out that there are a lot of things we can all do to help reverse the trend, and the numbers would suggest that we are already making big strides to keep global temperature rises in check.
The biggest individual changes appear to be to drastically reduce red meat consumption and to stop driving outsized SUVs.
These far outweigh the effects of recycling, plastic bag use or even air travel. There’s work there for us all to do, this writer included.
