The Rocky Road Stops Here – Winter Is Over

 

Carrick-On-Shannon Marina at sunset

The island of Ireland is the westernmost country of the European Union (for now), and politics aside, its location in the eastern Atlantic makes it simultaneously the safest place in the northern hemisphere in the event of a new world war, and the most dangerous place to go outside when there is an R in the month.

The howling wind that blows off the Atlantic combined with the endless cloud, horizontal rain and short daylight hours made the winter a particularly cheerless time, but most importantly, it didn’t feel at all like we were going to die: a stark contrast from the devastation wrought on the Valencians back in 2024.

For the most part, the children got up, went to school, came home, ate, watched TV and went to bed. But in all that, Things Were Actually Happening. For example, Livia had some life-defining tests that confirmed – officially – that she has a light form of autism.

What happened next was a complete breath of fresh air compared to the treatment she received elsewhere: she can be assigned a qualified Special Educational Needs professional in the classroom, who will support her, give her moral guidance, and crucially help her learn at her own pace.

Livia’s school is located in a tiny town in rural Ireland, but the staff have made her feel at home – she no longer stays in bed as long as possible in the mornings trying to avoid the inevitable: she doesn’t relish school, but she isn’t having mini panic attacks at the thought of spending the day there.

What’s more, Livia has actually started applying the things she has learned: she even wrote a full sentence without any help, which caused me to spontaneously stand up in surprise and sheer wonderment at how far she has come in such a short time. She is expressing herself fully, making fewer monosyllabic noises when she wants something, and answering questions, albeit often after having repeated them.

She has always had a mischievous sense of humour, verging on the slapstick with a side-order of absurdism, and this has developed a great deal in the meantime. She can be either great company or a total blight on the experience, but this is the very essence of her versatile character.

Dainoris has flourished at school. He has developed a keen interest in the animal world, and can tell us facts about all sorts of creatures that we have never heard of. He will often watch a full Attenborough documentary, pausing only to blink or occasionally breathe. His room is full of animal figurines he has collected – some from the German Schleich brand, which are anatomically extremely accurate.

He also likes to play board games, as does his mother, so they spent the dark winter evenings bonding a lot playing mainly Frustration and Snakes and Ladders. I occasionally joined them, but it was mostly their thing. Besides, I am more into Scrabble and 15-ball pool.

On top of all this, he has a close relationship with a young lady from his class, that we shall call Manon. Her mother is coincidentally Belgian (Walloon this time) and father British, both with hints of German. The mirroring to our family history is quite uncanny. They hang around in school a lot and also after school on Fridays at the playground. Manon has a younger sister, Marie, who likes to play with Livia and Milda: she also has spectrum-like overtones, which puts her in pole position to make Livia a perfect playmate.

As for Milda, she is going places. She pays attention to everything going on around her; she listens to adults’ advice and tries to apply her new-found wisdom; she is super easy to tend to, and she’ll eat what you put in front of her, although less so these days than she used to.

Despite being the youngest, she is also the most articulate and erudite – she loves a good chat on anything, no matter its nature, and has a penchant for making complicated phrases out of straightforward explanations, much like this sentence. I am surprised she stops for air sometimes. Her brain is so methodical and rational, that she gets angry with herself for making mistakes. Methinks we have a perfectionist in the household – I am going to try to teach her to understand that mistakes are good ways of learning and remembering better ways to accomplish things.

Bonny Bee has been very busy this winter with her translations – she has a great number of things on the go at the same time, and relishes her daily activities. I have been doing the auxiliary tasks, like driving everyone around, shopping, cooking, and developing the garden. Now that spring has arrived, I have started on the project of landscaping the grounds, including putting in two ponds, five trees (to start with), and some decent paths, rocks, flowerbeds, and seating areas.

As well as this, I have almost totally completed my pivot from adult language training to writing and my debut novel made it to the shelves in February. It’s been a difficult birth, but finally it saw the light: I wrote it back in Luxembourg in 2022, and after a year getting the illustrations right, I found myself in Spain. So I had to coordinate that as well as our integration into Spanish society. By the time it was finally published, we had moved to Ireland.

So what’s next? Well… we are getting on with the house renovation, slowly but there are signs of progress – we hope to have a bathroom and utility room fitted by the end of spring, then we will move on to the roof and ceilings before tackling the bedrooms. Once they are properly installed and equipped, the central room will need attention, and then I think we can move in. I’m hoping by this time next year.

Imagine: if it weren’t for a group of defeatist boardroom directors in a private school in Luxembourg, we would probably never have had these experiences. I love to turn adversity into positivity.

On 22 January, Milda turned 6. We decided from now on, every child will have a party for their birthday and a cake. This particular one was made by Anna Kaczmarek, owner of Cake Me Away in Carrick, and it was better than some people's wedding cakes.

Full moon, 3 March - it was so bright, I could even leave the flash off my camera.

Dainoris and Manon on the Boardwalk at Drumshanbo, a popular place to go for a walk.

The gawdy lettering in Dunnes Bar, Carrick.

Going for a magic walk at the fairy trail in Slatta, County Roscommon.

The bank of the River Erne at Enniskillen is a fabulous place to go for a walk.

St Patrick's Day is a proper community event.

Even the coffee is green!

They threw sweets from the procession floats - needless to say, the children reached quite a hoard...

Swans glide under the bridge at Carrick-On-Shannon connecting Leitrim with Roscommon. 

Signing books at Fenagh Community Centre.

Meeting our friend Basel in Dublin. He left Gaza and now he is saving lives in a busy hospital

The magnificent Rye River Café in Kilcock, County Kildare.

A spectacular view north from County Westmeath graced further by the appearance of a rainbow.

Down The Rocky Road – Mown, Mown, Mown

Carrick-On-Shannon is a great place for a walk and a drink

I would like to introduce you to the Irish word craic, pronounced the same as crack. It actually comes from Northern English, where it meant “chat” or “gossip”. If you said “what’s the crack?”, it meant “what’s been happening?” Someone might say “there was some good crack at the pub last night”, meaning the banter flowed freely and there were a lot of fun things to talk about. This takes on an extra meaning in Ireland, where it also refers to a very special type of amusement – the kind that everyone in your circle finds hilarious although others might not. Sometimes the target will see the funny side, and other times not.

For example, in one railway station, they stuck the timetable on the electronic door so anyone wanting to read it would get close before it moved to the side. And when you move over to read it, the door would of course close, taking the timetable with it. People who discovered this sat there watching the stream of unfortunates try to read the timetable. It’s dark humour but even the head of Health and Safety at Haringey Council would chuckle. That’s the purest definition of craic.

On Wednesday morning, we became victims of this ourselves. The evening before, the children went to look for something in the car and left three of the doors open all night. I discovered this when I left our caravan to check the post. The post box was empty, but a letter was sitting on the driver’s seat in the car, doors still wide open. Utterly brilliant trolling; made my day – we didn’t stop grinning from breakfast to dinner.

I have also been involved in this activity myself: before we left Spain, the previous owner of our property told me of a man in his early eighties, a former farmer who lives just round the corner from us and was looking forward to meeting us. He is a local legend as only a few years ago he was brutally gored by a bull, its horn ripping through him, causing him to spend a year in hospital recovering. The story of his resilience made it to the TV and press as well. But he is a bit of a character and everyone around knows of him. As we were coming from Spain, I bought him an appropriate present: a bullfighter’s hat and cape. I hope he wears them at the pub.

An exhibit at Glenview Folk Museum

On Monday 14 July we went to Glenview Folk Museum near Ballinamore. It’s packed full of artifacts from past times, and the man who runs the place takes you on a tour round the various objects and displays at lightning speed. There’s a salvaged food truck from the 1920s in there, a massive collection of eggcups, an early electric sports car from 50 years ago (no joke), and a huge number of exhibits from different genres, such as apothecary, newsagent, café, domestic, and automotive.

Just a year ago, we would not have been able to spend so long in such a place, but things are changing and the children are getting a lot more interested in this type of thing. Except Livia, who shut off after a while and went outside.

The children look on as sheep eat away at their inheritance

The next morning, we woke up to find several sheep outside our window: they had escaped from their field and had decided to come over for a mini-break. The weather had been quite changeable, so we took them to a soft play centre in Fenagh Visitors’ Centre. It’s always a huge surprise to show up in small villages and find such facilities – we have virtually everything we need around us, despite being a million miles from a large city.

Seán's sheep

Seán often appears in the area either herding his sheep with a quad bike or checking on his land to make sure the sheep are secure. He promised me one of the lads would come up and cut our land as the grass was starting to get very tall. A lot of it had been appropriated by reeds, and it needed a proper tractor to mow it.

On Monday we were in Longford at a mower shop – I bought a very heavy-duty brush cutter and strimmer at a specialist shop, and then we went to Carrick-On-Shannon to buy some garden tools, such as a rake and a spade. While we were there, Seán called and said one of the lads was coming up to cut our grass. We hurried back from Carrick to find almost all of it done. What would have taken an ordinary mower at least a full day had been done with the tractor in a matter of minutes.

The tractor mows part of our field

The lad on the tractor was 17 years old and handled the immense beast like a vacuum cleaner in an empty room. I gave him a couple of notes for his efforts and we had a chat. Clever kid, had a lot to say – he could have been 40 years old. Anyway, it seems with all these people we’ve met, we’re on the way to becoming part of the local fabric.

We also took a trip to a place called Bóthar na Naomh, a country park with a predetermined path to follow. The shorter route is only a couple of kilometres, and mainly on the flat, so we decided to try it out on the children. I remember when we went to the Garbí near Sagunto for the first time – they complained a great deal about having to walk along the stony paths through all the trees. By the fifth time, it was much easier although Livia was still reluctant.

Here, things hadn’t changed, at least initially. For the first couple of hundred metres, Livia was enraged to the point of explosion that anyone would actually want to go for a walk anywhere, but once she had calmed down and saw where she was, she started to enjoy it. The nature there is resplendent, with a mix of woodland wildflowers and open field ones too. There were meadowsweet, St John’s wort, cornflower, mountain ash. fireweed, syringa, wild orchid, lupin, hollyhock, bee blossom, salvia, saxifrage, hawthorn, elm, beech, oak, cypress, and those are just the ones I could name.

We walked through the forested area, taking longer than usual, because Dainoris and Milda wanted to look at the flora. This was incredibly encouraging. Livia was starting to get in the mood as well. Then we came to the open part, which straddled the edge of a lake and some wide open pastures with cows grazing. Except one: standing menacingly in the meadow, staring at us like a coked-up night club bouncer looking for some action, was an angry-looking cow with an expression of world-weariness mixed with utter paranoia. She seemed the type of cow that would kick your car windows in and steal all your belongings while you and your family were sitting in there terrified. See if you can tell in the photo which one…

Yes, that’s her, the ruthless bovine colossus.

The children had been asking about doing some more activities, especially ones with meaning, which was a credit to their personalities. A week or two ago, there was a poster in the window of The Corner café advertising a Martial Arts course for kids. I proposed it to them and they were delighted. Every day they kept asking, “are we going to Ninja School today?”

So on Wednesday 23 July, we drove to the community hall in Ballinamore to begin their training. Initially, I told Livia she couldn’t go, because I didn’t think she would be able to pay attention and listen to the instructor. How wrong was I? Not only did she pay attention, she loved every minute of it. Dainoris came away tired but elated. However Milda was not so overjoyed – she decided it wasn’t for her and we respect her decision. She wants to do dance classes instead.

Ninja School - image blurred for obvious reasons

It started with some basic instructions like stand up, hands in the air, now by your sides. But it developed into running up and down, or hopping to the middle, or frog leaping. Livia followed every step and listened to the whole thing.

Then came the breakthrough we have all been waiting for: the instructor said they would be getting their white gowns the coming week and to earn a different colour to go on their belts, they have to do their homework, and this week their homework is to help their parents clean up.

Well.

The day after, Livia not only helped us tidy up, she did the whole thing herself. Since then, she has taken on an air of responsibility and has started putting importance on household maintenance. She still flares up, but she has started to demonstrate more independence and self-confidence.

Roly-Poly Hill, Ballinamore

After the Ninja School, we went outside to the playground and the children did some more running about. Where on Earth they get their energy from beats me. They intentionally get up at a time when adults slouch out of bed to get ready for work. They eat the bare minimum until an intervention from a parent, yet they charge around like they’d been given an athlete’s diet and a litre of coffee. This carries on all day until they have a little crash. This crash and resulting short nap allows them to go on until as late as possible, even if they’ve spent an hour charging around a hall.

I took a walk through Ballinamore’s public park. It is a happy place, and full of everyday life – the kids playing football with a couple of bags as goalposts; the old geezer out for a run; the mother on the phone while her children blow bubbles; a dad, his son and a friend cracking a hurling ball across the park, and my three rolling down the steep spectator banks on the far side of the field, screaming with laughter.

Here, also, I discovered one of the trees of my youth: the Lawson’s cypress, also known as the Oregon cedar, a tree so grand and tall, that it’s essentially permanent nighttime under its fronds. I loved those trees as they remind me of my childhood. They have these unique berries that look like sultanas but are as hard as rubber balls. It’s hard to come to terms with the rubbish you did as a child, but at least you can comfort yourself in some of the more pleasant memories.

Our horticultural hoard

There’s a garden centre about ten minutes after Carrick called Ardcarne, and it is a haven of horticultural happiness. On Thursday 24 July, we drove out there to see what we would like to put in the garden. Thinking we were just going to look, I forgot how insistent the children are, especially Dainoris. He looks at something in a shop and wants to buy it: whether it be a spare part for a lawnmower, a packet of dishwasher tablets, a milk churn, a set of oyster knives, a crystal lampshade, a 1993 Charlton Athletic mug, or some Norwegian flags, Dainoris will take the lot if his eyes train on them.

So in the end, we came out of there with enough plants to turn part of our garden into a mini jungle. All the many staff in there were ultra friendly and the café was a lesson in how to make sure people keep coming back. We had a good gluttonous cake session in there before we headed out to buy some plants. And this is the main issue – the garden wasn’t ready for any plants so I’d need to get back and start preparing the ground pretty quickly. We bought the basic garden tools and some compost, and the next day I dug out a space for many of the plants and shrubs we had bought. There would be a lower flower bed, and with the earth I had dug, there would be a mound to use as a windbreaker.

The children tried to help but generally they fulfilled the role of disturbers and tormentors: I can’t find my shoes! They’re in the shoe bin. Where are you going to put that plant? There. What’s its name? Colin. It winds me down to the point of giving up, but all that money we spent on the plants keeps me going. It will be ready by the end of July. However, Dainoris has shown a lot of interest in gardening, so I can only encourage it. He even made his own little rockery.

Coming up: August Bank Holidays in Ireland are full of events for everyone. The next is on 4 August. Looking forward to it!

EXTRA PHOTOS BELOW

Bóthar na Naomh, wild flowers

Bóthar na Naomh

Bóthar na Naomh

Carrick-On-Shannon

Mown.