the lad with the long ears



Irish Donkeys Finlay and Beartlai



There is something special about a donkey. It’s their naughty nature and those adorable ears.

When I first went to Ballinasloe fair in 1987 the price of a donkey was 5 punts. If I had rented a big field and bought them all up I would be a donkey tycoon today! The place was flooded with them. No longer needed to pull the little orange donkey carts full of turf, people had got fed up of looking at them standing about in the field, and loaded them up into their traillers to sell at the fairs. Tragically most of them ended up on the boat to France for salami or in a truck destined for the horse abattoir to feed the lions in Dublin zoo.

They then became quite scarce and it is much rarer now to see ‘the lad with the long ears’ leaning out over a gate. In the Celtic tiger years the price of a donkey reached 1000 euro. Now that common sense has been restored to Ireland they are advertised on the Done Deal trading website for between 50 and 200 euro.

Interestingly donkeys, who seem to be a symbol of rural Ireland, were only introduced during the Napoleonic wars, around 1800, when many horses were bought up to be used in the war and replaced with donkeys imported from Spain.

I met Finlay and Bartlai (above) this week and they are such characters they stole my heart. Finlay was put into his shed lately to await the farrier who was coming to trim his hooves. He managed to levitate and jump out of a small window. That is only one of his many amazing achievements! They really are charming and are meant to bring luck to a farm. I think we will have to go shopping.

We have had our own fair share of luck this week with my husband securing one of those illusive Irish jobs; he will be looking after a fleet of buses in Galway city. It became available because unfortunately the Brazilian mechanic who had worked there for the last few years was unable to renew his work permit. The government has clamped down on issuing permits for non nationals. What is also good is he starts at 7.30 and will therefore avoid sitting in the famous Galway rush hour traffic for hours every day.

I have been working on the young pony every day and he has stopped looking as if he is constantly under threat of attack by a mountain lion. I was very excited when he started to walk around at my shoulder, turning right and left and halting when I stop, even backing up if I walk backwards. But although he turns towards me now from the outside of the ring he refuses to approach me more than a step or two and I have to walk in towards him. So I think that is cheating a bit and I am really joining up with him rather than him with me?

See the donkey sanctuary

high winds and shipwrecks in the wild west

3 year old Connemara cross

There are high winds and a strange, warm, misty rain like the end of the world. It is shipwreck weather, with two Danish sailors rescued off the coast of Cork in gale force winds and a haul of silver worth 127 million found lately off the coast of Galway. We have been cowering inside by the fire most of the week.

I have made some progress with the three year old pony and can now get him out to the arena and back into his stable. I had to divide the arena into two with white electric tape to keep him away from the gate and he is now lunging on both reins and turning when asked. He is also happily wearing the breaking tack and side reins. The first day he felt the girth around him he catapulted his two back heels high into the sky and I thanked the Almighty that I wasn’t on board. The quality and athleticism of the Connemara pony originates from Spanish bloodlines. When the Armada was wrecked of the Irish shore, the white Spanish horses (something like today’s Lipizzaners swam in and bred with the tough little native ponies. A Spanish person also washed up on Island Eddie, the tiny little Island in Kinvara bay and the family became the Corless’ (Originally Carlos).

As he is so wild when you take him out of the stable I decided to try the Monty Roberts technique on him. I you tubed Monty doing his famous ‘join up’.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Dx91mH2voo

The horse is meant to run around and the human chases him. You keep your body square to the horse and keep looking him in the eye. We did that very well. I kept looking, he kept running. Eventually the horse starts to flick his inside ear towards the human. Amazingly this did happen after a few minutes. Then he is meant to slightly turn his head towards you as he goes around. He did as predicted- how easy was this… He should then start licking and chewing, like a foal and drop his head in a sign of submission. I couldn’t believe it when he started doing exactly. At that point you are meant to become passive and turn away at a 45 degree angle and drop your gaze to the ground. He should then walk over to you and start following you around like a dog and you can put the saddle on and jump up with a bond that will never be broken as he is so desperate to be your friend, you can ride him bareback, backwards etc etc and he will willingly do whatever you desire.

Only he didn’t walk over to me. I kept repeating all the steps but when he is meant to ‘join up’ he makes it quite clear that I am an impostor and he does not want to be part of my herd. He stands cemented to the ground shaking and looking terrified. I tried standing and waiting, walking away, putting the rope on him and pulling him towards me. No way José. No join up! I feel flawed. He did the horse bit right, it was the human that couldn’t speak the right language. I had visions of him following me around, with ribbons in his long black mane, bowing and lying down like a circus pony. He obviously has different ideas, mostly about getting back into the field and eating grass with his REAL friends. Maybe trying to join up with the whole world collapsing around us in a hurricane was a bit ambitious; I am trying not to take it personally

autumn berries and cows to the mart

Spindle Tree

Galway County Council has granted planning permission to open the farm as a nature park, with a farm café and indoor playground in the barn. The one objecting neighbour now has two weeks to lodge an appeal and this will take Bord Pleanála, in Dublin, 18 weeks to process.

The Autumn berries are on the hedgerows; holly, red hops, sloes and blackberries. Hazelnuts are ripe and mushrooms are magically appearing in the mornings. I love watching out for the surprising pink berries of a lone windswept Spindle tree on the side of the road, shining out against the backdrop of the blue-grey Burren rock.

The calves have gone to the mart. They made the best price ever with the heaviest at 295 kilos making €895. This would be twice what they normally sell for. It seems whilst the rest of the world is investing in gold we are sinking our spare cash into fat cows; wealth marked by the size of your herd, like the nomadic Maasai people in Kenya. Farmers are too scared to put their money in the banks and the prices at the marts have rocketed.

It is the time of year to stable the three year old pony and start his training. He is another half Connemara, a beautiful yellow dun colour with black mane and tail, about 15.2hh high. I caught him yesterday to put him in for the winter and he was very obliging, letting me put the bridle with the training bit on without any fuss. He also let me brush him all over, which I was delighted about as he hasn’t had much handling, and I cut the end off two long dreadlocks in his mane that had tangled into a rope from three years of freedom.  I was so excited about his good behaviour I decided to try and get him into the arena to start teaching him to lunge. But on seeing his sister, who started roaring at him with separation anxiety, he jumped out over the 5 bar gate back into the yard and I was lucky to persuade him back into the stable as he eyed up every other gate to get back out the field. I will have to move her and the old horse to the other end of the farm and put up a rail over the gate before we try that again.

I eventually got all the ingredients for the ‘delicious seaweed smoothie’

It looked like something that had been bubbling in a witch’s cauldron for a week; I half expected bats wings and cats eyes to float to the surface. However much I blended it did not get smooth. Every mouthful had a tiny, fibrous rubbery bits suspended in a silky mucous. I managed to drink a pint, concentrating on all the lovely vitamins and minerals I was imbibing and not the fact that it resembled a pint of green you know what.
Sorry Prannie, I blame the cook.

Zumba and Seaweed to beat off the rain



A pint of the green stuff



The rain has settled in and the view ahead is disturbingly dark grey and wet. Depression was beating at the door, with no sign of work and the prospect of being stuck inside for the next six months...

So attack being the best form of defence I am trying a two pronged approach- exercise and healthy eating. I have joined Zumba, a craze that seems to have overtaken the whole of Galway (see flash Zumba mob video below in the city recently.)  There are three jam packed classes a week scheduled in the village alone. The nice part is that you pay for eight sessions but you can take them as you wish and Arisa, the beautiful, sunny, blond, tanned, Polish Zumba teacher (so skilled at twirling the tassles on her back pockets) punches a hole in your card when you attend so you don’t have the pressure of committing to one time slot each week.

When I walked into my first Zumba class in Johnston’s hall it was apparent that I was the last person in Kinvara to take it up. All ages were flamencoing, bellydancing, salsaing and cha cha cha-ing. Even senior members of staff from the school had all the moves off for Tina Turners ‘Rolling down the River’. Combining mambo dancing with aerobics is guaranteed to leave you sweating and put a smile on your face. And your muscles won’t let you forget that you did it the next day. One lady had a calorie monitor on and we burned 620 calories last night!

Inspired by Prannie Rhattigan’s cook book ‘The Seaweed Kitchen’ and the benefits of eating seaweed- full of vitamins and minerals (and also free..), we went down at low tide to the Flaggy shore searching for ‘Alaria’ the ingredient in her super green smoothie (see the photo above) that I wanted to try and make. Alaria contains vitamin C and K, all the B vitamins, calcium, iron, magnesium, manganese, zinc, copper, potassium and iodine. It is meant to grow on stony ledges just past the tide level on wave beaten shores. I peered over the edge of lots of rocky ledges and got soaked by beating waves but didn’t see a frond of Alaria even in the washed up piles on the beach. We did find Duileasc, Egg wrack, Saw wrack and Sugar kelp. Duileasc is also commonly eaten and potently nutritious.

So I made a power packed quinoa salad with roasted carrots and beetroot, sprouting broccoli and feta cheese, dressed with olive oil and lemon juice and topped with shreds of Duileasc. It was delicious, the seaweed tasted nutty with a nice tender, rubbery texture.

So far the two pronged approach is working and I am really excited about zumba-ing through the recession and cooking more seaweed recipes!

the guard



The G Hotel, Galway

We are probably among the last people in Ireland to see the film The Guard. We had a delicious M50 hamburger in Eddie Rockets beforehand (topped with melted Swiss cheese NYC cart onions, grilled mushrooms and ER secret sauce) not knowing the diner features in the blackmail scene from the movie and the cinema is next door to the G Hotel, where Gerry Boyle spent his ‘day off’.

The G Hotel has won over even the grumpiest begrudgers with its pink walls, silver chairs, sumptuous carpets and velvet furnishings. It was decorated by the celebrity hat designer, Philip Tracy, originally from the tiny village of Ahascragh. It is inspiring to know that it is only one small step from Ahascragh to world hat domination.

We are grateful to have The G as a vibrant remnant of the Celtic Tiger (the bonsai tree outside the front door is reputedly insured for €30k.)

The movie is a good introduction to Irish dead pan humour (see video below for the main character’s take on this). Trying to ‘knock a rise’ out of people, just to raise a smile is a national pass time. Or interspersing the truth with swathes of lies, just to brighten up the day, and to stop people taking themselves too seriously, can be confusing for the uninitiated. Brendan Gleeson is an expert. It also illustrates brilliantly the boredom and monotony of being loyally stuck in a small corner, of a small country but craving the bright lights and mental stimulation of the metropolis.

Somehow the brazen jokes manage to take the power out of the racism and show that sometimes precious PC behaviour can be more divisive than cohesive. The stereotypical bigotry, bad language, corrupt gardai and weak drug running gangster plot are lifted to box office triumph by the skilfully written script full of snappy one liners, that mature nicely on reflection, and the brilliant casting of the magnetic characters. It is a movie that is destined to wear out many DVDS and sit on the shelf with Man about dog, Into the West and box sets of Father Ted.

Back to reality- the Kinvara Minors hurling team lost their semi final. It was a hot, messy, overcast game with very little good play that deteriorated from an even match at half time to an all out thrashing. But the good news is…

The Cardiac First Responders Group saved their first patient yesterday. There was a collapse in the hotel and CPR was started, someone raced down to the school for the defibrillator and shocks were delivered. When the ambulance arrived the casualty was breathing. So our neighbour’s death, that inspired my sister in law to start the group, has saved a life. (She is a bangarda and everyone from the station loved the movie by the way..)

Enter the stillness

The meditation hall  at the Sunyata retreat, Sixmilebridge, Co. Clare

I spent the weekend at the Sunyata retreat centre in County Clare, looking for a bit of silence. It was a weekend course  called ‘Enter the great stillness:the mystical side of Qigong.’

Friday morning was difficult.The cows had to be put in the pen for the second half of the TB test, which entails looking at the injection site to see if it it is inflamed. Having all been stabbed in the neck on Tuesday they decided it was a really bad idea to go back in the pen. They ignored the bucket and raced up and down the fields refusing to go in the gate. Eventually my husband got into the car and tried to turn a VW golf into a cattle dog. It resulted in a broken headlight and a cow with a nasty cut on her back leg. So we gave up and hours later got them in using patience, stealth and lots of confusingly placed buckets of feed.

Then I started on the computer. I had agreed to turn the Kinvara Cardiac Response Guidelines, that we are drawing up, into a nice little A5 document. After downloading a huge and complicated free publishing software package and eventually understanding how to work it, I was about to complete the last page of the booklet and a message popped up ‘if you need another page please send $90’ at which point the children were home, exhausted, starving and clingy after the first two days of school.

So I got out the credit card, googled ‘meditation retreat’ rang Marion (originally from Texas) at the Sunyata centre and she said their was a place left on the course. I had never heard of Qigong, all I saw in the title was ‘stillness’ and thought it sounded perfect. It was. My husband had got through to the next stage of interview with Boston Scientific, an engineering aptitude test, which he did on Friday. As soon as he got home I was winging my way down to County Clare.

Qigong is the ancient practice of gathering the healing energy of the universe through gentle, graceful, mystical movements. For two days I did 8 hours of Qi Gong with about two hours of meditation in between. I did movements such as 'arrive at oneness' and 'bridge over heaven's river.' The hall was beautiful, looking out over a vast expanse of green countryside and trees, with little birds chattering. The retreat is in the middle of nowhere and the only visitor we had was a lone white puck goat that wandered into the courtyard. A short stroll away through a bit of forest brings you to a waterfall where dark peaty water pours in rivelets, over two boulders, into a pool and rolls over a log to splash into the stream below.

I returned on Sunday buzzing like a buddah, my head clear, full of energy, with my feet firmly planted on the ground.

Our teacher Max Weier, learnt his skills from Master Lee (see video below for a short introduction to sitting qi gong) who was a famous kung fu expert, even winning a Chinese oscar.
He gave up kung fu to become a Qigong master.

Hiking in the Burren hills but Summer is nearly over, back to reality and a lost job.



Pirate enjoying Abbey Hill on the Burren with Galway Bay behind



My sister in law’s mother died suddenly on Thursday. She was elderly, but just not the person you would expect to vanish so unexpectedly. Peggy was part of the furniture. I thought the best compliment you could wish for came from her daughter. She said that whatever happened there was always someone there to say ‘it’s ok’. She has her own lovely family, but that was different and age 41 that unconditional security was gone and she knew what it felt like to be an orphan.

I was walking up Abbey hill in the Burren. The late summer flowers are carpeting the little pastures that separate the limestone flags. Ox eye daisies, eyebright, devils bit scabious, self heal; white, blue and purples predominating at this time of year. Just to get an hour up there in the late summer air, looking out over Galway bay, past Galway City, as far as the 12 bens of Connemara and the Aran Islands is powerful medicine, and washed away the anxiety of my husband losing his job last week. But as the old saying goes ‘you can’t eat scenery.’

Thoughts of moving or commuting to London are encroaching again. It’s not a great time of year to be looking for a job, with winter drawing in and the kids going back to school, with all the extra costs that entails. The holidays are really over. When school starts on Thursday we will have to sit down, assess the situation and make some decisions. I am trying not to panic.

The cows are having their yearly test for TB today and the calves are fat and shiny and ready for the mart at the end of the month. Also the farm area aid payments come in October but with just 50 acres and only 9 calves that will only keep us afloat for a few weeks. The only company that seems to be recruiting in Galway is Boston Scientific, who make medical devices, and are one of the companies that benefit from Ireland’s low corporation tax of 12 ½ %.They have always been a great employer in this locality, but I imagine the stack of CVs is hitting the ceiling at this stage. Hopefully my husband’s is on top.

With Peggy in the ground it made me very grateful that I managed to spend so much time with my parents and my children over the Summer. When you are working full time you do not have the luxury of complaining about how many meals you have to cook for your relations, or that the kids are driving you insane (and they are at this stage) as you bump into them every time you turn around…that time is precious.