IT'S A DAD'S LIFE:A weekend on the beach gets me thinking
WE’RE ALL wrinkled like pensioner orang-utans, having spent the weekend basking in the Atlantic. The sun comes out and I know why we moved here, to line the beaches with every other ray-starved, crackling-coated Irish person in the southwest. Forget the “good life” or “lower classroom numbers” or “traffic-free commutes”, it’s about soaking in salt water on the most spectacular stretches of coastline for the two days a year the sun has got its hat on.
The endorphin reaction is intense. Even at 9am on Monday morning, the petrol station buzzes with people far too chirpy for this time of the week. Sunburnt noses compete for space with white spaghetti strap tops, highlighting joined-up freckle shoulders.
I spy a farmer licking a 99 for breakfast, his Land Cruiser outside. The cows can wait. Already, so early, heat begins to shimmer off the forecourt. It’s all very Route 66.
At this time of year, the dark days of December are another planet and my perma-smile knows no winter. I wish I could bottle this and spread a little across the far end of the calendar. The fact that the sun seems to shine a little brighter the further you are from the city does not quite mask how much darker it feels at other times. How to strike a balance?
It seems Joe Horgan has. I know Joe because his daughter is in my daughter's class. I don't know him well, but I do know he works in mental health services, plays football, doesn't possess a TV and cultivates sideburns like a 1970s Elvis. Joe has written a book called The Song at Your Backdoor, which suggests to me he has this bright summer/dark winter problem sussed.
Songtells the story of the countryside. It tracks walks in a seven-mile radius from Joe's yard and maps the landscape, the creatures that inhabit it, their noises and smells. It owes a lot to Kavanagh and is compelling in its marriage of a country's past as it grows into a new place – Ireland's story through flora and fauna. As you would expect from a celebrated poet (that he is), his language is taut and personal.
I read this book and wonder, is this Joe’s own story wrapped up in hedgerows? If he walks the local turf and finds so much therein, does it mean the turf has calmed him? Made him, a city boy like me, content? Because if it has, I want some of his magic beans.
I corner him at the school gate: “What’s the story Joe? Where’d you bag all this contentment stuff? How did you get to be a philosophical Grizzly Adams and still find time to kick ball?”
This genuinely intrigues me because it is important. Am I destined to scratch at the inside of my head no matter where I am, no matter how much pleasure I take from my family or work? For years, I have presumed that to be the truth, that the unidentifiable itch will forever need to be scratched and, to be honest, welcomed it because it is, in its own way, refreshing. Yet every now and then something like this book comes along and makes me wonder, can a buzzing mind be put at its ease by the land that surrounds it?
Joe puts me right quickly. The book is about ideas more than places and things. In his own words: “Even in a modern, commercial world, to stop and think about things is important . . . in itself a political statement. But you can have just as powerful an experience in the city as in the country.”
That line stays with me because although he, more than anyone else I have encountered, has embraced the rural idyll, he still says that what is important is to commune with the environment in which you choose to live – rural, urban or polar ice cap.
I can move my family anywhere in the world and that inner-head scratch will remain, it’s unavoidable. But your environment starts with yourself, then moves to those closest around you, followed at a distance by the place in which you live.
By my reckoning, to feel comfortable in that place, wherever it may be, you have to concentrate first on your own skin and those who put up with you, day in and out. They make the winter days bearable and the hazy days of summer brighter still.