Holiday brochures everywhere. Sun, sand, blue skies, too much food. It's tempting to rove the world, but you can't get to know it all. Stick to a few places you know? Always by the sea, or near the sea. The sea is a great healer. To walk along a strand, feeling with the rhythm of the waves. Smelling the salt and the seaweed. Healing, life giving. You may know a corner of the French Mediterranean where mountains tower above such a strand, where fresh seafood comes as god as our own, and where you have a change of ambience. "You're Irish? Just like us Catalans," and the talk flows.
And the sun heals and the umbrella trees shade you as you read the local papers and order more coffee, bracing yourself for another dip. Or it may be almost anywhere in the west of our own country. You can visit parts of it ten times and still find something new to marvel at. For sheer take your breath away, it's hard to beat Dun Aengus and the cliffs on that side of Inishmore. Others find solace in the often deserted beaches away from the more fashionable parts of the Galway coast. Take your pick. But, in a way, the holidays in the mind, said an old timer recently, are second to none. He likes to mull over, with his cousins, the years of the mushrooms, for example. When they would start out from the gate on the big field and, by the time they had made the round back to it, they had an enamel bucket full of fresh, that night's growth.
Indeed, if they went back an hour later - so they swear they could fill the bucket again. Then there were the nights out in the punt, when they came back with the bottom covered with blocken and lythe - all right coalfish and pollack. This would be August. At the end of September you would come down for a weekend to gather enough blackberries to keep the two families through the winter. And, of course, they were at the age when two or even three swims per day was normality. Now for the brochures ... At his age, he says, a bit of heat does him a power of good.