January 2016

On Winter Nasturtiums

I always look out to the garden (such as it is) when I’m having my breakfast (such as it is), even in the paling grey mornings of an Irish November* (such as they are). Just joking. The garden is fine, and the breakfast finer. And mornings bring miracles and the hope of renewal. And outside the window there is a patio area and a concrete retaining wall painted white by my own hand. And growing from the apparently barren pebbles on the shaded ground below a proud unlikely nasturtium flourishes each year. It appears in early Summer, full of curiosity and hope (as perennials do) and crawls its tiptoe creep along the stones and the patio slabs. One, two, three, four stems grow and thicken and seek the purchase they need to go upwards, onward, towards the bounty of light. Like fingers feeling under the bed sheets for the promise

Tuscany Downs 3: The Sullivans

  How’s the going, like? We’re all sound here in Tuscany Downs in Cork, where we don’t have no water meters and we won’t neither. Ever. Over my dead body. I’m getting dirty looks from yerwan next door but it’s not my fault that she let the water run out on the road so that there was a sheet of ice outside her gate. Lucky nobody was killed. Tommy could have banged his head or anything. He could have an acute subdural haematoma, or something. Look what happened to Cilla Black, like. If there’s culpability, there’s culpability – it’s in the lawyer’s hands now, I’ll let justice take its course. They’ll settle anyway, they always do. That’s deadly news about David Bowie. Between himself, Lemmy and that English actor from Harry Potter, it’s getting scary. Jesus if cancer killed all them, there’s no hope for the rest of us. Especially

Tuscany Downs 2: The Widow

It’s been a terrible week here in Tuscany Downs in Cork City, just terrible. And it’s only Tuesday. We had frost and you’ll never guess what happened. My gutter was leaking and with all the rain the past few weeks, the water was flowing down my path and on to the road. Well, that froze over last night and didn’t Tommy Sullivan next door slip on it and he’s after hurting himself. I can’t get the rights of it from his mother, that little rip, but he’s on crutches and she says he has ‘severe trauma’ – whatever that is. I don’t think anything is broken, though. I wouldn’t mind but that know-it-all next door has been on to me for weeks, months, about fixing it. But I kept putting him off. I just couldn’t bear being beholding to him, Jesus I’d never hear the end of it. Of course

First Frost

And so we get frost, we get frost. Frost on the car windows below on the road; frost on Hayes’s flat roof. The faint hint of it on the tips of the long grass out the back, just lightening the green to a silvery grey. But it’s a soft one – nothing on the discarded Christmas Tree on the gravel, solemnly awaiting its butchering. Nothing on the damp table top, still pristine after my Autumn varnishing. Imagine. The first frost of the Winter on the tenth of January. Jasmine flowering against the back wall. The fern still intact, only a touch of russet on its fine, kiwi-green fronds. The daffodils about to grant us new gold. And as I wander out on the landing on this Sunday morning I see cloud lining the river to the north. It’s there, above the water, and only there, behind Ashton’s new school and