Paul Malpas

One of the major aspects of moving base and going to live in a different country from that in which you have been historically domiciled is the fact that all your homework beforehand is a mere speck in the ocean compared to the reality of living the life.  Many a person has done it, Anthony Burgess, the writer, did it on numerous occasions and scarcely found happiness.  He seemed to treat every new abode as a base to travel from.  I wanted to cross to Ireland, go native, soak up the atmosphere and like the Normans did 800 years ago, become “more Irish than the Irish themselves”.  It has taken me five years to partially understand the country or enough of it to get by.  Most of what I have learned has been a plus to my original thoughts but as with everything there has been some downsides.

We,  ie.  my wife Helen,our youngest son Paul and myself came over in 2004 as a result of certain changes in my life.  The business I was running failed that year,  I realized I was a dinosaur in the world I existed in and technology had overtaken me without me properly realizing it.   I knew nearly all there was to know about the building and civil engineering industry but not about the computer technology that had taken over in the few years previously.   I was starting to hit the brick wall that so many people  of my advanced years hit at some time.   I did not want to continue in the life I had been in for 44 years.   I wanted a complete sea change and Ireland to me looked the part, a country where we had spent most of our spare time for years.    In this dream I was aided and abetted by Helen,  who in fact was born there but who had moved over to England with her parents during infancy.   It was without doubt our spiritual home,  our whole lives had been spent with wistful relations looking with nostalgic green eyes westward at their homes across the sea.   I had spent my whole working life in the company of  Irishmen,   in fact I had rarely worked with an English man and when I did there was normally a row.

Paul was 11 and due to start secondary school,  I had no wish to continue in a country slowly being turned into a caricature by Mr. Blair and his Scottish cronies.  Helen thought that if there was a time,  that time was then.   Our only worry was Paddy Jo, our fifth child, who was in her last year at school before hopefully going on to university.   As it turned out this evacuation put steel in her backbone and generously aided by her sister Kate and Mark, Kate’s husband,  she recorded magnificent A-levels,  went on a character building exercise to Borneo helping the indigenous orangutans to come to terms with  21st century living,  took a year out working with her sisters and is now in her last year reading English at University College Dublin,  where she has embraced the academic and thespian life.   What worries?  Ireland was only 45 minutes flying time from Manchester;  it was not a foreign country.  It was no different to going to live in Devon or Wales or even Yorkshire.

As a non-irish person,  whenever you have to fill in an official form, they ask for your nationality and what day did you come to Ireland.  On my first form I said sometime in the last 40 years.   That was not good enough but I did learn that through humour you advance.  I remember when claiming money for Child Benefit, when that date was finally nailed down,  the English authorities were claiming back from us £143 of overpaid Child Benefit which had to be repaid  before they would give permission for the Irish authorities to pay their contribution.   We should have by law applied for these things within months of landing but this was over two years after,  when we caught up with the system.   I wrote to the Benefits Office in Donegal that I found it amazing that 90 years after Independence the long scrawny arm of Her Majesty could reach across a foreign country to claw back what she thought was rightfully hers.  I received a congratulatory telephone call from the Donegal civil servant on my case who passed my claim with many a chuckle and backdated it two and a half years to boot.  No wonder Ireland has gone down the pan financially;  the Child Benefit they paid was €42 per week considerably more than the £11.70p we were receiving in England.   With a family of six children you would only need to work part time to get by, and the papers told us it was the suppression of birth control and the Catholic Church made the Irish have big families.   It was not;  it was the weekly bonus from the State.

So here we were in Ireland with a house we were trying to sell in England,  (a story I might put in the blog one day for amusement purposes) and Paul expecting to go to the newly opened Abbey College in Boyle.  Our first hurdle, the change from Junior to Senior School comes at 12 in Ireland not the 11 we were expecting.  So the mature 11 year old had to do a year in National School; an immediate come down for him.

We placed him in a school in Corrigeenroe, at the top of Loch Ce some four miles from Boyle and with just 60 pupils to its name. Incidentally Corrigeenroe means Little Red Rock and is in a delightful location looking down the eight miles or so of the Loch.   A loch that is considered to be one of the most beautiful in Ireland with reputably an island for every county  within it.   All Paul could see was thwarted ambition.

I settled down to write my memoir which I did during the hours of midnight and dawn in three weeks in December, all 120,000 words of it.  I have been editing and rewriting it ever since.   It has given me great satisfaction and practise in sharpening up my keyboard skills.

More tomorrow on my drift into ways Irish and just to say that we are no longer an island but a fully fledged peninsula sticking out into the ever diminishing Boyle River.   It has not rained for three or four days and we are set fair for Christmas however there are thousands in the West who cannot tell the same story.   I pity them and hope they hit the new year running.

When I decided to throw in my lot with Ireland and came to live here full time some five years ago after years of living a ping pong existence between the two countries, I decided that my time should be taken up with it’s history and ideally in the explanation of that history i.e. it’s archaeology.

So as soon as I could, I sought admission to an Archaeology Diploma course at Galway University, or NUI Galway as it likes to be called. What qualified me for this course was my point blank refusal to send them my General Certificate of Education results which I had sat some 50 years previously.

What followed was a thoroughly enjoyable two years of mainly thought provoking lectures on Ireland and particularly west of Ireland archaeology, only marred for some by the Head of the Archaeology School telling us towards the end of the first year that the Celts never came to Ireland. This statement did not disturb me, but in a class of Celts it was almost like being called a bastard. So much so that three of the class never appeared again and from the rest there was constant mutterings for the remaining 15 months, so engrained is this Celtic myth in the Irish psyche. In fact a myth introduced by politicians at the end of the 19th century to give some kind of focus to the new and burgeoning state of Ireland. Therefore let me just confirm the fact that THE CELTS AS A PEOPLE NEVER CAME TO IRELAND, however it is true that a few ideas were exchanged with the intermarriage of eminent families in Ireland with their neighbours on the continent of Europe.

The course finished and my examination results were satifactory enough for me to be invited down to the University to celebrate Graduation Day. Now I had already experienced one graduation ceremony with my eldest daughter at Nottingham University some years before and at that time was overwhelmed with the gross waste of time , money and energy expended in the simple task of handing over a peice of paper.

Thousands of students with parents in tow buying gowns, hats and dresses journeying down to the university campus to wallow in their millisecond of fame in front of a stageful of multicoloured academics who should surely be doing something better suited to their intellects. Since that time all my children and I have many, have taken in my thoughts on the subject and refused to expose themselves to this financial legerdemain.

I explained this to the nice lady from the University Graduation Office who rang me wondering why I had not filled in the application form for this gratifying day. Halfway through my verbiose diatribe she put the phone down leaving me unfulfilled. However my diploma arrived by post written in a quasi Latin script, I and at least 20 other people have tried to interpret without success. No wonder doctors and scientists can be accepted for positions of authority by flashing these pieces of parchment illuminated by Book of Kells type illustration and gobbledygook script. No one can translate the document therefore no one can refute the lies in the job application.

However the course was a tremendous success for me personally and I now know more about North Roscommon Archaeology than 99.9% of the natives and it helped me greatly in my understanding of the landscape which is integral in the formation of its archaeology, but I still cannot understand the academics, people of powerful thought, who annually put themselves through this graduation charade.

For the last week now we have been surrounded by water. We live in an enclave of 10 houses built six years ago at the height of the Celtic Tiger on land people refused to venture on because of its tendency to remain under water for much of the time. Mr. Gallagher, our builder, who served his time in the Indus Delta area of Bangladesh, used all his wily inate skills that only a true post-colonial Irishman has and constructed the raft foundations of the houses to a level he knew was above and only just above the record flood levels we have reached this week.

Some of our neighbours are panicking and going to unbelievable efforts to keep the waters at bay but cannot understand the basic principles of hydrodynamics and so are valiantly wasting their time and money in flood prevention work that has no effect on either flood or property. If they had stayed in bed for a week they would have been more successful and possibly more creative. As it turned out the water levels did not get to within 150mm of their thresholds but with some,sphinctures start to twitch before they need to. Therefore my hero of the week is the wily Mr. G for laying the slabs of the houses at such a high altitude.

My other hero is our postman , who faced with waters so deep that he could not safely drive his van through, parked on high ground, and with his arms full of letters, parcels and the daily shite that normally comes through your letter box, climbed over several fences and delivered. This was true Wells Fargo stuff and delightful to witness.

My more serious thoughts go to the archaeological sites for which this area is inundated with and hope that they have withstood the weather better than some 21st Century constructions. They will certainly have had better practice at it as some of these sights are 5500 years old. Looking out into the flooded field at the rear of the house the site of Drum church and its attendant souterrain is under water. The church is famous for being founded by Columcille in about 560AD.  Unfortunately it was destroyed by some pre-colonial cattle raiders in the 15th century but not before it had made its mark on Irish history.

Going further up river you arrive at Abbeytown Bridge built by the Cistercian monks in 1220AD and the oldest working bridge in Ireland. It is this bridge that probably saved our twee little enclave as all week long it has been holding back 900mm of water and acting like a dam for property down river. I am sticking the old Cistercian monks up there with my heroes of the week. More talk of our archaeological riches in the days to come.

Having just read Drayton Bird‘s dynamic daily blog I fully concur with his sentiments. Why do you people of England let this dreary little shirt Mandelson patronise and at the same time laugh at you on a daily basis. I would make sure that I would be with Drayton when tying him to the front of the car and make sure his rectum was facing outwards to ensure as much as possible was thrust up it.

This to me is a totally new and exciting medium to record my diurnal or bidiurnal thoughts. A diary without boundary, a chronicle without necessarily the need for chronology. I am looking forward to it so much, for its width and its power.

After two days of practice I have now to seriously put pen to paper or should I say digit to key. I have just found out that I am on Mark Attwood‘s Blogroll, so the complexities of the system will slowly unfold while I for the moment concentrate on style and the shift key. My expertise on the keyboard is not great even though I have typed out laboriously my 400 page memoir with one finger which is slowly being pushed into my wrist.

By the way Mark Attwood is an Internet Marketeer and SEO Expert par excellence as well as being lucky enough to be my son-in-law and I am lucky enough to be joined on his Blogroll by Drayton Bird, possibly the most famous marketing expert in the world who is also lucky enough to be born in Ashton under Lyne where my father went to school, by Katy Attwood who is priviledged to be my daughter and mother of three and a half Attwood children, by Ken McCarthy, an American, and also by a chap called Vince Samios who is misplaced ambition personified, no doubt emanating from the fact that he is Australian. I thought that they were only good at cricket and serving penal servitude.

In this exalted company I am expected to shine. So here goes.

I have just finished reading the main works of Diana Athill, a woman of 92 years  who did not start to write with energy until past her 80th birthday. Her work is mainly in Memoir form and so real and honest, you imagine you are living her life for her. As a fan of the memoir genre I find my own pitiable attempts need to be drastically rewritten for them to be half as interesting as her writing is to the reader. She has reached massive new heights in the content and presentation of this style of prose.

Her only claims to fame were that she loved to read, loved to love and loved the art of procrastination. Which is probably why she has lived to her ripe old age without too much trouble. Her titles are:- “Yesterday Morning”, “Instead of a Letter”, “Stet”, “After a Funeral”, “Make Believe” and “Somewhere Towards the End” and a novel  “Dont Look at Me Like That”, which I have not yet read. All it seems can be bought on Amazon for next to nothing. However her compendium edition “Life Class” just recently published with a forward by Ian Jack costs a few pounds more. Start reading, start loving and procrastinating and live to whatever age you want.

Here’s an interview with Diana in case you’re interested:

So I sign off with the thought that it looks like the hand of God has reached out and accomplished more than King Canute ever did. The waters of Boyle seem to have stopped rising just as they started lapping at my gateway.