Paisley

Ian Paisley was on a talk show tonight. He was greeted in this household with a little bit of growling at the screen in somewhat realistic attempts to mimic his accent, and a commentary about the Troubles and how hard it was to take his more mellow comments seriously given the pain of the past.

Irish history is fascinating and desperately sad. Every current action and mood is given a link to some kind of pain dealt to someone in the past, going back centuries. I, seeing things at a face value, am quite literally performing a fly-by.

Just for a while back there

I've been listening to Tom Waits while driving through windy hillsides.

I've been listening to Leonard Cohen while sitting by the fire.

I've been reading Dylan Thomas and Seamus Heaney. I would, if it was at all possible, rather like to have a stroke that affected the language centre of the brain in such a way that instead of producing word salads I could only ever talk like Dylan Thomas' poetry. No one would have the faintest clue of what I was saying, but it would be beautiful.

I saw two Irish wolfhounds and a peregrine falcon yesterday. I petted two of the three, and felt that it was overall a rather aristocratic day.

Yes

It's a normal kind of word, definitely the standard in affirmative communication, but I've experienced a new incarnation of the word 'yes' while in the north west of Ireland.

The locals here say it while breathing in. Try it sometime and see what it sounds like. I assume it's so that the lungs have enough air to continue the conversation the same breakneck speed it was begun.

But a sharp intake of breath means something rather different to me. So imagine sitting around in a room having a conversation, while your head whips round at every breath inwards. It's a funny old world.

"We'll make a Donegal lass out of you yet!"

So said my host when I managed to bring in the turf (what they call peat).

But in the meantime I would like to call a toast - to me, for successfully lighting and sustaining a wet and soggy turf fire, now smoking away in the range. I won't say it's the best fire I've ever made - but turf is a tricky beast and I'm very proud of myself. Even my 'checking' every five minutes to see if the little dragon hasn't fallen asleep hasn't hurt it.

So you'll have to excuse me, today the skies are a gorgeous blue. I think the Irish must have engaged in a bit of subterfuge in order to wrangle it, so I will stomp around in the sunshine for as long as I possibly can.

As I walked along the cliffs

Yesterday I went to see the edge of Ireland - up and down the coast as it drops into the Atlantic. At one of the spots we stopped at we had to walk from halfway down the road as Donegal council decided to fix things a little.

I lost my boot in the mud at the edge of the road, found and reclaimed it, and walked up along the cliff edge to the top of the hill. I looked over at the sea - an enourmous expanse of silvery blue with pearl-like spots where the sun shined upon it. We went back to the car, and the hail and the rain edged us sideways, hitting my face like little vengeful bullets.

Back at the house, as we were dry, I saw that the mud from the clifftop had left a golden glitter to my shoes. They sparkle like the stars now.

Other forgotten things

Besides the standing stones and megalithic tombs I saw today - eerie echoes of people half forgotten about and misremembered - I've forgotten to tell you about some things here.

The house that I'm staying at uses peat in the range downstairs. Peat smells wonderful - just the right kind of earthy home smell that makes a good welcome into the warmth. Although, the places where they scrape it off the surface of the bogs look like rubbish tips with piles of different coloured bags full of peat sitting at the edge of the rows.

These little piles of plastic are a lot like the horribly coloured and terribly out of place holiday homes that are being built around this area. They have butter-coloured fenced walls and the kind of soul-less similarity is heartbreaking around here. They just don't fit, the stone walls nearby will crumble to the edge of an unyeilding edifice to comfort and security built of pastel colours and no sensibility of the area it sits in.

And the sea creates masses of foam, the parts where the waves crash near the rocks look like milk. As they curl the greens and blues and purples of the waves turn to white, and the spray hangs in the air, taking its gentle pleasure in falling back into the sea.

Somewhere very elsewhere

I caught the bus from Dublin to Glencolumcille the day before yesterday. If you've not heard of the second place, I'm not surprised - I was the only one left on the bus after Killybegs (just a short way away from Donegal) and when the driver let me out, on the street corner in the rain, all I could see was a shop and a house and a road.

And it was really raining. I haven't been properly rained on since I've been overseas, but this rain finally justified my carrying a raincoat around for the last 3 months. Pity then that it was stuffed under my sleeping bag at the foot of my backpack.

So instead I ran into the local shop, a tiny little room lined with newspapers, magazines, cigarettes and lollies. There I talked to the very friendly shop assistant until I was picked up by the friends that I'm staying with here, who are sporting a few more wrinkles (and in the case of their children, many more inches) but are otherwise exactly as I remember.

And, incidentally, this part of Ireland is amazing. Absolutely beautiful, in a wild and untamed kind of way. There are cottages here, pointed out to me by my hosts, that were lived in not 15 years ago but now have the look of an ancient ruin. Which echoes the standing stones and megalithic tombs dotted around the landscape, in at least one case in the middle of a village, and in another a domesticated stone can be found next to a patch of vegetables.

And the landscape. There are cliffs here that are apparently the tallest in Europe, valleys that have been visited by Dylan Thomas and absolutely breathtaking beaches, both with sand and with round white stones that make the most beautiful sound I have ever heard as each wave recedes into the ocean. And always the hills, and always the wind, and always the rain yeilding to glimpses of sunshine, the appearence of which makes the hills practically sing with colour - purple and red heather and bracken, every shade of green you can imagine, silver stones, and golden clumps of grass. It's very little wonder that this is the land of woods and waters wild.

W B Yeats

A very odd person indeed, was our man Yeats. Into all kinds of weird and wacky Victorian symbolism and spiritualism, whose wife he asked to marry him after being refused by the daughter of a former infatuation.

But for all that he seems to have gotten his poetry out all right.

I mention him because today I went to the National Library - they have, besides copies of all his and other Irish authors' works, an exhibition on the life and loves of Yeats for the free perusal of anyone who wanted to see it. And I did, and so I did.

Yesterday, besides the Guinness storehouse (a marvelous institution!) I went to wander around Trinity College, to see if I could see the book of Kells. I couldn't - they're fixing up it's box or something similar - but what I did see was the library. Oh, deary me! Its the most beautiful room I've been in so far - rows and rows and books and books and winding staircases and little enclaves.

Somehow I don't think they'd let me take it back though.

My goodness...

My Guinness!

The streets next to the Guinness storehouse are as black as the brew, and the air smells like vegemite.

Ireland

Please forgive this terrible correspondent. I warned you that I wouldn't be as consistent as I'd like.

I caught a bus from London to Dublin last night. Normally this might not be possible, I was imagining the wheels turning into fins and the bus swimming across from Holyhead - but alas, no. Just a normal run-of-the-mill ferry crossing the Irish sea in gale-force winds. I slept through it though, goodness knows how!

Dublin in the daytime is pretty and fun. For some reason it feels like I'm travelling again, maybe it was being sick but the time I was in England didn't really feel like I was overseas. Everything was so familliar.

I look forward to any travel tips for Ireland that you, dear reader, have - but mostly I'm looking forward to looking. Those of you who have not been to Ireland before won't know how green the grass is. And wet the ground is.

London

I've found the transport in London to be alarming. I don't mean that it's bad - which it may be, but compared to Sydney seems really quite good - I mean that it behaves in a very odd way. The tube bounces - moving the same as the cartoon trains and buses at the start of Sesame Street - and no-one on it seems to notice.

Walks

One of my favourite things about England is the number of public footpaths through farmland and over and around landmarks. The signs are often confusing and a little fluid with their use of distance, but perhaps in a place where everyone has walked before that's the mystery.

Ware

I woke up this morning in a tiny town in Hertfordshire. Today I may well wander through snowy fields or in to town to see what I can see.

In the new year

I believe it might be a very good start to a year to wander around the Lake District on a frosty day. So I did.