A Taste of Ireland

My sister in law’s mother died suddenly on Thursday. She was elderly, but just not the person you would expect to vanish so unexpectedly.

Peggy was part of the furniture. I thought the best compliment you could wish for came from her daughter. She said that whatever happened there was always someone there to say ‘it’s okay’. She has her own lovely family, but that was different and age 41 that unconditional security was gone and she knew what it felt like to be an orphan.

It was the Cruinniú na mBád festival this weekend (‘the gathering of the boats’).

The traditional sailing boats ‘hookers’, some of them 180 years old and crewed by the same families for five generations, symbolically brought the turf from Connemara to Kinvara on Saturday, as they used to do for centuries, until the 1950s when the Bedford truck took over and they ceased to trade.