Slievemore and Acid House

It's funny how on a day I climbed a mountain I also happened to read an article on the benefits of walking for the artistic brain. It felt good to challenge myself again on the side of a slope, and Slievemore is beautiful, but it was really the thoughts I had with me that are my memory of today. Again, I got nostalgic for a period during my life that really was the playground for others - that of rave culture - after I listened to a great podcast on my way to Achill on the mixing of drugs and dance music in late 1980s Britain. But now I feel that this nostalgia I have always had is hardening into memory without as much emotion. In a few words: it feels like I myself am coming to terms with my youth and my past and I'm ready finally to live in the here and now. It's probably all coincidence, but the physical struggle with a mountain gives you a great focus on what is actually happening to your being, right here, right now (as Fatboy Slim once said). And even if your mind is wandering, that's the main benefit of exercise - releasing clogged up thoughts and memories, and finding air and clarity for today. I hope I'll never cease to move with purpose, remembering my life, but also knowing that what happens now is just as important as what once was. I'll no doubt write more on these old fragments in future posts, but today was a good day, as it always is, when I go out and participate in the great outdoors 

North

I travelled across the border today into Northern Ireland and it was strange how literally seamless the transition was. You couldn't tell where the border was, where the line had been drawn. You need to wait for the different road markings, or a sign painted oddly, to know you're in a different country. And despite what nationalists might try to force you to believe (or convince themselves to) you know you've distinctly entered another state. Urban N. Ireland is a place that can seem almost alien, until you get used to it, with all those loyalist flags today seeming like a last desperate stand by a community surrounded, and with a mother country across the water that treats them like an unwanted child. And it's dreary, with not much of interest to see - flags can get very tiresome. The quaint little bus shelters dotted around the countryside in places of no importance reminded me of a trip I took to Republika Srbska last year, and the rural people getting on and off at locations in the middle of nowhere. And as I think of it now, that part of Bosnia and Herzegovina is a last remnant of an old world; its Serb population not unlike Northern Ireland's loyalists; living by history rather than the hear and now. North of the border is a place I like to visit, but it depresses me too. A feeling not unlike nostalgia, with all the good bits taken out 

Last days

My father is in his last days, though he has held on for quite some time with recurring illness about 10 years now. My relationship has been complicated with him. I have spent years being angry, angry about my youth, and the way he bullied us all. There is such a complexity to it though, as I firmly believe he was a man of his time, with many unfulfilled hopes, financial pressures, and a lack of educational intelligence. He never physically harmed me, though I was too weak to take his own anger, and it has marked me to this day. I know it is at the root of all my problems, all the things I feel I've lost out on, the confidence I don't have, my low self esteem, my problems with addiction. I have dreams now where I wake up in a sweat. I dreamt a few days ago that he was dead and I woke to expect the news would come that day. It didn't, and we all wait. A kind of purgatory of its own. At least I think I'm at peace with him now; he not being fit enough for years to shout or insult. I know I'm right to think he did wrong, because he did. But it makes things no easier to be alone with those thoughts, not being able to express them fully to anyone

Garden therapy

I often think that the greatest therapy is right at our fingertips, in the practice of physical outdoor work. For many years my 'work' has either been a specifically urban type of indoor shift work in hospitality, or long hours writing essays or starting, progressing through, and finishing text for publication in front of a computer screen. I can't say I'd forgotten what the outdoors was like, because being from the countryside it is simply a part of who I am. When I go back to it it replinishes the soul. A project I've been working on this summer during the pandemic has been trying to transform a big overgrown orchard behind my Roscommon house. It's a very large area for one man and a spade, but I like it that way. I'll have something to do. Digging , cutting and slogging away among the old oaks, sycamore and crab apple is its own kind of fulfilment; the great therapy of physical toil

Nephin

This is a nice picture of Mount Nephin in Mayo and was taken, I believe, just after I came down off it last week with my great friend JL. It's difficult to tell mountain weather sometimes and a cloud that looks ominous on top may well be nasty, or is might just be mist that's not even that damp. The hollow part in the middle, I've found out, is called a 'glacial corrie' and for some reason I love these features. Like the weather they can also look stark, and are very common. Seeing these features untouched for millenia, and sometimes millions of years, is one of my favourite things about taking to the mountains: it can seem like you are finally back to the landscape you originally came from. The training for Carrauntoohil is going nicely now, and it's the 'Lug' in Wicklow in a fortnight. I can't wait! 

Why a journal?

Yesterday I entered an old house and it got me thinking about nostalgia and my own life, which seems long to me to a certain extent but really it's just a drop in the ocean of history. Twenty-five years ago I was just fifteen but that distance is the same as from 1820 to 1845: a small interval when looking through the lens of history, for example. Anyway, it's why I'm starting thus journal. For nostalgia, memory, and the fleeting nature of time