Smoked monks and suicidal witches

Antrim Round Tower

Well… it’s a tower, I said thoughtfully. And it’s… round. But what is it?

A Round Tower, replied Billy, helpfully. She set off in search of the entrance, walking all the way around the tower and returning to her original starting point approximately 8 seconds later.

It seems that Irish Round Towers are actual “Things”, if you know what I mean. As in, there’s a Wikipedia page about them, and everyone knows that having a Wikipedia page is the very proof of existence. I have a Wikipedia page, therefore I am. Unfortunately, this theory doesn’t help me to prove my own existence, nor that of most other people I know. It remains possible that we do not exist. This hasn’t caused me any significant difficulties so far, though, so I’m not particularly bothered about it.

Anyway, this disturbingly phallic piece of Irish history stands at an impressive 93 feet tall, and is probably about a thousand years old. In a wonderful example of the same Irish construction ability famous for building an unsinkable ship that sank, they decided to put the door to the tower about 7 or 8 feet up the wall.

Up here! Tower door.

The logic, perhaps, was that in case of an invasion of Vikings or whoever was causing trouble back then (I assume it wasn’t always the IRA and the UVF), the frightened monks of the surrounding monastic settlement could scurry up the ladder into the tower, and then withdraw the ladder so that their attackers couldn’t reach them. Yah! they’d shout, defiantly, as the Vikings scratched their helmets and wondered what to do. Oh, crap! they’d add soon afterwards, as the Vikings gave each other a leg-up and set fire to the door. For, indeed, when you’ve got a couple of dozen monks piled into a tall, narrow, and (let’s face it) chimney-shaped tower sealed with a lid, the solution practically leaps out and smacks you in the beard.

And so it is that Round Towers all through Ireland show evidence of fire damage around the door, and have records of people burning or suffocating to death inside them. Irish history: you couldn’t make it up.

The best part of Antrim’s tower, however, is actually the large boulder next to it, which is impressively entitled “The Legend of the Witches Stone”. The stone has two bullauns (depressions) which are said to always be full of water (and apparently a Subway napkin, which I had to remove before taking the picture… grrrr!).

Legend of the Witches Stone

This is interesting. It is like a mysterious holy miracle thing, and I am keen to return sometime when it hasn’t rained for weeks, to see if they are still water-filled. Of course, in typing that sentence, I see the problem with my plan, and very likely the real reason why the holes always have water in them…

The information sign suggests that the water in the bullauns was regarded as holy, and was therefore possibly used to “baptise converted pagans or cure warts”. I found this sentence very amusing. Religious rebirthing symbolism on the same level as curing warts. Gotta love it. However, the reason the stone got its name is that according to legend, a local Antrim witch who was unhappy about the construction of the monastery decided to show her disapproval and take a stand – or rather, a flying leap. Off the top of the tower. She landed on a large stone, so hard that when they scraped her off it, they found that she’d dented it. To this day, the impressions left by her knee and elbow remain in the boulder.

It’s a beautiful story, no?

Alas! It is probably not true – not least because the stone was originally located over a hundred yards away from the tower. Mind you, she probably had a broomstick. Although why a witch would jump off a tower in protest, fly a hundred yards on her broomstick, and then jump off that, too, is a bit beyond me. Maybe I’m putting too much thought into this…

[Apologies for the rubbishness of my photos – I don’t have a camera, and my phone isn’t much good at the best of times, never mind twilight. For better (i.e. “someone else’s”) pictures, click here.]

Driving in NI

Ice cream, I decided, having spent the day writing numerous informative articles about poison ivy. Ice cream.

It wasn’t much of a descision, as decisions go, in the world history of decisions. I mean, it certainly wasn’t up there with “abolish slavery” or “invent the internet”, for example. But I felt that it was the right one. I requested a companion on Facebook, and was soon on my way to pick up Billy (who – interesting fact – is one of only two of my blog “characters” who actually goes by her blog nickname in real life). We decided to drive to Newferry, it being near to where she lives, as she assured me that it involved scenery and water and walking and that sort of thing.

As it turned out, Newferry was very difficult to find. We stopped for ice cream in Toome, and my cone was long gone by the time we eventually reached our destination. I have to issue a complaint at this point regarding signposts in this country. They are almost always in the wrong place. What is this, a test of intuition? Punishment of tourists and/or those who don’t know their own country very well? If a signpost marked with your destination is pointing down a road, you immediately indicate and turn down that road. That’s just obvious, surely. When I did this tonight, I ended up first in a housing estate and then in a farm. It turns out that the sign meant to take the next road, not the one it was pointing down. Or, in the case of one sign, it meant nothing at all and was just there for a bit of a laugh.

I don’t think this is Newferry, we agreed solemnly each time, returning to the point where we saw the original sign saying “Newferry 3 1/2 miles” and starting again. Anyway, when we eventually arrived in Newferry, we discovered that it was, in fact, a large car park. If there was more, I remain unaware of it. It was a car park, and a jetty, and some people in boats and on water skis.

We were unimpressed, particularly since it had taken us half the night to get there from three and a half miles away.

So Billy, being the one with very little navigational ability as opposed to the one with no navigational ability whatsoever, suggested heading to Antrim to walk along a nice river path. Is Antrim close? I asked dubiously. It’s just down the road! said Billy cheerfully.

We went to Antrim, which, it transpired, was actually a half hour drive away.

By the time we got there, we had decided that aiming for specific destinations when neither of us really possessed an ounce of common sense nor a sense of direction was a foolish idea to begin with. Instead, we decided to look for brown signs and follow them, with a view to finding something culturally interesting, saying Ohhhh, how interesting!, and then going home.

That’s how we ended up walking round and round and round a very tall, very narrow round tower looking in vain for its entrance, and reading about suicidal witches gliding from windows. But I think that deserves a blog post of its own. ..

From Carnlough to Bedlam

Ladies and gentlemen, as promised, I am staging a comeback.

I am determinedly shaking off the past and filling my days with productive work, family, and friends, instead of sitting glumly feeling hard-done-by and rejected and sad. This has only been happening for a couple of days, mind you, but I already feel slightly better, which in itself is making me feel slightly better, if you see what I mean.

Carnlough - old phone box

I drove The Parents to Carnlough on Monday, and it was nice to get out for a walk. The sea always makes me feel better, for some reason. It’s calming and pretty and also associated with lots of happy childhood memories for me, so that’s all good. And Carnlough is one of those tiny little old-fashioned Northern Irish seaside towns, with a sweet harbour and an unhurried feel, and its main street running along the seafront. We strolled, we ate fish and chips and ice cream by the sea… it was lovely.

And who could fail to feel better when looking at this sort of thing?

Carnlough beach

Blues that chase away the blues...

Seriously gorgeous. I may have to indulge in sea therapy at least once a week from now on.

Yesterday, then, I worked, and also mused about the fact that I was having so much difficulty refraining from dwelling on Certain Issues. I managed to find a good solution, but I’m a little too embarrassed to share it with anyone except the one person I’ve told, who laughed at me instead of thinking I was a scary freak for having to do such a thing. Anyway, suffice it to say that I will no longer be able to waste large amounts of my time and sanity on the wrong person, even if I should wish to do so. And that’s all I’m saying. :)

Of course, the person who laughed at me when I was seriously confiding in her about my heartbreak and drastic measures could only be McBouncy. I called out to visit her today, and I feel cheered, cheered I tell you! The McLovely house is always bedlam, I don’t think they’d mind me telling you that, but today really took the entire cake tin, mainly because McBouncy had described it as a very boring, quiet, chilling out day. As I sat there watching an almost fully grown Red Setter skidding around the floor in hot pursuit of an ever-so-slightly faster cat while McBouncy and I tried to protect our drinks and have a conversation, I had to disagree.

Arghhhh! squealed McGinger as the cat took refuge beside her and the dog promptly joined them.She leapt up and appeared to join the chase. Now we had a dog, a cat, and a child running around like mad things. The dog started to bark, and McBouncy – in helpful response to her daughter’s squeals – suggested that McGinger just bark back.

The dog was barking. The child was barking.

Then the dog actually vaulted over the sofa, with me still on it. This was a little scary. I left soon afterwards.

I am very thankful for the fact that a place such as the McLovely house exists. It’s impossible to sit and mope while all that’s going on around you!

Wasting Time

Oh dear. I really need to get out more. I’ve had so much enjoyment from this video that it’s making me fear for my sanity.

Mind you, it was, once again, my father who introduced it to me. Watch this, it’s so funny… it‘s Kat! This recluse-style living has really got to stop, for all of us.

And so I have decided that tomorrow, I am taking The Parents out somewhere and we are going for a nice, healthy walk. We shall stride briskly, breathe in some fresh sea air, drink water, perhaps eat a salad, enjoy stimulating and intellectual conversation, and return home energised, rejuvenated, and glowing with health. We shall not limp along like crocks, eat ridiculously large ice cream cones, stop for a pint, or discuss the guy from the pub who said he’d streak home if Liverpool won the match, and then kept his word and ended up walking down the Larne Road with his clothes under his arm as an old lady coming out of the chapel checked out the back view.

Nope. I’ve really got to shake off this lethargy, and get up and out. All work and no play has made me tired, sluggish, bored, and quite miserable. I think I’ve worked through Phase One (crying and self-pity), Phase Two (anger and bitterness), Phase Three (acceptance, loneliness, and depression), and am now ready to tackle Phase Four: re-establishing contact with human beings. Ugh. It’s not that I don’t want to see my friends; of course I do. It’s just that I don’t think I can remember how to talk, and also, actually sending messages/replying emails/making phone calls and then the physical process of getting up, getting dressed, going somewhere… it all seems like a really big deal at the moment. Is that normal?!

But I’m going to make the effort. Otherwise I’ll never get to Phase Five, which is hopefully “having fun”, or indeed Phase Six, which is probably “getting a crush on somebody completely inappropriate and starting the whole process over again”… ;)

Scaredy Kat

Once upon a time, when I was off in some far-flung land, The Parents arrived home one night in the torrential rain.

Nothing too unusual about that, you might suppose, since it is Always Bloody Raining in this country. However, it is a slightly rarer occurrence for someone (e.g. The Parents) to discover said torrential rain inside the house as well as outside.

Thanks to some poor planning on the part of whoever built this house, the yard slopes down towards the back door. Very occasionally, owing to a disastrous combination of very persistent rain and the drain becoming blocked at the most inconvenient of times, the water will just merrily flow down the back yard, under the door, and into the house. This doesn’t happen on a regular basis or anything, but it’s certainly an experience when it does. The only recollection I have of it happening was when I was very young, maybe 5 or so, and went to go down the step into the kitchen one morning to find that it was, in fact, ankle deep in water. It was all very exciting, although mum didn’t seem terribly amused.

Anyway. The Parents arrived home one day last year to discover that disaster had struck again. Poor mum had just had the new kitchen fitted, and there it was, all full of icky water. Dad pushed open the kitchen door to find himself paddling, as a pair of shoes floated past. He heard a terrified miaow, and saw, on the windowsill, poor Kat the Cat, who had no idea what was going on. She was sitting there, a small and furry Robinson Crusoe, watching with wide and frightened eyes as random household objects floated around below her on the previously dry kitchen floor.

A cat rescue operation was carried out, and the house restored to its previous dry and clean condition. There were lasting consequences. One of these is that both my mother and the cat are now scared when the rain comes on. Mum’s out checking the drains and the yard water levels every five minutes; Kat comes flying off the roof like a mad thing and racing down the yard with a wild look in her eyes as soon as the first heavy drops appear.

Which brings me to yesterday. It has rained, and rained, and rained here lately. It is depressing the hell out of me. Rain, rain, rain, it goes. Rain, rain, rain. Yesterday, it was particularly determined rain. RAIN, RAIN, RAIN, it went, thundering on the roofs and windows and bouncing off the ground. Kat the Cat appeared from nowhere as if by magic, paws hardly touching the ground as she sprinted into the porch and hid behind the door. But here’s the weird bit. When it’s raining heavily, she won’t lie in her basket – which isn’t at ground level, it sits on an ottoman. So it’s not like it got flooded previously and she thinks it’s going to happen again. And yet rain seems to put her off getting into her favourite snoozing spot.

So yesterday, I went out with my laptop to sit in the porch and absentmindedly lifted the cat from the only chair, placing her in her basket instead. That was the point at which all hell broke loose. The ridiculous creature was genuinely petrified – hair standing on end, legs outstretched, claws out, hissing, wriggling, the works. The second she touched the basket and all this happened (taking me somewhat by surprise, as you might imagine), she howled and practically fell backwards on to the floor in a scrambling flurry of legs and tail, in her madness to get away from the scary killer basket she’d been happily snoozing in a few hours earlier. She then proceeded to sit on the floor and stare up at it, ears back, eyes wide and frightened. She refused to get in until the rain stopped.

That cat has never been all there, mentally, but I fear that being terrified of her own bed when it’s raining outside is taking things a little bit further towards Seriously Disturbed than ever before…

My lil' lolkat

A Site For Sore Eyes

This morning I woke up after a rather disturbed night’s sleep and found that the headache and eye strain that come with spending too much time writing/staring at a computer screen were still making their presence felt.

With another day’s work ahead of me, I staggered downstairs for a healthy breakfast of Nurofen and nicotine and caffeine, hopeful that at least one of these would improve the head situation sufficiently for me to produce some relatively useful web content without the blood vessels in my eyes exploding. I discovered my father sitting in the porch with his laptop.

We sat in companionable silence, me ingesting three different kinds of drugs, him reading blogs. The silence was broken at intervals by sniggers. These were obviously not from me.

I eventually gave him a questioning What’s so funny? look.

I’ve just discovered a guinea pig blog, says he.

Dad has really only just accepted the presence of Kat the Cat in his life. It seemed a little odd that he was now reading about other domestic pets in his free time.

No, no, he explained enthusiastically, it’s a blog by a guinea pig. “True Thoughts Of A Guinea Pig”.

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I went back to smoking and drinking coffee, and he went back to reading and giggling. Then I backed slowly out of the room and carefully closed the door.

I’d love to end it there, but I must confess that as I was waiting for the painkillers to kick in, I looked up the guinea pig blog. It really is very funny. It’s a guinea pig called Sighs, who lives with his cage-mate, “Dumb Fuck”, and keeps a diary of his experiences as an intelligent, somewhat intellectual guinea pig doomed to an existence of eating pellets and watching the beyond stupid activities of the ‘monkey’ who owns him (“What’s-her-name”), and “that moronic boyfriend”.

I think it’s great that the guinea pigs of the world now have a forum for their thoughts. Poor Sighs is quite a bitter character, and his frustration with everything he sees around him would probably consume him if he didn’t have some way of letting it all out now and again. So he blogs. He blogs about his contempt for What’s-her-name, his utter loathing of the moron boyfriend, his desperate attempts to get some serious, intellectual conversation out of his cage-mate, who only wants to eat and fart and sleep.

If you’ve ever wondered if the diary of an intelligent, sociopathic, angry, frustrated guinea pig who swears like a trooper would be funny, as I’m sure you have if you’re anything like me, then this is a fantastic find. Kept me back from a whole stack of work for an hour, anyway. Kudos to Dad.

I really need to get back to work now.  You go and experience Guinea Pig Sighs.

What do They know about me?

Typically, I’ve started getting a steady stream of work coming in. This means that my career as a freelance writer is finally taking off properly just as I’ve decided to go and be an English teacher for a year! But I won’t complain. It’s still not great pay, but it’s going to give me a little bit of cash in reserve when I arrive in Korea.

Of course, it means I’ve hardly been out of the house, since I’m working very long hours. I suppose I really need to start getting out and socialising, since people might be slightly miffed to discover I’d taken off again without seeing them even once.

I did go to see MonkeyMrs tonight, as she’s just returned from Ethiopia and was therefore able to entice me out of hiding with fresh Ethiopian coffee beans (nothing short of spectacular, by the way). We were exchanging travel tales and catching up when MonkeyMan arrived in.

Yeah, so I think it might be strange at first, I continued after greeting him. Eating with chopsticks and, well, not being Korean and everything. But I have now learned the Korean alphabet!

MonkeyMrs nodded enthusiastically. MonkeyMan just looked decidedly confused. Erm, hang on… what? he asked uncertainly. Are you moving to Korea? Going to a Korean restaurant?

I think, generally, you’d probably be expecting the answer to be closer to the second option. It was quite good fun to be able to casually reply with the more exciting one!

I have started the process of applying for sealed transcripts of my university marks and suchlike, and tonight went to the police station to request a criminal background check. I must say I was suitably impressed by the nice policeman, who was very friendly and helpful and pleasant – very different from my only other time in a PSNI station, when I was trying in vain to get someone to care about poor Rio the Clio’s injuries. He made me forget that I’d been feeling slightly nervous, as I always do when I encounter authority figures, despite the fact that I’ve done nothing wrong. I’m always scared that I’ll be seized with an uncontrollable urge to to something bad (like the laughing at a funeral concept – you know it would be the worst possible thing to do, and you absolutely do not want to do it, so suddenly you feel yourself overwhelmed by the desire to), and then I’ll get thrown into jail. Plus I just have this vague fear that I really have done something terrible at some point and blocked it from my memory, and They know about it, and it’s “in the system”. Which would be awful, when you think about it.

I have a touch of the neurotic about me.

So how long will this take? I asked as he gave me back my documents and handed me my FOI Request receipt.

About 40 days, he replied, upsettingly. Seeing my alarmed expression, he hastened to reassure me. Do you actually have a record? he asked, shaking his head with a smile as if he knew the question to be ridiculous as I was clearly a lovely, good, pure, innocent and well-behaved young lady. I shook my head meekly. Not so much as a traffic offence, I said demurely, wondering for the first time how on earth that is still true after three and a half years of Really Bad Driving. He promised me that it should only take a couple of weeks for someone as perfect as myself, and I nodded in relief.

Moving to Korea, I see? he added. I nodded again.

Nice policeman sighed wistfully, looking at the two hoodie-wearing teenagers sitting sulkily glaring at him from behind me, and the woman who’d just walked in wearing a woolly hat and scarf, in the middle of July.

I don’t blame you, he said sadly.

I can’t use chopsticks, though.

I am writing this post purely as an attempt to get my brain to wind down sufficiently for me to go to sleep. I worked a twelve-hour day today, which is a fairly new concept to someone who’s struggled to find enough writing work up until now, and my eyes are actually aching from staring at the screen all day. However, as the alternative to putting down the laptop was lifting a large and heavy suitcase from the top of my wardrobe and searching its contents for my degree certificate, I chose to come here instead. Blindness will follow shortly, no doubt.

I am becoming an expert on all matters pertaining to green tea. I have written 25 of 50 articles on the subject, and would really like to write about something else. So here it is:

I have The Plan!

Not bad – just over one month of self pity and wallowing and depression was required before I pulled myself together and thought seriously about how to travel and make money at the same time. The solution?

I am going to teach English in South Korea.

Hurrah! It is all very exciting and scary and all the rest of the things I felt way back last year when I wrote this post. That delicious thrill of anticipation, the fear that I might be raving mad, the joy of a completely unfamiliar country just waiting to be explored, the thought of the new people who might cross my path, the enthusiasm for trying out a new type of job… it’s all there.

Of course, I do have the slight worry that I’ve gotten my hopes up and I’ll end up being disappointed – I should probably wait until I actually land a job before I post this. But what the heck. You’re used to being dragged along with my bursts of enthusiasm, and then listening to the crying when it doesn’t go to plan, right? Anyway, from what I can tell, demand for English teachers in Korea is much higher than supply. The only reason I won’t get a job is if, erm, I can’t find that degree certificate. Or if I discover when I get a police check done that I once committed a serious crime while sleepwalking. Barring that sort of thing, I think it’s going to be fine.

I announced my intentions on my Facebook status, and am once again in awe of the miracle that is the Facebook Friends List. Within less than 24 hours, I have made four contacts in South Korea, through friends who saw my update. Three of these are teaching English there, and I’ve had really useful conversations with them – including one which made me realise that there was absolutely no need for me to go through an agency, thus saving me over £1500 in one minute. This new contact then introduced me to the person who got him his teaching job, and voilá! The process is underway.

It’s the personal aspect of the modern Facebook-assisted world that I really love. Looking through endless websites, I could gather plenty of information, but I still had this niggling worry that I would land in Korea to find no one there to meet me, and discover that it was all a scam and I had nowhere to live, or that the whole set-up was really dodgy. This way, I’m getting to talk to friends of friends – people whose characters are vouched for, who are actually doing the thing that I’m trying to do, and who are seeking out jobs for me in schools that they know from firsthand experience have a good reputation.

It’s this that’s giving me great peace of mind about my decision. I mean, if you saw a job description with things like Approx. 25 hours per week.  Accommodation provided, rent paid. Return airfare paid. Salary £1000 net per month. Assistance with work visa application. in it, and knew that you were pretty much guaranteed to get it without really having to apply or try, wouldn’t you think it was too good to be true, and that there had to be a catch? But now I’ve talked to people who can assure me that it’s all above board, and what’s more, they love it!

Given the low cost of living and the fact that accommodation is paid for, my sources tell me that if I want to earn and save money for future travels, this is the place to go. Apparently I can get by on £200 per month, saving £800. If I continue to do a bit of writing work, too, then after a year in Korea I could have saved up somewhere between £10,000 and £12,000. Do you realise how much budget travelling I could do for that?!

I am very enthusiastic about the whole thing. However, I fear that my eyes are about to fall out of my head due to strain, and I have 25 more articles about green tea to write, so I think a good night’s sleep is now called for…

Attempted Murder

There is a sudden commotion in the back yard, scuffling and crashing followed by a shrill squealing noise. I look up in alarm from my 14th article on the health benefits of green tea, and see Kat the Cat’s tail waving suspiciously amongst the shrubbery. I can’t help but remember how proud and superior I sounded yesterday, when I was telling my grandmother about how my beloved kitty has never gone after birds.

Throwing open the door and yelling “OI!” with unbridled rage that subdues the next door neighbours into complete silence right in the middle of the grandson’s bubble-blowing lessons, I storm up the yard and am greeted by a guilty looking Kat the Cat with a tiny sparrow clamped in her jaws.

I am clearly much too soft-hearted and easily upset to be a cat owner. My eyes fill with tears and my stomach churns as the cat and I eyeball each other in a wary standoff. It is all my fault. If I’d never gotten the cat, she would not be in this yard, and the itty bitty birdie would be cheerfully twittering away beside the pond as planned. Now its little legs are sticking helplessly out of a whiskered mouth. All my fault.

I must do something. I lunge at the cat, who makes a dive to get past me. My rage and guilt make me a better predator than my pet, and I catch her tail. We pause again, and then I yank the tail fiercely. Sort of like a feline gumball machine, she spits out the bird and wheels round to free her tail, at which point I grab her collar. Unfortunately the collar turns out to be one of those safety ones designed to snap open if caught. No doubt I’d appreciate this if the thing doing the catching was a high-up tree branch rather than my hand, but I am considerably less thrilled to find myself holding a limp piece of cloth with a bell on it as the cat leaps towards the terrified bird once again.

“Nooooo!” I yell, having lost all remaining calm and poise. I snatch the cat up by the scruff of her neck and practically swing her into the porch, slamming the door in her indignant face as she attempts to dart straight back out again.

I go quietly to examine the sparrow. It is very tiny, and cowering behind a flowerpot. There doesn’t seem to be any blood, but it’s not flying away. Upset, I seek advice from both parents, and then from Google, which alternately berates me for not just letting nature take its course (thus saving unfortunate bird from a long, slow death), and advises me to put the patient into a cloth-lined box and keep it in quiet isolation for a few hours to let it recover from the shock.

Cloth-lined isolation booth prepared, I attempt to retrieve the bird, and am quite upset to discover that it clearly thinks I am just as evilly evil as the evil evil cat. It hops around, keeping out of reach. Not wanting to traumatise the poor thing any further, I leave it alone and return to the porch to shout at the cat and stare out of the window at the guilt-inducing baby sparrow.

It is cheeping. Probably calling to its friends and family for help. All scared and frightened and hurt. Cheep-cheep-cheep. And the cat is going mental to get out, which is probably what makes it think that cats can leap halfway across the room from a chair back to a window that’s open no more than 2 inches, and not fall backwards 6 feet to the ground.

Cheep-cheep-cheep.

I will not sleep tonight, out of guilt and sadness. I may wake Kat the Cat at regular intervals just so that she’ll lose some sleep over the head of it, too.

Waiting to murder

Why do we do the things we do?

As much as I have generally negative feelings about The Twelfth, I did love it when I was younger.

A diary entry from a very young Hails reads:

I woke up because there were drums outside and we went outside and waved at the orange people. Then we put on our new clothes and went round to Queen Street. We sat on the kerb and watched the bands. There were lots of people. I had a flag and I waved it and mummy took photos of me. Then everybody came to our house and had broth.

A diary entry from a 12-year-old Hails reads:

I love the Twelfth Day! It’s like a big party.

Street Party

It’s so exciting to wake up and hear all the drums in the distance – today the first band went past and I had to hide behind the curtains to watch, because I was still in my pyjamas and the boy that I like is in that band. I saw him though – he looked sooooo cute in his uniform! And then later when we were out watching the bands, Colin was teasing me about him, and he decided to get a photo of him, and ran out into the middle of the road to take it – I was so embarrassed!!!!

After the parade everyone always comes round to our house for broth. It’s a tradition to have broth on The Twelfth. Mum makes the best broth in the world, and she makes two big giant pots of it. We have family members and passing friends calling in and out all afternoon, and it’s such good fun. It feels like a big festival with all the noise of crowds and bands in the background, and the flags and streamers everywhere.

And then everybody goes round to the local pub – it’s the only day that children are allowed in, and it’s always packed full. Today some men had guitars with them and they played music and we had a singalong. And the barmaid let us have a Hooch each, but she said we weren’t to let on so we drank it out of glasses and pretended it was fizzy orange!!! I had a great day.

27-year-old Hails doesn’t have a diary, but she has a blog. Today’s entry reads:

I woke up to the sound of drums. Not just from the neighbours’ grandson, who received the somewhat unwise gift of a drum and a pair of cymbals several months ago and has been a very lively presence ever since, but also from the bands from all over the town who were on their way to the Field. This is where they start and end the parade.

Band

Lambeg Drums

The parade consists of bands and Orange lodges. There’s a band from each local area, each one with its own uniform. The most common kind is the flute band, but there are also accordian bands, bagpipe bands, and lambegs. Oh, the lambegs… huge big drums, for anyone who isn’t familiar with the concept, so large that the drummers can only carry them for a short time, and so they play in shifts. When the lambegs play, you feel it in your stomach and hear it for a week afterwards.

In between each band is an orange lodge. These are mostly made up of older men who have been brought up to be staunchly proud of their history. They walk with dignity, dressed in suits and bowler hats, often with decorative swords, flowers in their lapels, and all with an orange sash draped across them. There’s no one in Northern Ireland who doesn’t know the song:

Orangeman

It is old, but it is beautiful,
And its colours, they are fine.
It was worn at Derry, Aughrim,
Enniskillen, and the Boyne.
Sure my father wore it when a youth,
In the bygone days of Yore.
And it’s on The Twelfth I love to wear
The Sash my father wore.

The Twelfth commemorates the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, where William of Orange (or King Billy, as he’s known round these parts) ended the attempt of ousted Catholic king, James II, to regain his throne by ensuring that the few remaining Protestant strongholds in Ireland were captured by his new Irish Catholic Army. Although deeply unpopular in England, James still had quite a loyal following in Ireland, whose natives were Catholic – but his occupation of the North caused great resentment amongst a population with a heavy concentration of English and Scottish Protestant settlers. William’s troops marched in to relieve the besieged city of Derry, and all hell broke loose, for a while, until the Battle of the Boyne eventually brought an end to James II’s confidence about his chances of hanging on to Ireland.

No doubt there are umpteen versions of this story, but this is a simplified one, and the only one that I can even vaguely understand – it’s all very complicated, and I’m not likely to be able to explain the Irish Situation in one blog post, when none of us here really understand it anyway. Anyway, to this day, you’ve got the Protestant Unionists, who are grateful to King Billy for liberation, and who see themselves as part of the UK. Then you’ve got the Catholic Nationalists, who see themselves as Irish and would rather James had been successful (he was known as Séamus an Chaca or James the Shit when he deserted his Irish supporters and returned to exile in France!).

Anyway, what I’d really, really love to do would be to go up to a number of random band members, flag wavers, banner carriers, and Sash singers, in my capacity as an investigative journalist (!), and ask them to tell me about what they’re celebrating. What was the Battle of the Boyne? Who was King Billy fighting against? Why?

Future NI political leader?

I guarantee you that the percentage who could answer with more than a shrug would be very, very small.