The muesli, the yogurt, and the family Bible

Monday September 5, Claremorris

It is early Monday morning and I have been waiting in the cold mist at Claremorris (Clar Chlainne Mhuiris) station, in the west of Ireland.

About an hour ago, woken by my alarm, I stepped outside of the luxuriant guestroom in which I'd been sleeping, to see a middle-aged man waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs. How long he had been standing there, I could not guess. He greeted me, offered me a cup of tea, then hurried into the kitchen to pour it. I came down the stairs, with my bag already packed, and turned into the kitchen, where Mr Shaw-Smith of Barranna shoved the cup of tea into one of my hands, a bowl of muesli into the other, then declared that he would 'be in the car'. Seconds later, the idling car engine could be heard just outside the front door. Unsure of protocol, I took the tea and muesli with me (ever cautious to avoid railway food) and got into the car next to Mr Shaw-Smith. As he sped off down the winding, narrow roads of countryside Ireland, I struggled to get any significant amount of tea or muesli into my mouth, though both vessels were soon empty anyway, having spilt all over my legs. Mr Shaw-Smith was determined that I should get my train.

Mr Shaw-Smith is Dan's dad (see post for August 20). He is the owner of Barranna, a large house on Lough Carrig, near Claremorris, in County Mayo. The Shaw-Smiths can trace their lineage over many hundreds of years, and indeed they were once a 'landed' family, though Barranna is not an ancestral estate. On the way to the station, Mr Shaw-Smith spoke little, concentrating instead on driving suicidally, mentioning a quick prayer as he sped into the glare of the early sun, asking our dear Lord that there be nothing on the indiscernable road in front of us. He did ask me at one point:

'And what does your father do, John - back in Australia?'

'He's a doctor,' I replied.

'A helicoptor pilot?'

'No, a doctor.'

'Oh.'

He did not pursue the topic. Perhaps he was disappointed. In fact, though Mr S-S is known here as a great film-maker and photographer - he specialises in documenting the cultural traditions of rural Ireland - I found his conversation somewhat limited. When I told him earlier that I was from Australia, he simply replied: 'That's a place I know nothing about,' a moved on. But he is only upholding the diligent social awkwardness of fathers the world over.

I came out to Mayo on Saturday, with Dan, his friend Gary (the repressed-gay-textile-designer - see August 20 post), and another of Dan's friends, Alison - a writer, who lives in Manhattan, and 'knows people', and definitely 'knows people who know people'. Alison has had stories published in some of America's most prestigious journals, and has an agent ('one of the major ones', she said) now trying to sell her novel. When I commented how great it is that she has an agent pushing her novel, Alison replied: 'Yeah, well, I'm good.' If you're American and you're good you can just say so.

Alison gave me a copy of the New Yorker magazine and maybe, kind-of, half-invited me to New York. Whatever it was she said, I could construe it as an invitation, anyway.

Gary wore a freshly ironed shirt with pink flowers on it, his hair as neatly combed and parted as ever, chin immaculately shaved. He commented with great enthusiasm on a picture we saw of a fluffy white poodle. You may think I am cultivating cliches here - but I report only what I see: Gary's sublimated identity, both tragic and hilarious. He spoke little throughout the weekend, commenting only on things such as the train having made up twenty minutes between Dublin and Athlone, or advising me that Westport was 'about twenty-six kilometres away'. He is very generous and polite, brought chocolates for Mrs Shaw-Smith, and some outrageously tacky nail-clippers (pink) from Portugal, for a friend in Westport. Alison, who is in the midst of a casual (very casual) tryst with Dan, argues that Gary is in love with him. She says: 'see how he looks at him - longingly!'

We came out to Mayo for a community art exhibition, in Claremorris on Saturday night. To be honest, I thought most of the art was average at best, though I am very cranky and hard-to-please, and who can argue with rural community enthusiasm, anyway? We met local artist friends of Dan, visited their studios (much better work there- not like the bloody opaque interactive DVD installations that dominated the exhibition), and drove through the hills of Connemara. This is real potato-famine country, all bog and heather, acid soil, steep and difficult hillsides, and the ruins of pathetically small stone cottages everywhere. Strange that such a beautiful place should have been so wretched for so long.

I sat in the back of Dan's old Ford, alternately reading the New Yorker and looking at the scenery. I was quite stoned, mostly, since Steve recently harvested his plants, and gave me some of the crop in thanks for having looked after them. I tried offering my wares to the others in the car, but they generally declined. Gary just asked, 'Is that legal?', then went to looking out the window. Thank God I was travelling with artists, who indulged my ranting, even when I spoke at great length about how much I was irritated by the wording on a container of hazelnut yogurt.

The offending sentence read:

And this annoyed me on three points:

2. The way the ingredients are presented as an 'engaging narrative', so that you are told not just what is in it, but how it has been lovingly prepared, seems to be derived from the style of menu used in expensive restaurants. This is entirely inappropriate for a tub of 60c yogurt from Dunne's stores;

3. These signs of marketing artifice are way too obvious. We con-men of words have standards to maintain!

Later, back at Barranna, Mrs S-S had prepared an immense meal. Afterwards, Mr S-S gave me a page-by-page commentary on his latest book, demonstrating that special capacity that middle-aged fathers have for drawing the story out to its full length and potential (sorry, Dad, but yes, I am talking about you). Then, at the request of me and Alison, he got out the family Bible to show us. This was printed in the mid-1500s, barely half a century after Gutenberg first invented the typographic press. It was made in Antwerp, one of the few places where it could be printed in English without fear of harsh reprisals, but was taken to England, where it had to be kept in secret. At this time, the Church still considered the Latin Bible to be a key to its power (since this kept the Word of God as an exclusive priestly domain), and vernacular Bibles were strictly forbidden throughout most of Europe. The Shaw-Smiths held onto theirs, and its male heir of every generation since has written his name inside the front cover. I sat at the kitchen table and read this book. I read a passage from Exodus, where Moses is found among the reeds - reading from the same page that was huddled over in clandestine, by pious progressives, almost 500 years ago. I have never before encountered such a thing, except for in a museum.

Our final episode was in a tiny country pub, standing alone on one of the roads to Claremorris. Everyone looked at us when we entered, then went back to their Guiness-fuelled conversations. Alison (New Yorker, writer, her family Jewish immigrants from Poland and Russia) taught us a Hebrew 'cheers', which I have forgotten already. Dan asked about the Middle East, to which she replied simply: 'I'm not allowed to talk about Israel. My mother screamed at me last Christmas and called me a Holocaust-denier.' Her mother also called her 'the laziest white person she knew', which, as Alison pointed out, is impressive for managing to offend on so many levels at once.

And the train now takes me back to Dublin for work, away from 'the real Ireland' and its incomprehensible accents. Alison only arrived in Ireland on Friday, and said she understood little of what was said out in Mayo. We had a particularly rustic cab driver - a highlight - who dropped us at the gates of Barranna and said: 'this is ye'.

But already we are nearly in Dublin, for this is not such a big country.