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The Gness Holiday Diaries (Part 4)
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Oh what fun we have had today, not that the evening wasn’t without fun, your Gness well rat-arsed and having a go at the Flute and the Fiddle, especially as the Deadwoods, distant cousins to the Jedwards (but then everybody in Ireland is related to each other, even the priests), appeared for our musical soirée. Men as well! I truly whetted my flute and had a quick fiddle. By the time Conor sang, he rendered “An Emigrant's Daughter” as if he was Sinéad O’Connor, one of our great Irish exports unlike the Deadwoods and Jedwoods.
Today, well the morning, was all about ABers Christmas pressies and I met up with my old friend, Pete, to go peat digging in the hills of Seefin, wonderful bogs that they are. Pete Geraghty still lived on his family farm that he had grown up on, tending his donkeys that were used to carry unsuspecting American visitors on his personalised pub tour of the Island Valentia, usually ending up with them totally flattened and spending the night at bus stop in front of the Ring of Lynne to await the ferry back to the mainland. Many of them asked him “How do we get from here to Sneem or wherever, to which his standard answer was “If I was you, I wouldn’t start from Here.” He said that their faces were always priceless when the 05.28 bus to Portmagee and onto Waterville turned up.
Pete is strong as an ox. I guess that came from me, when we were young, insisting that he always played Tarzan, me Jane, with him swinging dementedly in the trees, invariably with no trousers on, or his firehose caught in his zip. The number of times that he failed to catch the next branch were legendary and he would plummet to the soft woods floor, ten feet, twenty feet and a couple of spectacular times from way, way up. No wonder he now walked with a distinct stunted gait and had to use his long-handled spade as an aid. He even went to bed with his spade, “Scorcha the Spád” as he called her.
Pete isn’t the brightest man on the block; after all the falls must have taken it out of him intellectually, so now he was a case of the proverbial confused man in the with two Scorchas and told to take his pick. Not that Tony would ever do anything like that…….How is goat-man, has Lady J got you embalmed yet?
We rode up on the cart for the turf, pulled by Brae, into the hills above his farm and Glenbeigh, in the back Pete’s Scorcha, his pick and two pint glasses to dip in the crystal clear waters of the stream, me with a smaller spade and my Irish wellies on, the left one green and the right orange. This saves having to put L and R on the soles of the boots, something that the likes of Pete would never understand.
We got to the site and set up, Pete swinging his pick into the heavily tufted grass above the old trench. He nearly nobbled himself as the shaft split, the metal part missing his hose by a millimetre or three to land in a rabbit hole, the ground that hard, despite all the rain this year.
“Mmmmm”, he reflected, “we are going to need some dyneeemite to shift this lot, me thinks.”
Now the very idea of Pete with dyneeemite even worried me, his experience with explosives had never been that good, the Garda thinking that he was a terrorist when, as a youngster, he blew up the Parknasnilla sub-station when out rabbiting. I didn’t even get blamed for that one.
He rams two sticks of the jelly down the rabbit holes, wires them up and runs the cables to his plunger, and then moves Brae out of the way, not that Brae would ever hear the explosion as he had long been deaf, then got me to crouch down behind an old stone wall.
The plunger went down and “BOOOOOM” as the whole lot went up, the terrain looking like a version of Dante’s “Inferno”, or if excelsior had shot down Wendi’s beloved space-station.
As the smoke cleared, it started raining oil. Oh my God, he has just blown up the Bantry to Limerick crude oil line….and then it dawned on me, this wasn’t hot or sticky enough to be A-rab oil, it was black, milky and frothy.
Today, well the morning, was all about ABers Christmas pressies and I met up with my old friend, Pete, to go peat digging in the hills of Seefin, wonderful bogs that they are. Pete Geraghty still lived on his family farm that he had grown up on, tending his donkeys that were used to carry unsuspecting American visitors on his personalised pub tour of the Island Valentia, usually ending up with them totally flattened and spending the night at bus stop in front of the Ring of Lynne to await the ferry back to the mainland. Many of them asked him “How do we get from here to Sneem or wherever, to which his standard answer was “If I was you, I wouldn’t start from Here.” He said that their faces were always priceless when the 05.28 bus to Portmagee and onto Waterville turned up.
Pete is strong as an ox. I guess that came from me, when we were young, insisting that he always played Tarzan, me Jane, with him swinging dementedly in the trees, invariably with no trousers on, or his firehose caught in his zip. The number of times that he failed to catch the next branch were legendary and he would plummet to the soft woods floor, ten feet, twenty feet and a couple of spectacular times from way, way up. No wonder he now walked with a distinct stunted gait and had to use his long-handled spade as an aid. He even went to bed with his spade, “Scorcha the Spád” as he called her.
Pete isn’t the brightest man on the block; after all the falls must have taken it out of him intellectually, so now he was a case of the proverbial confused man in the with two Scorchas and told to take his pick. Not that Tony would ever do anything like that…….How is goat-man, has Lady J got you embalmed yet?
We rode up on the cart for the turf, pulled by Brae, into the hills above his farm and Glenbeigh, in the back Pete’s Scorcha, his pick and two pint glasses to dip in the crystal clear waters of the stream, me with a smaller spade and my Irish wellies on, the left one green and the right orange. This saves having to put L and R on the soles of the boots, something that the likes of Pete would never understand.
We got to the site and set up, Pete swinging his pick into the heavily tufted grass above the old trench. He nearly nobbled himself as the shaft split, the metal part missing his hose by a millimetre or three to land in a rabbit hole, the ground that hard, despite all the rain this year.
“Mmmmm”, he reflected, “we are going to need some dyneeemite to shift this lot, me thinks.”
Now the very idea of Pete with dyneeemite even worried me, his experience with explosives had never been that good, the Garda thinking that he was a terrorist when, as a youngster, he blew up the Parknasnilla sub-station when out rabbiting. I didn’t even get blamed for that one.
He rams two sticks of the jelly down the rabbit holes, wires them up and runs the cables to his plunger, and then moves Brae out of the way, not that Brae would ever hear the explosion as he had long been deaf, then got me to crouch down behind an old stone wall.
The plunger went down and “BOOOOOM” as the whole lot went up, the terrain looking like a version of Dante’s “Inferno”, or if excelsior had shot down Wendi’s beloved space-station.
As the smoke cleared, it started raining oil. Oh my God, he has just blown up the Bantry to Limerick crude oil line….and then it dawned on me, this wasn’t hot or sticky enough to be A-rab oil, it was black, milky and frothy.
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It was the national Guinness pipeline that he, Pete, had mistakenly taken out, installed in the 30s for strategic defence purposes and running from Kenmare to Waterville and then on up the coast to Limerick, sited well out of sight from the road for obvious reasons of “Not seen, out of an Irish mind”.
It was teeming the wonderful stout. Out came our glasses and we ended up legless, but not as legless as the two sheep that were caught in the blast. We would need Dan Galvin’s metal prostheses for them – and I had, inadvertently, just nabbed dinner for all of us at the cottage as well. Does Voddie or Eccles have a nice recipe for Leg of Lamb, a bit singed on the side?
Kerry the land of plenty, mamya good-heartedness, horseshoes dung, starbuck coffee, alba honey and NoM wine
Fishing later and I must, somehow, compose my 50 Shades of Paint verse for the Literary Festival, starting tonight.
To be continued.
It was teeming the wonderful stout. Out came our glasses and we ended up legless, but not as legless as the two sheep that were caught in the blast. We would need Dan Galvin’s metal prostheses for them – and I had, inadvertently, just nabbed dinner for all of us at the cottage as well. Does Voddie or Eccles have a nice recipe for Leg of Lamb, a bit singed on the side?
Kerry the land of plenty, mamya good-heartedness, horseshoes dung, starbuck coffee, alba honey and NoM wine
Fishing later and I must, somehow, compose my 50 Shades of Paint verse for the Literary Festival, starting tonight.
To be continued.
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