This weekend is one of the busiest in the year in Ireland for First Holy Communions.  First Communion is a right of passage for every 7-8 year old Catholic child, their first time to receive the sacrament of the Eucharist having prepared spiritually by making their First Confession. In Ireland First Communion has always been a big deal. Traditionally the boys wear white shirts and school ties and blazers with medaled rosettes and the girls white frocks and veils. Traditionally also, family and adult friends gift the child with money.

Over the years, the parties and celebrations for Holy Communion, the outfits worn and the amounts of money the child ‘earns’ became more and more lavish. During the Celtic Tiger years in Ireland, there were stretch limos to collect the Communicants, designer dresses, tiaras and fake tans for the girls and afterwards, huge parties with inflatable ‘bouncy castles’ for the children and champagne receptions for the adults.

Now, of course, Ireland has got a good slap and been told to go back into their corner on the furthermost western reaches of Europe and behave themselves, and this weekend there is far less ostentation surrounding the First Communions. The Saturday magazine section of the Irish Times newspaper has a “What’s Hot” column which notes modes and mores for the week.  It’s “What’s Not (Hot)” includes – mock nostalgically – “Communions. Sad to see the old traditions dying out. Hardly anyone arrives at the church by helicopter  in a Vera Wang designed dress anymore.”

In Dublin the other day, I was passing through Dunnes Stores and stopped, entranced, by their accessories display of the most fabulously designed and produced jewellery and hair baubles, ranging in price from €2.99 to €12.99.  A small woman with a lovely gentle voice and fine, softly curled hair stood beside me sayiing “It’s so hard to choose, isn’t it?” I said that indeed it was, and she showed me a pearl necklace (€5.99) and matching stud earrings (€2.99) she was thinking of buying and asked my opinion on the purchase. I told her they were perfect for her, so classic. “It’s my granddaughter’s First Communion in Wexford on Saturday” she said “and I don’t want to upstage her. I mean, it’s her day, isn’t it? My outfit is red, white and blue…..you don’t think that’s too loud?”  I told her not at all, that again, red white and blue were classic summer colours and very French and stylish, as were the understated pearls. She went off smiling and happy. I went to visit my Aunt and 92 year old uncle and they were looking forward to attending a grandson’s First Communion in Celbridge to-day.   A friend called to daughter Lucy in Kinsale this morning for breakfast before going to church, apologizing on the doorstep for being late as she had been on “parsley cutting duty” at home for her niece’s party and tomorrow we go to Naas to a luncheon for a nephew’s First Communion, but will miss another nephew’s big day in Carrigaline next week.

On the way back from Kinsale after lunch to-day we passed a house with an ENORMOUS bouncy castle in the garden and knew immediately that it was First Communion day in that family.  The full to overflowing car park of a popular suburban bar/restaurant along the road told the same story.

Being back in Ireland is great. The place is bankrupt – the health board has told the old peoplesin homes to cut back on the number of incontinence pads they use (the hospitals refused) and it is freezing cold, grey, wet and miserable. The posters for the May 31^st fiscal treaty referendum at the end of the month are flapping in the biting wind.  The common feeling is “we’re fkd if we do and we’re fkd if we don’t.”)

But be it ever so humble etc…….if we only had a half decent economy and some good weather, Ireland would be a great little country entirely.

I’m posting this water jug as much for itself as to welcome the May. (“Bring flowers of the rarest, and blossoms the fairest from garden and woodland and hillside and glade”…) It cost €3 in Annecy, is hand made and is not old, I would reckon of the last 25 years. Its appeal is both the interesting pouring mouth – it’s held in the opposite way to the obvious in order to ensure no dribbles – and is etched rather than engraved with the English word “Water.”

I bought the jug in March and took the photograph when the first of the spring flowers, crocuses and primroses were appearing. The bed encircles a beech tree which has grown so much in the few past years we had to lop it by half last year to comply with local regulations regarding the height of trees bordering neighbouring properties. We have a wondrous machine which we call “Fargo” into which one feeds tree, hedge and shrub prunings and neat chippings come out the other end. Anyone who has seen the film “Fargo” will understand the allusion.

This is the same bed this month. A couple of years ago the American homemaker guru Martha Stewart talked about planting her spring flowering bulbs….. 60,000 of them.  I don’t like planting bulbs so had just shoved the contents of a mixed bag into the ground (probably far too late in the season) hence the clash of types and colours. The unexpected appearance of the tulips was however a bonus. I had forgotten pushing the bulbs into the circle just before putting down the winter mulch. Before the flowers die off I will label the colours and at a later date transplant the various hues to more coordinated surroundings.

With loyalty points from our local supermarket Super U,  you can get fantastic gifts such as sandwich toasters and ice-cream sundae glasses and polyester pillows, but with an active imagination and a memory not yet lost to age or the cumulative effects of mild narcotics, one can get much more. Yesterday, in the euphoria of collecting a new electric toothbrush, courtesy of my Carte Super U, I remembered the Green Shield Stamps.

Green Shield Stamps were reward trading stamps redeemable against gifts from a catalogue issued in shops, supermarkets, petrol stations etc as a shopping incentive, first introduced in America in 1896 and most popular from the 1930s to the 1980s. During the 1960s the US Green Stamps gifts catalogue was the largest publication in the United States and the company issued three times as many stamps as the Postal Service. Unlike Super U Carte loyalty points, which are electronically scanned and provide an enormous amount of information about the customer, Green Shield Stamps were perforated and gummed and had to be moistened (i.e.licked) and stuck into a book before one could claim one’s gift from the catalogue. I remember getting a SodaStream with my stamps and a radio alarm clock which was still going strong long after the Green Shield Stamps company had folded in Ireland and Britain.

In 1984, Ronald Reagan was President of the United States. In Nineteen Eighty Four, not all of George Orwell’s 1949 predictions of an oligarchial dictatorship of pervasive government surveillance had come to pass internationally – we didn’t have the technology – but now we do. Loyalty cards and Facebook ‘Likes’ are all monitoring our every purchase (and emotion or physical need triggering a purchase) and could yet become the most damning evidence against us if we are ever accused of Thoughtcrimes.

Ronald Reagan was a popular President (with the Right, with those enjoying tax breaks on un-earned income and with the likes of Margaret Thatcher.) He was also popular with satirists; almost a decade before he himself admitted to suffering from Alzheimers Disease, the British TV show “Spitting Image” had a segment called “The President’s Brain is Missing.” Reagan wanted to woo the Irish-American vote, so he came to Ireland to visit his ancestral Irish homestead, as had President John F. Kennedy. With the visit to his Irish ‘homestead’ the ‘President’s Brain’ was depicted as a potato.

Reagan described the Soviet Union as “the evil empire” and escalated military spending to stock-pile weapons against the Communist Threat, but Reagan was lucky in that history sees him as an active participant in assisting the fall of the Soviet Regime.  This March, two gorgeous teenage sisters from a home-schooled, Christian fundamentalist Oklahoma family of 7 who form the band “First Love” attended a rally for the Republican presidential candidate hopeful Rick Santorum and wrote a song called “Game On”.  Actually, their parents – very much part of the act – wrote it, the girls probably know nothing about Ronald Reagan except that, like Michael Jackson, he played with a monkey.

The song included the lyrics “Oh there is hope for our nation again/Maybe the first time since we had Ronald Reagan/There will be justice for the unborn, factories back on our shores/ where the constitution rules our land…..yes I believe Rick Santorum is our man.”  (A comment was made in response to the news that the song had gone ‘viral’ on the internet, that yes, the song was ‘viral’ because the video “makes you sick and you want to throw up after you watch it”.)

The Kennedys of Dunganstown County Wexford really did look like the Kennedys of Boston. The Regans were from Ballyporeen in County Tipperary. There was one Ballyporeen Reagan in particular who was the spitting image of the US President – he could easily have been mistaken for Ronald Regan’s brother. (No such physical similarities were apparent when last year President Barak Obama visited Moneygal, County Offaly, home of his great-great-great-grandfather.)

Everyone in Ireland adored the Kennedys, but not everybody celebrated Reagan’s Irish visit.  The Raven Arts Press published a book called “After the War is Over” edited by Dermot Bolger and introduced by Francis Stuart which included such respected poets as Sara Berkeley, Anthony Cronin, Michael Davitt, Sean Dunne, Michael Hartnett, Pearse Hutchinson, Aidan Murphy, Sydney Bernard Smith and Matthew Sweeney.  It was described as bringing together satire and serious poetry dealing “directly or indirectly with aspects of Mr Reagan’s domestic and foreign policies and examines the growing influence of American consumer and cultural imperialism on Irish life today.   The protest made in this book is not, primarily, a political one. It is a humanitarian protest about the erosion of human values, the deprivation of human rights in South America and elsewhere, the rewriting of history, the genocide of minority cultures and the threat of destruction hanging over the earth.  ‘After the War is Over’ is the voice of 16 individuals from a small nation raised against the largest propaganda machine in the world. Faced with all the hype of this vote-gathering visit, the aim of the book is to mark with dignity the concern of those writers, and we feel, the majority of Irish people, at the policies, at home and abroad, of the government of Mr Reagan of Washington DC and Ballyporeen, County Tipperary.” (Reading it again a quarter of a century later, it did not turn out to be prophetic, rather very worthy and inflamed, in a way our poets’ protests no longer seem to burn. Maybe it was the time of man. What is sad is that so many of these poets are now dead: Davitt, Dunne, Hartnett, Hutchinson, Smith, Stuart……)

Author and Journalist Mary Leland with Lucy in Ballyporeen May/June 1984

But back to Ballyporeen:  It was cold and wet on the afternoon at the end of May 1984 when I went to the village a few days before Ronald Regan was due. Preparations for the visit were well underway and the media coverage was enormous. The wooden stage was up and the bunting was flapping in the rain.  Already access was restricted, security was tight and Secret Service personnel were sweeping the area. The fleet of armour-plated limos had arrived from America and I just happened to be at the petrol station as the drivers and bodyguards (wearing their trenchcoats, suits and signature sunglasses in the Irish rain) were filling them up. There was hardly enough petrol in all of Tipperary to satisfy the engines of these massive automobiles, the meter clicked and clicked and so did my brain. I approached a man in sunglasses with a walkie-talkie holding a hose into a gas guzzling beast and asked him, in a very nice, friendly fashion, if I could have the presidential cavalcade Green Shield Stamps……We speak the English language fluently in Ireland, a language common to our American cousins, but I may as well have been speaking one of the First Nation languages of the New World wiped out by the arrival of the Europeans and their cultures. To say that I was brusquely rebuffed would be an understatement; I felt all the ice used in the Cold War aimed frostily in my direction. For a very, very long time I have known not to make jokes with military, police or security personnel.  That day in 1984 in Ballyporeen, I learned never to ask them a favour either.

Tonight in Cork the 58^th International Choral Festival begins with a Gala Opening Concert of Mozart’s Requiem by the Goethe-Institut Choir of Dublin and soloists. The Choral Festival began in 1954 as part of a three week Spring cultural event called “An Tóstal”  with a week each of  choral music and folk dance, film and ballet. The Ballet week died out, but the Film Festival and Choral Festivals are still going strong. Until May 6^th, 4,500 singers will compete in the prestigious world class competitions in City Hall and entertain in concert halls, bars, galleries, churches and venues all over the city. There are now more people in Britain who  participate in choral singing, than go to football matches, and this year’s Cork Festival is very democratic and though the competitions are serious and the seminars attract major composers, it is not at all stuffy -  there is even a “Big Sing” next Saturday when anyone can come along and learn to sing the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah.

In the old days however, the Cork festivals could be very grand affairs if one was a participant, guest or member. The Film Festival Club was dress only – more Mad Men than the Mad Men themselves – and often attracted people who hardly bothered to go to the movies, but loved to strut their stuff. My father, an academic and liguist, was always asked to be translator for the many foreign choirs who came to Cork, even from Eastern Europe during the Cold War. He would mind the Polish choirs, join in with the Germans and often brought the Spaniards home. When our parents went out at night to the gala performances and the Festival Club my father would not bother with a mere dinner jacket, he preferred white tie and tails with a top hat. It’s a wonder they ever got out at all, because we had to have several encores of his style performance….he would take a flat shiny disc from under his arm, snap it in the air and put it as a full top hat, on his head…..and then off again with a flourish, to be squeezed flat under his arm again with a bow.

The Choral Festival was always part of our Spring. When still too young to go to the concerts, we would be brought to FitzGerald’s Park after a sung Mass in one of the city churches, where various choirs and dancers would trill and twirl on the Banks of My Own Lovely Lee. The first time I went out without her after my daughter was born was to go with my mother to the Choral Festival. Said daughter later went on to manage the Festival for three very happy years, and if you look at the poster for to-night’s Mozart concert, in the crook of the conductor’s arm is a young blonde lass singing with the Gothe Institute and that would be niece Rachael. (www.corkchoral.ie/)

Yesterday was May Day, and at the Vide Grenier in Talloires on Lake Annecy, the air was full of the scent of Muget. Stall holders had vases of Lilies of the Valley decorating their stands, and women stood selling little bunches from big baskets at their feet and on their arms. It was there, in the square high above the lake in the sunshine, picking my way gingerly between the children squatting on the ground scrabbling through big baskets of coloured glass marbles that I came across a box labelled “Chapeaux Méchaniques” and was brought back to childhood. The hat and its box were 40euro and when the vendor asked if I was interested in buying and I said all I wanted was to take a ‘photo, he was as kind as he could be. Maybe that is the best way to go to Vide Greniers; take only ‘photos, leave only footprints (speak softly, always carry a big stick, sing like you’re on stage at the Choral Festival,dance like there’s nobody watching, and live like it’s heaven on earth) ……and for heaven on earth, it’s hard to beat a May Day in Talloires.

Under the old Soviet regime not many ordinary folk got the better of the system in the USSR. If one was a high-up member of The Party of course, things were different. However, as a bourgeoise citizen of a democratic island republic I got to drive in long black Party cars through Moscow, be flown to Armenia and Georgia and put up in the best hotels with a guide and interpreter (minder) all the way, for one week under the old regime. I remember it as September 1987,but it could have been ’88. The USSR was talking proudly about its 70^th Russian Revolution celebrations, the 1980 Moscow Olympics mascot ‘Misha the Bear’ pins were still available (but not much else) and ‘Glasnost’ and ‘Perestroika’ were words beginning to be used, if not quite widely practiced. It was before the fall of the Berlin Wall, before things fell apart the centre could not hold.

It was early September and colder than I had ever experienced before. I had just done a TV piece for RTE (Irish national television) on the Soviet airline Aeroflot’s re-fuelling deal and new refurbishment facility and hangar at Shannon Airport, and Himself – my producer – and myself thought we might cover the launch of the Duty Free Shop at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport, a joint venture between the Irish aviation authority Aer Ríanta, and Aeroflot, and the first foreign run commercial enterprise in the USSR.

We flew Aeroflot from Shannon airport and not one, but a fleet, of long black cars met us at Sheremetyevo…and not at Arrivals, but on the tarmac. We thought we were getting a free Aeroflot flight, but had no idea we would be touring Moscow and on to Armenia and Georgia courtesy of our Soviet Comrades. They had no idea that we were not actually bringing a television crew to do the filming there and then….but when we explained, they just sent away all but one of the cars and the planned schedule continued. In this era, a lot got lost in translation. A local call to the USSR Embassy in Dublin asking “Can I speak to the Cultural Attaché?” was answered with “Natasha who?” It was, after all, 1987/8 when communication from behind the Iron Curtain to the outside world was mainly by telex. International ‘phone calls had to be booked hours in advance and might not connect. I remember worrying that if we were witness to a big news story how I would get it out…(In December 1988, a 7.1 earthquake in the Spitak region of Armenia killed at least 25,000 people. Experts blamed the poor building practices of the Brezhnev era on the high death toll.)

We had lots of meetings with lots of nice, courteous and hospitable Party Comrades, ministers for tourism and the like, we saw wonderful sights; monuments and churches, monastries in the mountains, the beautiful and profoundly moving memorial to the victims of the 1915 Armenian genocide by the Turks on a hill overlooking Yerevan, Georgian folk parks of traditional buildings, fabulous art galleries in Yerevan in which works by radical modern artists were kept – if not openly shown –  and the beautiful works of the artists and craftspeople of Tbilisi. We were rarely alone in public, which was lucky, because being from Cork –  the Jaywalking Capital of the World – we ignored formal pedestrian crossings and blithely tried to weave and dodge across Tverskaya Street from our (hideous, now demolished) Intourist Hotel.  It is a very wide street and that was one of the times on that trip – the other was crossing the Caucauses in very small, very noisy plane – that I feared for my life.

Whenever translator Irena left us to our own devices it was because she was off foraging for food and would appear a few hours later laden down with paper bags and twine wrapped packages of fruit and vegetables. There were no ‘shopping opportunities’ for us, because, basically, there weren’t any shops, and if there were, there was so little in them that the staff would ask me for goods. The only things I bought in the USSR in 1988 were ceramics, a few very dark bowls in Armenia, the plaster nose and eye of David as used by art students in Tbilisi and some blue and white porcelain figures of cockerels and peasant women with hens in Moscow. The porcelain was from Gzhel, about 50 kms from Moscow, then and now famous for its traditional industry of ceramic production and folk inspired painting.

I got a little rooster in a brocante in France a while back, recognizing the Gzhel and ‘handpainted in Russia’ stamp on the bottom, and last week in the Strasse des 17 Juni market in Berlin, I found a tiny Gzhel figure of a lady reading a book with a cat circling her skirt. I love the idea of the weekend Strasse des 17 Juni market west of the Tiergarten and amongst the abundant fur coats there could well be treasures, but not for me Biddy. I find the old handbags, lace, photographs, lamps, spectacles and effects sad; for we know not their provenance. The prices are saucily high and the dealers are not always nice – in fact, some are horrible.

In 1988 we got £1 for the Russian ruble and the Gzhel cockerels cost about that. In Berlin last week, my little Gzhel lady cost €2. Though they are hand painted and the Gzhel industry is historic, they have always been produced in large quantities and though there is a huge demand for them – so much so that fakes are now being traded – they are not at all valuable. I don’t do ‘figurines’ but these were so beautifully wrought and glazed, have such a good stance and attitude and were so comfortable in themselves, that after my trip to the Soviet Union I gave them as presents knowing they would be comfortable in the houses of sisters and friends. Almost quarter of a century later, the Soviet Empire has collapsed, the Berlin Wall has fallen, the world has changed, but the Gzhel women, their cats and poultry still sit comfortably at home and on the shelves of friends and sisters.

In or around 1910, my grandfather bought shares in the Munster and Leinster Bank and gave some to his children. Over the years, the name of the bank changed to Allied Irish, but the shares stayed in the family and eventually got passed down to my generation. Some of us used them wisely, others not at all, thinking that if they were almost a hundred years old and still growing, they would be good for a rainy day. I kept mine as Running Away Money. Now I’m stuck. In 2008 Irish bank shares collapsed spectacularly – as everybody knows – and now I can’t run away, for I’ve nothing to run away with.

All we have left is art.  In 1980, with my money – and yours too, Biddy –Allied Irish then known as the Allied Irish Bank, or AIB, began buying art.  The emphasis was on tracing the development of modernism in Irish art, from 100 years previously and continuing, with an increasing emphasis on contemporary artists. By 1986 they had amassed enough works from the twentieth century to be exhibited at the Crawford Gallery in Cork and the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin and subsequently go on tour.  “Walk into our headquarters in Ireland, Britain and America and you’ll see part of our extraordinary range of paintings, sculptures, tapestries and graphics” said the Chairman of the group in 1995 in an introduction to a lavish book of 120 works in full page, full colour representation, published in “a new initiative to make the collection more accessible to the wider public.”

By 2002 the Chief Executive of the time, Michael Buckley (Booh! Booh!) was writing …. “The artwork in our offices is connected to our more general commitment to make AIB a stimulating place to do business.  The demand for art in AIB locations all over Ireland and beyond is staggering, with the result that in addition to offices here in Ireland, we continue to place Irish works in our offices abroad, most recently in Poland.” Ah. Poland.

In April we were back in Cork, busy with family matters, but friends Mike and Kathryn extolled the virtues of two current exhibitions in the Municipal gallery in town, two friends shared links about them on Facebook (one the son of a painter featured in the show) and the Irish Times newspaper urged “Anyone visiting Cork for Easter or, as the locals might put it, lucky enough to live there, should visit the Crawford Art Gallery….which is holding a temporary exhibition of the AIB Bank art collection recently donated to the State. The donation by the bailed-out, and now State-owned, bank consists of 38 paintings and one sculpture …(value: €5 million)….and features work by leading Irish artists including Jack B Yeats, Paul Henry, Sir John Lavery, Sir William Orpen, Séan Keating and Roderic O’Conor.”  (Quick question:  How can AIB make a ‘donation’ to the State if it already owns AIB?)

“The Crawford’s Director, Peter Murray, described the works as ‘ the most substantial, serious and beautiful collection of art to come to the Crawford for 50 years.’ “….The donation of twelve of the works is immediate, so they will stay on display. When the temporary exhibition ends, 27 of the paintings will be returned – albeit temporarily – to AIB’s headquarters in Dublin”…..”and ‘gradually’ donated  to the Crawford over the next two years…….The reason for the phased donation appears, quite simply, to be the bankers’ reluctance to part with all of the art in one fell swoop. The donation will leave big gaps on the walls of the AIB boardroom and offices of senior bank executives.”  Aw shucks, they just can’t let go – but I wasn’t given two years to get used to the idea that they were taking my Running Away Money.

I absolutely agree with the Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaelteacht Jimmy Deenihan, that: “AIB has enjoyed a long association with Irish artists.  Expert sensibilities watched, nurtured and ultimately purchased from many of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. The result of AIB’s dedication is clear to see in the strength of its holdings. As a collection it provides a distinct narrative on visual art practice in Ireland in the 20^th century and its value to art historians, art lovers and future generations is incalculable”

So I bowled along to the Crawford and first had a nice bowl of soup with their excellent brown bread and a cup of coffee in the restaurant. (Didn’t want the soup; though the restaurant was not full, they insisted on only serving ‘lunches’ until mid afternoon and were a bit sniffy about it…..)

Drool, drool, drool (not the soup, the art.) What a collection of familiar names, what an evocation of emotions! One wasn’t cross, one was too uplifted and bathed in honey balm. The exhibition space was crowded with all kinds of people, all looking very proprietorial; Cork faces and burghers, a young woman pointing at details and talking excitedly in a hushed voice in Irish to her male companion, a Polish couple pushing their baby buggy up the wheelchair ramp and Sally Phipps, daughter of the writer Molly Keane, with a glamorous woman who looked vaguely familiar and sort of famous….and if she wasn’t, she should have been.

I was the second person to interview Molly Keane after her novel “Good Behaviour” came out, her first work under her own name and the first she allowed sent to a publisher (encouraged by the actress Peggy Ashcroft) in twenty years and we instantly hit it off. At that stage, she was poor as a church mouse and when I urged she apply to join the artists’ affiliation Aosdána and get a few bob, she was charmed. (She got the gig, and the stipend…..but with a Man-Booker prize shortlist, soon the royalties were rolling in from book sales, a re-growth of interest in her 1921-56 plays as ‘M.J.Farrell’, television rights, media and appearances.) Of course, I was too shy to stop Sally Phipps in front of a William Crozier (another lovely person now deceased) and tell her that it had always been my ambition to be like her mother when I grew up, and now that I am growing up, I am working towards that goal…and with the help of AIB, I’m starting by being as poor as a church mouse.

This collage of printing blocks and moulds began with some pieces I picked up in the Markets in Belfast in 1978-80ish. They would have been relics of the linen trade in the city, where my sister (the Elder) was living at the time. I had a small baby, and once she nearly got sold.   I used to carry my daughter in a soft woven French basket, a long, shallower version of the deep ones still used for everything from fresh produce shopping to a beach outing in France. The St George Market in Belfast in the late ‘70s and 80s were a place of treasure, due – as with all such second hand trade – to economics, fashion and natural wastage, but also, unfortunately, the sad political state of the Six Counties’ capital at the time.  Families were being terrorized out of their homes, buildings burned and people being killed…..and no doubt, during The Troubles, some of their possessions ended up in the Markets.

When my daughter was a baby, the Markets sold fish and plants as well as junk. When the toilets were renovated it was a bit deal; it was a long way from the lattes and olives and smoothies available in the very gentrified place that the St George’s Market is today.  I was shocked that my sister wouldn’t bother to lock the car when we parked nearby on our weekend forays, but she said that as there were so many police and soldiers on the streets that Belfast was probably the safest place in Ireland. So, lifting out the baby in her straw basket, we’d head off in search of treasure and my sister’s weekly gossip update from the traders she got to know by name.

If one is carrying a baby in a basket, it is difficult to handle lace and linen, check the underside of china for makers’ names or inspect cutlery for hallmarks. I put my daughter down on a pile of goods….and was distracted by a squeal of panic and amazement followed by laughter.  A stall holder had lifted up the basket thinking it was part of her store, only to find a baby inside. She didn’t connect the woman lost in flotillas of old lace with the small person asleep in her cocoon……and when I re-claimed the child, the woman said she was just about to offer the basket for sale!

New technology is a great thing entirely, but when I started out as a writer, newspapers were still using hot/cold printing techniques.  I will always remember the smell of ink and the crank of machinery in the Irish Press in Burgh Quay in Dublin, or at the back door to the Irish Times in Fleet Street, the black and blue stained hands and overalls of the printers in the canteen in the old Cork Examiner offices in Academy Street when they came upstairs for their mugs of tea as that day’s Evening Echo went out on the streets. Over the years, my collection of printing blocks and wooden butter and biscuit moulds and presses grew.  I bought some in India, in Singapore, in the Coal Quay in Cork, in Christmas markets in Germany. When we got an apartment in Berlin, I assembled them on an old off-cut of hardwood, and the piece keeps growing.

Yesterday I added two more pieces to the design, a wooden exclamation mark and a comma which I bought at Plainpalais Market in Geneva in March for a couple of Swiss francs.

We have a second guest room under the eaves with a sloping ceiling in which is placed the room’s only window. If this window were bigger, or lower, or even on a wall, it would have the best view in the house, but it’s not, so the room really annoys me and without overflow guests, it is mostly used as an overflow dump; a handy place to chuck the vacuum cleaner or suitcases for packing before a trip.

We call it Heidi’s room because of its shape and size and I have always planned to decorate it properly in Alpine style, a style which is best suited to small areas, unless one lives in a wooden chalet up the mountains.  In Plainpalais Market in Geneva in March, I found a painting which was unnamed, unsigned, but to me, it is Heidi’s friend Goat Peter, cooling off at a mountain stream with his flock and an inquisitive cow.  It’s not a good painting, but its an oil, an original, and I like it. Goat Peter cost Chf 10, and all he needed was a rub of a damp cloth before hanging him on the wall.

I had forgotten to bring my passport when we boogied off down to Spain from Beziers in the south of France last week.  Turned around after lunch in Figures and drove straight back up to the Swiss border to change cotton dresses for cashmere sweaters, flip-flops for boots when we learned the funeral we durst attend in Cork was taking place next day. Home at midnight, we unpacked and repacked – carefully ensuring the green leather passport holder was in my bag – and got up at 4.30 for a 7.30 am flight to Zurich-Dublin.

As Himself checked us in at Geneva, I put the familiar, soft-rubbed leather sleeve on the counter…..it felt very, kind of….limp.  There was no passport inside. I had my Irish driving licence, a resident’s season ticket for our local beach (out of date) and membership cards for Cork City and County libraries (even more out of date.) I hate to spoil a good story with mere facts, but Himself also had a scan of my passport on his laptop.  We waved the machine, the driving licence and the St Jo Plage card around a bit, and they let us through to the boarding gate.

I was toting a carry-on (Longchamps, regulation size) a handbag (ditto, of the long-handled variety) and an insulated bag of chocolate bunnies.   Before leaving, I asked my sister on the ‘phone if she’d like me to bring her anything from France and  distinctly heard her say “a lint bunny,” so despite the unearthly hour – 2.00am –I went out the buanderie, collected the lint from the filter of the tumble dryer and packed it, with a felting needle and a rabbit shaped cookie cutter,  to make her a needle-felt lint bunny. Then, passing the airport shops, it occurred to me that maybe she meant a “Lindt bunny”….which is chocolate. So I bought one each for the family and carefully carried them in a padded bag (Aer Lingus, freebie) so they wouldn’t lose their heads.

At the boarding gate a jobsworth man noted that I had 3 bags instead of the regulation one and confiscated the carry-on, to go through to Dublin in the hold. There was such a cafuffle as I wrestled the bunnies from him saying they needed to be hand-carried, that they forgot to ask me for i.d. At Zurich passport control, I realized the beach pass and driving licence were in transit in the carry-on and all I was left with were the library cards. I was allowed through passport control, but at the boarding gate, a very glamorous young black woman asked for my passport. I told her the story and she said I must have a letter from the police…..no police we said, we need to get on this flight, leaving, er….now.  First she shook her gleaming head “Have you got ANY form of identification?” she asked.  I produced my “Leabharlann Chontae Corcaighe” and “Leabharlann Cathrach Corcaighe” reader’s cards, she flicked them and said “Go ahead.” They don’t have photo i.d. (they are from a previous century) and are written in Irish, but still, they did the trick. Thank you, thank you, dear Liam Roynane, City Librarian with whom this Belle toiled when you were a mere callow (albeit eminently fanciable) youth.

At Dublin airport passport control, I said “Howrya” to the immigration official, and he allowed me through without a quibble. When I enquired how I’d get out of the country again, he said “You’ll be grand.” In Cork, I rang the Passport Office, explained that I wanted to travel back to France via Switzerland (non EU) from Dublin (non Schengen) today and they said that with the Easter holiday, there wasn’t a chance they’d get an interim document to me in that time.  But, they implied, I’d be grand.

The guy at the Swiss check-in desk at Dublin wasn’t so casual. Sure, I’d be grand, but they mightn’t, as if I travelled on their airline to Switzerland without official documentation, I could be sent back to Ireland and the company would have to pay my fare and would be fined for being naughty and letting people into the land of cuckoo clocks and Toblerones without a valid passport. The check-in guy passed me, and the next in line in the queue, two greyhounds in large wooden crates, on to the higher echelons. At that desk, there was much shaking of heads, but we were lucky.  Roger was on duty. Roger quizzed me, perused the St Jo Plage season ticket (proof of local residence) and a subscription copy of the New Yorker magazine which we’d taken from the post box before leaving home and never got round to opening; examined the print-out of my passport which my dear brother-in-law had made, checked our French and Swiss bank cards and lifted the phone.  Then, reasonably, respectfully and with a perfect grasp of the situation and the seachange – akin to Chinese whispers – stories suffer when crossing from an island to a continental mass with a different language and a different culture (one that doesn’t run on “you’ll be grand) he talked to the highest echelons in Swiss immigration control, got me a name and number and we were through.

At Zurich they couldn’t believe the tale. No such thing had ever happened in the history of the Swiss state. A blonde lady said she’d call a colleague. I was very glad I didn’t have a tattoo on my hand reading “HATE” or “SUBVERSION” but I was very glad I did have a brass neck. A six-foot policeman in a pair of heavy black leather boots, a gold earring in his ear and a gun strapped to his thigh came out and did a bit of Swiss German glowering. Then he went into the privacy of his own office and did something private with my photocopy, my beach card and my driving licence and his computer. Then he came out and escorted us through immigration control. I love Swiss Germans. Can’t talk to them mind – but they’re pussycats, even with guns and gold earrings.

As we left Zurich, it was snowing. This morning we were on the road at dawn, before the sun rose over the Galtees. It did not dance, but now it sets, pink and  gentle, behind the Bauges.  We may not have had the required documentation, but we are home safe, because we have the right technology, the right cards in our pockets, a shine on our shoes, a gloss on our blás. As I lounged in an airport lounge reading a book of poetry, waiting for my fate to be decided, knowing I’d be grand, I thought of the day we crossed by foot from Tijuana back into California, with barely a nod of acknowledgement, of those who stand behind the rails, fingers curled through wire, anxious and aching with envy, unable to cross the divide.

”They’re flying them back to the Mexican border

To pay all their money to wade back again….

Who are these good people all scattered like dry leaves

The radio said they were just deportees”

In France, we have Brocantes, which are antique markets, Marche aux Puces which are Flea Markets, Braderies (street fairs, often with local vendors selling goods on trestles outside their shops at a reduced price) and Vides Grenier (“Empty the Attic”) which are garage sales. There are also Antiquitiés (a bit posh) and Vente Aux Enchéres (auctions) and bargains to be had in Depot Vente –salesrooms – and various other Marches which might just be for books or stamps or toys, and Bourses which can either be an organized exchange market for bicycles or skies or a Stock Exchange…but we don’t go there.

In the southern part of France where the weather is clement, village Brocantes are held throughout the year. In our area – the north east near the Swiss border – the Brocante season proper doesn’t start until March/April when the weather gets warmer, and runs through until October. That is why I am starting my chronicle of A Year in Brocante at Eastertime. I am very dedicated, pretty canny, not very wise and do very well.

Many of my finds and purchases are not ends in themselves, they are merely a means to an end, which often has nothing to do with their beginning. They can also be enhanced or enhancements (I am the woman who cuts up the designs of the Spanish clothing company Desigual to make them more patchworky and who pin-tucks styles by the Japanese designer Issey Miyake to make them more pleated.) To protect my sources, do not always expect the exact location of my finds….vague is my default mode.

I first came across the use of feedsacks as sewing fabrics as a child, reading – I think – the “Little House on the Prairie” books of Laura Ingalls Wilder and have long admired the ability of American women during the Depression years – and later – to made quilts  quilts and clothing from the cotton sacks in which the household flour, sugar and animal food was purchased. Originally, the sacks were printed with the contents, provenance and weight of the contents. When the producers realized that their bags were being recycled in homesteads for furnishings and clothing, some put the details on paper strips which could be washed from the bags and dyed  and printed the cotton with feminine and farm related designs.

In March, at the large twice weekly Brocante at Plainpalais in Geneva, I found two sugar sacks from Cuba and though they had already been cut open and had some rust stains, I bought them for Chf 5. There was not enough material for an entire dress and the pattern had to be altered somewhat to highlight the printing, so I cut and pieced the front and used the end of a pair of Ikea curtains (a tip learned from Scarlett O’Hara) for the back.

The Cuban sugar sack at the 9 Locks in Beziers with friends Martin and Síle and Himself.