Hawthorn, Superstition and Death

I remember giving my mother a bunch of hawthorn flowers and being warned to take them out of the house as they were bad luck. I remember taking them out and planting them uselessly in the ground taking it as true because my mother told me. 

This was an Irish superstition, it seems since the middle ages. Hawthorn could adorn the outdoors but to bring it into the house would signify death.

The book Under the Hawthorn Tree by Marita Conlon-McKenna, certainly has much to say about death as a book about children trying to escape the workhouse at the time of the Irish Famine. People were dying all round them and their baby sister was buried where they used to play, under the hawthorn tree.

The origin of the link with death associated with the hawthorn, it seems began when it was said that the flowers smelled like the plague. In later years, according to Trees for Life,  botanists discovered that the hawthorn flower has the chemical trimethylamine which is also a chemical made by decaying flesh. This was a smell people were used to when copses were kept in the house for days before burial and makes sense of the link made between hawthorn and death.

So although I like the blossom of the hawthorn, it won't be adorning the rooms of my house. Not because of any superstition or bad luck, but because I just don't happen to like the smell of rotting flesh, even from a flower.

Leaving Home: For Hundreds of Years

Reading 'Star of the Sea' by Joseph O'Connor, reccommended to me by my Father, I was struck by the many and varied ways we see the lives of those fleeing from famine and destitution to America in the 1840s. On the 26 day voyage, we read letters, headlines and announcements, hear stories of the past in Ireland and see the lives conflict on board the Star of the Sea. 

It is not hard to see where the migrant culture of Ireland has come from. It is not hard to see why the population of Ireland is only 4.8 million today compared to that of the city of London's which is 8.6 million.  It is not hard to see why, by the time Ireland achieved independence in 1921, that Ireland's population had dropped to only half what it was in the 1840s and why it's still less than it was before the famine over a hundred and fifty years ago.

It is said that there are more Irish abroad than in Ireland. Global Irish has some sources saying that the diaspora total number is 70 million. 

According to The Washington Post, the census of 2013, had 34.5 million Americans who listed their heritage as Irish. The headline read:

The Irish-American Population is Seven times larger than in Ireland 

Yet in the Irish Times, John Grenham says 'Nobody ever left Ireland to go to America.' And I understand what he meant. I never left Ireland to go to Italy. I left for a job, opportunity, experience and a new life. But mostly I left because of the people, the Irish and Italian links, like when I left for London,  just like Grenham mentions in his article. People left Ireland to go to jobs or opportunities with family and friends and they were all in America.

The Right Word

In The Blarney Stone and The Gift of the Gab I talked about the gift of eloquence and the difference between the right and almost right word. Visiting Ireland with two Britons I was aware of the differences in our languages. Of course we have the Irish language Gaelige or Gaelic but we also have our version or dialect of English. Here are some of the differences:

• eejit = idiot
• press = cupboard
• craic = fun
• yoke = thing
• haymes = mess
• runners = trainers
• gowl = silly person
• banjaxed = broken
• give out = tell off/chastise
•  sliced pan = sliced loaf

While some of these words like 'craic' have been derived from English words other words in the English language have been derived from Irish such as 'boycott' and 'bog'. However my favourite one is the word 'Tory', considered by the Oxford Dictionary to be derived from the 17th Century Irish word toraidhe meaning outlaw or  highwayman.

There's no more to say.

The Blarney Stone & The Gift of the Gab

Visiting Blarney Castle in the Irish village where I spent my last school years I once more kissed the Blarney Stone. For the people with me it was their first time, and for me my second, the last time being when I was 16 the same age as one of my companions. 

I remember my struggle with unscripted spoken word in my teens. I never felt I had the right word, that my vocabulary was deficient and felt a constant frustration with never actually saying what I meant. 

Mark Twain talked about the difference between the 'right word' and the 'almost right word' being 'the difference between the lightening bug and the lightening' [1].  I felt it.

Kissing the Blarney Stone is supposed to bestow upon the lips of the kisser, the gift of eloquence (or the gift of the gab). I don't know if it did when I was sixteen but years of reading and writing and interacting with people has widened my vocabulary and given me more confidence in my ability to communicate. However, my insecurities still raised their heads. It did still cross my mind, if it was true that if you kissed the Blarney stone once you got the gift of eloquence but if you kissed it again you gave it back. 

I'm still waiting to see.

[1] Cited by Powers, R. (2001) Dangerous Water: A Biography of the Boy who became Mark Twain, Da Capo Press, p.174

The Forecast is Love

 62% YES Vote for Marriage Equality in Irish Referendum

Guardian Article on Irish Referendum:
Guardian article on Ireland being first country to obtain marriage equality by 'popular vote'.

Irish Marriage Equality Referendum post:
Things That Matter: Equality 

Things That Matter: Equality

'Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.'

 (Martin Luther King, cited by Halligan, May 16th 2015, Irish Times)

Irish Tv journalist and political correspondent, Ursula Halligan ended a 54 year silence with the above quote. With the Irish referendum on marriage equality only days away, Halligan revealed her secret self, which had been hidden away in a diary from when she was 17.  She hopes her story will not only help get a YES vote for marriage equality, but save other 17 year olds like her from the pain of repression, injustice and inequality.

Read Article here: Ursula Halligan: Referendum led me to tell truth about myself

You Don't Know What You Don't Know

Sufferin' Succotash

Reading the recipe book for a new blender  I see the word 'succotash' and immediately think of Daffy Duck and Sylvester the cat of Warner brothers fame, exclaiming in consternation, 'Sufferin succotash!'.  I'd never heard the term before in real life. I wondered if there was a link. There is. Seems its an exclamation from when people ended up eating this basic bean dish so often in the time of the Depression in the US.

Beavis & Butthead

There are so many seemingly 'throw away phrases' that have just gone over my head because of a lack of cultural reference. Take Beavis and Butthead from the 90s when Beavis (as his alter-ego Cornholio, he said 'TP for my bunghole' I had no idea what this meant. That is, until I watched a US college drama years later when they mentioned 'TP-ing' a house and they proceeded to cover it in toilet paper. So then I guessed 'TP for my bunghole' was toilet paper for his nose. Who knew? Most did I'm sure, and I'm equally as sure that I haven't missed out greatly for this loss.

Ireland & England

But who knows what else I miss because of the cultural context, whether its historical or geograpical or language related. For instance, I always thought my daughter was born on the first day of spring. She was - in Ireland but not in England where I live. Seems the Irish calendar has the fist day of spring on February 1st and in England on March 1st. Yes that caused confusion until I worked it out. When talking about bonfire night in England its on November the 5th and in Ireland ist in the summer...the Irish summer. Then there are language differences, and I don't mean Gailige, our home language, I mean different words even in English. Like 'press' for 'cupboard' or 'sliced pan' for 'sliced loaf'. And that's just Ireland and England, neigbouring islands with a common language and lots of shared history. 

I Know What I Know

I don't know what I don't know. It's unknown, not necessarily just to me, maybe to others or everyone. Unknown knowns and unknown unknowns. Stuff we know we don't know and stuff we don't even know we don't know.

You don't know half the things you don't know. How can you? Some, you would not have experienced. Some you may have experienced but not consciously engaged with. Some is not known by anyone. 

Interstellar

In the movie Interstellar  the characters talked about gravity, relativity, wormholes, black holes and space travel... whole areas of science which at one time never existed. It was unknown. In the past the stars were gods because we had to fill the blanks. Like when my young daughter read the juice box and couldn't understand why someone would write something so obvious on the top, 'Best before end' it read. 'Of course it's best before the end...after its gone!' She had filled in the blanks. She could only relate the message on the carton to her experience. She had no idea about 'sell by' or 'use by' dates only how good the juice tasted while it lasted.

So we fill in the blanks. When we know there are blanks. The rest of the time we are ignorant. We don't know what we don't know. 

Sufferin' Succotash ...so much to learn! So much we don't know.