Christmas scene in Ballincollig
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Continuing my Nana tour
Carine, Bobby and me supporting Sean in his Winter League tennis match. His team, Lakewood, won.
You know you’re old when your grandson joins you in a Christmas drink.
Ever played Rummikub? It’s a great game. Cora is the family champ.
If you know the game, you’ll have sympathy for me here. I had 28 tiles and was being accused of holding up the whole show. I still couldn’t meld (i.e. start to play). You can only start by putting down 3 tiles adding up to 30 or more.
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A Creative Writer helping Ard Chúram
I missed the launch of this one but I’m enjoying reading the book. Some of Dick’s writing has appeared on Listowel Connection before. The title of his latest book might give the impression that it is a scholarly work. It is a very accessible book with something for everyone.
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A Robin photographed by Chris Grayson
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The First Christmas essay of 2024
Christmas is a time when it’s nice to wallow in the familiar. I make a point of reposting the same Christmas stuff year after year. You’ve read this before but it’s worth another read.
MY BEST CHRISTMAS SO FAR.
By Mattie Lennon.
It was mid-December in the third decade of the twenty-first century. I was at a Toastmasters Table Topics session. Because of my dubious ability to read upside down, I could make out the Topic master’s list of questions at the top table. One jumped out at me. “What was your best Christmas ever?” I hoped I’d get that one. I had an answer.
My best Christmas was Christmas 1956 but I didn’t know it at the time. About the eighth of December that year I developed a pain in my stomach which didn’t feel all that serious. . Various stages of discomfort, ranging from relatively mild to severe pain, continued until the end of the month. By this stage a hard lump could be felt in my stomach. All kinds of remedies from the relic of Blessed Martin de Porres to Lourdes water to many folk “cures” were applied. None of them did me any harm. Medical intervention hadn’t been sought. And because of the thinking of the time and the climate in which we lived I don’t blame anyone for that… On Sunday December 30th Doctor Clearkin from Blessington was called. As the December light was fading he examined me. His work illuminated by lamplight as rural electrification was still in the future. He told my parents that if it was appendicitis then I was “a very strong boy.” He was puzzled and didn’t make a diagnosis. His best guess was that one of my testicles hadn’t descended and he insisted that I was too ill to be out of bed.
He called the ambulance and on arrival I wanted to sit in the front but Mick Byrne, the driver, was adamant that I would be parallel with the horizontal in the back. I don’t know what time we arrived at Baltinglass Hospital but the doctor there was equally puzzled.
I was loaded up again and we hit the road for Mercer’s Hospital in Dublin. It was only my second visit to the Capital. The previous May my father brought me to Frawleys in Thomas Street to buy my Confirmation suit.
Two years earlier I spent some days in hospital with a knocked-out elbow so I wasn’t all that perturbed by the clinical environment.
My details were taken as well as the name of the local postmaster as the post office in Lacken was our nearest phone… I received a penicillin injection every four hours and I still remember the taste of liquid paraffin. Many doctors examined me and all were equally puzzled. . One of them described me as “intelligent” but very few people have agreed with him since.
. Whenever I hear the ballad “Sean South from Garryowen” I’m transported back to the radio of Patsy Cavanagh from Craanford County Wexford, who was in the corner of the ward. It was New Year’s Day 1953 and the main news item covered the shooting of Sean South and Fergal O’ Hanlon at Brookeborough, County Fermanagh the night before.
I’m not sure if I turned off the immersion this morning or where I put the car keys but I’m amazed at how many names of my fellow patients I can remember after more than three score years. There was Seamus Osborne also from Craanford, Tony Hand, from Arklow, who was younger than me and whose father was in the army. Pipe smoking Kerryman, Tim Toomey, who was a guard in Enniskerry. When he learned that his father had died he asked me to say a prayer for him. George McCullough, a farmer, from Goresbridge, County Kilkenny who was a seanachai and didn’t know it.
On that first day of the New Year, my father came to visit me. He was able to tell me that one of the surgeons in Mercers had “his hands blessed by the Pope.” When, not quite out of earshot, he asked a doctor about my condition, he was told. “Well, He’s an unusual case.” ( I was still a mystery to the medical profession.)
I didn’t ever ascertain how close to death I was. I meant to look for my medical records before Mercers Hospital closed in 1983 but procrastination got in the way. So far I have lived through 77 Christmases, all of them good even if some of them resulted in severe hangovers. But the best one was in 1956. . . because I was alive to see it.
Oh, at the table topic session I was asked “If you had to cook for eight people on Christmas Day what would you do?”. I wasn’t disappointed that I didn’t get the other question. How would I have fitted my prepared answer, to the other question, into two minutes?
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A Fact
From 1945 to 1966 the Abbey Theatre pantomime was in the Irish language.
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