May Friel. A brave Donegal woman

When I was in my pre-school year, for practical reasons my parents farmed me out to live with my grandmother on the other side of Omagh.

She had recently been widowed, her and my grandfather Hugh Friel having moved to a new bungalow on the edge of the town. There she lived with her cat Rascal, a beautiful and friendly cat that she found in the garage and kept for many years.

Staying with my granny had a longlasting effect upon me.

Every morning we walked the distance to mass in town. I look at my own children now and realise that I must have deeved her head talking rubbish, playing with my toys.

She always said I was very good. I had reason to be – every day she would buy me one thing in the shop. I knew not to ask for anything else.

At the weekend I would be returned to my family where I called my mother granny and my other brothers ‘Jimmy’ – my uncle’s name.

It was an idyllic time and whilst I cannot recall many of the specifics with the passing of the years, it is shrouded in a warm glow of happiness.

When I started in primary one, I used to wait after school in my uncle’s pub. There I would hang around and talk to the men in the bar. I am sure looking back that the only men drinking in a bar at lunchtime would have been fairly hard core locals, yet here I was shooting the breeze with them.

I remember these guys lowering pints, half ‘uns, nicotine covered fingers toking on endless fags. In those days pubs didn’t have televisions so these guys sat at the bar. And drank. And drank.

I enjoyed dipping my finger into the spill trays below the beer taps. A toastie machine appeared in the bar, a total novelty. The smell of toasted ham sandwiches mingled in the fugue with smoke from Benson and Hedges, Regal and the occasional bit of pipe tobacco. Occasionally I might be bought a bag of crips, Golden Wonder Smokey Bacon stick in my mind and maybe a bottle of Coke.

I would happily play round the place, passing time until I was picked up by my dad or my granny or whoever. My particular friend was one old guy Maxi Chisum who must have been kind to me. It remains another happy memory.

As I moved through school I continued to visit my granny, staying over with her, keeping her company. She was the person who told me my father had had a heart attack and was in hospital, I arrived home from school to this particular piece of news. I didn’t realise its import at the time. It was Mrs McGale that told me he was dead but that is a story for another day, maybe never.

As I grew older my granny was a constant presence. I used to visit her every Saturday evening after dodging about the town with my mate Brogy. I would then walk back in to Saturday evening mass and on homewards. She used to make me delicious home made pizza with a soda bread base. It was awesome stuff.

At that time I would have been playing football and hurling and she always took an interest in what I was at. I didn’t know at the time that she often took clippings from the paper of reports of matches I played in, and kept them – we found these years later after she died.

As she got older and her health deteriorated a couple of times, she had some sort of mini stroke and had to come and live with us. Although her and my mother were as thick as thieves, after a short while in the same house horns would lock.

My granny was a stubborn woman, and she had her own way of doing things. Being told what to do by her daughter didn’t please her and nothing would do her only to get back to her own house, her own place that she knew and where she felt comfortable.

Her mind remained alert and although another stroke had taken its toll, she would often regale me with tales of living in Donegal and Derry in the early years of the twentieth century. She told me of travelling to Derry, and gunfire being directed at the train. Born in 1901, this was highly likely. She recounted how my grandfather had courted her in Derry and how they ended up in Omagh running the Military Arms pub.

My mother was surprised and perhaps a little wounded that I was hearing all these tales, stories that she had maybe not shared with anyone else.

Eventually a major stroke totally incapacitated her and she was permanently located in Ward 12 in the Tyrone County Hospital. It was full of all sorts of human debris, old people in various command of their faculties. What a place to end up.

Amazingly she staged a bit of a recovery but one side of her body was in a permanent spasm and she was paralysed and very severely incapacitated.

With great effort my mother got her out of the hospital to spend a few days over Christmas with us. I remember the glint in her eye when she grabbed a glass of wine that wasn’t hers at Christmas dinner. She was determined to enjoy things while she could. It was difficult to take her back to hospital but there was nothing else could be done. In my mother’s case she had retired the previous summer but had spent her first year of retirement looking after her ailing mother.

Transferred eventually to the General Hospital in Omagh, she seemed to lose heart. She would have known the General as the Workhouse, to a woman of her age and her vintage, whose own mother lived to the age of 99 and whose grandparents survived the Great Famine, it would have held a certain dread. It was there that I sensed her spirit start to dwindle. It coincided with my first year at University and after acting the candyman during the week I would return to visit the woman who had half reared me in her own gentle way.

In early June, she deteriorated badly and although I had visited, for some reason I had an irresistable calling urge to go and see her again. I called my friend Conor and asked him could he take me to the hospital, my mother already there. When I walked in she was there, lying in her hospital bed, behind the curtain, breathing in a shallow way, her eyes closed, unconscious. My mother said to me, maybe if you speak to her she will come around a bit.

Looking at her, I knew that was not something she would have wanted me to do. It was her time. Touching her hand, I said my own goodbye and let her go. I was happy to have been there to do that. I didn’t know what had drawn me to  the hospital, but something did. I quietly left and went home, my heart breaking. I knew it was only matter of time before she slipped away. My mother returned a short time later with the news.

I’ve never seen anything like the snow today in Portstewart. Thick snowfall really quickly. Roads blocked, cars can’t move, schools closed. Hens stranded under the trampoline.Portstewart Beach 6 December 2010

Some presents I would buy for some imaginary people.

An espresso machine. When I started working at home I used to make rocket powered espressos with a good dose of sugar. Then the machine bust. I’m sure someone else would like the experience.

An ipod. Somewhere just to keep all your music in one place. That or some way of pumping round the house through Airport Express. Now there’s a thought.

Northface gloves with the fancy fingertip control. Use your iPhone even when it’s ball freezing. Suitable for girls too.

An acoustic guitar. Some people just need to play the guitar.

For my little daughter a rocket. ‘Five Rockets dad’ she says. Who am I to argue? She has one. A Little Einsteins. For a girl that can say yes and no in English and Polish the world is her oyster.

Pile of new clothes so no longer will I be asked ‘What’s this like’.

Mad Men boxed set. If you don’t get this, you’re. . . strange.

Book of Old English poetry in the original. Some people need a challenge.

A bif f*** off iMac. Looks great, performs well, dogz bollix.

Some socks. Everyone needs socks.

Three hens. Fresh eggs. You’ll never go back.

An Irish speaking peasant to practice Irish upon le do thoil.

Sin é!

Children playing, having fun.

Someone was asking me the other day what the

Frozen in time, the familiar - unfamiliar.

beach and the sea were like in the winter when it was freezing. Usually the salt air prevents too much ice forming but last Christmas with the massive drop in temperature there was ice everywhere.

The beach at Portstewart was like something from CS Lewis.

The water run off from the hills made the stalactites, meanwhile the water lying in rockpools and little rivulets had frozen solid. Whilst I’m no fan of the bitter cold but I hope we see this again.

Last week I travelled down south, it was four degrees colder inland than it was at the sea. This would be common enough. Last winter also, my mother for the first time saw the two rivers in Omagh frozen over.

Our ones are looking forward to more snow because last year we had hours of fun sliding down the fairways at Portstewart golf club.

As children we used old fertilizer bags or whatever sort of plastic sheeting we could get to fly down the hills at the Camowen Hill home. Nowadays we used plastic sleighs and sliders that you can also use in the  dunes at the beach even when the weather is fine.

Whatever, the snow brings out the child in each of us. Hard to resist taking a furtive slide to yourself, even if it means falling on your arse. Better to have tried to slide, than stood like a square. Eh?

from The Sea in Winter by Derek Mahon.

But morning scatters down the strand

Relics of last night's gale-force wind.

Far out, the Atlantic faintly breaks,

Seaweed exhales among the rocks,

And fretfully the spent winds fan

the Cenotaph and the lifeboat mine.

From door to door the Ormo van

Delivers, while the stars decline.

This is where Jimmy Kennedy wrote

'Red Sails in the the Sunset'. Blue

And Intimate, Elysian

And neighbourly, the Inishowen

Of Joyce Carey and Red Hugh

Gleams in the distance. On a clear day

You can see Jura and Islay

Severe against the Northern Sky

Portstewart, Portrush and Portballintrae

Une beau pays mal habité. . .

I despair.

My daughter was doing her English homework this morning. Why not last night?

Well we have visitors and things are too much craic in the evening to bother about homework. Anyhow, I digress, it’s a habit I learned from my mother.

The topic of the homework was prefixes. She had to place particular prefixes in front of a series of words and also explain the meaning of the prefix. In other words she had to show she understood what a prefix does to the word it goes in front of. She made the usual mistakes whilst getting the hang of it, but seemed to be cottoning on rightly.

So then, the prefix she had to use was ‘pro’, the example given was ‘proactive’ and she came up with ‘protein’.

No, I said, ‘tein’ isn’t a word in its own right therefore in that instance ‘pro’ isn’t a prefix. Likewise with ‘professional’, ‘production’ and so on.

Eventually she settled on pro-Europe and pro-choice (we didn’t get into the specific meanings of that – it will keep for another day).

As I made school lunches, sandwiches for the others – tuna, and banana for Sorcha if you’re interested – she says ‘Daddy, what about ‘sus’.’ The example given was ‘suspect’.

In the name of God, and this is in a textbook. I explained that there is no such word as ‘pect’ therefore ‘sus’ is not a prefix, ergo the book was wrong. And Cáit, in fact ‘sus’ does not act as a prefix in any context. I love it when the book is wrong.  I pointed it out to my own teacher in primary school once and he hated me for it.

Little did I suspect when I got up this morning that this conversation would prefix my day. I am awaiting with profoundly bated breath the markings of the teacher.

If I was a poet and I’m not, more’s the pity, I could write about the start of this week. What is the Zen koan ‘Chop wood, carry water.’ This morning a friend, my nephew and myself had an entirely enjoyable time chainsawing three piles of wood I had accumulated over a couple of years. I felt like the star in a Seamus Heaney poem, carrying, lifting, moving, helping as my good friend Richard Carey did the sawing and Ciaran waited for his hand to become chain-sawed!

In the current climate it’s equivalent to a day’s work in the money we saved! I feel a more subsistence based lifestyle coming on for a lot of people in the days ahead. The hens may have to up their production levels.

Getting some interesting reaction to a piece I wrote the other day. Interesting topic, challenging – made a few people a little edgy. All good. Chased up a few new clients and prepared for a visit to a another client come Wednesday.

On Saturday for reasons best known to Ulster Camogie I was at an event in a place called Madden in Armagh. Very impressed with their facilities, less so some of the tripe talked! Afterwards we headed to Monaghan for a team bonding exercise so feel duly bonded after laughing my head off all night!

Tonight it’s Monday so it must be Armagh for this course. So far been very good. Missing my ma’s birthday party to go. I’m a bad son.

On 15 August 1998 I was in a shop in Buncrana when Angela came in, in a fairly agitated state, and told me that there had been a no warning bomb in Omagh. Straight away I went to the nearest telephone box to ring my mother. There was no answer.

We had returned from Peru the previous weekend having travelled there for a holiday after getting married. We were due in Omagh that Saturday, but the weather being good my mother had decided to visit us instead earlier in the week. We recounted our tales of Peru and she returned home. Then instead of going to Omagh, on the Saturday we went with Angela’s mother to Buncrana to collect some wedding presents. The irony of being in Buncrana when the Omagh Bomb happened was not lost on me.

As we drove back to Derry and from there onwards to Portstewart, the details of the mayhem in Omagh unfolded. I had eventually got a hold of my uncle Jimmy who was able to tell me that my mother was safe. But he told me, the scenes in the town were devastating, there was blood running down the street he said. His son had witnessed the aftermath of the bomb. Things weren’t good.

When I got home the telephone lines to Omagh were still down. No-one could get through. It was a time of sheer panic. I felt removed from the scene as I no longer lived there. Angela’s brother went up from Derry to volunteer but not being a surgeon he wasn’t required.

The name of one of the casualties shared the name of a close friend, Aidan Gallagher. Over time it transpired it was a different Aidan, a casualty nonetheless. My friend Aidan’s brother had a nightmare trying to locate his mother among the carnage in the County Hospital. Turned out she had gone straight home when the bomb warning was made and was home, safe and sound.

I found it difficult to watch the television. The scenes was unbearable. The Tyrone County Hospital Grounds were like a playground to us growing up. Here they were catapulted onto the world stage as a scene from a disaster movie.

Thanks be to God no close friends or relatives were caught up in the bomb. But I still knew people who were. The Grimes from Beragh I knew at school and played football with them. They lost a mother, Mary; a sister, Avril; a one year old neice Maura, and two unborn twins. Doreen McFarland lost her teenage daughter Samantha. Doreen is now our next door neighbour in Omagh.

My mother knew Libbi Rush and I had often been in her coffee shop at the foot of the town. My friend Ann McGrath lost her father in law Sean, the last to succumb to his injuries. Several years later I met Paul Marlowe at a football function in Jordanstown. He lost his sister Jolene. Still in visits to Omagh I see people maimed or injured or carrying the mental scars.

I attended the memorial service a week after the bomb. I felt I had to be there but I felt a sense of removal and distance from the real people of the town who had lived through the previous week. One of my friends went to all the funerals. Of people he didn’t even know. He felt he had to be there.

I never really stopped to ask my mother if she was OK. I was partially numbed at the short frantic time I spent trying to locate her but I suppose I knew in my heart of hearts she was alright. I never stopped either to think what if she hadn’t, if she had changed her habits and for some reason been in the town that day. Such a simple decision. Many simple decisions that day became a matter of life and death.

My mother stoically absorbed the bomb and all its implications. An Omagh woman her entire life, like thousands of others, God knows the impact upon her. Doreen is a good friend to her, at times I think her loss overwhelms her too.

I remember walking to the memorial service with Angela. We arrived at the Bus Depot in the town. Again a familiar place to me: over there we sat one summer’s evening on the riverbank drinking a carry out. Down there I used to walk a girlfriend to the Carrickmore bus when I was at the Christian Brothers’ School. Around me hundreds of familiar faces, haunted, grief stricken. Friends looking empty, distraught. I saw Eamon Cunningham.  He just looked at me and shook his head.

The silence was unbearable. And then Juliet Turner sang Broken Things. The song hung in the air, drifted around the trees at the Tech, swooped over the Strule, and skimmed the surface of the Drumragh and the Camowen, down over the bridge towards Campsie.

Her delivery clipped, hesitant, childlike, beautiful. It was as if in all the mayhem, carnage and debris, time had stopped and the innocent, the maimed and the dead all stopped their journey to speak to each of us individually. I have never heard anything like it. I stood, a stranger in my own town and wept for the living and the dead.

Nothing compares to Omagh. Nothing.

What a wonderful life.

Went and bought new hat and gloves to work in the office. Very cold in here. There’s a draught somewhere and for two years now I haven’t been able to figure it out. Maybe it’s a poltergeist. If it is, maybe it will reveal itself, sometimes the company would be nice.

Got a bit of bad news yesterday about a close relative. Need to figure out what to do here. You can’t just phone the man up and say “I hear you’ve got cancer.”

Fox’s Chunky Extremely Chocolatey Cookies are exactly that.

I expected ice on the road to and from Armagh last night but thankfully there was none. The course provided more food for thought and more good ideas that I can use for the challenge ahead and for next season too. Are players mature enough to self evaluate? We will see. Are any of us?

Yesterday getting the children out to school I said “Coats on, it’s the coldest day of the year so far.” Leo replied, “What about January dad.” I was thinking school year, he calendar. There’s at least two perspectives on everything.

My brother came to visit us with Andrea and the three children on Sunday. The youngest, Sean Andrew and our Treasa did not hit it off. At all. ‘I don’t like THAT BOY’ she declaimed repeatedly, in a state of high agitation. The feeling was mutual. He was not impressed. Round two next weekend.

I read an article about suicide at the weekend in the Irish Times. To be in that situation where your world closes in around you, there is no escape and despair takes over. How can people get to the point of no return?

I just received a piece of disappointing news myself which is a bit of a hard blow to take and a real hard kick in the stones. However what puts it in perspective is the news I heard yesterday. Also in my mind is the optimism I had this time a year ago, only for it to be dashed leaving us bereft and utterly distraught.

“In the depths of winter I finally learned that there was was within me an invincible summer.”

Bitter cold today, chill icy wind coming in off the sea.

I may light the stove and move from the office to the kitchen for the day. Read the papers yesterday and this morning, watching the manoevrings of various politicians over the weekend.

Aung San Suu Kyi released from house arrest; Gerry Adams announced he’s moving way down south to re-invent himself as a TD; Jim Allister rages against the dying of the light. In England lightweight Liberal Nick Clegg shows he was well duped by the Tories over tuition fees. Who didn’t see that coming?

Of these the events in Burma caught the eye of the media and imagination of the world. But in reality will the release of Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest make any real difference, will it lead to regime change in Burma? Probably not.

Still, for all our criticism of the politicians that we are blessed with,  it is better to have a load of half canned students sacking an office than being gunned down in the streets for having an opinion. Western democracy was such a good idea.

From my own days as a student, demonstrations and protests were part of the craic and we weren’t a radical bunch by any means. More like a load of bollixes with nothing better to do looking an excuse to go on the beer. Anti-student loans or save our grants. Whatever the cause, they could count on us.

Off we would march from Queen’s, down past pub after tempting pub, keeping a steady course for Belfast City Hall. After the demo was over we would take ourselves down Royal Avenue and into Kelly’s Cellars and begin the serious business of pub crawling back up to the Union or home.

In no time at all, half canned, full of beans. We could have changed the world but it was easier to worry about where the next pint of stout was coming from.

Sometimes we would not even make it as far as home, ending up again in what was the old Crescent Bar in Sandy Row. A refuge for drunks, desperadoes, the last stop on the Lost Highway. More times than not an entirely forgettable night out, one merging into the next, meeting the same people over and over again.

Still, it got you out of the house, which is more than Aung San Suu Kyi could say.

This piece is designed for any readers that fancy themselves as linguists with a cunning streak – our topic? Headlines.

When writing, the headline is there for a reason. It’s the thing that will attract a reader.

So for me it is an opportunity to have some fun with the reader and give them some enjoyment too.

Likewise when reading others’ work, oftentimes the laugh is because the author may not even see the double entendre in their headline.

A few things led me to this article. I came upon a piece the other day with a headline about someone blowing a gasket. Indeed. . .

In papers, it is the sub editor who combines fixing copy, chopping for length and generally tidying up copy, with the task of writing headlines. The result can be a stroke of pure genius.

For bloggers and other writers, giving a piece a good head is entirely our own responsibility.

Even some experienced writers don’t have the knack. Others have it down to a fine art. A former colleague populated staff magazine headlines with The Beatles’ song titles.

So we had a piece about Norwegian tree research called ‘Norwegians Would’; a piece about trade union negotiations called ‘We Can Work it Out’.

From there we would be on the hunt for sports reports from University teams to see if we could get a chance to insert headlines like ‘Yellow Sub Maureen’ or in the case of a new type of long lasting coloured fabric that had been developed a piece headlined ‘Strawberry Feels Forever’.

The trick is to be able to play on words, often throwing in some sort of mild double entrendre. If you prove to be good at this it can enliven even the dullest piece.

A few tips to bear in mind if you want to either avoid or create headlines with a double meaning.

Read your headline aloud.

Consider any double meanings. If your audience is likely to appreciate the humour then go for it.

Best of all, your headline may have such a clever play on words that no-one except you will get it. How smug will you be? But remember you are writing for an audience.

Try and avoid cliches, some quotes from the Bible and Shakespeare have been done to death – the likes of ‘With a Little Help From My Friends’ and so on.

But by all means have as much craic as you can.

And so what if someone blows a gasket? There’s a load worse things can happen to even the most cunning of linguists.