There just had to be a Nicaraguan woman working in the coffee shop. It was just so right, so fair trade. So ecological. So Sonairte.
So wha?
Sonairte. The National Ecology Centre in Laytown.
Laytown? A dreary stretch of coastline pockmarked with depressing looking housing estates plonked on sand dunes and in scrubby fields. It’s near Julianstown.
Julianstown? A dreary stretch of coastline pockmarked with depressing looking housing estates plonked on sand dunes and in scrubby fields.
“Do you want”, said I to my friend John the Polymath, “do you want to go to Laytown to the National Ecology Centre?”
“Uh..mmm..ok” he said.
So off we sped up the M1 in H’s Passat. H is the wife. The car is hers. It’s a tradition in our marriage that she always owns the motorcar. This is a hangover from the days when she had a job and I didn’t, and thus could raise finance for wheels. And a house. And food for the kids, that sort of detail. Of course these days neither of us really have jobs. As such. OK I do write, and she watches Spooks and Lost and stuff like that on TV. Not exactly jobs, not really. But we seem to be pretty well sorted. Perhaps not minted, as the expression has it. But comfortable.
Bloody nice car, Passat. And a very fine road, from Dublin towards Drogheda . (Yes this notebook is jointly sponsored by Volkswagen and the National Roads Authority.) Nice car, good road, a fine quiet Saturday morning. And my friend John the Polymath looking thoughtfully out the window at the story of Ireland
What more could a man want?
Some food.
“What’s the soup”, I said to the man in the National Ecology Centre coffee shop. I would have said it to the Nicaraguan woman but I knew that she didn’t speak english. Something to do with her grin. That I-don’t-speak-english sort of grin.
“Roasted parsnips and lentil”, said the man.
My friend John and I looked at each other. The word lentil has a certain resonance. Carries some sort of baggage.
“Organic”, added the man. As if to clinch the deal. Like a bloke in Power City offering a further five percent off the plasma TV.
My friend John and I looked at each other again. The word organic also has a certain resonance. In proximity to the word lentil it’s vaguely disturbing. Like watching an Islamic guy on the DART with a smoking rucksack.
How and ever, the soup was actually quite good. The accompanying slice of brown bread was…well, if you ever wonder where recycled cardboard goes there may be a few answers up around Laytown.
“What are we doing here?” asked my friend John.
I looked around.
Sonairte runs courses. Ecology courses. And whilst our soup was being decanted from some solar powered soup generating machine a dozen or so students wandered in for lunch. What precisely they were studying I have no idea. Though am quite certain it wasn’t anything to do with how to build a nuclear power station in the back garden. These were…well…organic sort of folks. And their carbon footprints danced lightly on this mother earth.
I remembered. Long years ago I had an organic and hippie sort of girlfriend. She was young and beautiful but I didn’t leave my wife H for her and looking around the coffee shop now I was glad. Yes of course organo females mean well, but that is not the same as ageing well.
“What are we doing here?” repeated John the Polymath.
“Genealogy”, I told him, waving a hand around. “Where are we sitting?”
“In the converted outbuildings of a Victorian farmyard”, he responded.
My friend John is an architect.
“Ah hah”, I shook a finger. “Yes indeed. But not just any converted outbuildings of any Victorian farmyard.”
“No?”
“No. These buildings were built by my kinsman Frederick Hans Kennedy. As indeed was half of the farmhouse out there across the yard”.
“He owned Sonairte?”
“The original farm, yes. Bought it in the 1880’s. Sold up just before the first world war. Died quite young. Buried in Deansgrange
“That all?”
“No no no no.”
“What else?”
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