“Then there came a day
Moved out ‘cross the Mediterranean
Came to rest on isles and the Greek young men
And with their silver beards they laughed
At the unknown of the universe
They could just sit and guess God’s name”
Karl Wallinger
We moved into our new home in 2004, a family of four returning to Monaghan after sojourns to places that individually and , or, collectively we once thought would be our place. Everywhere we were together was indeed our home at that time, but not always somewhere we could see ourselves settling and having a family. While footloose and fancy free we lived in Dublin, Galway, London, Dublin again, Kildare, and Belfast before making our way to Monaghan, where we’d grown up, met and become Soulmates.
Apart from Monaghan, I would say that Eileen was happiest in Kildare , and I was happiest in Belfast. Unrelated to those preferences, Jake was born in Holles St., which, I hasten to add, is a hospital, not a random street …although it was touch and go at some points on the drive in, and Robyn was born in the Royal Victoria.
My Soulmate was pregnant with Elliott when we moved into this home in Monaghan. He wasn’t called Elliott before he was born…obviously. We, or certainly I didn’t even know that he was a boy until he was born, and we hadn’t discussed names , so that was a surprise too, I think to both of us. I do recall being despatched from the maternity ward to Easons in Donegal Place to look up the spelling of Elliott. It transpired that it can be spelt with one ‘l’ and one ’t’ , two ‘l’s and one ‘t’ , one ‘l’ and two ‘t’s, or , as we immediately opted for, two ‘l’s and two ‘t’s. When the nurse came in to fill in his birth registration form and we proudly said his name and spelt it out , after writing it down she looked at us and said “That’s the name of someone who will be famous.”
When she left we smiled down at him and at each other and thought, ‘Well she’s seen a thing or two , maybe he is the Golden Child ?”.
Then we heard her across the hall saying to another couple “Chloë McEntaggart ? That’s the name of someone who will be famous.”
But we felt that she was genuine when saying it to us, and polite when she said it to the McEntaggarts.
After various adventures , we settled into our life in Monaghan, now a family of five, with amazing neighbours , Uncles, Aunties, Grannies, and Grandas close by, and a wonderful house to make our home and an intimidatingly large garden. Before we’d celebrated our first anniversary in our new home , my Soulmate’s Uncle Jimmy arrived with a lorry containing a wooden fort, climbing wall ,and slide that he’d collected from my Soulmate’s cousin, and my friend Mark, in London. His kids had outgrown it and he was removing it and was reluctant to dump it when Jimmy said that ‘Eileen and Paul have a great big garden, I’ll take it over to them next time I’m heading.’
There were no instructions.
I was then, and remain, the least practical person alive…seriously, Eileen has always changed the plugs, fuses, light bulbs in every flat or house we have shared. She painted ,decorated, wall papered, shelved, and on one occasion, while 7 months pregnant with Robyn , took a sledge hammer , and removed a steel rod reinforced concrete fireplace from the living room in our house in Upper Malone Gardens. I arrived home to a pile of rubble in our back garden.
But this, in our new home, our destination, this I was determined to do myself.
( With apologies to Monty Python ) When I tried the first time, the garden hadn’t properly settled. Everyone said I was daft to build a wooden fort, climbing wall ,and slide without any cement foundations, but I built it all the same, just to show them. It fell over in the first breeze. So I built it a second time. That fell over when a silage harvester went by. So I built it a third time. That was struck by lightning, and then fell over. But the fourth one stayed up…largely due to Dad insisting on helping, and then insisting on digging out post holes , and using cement ,rather than simply smiling at it and telling it that I had faith in it.
It was all worth it in the end. The fort became a refuge in time of trouble, the best place to hide a stash of water balloons , somewhere to hide when sulking, and best of all somewhere to roar “WHEE!” when going down the slide. The kids used it as well.
A few months later the hairs stood on the back of my neck when Jimmy’s lorry trundled into the yard and I was afraid to ask what new construction project was about to hasten my doom. Thankfully it wasn’t anything needing instructions, it was just plastic bags filled with dirt and twigs. I helped him unload them and he said that ‘There’s 900 there, let me know if you need anymore.”
I knew , even with my rudimentary ability to count, that there weren’t any more than 10 bags, and assumed that it was some kind of compost for the garden. My Soulmate informed me that they were indeed 900 beech saplings for the hedge.
“What hedge ?”
“The one you’re planting tomorrow all around the house.”
“You mean at the front, along the road…”
“No, I mean all around the house, the whole perimeter.”
“But who will see them at the back ???”
“I will !”
I spent a weekend planting 900 baby Beech trees around our house. When I was finished my Soulmate smiled at me, patted me on the head , saying ‘That’ll do Donkey, that’ll do.” Which I was very pleased with , as I adored ‘Shrek’ and hated ‘Babe’.
You would think , after planting 900 baby Beech trees around our house, that I would cherish and care for them. Reader, I did not. Many fell victim to hungry cows, bored strimming, and our garden being the perfect size for 5-a-side football matches. As the survivors grew , gaps appeared. These gaps were particularly prominent at the bottom end of the garden where the football goal was, bits where I had to lean back while strimming on the hilly side of the house and couldn’t determine through the safety visor, or to be honest, care, which things were thistles or which things were nascent Beech trees, and the gap that Granny Rosaleen’s dog, Lucy, tore through whenever any of us arrived home so that we could throw sticks for her.
I then discovered that the only thing more annoying than planting baby Beech trees, was then trimming them when they grew higher than the perfectly adequate wooden fence that we’d had around the house from the start. The second most disheartening ‘Father’s Day’ present I ever got was a hedge trimmer. In fairness Father’s Day always falls a week or so after my birthday, and I ‘m always happy , surprised and in awe of the thought and love that go into the cards and presents I receive on my birthday and almost dread Father’s Day. I have a genuine heartfelt empathy for those poor souls whose birthdays coincide with Christmas.
After my first hour in possession of a shiny new, orange Black+Decker hedge trimmer it stopped working. I rang Dad to see what was wrong with it.
“Is the tank full ?”
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t know you had anything else that used two-stroke oil.”
“What’s 2-stroke ?”
You know those cards you get from coffee shops where you get it stamped every time you get a coffee, and then you get the 10th coffee free ?
Monaghan Plant Hire have a very exclusive loyalty programme, I’m the only member. As soon as I open the door , they start laughing , and quickly look up their POS and see which staff member had drawn this week in the year in their lottery, and had to pay for whatever repair I’d self-induced.
But that was a long time ago.
The surviving members of the original baby Beech trees I planted 20 or so years ago are now of such a robust nature that my neighbour , Kieran , when out with his tractor mounted hedge shredder, trims them.
We haven’t had a decent footie match between Monkey Head United and Daddy Hotspur in ages. Lucy is chasing sticks on a farm very far away and is very happy, or so my Soulmate told me. And the places where I couldn’t reach to strim or trim are trees.
The gaps are filled.
Elliott finished his 4 year Bio-Med course in May , and today he got his results.
They were great results.
He’s home with us.
My Soulmate asked him what would he like for dinner to celebrate.
He replied ‘Risotto’.
Courtesy of the good people in Fleming’s SuperValu, and their wise decision to stock Casale Paradio’s idiot proof mushroom risotto, to which I add their ‘Guess The Fish’ mix of smoked something, a meaty white something, and a pink something, vegetable stock, prawns, and some cheese at the end, I can rummage up a pretty decent risotto. My Soulmate made a wonderfully cosmopolitan salad and , despite it being a school night, we had beer, wine, and more beer.
We could have left it until the weekend, but we should celebrate today what deserves celebration today. If we leave a gap , it may be filled by something else.
If someone gives you a bottle of Champagne, drink it, don’t save it. Use the good China, wear the outfit you were saving, meet the friend, say yes…
When we were having dinner earlier my Soulmate asked if I’d written my blog for tomorrow, which is now today, and I said no. We had our dinner, our chat, our celebration , and as it was Elliott’s day, we allowed him to pick a movie for us to watch. He picked ‘I Am Legend’ , which I’d seen before , but jumped out of my skin on occasion, and had completely forgotten the ending. When it ended my Soulmate went to bed, Elliott went onto his laptop and I went outside and just walked around the house and heard something in the back field and automatically went to the spot where there had always been a gap …and was greeted by a robust , impenetrable , and lusciously vibrant hedge that was taller than I am. Just as I was thinking ‘Where’s the gap’, in the same split second, the London Underground automated announcement popped into my head ‘Mind the gap’.
In the wonderful evolution of London Underground lines and platforms, some station platforms had slightly ‘S’ curved shapes, which they’d always planned to straighten, but never did. Drivers and conductors couldn’t be expected to remember which station was which shape, so they decided to have automated announcements. Due to the technological constraints at the time, pre-pre-pre digital, the message had to be clear and concise.
“Mind the gap”. Fitted the bill.
Back in the day the different lines, Circle , Piccadilly, District, Vicroria, and so on all had different operators, and they each had different recordings of the announcements.
In 1972 the Northern Line commissioned a stage actor Oswald Lawrence to voice their recording. His wife , Dr.Margaet McCollum, used the Northern Line to travel to and from work, and would sometimes wait for a couple of trains to pass , just to hear his voice, and smile. Over the years the Northern Line gradually updated and renovated platforms , and eventually it was only the northern platform at The Embankment station that used the recording. Oswald passed away in 2007, and Margaret would then sometimes travel to the Embankment for no other reason than to hear his voice, remember , and smile.
One day, November 1st 2012, Margaret arrived at the Embankment station and heard someone else say ‘Mind the Gap’.
She was very upset.
A station attendant asked what was wrong and she said ‘They changed the voice’.
‘Yes. They did that yesterday, digitised the whole system, same announcements on all the lines, all the stations. Not quite the same is it ?’ He said.
‘It was my husband.’
‘Oh, I am sorry.’
‘I come here every day, just to ….’ She started to cry.
‘Let me see what I can do.’
They managed to find an old ceramic disc with the original recording and they had it recorded onto a tape, a CD, and an MP3, so Margaret could play it on any device whenever she wanted.
And then…
Someone in Transport For London heard about it and…
Today, and every day since March 1st 2013, you will here the same digitised voices making the same anodyne announcements in all eleven lines, and all 272 of their stations, and all 570 of their platforms, except one , the northbound platform in The Embankment plays the original Oswald Laurene recording of’ Mind the gap’.
Other than me writing this and you reading it, there are gaps between all of us.
And yet, there aren’t.
Best not to worry about them.
They find their way.
We find our way.
Toodles,
Paul
P.S. This is magnificent , and so are you .
P.P.S This is the audio of an old blog from 2023
