Friends in Éire too..? 15 2 23 (13) 25 1 23

It wasn't until after I wrote my blog yesterday that I registered the fact that my marathon page hitter of the day before may indeed have hailed from no other place than Erin's Green Isle, Éire or Ireland if you will..? But when I think about it more deeply maybe not unless..?

The thought of it however got me thinking about all the great sons of Erin who left their fair isle for pastures new and how inexorably alcohol and religion always somehow became a part of their mix...

Like when I first travelled to Éire as a protestant boy of 17 it was with catholic boys and a girl from Belfast that we teamed up with, visiting in the process a fair number of pubs in Waterford Cork Tipperary Killarney Limerick Galway Bay and Athlone on cycling travels when the Black Porter first passed my lips, and I have to say I felt most welcomed and most at home with the people and their customs...

Later when our sister met and fell in love with a catholic boy who called himself an Englishman but whose parents came from the South of Ireland, somewhere close to Galway Bay for his father, and his mother further north in Donegal, she turned to me in the absence of our father because of the war to ask what she should do and I told her she must decide that matter for herself, little suspecting that one day she would become a Minister of the Eucharist and find her true calling..?

And still later when I moved to Scandinavia and met and befriended this guy John Feeney, an Irish American whose all four grandparents vacated Ireland in the mid-nineteen century during the potato famine, who was brought up to hate the English, telling me I was the first Englishman with whom he got on, I said to him "John you must remember that everyone (of the common people, referring as I was to these English) was poor too in those days…"

And only later after John’s untimely death did I discover that James Patrick my father's father was born of Irish stock from Dublin, and that his grandfather was also a James Patrick though his mother was a Pinkburn whose father William was also Irish the family hailing from Clones in Éire, undoubtedly of the Orange hue.         

So when I talked about my own meandering and the meandering of my children perhaps we were simply following in the footsteps of our Irish forefathers who half a century before had left Éire for England where they met and married other like-minded peoples be they part Welsh Scottish or English and that such movements seek to dilute the races unabated wherein alcohol and religion are sometimes minor and sometimes major players ..?

Whatever your pedigree my readers I wish you Good Day! 

Pictures today from our east facing neighbour's plot above which stands a large rock which today for the first time in 26 years I stood atop of deciding in my neighbours absence it was high time I took advantage of him...