Ooze Next?

Ooze Next?

7 September 2025, Sunday

In the lands of Fanad, where the Granodiorite Rocks stand guard against the fury of the great ocean at the edge of the world, in the dark night that is very long, the folk of the Tír Chonaill sit by their great log fires and they tell a tale...

Our musty rustic cottage oozed 1960s rural Irish style but unfortunately it also oozed moisture from the walls and a thatched roof that was cut out of locally sourced reeds but wasn’t cut out for coping with the class of rain that falls the wild Atlantic way. The smell of the place rekindled memories of things I had sniffed as an Antrim child in the 1960s but in a mouldy and decaying sort of way. I would have preferred the nostalgic aroma of Ford Anglia motor cars, Georgie Best sausages (which were really Cookstown sausages), Oxydol, Val Doonican records and Spangles.

When it rained outside it was cold inside and attempting to light the wood stove was an arduous task. Efforts to have heat radiating from the decrepit contraption, that I had tried and failed to love, always fell short of complete success as the wood, probably bought from a rain-lashed petrol station forecourt, was as damp as a badger’s damp bits. It made me think back to our wonderful old enamelled petchka at home which we load with logs that have dried in the woodshed for at least a year making them easy to split and to burn. The earwigs living amongst the Irish kindling each coughed the cough of an old consumptive but with a bit of a squeak that you’d soon recognise as one of the annoying personal habits of the Donegal dermaptera. Before emigrating from England to Bulgaria I’d considered a move to Ireland but this day’s experiences provided conclusive evidence that I had made the right decision. I missed the warm sunny Balkan weather and our powerful wood burner. I mused that although I loved Ireland to bits I could never live there. The weather would kill me.

The dampness problem was made worse by the leaking teapot that was dribblier than a badger’s dribbly bits and I came to realise that the safest way to drink tea was to do it in the bath. Mentally I composed a strongly worded complaint about it for posting on Tripadvisor the minute I arrived back in the Balkans. I rarely drank tea when I was at home. Instead I would kick start my days with industrial strength Turkish coffee I’d brewed up in a small copper pan that had survived numerous wars, revolutions and totalitarian regimes. It was easier to make than tea, far less messy to drink, and good powerful stuff to have galloping around the veins and other internal bodily tubes and canals. I was drinking tea in Ireland because my Éireannach ancestors had done so since the 1650’s when great (to the power of twelve) aunt Brigid from the posh end of Ballycastle had taken the boat over to Holyhead on one of her bingo trips and smuggled back a packet of Rington’s Red Label in her farthingale.

Whilst attempting to seal up the weeping base of the musty rustic cottage teapot with bathroom fitter’s mastic bought in the shop near the lighthouse that sold everything except utility teapots, I formed the opinion that Ireland would have ousted her uninvited occupiers far sooner had her natives adopted a different approach to beverage making. Ireland’s history and culture bore many similarities to those of Bulgaria, I had learnt, but tea drinking had never been a viable pastime anywhere in Eastern Europe. So it became quite clear to me that the main difference between the two countries had been the difference in their caffeinated beverages and it had been that difference that had been responsible for the time difference in shaking off imperialist occupation. The superior brew had certainly worked for the Bulgarians who accomplished a state of independence in 300 fewer years than it took Ireland. However, it would have been wrong of me to ignore the fact that Bulgarians had much nicer weather for going out to do their struggling for freedom from the yoke of cruel colonialism.

At the free roast chicken shop in Carrickart we were disappointed to see that the roast chickens had all been packed into paper bags and labelled with barcodes, so on that occasion it would have been necessary to pay if we’d picked one out. During our previous visit, our chosen spit-roast beauty had been barcode-free and, to avoid a commotion at the checkout, the checkout lady had given it to us for free despite our offer of the estimated cost. But this time we couldn’t have carried one anyway because we were so weighed down with soda bread and scones. Every shop we’d been to in Donegal sold freshly baked baked goods, including the ironmonger’s, the haberdasher’s and the shillelaghsmith’s. I mused that although I loved Ireland to bits I could never live there. The profusion of bread and cake-type stuff, and hot food to take away would kill me. Back home in Bulgaria you’d need to go to a pharmacy to buy a packet of Rennies but in Donegal the supermarkets each had a whole shelf stocked with an inexhaustible range of anti-indigestion products and, from the nature of the food on all the other shelves, it was easy to see why. It became obvious that living in a lane inhabited mostly by gypsies in a rundown village in a cut off valley in the European Union’s poorest country had turned us into snobs, at least as far as having a healthy diet was concerned.

We had a walk around the town to look at the sculptures, statues and memorials. Up until that point there had been an unexpected dearth of them in our part of Donegal. I thought back with fondness to a favourite quote from the television. ‘Catholics! We do love a good statue,’ said Sister Michael, the headmistress of Our Lady Immaculate College in Derry, who in my opinion was a woman deserving of a statue put up of herself. Previously, in County Mayo on our best ever Irish trip, we had seen statues of just about everybody, including John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara, and Johnny Kilbane the boxer from Cleveland Ohio, so we were missing that old place more and more as regular comparisons cropped up in our conversations.

Our irrepressible wanderlust sent us off in search of Ballyhoorisky (Irish: Baile Uí Fhuaruisce, meaning ‘lovely part of the world though you’ll not find a lot to do there on a soaking wet day’) but decided it was too risky to be getting out of the car on account of Mother Nature’s afternoon rage. So with everything closed or wet or both, we went to the clubhouse at Portsalon Golf Club for something to eat. We had heard they had nice tees there. From our table near a first floor window we could see Atlantic breakers pounding and crashing on the second best beach in the world in the distance. In the foreground we could see people playing golf on the golf course outside, and on the huge television mounted on the lounge wall we could see people (Rory McIlroy apparently being by far the best of them) playing golf on a golf course in Portrush, just a few wee miles over the other side of the soft border.

Two things kept us entertained more than the golf did. One was the device they had installed just outside the clubhouse back door. It was one of those gizmos they have at petrol stations for inflating the tyres on your car, but the golfers used it to blow the mud and wet leaves off the soles of their shoes. We were envious. Second on the bill was a woman dressed in her grandmother’s curtains and drinking gin and tonic in pints. It wasn’t specifically her that amused us but another woman in her party (we guessed it was her sister) who was getting more and more annoyed with her each time she fell asleep, putting her drink in great danger of being knocked off the table. Feeling a bit drowsy in the warm surroundings and having a pint of Guinness in me, I worried that I might be tarred with the same brush.

Just before the setting of the sun and the rising of the moon, we went to Ballyhiernan Bay to see the latest in a series of abnormally high tides. Then, just before the abnormally high tide had completely washed us away and the daylight had completely gone, we went to Fanad Head Lighthouse in time for lighting up time. Cloudy skies, our westerly location and our not knowing anything at all about it meant that we missed the partial lunar eclipse that the rest of the world had gasped at the magnificence of, but we were surrounded by so much raw beauty that we didn’t care. There’s more to an Irish holiday than astronomical phenomena, as the old saying goes.

We had spent much of the day observing cattle. We always see them as beautiful creatures though a bit mucky, but in County Donegal every single specimen of their species seemed spotlessly clean. We put this down to the persistent sideways rain. Our car, Fionnuala the Fiat, had remained very clean too, except on the inside. Crumbs from scones from the Centra shop in Carrickart didn’t react well with rainwater from boots.

So Turlough and Priyatelkata came home to their musty rustic cottage. They put the kettle on that evening and slapped outrageously thick layers of Kerrygold on wedges of soft soda bread. They didn’t have a great log fire so they sat by their jaded iron stove and inhaled wood smoke as Connemara kippers might. They imagined themselves in their Ulaidh castle where the sea roars against the black cliffs and the winds howl cold in the night, and their reign was long and happy, and their rain was sideways and heavy.

Image:

A stone Celtic high cross in Carrickart, positioned there so you know when you’re near the shop that does the gorgeous soda bread and scones. My own photograph.

Part Seven:

Ardara Rain’s A‐Gonna Fall

Click on the link to read.

Photographs:

The Donegal Dally