Everybody needs good neighbours

Cavan Calling: There are certain indignities you really should not have to face once a certain age is reached

Cavan Calling: There are certain indignities you really should not have to face once a certain age is reached. The fact that you are no better at dealing with it at 50 (only just, at the start of this month) than you were at five only fuels the sense of injured pride.

For various reasons I seem to have spent a considerable amount of time recently in my car, and I decided I needed some fresh air and exercise. Although the inside of my home is now warm, comfortable and cosy, the outside is a bit of a nightmare, with charred tree stumps and tracks from heavy machinery scarring the ground at the front of the house. In the spring, once the ground has dried out sufficiently we need some hard landscaping done, but until then our plot resembles a nuclear wasteland.

Trying to be positive about this state of affairs and wanting to spend some time outside, I decided I would start to clear a ditch that runs along the road to one side of our house. Dressed in wellies and warm clothing and carrying suitable implements, I strode purposefully into the ditch. At first, things went well. I was working hard enough to feel pleasantly warm despite the cold weather, but perhaps the logic of working backwards down the ditch did not, on reflection, stack up. I failed to see the horribly boggy bit before I stepped backwards into it and sank midway up my calves.

Several expletives later, I realised my situation was much worse than I originally thought. I was stuck fast in the glutinous mass. If I managed to get my feet out of the wellies there was nowhere to put my foot down other than into bog. I remembered something similar happening in my childhood and the same wave of panic and frustration that hit me then, washed over me now.

READ MORE

Tony was in the house too far away to hear me, and as he knows my habit of spending a long time messing about outside, it could be hours before he even missed me. Despite warm socks, my feet were starting to get cold. I was just abandoning all hope when a neighbour came down the road in his tractor.

I began gesticulating wildly to him, but as it is the habit in these parts to acknowledge each other with waves, he initially thought I was just being extremely friendly. Fortunately, the panic on my face registered with him and he stopped. Straddling the sides of the ditch, he pulled me out of my boots and deposited me on the dry bank. He then retrieved my wellies for me. With as much dignity as I could possibly muster in such a situation, I thanked him. I was also very grateful he did not laugh. It would have been the final straw for my already mangled pride.

Ditch-clearing projects are now on hold until spring. I have decided to devote my energies to hopefully far safer activities such as the Cavan Literary Festival. This is to be held in Cavan town over the first weekend in March. Elaine Lennon, the arts organiser for Cavan, contacted Tony some months ago to ask if he would give a reading from his autobiography, What's Left. He agreed, barring acting commitments, to take part. When Tony told me about this conversation, he neglected to mention that Elaine had asked if I would be willing to facilitate a panel discussion during the festival and that he had readily agreed on my behalf. When Elaine telephoned me some weeks ago, I was therefore initially a little unclear what the conversation was about.

Once my confusion was cleared (Elaine not unreasonably assumed my husband might have mentioned her request to me), I was delighted to be involved. My contribution will be on the opening night, Friday, March 4th, on a panel that includes Irish Times columnist and writer John Waters, columnist and social diarist John McEntee, and the novelist Evelyn Conlon, who edited Later On: The Monaghan Bombing Memorial Anthology.

The issue under discussion will be politics and storytelling. How far do fact and fiction merge and how can we know, then, what is true?

As someone who observed the Irish political situation from Britain with knowledge and understanding gleaned from reporting in the British media and through films such as The Crying Game and novels such as Eureka Street by Robert McLiam Wilson, it will be a fascinating debate.

* More details of the Cavan Literary Festival March 4th-6th, 2005 from tel: 049-4372099 or www.cavancoco.ie