Michael Harding on a happy fortnight of Cill Rialaig calm

Every morning in Kerry I woke to the sound of the ocean crashing on black rocks at the foot of a cliff outside my door. I stood at the gable wall with a mug of tea and thought myself blessed to be alive.

On Sunday morning the ocean was as flat as a lake and after a short while I saw a pod of dolphins moving out into the bay, slipping in and out of the water as they journeyed around Bolus Head. And then I heard a great noise like an old man exhaling on a sofa after a long day. I heard it again and then, after a third time, I realised it was a whale somewhere down below me in the ocean.

I strolled up the hill to the remnants of a monastic site where a primitive Celtic cross etched on a slab of stone stood in the middle of a sheep field. And from further up the hill, I saw the Skelligs on the horizon, where a monastery of hermetic monks survived for over 500 years.

Because I had been communing with nature for so long I was now burdened with a backlog of business work

Daniel Barenboim once said that the important thing about music is the silence between the notes. Every note rises out of silence and every note falls back into silence. The silence gives the notes their shape, and space and beauty.

The beauty of Kerry couldn’t erase the memory of angry dad in the Topaz station

---

I was never on Skellig but I made love in Kerry in the 1970s with a petite German girl

---

Radox is as near as I ever get to an exotic life in the bathroom

---

‘Wasn’t he lucky to go like that? Feet washed. A few pints. Off to sleep’

---

Hidden presence

And the same is true of landscape. It’s not that the Kerry mountains or the coast of Donegal is beautiful in itself, but there seems to be a hidden counterpoint, a sense of otherness that is gathered in a beautiful place, a hidden presence beyond our seeing, that counter balances what stands empirically before our eyes.

Maybe it’s all to do with quantum physics. Every particle is balanced with the possibility of a wave. The contingency of mountains makes them delicate. Oceans are underscored by the music of emptiness.

I suppose that’s why many people head across the Shannon in summertime.

I enjoyed two weeks of calm abiding at the artists’ village in Cill Rialaig, which lies on the ocean’s edge beyond Cahersiveen. And on my way home I felt as happy as a healthy tree.

But because I had been communing with nature for so long I was now burdened with a backlog of business work; in particular a legal contract that I was supposed to have signed weeks earlier.

I was trying to be chatty but she maintained an intensity more in keeping with an opera by Wagner

I phoned my solicitor on the way home and he said to drop into a Garda station, get it witnessed, and pop it in the post. Any Garda station will oblige, he assured me.

So I stopped at the next oasis of law and order with my document and driving license and I walked into the waiting room and rang the bell. But I did not hear any ringing sound inside so I tried again. Suddenly a voice rang out from within.

“Take a seat. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

A few moments later the two glass shutters at the reception desk flung open and there within was a young Garda, her feet squarely on the floor, her hands folded and a dramatic shadow of irritation across her countenance.

“What can I do for you?” she inquired.

Wagner

I said I have a document to sign and I need a witness to my signature.

“What kind of a document is it?” she wondered.

I said, “It’s just a memorandum of agreement, but that’s not important. I just need you to sign it.”

I was trying to be chatty but she maintained an intensity more in keeping with an opera by Wagner.

“Why do you need a Garda to sign it?” she wondered, her eyes widening in annoyance.

“Simply as a witness to my signature,” I assured her.

She examined the document.

“That doesn’t need to be signed by a Garda,” she said.

I agreed.

“But I just thought you might oblige.”

Perhaps the word oblige was inappropriate. Perhaps deference to the forces of law and order requires that civilians don’t expect obligements.

She eyed the document from a distance, keeping her hands firmly on her hips.

“I’m not going to sign something like that,” she declared at last.

“Ok,” I said, “that’s no problem, I’ll just find someone else.” And I thanked her politely before leaving the building, grateful that I wasn’t being arrested for wasting the officer’s precious time.

But the sense of serenity I had felt for two weeks talking to dolphins and contemplating the divinity like a medieval monk had now completely evaporated. My fingers were shaking as I gripped the steering wheel and drove onwards across the Shannon and into the belly of the raging world.