The Wind that Shakes The Barley.

I went to see The Wind that Shakes the Barley tonight , after several abortive attempts, too tedious to detail, but which mostly involved the cinema being too small or my social circle too complicated. Mostly, I liked it, though it has Loach's tendency to propagandise (although as usual he's on the right side) leavened with his compelling cinematic sweep. I loved it, really, reservations about cliches aside ( the cliches are in this case cliches because that's what happened). 

The most gripping scene wasn't the much vaunted flying column appearing out of the mist, but the argument, post-Treaty, about who was right. It got the problems with wars and armies and orders perfectly and in a pair of scenes contrasted the willingness of the main protaganist and a young British soldier to obey orders, no matter what and in that conveyed the inhumanity of armies and hierarchies with guns. This, I thought, whilst I watched it, is why I am a pacificist: despite all the provocation, endorsing the notion of a just war leads you to the shooting of a youngster in the head. What starts out as a noble cause ends up in ignominy and blood.

Happy Accidents.

A friend rang. Was I doing anything? Not much, I said, rousing myself from my afternoon in the garden reading chick-lit. Well, there was this film-maker friend of his from Uzbekistan and she was in town for just a day and they were just going to eat in the garden and did I want to come? He is the sort of guy who has friends from Uzbekistan who drop by for the day, so I said yes, of course I did. 

They had spread out two brightly patterned rugs on the grass by the time I got there, stopping only to pick up some fruit as a gift. They’re the sort of people don’t eat wheat and that sort of thing, so a tub of Haagen-Daas was out. Half a dozen people were there already, including the friend from Uzbekistan and one from Germany and another from Moscow. Oh and a refusenik Israeli and, later, an Algerian and a brace of Dubliners. We ate cold chicken, tepid pasta, brown bread and salad, sprawled out on the cool grass in the evening sun like Romans at a feast. The cat and the new kitten weaved around us, prowling for food whilst we talked about politics, land, fighting the system and, of course, the weather. 

“It’s beautiful”, he said, “Can you believe it?” His voice is like gravel, only nicer, I realise. ‘Don’t jinx it by mentioning it’, I shot back quickly, afraid that all this admiring of the summer will bring the hailstones down upon us. I always think you should ignore good weather in Ireland, in a sort of whistling-past-the-graveyard sort of way. The minute you notice it is the minute the gods of the hills and the sky have their revenge and it’ll rain for a month. I said so and he laughed, in his crinkly-eyed way, and we went back to playing with the cats. Later we lay in the field at the back after a couple of historians had joined the company and argued about the 17^th century and whether O’Neill was unlucky or dumb. On my way home I realised that this is one of the reasons I like my life: the people in it are often extraordinary and I am all the happier for it.

Make My Day.

Sometimes someone thanks you for something you've done in a way that makes up for all the times that no-one has bothered to say thank you, in a way that makes you want to frame it and hang it on the wall, if only you could. Sometimes it makes your day.

The Weaver's Road.

Take the Weavers Road, he says, pointing to an iron gateway between hedges of dark red roses, tumbling over the gates. The way through is a grassy path worn into the centre, billowing blossom on either side. We had bowled down twisty Kerry lanes to get there, burrowing through hedges of scarlet fuschia, purple heather and knotted thorn, white with yarrow. 

A long walk down a stony path, we pass the grassy loop of a fairy fort; my heart beats faster at the view from Dunbeg. I pick up two stones from the earth and drop them, with an invocation to the god of the mountains, into a gap in the Stone-Age walls. I leave a coin as well. Someone else has left a ring as an offering. I’d leave my heart if I thought I’d get it back in one piece. It’s moments like that when I know I’m a pagan, no matter what.

Happy.

Around about this time a year ago, I was sitting the terrace of a small café on a promontory on the Amalfi Coast, looking out across the Bay of Naples to Vesuvius. It was the most beautiful day – warm and balmy, but not sweltering. The sky above was almost cloudless and the sea beyond the terrace was a postcard Mediterranean Blue. The only flaw in the experience was the radio in the café behind me, which was blaring out the usual awful europap, but I managed to tune it out.

Then the DJ had a sudden rush of taste to the head and put on The GooGoo Dolls beautiful song Iris. I put down the book I was reading to listen to the music and as I did so, I realised something. In that moment I was happy. I had no especial reason to be happy – I was on my own, drinking water, reading a book, but there it was, I was happy. I remember thinking, this is what peace is – being happy in a moment for no particular reason and knowing it.

Happiness isn’t a constant state: perhaps that’s the biggest cultural, emotional con-trick played on us all. Happiness is an intermittent thing: the important thing is to experience it when it occurs and not break your heart trying to make your life and the people in it into the impossible state of constant joy.

Sometimes I sleep with the radio on. Because sometimes, especially when the nights are light, I can’t sleep without it. I find the Shipping Forecast strangely soothing and the faint drone of the World Service in the background wafts me slowly off to sleep. It makes for whacky dreams sometimes – last night there was clearly some programme on about vets who moonlight as plumbers, because I dreamed I was hacking a radiator to pieces in a room slowly filling with kittens. I don‘t do drugs, but I do mainline Radio Four.

It's the summer. Apparently. Not that you'd know by the gale force wind currently bending trees all over the place. Out of the side of my eye I can see a line of ruffled birds perched along the brow of the house opposite. A quick gust of wind and they're off, blown away, like a flight of bubbles in a wind machine.

I spent a big chunk of Friday evening at a party in a friend's house in Donegal. The house has this amazing view over the Foyle estuary and out to sea, falling away at your feet, tumbling over a sweep of green fields and bowling right down to the water's edge a few miles away. In the distance you can see Magilligan and Benevenagh, over the sea to the north -- or rather to the north-east. Directions are a bit tricky in my part of Ireland, where you can be in the south even when you are further north than the north. If you see what I mean. Anyway, the house was tiny and the party large, so we sat outside, slowly foundering whilst the sun paled and the moon swelled and the stars came out. If I had a view like that I'd never be inside. Not even on a day like this.