Snow at our house
Nóllaig Shóna December 2005
That’s Happy/Merry Christmas in Irish. One
of the few expressions I can say with certainty now that I’ve had 4 whole classes in Irish. I started taking them in November. There were supposed to be 8 classes this term but they were a little late starting so there were only six in the end. I was sick for one of them and the last one was a pub quiz on the night I had choir practice. It all was a bit of a muddle from the start. The woman who organizes it is in the choir (Peadar’s sister ) and she told me she put me on the list to be contacted when they were to start and mentioned that one class was on Tuesday in Ballingeary, the Wednesday class was in Ballyvourney and the Thursday class was in Kilnamartyra. Since choir alternated between Wednesday and Thursday of course it was
the Tuesday class for me –in the furthest village (of course). But I never got the letter so I only found out on the Thursday of the first week and so I went to Kilnamartyra for the first class.
There were about 25 of them there, many of them English. It was a mother and daughter team teaching and the daughter (about 20 years old) took the 5 of us complete beginners (I didn’t think I was ready for the“improvers”). We shared the room with the other 20 improvers and it was a bit noisy. The daughter just pointed to a sheet she had and started saying various phrases beginning with “hello” and working her way through “how are you” and“my name is.” All very
casual.
The next class I took over in Ballingeary and it was taught by a woman who left us in no doubt she was a national school (primary) teacher. There were only 5 of us and the others were Irish women who had learned Irish in school years ago and claimed they had forgotten it. What a contrast. It really stretched me to say the least and I felt like I did years ago when I was in
Advanced Placement French reading Sartre, or The Red and the Black in French and the teacher rabbiting on about existentialism in French. The teacher here was kind enough to give me 15 minutes extra before each class to give me some basic nouns and things so I could string a few sentences together. After the first week though, there was no chalk to be had and so she couldn’t put words on the board and so she would spell them out. Now there was a challenge too, because the Irish don’t spell quite like I’m used to. A is said “ah.” It’s not rocket science but it does slow you down as you’re trying desperately to make sense of it all. Then toss in a fada (an accent) and it really can throw you for a loop. Not to get too deep into Irish spelling and pronunciation, suffice it to say it drives Dave into “gaels” of laughter (ha-ha) and can be confusing even if you don’t take into account regional differences. I had learned some
pronunciation before I came from listening to and singing songs in Irish. But what I learned and heard was the Donegal and a little Connemara, not Munster Irish which is what is spoken
here. But one thing is common among all--the expression for Santa Claus (Father Christmas really): Daddaí Nóllaig (fada over the I in daddai and over the o).
I am starting to differentiate the accents a bit from general region to general region. Apparently there is a definite Cork city accent which is “much different” from the accent around
here. That one I haven’t a clue to differentiate. The first strong difference is of course the northern Irish accent, which has some tones similar to Scotland for obvious reasons.
The funniest obvious little clip of a northern accent was on the TV at Dave sister’s the other night when we heard them announcing when the next episode of the American drama ER was to be shown. The woman pronounced it “E—Ore” My brother-in-law looked over at us and said “like the donkey?” “It’s the Shrek effect.” (The shrek effect is what in England they call all those urban people who have moved out to the country and then don’t want to mow their miles of grass so they buy a donkey—“they’re so cute”. The prices of donkeys have soared in Ireland and the continent).
TV is something we still haven’t done yet at our household, though we did actually try and put our old one on a few months ago only to have smoke come out from the back of it. It was old so
we weren’t too surprised. As of yet we haven’t bought a new one. They do have a license fee over here—it’s about 140 euro per year which is only a little less than the £115 or so it cost in the U.K. For that though you get about 4 stations, one of which is in Irish most of the time, though there usually are English subtitles at the bottom. This station, TG4, actually broadcasts
the American TV show, Survivor, which is hilariously narrated in Irish with subtitles and then the actual conversations are in English.
TG4 were at the culture center in the village a month or so ago to premier this new film about Cork city. It was a free night that also shared bill with the local winners of the Oireachtas. The Oireachtas is a national competition held in a different place each time to celebrate and promote Irish language and culture (It’s also the name of. There is singing, reciting, plays, poetry and various combinations of these for all ages, for about 4 days. This year it was coordinated by
Peadar (our choir director) and a few others but since there was no where in the area big enough to hold it they had it just outside of Cork City. Many of the choir members competed in various events and several of them placed or came first. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t attend because Dave needed the car for tutoring, but it was the next best thing to go to the evening at the culture center to celebrate the local winners. They had singing and recitations and a little humorous vignette by some young teens. It was all in Irish of course, but they
were so good and I had heard the summary from someone so I got the gist of it.
One of the men who won first place, Ownie Mikey (real name Owen O’Sullivan but his Dad was called Mike) got up stood there in his rumpled jeans, work boots, hands in his rumpled jacket pocket and sang in a beautiful baritone voice. The whole evening concluded with several of the men’s choir (made famous by Sean O’Riada when he composed the mass in Irish for them in the 1960s) leading the hall in their favorite--Mo Ghile Mear.
The song Mo Ghile Mear (pronounced Mo Gheela Mar in Munster Irish) featured at one point the next day when I had a choir workshop with a singing instructor. The woman, Mary Mac (short for Mc something I can’t remember) was originally from the area but had spent the last 15 years teaching and coaching singing in Germany. She is now head of the voice department of the School of Music in Cork. She is a personal friend of Peadar’s and he asked her to come and give us a workshop to help us with our singing. She was amazing. She incorporated many kinesthetic things with the voice coaching as well as theory and metaphysical aspects too. She worked on some of us individually too I was too chicken to have her pull and push my lips, jaw and head or have me on the floor with her hand on my diaphragm while I belted out a
song in Irish. I have enough problem remembering the tune and words without all that. Maybe next time. The song Mo Ghile Mear came up when she was discussing interpretation. She had
Irish but it was rusty and she was confused about the song because the manner in which the song had been sung the night before had her thinking it was a march. But when she translated the words to herself it was not. So she had a choir member say the words in Irish while another translated them. Then she had the woman say the words as if she was acting them out. The song, translated as something like My Bright Hero, or My Bright Light is a woman lamenting that her hero, her lover is gone, and won’t return to rescue her from her life of oppression. The woman though, is Ireland, and the lover/hero is Bonny Prince Charlie,
who was supposed to come across and defeat the English but he never did. So Mary Mac drew out another approach to singing the song, one filled with passion and sorrow, but the choir said the men had made their stamp on that song in this area so much they wouldn’t dare sing it any other way around here. Maybe if they got up in a disguise they could get away with it…
That’s Happy/Merry Christmas in Irish. One
of the few expressions I can say with certainty now that I’ve had 4 whole classes in Irish. I started taking them in November. There were supposed to be 8 classes this term but they were a little late starting so there were only six in the end. I was sick for one of them and the last one was a pub quiz on the night I had choir practice. It all was a bit of a muddle from the start. The woman who organizes it is in the choir (Peadar’s sister ) and she told me she put me on the list to be contacted when they were to start and mentioned that one class was on Tuesday in Ballingeary, the Wednesday class was in Ballyvourney and the Thursday class was in Kilnamartyra. Since choir alternated between Wednesday and Thursday of course it was
the Tuesday class for me –in the furthest village (of course). But I never got the letter so I only found out on the Thursday of the first week and so I went to Kilnamartyra for the first class.
There were about 25 of them there, many of them English. It was a mother and daughter team teaching and the daughter (about 20 years old) took the 5 of us complete beginners (I didn’t think I was ready for the“improvers”). We shared the room with the other 20 improvers and it was a bit noisy. The daughter just pointed to a sheet she had and started saying various phrases beginning with “hello” and working her way through “how are you” and“my name is.” All very
casual.
The next class I took over in Ballingeary and it was taught by a woman who left us in no doubt she was a national school (primary) teacher. There were only 5 of us and the others were Irish women who had learned Irish in school years ago and claimed they had forgotten it. What a contrast. It really stretched me to say the least and I felt like I did years ago when I was in
Advanced Placement French reading Sartre, or The Red and the Black in French and the teacher rabbiting on about existentialism in French. The teacher here was kind enough to give me 15 minutes extra before each class to give me some basic nouns and things so I could string a few sentences together. After the first week though, there was no chalk to be had and so she couldn’t put words on the board and so she would spell them out. Now there was a challenge too, because the Irish don’t spell quite like I’m used to. A is said “ah.” It’s not rocket science but it does slow you down as you’re trying desperately to make sense of it all. Then toss in a fada (an accent) and it really can throw you for a loop. Not to get too deep into Irish spelling and pronunciation, suffice it to say it drives Dave into “gaels” of laughter (ha-ha) and can be confusing even if you don’t take into account regional differences. I had learned some
pronunciation before I came from listening to and singing songs in Irish. But what I learned and heard was the Donegal and a little Connemara, not Munster Irish which is what is spoken
here. But one thing is common among all--the expression for Santa Claus (Father Christmas really): Daddaí Nóllaig (fada over the I in daddai and over the o).
I am starting to differentiate the accents a bit from general region to general region. Apparently there is a definite Cork city accent which is “much different” from the accent around
here. That one I haven’t a clue to differentiate. The first strong difference is of course the northern Irish accent, which has some tones similar to Scotland for obvious reasons.
The funniest obvious little clip of a northern accent was on the TV at Dave sister’s the other night when we heard them announcing when the next episode of the American drama ER was to be shown. The woman pronounced it “E—Ore” My brother-in-law looked over at us and said “like the donkey?” “It’s the Shrek effect.” (The shrek effect is what in England they call all those urban people who have moved out to the country and then don’t want to mow their miles of grass so they buy a donkey—“they’re so cute”. The prices of donkeys have soared in Ireland and the continent).
TV is something we still haven’t done yet at our household, though we did actually try and put our old one on a few months ago only to have smoke come out from the back of it. It was old so
we weren’t too surprised. As of yet we haven’t bought a new one. They do have a license fee over here—it’s about 140 euro per year which is only a little less than the £115 or so it cost in the U.K. For that though you get about 4 stations, one of which is in Irish most of the time, though there usually are English subtitles at the bottom. This station, TG4, actually broadcasts
the American TV show, Survivor, which is hilariously narrated in Irish with subtitles and then the actual conversations are in English.
TG4 were at the culture center in the village a month or so ago to premier this new film about Cork city. It was a free night that also shared bill with the local winners of the Oireachtas. The Oireachtas is a national competition held in a different place each time to celebrate and promote Irish language and culture (It’s also the name of. There is singing, reciting, plays, poetry and various combinations of these for all ages, for about 4 days. This year it was coordinated by
Peadar (our choir director) and a few others but since there was no where in the area big enough to hold it they had it just outside of Cork City. Many of the choir members competed in various events and several of them placed or came first. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t attend because Dave needed the car for tutoring, but it was the next best thing to go to the evening at the culture center to celebrate the local winners. They had singing and recitations and a little humorous vignette by some young teens. It was all in Irish of course, but they
were so good and I had heard the summary from someone so I got the gist of it.
One of the men who won first place, Ownie Mikey (real name Owen O’Sullivan but his Dad was called Mike) got up stood there in his rumpled jeans, work boots, hands in his rumpled jacket pocket and sang in a beautiful baritone voice. The whole evening concluded with several of the men’s choir (made famous by Sean O’Riada when he composed the mass in Irish for them in the 1960s) leading the hall in their favorite--Mo Ghile Mear.
The song Mo Ghile Mear (pronounced Mo Gheela Mar in Munster Irish) featured at one point the next day when I had a choir workshop with a singing instructor. The woman, Mary Mac (short for Mc something I can’t remember) was originally from the area but had spent the last 15 years teaching and coaching singing in Germany. She is now head of the voice department of the School of Music in Cork. She is a personal friend of Peadar’s and he asked her to come and give us a workshop to help us with our singing. She was amazing. She incorporated many kinesthetic things with the voice coaching as well as theory and metaphysical aspects too. She worked on some of us individually too I was too chicken to have her pull and push my lips, jaw and head or have me on the floor with her hand on my diaphragm while I belted out a
song in Irish. I have enough problem remembering the tune and words without all that. Maybe next time. The song Mo Ghile Mear came up when she was discussing interpretation. She had
Irish but it was rusty and she was confused about the song because the manner in which the song had been sung the night before had her thinking it was a march. But when she translated the words to herself it was not. So she had a choir member say the words in Irish while another translated them. Then she had the woman say the words as if she was acting them out. The song, translated as something like My Bright Hero, or My Bright Light is a woman lamenting that her hero, her lover is gone, and won’t return to rescue her from her life of oppression. The woman though, is Ireland, and the lover/hero is Bonny Prince Charlie,
who was supposed to come across and defeat the English but he never did. So Mary Mac drew out another approach to singing the song, one filled with passion and sorrow, but the choir said the men had made their stamp on that song in this area so much they wouldn’t dare sing it any other way around here. Maybe if they got up in a disguise they could get away with it…
Cor Cuil Aodha (Men's choir of Coolea)
Singing and music was also on the menu a few weeks later when they had the annual Eigse in the village. It commemorates the life of Dhiarmuid O’ Suilleabhan, a local singer (brother to Ownie Mikey) who was tragically killed in a car crash in 1991. The weekend is a festival of workshops and music sessions, singing and ceili dancing. It is really a feast where there is too much choice. I went last year and, if you remember, seemed to arrive just as things were packing up. I also attempted the workshops and ended up trying to learn sean nos dancing with the instructions in Irish. A little wiser this year, I missed the workshops and focused on the pub music and singing sessions at the Mills pub. There were two different music sessions there- one in the back and one in the front. While I was in the back I saw many choir members and had one of them came up to me and introduce me to a young woman who was from California. She was staying in Cork City for a term doing her masters in folk music. Besides playing in sessions and studying fiddle she was also taking sean nos singing classes with the choir member and another choir member (sister to Dhiarmud O’ Suilleabhan) . The choir member asked me to look after the girl while she nipped back to Cork City for an event. She would return later for the sean nos singing in the dining room. So the girl made the rounds of the music session quite happily playing her fiddle with loads of others playing flutes, uillean pipes, bodhrans, concertinas, accordians and all the rest. The people were from all over Ireland, and I also heard a few American accents mingled with English. Then a smattering of Dutch to add to the flavor.
But the music was all traditional. Along about 11pm I made my way to the dining room and settled in for a few hours of beautiful singing. One little lady was 83 and had just released a CD that day of 24 songs she recorded in Peadar’s studio. She is the mother of one of the choir members (of course) and she lived in the area until the 60s when she moved to Cork. Her songs
are all from the area and she used to travel around with her daughter and sing with her. She is still very elegant and her voice is lovely. Others sang songs in Irish that were local but there were some who sang with a mixture English/Irish as well. There were young and old which was very gratifying. They were still going at it when I pulled myself away at 1 am.
But the music was all traditional. Along about 11pm I made my way to the dining room and settled in for a few hours of beautiful singing. One little lady was 83 and had just released a CD that day of 24 songs she recorded in Peadar’s studio. She is the mother of one of the choir members (of course) and she lived in the area until the 60s when she moved to Cork. Her songs
are all from the area and she used to travel around with her daughter and sing with her. She is still very elegant and her voice is lovely. Others sang songs in Irish that were local but there were some who sang with a mixture English/Irish as well. There were young and old which was very gratifying. They were still going at it when I pulled myself away at 1 am.
Session (Peadar is on right)
The next day I had to be awake for my harp student.
I now have two. I acquired another harp student through an email to a woman in Cork who has a little harp society through Cork City college. She teaches harp through the music school and had no room for this 15 year old girl so she asked if I could take her on. I did so willingly and she was keen to come out to me, despite the 45 minute trek. Harp teachers are hard to find, so she said. She already had years of piano, violin and saxophone so I have some good groundwork to build on with her.
Art has made some headway lately too in my life. Just after the choir workshop I took a watercolor workshop in Macroom with my neighbors. I’ve sadly missed the painting classes in Inchigeela because they clashed with the choir, but we all three were up for going to an all day workshop on a Saturday. It was great craic. The woman who led it was from South Africa, though she’s been over here many years. Her accent is still strong though and when she was talking about painting in the “wet in wet” technique, I had to think for a minute what she meant because it sounded like “wait in wait” or something near to that. Still she was a good instructor and she took us step by step through various techniques while we then tried it ourselves and painted a scene from the region. Overall I was pleased with my own result though my bridge somehow became humpbacked—definitely putting my own stamp on it as it were.
Where in all this comes the work on the house? Well it has slowed down now that it’s left to our own steam, but we are making progress. Dave has tiled the bathroom and I painted the rest of the house, so it is pretty much complete in that respect. Every room needs something and most particularly, until recently, the kitchen. Slowly we installed the cabinets. Thanks to our wonderful plumber we had some pipes to hide and cut out of cabinet backs. We also had sockets
to move, adjust or install. Then our countertop was ordered and the wrong one came in. One piece was so long we had to bring it through the window and take it out again when we were cutting out a piece to allow for the plumbing. At one point it was balanced on my head and I thought I was going to be bored into the ground. Then of course installing the sink is never straightforward, and one of the fittings was in metric, and the other was in inches so the taps/faucets wouldn’t go straight on. Never mind, it all came right in the end and I now have a kitchen sink! Who’d have thought I would get excited about doing the dishes? The person who honed dishwashing avoidance skills while growing up! So we now have most of our cabinets
installed, the kitchenware all in from the barn and it looks like a real kitchen. There are still the
larder/pantry bits, the new stove to install properly (the old one bit the dust a few weeks ago), the tiling and the flooring and a door installed, but hey that’s minor stuff….
Meanwhile there’s Christmas. We’ll be going to Cornwall for Christmas to spend it with Dave’s
mother. There’s a new addition to my sister-in-law’s son’s family. HeThey now have another little girl, so I will be seeing her for the first time over Christmas. Back after the new year to take up the tools again.
I now have two. I acquired another harp student through an email to a woman in Cork who has a little harp society through Cork City college. She teaches harp through the music school and had no room for this 15 year old girl so she asked if I could take her on. I did so willingly and she was keen to come out to me, despite the 45 minute trek. Harp teachers are hard to find, so she said. She already had years of piano, violin and saxophone so I have some good groundwork to build on with her.
Art has made some headway lately too in my life. Just after the choir workshop I took a watercolor workshop in Macroom with my neighbors. I’ve sadly missed the painting classes in Inchigeela because they clashed with the choir, but we all three were up for going to an all day workshop on a Saturday. It was great craic. The woman who led it was from South Africa, though she’s been over here many years. Her accent is still strong though and when she was talking about painting in the “wet in wet” technique, I had to think for a minute what she meant because it sounded like “wait in wait” or something near to that. Still she was a good instructor and she took us step by step through various techniques while we then tried it ourselves and painted a scene from the region. Overall I was pleased with my own result though my bridge somehow became humpbacked—definitely putting my own stamp on it as it were.
Where in all this comes the work on the house? Well it has slowed down now that it’s left to our own steam, but we are making progress. Dave has tiled the bathroom and I painted the rest of the house, so it is pretty much complete in that respect. Every room needs something and most particularly, until recently, the kitchen. Slowly we installed the cabinets. Thanks to our wonderful plumber we had some pipes to hide and cut out of cabinet backs. We also had sockets
to move, adjust or install. Then our countertop was ordered and the wrong one came in. One piece was so long we had to bring it through the window and take it out again when we were cutting out a piece to allow for the plumbing. At one point it was balanced on my head and I thought I was going to be bored into the ground. Then of course installing the sink is never straightforward, and one of the fittings was in metric, and the other was in inches so the taps/faucets wouldn’t go straight on. Never mind, it all came right in the end and I now have a kitchen sink! Who’d have thought I would get excited about doing the dishes? The person who honed dishwashing avoidance skills while growing up! So we now have most of our cabinets
installed, the kitchenware all in from the barn and it looks like a real kitchen. There are still the
larder/pantry bits, the new stove to install properly (the old one bit the dust a few weeks ago), the tiling and the flooring and a door installed, but hey that’s minor stuff….
Meanwhile there’s Christmas. We’ll be going to Cornwall for Christmas to spend it with Dave’s
mother. There’s a new addition to my sister-in-law’s son’s family. HeThey now have another little girl, so I will be seeing her for the first time over Christmas. Back after the new year to take up the tools again.
