(Un)Happy Halloween!

Fresh from our thunderclap Spanish trip, Kila played the Samhain Festival Of Fire in stormy Athboy on Halloween night to bring us back down to earth with a bang. And it had a depressing air about it initially, some of the bad weather being in my own head of course. 

When something upsetting happens in your life, it’s good to have a ‘go to’ haven. For me it could be anywhere that I had a great time with either or both of my parents. On this particular morning of the gig, I went to Powerscourt Waterfall in Wicklow. That’s a really happy memory set for me. My dad used to bring the best presents back from the far reaches of the world when he travelled as a professor of Biochemistry. Over the years, I remember even getting a full 1978 Brazil junior football strip… jersey, socks, and shorts; also a toy rocket with a parachute, and a red toy speedboat with a remote that I adored. I remember using this speedboat in the shallow river below the waterfall, slicing through rocks at speed… magical times. I had a little walk around, indulging these colourful rose tinted ‘videos in my mind’, as my dad used to say. Things turned a little sinister when I happened upon what seemed to be a cut noose rope hanging from a tree by the river in a place far from the beaten path. I stared at it for about 10 minutes trying to imagine that it was just part of a homemade swing, but it wasn’t. I couldn’t stop thoughts going towards what would have most likely have been some unhappy soul’s last movements and their troubled mind. It was a peaceful and beautiful setting and maybe there was some solace in that. 

The roar of the waterfall brought me back around, and so I left this dramatic setting behind and drove up on the top road above Enniskerry, Military road I think, towards the Glencree Peace and Reconciliation Centre where my mum used to work and where she brought me to help the helpers a few times. My mum also worked for the Peace Movement in Northern Ireland and famously once stood in the middle of a street knife fight in Belfast, and successfully forced both of the aggressors down. Both my parents were a mixture of gentle kindness and fierce courage. I don’t have much of either attributes, as I presume these kind of mostly old fashioned traits get diluted as they pass through generations. Maybe I have some positive attribute that makes up for it, but these things inspired me then and do still now, and these are beautiful havens to visit and spend time with their memories and 'chat' with them about anything tough that comes up for me nowadays. 

Cemeteries can be lively places at times. Every "footfall tapping secrecies of stone" (Patrick Kavanagh)

*On the side of the road coming out of The Glencree Centre is a German Military Cemetery. This is indeed a fascinating and spooky place. It was a strange coincidence as I had just watched the modern version of the war film ( that is really a horror film) ‘All Quiet On The Western Front’, which is very much about unusual antihero perspective of the tragic ( and mostly forgotten) young German frontline soldiers in WW1. The cemetery there in Wicklow has 134 graves, of which 28 are unmarked. The bodies had been uninterred from 25 counties around Ireland and were mostly airmen who crashed Luftwaffe planes or were Kreigsmarine navy men washed up on the shore during WW1, but mostly WW2 . The heartbreak involves the bodies that they couldn’t identify I suppose. The nameless graves. Didn’t they have parents, brothers, sisters, children? Do those relatives even know where they might have been laid to rest?  When I think about my parents, I get great comfort to know, that at least I have a place, no, many places, to share thoughts with them, and lay a flower beside.