Thanks to the recession, I finally got around to buying a small little house in my home town of Kinsale.  The previous owner passed away in 2008 and I went over to clear out the property at the weekend.

Amongst the previous owner’s belongings, were a couple of World War One medals which I wanted to share with ye. They were in their original envelope and addressed to a Mrs C Ahern of Higher Street, Kinsale, County Cork. Her husband must have died in the war..

When I opened the envelope, there were two little boxes inside.

On the sides of the boxes, it read: “James Ahern Dec’d”

Must have been awful for his wife to open the envelope and receive these in the post.

Inside each of the boxes, was an accompanying letter:

The first one had a Buckingham Palace Letterhead…

And the medal her husband never got to hold:

And this letter came with the other medal (dated 28th February, 1922):

And the medal:

I kept all the old photographs that were in the house.  They have names written on the back of the photographs identifying who is who, so I will post them on here when I get a chance.  Maybe people will be trying to piece a family history together and they may be of use to someone out there…

I downloaded his card from the National Archives Website, it doesn’t give much information other than his year of birth, which is 1874

There you have it now…

Ages ago I found another World War One Medal, read all about that here

]]> http://blog.shirleywalsh.com/clearing-out-the-house-973.html/feed 0 http://blog.shirleywalsh.com/the-irish-coffees-that-bombed-867.html http://blog.shirleywalsh.com/the-irish-coffees-that-bombed-867.html#comments Sat, 05 Dec 2009 09:07:46 +0000 Shirley http://blog.shirleywalsh.com/?p=867 Irish coffees have always been my forte. I make them so well that when people see me coming, they start seeing visual images of Irish coffees and begin to salivate.

At Christmas time, I usually make a batch after dinner for all the clan to enjoy. It had become a bit of a ritual by 2006,  but unfortunately that year there was a little eh, ‘mishap’ that jeopardised my position as Champion Irish Coffee Maker and since then… well, I haven’t been asked to make them again. That year there was no cream you see and I had to improvise…

I found some whipped white stuff in a bowl in the fridge that looked just like whipped cream and looking back, I suppose I just wanted to believe it was cream…

I went so far as sticking the tip of my index finger into the mixture for the purposes of taking a sample. It tasted ok, it was mild enough to do the trick and looking back, I suppose I just wanted to believe it was cream.

Functionally, it worked a charm. It sat in beautiful dollops on the dark coffee underneath and when I came around the corner with the tray of Irish coffees, it was like the climax of the evening… there were ‘ooooohs’ and ‘aaaaahs’ and ‘mmmms’ and enormous smiles – My mother nearly ruined the moment by asking me where I got the cream. I think I must have convinced myself she didn’t ask me that and proceeded to hand everyone their drinks.

Everyone started sipping and supping and gulping… then there was a sort of silence that grew…  I don’t know, the atmosphere just started to change and my imaginary bubble began to sag. People started to spit and cough and make faces and push the coffees away.

My mother then started to home in on the ‘cream’ side of things. I felt like I was in a courthouse. She was badgering me on what I used for the cream especially when she didn’t buy any. I finally confessed that I had used the ‘mixture in the fridge’ and they jeered at me when my mother revealed that it was marscapone cheese.

I drank all mine as they laughed and pointed. I thought it tasted lovely…

I don’t know…Looking back, I suppose I just wanted to believe it was cream.

The streets had that Sunday morning air of abandonment, a stark contrast to the night before, where throngs of drunken, belligerent, scantily clad females paraded around with gaping pizza boxes and mouths full of chips and curry sauce…

I was desperately trying to stop time and stay in the moment but as soon as you realise you’re clinging, you’ve already suffocated it and I was soon on my way to the airport.  It was too late then, i had to let go; the scenery was already whizzing past the car window and everything started to speed up.

The delightful Corrib River…

I never knew that identical twins were created from the same egg which then divides into two.  I felt like a bit of a moron when I revealed that ignorant nugget of information about myself in the midst of the flow of conversation.  I don’t really know how I thought they were created.  I think it’s amazing now that I’ve been educated about it and I will be smiling to myself in my knowledge when I see a pair of them next. 

I wonder if my ignorance is due to the fact that I went to a convent school… 

The nuns never told us anything about the birds and the bees now that I think of it.  My parents never said a word about it either.  I just kinda found out myself ha!  – I would have preferred it that way anyway because I would have died of embarrassment… 

Anyway the conversation sort of went off in a tangent and we wound up talking about foxy haired people. 

I have been informed that they’re ‘dying out’. 

I come from a family of six fine foxy haired red blooded Irish creatures, complete with white eyebrows and freckles, the lot of them.  I was born with jet black hair then, slap bang in the middle of all the ginger nuts.  They called me the postmans daughter.  No one ever knew me as a Walsh, it was great, I could get away with murder. 

One day, waaaaaaaay back when Taytos were only 9p, I was walking down the road with the ginger nuts.  It was a beautiful Summers day, I remember it well and we heading to a pool in the rocks where we used to swim.  An american couple passed by in the car anyway, stopped suddenly, then quickly reversed.  All I heard was “aoh my god, look at their hair! – Oh wow! freckles too!!!”  as they jumped out with a camera.  They asked us all to sit up on the gate and pose for a picture.  I was asked to step aside out of the picture and that they’d take one of me on my own later, as she wanted to get a picture of the ginger nuts together. 

She proceeded to take a number of photos of all the foxy ones and then she jumped into her car and sped off!  [insert violin music here]…

For those of you who don’t know what it is and find yourself in a rare situation where you have the opportunity to eat it, you better read this first or you’ll be at risk of choking to death. 

It is a kind of a light traditional Irish Fruitcake that used to make an appearance around Hallowe’en when I was a young wan. 

Haven’t seen it around since…

Anyway, it’s a nice tasting cake, nice and light, I normally don’t like fruity loafs but I really like Barmbrack.  It’s even nicer with a thick layer of butter on top and a cuppa cha on the side. 

Once you bite into it and start enjoying it, you’ll soon be picking at the contents in your mouth, the reason being that you will find all sorts of random objects in the cake.  Rings and sticks and hard peas and pieces of clothes…

Each object has a meaning and foretells your future…

If you find the pea in your slice - you’ll never get married…
The stick – you’d be beaten by your husband or if you were a man, you’d beat the wife.  This was an ever so subtle way of saying you were going to have an unhappy married life.
The piece of cloth – you’d be skint
The coin – you’d be rich.
The ring meant you would get married that year.

I remember one time, I was eating it and unknownst to myself, the stick was in the particular bit of cake I was chewing.  Whatever way I chewed it anyway, it made the stick go vertical and it slotted into one of the nukes and crannies in my bottom back tooth.  When the top teeth came down from above in the midst of the chewing, it shafted the stick further into my tooth and I’ll never forget the pain it caused me.  I had to yank the stick out from my tooth which caused it to bleed and it kind of put spinters into my gum.  I couldn’t chew on that side of my mouth for about a month after…

You’d never get away with having such a cake on the market these days…

Bring back the Barmbrack!

It’s the most lovely thing in the world to come home after a long day, give your hands a soothing soapy wash and then settle down to a good bit of thumb sucking.

I suck the thumb on my right hand only.  I know of people who suck both thumbs, but I really only suck my right thumb.

Once or twice I have had to suck my left thumb due to a burn or cut on my right thumb and I can only describe the experience as weird.  It’s like wearing your left shoe on your right foot.  It just didn’t feel right…

My Dad really badgered me to give up sucking my thumb when I was in my teens, I suppose he felt that it was going too far.  When we’d be sitting looking at the TV, he wouldn’t let me suck my thumb so I used to sit behind a plant and do it there.

I have been thinking about how lucky I am to have my thumb and to enjoy it so much.  It really is an incredibly unique experience and I feel at one with other adult thumb-suckers.  I always smile to myself when I spot them.  They are as rare as albinos, but they are out there.

Once I had a bad skin disorder on my thumb.  I mentioned it to the doctor in passing, when I was in for another ailment which I won’t go into now, I’m sure you wouldn’t be interested in that anyway.  The Doctor told me that the digestive juices are at work when my thumb is in my mouth and it’s causing the skin to be broken down.  I didn’t believe a word of that and sucked my thumb until it felt well again.  It’s been fine ever since but it’s down to the bone now.

That’s alright though…

I decided to get a big stick and try to separate the hedgerow to see if i could find where the sound was coming from.  As I poked the bushes I heard another cat meowing and realised there was more than one in there somewhere.  I wondered if maybe a cat had given birth in there.

A little while later, I spotted a plastic bag off to the left.  I poked it with the stick and it felt like there was some meat or something in there.  I began to climb down the wall so I could get closer to the bag.

I was then joined by some tourists who asked me what i was doing.  They got involved and held onto my arm while I fished out the plastic bag.

I managed to hook it with the stick and put it on the wall.  One of the girls opened the knot on top.  There were two sheets of newspaper inside which we unwrapped to reveal two tiny kittens clutching onto each other for dear life.

I asked the tourists if there was anywhere we could take them but they said there would be no such place in Gozo.  We found a clearing within the hedgerow and lay the newspaper out flat so they could at least breathe freely. 

I made the decision to walk away then as I didn’t know what else I could do.

I don’t know their fate after that…

When I was in my twenties (I living in Seattle), I wanted one of these:

An ol’ beat up 60’s Ford Mustang…

I never got any of the above automobiles – Just fantasised about them.  Once I so excited because I had almost saved enough money to buy a campervan so I went out and bought one of these in anticipation:

But I never wound up buying the Campervan. 

Non descript cars came and went… I don’t own a set of four wheels anymore.

Neither of them cost me a peanut…

Anyway, I was waiting in the foyer of the Irish Centre, waiting for my class and having a suppa soup when I looked up on the wall and I saw a painting of what had to be the statue of Holy Mary in Ballinspittle. The reason I say it had to be of Ballinspittle, was because there was an almerciful crowd gathered round her, arms folded all staring up at her expectedly. Among the crown of people was a “Mr Soft Whip” Ice cream van…

When I saw the painting, I said to myself “jeez thas funny now” and I only thinking of the moving statue’s the other day.

What in the name of God came over Ireland in the early eighties that led everyone in the country to believe that the Holy Statues were coming to life? What kind of mental state were we in at all? Ballinspittle didn’t know what hit it, normally a sleepy ol’ village; all of a sudden there were people coming in bus loads, travelling for hundreds of miles to the grotto, they had to pour concrete over the adjacent field to make a car park, the roads were widened to accommodate the traffic, two new jaxes were built, a couple of telephone boxes were put up…

It was mass hallucination at the grotto, everyone standing around, the rosary blasted out of the loud speakers and the crowds joined in, in prayer.

In its peak, prayers burst into hymns, it was like a big concert.

The prayers were interrupted now and then by murmurs such as “She nodded” or “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, there’s a tear rolling down her cheek, la”

People were claiming to have been cured and everything. Some deaf one said that she came home with her hearing intact, I don’t know…

I think it all came to abrupt end anyway, when a few fiends felt it was getting out of control and took the matter into their own hands. In full view of everyone, they climbed up to the statue wielding an axe and hammer, they took a few chunks out of the face of the statue, everyone sort of slowly emerged from the trance after that. The statue was replaced but the people stopped coming.

It’s the kind of thing you think back of and say to yourself: “did that really happen?…”

For proof that it all happened, watch this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZjM83wZmWw
 

I’d love to buy a statue… Can some one buy me one – I want a life size one…

A Naval Service spokesman said the VMS was introduced under EU regulations to monitor fishing activity in EU waters and was never intended as an emergency service for trawlers.  While I understand this statement, it doesn’t sway my belief that on a stormy night the lads at Haulbowline could have been a little more vigilant.  I mean, on a human level; to keep a watch out for your fellow man, because you can, because you are sitting in front of equipment that makes this possible, then why not?  Because it’s not intended as an emergency service???

The last radio contact with Ger was at 11.55pm on January 11^th.  The search operation for the Honeydew II was only launched about 6pm on January 12^th

Tomasz Jagla