All in a Summer’s Week

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Cormac MacConnell - The West's Awake

All in a Summer’s Week

July 10, 2008

By Cormac MacConnell

IT was raining heavily on the last day of June, and I was hung over anyway from my Letterkenny wedding. The cottage laptops were out of form too, and the both of them crashed for different reasons as the rain pattered the window. A drenched neighbor came in and told me he had captured a new swarm of bees to add to his existing hives after a hard morning. He said he had looked at the hives and there will be no honey this year. That’s a bad sign.

He’d been stung around the throat during the capture of the swarm and was not in great form either. He looked at the apple trees in the garden and said there would not be any apples either come September.

To hell with it we said, and took a couple of shots out of a bottle of Black Bush.

So today is the first day of July, and I had to come into this Internet cafe in Ennis to write this for my beloved Debbie. It’s not raining but it is crisp enough outside.

There is still time for the weather to improve, but that is only one of the factors of a good summer in the west. The good news is that the Willie Clancy Summer School — Willie Week — is starting this weekend in Miltownmalbay, and that is always a week to lift the spirits with music and craic and eat, drink and be merry ‘cos tomorrow it will be raining.

There is not a bed to be had within 20 miles of Miltown for the whole week, and if any of you happen to be in the west on vacation do make sure to get there. You will have trouble leaving.

Fact of the matter is that there are festivals starting up everywhere throughout the west these days. I got notice today of the Clarecastle Singing Festival (plus set dancing) in a week’s time, and that is a great weekend too. The Galway Arts Festival is upcoming just in advance of the Galway Races.

On the radio and TV there is talk of economic recession developing by the day but, in all fairness, nobody seems to be too concerned except the economists and the politicians. We have our own way of dealing both with the good days and the bad days, and I think it works well.

We have been praising the Celtic Tiger for 10 or 12 years now but, dammit, when he died recently with the publication of an official report, we did not give him a wake, never mind a funeral!

It’s high season for Gaelic football and hurling now, and the excitement is building by the Sunday. There was a titanic struggle up North before Armagh finally got the better of Down in the football semifinal for the province. It was a good, tough, hard clean match with Armagh clear enough winners in the end despite finishing a man down.

Now, if you are a Fermanagh man like myself, you can look forward to us meeting them in the Ulster final. They have won many Ulster titles, and we have not even won one. Last time we got as far as this year was 1982, and it was Armagh who triumphed back then.

Revenge is sweet and we have waited a long time for it. I’ll be there.

On other fronts, Dublin’s footballers defeated Westmeath in another good, hard game. It is always good when the Dubs get into the later stages of the championship because they always add that metro kind of excitement to the mix. They have a strut about them that culchies (country folk) like to knock outa them in big games, and their supporters always fill Croke Park to the rafters.

Kerry are still there, of course, and Galway and Mayo still have to settle the title battle in the west, and Wexford’s footballers will be contesting the Leinster title as well, which is unusual.

In the hurling Clare have hammered Limerick and will be meeting Tipperary shortly in what is certain to be a sparky battle, and the so-called back door is now open for the teams that have been defeated already so they can have a second bite of the cherry.

Would ye believe that the Gaelic battles have been so intense so far that the interest in them quite dwarfed the interest in the Euro soccer tournament in Austria and Switzerland? It might have been must watch stuff throughout the rest of Europe, but we kept it in second place. It’s good to be different too.

In the end Spain defeated Germany with a single goal. There was more real action in one five minute sequence of the Armagh /Down game than in the entire Euro final. It, though, brought great joy to my Basque daughter-in-law Patricia.

My beekeeper neighbor calls me again as a broken man. Once the swarm had been installed in his new hive he checked his best hive, the one that always brings the best return.

And what had happened? A hungry mouse had broken into the box and ravenously destroyed the golden combs. I wonder why the mouse was not speedily stung to death.

He cannot understand how it happened. And not alone is he broken, he is also hardly able to speak because his neck is swelling from the bee stings. He is having the kind of day today that I had yesterday.

The sun has started to shine outside. The Dutch Nation is in town and she calls.

She says she’d like to go out to the coast to see the dolphins. I say why not indeed.

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