Alessandra

I have recently finished reading this book. It is the story of Alessandra Cecchi, a child of the Renaissance, who after an eventful early life retires to a convent. As a Sister with a talent for drawing she undertakes to decorate the walls of the convent chapel with frescoes depicting the lives of the Virgin and John the Baptist. When finished she surveys what had become a major component of her life's work.

"My chapel is sadly mediochre. Should future conniosseurs of the new art (the Renaissance)  come upon it they will glance at it for a moment and then pass on, noting it as an attempt by an inferior artist in a superior age. Yes, it has a feel for colour(that passion I never lost), and there are times when my father's cloth moves like water and the occasional face speaks of character as well as paint.
But the compositions are clumsy and many of the figures, for all of my care, remain staid and lacking in life. If kindness and honesty were to be held in mutual regard, one might say it was the work of an older artist without training who did her best and deserves to be remembered as much for her enthusiasm as for her achievement.
And if that sounds like a statement of failure from an old woman at the end of her life, then you must believe me when I tell you it is absolutely not.
Because if you were to put it with all the others; all the wedding panels and the birth trays and the marriage chests and the frescoes and the altar pieces and the panel paintings that were produced in those heady days when we brought man into contact with God in a way he had never been before... then you would see it for what it is: a single voice lost inside a great chorus of others.
And such is the sound that the chorus made together, that to have been part of it all was enough for me."  

As a creator of various artistic motifs I can relate to this.

Some Shelves From My Trinket Cabinet

 Here are some shelves from my trinket cabinet....interesting and ordinary items that have accumulated there over time. The stories of many are listed individually on older posts but now you know where they live.

Stuff I have in my Trinket Cabinet

I have lots of random trinkets with no particular story attached to them. They are just things I like.

 

A nice shiny bell.....almost impossible to pass without pinging it.

Everyone likes rubber duckies.

Coloured pencils from twigs....I still haven't figured out how they got the pigment right through the centre of the bendy bits.

Two startled sheep with nice wooly jumpers and hats.

 The latent excitement of a catherine wheel.

Choirboys

It was with trepidation that I went to audition for the St. John's National School Choir. Brother Einard was the choir master and I always was a bit afraid of him even though I never had him for class. This test of suitability for the choir was not voluntary. Every boy in 5th. class was given this trial hearing, and failure to progress meant you were dispatched to the "crows nest". I succeeded, and the blemish of being a branded a crow was no longer a possibility.
We rehearsed in the choir master's classroom. There were tiered benches on which we stood to practice and for the most part it was very enjoyable, and Brother Einard was not the tyrant I had been expecting. Occasionally, of course, he flew off the handle but mostly he was patient and pleasant but seldom smiled, unless he was conducting us in competition. In competition,his face took on a myriad array of playful expressions, which had the desired effect. We all smiled back. 
We learnt the hymns for Requiem Mass: the Tantum Ergo and Lux Aeterna and sometimes we sang them in the cathedral in Sligo at funeral Masses. We never knew what the words meant but the haunting sound of these Gregorian chants remains with me still.
We learned other choral songs too, for the Feis, which was a singing competition in the town. My favourites were: The Trout, The Dying Swan, Brochan Lom (a Scottish Irish song about porridge!), Oklahoma and many others. We were winners at every Feis  but the highlight was when we won the National Champioship in Mullingar, County Westmeath, in 1969.
One of my most pleasant memories was singing in St. Patrick's Night concert in the Gilhooly Hall. We were decked out in our white shirts, black trousers and sky blue ties (Our Lady's colours). My mother was in one of the front rows and I caught a glimpse of her, enjoying our performance, while Brother Einard was, of course smiling maniacally at us, as he conducted. Afterwards I sat in the audience with her, and we chewed our way through a bag of Emerald chocolate toffees very contentedly.
As Christmas comes around, and the clear, frosty weather sets in I am reminded of the times that the choir travelled around the housing estates of Sligo, singing carols on a trailer pulled by a tractor. We were well wrapped up, and I was a happy ten year old as we sang out: Adeste Fidelis, Away in a Manger and Silent Night. There was a sprinkling of red-glass, Christmas candle lanterns amongst us too, to add to the atmosphere and the sound of our voices seemed to travel off into the distance. A team of collectors knocked on each door and gathered together donations that would later be distributed to the poor of the area, by the St. Vincent de Paul Society. On Christmas Eve we sang outside Cavendish's, in O' Connell Street, to the great enjoyment of the passing public, who smiled benevolently at us in this season of goodwill. Brother Einard's smile grew broader too as the afternoon grew to a close. Someone said he had a wee tradition of dropping in to the nearby pub for a warming hot whiskey. He deserved it.
 

My proud inscription on the back of the picture above.

These Hands

These are my hands after working on the set of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat for a few hours. There was a time when it was not unusual to see the colours of my day's painting spattered on me after painting a backdrop, flats or props in some theatre. Now it is a novelty and I am enjoying it thoroughly. I get caught up in the act of creating, and it is exhilirating, especially when it is progressing well.

 

Sunnyfresh

I don't remember when I first started working on Sunnyfresh farm. I think I was thirteen or fourteen years old. I cycled there with the Morrison, twin brothers, Sean and Gerard, and their younger brother Martin. It must have been late Autumn because it was still dark when we set off to begin work at eight o clock. I spent most of that first day digging.
Sunnyfresh was a tomato farm and at the time there were about three acres under glass. We started at eight and finished at six in the evening. I worked Saturdays during school term and then five days during the holidays.
It was interesting seeing the season develop, watching the two leaf seedlings grow to large fruit bearing plants. We were paid sixteen shillings per day, which in today's money would be a little less than a Euro. It kept me in pocket money and I even felt proud to be grown up enough to contribute to the family budget at home.
There was great cameraderie between the diverse range of employees. A lot of the men were elderly, small farmers, who worked there to supplement their income.  Others were younger men from the town. The work was hard, especially in the Summer when the weather was hot outside and very humid in the glasshouses themselves.
There were various jobs to be done, watering, weeding, de-leafing, removing sideshoots but mostly it is the picking of the fruit I remember. Racing to see who could get to the end of their path first. The tomatoes were picked when they were yellow-orange in colour and it was important to make sure the green calyx stayed on the  fruit. At the end of  a day's picking our hands  were green and the best thing to clean them was a squashed green tomato.  Even with  a lot of scrubbing our hands never came fully  clean and we were left, each evening, with a brown stain impregnated into our skin.  One of the perks,  was that we got to take home tomatoes any evening, not that many of us ate them, having looked at them all Summer.
The farm grew by another acre during my time there but when the oil crisis hit in the 1970s it nearly marked the end of the business. It was getting too expensive to heat the  glasshouses. There were three managers, an Irish man called Fred Duffy, an English man, Bill Dray and a Dutch man, Jan Moret. I think it was Duffy who got the  brainwave to buy up all the waste oil in garages. Mostly they got it free. It was collected in a truck and taken to the farm where it was passed through a long pipe that had a series of sieves or filters built ino it. When the oil came out the end it could be used to heat the glasshouses, for practically nothing. As time passed the managers discovered that they had a surplus so they began to sell it to other businesses. Soon they then realised there was more profit in selling this oil, than burning it, to grow tomatoes. Sunnyfresh was wound up and a national company, Atlas Oil was formed.
The site of Sunnyfresh Farm is now a housing estate and the ghosts of some of the former workers maybe wander through it occasionally.
Two of the lads, Sean and Gerard, that I started with that first morning have since passed on, but I have great memories of us learning to drive the old dumper and tractor and planning camping trips to Rosses Point. We told jokes planned our futures and discussed our favourite music and  clothes. Mostly we  talked about the girls we danced with at the weekend disco and wondered if any of them would be in the Mayfair Cafe that night.
I have especially warm memories of breakfasts with my father, Jerry, quietly eating porridge and drinking tea, while the rest of the house was asleep.
In all I suppose I worked there for about four years and I have always thought about growing my own tomatoes. This Summer I did. My small house of four plants grew well and the crop yielded lots of small, sweet cherry tomatoes. It is now the end of August and there are still a few trusses to be picked and enjoyed over the coming weeks.

  I also grew a few strawberries.

Opening Lines

Recently I came upon an article on famous opening lines.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
- Charles Dickens: A Tale Of Two Cities.

I was born in the year 1632, in the City of York, of a good family, tho' not of that city, my Father being a Foreigner of  Bremen, who settled first at Hull.
- Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderlay again.
-Daphne Du Maurier: Rebecca

Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent from London during the war because of the air-raids.
-C.S. Lewis: The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
-George Orwell: 1984

Once when I was six years old I saw a magnificent picture in a book about the jungle called True Stories.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery: The Little Prince

Once Upon A Time.
-Author Unknown: 14th. Century

I remembered back to when striking mental images became clearly perceptible to me having listened to and read  a passage of writing. I must have been about thirteen and was in secondary school. My English teacher was a wonderful gentleman called Brendan O' Connor. He read short stories for us, from our text book, an anthology of short stories: Exploring English 1. The dull, uninteresting title belied the magic that was conjured up for  me, on the pages within its covers.
The sun, seemed always to stream in through the classroom windows, and flood the room with light as I listened to the vivid words of Irish writers like, Liam O' Flaherty, Frank O' Connor, Sean O' Faolain, Mary Lavin and Michael Mc Laverty .
I laughed at the uplifting humour in the story of  young Jackie's, First Confession.
I was amazed in the sad account of The Story of the Widow's Son, that there were two endings.
My favourite short story was The Wild Duck's Nest by Michael Mc Laverty.
It too, has a wonderful, opening sentence and continues....

The sun was setting, spilling gold light on the low western hills of Rathlin Island. A small boy walked jauntily along a hoof-printed path that wriggled between the folds of these hills and opened into a crater-like valley on the cliff-top. Presently he stopped as if remembering something, then suddenly he left the path, and began running up one of the hills. When he reached the top he was out of breath and stood watching streaks of light radiating from golden-edged clouds, the scene reminding him of a picture of the Transfiguration......

The enchantment of the story has always stayed with me, and I still appreciate the enjoyment I derived from hearing these tales. Some thirty five or so years after listening to the telling of The Wild Duck's Nest I boarded the ferry at Ballycastle on the north Antrim coast and travelled the six miles to Church Bay on Rathlin Island.