Tag: dublin

Juanito’s Travels 50-Yr-Backpacker – Enniskillen, Northern Ireland in the Carrot Car 1995 BlogPt12

Agatha’s friend from Spain was staying at la Chaparrita. Ines was away with her boyfriend, so there was a spare bed in the girls’ room. The Irish guy was away so I was sleeping in his bed.

In the middle of the night Agatha decided to come down and get into my bed. We hugged and chatted and caressed a little. I ended up with an erection that felt like the size of my forearm, as hard as a stick.

‘Is it ok if I take my pants off?’ I asked Agatha.

‘Sure’ she said.

We played around a bit more, kissing a little.

‘I can’t’, she said.

‘That’s fine’, I said, and we just held each other. We continued to hold each other the rest of the night, my erection pressing into her back until early morning, just before dawn, when Agatha jumped up out of bed.

She said something like, ‘I have to get up for the quiet hour.’ I’m not sure if it was the quiet hour, or the silent hour or something similar. We’d watched some French film set in the French countryside where they were really into the time of the day right at the end of the night, but just before dawn, where the night sounds cease and the morning sounds of birds and the such, has yet to begin. It wasn’t really an hour, more like 5 minutes, but because of the silence it felt like an hour. It was an arty sort of film.

It was meant to be an especially quiet time of day though, this quiet hour or whatever they called it. They may have called it something much cooler than the quiet hour, but for the life of me I can’t remember.

I was too tired to get up so I just rolled over. I started to think why Agatha ‘couldn’t’. Was she married like Corrine? Or did she have a boyfriend, or a girlfriend? Was she a man? She didn’t feel like a man. Was she not into men? Not into me? Did she have her period? Or was she just not in the mood. I never asked though, so now in 2022, I still wonder why. It was all pretty cool anyway, I was, and still am, just interested. I wanted sex, but I had had a year without it. After Corrine’s visit to the Brock’s farm, and our trip travelling around AustraliaI’d pretty much lived the life of a celibate monk. Working, meditating, working, sleeping.  (Like I mentioned in an earlier post a fictionalised version of this affair is here – one of the main fictions being I didn’t mention we’d met at a train station and we didn’t travel together with my Bulgarian mate Kosio, much of the rest is pretty much true).

Of course I masturbated most nights when I was on the farm having no sex, just as I took the opportunity to do when Agatha had popped out of bed in the early hours of the Dublin morning. But I had no love interest and no sex or girlfriend for over a year.

About 45 minutes later Agatha returned, looking a bit guilty.

‘I wrote something on the wall’ she said.

‘Oh’, I said.

I got up and peeped through the curtain. Across the road on the wall was scrawled in uneven purple spray paint was the words: ‘The Quiet Hour’.

———

The next day we got into the German girls car and headed to Northern Ireland. The car was a light green with stencilled carrots all over it. We therefore called it the carrot car.

When we reached the border with Northern Ireland we had to show our passports to the British army guys there with big deadly looking guns and berets. They made us drive the carrot car into this big thick concrete barrier place in case they needed to blow the car and the 4 occupants up.

After satisfying themselves we were just some beatnik hippy types rather than provisional IRA, they waved us through. They didn’t smile. This was still a time of The Troubles, with sporadic violence still part of their recent history. It seemed to be getting better though, and nothing like the 70s & 80s. The Troubles were on the way to being not so much a trouble with a capital T.

The weather turned depressing as soon as we crossed the border. Dark, cloudy and miserable. Worse than I’d ever seen in Dublin in the few months I’d been visiting there. We drove down streets lined with houses where people displayed their Union Jacks proudly. Then we’d see some IRA inspired art on some walls and Irish flags waving.

Agatha said she knew some place on a lake near the town of Enniskillen that had cheap accommodation. It was in an old nunnery or something.

Part of my best friend from Palm Beach Currumbin High School Christophe’s family came from Enniskillen. They were protestants. His grandfather, whom he lived with growing up, still called Catholics ‘Micks’.  Enniskillen is in County Fermanagh, which borders my Grandmother Bee’s birthplace of County Sligo, which was more of a Catholic place.

We found the place in Enniskillen after a few hours drive through Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland is pretty small, especially compared to Australia – you can fit all or Ireland just in Tasmania. It was a creepy, dark manor that we found in Enniskillen. Quiet. Very Quiet. Quiet enough to murder us all and not be noticed all that much as long as you could dispose of the carrot car and our bodies. We entered what seemed to be the main entrance of the manor building. It seemed all but deserted. We tried to find someone but couldn’t see anyone. All of a sudden this guy appears. He looks like Lurch from the Addams family, a creepy loner, even creepier than the creepy manor. The type who might mail bombs to people. He wasn’t much help. We all got the Heebie Jeebies and decided to split, just like Scooby Doo and the gang might do on one of their misadventures, after Velma or one of the gang ‘had a bad feeling about this’.

We instead found a room at a hotel in Enniskillen town itself. It had 2 singles beds and a double.

After dumping our bags we went to a very, very small pub which seemed mainly frequented by locals who didn’t really want a bar of some suspicious looking foreign types.

The German girl – I guess I should name her, let’s call her Hilda – and Agatha’s friend from Spain took the single beds and Agatha and I shared the double. There didn’t seem to be any discussion about it, it just happened. Agatha and I were the mum and dad, and the Hilda and the Spanish woman were the kids they joked.

Agatha and I hugged again most of the night. I loved having her body next to mine.

Nothing much happened in Northern Ireland, it was basically a drive through. I’m sure it’s nice in parts and as we were leaving the weather did improve a bit with a few breaks in the dark clouds and a bit of sunshine. All up our Northern Ireland adventure was not even two whole days. I don’t know if I’ll ever be back, mainly because there’s a million other places to go, but you never know, I might make my way there another day, maybe check out the craic of Belfast or the far north coast.

Northern Ireland out of our system we made our way to Donegal. Which back then seemed like a long way away, but looking at Google maps is just a 48 minute drive.

I might start with Donegal next post though.

 

Juanito’s Travels 50-Yr-Backpacker 1995 Dublin, Temple Bar, the Chaparrita girls, Wicklow Pirates of the Penzance, and more Inisglas community Wexford 1995 BlogPt10

The Spanish girls nicknamed the house, in Blackpitts Dublin, La Chaparrita. I think it was mainly Agatha’s idea, she seemed the most enthusiastic when it came to zany ideas, and less zany ideas. She just liked ideas in general I think. Chaparrita means short woman. Indeed Agatha and Ines were both short statured people. I can’t recall the name of the Basque woman, I didn’t chat to her very much, but she was a bit taller.

The La Chaparrita household wasn’t entirely Spanish. Even out of the 3 Spanish girls (women) living there, Ines was the only one who truly considered herself Spanish. She was from Madrid. Agatha was from Barcelona and vehemently committed to being referred to as Catalan. She could have been a character out of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, which was one of my favourite reads. She wouldn’t teach me any Spanish, preferring I try and pick up the Catalan language. The Basque woman was more ambivalent about her nationality but definitely considered herself Basque first and Spanish second. There was a German, I’ve also forgotten her name. My memory of her was that she was more of an average height and had no obvious link to Spain. And there was Irish Guy, also can’t recall his name but I think he was the one who created the connection with the Inisglas biodynamic community as his mate regularly travelled between Inisglas and Dublin. He was a little taller than me I think, quite a gentle fella, and the only fella of the house.

So while La Chaparrita wasn’t entirely Spanish, 3 out of the 5 inhabitants held Spanish passports and could speak Spanish even though 2 of the 3 strongly preferred their mother tongues and cultural identities.

The household wasn’t that far from Temple Bar, a bar and restaurant district of Dublin. They were near some big church or cathedral. When I used to get into Dublin I’d just walk to their house, which took me maybe 20 minutes or half an hour. I never took much notice of the times or distance back then. But it wasn’t far from the bus or train station. Looking at Google maps around 27 years later, I see it was St Patrick’s Cathedral, a few blocks from the house, that I used to use as a landmark to find their place. You used to have to resort to just techniques before smartphones.

I became a regular visitor to their house, popping up from Wexford every few weeks. Sometimes I’d wait for the Inisglas community van to go up to the markets on Saturdays and get a lift with them, see some bread and then head to their house. Sometimes I’d just hitch a lift. People were pretty up to giving people lifts in those days so I usually didn’t have to wait too long. I think a couple of times I forked out the money to take the train back as it wasn’t as easy to get a lift the other way.

The girls mostly worked at the Elephant & Castle in Temple Bar. They get much for working there. Around £40 a week plus tips, from memory. I think the tips pretty much doubled their wage though most weeks. They were flush with cash and were appreciative of their mothers’ food packages that appeared every now and again from Barcelona, the Basque Country or Madrid. I think the Basque woman had a bit more money and may have had her own room. I think she may have also had a boyfriend. Agatha, Ines and the German shared a room. I’d sleep on the couch when I visited most times.

I usually didn’t make pre-arrangements to come up to Dublin. I tried to call a few times but they’d always say, just come up! So I’d just be bored at Inisglas one day and then get up and go to Dublin for a night or 2. Mostly mid-week when I didn’t have any bakery chores. I never really stopped doing my bread making activities while at Inisglas but I did neglect the vegetable gardening part a bit and became more of a casual labourer supporting Frankie to pick veggies and spread compost as required. I also helped Stuart with the cow milking many evenings. Though there were only 2 cows to milk so sometimes he’d just do that himself, especially when he was grumpy and wanted to be alone. Which was not too uncommon, him being a poet and all.

If I couldn’t find anyone at La Chaparrita house I knew I could go off to the Elephant & Castle where they’d usually be working and just get a drink while waiting for them to finish a shift, or just walking around Temple Bar for a while until they finished. Sometimes Irish Guy would be there by himself and he’d let me in and I could dump the small backpack I usually brought with me, which just contained some underwear, a new shirt and whatever bread, yoghurt and farm produce I had at hand at the time. It would usually be enough to contribute to cooking up something for the household during my visit, which was appreciated due to their poverty. It certainly wasn’t a spiritual poverty and they mostly displayed a bubbly zest for life. It reminded me of another of my favourite books by George Orwell, Down and Out and Paris and London, except maybe a We’re Poor but Don’t Care, We’re Still Up for a Party in Dublin version. One day finances were so bad that Agatha made lettuce soup. I’m pretty sure that’s not even a real thing, but we didn’t care.

I mainly hung out with Ines and Agatha. We’d hang out in St Stephen’s Green park when it was sunny, which was increasing in frequency once summer set in, just smoking and chatting, and maybe reading for hours on end. Or we’d just walk around exploring the place. I loved my time with Agatha, we felt like real soulmates. She told me she’d come to Dublin because the conditions in Barcelona were so bad and that her family just expected her to get married and have babies. It seemed like she lived in a high rise building complex there and that you were never far from a neighbours argument.

One day I took a walk around with Irish guy who showed me some Dublin street markets and gave me a bit of a potted history of the Irish rebellion which included showing me bullet marks at the main Post Office, which I’d still on occasions visit to see if my bloody Irish passport had shown up from the Irish embassy in London, after being sent from Canberra, Australia. It’d been missing for around 3 months at that stage.

When everyone was at work I’d sometimes wander around by myself, trying to find a decent coffee. Back in 1995 that was not that easy. And, having lived in Melbourne with access to some of the great cafes like Pelligrinis on Bourke Street and Tiamo’s on Lygon Street, I had high standards, even as a poor backpacker type. I tried Bewley’s coffee house on Grafton Street. It was the worst coffee I’d had at a place that claimed to make good coffee that I’d ever had in the world. They had a suggestion box and I suggested they learn to make coffee. I’m sure they’ve improved by now. Well, they still exist at least.

I found a second hand bookstore, that was in an old building that was on the River Liffey, which did better coffee, plus I could browse books. I don’t know if I ever bought a book, I feel like I was probably too stingy. Perhaps I bought Homage to Catalonia there. I’d like to think so. Perhaps I even bought Agatha one, if I didn’t I wish I had.

In the evenings, and days when the girls weren’t working, we’d party at the house. There was a fair amount of alcohol to be had and almost always some weed. I liked the weed the most and didn’t partake much of the alcohol. We did go out to a pub or two here and there, but I don’t think we stayed long. On one occasion we were in a pub and I saw on the TV that Prince Charles was visiting, which was the end of May. It was a pretty big deal as Lord Mountbatten, Charles’ great uncle, was assassinated by the I.R.A in the late 70s. I think that could have been a Friday – the day I saw that Charlie was visiting, it must have been before I took on the baking duties at Inisglas, which took up all my Fridays. I remember there being an awful lot of vomit on the streets of Dublin on the way back to La Chaparrita that evening.

At other times, when Charles wasn’t visiting, we’d just go have something to eat at the Elephant & Castle as the girls got some free food or discounts. Once we went to an illegal bar up on the top floor of some two-storey building. Because it was illegal they couldn’t open the windows so it was probably the smokiest, most disgusting place I’d ever been on earth. Yes, they smoked indoors back then, and I was probably exposed to the equivalent of 300 cigarettes in the space of 2 hours. But because it was illegal we could at least pass a joint around. I think I got sick from the smoke and asked if we could bail.

My visits became a cycle of smoking, drinking, chatting, and eating and then eventually crashing on the couch for me, and the girls in their bedrooms. Sometimes we’d go hire some videos. I always wanted to see Pulp Fiction, but the girls had all seen it several times so it wasn’t until upon my return to Australia sometime the following year, or even perhaps the year after that, that I got to see it. Apart from videos we’d also listen to hours of music, singing, dancing and shooting the shit. They were a ball.

I think I usually only stayed a couple of nights and then headed back to Inisglas in the morning so I could be back before dark.

On one occasion it took longer than usual to hitchhike from Wexford to Dublin and I arrived around 6 PM. I went to La Chaparrita and found Ines, hurriedly packing her mochilla (backpack).

‘Juanito!’ she said and kissed me on both cheeks in the Spanish way. ‘I’m going to Wicklow to see a musical. Do you want to go? We have to leave now.’

‘Sure!’, I said. And we literally left that moment. Somehow made our way to a country house in the nearby county Wicklow where Ines knew a few people. Turns out the people Ines knew were putting on the Pirates of the Penzance, the Gilbert and Sullivan show, out on a farm in County Wicklow.

They had a stage set up in front of a pond. It’s possible Ines and I got stoned before the show behind some bushes, who knows. Sounds like something we used to do. We managed to get there just before the show started, as the sun set. It was the craic as the Irish say, though I felt a bit like a dirty hippy surrounded by slightly more refined musical going Irish gentry type people.

It turns out Ines was keen on one of the Irish blokes whose family owned the farm where the Pirates of the Penzance was performed. He was one of the pirates I think. Or perhaps even a very model of a modern Major-General with information vegetable, animal, and mineral (he wasn’t as that fella was old and this guy was young).  It became apparent I was Ines’ wingman and I stepped back and let them have their dalliance. I’d grown fond of Ines so I was a bit disappointed she’d got together with Wicklow Pirate man, but at least I got to see a musical, which I’m pretty sure I didn’t pay for, and they put me up at the country house overnight before Ines and I headed back to Dublin the next day. We’ll at least I think we headed back together, she may have stayed on and ditched me like Tom Cruise did with Goose in Top Gun. Tragic. It wasn’t just a weekend hookup though, Ines and the Wicklow Pirate kept together at least for the time I was in Ireland. The bridesmaid role was set to continue the rest of my trip, but I didn’t know that then.

I was growing fonder of Agatha, and she seemed to be growing fonder of me. We’d often just hang out by ourselves, especially after Ines started spending more time with the Wicklow Pirate. We had similar philosophies on life, Agatha and I, and would often stay up to the early hours chatting. Sometimes we’d go to someone else’s house and hang out a bit, I don’t remember much of that, but I think we’d go to another Spanish person’s house near some canals. Her name may have been Bee, or something similar. We used to call my Irish granny from County Sligo Bee as well, it was short for Bridget.

Agatha and I went to see a Lesbian violent travel film called Butterfly Kiss at some point. It was some sort of arthouse film, which premiered at some film festival in Dublin. I think we may have seen at least one other film together, maybe even at the same festival. We were all into the independent alternative scene. I’m not sure if she even ended up visiting Inisglas again one time. I’d like to think so, perhaps for our Inisglas festival we hosted towards the end of summer, but thinking it doesn’t mean it actually happened.

At one point towards the end of summer I picked up a fair amount of weed in Wexford that someone had been growing. I walked into the kitchen at Inisglas one day and there were a couple of very giggly residents there. They offered me some of the cause of their gigglyness, giving me a decent sized takeaway bag. It was good shit and the next time I visited La Chaparrita we had a really big party time, courtesy of that biodynamic magic. I’m sure Steiner wouldn’t approve unless the shit was first buried in cow horns under the full moon and left for a few months so it would pick up all the cosmic vibes.

I felt free and alive during those months. I had good friends, good times. I never really needed to spend much money either. It was the way life should be.

Meanwhile my life at Inisglas continued. I started doing a bit of writing, with the help of Master Poet Stuart, and I think I actually improved a little, though I don’t think I’ve saved any of that work. I think I may have sent the occasional letter to Agatha, or at least some notes about her in a diary I’ve long forgotten, and back to the family in Australia. I’d call my mum every month or so courtesy of the special phone card my dad had given me before leaving, just to say I was alive and kicking. I also sent a roll of film back to them to be processed. It was like posting pics on Instagram before it existed, only much less instantaneous and with more chemicals involved.

As the summer went on I started to get itchy feet and thoughts increased of moving on from Inisglas. I mean, I was still enjoying the place and we had some craic to be sure – which wasn’t, as I originally thought, the crack cocaine – but the Irish term for fun. I’m sure that’s a common confusion.

On a few occasions, when it was warm, we took the kids down to the beach and spent a few hours there. I remember chatting with Nora on the Wexford beach for a while, drinking homemade cordial and then going for a bit of a swim in the cold Irish Sea.

On one occasion most of the guys from Inisglas took the community row boat down the River Slaney to the pub where I’d stopped on my first full day in Wexford on the way to Inisglas.  We had a few joints on the way, perhaps courtesy of Ross, who’d somewhat warmed to me and who had some secret weed grow plot about that I never came across despite my frequent walks into the forest. It could have been beyond the nettle forest, or close to the border of the rubbish dump that was adjacent to the property and which was the cause of a massive fly outbreak that meant we resorted to putting sticky fly traps in the kitchen for a few months that would be covered in a few hours.

But back to Ross, he had warmed to me to the point where he offered me some great advice that I’ll always remember.

‘John’, he said, ‘never drive a truck with drugs in it between Amsterdam and Britain. When we were importing from Amsterdam we’d occasionally set up a young dopey hippy like you to get busted by the cops.’

He went on to explain that they’d put a small amount in the dopey hippy’s truck and contact the customs people. ‘While they were busy busting the poor cunt for the small amount of drugs another truck would drive through with heaps in it, unchecked.’

It seemed Ross may have had some remorses around setting up naive hippies, and took me for the type who might fall for such a thing. But after my Bangkok Gem scam incident I was much less trusting of people anyway. And, even without being ripped off, that sounded like a seriously dodgy proposition anyway so I would certainly have avoided it. I’m quite confident in that. But I still appreciated Ross looking out for me. You didn’t want to get on the bad side of Ross. One day one of Michael’s Danish friends from the nearby disabled support community tried to get Inisglas to put money in to support their activities and Ross, smelling a rat, fairly violently reacted to the guy. He didn’t do anything physical, but the guy I’m sure shat himself, after getting a verbal serve from Ross, figuratively speaking, if not actually.

Anyway on the way to the pub in the row boat we saw a seal. On the way back up the Slaney River (which sounds like the title of an Irish folk drinking song) we were more stoned and more drunk and it was dark, and we were singing and then I looked out to the bank and I said: ‘Hey it seems like we’re not moving’.

Frankie, Stuart, Michael, Jay, and perhaps even Ross, looked over and there was some discussion on whether we were moving or not. I mean we were rowing so we should be going forward, but yes indeed it did seem like our efforts weren’t getting us anywhere. So Jay put the oar down and he said, ‘I think we’re on some sand bank’. And then he put his foot over and said, ‘yes, we are on some sand bank’. So we got all out and pushed ourselves off and continued rowing and singing all the way back to Inisglas.

On another occasion we’d all gone to a pub in Wexford and Stuart and I walked the few kilometres home in the dark ourselves, maybe leaving the others there for a bit longer. We had some deep and meaningful discussion that night I feel, by the light of the moon as we traversed the lanes between Wexford town and The Deeps.

Michael and I hitched down to Rosslare Harbour one night just because we were bored after doing a day’s baking, which Michale was now helping out with. We ended up inviting ourselves to some party at someone’s house and then trying to see if anyone would let us crash at their place. When it became apparent no such offerings were afoot I took my sleeping bag and headed to the beach leaving Michael behind to party some more. He joined me an hour or so later having had no success to convince neither man nor woman to give him a bed for the night. We had one of those cold and uncomfortable beach sleeps for a few hours and then got up and hitched back to Inisglas the next morning. I think Michael had wanted to get away as he’d recently been back to Denmark with his girlfriend, who worked at the same nearby disabled support community that the other Danish guy who had managed to piss off Ross worked at. He was meant to be staying at his girlfriend’s house but they somehow managed to break up on the flight over, so he just ended up sleeping on the street for 3 nights and then heading back to Ireland.

He wasn’t the only one getting rejected. But, perhaps more of that after. For there were a few other changes afoot at Inisglas.

Juanito’s Travels 50-Yr-Backpacker Zen Cleaning Robot, fiestas, mas drama y thinking of moving to County Sligo 1995/2022 BlogPt11

2022

I haven’t focussed on why I started this blog for a while, that is planning for my 50th birthday world trip. It turns out planning a 50th trip is a lot more complicated than planning a 22 year-old trip. When I was 22, in 1995 – for most of the year at least, I turned 23 in December – I didn’t think about jobs, kids, any wives, retirement savings or anything like that. I was like a bird that could just fly off and sit in a tree for a while when the desire took me. A simple life. I could just pack my blue backpack with a few things and hit the road.

Now, I research guidebooks, try and find the best time to travel to fit in with plans to move back to my hometown of the Gold Coast in Queensland, while maintaining a job here in Canberra where I’ve worked for various departments of the Australian government for the last 15 1/2 years. Thinking, should I quit my job, get a payout, travel around the world and then return and try and find another job, or should I try and keep my Canberra job, use up all my Long Service Leave and Annual leave, travel the world, visiting my wife’s family in Mexico, and having a 50th birthday party, on the way, then return to the Gold Coast and find another job, hopefully with enough savings to live off until I do.

Life was much simpler in 1995 when I was 22 and 2022 was some freakishly high number I could hardly fathom, where the Zen Cleaning Robots had taken over all the mundane jobs of the world leaving us humans to just run around having fun in free houses, rather than post-pandemic fears, rising housing prices, and, just to keep it interesting, part II of the 1850s Crimean War where Russia fought the West (and Turkey) for control of Sevastopol and other such strategic places on the Black Sea, which has also managed to drive up the price of lettuces here in Australia to $10 a head.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, people need to learn history, how often seemingly forgotten events from hundreds, or even thousands, of years ago can affect us and influence the current era.

But back to 1995.

1995

I returned to Wexford one summer’s afternoon, after visiting Agatha, Ines and the girls in Dublin. I think for once I got the train back to Wexford, as I’d managed to save a small amount of money over the last months and I couldn’t be bothered trying to hitch. When I arrived back in Wexford I had to walk from Wexford town out to Inisglas, in The Deeps, around 14-15 kms.

About halfway back the blackest of black clouds covered the sky which, moments earlier, had been clear blue and sunny. It was a most ominous sight. It came out of nowhere. Maybe not nowhere, it seemed to be from the direction of the Irish Sea. The elements erupted. A gale started blowing. Rain started pouring from the sky. The world turned black. Black as the night’s sky. Then the lightning started. Lighting strikes came down every 3-4 steps. 1,2,3 then a thunderous thunder clap. 1,2,3 and the ground shook like an electric bomb, and then another, and then some more. So loud. Whipping down from the heavens with a crack so intense it made my spine shiver, my hands shake. So terrified. I didn’t dare look up to see where the lighting was landing. It was close. Metres away close. No gap between the light and sound. No time to count to 1. How close to death I was, any step now I thought. I walked closer to the trees hoping they might take the brunt of any lighting strike, pulling my chin to keep the rain from my chest. No escaping it though. I kept walking. 20 terrifying minutes or so later,  looking at my feet, drenched with rain. It was gone. Quiet. Just for the sounds of the water dropping from the leaves of the trees.

I can’t remember many times I felt so close to death than those 20 minutes. Apart from the time the Thai Airways’s plane’s engines had failed – twice – after coming out of Bangkok a few months earlier. Or that time Luke had boiled up a whole bag of magic mushrooms that Matt had picked on his birthday and put in the freezer in the house we shared in Newcastle and given me a whole glass without alerting me to the phenomenal mind-fucking strength he’d made it. I mean most people just put in 3 or 4 mushrooms. That’s more than enough! What psycho puts a whole fucking kilo or something in? I ended up at a pizza shop that night asking a waiter to call an ambulance because I’d OD on mushies. But as I waited I saw a dog and started feeling better and decided to follow the dog to Sydney or somewhere.

Inisglas was also changing. The Buddha went on about change all the time. I would hear it everyday in my Vipassana mediation courses. Change, change. Everything’s always changing. If you get attached to things without recognising they will sooner or later change, you will be miserable.

I wasn’t feeling that miserable at the time, so perhaps I wasn’t that attached. But there were certainly changes afoot.

Nora and Stuart hooked up. Because Nora and Stuart hooked up, Frankie and I were now sharing the little space above or near the flour mill near Anthony and Eve’s house as Nora had moved to the main house. Frankie wasn’t too happy about the whole thing but he accepted it with sad dignity and continued to tend to the vegetable garden, even though most of the community, including myself, weren’t pulling their weight in that respect. Mind you I did continue to help Frankie out, picking veggies, mounding up potatoes, but it was more like a part time thing.

I also kept helping Stuart with the cow milking and yoghurt and quark making from time to time. Frankie helped me once when I drank a bunch of fresh unpasteurised milk straight from the milk bucket and ended up throwing up. He was a really nice guy. I think I’d discovered that day I might have also been intolerant to milk and asked Eve whether we could buy some soy milk during the weekly shopping run. Anthony, already upset that we had a freezer full of a dead cow that nobody was eating as we always made vegetarian meals, rolled his eyes in regards to the idea of milk intolerances. He also said Plato was dead set against people eating beans because it ruined their philosophical capacity or some crap like that. Sorry, but if the Buddha and Plato were in a fight the Buddha would shit on Plato and his beans any day, even when he was in his unhealthy self-deprivation period before he found the middle path.

Nora’s hooking up with Stuart meant Stuart’s son was getting more attention and being slightly less feral and pooing on the front lawn much less. But it meant Nora’s son getting a bit upset as he obviously as less attention was being given to him.

The kids in general were like community farm kids, roaming about like free range chickens most of the day and occasionally getting into trouble. One morning they all came in screaming and yelling and us adults all sprung into action wondering what the heck was going on. After more screaming it transpired that apparently they’d all been down to the beehives and  decided to whack the sides of the beehives with sticks, which the bees objected to. They were covered in bee stings. I think the homoeopathic vet had some lotion to put on the hundreds of stings. They all survived.

The homoeopathic vet also gave a cow that had eaten too much clover, and was thus getting bloated, some plain old dishwashing detergent. She held her nostrils and poured it down her throat. You’d probably charge someone £50 for that.

Then there was Jay. Jay had bought himself a donkey, and a cart, and was making plans with Anushka, or whatever the quiet German girl’s name was, to travel around Ireland picking winkles and smoking grass, while kipping on the cart. He was going to leave in a few weeks. Just at the start of Autumn. Not that I had any idea at the time as I hadn’t read or seen Lord of the Rings, but it sounded a bit like something a hobbit would do.

Michael from Denmark was getting tired of Ireland. He was planning to go back to Denmark I think, or perhaps go work with the other Danish people at the disabled home, where, I think, his ex-girlfriend was still working, but where he’d also get a real wage, which was not forthcoming at Inisglas due to its philosophy of not really making money from the farm despite it’s great potential.

Tron was looking into some biodynamic program somewhere else in Ireland or Scotland or Norway or something, so was soon leaving the place.

Ross, being on the run from the UK police, was happy to keep low and remain in place with his chickens, baconers and porkers.

And I, well I had saved a little money, but I wanted to save more, so I started looking into WWOOFing opportunities elsewhere in Ireland where all my food and board was included, so I could save all my dole. I had found a place in my granny’s home County Sligo, in fact around the area of her home town Tubbercurry, also spelt Tobercurry on occasions. I was going there in a few weeks so I was getting ready for that.

But there would be one big event before that move happened.

Inisglas’ main manor house was in disrepair, and since the farm barely made any money, there was no way to fix it. So Stuart had the idea of organising a music festival where we could sell tickets and put the proceeds towards fixing the place.

He turned out to be quite the organiser and got a few local bands to play at the event for free. He even managed to get his friends from a band called Elephant Walk, or some name like that, a folk/ world music outfit who’d played at Glastonbury. So we had a pretty good line up. To add to that, the guys at Inisglas decide to perform a few songs ourselves. We decided on Tears in Heaven by Eric Clapton, and two other songs I can’t remember. I was only singing choruses in those so I didn’t pay as much attention to them.

We decided for our performance we’d dress up like women. There was Frankie, Michael, Stuart and I, plus some googley-eyed German who’d recently arrived on the farm as a part of some farm stay thing he’d organised to learn biodynamic techniques. Tron was happy as he finally had someone on the biodynamic farm, besides Anthony and Eve who started the community, who was actually interested in biodynamics.

I liked Googly-eyed Person, but wasn’t there long enough to remember his name. He seemed like a good person.

We practised our songs for weeks and learnt all the words to Tears in Heaven which are still in my head somewhere today I’m sure. We did up posters, and put them up around town. Stuart got a spot on the local radio station to promote the event and after a few weeks, concert day was here.

It was a beautiful sunny day, though another summer storm threatened in the evening.

We decided that they Inisglas crew would start the event, so we donned our dresses like brides on a wedding day and made our way out for our big performance. Stuart had a nice slim dress which was in 1920s’ style. He even had a bit of lippy from Nora. Frankie, Michael and Googly-eyed German guy also had nice dresses. I was very happy with my dress, it was a lilac number, kind of thing you might see a Mexican woman wear on her sweet 15. I had really long hair, and the face of my great-grandmother from Sligo, so I think many in the crowd were thinking I might be the real deal, if it wasn’t for the obviously hairy legged men besides me. After Tears we had a more upbeat number and I went wild swinging my hair about. We had a ball.

The crowd was good and I think in the end we had a few hundred come along. We’d tried to get a liquor licence but were refused because we were holding the event on a Sunday, which was a harder day to get official permission to serve drinks given it was the Lord’s day. We got around the ‘law’ by having a game where you threw darts at a dart board, and if you hit a particular number we’d give you a free beer. It cost £3 to enter. After some confusion people realised the special number was any number, and even if you couldn’t hit the board we’d still give you a beer to console you. We kept making people throw the darts though as it was funny.

I’m sure if the liquor licensing people had come our whole scheme would have quickly fallen apart.

We also had sandwiches made with bread Michael and I had baked, some cheesy buns, also made at Inisglas, and home made cordial. Michael and I were the main bread makers at the time as Jay had moved more into beekeeping at that point and was prepping for his donkey-cart tour.

The rest of the real bands played throughout the evening and much craic was had by all. It did rain for a bit in the late afternoon and many of the families with young kids went off, leaving the harder core revellers. We ended up finishing up late into the evening smoking weed and drinking beers and wine by a big bonfire. It was like one of those wistful scenes at the end of some coming of age movie.

It was, really, the craic.

I decided to end on this high note, and in the days after, packed my bag and hitched up to Dublin to spend a few days with Agatha before heading to Sligo.

As it happened, Agatha had a friend who was coming to visit from Spain, so they’d organised a little trip through Northern Ireland and Donegal and were happy to drop me off at Tubbercurry, Sligo on the way back. So the universe was once again providing.

But just as change was happening at Inisglas, change was also happening at the Chaparrita in Dublin, and for me, most importantly, a change in my relationship with Agatha.

More of that in the next blog post though, I think finishing up Inisglas after a few months is also a nice spot to finish up this post.

P.s The Zen Cleaning Robot is a concept I came up with Rob Skelton at RMIT later in the nineties. I think it was for a school project on writing for the internet that started with a drunken night of wine and indoor soccer where I ended up sleeping at a house in Saint Kilda with the friend of a classmate who was growing a super awesome little weed plant grown from a seed form Holland.

I would have hoped Zen Cleaning Robots would be being manufactured by now.

Juanito’s Travels 50-Yr-Backpacker Inisglas Biodynamic Community 1995 BlogPt9

The day after arriving Ian drove the community van into Wexford to deliver some veggies and yoghurt to the health food shop. I went into the social services office and started the paperwork to get some unemployment benefits.

They gave me a number and issued me a plastic social services card which I still have today. I’m not sure if I actually got it on the day or whether they sent it to me later. Luckily I had enough documentation even without my Irish passport to prove I was Irish. They explained the unemployment system, similar to Australia in that you had to apply for a certain amount of jobs, but different in that they’d send a cheque to the address, which I could cash at the post office, rather than having money deposited in my bank account which they did in Australia. When I said I was staying at Inisglas they immediately recognised the place as it turned out just about everyone there was on the dole. Wexford wasn’t a huge place so people generally had a notion there was a bunch of hippy going-ons at the place, but that they were mostly harmless.

There were a few at Inisglas who weren’t on the dole. Anthony and Eve, and Ross – who probably didn’t want any official record of himself due to being a British fugitive – and the homoeopathic vet who brought in a basic income with the homoeopathic treatment of cows and the like. I think Wobbie also got most of his income from selling trees from the nursery. The others weren’t on the Irish dole, their respective countries had some sort of arrangement with Ireland so they could collect unemployment benefits from Denmark and the other places they were from. I think they got a bit more than us Irish.

I wasn’t that keen to be collecting the dole, but I really didn’t have much of a choice if I wanted to stay in Ireland more than 2 weeks. I soon also found there weren’t many jobs going in the local area so working on a biodynamic farm on the dole was going to be it while I was in Wexford.

I put my qualms about social welfare aside and quickly settled into a routine in the Inisglas community.

My granny from County Sligo had to move to Australia when she was 10, after her mother died. She worked on a farm in central Queensland close to Mt Morgan, near Rockhampton. I was sort of doing the same in reverse, but I think much more comfortable than my poor granny probably had to endure.

Before heading back to Inisglas I stopped off at one of the pubs in town with Jay and Frankie. Jay had a pint,  I think I just had an orange juice again. Stuart popped in a bit later for a quick drink.

The day at Inisglas always started with a light breakfast, or at least a cup of tea and a snack, at the wooden table in the kitchen. There was a wood fired AGA oven in there that was always on low. There was always a kettle there and a pot of tea on the go.

Ross was obsessed with having the kettle going 24/7 and used to get pissed when anyone left it empty, or drank the last of the tea without making a fresh batch. As he often had that look in his eye like, ‘I’ll stab the next person who leaves the teapot empty’, it seemed wise to make sure the brew never ran dry. I was suitably scared of Ross, but I was also friendly so I tried chatting to him. He’d often just grunt, but he would also sit occasionally and drink tea at the table with me and smoke rolly cigarettes at the kitchen table. If there were too many people about he’d usually just grab his tea and run off to another part of the manor house.

You could tell this used to be a stately home because the kitchen had places for a bunch of bells which were attached to various rooms to alert the kitchen staff to the desires of the stately home owners. It was a big place with maybe 10 bedrooms, a sizeable living area and space for a fancy table. The fancy table was long gone and we always ate around the solid wooden kitchen table that easily fitted 15-20.

Breakfast would normally be a bit of soda bread baked in the AGA, which Jay or Anthony would make during the week.  The community also had a sizeable bakery with professional bread ovens subsidised by the European community. But we only used that when we were doing the baking for the Dublin markets on the weekends as the ovens were only worth firing up if you were making dozens and dozens or loaves. I’d have the bread with jam for breakfast most days. Occasionally I’d go for a porridge or just fry a few eggs, depending on my mood. We have eggs and fruit in regular supply in the pantry as well as some dried and fresh fruit, and as much milk, freshly squeezed from the farm’s cows that you could ever possibly want to drink.

After breaky I’d head out with Frankie for a couple of hours to tend to the vegetables. It wasn’t overly strenuous. Sometimes we’d tend to the huge compost heaps which we’d use to feed the veggies. Sometimes we’d slash nettles and comfort and soak them in water to make fertiliser teas for the plants. Sometimes we’d plant out seedlings of kale – before kale was even popular – or spinach. It was still early in the season when I arrived and there wasn’t a huge variety to harvest, but we dug up a few Jerusalem artichokes which grew in abundance. Jerusalem artichokes are gassy, not super delicious, but highly nutritious and easy to grow root vegetables. Most evening meals made in my first weeks there at Inisglas included at least a few artichokes in them, while we waited for the nicer Mediterranean vegetables – although most of them originated in central America – like the tomatoes, zucchinis, eggplants. The other things ready to harvest in those first weeks of me being on the farm were carrots, some peas and a few beets and brassicas – kale and the like. I think we were getting the odd leek as well, so enough variety. Being Ireland we had a lot of potatoes growing, but in spring we could only forage a few little spuds, still plenty to add to meals though.

After a few hours in the garden we’d go back and have some more tea, some home made cordial and some bread and cheese, perhaps with some gherkins from bottles. After lunch we’d go do a bit more gardening, perhaps going to 5 PM, depending on the weather, or whenever it started getting dark, before stopping and heading in for dinner. I was amazed we never had to water much, just the stuff in the poly-tunnels and seedlings in the first few weeks after planting until their roots got down into the wet sublayer. We did regularly add the nettle and comfrey fertiliser teas though which gave the plants a bit of a drink I’m sure. Otherwise the rain was sufficient to keep them all going.

We took turns making dinner using some sort of roster. As mentioned, Tron was the worst cook. The rest of us usually did up a vegetable stew or curry with some sort of pulse like chickpeas, kidney beans, white beans or dried peas in it, as well as a few spuds, carrots, peas, parsnips and whatever veggies we were picking at the time, including the dreaded Jerusalem artichokes. Tron’s focussed on cooking nettles until Nora banned the use of nettles. I was thinking of writing: to be fair on Tron, nettles are nutritious, but I don’t think we should be fair on Tron and he should be rightly condemned for his cooking abominations, especially given the other delicious things we had at hand.

Often we’d add a few tins of tomatoes and tomato paste as well as herbs and spices to add flavour, and serve with rice, or pasta, or some carbs. There was always some bread to go with it if you wanted.

As there were around 20 people all up including kids you had to do up a big pot. As the veggies were fresh and full of biodynamic flavour the meals were pretty good, nothing super fancy but hearty and filling and never too boring apart from Tron’s nettles.

I’m not sure exactly what time of year it was when I started out at Inisglas, but one night soon after arriving I saw Eurovision was on the tele, which is usually in May. According to the Internet, the final was 13 May in 1995 to be precise, and Ireland hosted it that year after winning in 1994. I didn’t have the internet back then so I’ll stick with sometime in May just to be retro.

After initially focussing on helping out Frankie with the vegetables, I branched out a bit and started tagging along with Stuart, who milked the cows in the morning and afternoon. I got to be a regular cow milker and Stuart showed me how to make his Irish championship yoghurt. I had beginner’s luck and my first batch was as good as any Stuart had made. He also showed me how to make quark, a type of soft cheese, which, at least in Stuart’s version, involved putting yoghurt in cheesecloth and hanging it under the big rhododendron tree. It was another good thing to have for lunch with the bread from the AGA oven. I think we also made a type of cheddar cheese, or at least a cottage cheese, as well, which meant separating the milk curds from the whey, just as they did in nursery rhymes. Whey, for those who don’t know, is a watery yellowy buttery milky type of stuff, pretty clear and not white like milk. I’d take most of the whey to Ross who gave it to his pigs to fatten them up to make bacon out of them. Ross explained there were basically 2 types of pigs, porkers, which you used to make pork out of, and bacon’s, which you used for bacon. And thus endeth the pig lesson from Ross.

We would often save some cream from the milk, after we pasteurised it. You could have that on some of the cakes that people like Yvonne and Nora occasionally made. We’d also sometimes use a bit of the whey that Ross’ pigs didn’t eat to add to the vegetable stews. It gave a nice bite to the broth.

One thing we didn’t make was butter. Back then Ireland and Europe had a butter mountain and when you got your dole check they’d also send a voucher to get a pound of butter each fortnight which Eve would collect together so the community always had good Irish butter in abundance. I hope in some way I contributed to dealing with the butter mountain while I was there.

On Fridays I started helping Jay out in the bakery. After breakfast and tea we started making bread the whole day. We’d work up a sough dough or stoned ground biodynamic yeast bread batch, put it in the tins to rise, work on the next batch, and then chuck batches in the oven every hour or thereabouts. In between bakings, while the dough was rising and the risen ones were cooking in the oven, we’d sit and chat and have tea and cigarettes (me less than Jay who was a self confessed chain smoker), as well as freshly baked bread with some jam, cheese, and quark. We’d usually go from 10 am to 6 pm, then load the van around 7-8 PM ready to take the markets in Dublin the next day. We mostly had sourdoughs and yeast wholemeal breads just with some sesame seeds on top, but we also made a few fancy loaves. We made packets of flat pita style breads, some ones with olives and tomatoes, a sunflower seed loaf and a batch of raisin and nut loaf.

On Saturday mornings I’d hitch a lift up to the Dublin markets and help sell the bread, yoghurt, cheeses, bags of flour and whatever veggies we’d brought up with us. We’d usually sell out of everything by around 11 or 12, except maybe an olive loaf or raisin and nut bread. We alway kept a few loaves back at Inisglas for the community.

The drive to Dublin was nice. It only took an hour and a half to 2 hours. I was still getting used to these little countries after the expanse of Australia. We passed through County Wicklow, and got a nice view of the Wicklow Mountains. I remember a stand of Australian gum trees somewhere on the way and a few picturesque forest edged roads on the way.

Initially I didn’t stay much in Dublin, I just hung out at the markets for a few hours and maybe walked around whatever area that was in. I also took the chance to go check out the Dublin GPO to see if me Irish passport had arrived, which it never did. Later on though I’d come up fairly often to Dublin and stay with friends.

The friends from Dublin were ones I first met at Inisglas. One of the guys who seemed to regularly show up at Inisglas invited a few girls from Dublin to Inisglas one weekend. They were Spanish, well Ines was Spanish, Agatha, she was Catalan, as she would often point out. Stuart encouraged me to hang out with them and they invited me back to Dublin where they shared a house with an Irish guy, a Basque Spanish woman and a German woman, all in their twenties. After a weekend of fun on the farm and showing Ines and Agatha around I was keen to see more of them, so next time I took the bread up to the markets instead of going back to Inisglas, I took a loaf of bread, some cheese and yoghurt and headed off to their house. I started doing that every couple of weeks.

The first time I went to the girls’ house was a few weeks after arriving at Inisglas. By that stage my dole cheques were coming through. After contributing my £40 (yes it was still before Euros) I’d have £20 leftover. I used about £4 buying some duty free tobacco from Nora, who got it duty free on the ferry when she went over to London to study her Steiner education and brought enough back for all the smokers, which was pretty much everyone, except Stuart, who pretended not to smoke, but who ended up having a regular smoke. He was diabetic so he did need to try and at least to pretend to avoid it.

So I had about £16 pounds leftover each week which was enough to hang out in Dublin with. Especially if I could bring some bread, cheese and some veggies with me to cook at the girls house.

This allowed me to explore Dublin a bit over summer and party with the girls who had dubbed their house the Chaparrita. The girls were very short and this does seem to mean ‘shorty’, though sometimes I think it may have had a double meeting by the way they spoke and giggled about it.

More on Dublin next time though, I think it deserves some focus. Especially my relationship with Agatha Julia and Ines.