Looking On The Bright Side, Co Mayo

Mum went into respite for a couple of weeks last Thursday so I took advantage and drove west for the first time in a good while. My friend S and his wife J had invited me to spend a couple of nights, and I hadn't been to see them for a decade. S was heading to Dublin on Monday, so there was the added practicality of being able to offer him a lift.

After calling in to Slant's place to give a present to his partner (for her 50th birthday) I set off with enthusiasm into the pleasantly slim traffic stream...

...and ended up somehow getting lost/misdirected so that I drove all the way down to bloody Galway before getting back to Mayo. Crazy. A combination of complacency and muddle-headedness (my speciality). But I got there eventually, at around eleven at night.

The house is gorgeous. S had overlooked its building around ten years ago. It is built halfway up a small drumlin. The larger half is a sturdy modern two-story house, with generous windows overlooking the little valley, surrounded by other drumlins. The back of the house is constructed of a beautiful, local burgundy-coloured sandstone. The builders christened it The Tower, since it is rather squarish and contains its own separate staircase.

Next day S and J took me for a short circular ramble during which we visited this graveyard (above). S reminded me of the book by McGahern 'That They Might Face The Rising Sun', which took its title from the practice of burying people in this way in preparation for the Day of Judgment. In this graveyard the Council had screwed up and buried people facing across the little valley of patchwork drumlins (graves, or rather headstones, with a view). When someone pointed out their error they then started putting down the plots accordingly, so you have one row of graves, half of which are facing downhill and the others towards where the sun rises. Of course, this means that Christ is not facing in the proscribed direction. But then, He doesn't have to be, does He?

Later that day I helped S plant a little row of beeches, which he kindly named THE GRANIER GROVE.