Bringing home the catch

A busy day starting with beautiful sunrise admired from the bed with a cuppa!  The day was cold but gorgeous, bright and crisp and I sorted out the polytunnel, removing all dead stuff, hacking back the vines and ripping out wayward brambles/mint and nettles.  At around 3pm I went down to the strand to gather some seaweed - a free source of manure. I made two journeys and now one half of the poly is covered and put to bed. The fishing boat was returning and the day was already closing in.

I then nipped to Lady's Well to pay my respects for I'm sure you've remembered it's the Feast of the Immaculate Conception! The well was looking pristine, jars of fresh flowers on the mass rock and candles lit. I have never felt the water so cold though. Originally today was a public holiday. First you went to Mass and then you went shopping! It's also known as the Culchies Christmas shopping day - culchies being country folk who went up to Dublin, gawped in amazement at everything and spent tons of money. Now that you can buy so much online and there's Black Friday that seems to go on for a month, it's not such a  crucial day in the calendar, but I bet Dublin and Cork were packed - even the shops in Bantry had 10% off today. It made me think how things are universal. I was brought up in a very tiny village in rural Essex and every year we were taken up to town ie London. The best clothes were put on and we usually met my granny up there. We went to Oxford Street to admire the lights and usually visited Father Christmas in Selfridges. If we were very lucky we were taken to Hamleys which was jammed to the rafters with marvellous toys.  We were shown where the special desk for lost children was and given instructions! It was either there, or the Army and Navy stores, where my brother got stuck in the revolving doors! Granny had a wobbly and fainted and people were so busy looking after her no-one notice my poor brother with his finger still stuck in the door!  There might even have been a pantomime in the evening. I can remember a wonderful Peter Pan where the whole, very young and excitable, audience  shrieked that they believed as Tinkerbelle started to wilt! And there was somewhere you could go to watch a film and eat beans on toast. Once, as we queued up for our booth, men were emerging looking faint and pale - the other film had been about hair transplants! Hmm, the things you remember. I must be getting old!