A couple of towns over from Durham North Carolina is the mill village of Carrboro. (It may not be called that in the not-too-distant future, but that is a whole ‘nother story.) Sometime in the past few decades, Carrboro acquired the nickname The Paris of the Piedmont. I’ve only lived here for 27 years, so i have no idea how or why that should be the case. Maybe this story is even true.
I’ve spent quite a few days and nights in Carrboro, but i haven’t been out of the house other than to walk in the woods since we returned from Ireland and went more or less immediately into self-isolation. So this story isn’t about that Paris, although i expect to get there before i get to Paris, Texas.
In my early 20s, I read a description of the absinthe ritual as practiced in Paris in the 1800s. Might have been a Poe story. Might have been a biography of Rimbaud. But I thought that celebrating my 30th birthday by drinking absinthe on the Rive Gauche would be a pretty cool thing to do.
That opportunity passed, as did my 40th and 50th birthdays. By the time I turned 60, exorcising the demons of New Orleans seemed a better idea.
As we were planning our spring in Cork, I looked into a side trip to Paris, and it was surprisingly affordable. As it turns out, absinthe was illegal in France for much of that time, anyway. So yesterday I had plans to sit in a bar (not on the Seine, but near enough, and across the street from the Moulin Rouge) and celebrate another year by drinking absinthe.
We’re confined to our home in the woods in north Durham County for the next week, and i do not own an absinthe fountain, so I jury-rigged one. Absinthe fountain is somewhat of a misnomer. You pour the absinthe into the glass. What comes out of the fountain is ice water, and the purpose of the fountain is to precisely control the rate at which the water drips through the sugar cube into the glass.
On the left is the birthday card that Claire made for me.
The absinthe turned out all right, though I can only imagine it would have been better on the Boulevard de Clichy.
Best part of the day, though, was the reassurance i received from my granddaughter about getting to Paris some day. Maybe i’ll be able to bring her along, and we can visit the Washington Monument together.
We had only ever planned to spend two months in Cork, so our social sphere was naturally going to be constricted. Our apartment complex above the Gate Cinema on North Main Street consisted of 16 or 18 one and two bedroom units. A couple of them showed evidence of children, but i think most were inhabited by singles. We were far and away the oldest. At a guess, i’d say the median age was maybe 30. We said hello to maybe a dozen different people over the 6 weeks, but only ever had lengthy conversations with Barna, from Zagreb, Croatia, who we would occasionally see practicing his juggling and firestick act on the shared rooftop space. We did not get a chance to say goodbye to him before we left the city.
Some of the first people we met were in response to a meet-up posting about a Science Fiction and Fantasy reading group. We were fortunate in that the book being read our first month was quite short, and we were both able to finish it within the week, and join in the discussion, which was lively and opinionated and smart. Thanks for making us feel welcome.
I only got the one very poor shot of the reading group. I had hoped to improve on it in March, but sadly no.
I think i wrote previously about our chance encounter at the Cork Arts Theatre production of The Parish, with a ticket holder who was trying to find a buyer for a pair of tickets that friends of hers couldn’t use. Theresa was very sweet, and one of several people who recommended that we stop in at the Montenotte hotel for sunset drinks. They were all on point.
We met a few shopkeepers and proprietors.
Barbara Hubert is, apparently, well known in bookbinding circles. She was kind enough to allow a picture, and we were able to duck back into the shop on our last day to pick up a couple of small gifts.
We ended up spending time in a few regular haunts. Tabletop Boardgame Cafe, right down the street from our apartment, was one. Chris, the owner, is an incredibly nice person, and took the time to explain the various games we tried out for the first time. His business is going to take a huge hit, so if you’re in Ireland and like games, maybe consider placing an order from his website? We really want to see him opened when we’re able to return.
The Silly Goose, about 6 or 7 blocks away from our apartment, became our local, especially on Liverpool match days. Barry, the cook, is a massive fan. If the season is voided, and Liverpool aren’t awarded the title this year, he’s going to be crushed.Again, incredibly nice people, and i hope they’re able to survive the ongoing lockdown.
Probably doing some bantz after a Liverpool goal
The folks over at iElectron, who repaired my busted camera lens gratis, were also very nice. Hailing from several different states that formerly made up Yugoslavia, we had several nice conversations about Tesla and history, and they were as appreciative of the donuts i brought on our next to last day as i was of the complementary repair. No pictures, though.
My friend Dave Tilley back in North Carolina is a disc jockey at WXDU, and a record producer. When i told him i was going to be in Cork this spring, he let me know about the singer-songwriter Lynda Cullen, who was playing at Coughlan’s, one of Cork’s premier small rooms. I am so glad i went to that show. Lynda is a delight, and i’m happy to call her a friend.
Despite it being early spring, which apparently means half hour rain squalls 8 times a day, except for the days when it rains continuously, and temperatures rarely getting above 6° C , there were a number of regular street musicians. This guy had an amazing voice, and i threw coins his way more than once on the way to or from the grocery store. Never did get the chance to talk to him, though, as a result of our hasty departure. Will he still be around if we’re able to return?
But the man whose company i think i enjoyed most during our several conversations was John Coffey, proprietor of Uneeda Books on Oliver Plunkett Street. Just a lovely man. I want to be like that when i grow up.
One of the more enjoyable things we did in Cork was join a science fiction/fantasy reading group. In February, we read the literary SF novella This Is How You Lose The Time War. It reminded me of nothing so much as the experimental early 70s fiction of Josephine Saxton or Carol Emshwiller, a well i have not dipped into in too many years. The story concerns soldiers from two different cultures, Red and Blue, one gardeners, the other mechanics, who are battling throughout history creating alternate timelines in the hope that, as Feynman might have understood, the sum over histories will favor one over the other.
Not everyone’s cup of tea, but that’s OK. It is, supposedly, being prepped for a TV series, and whether it translates or not, well, we’ll see. It’ll need a lot of Doctor Who type elements to make it work effectively.
For March, the group decided to read Neal Stephenson’s massive 900 page 2015 novel Seveneves. As it turns out, we’re not meeting in March. But i read this thing, and i had a lot of reactions to it, and given who i am, i’m going to share them here. Because, man, it was a lot of effort to get through this book.
There will be spoilers. You have been warned.
For starters, let me say that this sort of “hard” SF is not my personal favorite sub-genre. But i am neither averse toward good examples of it, nor ignorant of its history. I read The Foundation Trilogy in my teen years. My Heinlein collection spans almost a foot on my bookshelf. I’ve read Joe Haldeman, and Arthur C. Clarke. Larry Niven. Stephen Baxter. More contemporaneously, i’ve enjoyed Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, Paolo Baccigaluppi’s Wind-Up Girl, and Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem. I’ve even read Stephenson before, though i won’t say that Snow Crash was one of my favorite reads.
This book, though, was a turd. No exaggeration to say that it is one of the worst books i’ve ever picked up, from its abhorrent concept, through its ignorance of any science (linguistics, sociology, archeology) that is not orbital mechanics, through its author’s disdain for his craft. It is an utter waste of time and paper.
Briefly, an “Agent” passes through the Moon, causing it to split into 7 large, asymmetrically divided, pieces. The “Agent” is never identified, but the most reasonable hypothesis is a micro-sized black hole. It doesn’t really matter, because once the orbital mechanics of the 7 pieces are calculated, the Neal deGrasse Tyson lookalike character in the novel figures out that the resulting collisions among the 7 pieces, and the fragments they will create, will turn into a “hard Rain” in about 24-30 months, which will drop into the greatest meteor shower ever seen on the earth, raising the surface temperature to 500° F and incinerating all life, including the microscopic and sea life, as the oceans are boiled off.
Being the intelligent, foresightful creatures that evolution has shaped us to be, the smartest, best equipped to survive and repopulate the earth segment of the human population, are sent into low earth orbit on board an expanded International Space Station (called Izzy in the future because nothing defines humanity so much as our ability to give things cute names). But because Hillary Clinton has won the 2016 election and is now the most powerful person on the planet, there is also a program in place to randomly select representatives of every planet and culture on earth to join these more qualified folks in orbit, and make sure the new earth to be born out of the ashes of the old gives equal weight to all cultures, and Stephenson’s disdain for the notion that, yeah, all cultures are equal, and none are intrinsically superior to any others, could hardly be more palpable. (It’s not “actually” Hillary Clinton in office, any more than “Doob” Dubois is “actually” Neal deGrasse Tyson, or Sean Probst is “actually” Elon Musk, but you’d have to be an idiot not to see what Stephenson is doing with these characters.
Of course, the program to choose these “multicultural” representatives is the most cynical thing ever constructed, and most of the candidates chosen this way are sent immediately to their deaths, and those that aren’t are shuttered off into portions of this orbital sanctuary that are not going to protect them from the dangers of space, because politicians, especially liberal politicians, don’t really care about people, just about perpetuating their own hold on power. So it’s no surprise when Hillary Clinton violates all protocols and laws and manages to get herself inserted onto the last orbital vehicle leaving the earth and onto the space station. Where, and you’re not going to believe this, she consolidates “political” power against the scientists who are only making the most rational decision about who should live and who should die, and the most statistically correct decisions about which parts of the space station should be protected against cosmic rays and accidental collisions.
As it turns out (and it’s not an accident that i use this phrase, and we’ll get to that in a bit) those decisions turn out to be wrong, but it’s not their fault, and they definitely should be allowed to continue to hold decision making power because democracy is bullshit and only technocrats removed from the people can make correct decisions, and all of the genetic material sent up to space to help perpetuate the human race is destroyed in the first week after life on earth is wiped out, and Jesus H. Christ how are we going to reseed the planet in the future now?
Well, the technocrats come up with one plan, and the humanists come up with another plan, but of course the humanist plan doesn’t allow for the dangers of space (at least the ones we follow; there’s another, break-away group which supposedly leaves to go and try and colonize Mars, and although we’re supposed to assume they died in the effort, Stephenson never really follows up on what happens to them, so maybe they’ll pop up, deus ex-machina style, in the sequel, not unlike two groups do in the last 75 pages of this book.
Anyway, about 2/3 of the way through this book, everybody on earth is dead. Virtually everybody on the satellite who was sent up to save the human race from extinction is dead. Except for 8 people. Who are all women. (All of the men are dead, having heroically sacrificed their lives in order to give the others a fighting chance. Because that’s what men do, right?) And one of the women is too old to bear children. So that leaves seven women to create the new human race, and by god, they’ll be known as the Seven Eves.
Did i mention Seven Eves is a palindrome? A palindrome is a sentence, group of letters, or numbers, that can be read forward or backwards, exactly the same. Perhaps the most famous example of a palindrome is ‘A Man, A Plan, A Canal, Panama.” Do you see how if you start from the beginning or the end, it can be read the same? Palindromes are actually totally devoid of any literary or cultural significance, other than that they’re cool. They’re as cool as fezzes to Matt Smith’s Doctor Who. Matt Smith, of course, was not as good as David Tennant, but he was charming in his own way. And the Vincent Van Gogh episode was particularly a classic. But Smith was definitely a cut above Peter Capaldi, yeah? And Karen Gillan, even though she was a bit of a waif at the beginning, was definitely hotter than Jenna Coleman, who, while not without her charms, lacked a certain quirkiness that we’ve come to expect in the Doctor’s companions. But of course, Billie Piper had been the best of the revived Doctor’s companions without question. She had been selected for some reason which no one now could remember, but maybe being blond had something to do with it. But her performance had been collectively seen as the best, and she had been recognized by all of Whodom as the ideal companion for all the others to strive for.
Where was I?
Oh, yeah, so now, we’re 2/3 of the way through the book, and everybody is dead except for these 8 women, only 7 of whom can bear children, who will be called on to re-populate the human race. By sheer coincidence of the necessity of the plot (because it is here that Stephenson’s real game become apparent, and it is even more hideous than you can imagine) these 7 women represent 7 different cultural and ethnic groups from what will henceforth be know as “Old Earth.” Because, over the next 5000 years, nothing about language will change for anybody who speaks it thanks to the magic of digital recording, except when it’s necessary for specific things to happen in the plot. Thankfully for the future of the human race, one of the 7 is a master manipulator of genes. She’ll be able to, with some modicum of success, create Y chromosomes within a generation or two of the womb creation portion of the program. And then, if we’re lucky, sexual reproduction and sharing of genes will create a heterogeneous population best suited for survival on a future terraformed planet.
Oh again, that’s not Stephenson’s game. See, as it turns out, what Stephenson is really trying to do is create an environment in which the disgraced science of The Bell Curve might actually be applicable. And these seven Eves are given the ability to choose which traits they want their offspring to possess. And one of them, i swear to god, want her offspring to be imbued with the exclusively masculine trait of “heroism.” And so the descendants of these seven Eves basically only make babies with others of their “race”, which should end up with seven pretty much inbred and useless groups of people, but that would defeat Stephenson’s purpose, which is to demonstrate the “scientific” basis for racism.
Because the final third of the novel takes place “Five thousand years in the future.” Which happens to be the time that the earth’s surface has stabilized enough for the re-terraforming efforts to be achieving some success, and colonies from the 3 billion descendants of the seven Eves to start resettling the planet. It was obviously easier to title a subsection of the book “Five thousand years later” than it was to tell any stories about what might have actually happened during that time. Or to figure out how humanity, which took approximately a quarter of a million years to expand it’s population to a billion the first time around could, on a bunch of artificial satellites, have achieved that sort of population growth in one fiftieth of the time on this go round. (Yeah, it’s true, humanity went from 1 billion to 3 billion in a century or less. But the first billion is the hardest.) And oh, did i mention, it wasn’t really “seven” Eves, it was more like 6 1/2, as one of them was about 50 years old, and only had enough time for one child before menopause. Oh, and really it was 6, because one of the others tried a number of genetic manipulations which were unsuccessful, and all of her offspring died, except for 1.
But anyway, 5 thousand years in the future, when there’s 3 billion people, who all are members of distinct “races” with distinct social and psychological and physical characteristics, and everybody’s actions and attitudes can be predicted by knowing which Eve they are descended from, all shit breaks loose, when it turns out there are not one but two groups of descendants of humans who have survived on the actual surface of the planet, one underground, who are actually cousins of one of the Eves, whose father was a miner and who was a real self-sufficient American man who figured out a way to hold a culture together underground, and one underwater because apparently although the seas boiled off during the Hard Rain, they didn’t actually boil all the way off, and these submarines, which were the same ones used to nuke Venezuela under Hillary Clinton’s order (remember there was a character based on Hillary Clinton? You won’t believe what happens to her after she lies and schemes to get on the satellite and foments a democratic overthrow of the rational technocrats) and whoa, you won’t believe that there’s a whole race descended from Hillary Clinton, and man are they just horrible people.
But this shit isn’t even the worst part of the book.
No, i’m kidding, the attempt to write a 900 page justification for racism is the worst part of the book.
But there are others that come close.
Moby Dick is widely considered to be the first Great American Novel. One of its defining characteristics is just how little of the text is devoted to advancing the narrative of Ishmael, signed up as a crewman aboard the Pequod under the command of the insane Captain Ahab, whose obsession with tracking down and killing the whale who took his leg and his previous command drives the novel. But we also get Melville’s almost encyclopedic knowledge of everything about the practice of whaling, entire chapters devoted to descriptions of the harpoons and their functions, the rendering engines, the winches that tie the dead whales to the boats in order to extract the oil to be rendered, the wood on the deck, the social structures of Nantucket Island, basically everything necessary to run a nineteenth century and understand the relationships that exist therein. It’s the kind of distraction from the plot that Tom Robbins excels at, and also Thomas Pynchon. It’s the kind of thing about which that book reviewers will often say, “Robbins skillfully navigates the Scylla and Charybdis of exposition and info-dump that in the hands of a lesser writer would render the text into a 900 page boat anchor.”
Friends, Neal Stephenson is that lesser writer.
His info-dumps are pedantic, repetitive, and almost singularly focused on orbital mechanics. I’m sure he gets that right. In fact, i remember most of them from Frank Reynolds’ coverage of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions of the 1960s. But Stephenson uses a lot more words to convey the same information. It’s practically a paean to mansplaining. And all told in the passive voice.
But, then, he passes several opportunities where a little exposition would be wonderful.
I read the 2016 Borough Press trade paper edition, so that’s where the page numbers come from.
On page 191, Doob (aka Neal deGrasse Tyson) is in Bhutan to help select and congratulate the two young people who have been chosen to carry that particular culture into the future. Here’s the quote: “The King drove him up the mountain in his personal Land Rover, Doob riding shotgun in the passenger seat on the left—for Bhutan, as it turned out, was a drive-on-the-left country.”
As it turned out?
Seriously? As it fucking turned out?
There are reasons why one country uses the drive on the left system, and another country uses the drive on the right system. It’s not the result of a coin flip. There wasn’t a game of Ro-Sham-Bo 2500 years ago which determined whether chariots would pass each other on the right or the left. There’s a knowable history behind which countries practice one system or the other.
But describing that history, because it delves into imperialism, military conquest, and some of the less palatable aspects of western civilization, has no place in Stephenson’s game; which though he takes great pains to hide, is nothing less than the rationalization of racism as a legitimate foundation of culture.
Oddly enough, when i researched the history of Bhutan for this essay, i learned that the various Buddhist nations of Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan, and their sub-kingdoms and fiefdoms, spent as much of their past in military adventurism against each other as the Europeans over the past 1500 years, or the Biblical tribes of Israel and their neighbors. But that the Bhutanese alliances with the British in the 18th and 19th centuries would likely explain how, as it turned out, the Bhutanese, like the Irish and the Australians, drive on the left. It would certainly have been worth a couple of paragraphs for Stephenson to go down that, um, road. I mean, with 900 pages, he had some to spare.
There’s no shortage of language, whole paragraphs of it in fact, that have the effect of stopping the reader dead in their tracks. And not in a good way. About 8 years ago, i read Gene Wolfe’s “Peace.” About 2/3 of the way through the book, there’s a scene where two people are driving through a rainstorm in a 1940s sedan. Wolfe writes “The wipers sponged generations of raindrops from the windshield as she spoke.” I hit that sentence, and had to put the book down, it was so beautiful. I spent an hour just contemplating the imagery of “generations of raindrops.” I wrote a FB post about how good it was.
Last year, i reread Peace. And while reading it, i honestly forgot about my previous reading. It was a new book to me. Until i hit that sentence, and it knocked me out again. And when that happened, i thought, didn’t i write something about this before? And i looked, and found my years old FB post. That’s the power of someone who cares about the craft of writing.
I hit the sentence “Forward the ice flowed,” in Seveneves, and i had to put the book down. For precisely the opposite reason as the Wolfe.
This was possibly the single ugliest sentence i have ever read in a novel.
If you want to tell the reader that a particular chunk of ice moved in a particular direction, you can write “The ice flowed forward,” and it accomplishes your goal perfectly. If you want to tell the reader that a particular chunk of ice moved in a particular direction, and that direction is significant, you can write “The ice flowed, forward,” and it still gets the job done, perfectly.
If you want to tell the reader that a particular chunk of ice moved in a particular direction, and that you understand somewhat how the cadences of language can make a sentence more or less pleasurable you can write “Forward flowed the ice,” and while it’s less elegant than the previous examples, at least forward is modifying the word that follows it. The sentence actually moves in a direction that reflects the action.
If you want to tell the reader that a particular chunk of ice moved in a particular direction, and that you really want to call attention to the fact that you are trying to impress people with your showy language skills that really aren’t very skillful, you can write “Forward the ice flowed,” and you will accomplish that effectively.
Man, i had to walk away from this book for a day after slamming into that brick wall.
Unbelievably, there’s more. Stephenson will write entire paragraphs that take up multiple pages of exposition that consist of a dozen or more sentences all containing the same “There had been an effort to determine which of the members of the crew should do such and such. And as a result there had been a decision made that resulted in other decisions being made, which had been required to make a decision that no decisions would be made,” construction. That’s bad enough. But then, in the last third of the book, he ascribes the ability to use this exact same “passive voice” construction to one of the seven races of his survivors, in a very deprecatory way. Something along the lines of: “Like all members of her race, she was skilled in using the passive voice to deflect any notion of responsibility for a decision that they had, in fact, consciously taken.” And his inability to recognize his own guilt, and the bias he brings to assigning favor and discredit to the various races and factions he supports or tries to discredit, is appalling.
At one point in the final section, he has one of his characters recognize that she is engaging in what he quaintly refers to as “The Old Racism.” Of course, she’s a descendant of the Black Eve, and she’s feeling prejudice towards one of the descendants of one of the white Eves. But despite describing Every. Single. Character. in the last third of the book by their racial characteristics, not only physical manifestations but also psychological predilections, aptitudes and intelligences, Stephenson is either in denial, or, rather more incredibly, ignorant of the racism he is bringing into play. The number of times he frames a character description with some variation of “As a member of this race, so and so was naturally inclined to believe such and such,” was beyond my count. About the only good thing you can say is that Stephenson’s racism is actually not as malign as his misogyny. He literally has one of his Eves make the conscious, verbal decision, during the end of the second part of the book where the seven Eves are going to determine which characteristics they want to pass on to their descendants (and because they are all women, there’s no possibility that any of them will consider any form of cooperation to benefit the whole group, just what they can do to privilege their own descendants against the other races) that she will give her descendants the masculine trait of “heroism.” And i wanted to gouge my eyeballs out.
No, i wanted to gouge Stephenson’s eyeballs out.
In short, this book sucked ass. Though i’d lay even money it’s Jordan Peterson’s favorite SF novel of the last generation.
If our time in Ireland taught me one thing, it is that after the rain comes the rainbow. It’s difficult to envision a rainbow right now, as the entire world shelters in place from this storm.
Friday morning was rainy, but we had a lot of packing and cleaning to do anyway. Once our packing was complete, the sun came out, and we went out for a last walk around Cork. We walked the length of Main Street and across the river to St. Fin Barre’s Cathedral, where we walked the labyrinth.
The labyrinth at St. Fin Barre’s Cathedral
We walked back east along the River Lee, then back west along Oliver Plunkett Street. Then just up and down the Grand Parade a couple of times. Being sure to keep appropriate distance from other people, of course.
We circled back towards the apartment but weren’t ready to go back yet. So we crossed the river to the north and walked out along the greenway, crossed back on the Mardyke Bridge and circled home.
The Mardyke Bridge over the River Lee. The building in the distance is the Music Department of University College Cork.
There were no direct flights from Cork to the U.S., and we didn’t think it was wise or desirable to spend hours in a UK or European airport on our way home. Our original flights were between Dublin and Philadelphia, so we changed our original, late April flight date to March 15. We rented a car and drove to Dublin and stayed at the Clayton Hotel near the airport. It appears to have several lovely restaurants, but we elected to eat peanut butter and marmite sandwiches in our room. They had hand sanitizer at the front desk, and allowed us to top off the rapidly diminishing pocket-size bottle I’d bought in January.
Soon after we booked our flight, Trump announced that anyone returning from the UK or Ireland would be subject to health screening and could only return through one of 11 airports — and Philadelphia was not one of them. The new restrictions would go into effect the day after our scheduled departure. We really needed to be on this flight.
On Sunday we got up before the crack of dawn and took the shuttle to the airport. We didn’t even stop for coffee, which turned out to be a good thing since I don’t think our bladders would have survived the wait. The airport was a madhouse. Thousands of Americans all trying to get the hell out of Dodge before the deadline. Most were young people — study abroad students ending their semester early, or returning from a limited study trip, or simply having headed to Ireland in the hopes of enjoying a festive Saint Patrick’s Day.
Besides the normal back-up of a crowded airport (the lines at San Diego airport after Comic-con were to date the longest I’d seen), Dublin Airport has U.S. pre-clearance, so you go through Customs there, not upon arrival. And you go through security twice, once for the airport, once for the U.S. area. In the confusion of arranging my toiletries for what I needed in Cork Saturday morning and in Dublin Saturday night and Sunday morning and what needed to be in checked luggage and what I needed to carry with me, I inadvertently left a small bag of liquids in my carry-on. So of course I got pulled over and had to empty the bag (once they saw what it was they wagged a finger but didn’t make me ditch any of it). I also discovered that my fitness tracker triggers the alarm, so I took that off for the second screening.
There were inexplicable delays. At one point, security screenings just stopped, for maybe 30 minutes. In Customs, they sorted us into two groups: people who had been in other European countries in the last 10 days and those who had not. Ours was the smaller group, I believe, so we moved a bit more quickly to the head of the queue to meet with a Customs officer. They have you stand on a numbered yellow square and await the officer at the desk with that number. We were on yellow square #12, next to be screened, when someone came through and said (loud enough for us to hear, but not the crowd behind us) “Stop processing people. Get representatives from the airlines out here.”
At that point Barry turned to me and said “We could be sleeping in this airport tonight.”
We were stuck on that square for about an hour. Most people behind us gave up and sat on the floor. They escorted small groups to the toilets (hooray, no coffee!). They passed out bottles of water.
I have no idea why they halted the Customs processing, or why it resumed, but what the airline representatives had to say was good news: they were delaying flights until everyone was on board. Since we’d had our boarding passes scanned at least twice already, they clearly knew who was at the airport but not yet at the gate.
Once Customs finally re-opened, we were of course next in line, and breezed through quickly. We even had time for Barry to buy a bottle of Teeling whiskey at the Duty Free shop!
Thankfully, we were not held too long on the ground once we boarded the plane. It was crowded but not completely full — we were the only people in a center row of five seats. The flight was uneventful, with little turbulence. We finally got a cup of coffee! We had lunch for breakfast, and I swear to you that airplane food never tasted so good. Even the salad was crisp and delicious. And when they served ice cream about six hours into the eight-hour flight I was as giddy as a 5-year-old.
We had another, even longer drive ahead of us, so we stayed the night at another airport hotel. The Microtel near the Philadelphia airport may well be the second saddest lodging I’ve ever seen (the first is a nightmare stay in a place in Las Vegas that I dubbed The Hotel That Time Forgot, but that’s a tale for a different blog). Whereas we were content to eat in our room at the Clayton, there was no way we wanted to spend any extra time awake in this depressing space. We decided to risk the outside world for dinner at Ruby Tuesday, the only restaurant within walking distance. It was fine, but believe it or not it was the most expensive meal of our trip! And that was with just entrees, one beer and two glasses of wine. No appetizers, desserts, or side dishes.
You would think that with all of this, we would have been in a hurry to get home the shortest way possible. But the shortest way possible is I-95 through Baltimore, DC, and Richmond. We took it to the outskirts of Baltimore, shot over to Frederick, MD, and headed south on U.S. 15. Significantly longer, but a must less stressful road. And central Virginia is almost as pretty as Ireland (but with dilapidated barns instead of crumbling castles).
We returned the rental car this morning, so our trip is now officially, completely over. Now starts the next adventure. A friend is doing a grocery run for us so that we can avoid bringing any airport germs to the Harris Teeter. The cherry trees are in bloom, and even some of the azaleas. It was warm enough to sit on the front porch yesterday evening. We’re home.
We’ve had a fantastic time here in Ireland, especially in Cork City, which we’ve both come to love. And we’ve done a lot of what we came here to do, and more: we’ve been all over the city centre and immediate outskirts, been to Blackrock Castle and Blarney Castle and Gardens and the Ring of Kerry, been to Midleton and Cobh and Kinsale and Youghal. We took advantage of living above a movie theater to see Parasite on a rainy day, and saw one film at the Cork French Film Festival. Barry found “a local” where everybody knew his name when he stopped in to watch a football match. We drank Murphy’s and Guinness and Beamish, tasted some Irish whiskies, ate fish and chips (and chips and chips…lots of chips), had a full Irish breakfast, beef and Guinness stew and seafood chowder.
We’ve also gone places and met people and done things that hadn’t been on our radar. We found a games cafe (not unlike Atomic Fern in Durham) where we enjoyed chatting with the proprietor, Chris, and playing games to while away rainy afternoons or days when we were tired from walking. We had wonderful conversations with the owner of a used bookstore. We discussed Nikola Tesla with some fellows from Serbia and Bosnia. We attended a Science Fiction meetup group, and joined their very lively and amusing discussions on WhatsApp. I discovered the details of my grandfather’s voyage from Ireland to the U.S. We watched the sunset over Cork from the Montenotte Hotel, went to two local theatre productions, visited the town of Crosshaven. We have seen more rainbows than we have ever seen before in such a short time — sometimes two or three a day!
But there’s a lot of things we set out to do that won’t be done, at least not on this trip, as we literally flee the country so that we can isolate ourselves in the comfort of our own home. Barry’s birthday trip to Paris will now be spent at home. All my hard work learning Spanish and Portuguese will go untested as we will not be traveling to those countries at all. If things had gone according to plan, we would at this moment be boarding a train to Dublin so that I could attend a meeting of the Pernicious Anaemia Society, and would have had the chance to meet our Chairman, Martyn Hooper MBE, a tireless leader for all of us who suffer from this condition. We won’t be having a cocktail at Ireland’s only tiki bar tonight, nor will we be having bagels in the Jewish Quarter tomorrow.
We won’t be doing that bus trip to West Cork. We won’t be taking short bus rides to the greenways through Blackrock/Mahon, Ballincollig, Bishopstown. We won’t be exploring the town of Macroom, which looked intriguing when we passed it on the bus to Kerry.
Maybe next time.
Tomorrow we drive in automotive isolation to Dublin, spend the night in a hotel, fly to Philadelphia and spend the night at a hotel there. We cancelled the PHL to RDU flight, figuring eight hours on an airplane is risk enough. On Monday we will drive home.
If I’m lucky, the trout lilies will still be in bloom, and the azaleas will be getting started. I’ll miss looking out at the River Lee multiple times a day, but will walk down and say hello to the Eno, being wary of the ticks that are undoubtedly starting to wake up for their spring feeding. I’ll watch some movies on Criterion and HBO, shoot some pool, sit outside if the weather is above 50 degrees. We’ll sleep in our own bed, cook in our own kitchen, drink in our own bar, and wave to the neighbors from the front porch.
Following on from Trump’s announcement last night, we’ve decided that cutting our trip short and returning to the US is our best option. We are rebooking our flight home, and should be there early next week. We are saddened by this, especially missing out on Paris and Portugal, but it appears, right now, to be the wisest choice.
More updates to follow as warranted. Take care of each other out there.
The Covid-19 situation remains fluid. As of last night, there are 34 confirmed cases in Ireland (population just under 5 million), and an additional 16 in Northern Ireland (population 1.8 million). Nearly 1800 people have been tested in the Republic. Authorities are still urging calm, and saying that closing schools and public transport remains unnecessary at this time. France, our next potential destination, has around 1800 confirmed cases (population 65 million), or roughly 5 times the infection rate of Ireland. They are expected to escalate their response to Level 3, which will involve closing most public transport. At that point, we expect our trip to be canceled for us by the airline.
Portugal remains relatively unaffected, with 41 total infections recorded out of a population of roughly 10 million. Travel to and from Italy has been suspended pretty much everywhere, as well as travel within the country. Spain is canceling most public events and large gatherings. Our itinerary puts us in Portugal and Spain between 5 April and 22 April, so we are keeping close tabs on both of those. We have confirmed that we can pick up our rental car from Cork to Dublin at an hour’s notice (currently we’re planning on making that drive between 1 April and 4 April), and that we can change our flight back to the US at no cost. So, if we decide in the next few weeks that it’s time to get out of Dodge, and ride this out in the comfort of our own home, we can do that in basically 24 hours.
Once again, our thanks to all of you who have expressed concern over our well-being. We are somewhat stressed, possibly inconvenienced and disappointed, and likely out some money. But we think our risk of catching this virus remains relatively low (my personal assessment is that it is no greater here than in the States), and there are far many people in much worse shape than we are.
Back to our travels!
Today is the midpoint of our planned trip. Yesterday we took the bus to the coastal community of Youghal. On our 2017 trip to Ireland, we passed through this town on our way between Waterford and Cork, and spent a couple of hours walking around. It was high on our list of places to return to.
We misread the bus schedule, and thought there was only one stop in the town, so we inadvertently got off 2 km from the town center. That turned out to be fortuitous, as we found ourselves at probably the nicest beach in the Republic. It was cold and windy, but gorgeous. And at low tide, flat and sandy.
I didn’t take my shoes off, but i did dip my hands into the Atlantic Ocean for the first time this year.
While some of the beach features are clearly man-made erosion control, there are some fascinating rock formations as well.
This little memorial would be called “Brandy” if it were in the States.
The story of the Youghal lighthouse is pretty cool. There’s been a light on this site for pretty near a millenium. A couple of hundred years ago, some town leaders thought it would make sense to move the light to an island a mile or so offshore. Construction got about halfway through, when the faction arguing that the light should remain in its traditional location returned to power, and the island project was abandoned. You can see the island in the second picture above, although at blog resolution i don’t think you can make out the light. It’s now a bird sanctuary. A new lighthouse was completed on the original site in 1852.
The village green reminded of nothing so much as the Willoughby epsiode of the Twilight Zone.
At the entrance to the green is a statue memorializing 4 men killed by British troops in the town in 1798. As i’ve mentioned previously, i’ve had a couple of conversations with people here about Confederate statues back home. (All initiated by locals. I’m doing my best to avoid politics on this trip). They have all made the “history” argument that removing memorials to the Confederacy violates “history.” The responding argument, of course is simple: where are the memorials to the British governors of Ireland who ordered these executions? They don’t exist, nor should they, because although they are clearly a part of history, their actions are not those we want to commemorate. The Confederacy is the same.
We walked about the town for a while, ate a fantastic lunch at McCarthy’s, in the Old Imperial Hotel, and otherwise enjoyed the relatively benign weather. Definitely high up on the list of places we’d consider living in.
When we were in the intense planning phase of this journey — booking flights and hotels, deciding which credit cards had the best travel benefits, purchasing travel health insurance — the two events we reasonably thought might disrupt our trip were (1) one of us getting sick or injured, or (2) a loved one falling gravely ill and requiring a hasty return to the States.
Neither a pandemic or a global financial collapse were high on the list.
When we left the U.S. at the end of January, the epidemic in Wuhan was in the news, and enough of a concern that we purchased face masks and hand sanitizer, mostly because airplanes are essentially airborne petri dishes and we thought they might be prudent for all the flights we had planned. But the idea that the epidemic in China would, in 5-6 weeks, become a major source of concern to us in Ireland was remote.
Now, we wash our hands before we leave the apartment, more vigorously and attentively than usual. We take the stairs and don’t touch the banister, or if we take the elevator, use a key to press the button. But we still need to pull on a door handle to get out of the building. We arrive at our destination, and out comes the small and rapidly depleting bottle of hand sanitizer. But then, a bartender passes us a pint after having taken cash and an empty glass from another patron. We are mindful about not touching our faces until after we’ve washed our hands yet again.
I had a brief bout of exacerbated asthma during the windier days during storms Ciara and Dennis, so I purchased a peak flow meter (the thing on the left of the photo) so that I could determine if my discomfort was an annoyance or something I actually needed to worry about. I’ve encouraged Barry to use it (with cleaning before and after, of course) to determine his baseline levels. Today, we purchased a thermometer. Just in case. It could be useful to objectively measure what’s going on should we feel poorly.
We stopped in about a dozen drug stores today. No hand sanitizer to be found. I did not look to stock up for the DIY alcohol-and-aloe-vera-gel solution, but that may be next if Boots does not get a new order in this week, as they said they would. Lloyds said it could be 2-3 weeks.
We may end up sanitizing with vodka and marmalade.
Things are not actually too bad in Ireland, at least not yet. It is one of the less affected countries in Europe. To date there are 21 COVID-19 cases, almost all of them related to people traveling to Italy for ski vacations (including a couple of school groups). But the first community-acquired infection (i.e., not traced to China, Iran, Italy or other hotspots) was here in Cork. Oddly enough, the patient was already in the hospital for something unrelated, and when he did not improve, they ran a battery of tests, including for COVID-19, which came back positive.
The situation in Italy is the worst in Europe. The concern about a bunch of people flying into Ireland from Italy was enough that they cancelled the Ireland-Italy 6 Nations rugby match, which a European friend tells me is on par with cancelling the Super Bowl (today, France v. Ireland was also cancelled).
And today, the St. Patrick’s Day parades in Dublin and Cork — the two largest cities in Ireland — were cancelled. St. Patrick’s Day is not a big deal for either of us (even though I spent 8 years in a school named for the old snake killer) — but we were truly looking forward to being here for such an essentially Irish celebration.
And yet, I was a bit relieved when it was cancelled.
France is our biggest worry. After Italy, it is the hardest hit country in Europe, and Paris is one of the cities most affected. We have a package trip to Paris booked for the weekend of Barry’s birthday, the weekend after next. France is already encouraging people to take their temperature twice a day, and avoid restaurants. It’s pretty much assumed they will reach Stage 3 epidemic precautions this week, which would include cancelling most transit.
At this point, we are hoping that the trip is cancelled on us, so that we can actually get a refund. If not? We are two 60+ individuals, both with asthma, one with hypertension, the other with a lung scarred by radiation for cancer treatment. It would be ill-advised for us to risk going to a city where people like us who fall ill may not recover.
But it’s not only the concern for our health. What if we were to go, and other countries ban flights from France as they’ve banned flights from China? What if we could return here to Ireland, but would need to stay in isolation for 14 days after — and our AirBnB lease runs out before then? Our concerns are not just medical, and financial, but logistical.
After we check out of our apartment in Cork on the morning of April 1, we have a couple of days on the road in Ireland, then a trip (planned, at least) to Portugal and Spain. Portugal, like Ireland, is one of the least-affected countries in Europe. However, the cases that they have are all in places we’re going. And we have a few days in Seville, in the Andalusia province of Spain, which is also a hotspot for the virus. It’s easy enough to cancel the Seville part of the trip and stay in Portugal.
TAP, the Portugal airline, cancelled a number of flights, but not ours. The cancelled flights were to Italy, France, and Spain.
So, we could pull our punches and cancel Portugal…there’s time to cancel the hotels but we would likely eat the cost of the airfare, or a large portion of it. Then we would need to change our flights to the U.S., which would also cost us. It’s not that we are not willing to eat the cost if it saves our lives or prevents a logistical nightmare. It’s that we don’t want to eat that cost if waiting a week means it will be cancelled for us and we’ll get a full refund.
But, seeing what the official response has been by the U.S. government, it has also occurred to us that NOT returning to the U.S. may be a better plan! On the other hand, we could “self-isolate” in our North Carolina house with the gourmet kitchen, bar, pool table, two TVs with Criterion subscriptions, an art studio, science fiction library, and pile of games… damn, as long as someone will deliver food to us, we’d pretty much be sitting pretty.
It hasn’t been all gloom and doom around these parts the past few days, but mostly. Ireland so far is one of the least affected countries in Europe by Covid-19, but clearly the authorities are worried that won’t last. The two community transmitted cases in the Republic are both here in Cork. If that number doesn’t increase significantly over the next week, we’re probably in the clear. But we’re making our preparations in case it does.
On the other hand, the trip to Paris on 20 March – 22 March is almost certainly off. We’re just waiting for French authorities to elevate their restrictions to Level 3, which should happen in a few days, before canceling. Portugal in early April is still on, but again, that’s a full 3 weeks away before we leave, and nobody has any idea what the situation will be then.
Meanwhile, we’re dodging raindrops, staying warm, and, when the sun actually comes out, enjoying the longer daylight hours. And washing our hands. A lot of washing our hands. So much washing of the hands. Here’s some random pictures of walking the streets of Cork over the past few days.
300+ year old rock house directly across the river from our apartment. It’s on the market, too, for €145K, cash only. If the stock markets had gone up 15% over the past 3 weeks, instead of down that amount, we might consider it.From the Rock House, looking back to our apartment, highlighted in yellow.
A few random street snaps from over the weekend.
Oliver Plunkett St.St. Patrick’s St.
Castle St. (left) and N. Main St. (right) walking back to our apartment
We dodged squalls walking back to west end of the island and beyond, along the river greenway west of the city on Sunday. It’s quiet there, when it’s not hailing. We ended up in the lobby of the fancy-pants Kingsley Hotel on the way out, and the way back, sheltering from the rain.
Siblings getting in their hurling practiceAdam and Eve, by Edward Delaney
I wrote a little about this building very early in our stay, but i thought it looked dramatic against the storm coming in. Probably a mistake to spend so much time in the street trying to get a decent shot in those circumstances, though.
This abandoned building is not on the market yet, as far as I could tell. Love the little fence on top of the wall, though
Capped off the night on Sunday catching the jazz trio over at the Franciscan Well. If you’ve seen the commercials for Jameson Caskmates whiskeys, this is the brewery they’re swapping barrels with.
Cork Spring 