We live in a town of about 8500 people. After 6 months here, i don’t think it’s unfair to call it sleepy. Paddy’s Day is a big deal, and Ironman weekend brought out the crowds, but you could still find a seat at most restaurants, and the streets were quiet by 1 am.
If there’s any major controversy in Youghal, it’s the grumbling from some quarters about the new greenway going in over the old railroad. there are plenty of people who think reworking the railroad and bringing Youghal into Cork City’s commuter orbit (it’s roughly 30 miles away) makes more sense than a bike/ped greenway to Midleton. But the greenway’s been approved and funded and work has already started, so it’s unlikely that the train is going to happen any time soon. And it will have to find a new route anyway.
Second issue that i’ve seen has been dog poop. Ireland in general is probably 30 years behind the US in acculturating dog owners to pick up after their dogs, especially on urban sidewalks, but also on the several hiking trails around town and along the beaches. There are signs in strategic areas warning dog owners that they face a fine up to €300 for not picking up after their dog. But in the entirety of County Cork, which stretches about 100 miles to the west and is home to over half a million people, only 3 fines were levied in all of 2021. I’ve met our representative on the Cork County Council (who is an independent and quite visible around town during many social events) and shared a few thoughts on the issue. She seemed to like one of my ideas, so we’ll see if things change up next year or not.
Which makes this “protest truck” all the more interesting.
From what i gather, the coffee shop off to the right of the frame has been putting a few tables and chairs out in the street, and taking a couple of parking spaces in the process. I’m pretty sure they close at 4 pm. The only time i’ve seen musicians there was during Ironman, where a guitar/clarinet duo set up a few meters beyond where the two people are sitting in the frame.
The truck owner seems particularly riled by this, though. And i’m on tenterhooks waiting to see just what is going to happen over the coming weeks.
In September of 1976 i dropped out of college and spent the next 2 1/2 years traveling around the US, working a series of menial jobs on assembly lines, in tourist hotels, and tending other people’s yards. Like many people in their early 20s, i had the time of my life, formed the basic tenets that would see me through to my dotage, and acquired a good number of stories that, as the telling has gotten refined over the years, still generate laughs and head shakes, even from people who have heard them a few times. Did i brush up against my mortality on occasion? Well, come to think of it …
The first town i ended up having an extended stay was Phoenix Arizona. (How and why Phoenix is an amusing tale in its own right, but irrelevant here.) I think we arrived very early November. One of my first memories there is watching election returns on the cheap TV in the fleabag hotel we were staying in on East Van Buren across the street from the prison/mental hospital complex. Looking at Google Maps, i believe it is now called the Paradise Motel, and looks to be slightly more upscale than 46 years ago.
We (my college roommate and traveling companion) had used a Super 8 movie camera as collateral on the room for 2 weeks until we could find jobs and scrounge up some cash. After we’d been there about a month, the proprietor said he had a 1 bedroom “house” that he would rent to us for $85/month a few blocks away, on Fillmore St. I want to say it was between 10th and 11th streets, but i could be off a block in either direction. House is a generous description. The place was a shack, no larger than a medium sized toolshed you can buy nowadays at Home Depot for a couple of grand. We had to take the refrigerator outside for a bleach bath before we could use it, as the previous tenants had left a bunch of vegetables to rot while the electricity was turned off. The bathroom, surprisingly, contained a fabulous enameled claw-foot tub. The bathroom floor, however, wasn’t strong enough to support it, so, through several holes punched through the floor boards, the tub rested on stacked cinder blocks. We had a removable cassette deck in my van, and hooked it up to a spare car battery in the living room and played it through i don’t know what kind of speakers we could get for 3 bucks a pair.
Sometime around Christmas, possibly as late as the second week in January, i made the best purchase of my time in Arizona. A well used 9 inch cast iron skillet from the flea market, for 50 cents. After 45+ years, i think i’ve finally gotten it seasoned. It’s partner, a flat skillet that i inherited from a couple of roommates a few years later, also got packed up and sent to Ireland with the boxes that were intended to arrive here at the beginning of July, but which ended up sitting in a FedEx warehouse for over a month while various officials in both the company and Irish customs passed the buck back and forth for getting these things cleared and delivered.
Anyway, my cast iron, and a few other choice goods, arrived this week, and i couldn’t be happier. Might even make some corn bread soon.
We’ve only been back in Youghal for a month or two so I can’t be certain, but I suspect that most of the cats we see throughout town are housed, and not feral. There’s one black kitty we’ve seen on the Slob Bank a couple of times who may or may not be the same one in the picture with the blue fence. A lot of them are camera shy, darting away as soon as I raise the camera or phone to my face. And the overwhelming majority of cats in Youghal are black and white. I have a vision of 17th century pirates landing in Youghal with a shipful of black and white kittens who then adopted and colonized the town, and we’re seeing their many times great grandkitties when we go out and about.
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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.
Cork Spring 