6 am. A blustery Saturday morning here, with overcast skies and wind whipping the shrubbery outside my window. Instead of a trip to Dublin this morning I am staying put to have lunch at Furey’s with a new relative, or at least a relative that’s new to me. The lunch was organized by Grattan, who is excited to bring together two people with historical connections, however fragile. Our bloodline is shared through Martha Williams, who married a Tyrrell in the eighteenth century and later became the stuff of legend when she refused to submit to a rebel attack on her stagecoach during the 1798 uprising. There is a portrait of Martha hanging at Ballindoolin that has been rather zealously restored through the generosity of another Grattan, this one of the Canadian Tyrrells. The portrait is on the wall above a stuffed falcon in the Ballindoolin dining room. In the portrait Martha has a demure countenance. She wears a lace-trimmed blue silk dress and matching cap. The hands that are lightly clasped across her lap are out of proportion with the rest of her body; they look as if they belong to someone much bigger than this delicate pink lady. The assumption is that the portraitist who painted Martha finished the face and passed along the rest of the painting to an assistant, with clumsy results.
Xandria, Martha’s contemporary relative, raises alpacas. She lives in London but travels to Ireland a couple of times a month to check on them. As it turns out, she is practically my neighbor; her alpaca farm is just up the road. I’ve gone by the place a few times and never seen any alpacas lurking about; they would seem almost shocking in a countryside that is dominated by placid herds of cattle with a few horses scattered in.
This will be my third lunch out this week. Lunch, eaten generally no earlier than 1pm and often quite a bit later, is a popular meal here. Part of the reason is historical: midday dinner was the main meal here until very recently. Nodlaig, who is ninety this year, still has her dinner at midday. For traditional Ireeland tea is the late afternoon or evening meal. Nodlaig’s tea often consists of bread and butter, a biscuit or cake, and maybe an egg. Her dinner is the traditional Irish meal of meat, potato and veg, followed by some kind of sweet. At Furey’s today there will be soup as a starter, a meat special, some kind of curry, a steak sandwich served open-faced, burgers. If you order a plain burger that’s exactly what you get: ground beef between two buns, with bottles of catsup and mayonnaise on the table. No lettuce, no pickle (Irish food barely acknowledges the existence of the pickle). The chips at Furey’s are, I’m told, among the best around. Chips here are thick and cut into different shapes. They are slightly greasy and very soft and don’t remotely resemble french fries in the States. Here they joke about MacDonald’s fries, saying that MacDonald’s has managed to eliminate the potato from its fries, since those skinny crisp sticks don’t in any way acknowledge the true nature of the potato, about which the Irish may know more than anyone else.
Of course in the urban areas lunch would be updated—salads, wraps, soups, light sandwiches—but here in the country salad for lunch can be a hard sell. Having the leisure to linger over lunch is the real pleasure here and a rhythm that is difficult to get used to.
My lunch with Xandria, who is a naturopath with a long string of degrees and some twenty books under her belt, was immediately followed by an invitation to visit the alpaca farm the next day. I had plans for a hike in the Slievebloom Mountains, but the weather was foul when I got up, cold with the threat of gale-force winds, and I opted for a trip to Marks & Spencer to do some shopping. I had stupidly left my coat in the States and needed something to replace it. Marks & Spencer also has a lovely food hall that sells lots of prepared meals and some hard to come by British cheeses. When I got back I headed up the road for Xandria’s. This was one of her open days at the farm. The idea was to watch the alpacas mating, a rather unlikely scenario that involves the female sitting down and the male making loud, high-pitched yodels. Xandria insisted in pointing out to all and sundry the size of the male’s thing, as she said, and although that was more information that I wanted it was pretty tiny.
Xandria’s house is quite modest, a wooden cottage built from a kit by a couple who evidently took Xandria in at about the age of 18 after her difficult childhood. The couple have since both died; the alpacas came about because a friend wanted to start a herd on Xandria’s property and in the way of these things, the friend move on and Xandria found a new part-time passion. After the rest of her visitors left Xandria and I had a glass of wine in her sitting room. The room is filled with the heritage of her adoptive couple, for whom she has an obvious abiding love and gratitude. Outside the alpacas, not visible from the house and back to being silent now that the excitement of the coupling is finished, turn their absurd little faces toward me as I pass by them on the way back up the driveway.
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