I am, I will have to admit, a tad tentative about writing this. I'm not sure where October went - it wasn't for a lack of topics. In fact the opposite; there was so much going on that I figuratively threw my hands up and kind of hoped the blog would write itself.
It didn't, but it took me nearly two months to figure that out.
What spurred this 'comeback' was an anxious phone call from a Japanese friend last Friday wondering if everything was alright. My contract at the university finishes at the end of next March and he was concerned that I might have already departed for foreign shores given my continuing online silence.
Not yet, but as the dark days of winter descend, I may well give the idea some serious thought. And Sanae will no doubt tell me to 'seriously cop on' reminding of my fatherly and husbandly responsibilities, and enough already with the whiny, introspective shite. She'll probably add something about the snow needing to be cleared from in front of the house.
So, we're back and we will have to go back as I have a lot to catch up on. I'll take it in reverse chronological order, beginning with last weekend. (This weekend mainly involved surfing and applying a couple of gallons of wood preservative to the wooden siding on the exterior of the house.)
It was unseasonably mild and misty last Sunday so Cian and myself decided to go for a walk. Well, I wanted to go for a walk and Cian just wanted to get out of the house in case Mammy made him do any more Japanese homework.
First off we stopped at the spring at the end of the road where we found a rather large and lethargic cuttlefish. I think the old boy was preparing to shuffle off to the great aquarium in the sky. Cian had found a baby cuttlefish here the week previously which was duly added to our pet collection (currently: one goldfish, three cuttlefish, and eight loaches. Over the summer this was augmented by some seasonal and very noise crickets and a stag beetle).
After that we headed up into the hills behind our house. We initially planned to follow the gravel road up but Cian considered that too tame so instead we struck off into the mist shrouded forest. Where we unexpectedly came across a deer.
As we stood there for a couple of moments staring uncertainly at each other it brought back memories of the film 'The Deer Hunter'. Micheal Cimino's masterpiece (though Pauline Kael denounced it as 'fascist') came out in 1978 but didn't intrude on my consciousness until the summer of 1982. In June of that year RTE planned to show live the WBC World Heavyweight Championship boxing match Larry Holmes and Gerry Cooney (father of George and one of the original Guildford Four). The fight was taking place in Las Vegas which, with the time difference, meant that the fight would be screening at 4:00am. Back then Irish people weren't minded to stay up all night watching tv, because, basically, they couldn't: programming usually stopped some time around midnight and off to bed you were expected to go. But what with the local interest RTE decided to break new ground with this and transmit live. To try and keep the Irish nation awake, they decided to show the Deer Hunter prior to the fight, the first time it was to be screened on broadcast tv. And in the build up they screened lots of promo clips of soldiers, and explosions, and deer, and men hanging off helicopters, and more deer, and all of it seemingly taking place in a jungle in Africa as to me, at 11, that was where all the jungles were. And to the 11 year old me, it looked utterly, feckin, awesome!
But as I was only 11 there wasn't any feckin way I was going to get to see it either. As it turned out not many people did. On the night in question, about an hour into the film, the transmitter up on top of Three Rock Mountain shorted, blacking out screens across the nation. Which meant a generation of Irish people grew up thinking that Russian roulette was a communist card game.
(Actually they didn't as RTE re-screened the film the following night). Anyway all this kind of meandered through my mind as I observed the deer before he bolted into the trees and disappeared. The rest of the walk was pretty uneventful, so I'll end the post here.
