Son of the soil – Colm Keena on the occasional delights of getting our hands dirty

I’ve spent most of my working life toiling, happily enough, in newsrooms. Once big, noisy, and often testosterone-filled, they are much quieter places these days, particularly since Covid turned urban work practices upside down. But if the soundscape is now more the hum of computer motors than the swearing of half-mad alcoholics, the seven days a week requirement to produce news has remained the same.

Because news does not respect the Sabbath – Christian or Jewish – reporters’ rosters include weekend work with days off during the week in compensation. I’ve always enjoyed this aspect of the job, there being something attractive about being footloose and free while the rest of the world has its head down.

One recent midweek day off work, I came down to the kitchen to make breakfast and, before doing so, brought something out to the bin. This required a walk from the kitchen door across my south-facing garden to the place where I hide the bins behind a wooden trellis and a rosebush. On the way back to the kitchen I got distracted and, before I knew it, I had fetched my gardening tools and my breakfast was being had, so to speak, on the hoof.

It was a bright, cloudless day and tinkering and weeding soon progressed to work requiring a shovel and a pitchfork. When the mid-morning coffee moment came, that too was consumed outdoors, on the hoof. By now my blood was up, and the succession of chores that were presenting themselves was like climbing a mountain; you keep thinking the topmost crest is just there ahead of you, but when you reach it, you discover another has been hiding behind. On I went. The sun reached its zenith. Lunch was brought outdoors and consumed while standing. I was like some orbiting object in the heavens; massive energy and intervention would be required to stop me.

Drama and spirituality – Desmond O’Neill on Rossini’s Petite messe solennelle

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Dutch gold – Frank McNally on a weekend in idyllic Amsterdam

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Music of chance – John Fleming on his encounters with Paul Auster

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La vie en rose – Colm Keena on bohemian days in Paris

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During the afternoon my labouring caused me to remember my late uncles, Owen and Jimmy, who lived on the farm in Westmeath where my mother grew up. We used to visit them regularly from Dublin and sometimes I stayed with them as a child. To say it was a mixed farm would be an understatement. It had all the typical farm animals, including fowl, but also, during the 1960s, produced hay, some class of grain (it was cut and gathered into stooks by hand), and an array of vegetables for home consumption. The haycocks were brought in on a two-wheeled cart that was pulled by a workhorse. Everywhere you went the dog followed you. At one stage Jimmy had a pet lamb whose mother had died giving birth to it. When it saw you enter the field it would run over and give you a friendly headbutt on the hip, something that felt less and less friendly as the animal grew in strength and size.

Once, when one of my uncle’s swung me up on the bare back of the huge, strong workhorse with the idea that the unaccompanied beast would bring me for a wander around the farm, my mother expressed unease. “He’ll be grand,” her brother assured her as I looked down from what felt like a great height indeed. “The horse will look after him.” It was a boy’s paradise.

I could see that farming was an occupation defined by its unending series of chores, most of them outdoors. The seasons brought different chores as did the passing hours of each day. Milking the cows. Bringing them in. Bringing them back out. Burning gorse. Mending stuff. I once walked with my uncles back from Moate, where they’d bought a few cattle in the mart that they herded back along the road to the farm. On summer days when “we” turned the cut grass lying in the fields, ham sandwiches and milky tea would be brought out to us by the women.

My uncles had this implement like a big corkscrew that they would push into the cock of hay and then twist while slowly drawing it towards them. Done correctly, it produced a type of umbilical cord made of hay, which they used to hold down the cock, and the piece of sackcloth they placed on its tip to keep off the rain.

By the end of my day in my garden I was physically tired but in a glad, gratified way. The sun was low, the temperature was dropping, and it was time to take off my mucky shoes and think about going indoors. I took a last look at my small patch of land and thought of my uncles and the acres that kept them so busy all their lives. A happy idea crossed my mind: weren’t they lucky.