I was somewhat shocked to realise it's been nearly six months since Tony, Leo and I relocated from Dublin. Even trying to mark time with this column is useless; time is not so much standing still but moving in freeze-frame. Certain details fade in and out of view, but the bigger picture seems lost somehow.
We're a great household for "to-do lists" which morph into "didn't-do lists". Flicking back over the ones under the banana magnet on our fridge door, I can see the bullet points - "do garden" "do outhouse" "do yard".
Needless to say, nothing has been done on any of these fronts. "Do house" has fared a little better, with an onslaught of activity on the attic (now my office), but everyday I stare at the open wound in the ceiling, to which a wall used to be attached. "Get plaster" was on the latest list, but that's already been covered by "Really, really must do garden".
Who am I fooling? I think I'll just revert to my bourgeois roots and hire somebody to landscape. I'm beginning to think that, as much as I accused people of not understanding life in rural Ireland, I didn't have much of a notion myself, especially when it comes to the required levels of motivation. Take the old "I'll have more time to write" lark. On arrival here I had completed a children's book, a novella and six chapters of a novel. Have I done anything since? Not a jot. Writing to-do lists takes forever. Large chunks of time are taken up with two things: the weather and the rubbish. Will it be dry today, or any day soon? Will I remember to put the bin out? Rubbish actually looms large in the scheme of things, since unlike in Dublin, we have to pay for its collection, and the service is offered by private contractors, not the county council.
Having had an excellent relationship with my former rubbish-man, John Gallagher, I was disappointed that he discontinued his service. It's been taken up by Noel O'Rourke, and God forbid that I'd cast any aspersions on him, but in my opinion his big, shiny wheelie bins can never match the charm of John's old trailer.
For some reason, John also insisted on calling me "Deirdre", which, when your anonymity is totally destroyed, is vaguely comforting. He also took a personal interest in things, so that if you forgot to put your rubbish out on time, he'd drive by the next day and pick it up for you anyway. "Aren't you're a demon for forgetting the rubbish Deirdre" he'd shout from his car window "Sorry John, I'd reply".
It's those little details which make life here worth living. Now, if we don't get the wheelie bin out on Sunday night, we can resign ourselves to becoming the town dump for the next two weeks. I never believed that green plastic bags and marauding town dogs would feature so large in my life. When I'm not contemplating the weather and worrying about the rubbish, I wonder whether or not my career is going off the rails as a result of being so far from the city, and devise strategies to ascertain whether people really like what I'm doing here or not. I have discovered that the people who tell me "they love the column" often don't, and those who say nothing are often approving. The net effect of this, is that we have lost some people from our lives we once believed were friends, and in the process have gained others.
Small flashes of community spirit lift our own, so the pleasant and upbeat service in the Spar supermarket run by Paul Keenan is a godsend. He's never remarked on this column, but when I was there recently he was knee deep in the conversion of his shop, which has expanded the space and his services. "It's a vote of confidence in Manorhamilton, and in the north-west," he said with pride. When you talk to people like him, you feel you are on the same side somehow, and that the bigger picture has not escaped you, just floated temporarily out of view. And I do take confidence from these developments, these small changes which say "there is a future here, and I'm prepared to put my money where my mouth is".
Duly inspired, there's no longer anything under the fridge magnet, because I've cleared the decks. I swear by the next time I report in from the wild, wild, north-west there will be a pristine polyurethane sheet covering my garden, in readiness for spring planting. There, I've done it now by saying it in the newspaper, because as everybody knows, if it's written down in the paper - then it has to be true.
