Prison Food Tastes Better Than this

I am sucking Strepsils. I can feel a cold coming on and my son has finished the Berocca.  The forecast is bad: heavy rain and winds in the South West and this morning, I'm South heading West over the County Bounds to Kerry.     My first stop is Brighid's workshop in Gortaclea, half way between Killarney and Tralee.  

On Sunday, I drive north via Tarbert to the land of my ancestors in west Clare where my mother and her sisters have taken a house in Kilkee.  My grandmother, Mary McMahon grew up in Milltown Malbay and boasted that she owned the first flush toilet in Clare.  My grandfather, Michael O'Dywer, a medical student from Kilrush, was arrested during the War of Independence by British troops for being Michael Collins.  He spent one night in jail.  My uncle John told me his father used to complain about his mother's cooking saying, "Prison food tastes better than this."

The British troops weren't far wrong: my grandfather did run errands for the old IRA.  In fact he was so active he neglected his studies and doomed to fail his final anatomy exam, the IRA stole the papers for him and he passed.  The irony is that he when he qualified as a doctor he could not get work in the new, free Ireland and had to emigrate to England where he set up his GP practice in Forest Gate, in east London.

Holiday time with my mother and her siblings is chaotic.  There is fun but before then egos clash, tempers flair and words fly; no one escapes unscathed.  My extended family are like Jack Russell dogs marking their territory before they settle down.  Every year my mother swears she'll never to do it again.  But over the winter months, amnesia sets in, memories soften and come January she books another house declaring, "This year, it will be different and, what if we never see Uncle John again?"

Prison food would be better than this.