Christmas Letter 2012 - The Round Robin comes Bob-bob-bobbing along again!

It's that time of year once again - Keeping up with the Rotte-Murray Family - though we are nowhere near as rich or (in)famous as the TV family half the youth of the world are keen on keeping up with, the Kardashians. It's a special day today, being the 12-12-12, a type of date that won't roll around again this century.

I hope you're all well and looking forward to the festive season albeit in a time of austerity and post-budget blues, when we are all counting the cost of the pain, and are unhappy with some of the cuts that are having an impact on young families and older people. Banks and big business seems immune from the worst excesses of austerity and people are getting increasingly angry and aggrieved, all understandably. I am not complaining personally as I am one of the cushioned public servants as a HSE nurse, but I do resent all the assumptions that I'm on a gravy train and get my gold-plated pension for free! I'll be lucky to retire in the next decade with less than 20 years of service - equal to about a quarter salary including the state pension. Meanwhile I'll grit my teeth and smile whenever I'm told I'm lucky to have a job!

What a year it's been in our family - one of flux and massive changes, mostly good, although not without some measure of poignancy, as our children move on and make their path in life. It reminds me of us a generation ago and I guess we gave little thought to the impact our choices made on our families. Now I can see that my mother had great fortitude to let me go off on my travels without guilt tripping me, and also that it can't have been easy for her to see us heading to Africa when she only saw her grandchildren when we came on holidays every year.

The year started with Martin heading off to Australia on a year's work-holiday visa. He went with his friend Bobby and they were based in Brisbane where they had friends. They tried their hand at farming in N. Queensland but it spiralled into a cascade of unfortunate events culminating in their somewhat premature return to the comforts of city living and settled down to working in Brisbane, where Martin is still enjoying working in a graphic design company and he spent some months in a nice upmarket restaurant as well. He'll be back in Ireland in a couple of months, and see where his next adventures will bring him.

Maeve has just turned 17 which is hard to believe and I wonder where all the years have gone since she was a baby - then I realise we are living in Ireland for almost 16 years or most of her life! She has really grown up and is taller than me, peroxide blonde for the past few months after working her way through the spectrum of home hair colours from brown to purple through red. She is in Fifth year in the local Blackwater Community School, and has a far livelier social life than I remember at that age. Learning to drive is top of her to-do list right now so she'll have to knuckle down and get her theory test before she can even take a lesson.

William has just finished his Masters in UCC in e-business (no, I haven't a clue either!) and is now in Dublin looking for work and enjoying a break after all the study. He seemed to enjoy the course and worked in Cork in an outdoor adventure shop for a few months. He would like to travel but will need to get some funds together after being a student for five of the past six years! He doesn't come back to Lismore much although he will be home for Christmas, which will be great, as it'll be a quiet one compared to the last few years.

And the reason for this - as many of you already know - is that Shayne and Jany and Sofia and Livia moved back to Spain in late July, a few weeks after their wedding on July 5th! This was the big family event of the year, which we knew would take place in the summer. We were all looking forward to it, and then at the end of May they announced their plans to move back to Spain where they had lived up to three years ago, before they came to Ireland. So that news took us all a bit by surprise, although we knew they'd ultimately planned to return, mainly as we hadn't realised it would happen so soon after the wedding. They had steady jobs in Ireland and in the midst of so much unemployment it seemed Spain would be the last place to find work. Yet within days of checking online jobs in Spain Jany was offered a job in IT in Barcelona. Then Shayne was offered an interview for a customer services job in Citibank in Barcelona. All this fast forwarded their plans for moving so within weeks of the wedding they had moved.

The wedding itself was a wonderful day, the ceremony in Cork Registry Office followed by a reception in the Montenotte Hotel. I made the wedding cake which was a new and fun challenge for me! We had a small group of about 45 sitting down to dinner and then another 30 or so for the afters, that peculiarly Irish institution of extending the party to everyone who doesn't come for the whole day. Anne came over from New Jersey for her Godson's wedding, which was great, and we enjoyed meeting all of Jany's family who came from Holland and who we met for the first time. Sofia and Livia looked sweet in their little flower girl frocks and loved the excitement of the day, and Jany made a beautiful bride, with her lacy dress and homemade crochet bouquet which was so creative, and a lovely touch. I had the heebie-jeebies about being mother of the groom as I am so not into fancy frocks and any I tried on seemed to add about 20 years to me - at least that's how it seemed to me! Finally I saw a lovely lavender ensemble in Shaw’s that felt right and I made a little crochet handbag and was sorted for the day. Maeve wore a beautiful blue dress from TKMaxx and she and her three friends looked great.

As the move to Spain was so soon after the wedding there was plenty to plan - Jan and William drove down to Malgrat, where Shayne and Jany had lived before, with all their worldly goods in the back of the Trajet, which held a lot once the seats were removed. Shayne flew over earlier, and found an apartment before the stuff arrived, and I flew over with Jany and the girls once everything was in place. I stayed for a week's holidays and enjoyed spending that time with the girls as Jany started work a few days after we arrived. Shayne got the job in Citibank and they are well settled in by now, with the girls in the local crèche and a childminder to help out. I went over for a long weekend in October and look forward to going over again in the New Year. We miss them a lot but Skype is terrific and with almost daily chat on Facebook it is easy to keep in touch thanks to social media. Cork is definitely not the same without them and I'll always have great memories of the Hen Night in June when we took over Cork by stretch limo and had a great night out clubbing and in the Old Oak.

Jan had a busy year with Immrama going from strength to strength and this year's festival had a great lineup of speakers yet again. Despite the Arts funding cuts the festival was a big success, and hopefully this will continue to the second decade. They published a book of essays from previous speakers - The Blue Sky Bends Over All (The words of Thackeray on Lismore) - to mark the first decade of the festival. He was busy with the town council and got elected to be a delegate to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, where he went for a conference in October. There are a lot of changes afoot in the whole local government area and it looks like the town councils will be abolished and replaced with district municipal councils, covering a wider area. Time will tell how it'll all work out, as there's a lot of scepticism around the future of local democracy if there's no representation at town level. So it looks like Jan will go down in history as the last Mayor of Lismore, a somewhat dubious honour if it’s the swan song for the town council as we know it.

As for me, I've been enjoying getting embedded in Lismore as the local public health nurse, and as I drive around the area I sometimes have to remind myself that this is actually work, so much do I enjoy it! I'll take some photos of the mountains or the sky or the views if it takes my fancy and share them on Facebook or Twitter, so that others can enjoy the beauties of Lismore and its environs. I went to the INMO conference in Killarney, and I go to Dublin for meetings of Labour Women. It's the centenary year of the Party and there have been some nice celebrations, although not on the ostentatious lines of the infamous Galway tent of Celtic Tiger days! I'm still enjoying knitting and crochet and made some great jumpers, socks and scarves, and the knitting circle and Bookclub are my downtime activities and I get a lot of pleasure from my hobbies! This year the knitting circle got involved in Yarn Bombing or Guerilla Knitting, blitzing public space with knitted art. We did a bicycle for the Immrama 10th anniversary which you can see below, and both Jan and I did the Sean Kelly cycle again this year, me the 50km and Jan the 100km. So we really are as fit as fiddles! We even took part in the second Aengus Finucane Memorial Walk in The Burren in May, which was a great weekend of old friends reunited from our Bangladesh days with Concern onwards through Tanzania and Laos. We are delighted that the Waterford contingent will be hosting the walk in 2013 and have a delightful route planned in West Waterford – and all in a good cause for a charity after Aengus’s heart. This year it went to Jack Praeger’s Foundation in Calcutta.

On that upbeat note I’ll wind up the newsletter for this year. We loved meeting friends old and new, from near and far, and while we’ll miss having the family all together over Christmas we’ll be Skypeing across the airmiles and looking forward to our next reunion. As ever we wish you and yours a wonderful Christmas and every good wish for a great 2013, in the hopes that the recession will recede as it should, and as the cliché goes - things can only get better.

Love and good wishes from Jan and Catherine and all the family near and far – Shayne, Jany, Sofia and Livia, Martin, William, Maeve and of course our old faithful Ben!

Happy Christmas 2011 - the Round Robin comes bob-bob-bobbing along - again!

For the past 22 years I've written a Christmas Newsletter from our family to the wider world - and since I started this blog I've shared it with the blogosphere - it's a family update but it's quite general and broad and people seem to enjoy getting it each year. I started it in Tanzania in 1989 and while it's a genre that's frequently the butt of bad jokes and ridiculed as being a self-indulgent brag-fest of family perfection and accomplished genius children I hope mine strikes a balance of normality while entertaining some bragging rights along the way. Enjoy! The photos are a selection you may have already seen on the blog.

           Happy Christmas 2011

Dear Friends,

The Christening Party

It’s that wonderful time of the year again when I get down to writing the annual Christmas Newsletter from Lismore and update you on the goings on in the Rotte-Murray household over the past year. It’s become a real tradition now since it began in Iringa in Tanzania in 1989 – hard to believe this is Issue No. 22! I could nearly compile my very own cringe-inducing Round Robin book and give Simon Hogget a run for his money – I’d call it something more creative than The Cat Who Could Open the Fridge! The tree is up since Saturday and there’s a festive air about, with street lights and Christmas fairs all over the place. Shopping till dropping seems to be the mantra in the towns and cities, where there are little signs of recession if you see the tailbacked traffic entering Mahon Point in Cork. Now all I wish for is that there’ll be no severe cold spell like last year when we’d no water for 8 days over Christmas – genuinely Dickensian, drawing water from the Spout (local spring source) and washing everything by hand. Thanks but no thanks!

Livia in her Christening Robe

With the economy in the pits and the recession still nowhere near bottoming out (if we can believe the prophets of doom who hound us on the daily news and current affairs programmes) there’s sometimes a temptation to join the 99% in one of the Occupy sites that have sprung up in our cities and larger towns. It’s really painful to see the budget bleeding every last cent from hard-pressed taxpayers and homeowners just to bailout/pay off the faceless bond-holders who hold us in their clutches. I don’t mind taxes where they’re targeted at specifics that enhance and benefit society – we hear a lot this year about living in a society not an economy, and it’s difficult to square the circle when the country has lost economic sovereignty to our paymasters in Frankfurt (ECB) and Washington (IMF). We hear that in a few years we’ll be able to go back to the markets (financial, not farmers, I’m guessing) and that’s gonna restore our sense of pride and place. Haven’t we all become whizzes at the jargon of economics and high finance? It reminds me of Italia ’90 when every Irish person became an expert in football and pretended to understand the offside rule, while throwing opinions on various players around like snuff at a wake - though it’s a bit obscene to compare those innocent halcyon days with the gloom of the current global crisis.

As for ourselves, we are hit but not rock bottom like many – we aren’t going to lose our home like so many unfortunate people who got stuck in negative equity and repossessions if they lost their jobs, and I am lucky to have a relatively secure public sector job. There are plans to lose thousands of public sector workers in the next few years through voluntary redundancy and early retirement plans and that ghastly term “natural wastage” (where people retire and are not replaced). In the HSE and nursing services there will be a mass exodus of management and some frontline staff come February when the deadline for current pension payments hits. Thereafter previously exempt lump sums will be taxed and no-one blames anyone who is due to retire in the next few years and who has a reasonable amount of years accrued from going while the going is good.  The downside for those of us left on the frontline is an increased workload with fewer staff. We’re all working flat out as it is and there will be an inevitable knock-on effect on patient services if it gets much worse. Morale is low at times but for frontline staff like me there’s a lot of job satisfaction so that and team solidarity makes it worthwhile.    

Livia's Christening Party

My big news from the work front this year is that I got a transfer from Old Parish, where I’d been for nine years, to Lismore, where my office is around the corner from the house! I am delighted with the new post and have settled in well in the past three months. I knew the area pretty well already though I find some of the back roads in the more remote upland areas in the foothills of the beautiful Knockmealdowns a challenge at times – thank goodness for the satnav – it’s saved my bacon on a few occasions. It’s been good for my personal economy too – my petrol bill has halved since the move, as I’m 150 miles a week down on my previous travel to Dungarvan. Between knitting circles and book clubs, there’s never a dull moment. Jan and I did the Sean Kelly Cycle again in August, with him doing the 90km and me the 50km, great fun and a chance to keep fit.

With Theo in the Guinness Storehouse, Dublin

Jan is still in the Labour Party as Town Councillor and had a busy start to the year with the General Election in February, after Ciara Conway, the Labour candidate for Waterford, asked him to be her Director of Elections. He got into it with great gusto and was on the highways and byways canvassing madly for the few weeks of the campaign, and it all paid off when Ciara was elected to Dáil Eireann after a nail biting marathon in the count centre. It’s been a roller coaster of a year politically as the Labour Party went into Government with Fine Gael, the more conservative centre-right party, after Fianna Fáil, commonly called the “previous shower”, suffered a massive wipe-out at the hands of a furious electorate, ending up with a handful of TDs. Jan had the honour of being at the Dáil for the first day as Ciara’s guest, and it was a great achievement for both of them. Ciara’s making a great name for herself as a vocal back-bencher on many issues, particularly social and economic. One thing’s certain – people will be as angry at this coalition as at FF when times get tough. Reading Twitter when there’s a topical programme on gives a good reflection of the Irish zeitgeist. Immrama was another busy time for Jan with the 9^th festival this year hosting travel writers from a broad sweep of the genre. We had a great weekend and plans are well underway for the 10^th year in 2012, which has to be special. The fundraisers will get under way in January with the annual table quiz honing our dormant post-Christmas brain cells.

Shayne, Jany and Sofia and Livia

The rest of the family are all fine, with plenty going on in their lives. The big news for 2011 was the birth on 26^th March of our beautiful second granddaughter, Livia, to Shayne and Jany and she’s a sweet sister for Sofia, who gets on great with her. She is a lovely happy baby, and is now sitting up and starting to move around. We had her Christening in Lismore at the end of October, and she looked sweet in our century-old family Christening robe which Sofia wore the previous year. Sofia is almost two and is full of chat and always on the go, a real livewire, yet she can sit and play for ages with her toys and it’s great to see her playing with the stash of Duplo from the attic when she’s in Lismore.  Shayne got a job in Cork the week after Livia’s birth, in Abtran in Bishopstown, in customer services for Electric Ireland (old ESB). Jany was on maternity leave until September and she got a new job closer to home the week before she was due to go back to work, she’s an IT helpdesk specialist in a company near the CSO in Mahon. They’ve sorted childcare with Anne, a Dutch au pair who’s living with them for a year.  Their other big news is they are planning a wedding for next July in Lismore – so we can look forward to another celebration!

Godfather Martin with Livia

Martin is still in Dublin, he was out of work for a few months after finishing his Masters, and then he got a job as a waiter in the Westbury Hotel in Dublin, a pretty swanky place where plenty of celebs stay when they’re doing shows in the city. Graphic design jobs are pretty thin on the ground so he was glad to get off the dole with the Westbury job, but he’s looking farther afield for the coming year and he’s going to Australia at the end of January. He’s going with a friend who’s also a graphic designer, and they’re heading for Brisbane where they have friends who were in Tanzania when we were there – as kids they grew up together in Iringa so it’s nice that they’ve kept in touch over the years, as we have with the parents – in fact Tandy was here in 2010, and the three girls were here over the New Year and visited us in Lismore. So while I’ll miss Martin madly, I have to overcome my Irish Mammyness and be happy for him, as he’s doing the best thing for himself – and wish him the best of luck down under! 

Godfather William with Sofia

William is still in Cork; after working in a variety of jobs since he graduated from Limerick and moved to the real Capital last year, he decided to go back to being a student and is doing his Masters in Electronic Business in UCC – totally unrelated to his PE teaching degree but something he wanted to do – sadly a new regulation barring grants if returning to education within 3 years of previous study meant he wasn’t eligible for a grant, but he decided to go ahead with it and luckily we can help him out. He’s got into the sport and social side of UCC life with Intervarsity Volleyball and Trampolining. He’s on the Irish Volleyball team now and has got his first cap a few weeks ago. He will probably travel once he’s finished his Masters, unless a plum job lands on him. It’s hard to see the young adults leaving if there’s little prospects for them coming back in the future – we went from choice back in our day, and jobs prospects for nurses were a given – now the public sector recruitment embargo has done away with that certainty.

Maeve did her Junior Cert and decided to go straight to 5^th year but after a few days she realised she’d made a wrong choice and luckily she was able to go back to Transition Year which is like a gap year – school without too much pressure, plenty of variety and fun activities, and not too much academic pressure. Work experience is part of the programme and she spent a week at the crèche in Fermoy where she went as a toddler until she went to school. She’ll have another two sessions of work experience in the New Year so that will be another taster of the world of work. She is now 16 and taller than me, and she is becoming very grown up and independent, enjoying spending time hanging out with her friends. In June she went with two of her friends to SummerJam in the O2/Point in Dublin, and I had to go as they were under 16 – despite the ear-bleeding decibels I enjoyed some of the acts –  LMFAO and Ke$ha – don’t ask! It’s an indoor festival, a kind of Oxygen without the mud, lasting 3-4 hours. 

Jan and me at Newgrange World Heritage Site in Co. Meath

Jan and me went to a couple of gigs this year – Eric Clapton was Jan’s guitar hero for years and for his birthday we went to see him at the O2 and he didn’t disappoint – he ain’t Mr. Personality but boy he can play and sing! Christy Moore at the Marquee in Cork was an anniversary pressie from the kids and that was a great night – Christy was in flying form and not grumpy at the crowd as he is at times. We had a lovely day out in Dublin in July when Theo, our old Dutch friend from Iringa days, came with his Dutch Brass Band Me Tresse to play a series of concerts in Ireland – we saw them in the Guinness Storehouse and Jan went to see them in Galway as well. We had another trip to Galway to visit friends and Jan and I had a few staycation short breaks in Sligo and Trim, and I went to the INMO conference in Kilkenny in May. We spent a lot of weekends in Dublin and Cork, and the year flew by.

So that’s about the summary of our lives for another year, and I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and every good wish for 2012 – may it be a happy and prosperous year and don’t forget our door is always open and we’d love to see you anytime. I hope we meet over Christmas!

Love Catherine, Jan, Shayne, Jany, Sofia and Livia, Martin, William and Maeve (and Ben whom I left out of the email and letter version!)

Socks, Scarves and Snowflakes - coping with the Big Freeze at Christmas

Modelling the Curly-Wurly Ruffle Scarf

I've been trying to keep my mind off the state of the nation (not an easy task) by immersing myself in knitting and crochet mini-projects. It may be a sign of the times that I can't get down to a single big project like a jumper or jacket, as there's just too much going on with work, home and Christmas less than a week away to concentrate on something demanding a lot of time and attention. That's what the grim gloom of January and February is for! Jany (our d-i-l-to-be) has totally taken to crochet since I showed her how to do it a few months back, and has made some wonderful hats and scarves since then, some of which I posted about recently. She has got me hooked (sorry, couldn't resist that!) on it as well, and as it is much quicker than knitting there's a certain attraction when you want something in a hurry.

This weekend I made a lovely curly-wurly ruffle scarf, in chunky random-dyed wool from the local shop - Angela's Design Workshop - which has reawakened interest in a lot of dormant knitters and crocheters. This coral reef style pattern was so easy and fast to work I couldn't believe it - a scarf in a couple of hours. I can see myself making presents of these for friends - so watch out!

Curly-Wurly Ruffle Scarf

I also got some terrific wool in Lidl which awaits my attention but is such good value you couldn't leave it - especially as Lidl only very occasionally has wool for sale, and when it's there you grab it. There were whole kits - wool, pattern and a circular needle for a jumper for about €5 - ridiculous and yet unmissable. The small independent shops can't compete with that so I don't abandon our local shop which has terrific bargain basement wool - balls of 100g DK for €3, perfectly serviceable and the makings of a scarf or a pair of socks. How bad is that?

Curly-Wurly Ruffle Scarf detail

Cable and Basketweave Socks

Heel detail of  Cable and Basketweave socks

A couple of weeks ago I finished a pair of socks - pattern from Ravelry I think - Cable and Basketweave design. They are very chunky and warm, only suitable with my trainers which is fine, but too thick for my ankle boots. I love them, and they were trimmed with remnants from my stash, so very good for using up scraps. I had a disaster with another pair - my lovely peachy socks I posted about a while back - when second son washed his jeans in the same load. They emerged sludge grey and the little heel hole I'd planned on darning had expanded to beyond repair level - even if they'd retained their colour. So into the bin, before their time. The trials and tribulations of hand knit socks - they don't always wear as well as the shop socks but then that's not why I make them!

Seafoam Scarf

Snowflake for the tree!

I got some random-dyed wool blend a few weeks ago and made this lovely loopy seafoam scarf, and that was another pattern from one of the many online sites I wander around. You can see the original pattern and I made it in a different blend of colours. It was easy to make and ran up very quickly.

This weekend I made a lovely crochet snowflake - it was from a Lion Brand Yarn free download pattern - and Jany made two or three more - they are all delightful and adorn our tree, so that's something I'll do again. There are so many talented designers out there - all I do is knit and crochet, not design anything. 

So I hope you get some inspiration from this post - I hadn't knitted or crocheted anything for  years and only took it up a few years ago, and now I find it a great hobby with a nice end product - and I love that I've shown some others how to knit (Tandy who came in March and is now knitting in London!) and Jany. She has passed me out by leaps and bounds and last night we laughed when she showed me how to do a 3D flower in crochet, while she was a beginner only a few short months ago. There are hundreds of online tutorials for knitting and crochet projects, so check them out on YouTube - just search for them by name and you'll be busy for some time. Most of them are also available as printed patterns, if you prefer.

Toll Plaza on M8 Cork-Dublin motorway at Watergrasshill, Co. Cork

As we are in the middle of the coldest December in my memory with snow and sub-zero temperatures I wish you all a very Happy Christmas. Hope you enjoyed my last post with all our news from the year, and I am loving reading all the cards and letter coming by snail mail each day through our letter box. You can't beat the old ways - even though I only hand-write at Christmas since the advent of email and blogging!

Here's a photo of the road from Cork today after bringing Shayne, Jany and little Sofia home after a weekend with us in Lismore. They'll all be here for Christmas which will be terrific.

Happy Christmas 2010 - thoughts on Round Robins and Recessions

Happy Christmas 2010!

Dear friends,

Family gathering for Jan's birthday celebrations (minus William)

It's that time of year again – the Round Robin's bob-bobbing along to a mailbox near you as yet again the annual missive that is our Christmas Newsletter wings its way around the globe. I just realised that this is the 21^st Anniversary of our Newsletter – the first one was written on a portable typewriter in Iringa in 1989 and photocopied – badly – and sent off to far-flung corners of the globe from the Southern Highlands of Tanzania!

We are coasting downhill to the Christmas and the New Year with more trepidation than we've collectively felt in my lifetime. There's a strong sense of déjà vu – last year was bad but this year Ireland has a post-apocalyptic feeling now after our €85billion bailout by the IMF and the EU – an intervention much denied by our benighted government in the run-up to their arrival. These sheriffs have been and gone but will keep a close eye on us to make sure we're doing as we're told to keep the banks afloat and raise the taxes to do so, all the while paying the lenders enough interest would run the health service every year. The ignominy of having our affairs handed over to outside forces is a bitter pill to swallow as we have certainly lost our financial sovereignty – not quite back to the old colonial days but economically somewhat similar.

The dreaded budget was unveiled on Tuesday – there's a deficit of €6 billion to fund this year, part of the €14 billion we have to find by 2014. The years of wheeling and dealing have finally caught up with a government who had no grasp on economics as they led us into a bubble of property development borrowing from toxic banks that was totally unsustainable. We're all crashing to earth after builder developers abandon the ghost estates that litter the rural hinterland, while the banksters are all exposed as bluffers who profited from the light touch regulation and deference of the government. What it means to me is a drop in take-home pay of around €2K p.a. and that's just speculative – we won't know till mid-January as there're so many new and combined levies we have a job calculating it all till our first paycheques.

Jan and me at his birthday party May 2010

Back to the news from the Rotte-Murray family – and what a year it's been. We've seen the best of times and the worst of times, to borrow a line from Charles Dickens. We were blessed with the birth of our first grandchild, a beautiful little girl, Sofia, born to Shayne and Jany in Cork on February 11^th. She is a joy and delight for all of us, as she grows to a lively active baby, well on the way to being a toddler who'll keep everyone on their toes this Christmas. Then three weeks later, on March 5^th, we were plunged into sadness with the death of my beloved mother at the great age of 94. She had been declining over recent years, and she had a peaceful passing for which we are all grateful – she didn't suffer and I was blessed to be able to spend so much time with her in her last weeks in St. Joseph's Hospital in Dungarvan. It has been an awful loss as we were so close, but these last years have been a long goodbye, with her decline into dementia. She was buried in Lismore with her beloved parents, and Jan gave a beautiful eulogy at her funeral Mass. I have great memories of her, and I can look out our window to the graveyard at the back of our garden where she's at rest, and there's a comfort in that for me. We are all glad that the whole family were together with her a few days before she died, and we took treasured photos of her with Sofia and all of us.

Sofia's Christening Day, 4^th September, with her parents

Shayne and Jany have settled into life in Cork, and they are expecting a second baby next March! Shayne had been working with Concern in direct fundraising but was let go in February. Jany then got a job in Marriott International in April, and Shayne is looking after Sofia and doing a business course – Jan or me babysit on the days he's at college. They are in a nice house in Blackrock, close to shops and bus routes. They went to Holland in August to bring Sofia to see Jany's family and friends. It is lovely having them in Ireland after all the years Shayne was in Spain, and we would miss them so much if they weren't here –so the timing was perfect when they came back – another year and they might have been put off by the dire economic situation. We had a lovely ceremony for Sofia's Christening in Lismore in September – she looked sweet in our family heirloom Christening robe – the 4^th or 5^th generation – and had a BBQ in the garden here afterwards, as we had a good summer this year.

Me and Sofia - October

Martin and us at his MA graduation DIT - Oct. 2010

 Martin has just finished his Master's Degree in Professional Design Practice in DIT (Dublin Institute of Technology in Bolton Street) and we had a lovely day at his recent graduation in St. Patrick's Cathedral. He is still living in Dublin, and is trying to find a job, without much luck so far though he has an interview this week. He enjoyed his MA and it is a damning indictment of the system to see so many well-educated graduates on the dole and unable to get work in their professional field- he has done unpaid interning to get experience for his CV, so I hope it pays off. There's so much emigration now that the government is factoring it into the projections for the social welfare costs for the next four years and they are also claiming the figures on the live register are dropping (the Social Welfare register) – that's all because of the emigration. I don't want the boys to have to go abroad – when we went it was from choice, not necessity. That's a whole different ball-game.

William and us at his BA graduation UL August 2010

William finished his BA in Physical Education and Geography in the University of Limerick and we celebrated with his graduation in August. He moved to Cork when he got a job as a waiter in the Airport Hotel, and as he was getting very few hours there he got another job this week in Amazon in Cork. He has applied for teaching in the UK as there seems very little in teaching in Ireland – the public service embargo is affecting new grads worse than experienced teachers as they are all competing for the few substitute jobs or maternity cover or the private schools unaffected by the ban on recruitment in the public sector. All very demoralising for the lads and their parents aren't too happy either – but we are very proud of all of them for getting to adulthood with a positive outlook on life and not giving up on Ireland – just yet anyway.

Maeve has just had her 15^th birthday with a sleepover weekend here at home with five or six of her friends – we lifted the term-time ban on sleepovers for the occasion and she made the best of it. With her Junior Cert looming in June, she has had to knuckle down to the books – and having to do supervised study doesn't really appeal but it concentrates the study to the afternoon and she doesn't have that much to do after dinner. As we didn't go abroad for holidays this year – sign of the times – she spent the summer camping in the garden in a big tent we got in Argos, and they had good fun with that. I took four of the girls to Dublin for a weekend in July – we stayed in the Skylon Hotel and they shopped till I dropped. They enjoyed it and I was able to drop them to Blanchardstown Centre and spend time with Martin and also visit old friends Tom and Darina.
 
Jan had a very significant birthday this year – he turned sixty in May! All his family came over from Holland for a week and we marked the big occasion with a party in Ballyrafter House Hotel with the family and our friends. I baked a huge cake and we had a lovely night, and he didn't look a day over fifty (!) as we danced the night away to a local combo. The family all stayed in Youghal in holiday homes, and did a lot of sightseeing as well as spending time with us in Lismore during the week – we had a BBQ at home and then hired a bus for a day trip around the Ring of Kerry, which was a highlight for all of us. It was over thirty years since I had been there in my hitch-hiking student days. It's still a beautiful scenic route – a 90 mile round trip from Killarney and some hair-raising bends – no wonder the tour buses can only go one-way! Jan is still active in the local Town Council for Labour and on the national town councillors' committee, as well as Concern's council, and the national festival association.

Shayne, Sofia and Jany

This year's Immrama festival of Travel Writing was another great success, with big names like Ranulph Fiennes speaking about his Boy's Own adventures to various frozen wastes of the world, his self-amputation of his fingers after a nasty dose of frostbite, and other tales of derring-do. Tim Severin was also there, telling of his high seas adventures in the wake of Sinbad and St. Brendan and other great voyagers, and veteran writer Jan Morris rounded off a terrific weekend of armchair travel in wonderful settings around Lismore. It proved a great respite from the recession, and hopefully 2011 will be as big an event – many old faces return for the fringe events, and its international reputation keeps growing. Jan is kept busy as the festival manager, and plans are already underway for next year. We took part in the Seán Kelly Charity Tour of Waterford in August, with Jan doing 90km while Shayne and me did 50km, and Shayne did 90km in the Cork Rebel Tour in September. I got a lot of fun from my birthday present of a lipstick-red hybrid tour/trek cross bike.

I'm still working away in Old Parish area as the public health nurse, although I moved office to Dungarvan in May. With the snow we've had in Ireland in recent weeks – Snowvember as some called it – there have been parts of my area impassable by car, and the coastguard jeep had to do shopping for some isolated folk in the uplands. I don't think Ireland does snow and bad weather too well, as is the norm in so many countries, but we literally grind to a halt when there's more than a few days of snow and ice. We had the Big Freeze in 2009/10 and it looks like it may be round 2 already, with plenty more forecast. I continue to enjoy my job despite the constraints of cutbacks, as the recruitment ban means that posts aren't always automatically filled, and now there're plans to reduce numbers by 6000 in the coming years, half of which may be frontline nursing staff. With beds closing, hospitals overcrowded, and morale very low, it's hard to know where it will all end. There's even talk of returning the beleaguered HSE to the old Health Boards system to improve accountability.

That's about it for our news this year – we weren't away for any holiday, rather the family came to us in May and in late March an old friend Tandy came for a visit – we hadn't met since we lived in Iringa where our kids grew up together, so we'd a lot of catching up to do. We spent some of the time sightseeing around lovely West Waterford and had some knitting lessons – which she has kept up since returning to London. Jany has discovered a previously unknown talent for crochet, and I knitted some funky socks for myself as well as some baby clothes for Sofia. I'm still reading avidly, and in the book club, as well as an online Bloggers' book club, where there's a lot of overlap with the real world club. I enjoy blogging as an outlet for writing – mostly recipes, book reviews, knitting, family events, and current affairs ranting. Check it out – I was chuffed to be shortlisted for two categories in the Irish Blog Awards, even though I didn't win it was a nice accolade.

We're looking forward to having all the family together for Christmas in Lismore, even though it'll be sad as the first one without Ma, and she'll be in our thoughts. May you all have a wonderful Christmas, and drop in if you're around Lismore – we've an open door here and love to catch up on old friends in real time as well as all those we keep in contact with through Skype, Facebook and email, which have all changed the way the world communicates. We wish you all much happiness in 2011 and look forward to hearing from you in the coming weeks and over the festive season.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all,

Love from



Jan and Catherine, Shayne, Jany and Sofia, Maeve, William and Martin, and Ben the dog.

Happy Christmas 2009 - the Round Robin comes bobbin' along

HAPPY CHRISTMAS 2009!

Here is the complete text - with photos-of our annual Christmas letter to friends and family at home and abroad - it goes global by snail mail, email and now I am posting it on the blog.

It's a tradition that began in 1989 in Tanzania and has continued to date, at the request of many of the recipients/victims, so you are getting a summary of what's in a lot of the blogposts throughout the year. It's a bit long - very long in fact - so you may not have the stamina to stay to the end, but if you don't lose the will to live but persist, then congratulations are in order! Thanks for your patience and I hope you enjoy it. The photos you may have seen before as some were in old posts, but they were in the print version so for authenticity I'm including them here! (The photos are of the family taken last Christmas, Jan and me at a wedding, Maeve's 14th birthday, Spain holiday, BBQ in the rain, the boys at parties, and at Immrama 2009 with the speakers.)

Dear Friends,

It’s that time of the year again, when the Rotte family Christmas newsletter is wending its way to a letterbox near you. Be it email, snail mail or blog, there is no escape from this annual update from Lismore, so you’d better brace yourselves for the Recession Rant Roundup of events in and around our lives over the past year. It’s been such a rollercoaster year since our last communiqué this will probably just skim the surface and not cover a fraction of events at a local and wider level. I don’t feel at all Christmassy yet; the tree has yet to go up, or perhaps it’s that I’ve done a lot of shopping online – thank you Amazon – tantamount to economic treason, according to the Minister of Finance!

The country is in turmoil – a real winter of discontent. Industrial unrest abounds and the church is convulsed with the fallout from the clerical cover-ups over the sex abuse of children in Dublin and the institutional abuse over decades. Half the country was under floodwaters last month as a result of bad planning and building on our floodplains, and we have just had the most divisive budget in my memory. The government has deflected public anger at the bank bailouts by vilifying the public sector which now has pariah status. As this is the season of goodwill I will try to be restrained and suffice to say I took part in my first strike last month, and the mass protest march back in February in Dublin, and there’s palpable anger at the inequity of last week’s budget. Social welfare and the public sector have been targeted for cuts to recoup the extra €4 billion the government needs to run the country – never mind that the bank bailouts cost €54 billion. I am down 14% this year as a public servant, and resent being singled out – if it was across the board cuts like tax increases it would be more palatable. To ostensibly stem the flood of cross-border shoppers, the budget reduced the price of drink. Maybe we can now afford to drown our sorrows but reinforcing negative stereotypes doesn’t do much for us internationally.

Enough government-bashing for now – time to move on to the family news. It has been a momentous year for us, especially as we heard from Spain that we will become grandparents in February 2010 when Shayne and Jany’s baby girl is born! We are all delighted and the good news is that they have decided to move to Ireland – and did so in November. So far they have been very lucky – after three weeks here Shayne got a job with Concern based in Cork, in direct fundraising around Munster – signing people up for donations on the street – and it is going well. It is not the dreaded “chugging” or charity mugging of some agencies, who work on commission, as he is on a salary which is not contingent on sign-ups. He has a real understanding of what Concern is all about, having been a Concern kid for most of his life overseas, so it’s ironic that he has gone full circle – almost a homecoming!

Jany’s pregnancy is going well though she is very tired at 32 weeks now, but that is par for the course and hopefully I can be a useful midwife to her at this time as well as when I’m a doting granny, and not be an interfering old bat! I am enjoying digging out all the baby stuff hoarded for years and revisiting Mothercare. Right now they are staying in Cork with our old friend from Tanzania days, Sohaila, and as she will be away for a few weeks they will housesit for her. They are busy house-hunting in Cork city so the best of luck to them – it’s less than an hour from Lismore so we won’t have too far to go to visit them – or vice versa!

Martin graduated last year and spent a few months at home trying to get work without much luck in the graphic design field – so he has gone back to study for his Masters’ in DIT (Dublin Institute of Technology), and he is really enjoying it. He had some summer work with a local printer in Dungarvan which helped with the fees – postgraduate study isn’t cheap and he wasn’t eligible for a grant as he had lived at home after his degree when he was job hunting. He comes home at weekends once or twice a month and will be here over Christmas with all the family.

William is in final year of his PE and Geography degree in Limerick University, and has been doing teaching practice in Lismore for this semester, in Maeve’s school but not her class – she couldn’t get used to her pals calling him Sir! Hopefully he will get what he wants when he graduates in the summer, whether it’s teaching at home or abroad, or taking a break. This time last year he was just back from a semester in Tennessee where he had a ball and that probably reignited the travel bug that must be ingrained in all the boys from their nomadic childhoods. He had intermittent summer work in Lismore but the recession certainly had an impact compared to other years, and he didn’t even get away for a holiday, poor lad.

Maeve has just had her 14^th birthday and didn’t have a party as it coincided with some of her friends’ birthdays – so she will probably just invite them to our planned New Year’s Eve party instead! She is very grown up and taller than me; she’s in 2^nd year now and seems to be getting on fine academically, while maintaining the requisite teen apathy about school. She has joined the local Foróige youth club and they are going to entertain the residents at St. Carthage’s Home with Carols next week. Alána, her friend, and herself went to England for a holiday to Alána’s aunts and cousins and had a ball. She auditioned for a part in next spring’s production of the local Dramatic Society, “Wiz”, and was in a great show last May – excerpts from 4 musicals – Grease, Hairspray, Mamma Mia and High School Musical

In July Maeve and me went to Spain for a short holiday to see Shayne and Jany in Malgrat, and it was great timing that Anne, my old friend from student days and her teen girls were in Barcelona when we were there. We spent nearly 4 days together between Malgrat and Barcelona and had fun catching up. First time since backpacking around India, Nepal and Sri Lanka when we were in Bangladesh 30 years ago, and it was great to see we still can pack in as much in a day’s sightseeing as we did back then! We spent two full days on the Barcelona Bus Turístic and had great fun playing tourists to the max. It’s a beautiful city and I surprised myself by loving the cable cars over the harbour and at Montjuic, with my fear of heights! True to the recession we didn’t go to the costly and well-worn attractions of yesteryear like Port Aventura and Marineland, but Tibidabo – with rides from 1929 – suited us fine. We stayed with Shayne and Jany in Malgrat, and enjoyed the beach and pool, eating in and out, and wandering round the shops and markets. We also got acquainted with Migo their dog – he is still in Spain, until his anti-rabies quarantine is up in March, when he’ll move to Ireland.

Jan and me are fine even if we are apoplectic at the state of the nation. He is still active in the Labour Party and was Mayor of Lismore until the end of his first term in June. Then he had the local elections and we were all thrilled when he was elected to the Town Council – it was his first election as he had been co-opted to the council initially. He was featured on a national radio programme (Newstalk’s Global Village) on the immigrant candidates just before the election. He was one of only 4 non-Irish candidates elected from 44 in the elections. I enjoyed the tense atmosphere at the count centres, and still don’t understand it all. No, don’t ask, as I am not going to even attempt to explain the arcane system of transfers and surplus redistribution that operates here in elections. We both went to the Labour Party Conference in Mullingar in March, and I went to the Labour Women’s Conference in Dublin in October for the first time, with other Waterford Women delegates, and spoke to a motion against the reversal of the proposed cervical cancer vaccine programme.

Jan also went to Mozambique with Concern for a week’s field trip as a Concern Council Member (not to be confused with the town council!). He had a wonderful time, with a trip up the Zambezi bringing back memories of our 1994 trip on that river in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. I think he would go back to Africa in the morning if circumstances allowed – as would I! We were both saddened by the death in October of our old friend and co-founder of Concern, Fr. Aengus Finucane. He was my boss in Bangladesh and CEO of Concern for all our time with the organisation in Tanzania and Laos. He helped make Concern the organisation it is today, as was evident in the huge funeral and the international acclaim his passing brought. The funeral was like a reunion of Concern over the past 4 decades, as friends going back to his days in Biafra were present.

The Immrama Travel Writing festival in June was another resounding success – Kate Adie and Fergal Keane captivated everyone with their accounts of reporting from frontline conflict zones in Africa and Asia, and Manchán Magan amused the breakfast audience in Ballyrafter. Jan continues as administrator for the festival and planning is underway for 2010 – so watch the website for the line-up in a few months at http://lismoreimmrama.com/.

I am still the Public Health Nurse in Old Parish and Ring, and I love my day-to-day frontline work with patients. I have been involved in the Swine Flu Mass Vaccination Clinics and enjoyed meeting new people. I was profiled in the current HSE staff magazine in the “getting to know you” section – my 15 minutes of fame! I went on my first strike last month – it was a one-day stoppage by all public sector workers to highlight the unfairness of the proposed cuts. I was organiser for the PHNs as I am rep for the INO in the area, and it was a steep learning curve. All went well, despite the weather – it was at the height of the recent flooding and monsoon-like rains, so not a great day for picketing. I went to the INO conference in Killarney in May, and as ever it was an enjoyable busy few days in a beautiful setting, and I came home via the scenic route of the Lakes, Torc Waterfall and Kenmare.

Life is very busy with work and family commitments, and my mother is still being well cared for in Dungarvan Community Hospital, at the ripe old age of 94. She is fully bed-bound dependent now, but still knows me, and though it is so sad to see the shadow of her former self, it is lovely to see her every day I am at work, and she enjoys the chat even if she doesn’t remember it afterwards.

On the relaxation front, I still read as much as ever, and have started a blog in the past year, which many of you may have seen. I called it “Dispatches from the Deise” at http://deise-dispatches.blogspot.com/. It has just been added to Irish Blogs which might increase its exposure. Hard to describe it except to say it’s pretty eclectic. From political rants to personal ramblings, with recipes on the side, and some travel pieces, nothing’s off-limits!

We enjoyed visits from various friends during the year and love to reconnect with old friends from our days abroad as well as those of you closer to home, and we enjoyed a lovely wedding in August, and have another to look forward to (sister of the first bride!) just after Christmas. Otherwise our social life was quieter than other years – sign of the times or is staying in the new going out!

I am coming to the close of the letter now and I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas with your loved ones. If you are in the Lismore area on New Year’s Eve then welcome to our party! Let’s hope that 2010 will see us personally achieving our dreams and goals and that the country and the world will emerge from the global recession and start to really recover economic stability and peace. Have a wonderful Christmas and to paraphrase the former NI minister’s unparliamentary language (not unlike the recent Dáil outburst by Green TD Paul Gogarty) – don’t let the recession get you down!

Love from us all, Catherine, Jan, Shayne and Jany, Martin, William, Maeve and Ben the dog

catherine.rottemurray@gmail.com Blog: http://deise-dispatches.blogspot.com/