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!

Of Hens, Weddings and Emigration - Our Irish Summer

Happy Family with the kids

 So much for my good intentions of blogging regularly - it's been almost a month since my last post and so much has been happening I think I got so totally overwhelmed by the pace of events that blogging was the first casualty. At any rate I think I'm ready to face the blogosphere again by just posting a summary of the excitement - the highs and lows.

For those of you who follow me on Facebook you'll know that the big event of the year in our family is the wedding of our son Shayne and Jany his fiancee and mother of their two lovely girls, our beloved granddaughters Sofia and Livia. This special day was planned with fairly military precision (that sounds a bit oxymoronic!) to take place on July 5th in Cork, and we all looked forward to it greatly. It was all a bit surreal as I didn't know what it should feel like to have a child marry and take on the official mantle of family responsibility that marriage confers, but I know I am very happy that such a lovely couple tied the knot.

A major announcement in the run-up to the wedding was the decision of Shayne and Jany to return to the country where they met and lived for a number of years before coming to Ireland - Spain. This had been flagged a few times as a future probability but I hadn't reckoned on it happening in the near future, so it came as a bit of a shock to hear they were seriously jobhunting and making plans to move after the wedding. The next milestone was the news that Jany got a  job offer in Barcelona a few weeks before the wedding, which made it all very real, and gave me the chance to get accustomed to the fact they'd be living 3 hours away instead of an hour. There are 2 hour flights from Cork to Girona and Barcelona on a daily basis and can be as cheap as chips if you plan ahead so I think we'll have a track worn to there - I'm already going over with Jany and the kids tomorrow week for a week to help them settle in.

Hen Party girls!

Where there's a wedding there's always a Hen Party - and that was the best fun ever! I really enjoyed the night out in Cork with Jany and her workmates (her boss organised it) and her friends. I was definitiely the Mother (in Law of the) Hen and the most - ahem - mature among the party, as well as being the only Irish there, showing what a cosmopolitan friendship circle Jany has. Magda had us all meet in her apartment and we had a number of delicious cocktails there to prime us for the night ahead, and Jany opened her gift box which had a nice tasteful selection of Hen Party pressies! We headed off in a super stretch limo for the nightclub, but the best part was the hour-long jaunt around Cork city in the limo which was a raucous noisy celebration and we must have driven the poor limo driver nuts, with our karaoke skills - not! We had champagne in the limo and hung out the windows cheering and ensuring the passers-by knew we were partying! For most of us it was the first time in a stretch limo, so we were determined to make the most of it and do the bling thing to the limit!

Jany and me in the limo

The nightclub, Cubins, was nearly empty when we arrived so we danced around our handbags for an hour or so, and then cut loose for a place with more atmosphere - The Old Oak, a Cork legend which has a great buzz and terrific music. They have some good gigs there  but we just had the regular DJ that night, but we danced and took photos and generally enjoyed the craic, and made sure Jany did as well. We were there till the small hours and ended the night in a kebab house nearby where we had curry chips which are my food of the gods at 3a.m. I don't get out often enough evidently as I was amazed at the crowds thronging the streets of Cork at that hour, and thankfully it was good-natured and there were no rows that we could see. Taxi and home, end of a great  night for all and no hangover for me, as I kept the mixing to a minimum!

Partying in the Stretch Limo!

Cutting the Cake!

Then a few days later the Big Day - the Wedding of the Year! We were all in Cork before noon to check into the hotel and get glammed up for the day, and it was a fantastic day. It was a Civil Ceremony in the Cork Registry Office where we met up with everyone else for 3pm and the beautiful bride arrived in the wedding car - hubby Jan was the chauffeur and had taken out the middle seats of the 7-seater to turn it into a limo; with ribbons it looked the part to perfection. Jany looked beautiful in her lovely lacy dress and bolero, and Shayne looked very handsome in his pink cravat! Jany had made her own bouquet from crochet flowers embellished with beads and ribbons, and it was lovely, and I had crocheted my bag, which went with my lavender outfit. My gear had only come together a few days before the wedding when I got a cardi to go with a lovely lavender dress I already had.

The happy couple

After the short but lovely ceremony with Joan, Shayne's friend from Catalunya and Jany's sis Nikita as Best Man and Bridesmaid, we went back to the Montenotte Hotel in the wedding bus, and the rest of the day passed by in a blur of celebration with our friends and family meeting for the first time in most cases, as the Dutch contingent all came to Ireland for the wedding from Jany's family. We  had a lovely drinks reception back at the hotel and then took photos out in the garden, as it was the only dry day that week; in a dreadful summer the weather gods were certainly looking us on the day!

My creation!

Living the moment with hubby Jan!

The dinner was absolutely delicious and the hotel had prepared the room beautifully - and I was delighted with how good my first wedding cake turned out, when it was decorated with a pink ribbon and some gerbera flowers. It was presented on a lovely swan shaped stand which really set it off. Best of all was the gathering of family and friends - Maeve had 3 of her girlfriends there and they looked wonderful in their long ballgowns, bling central and hair and shoes to match, and Martin had come home from Australia, while William is finishing off his Masters degree in UCC, and they both looked very handsome in unfamiliar suits! Jan's shirt coincidentally matched my lavender and he looked great in a new grey summer suit. Anne my best friend from nursing days (see my Barcelona blog from 2009) came all the way from America for the wedding of her Godson, and her sis Fran joined her from Galway. Jany's extended family enjoyed visiting Ireland, and some stayed on for a holiday after the wedding. It was fun being at the top table along with Shayne and Jany and the family, and to see all the rest of the guests having a great time. After the meal Jan made the only speech of the day, as Shayne didn't want to and Joan didn't feel his English was up to it! Jan's was a resumé of Shayne's early years in Africa particularly and of course welcoming Jany into the family officially!

Meet the Parents!

After the meal we went outside to enjoy the evening sun, such a rarity this year, and spent time chatting and catching up with everyone, before the dancing and music started. DJ Liam from Lismore was the music man for the evening and he played a great set, from Spanish through Dutch and Irish and 80s and 90s hits - Golden Oldies by the young people's standards and familiar enough for us all to sing along to, as well as enough current hits to keep the teenagers happy! We were on the floor most of the night, and
managed to find time to spend with the many guests who came for the Afters, including a some old friends of the lads from their Africa days. The Afters might be an Irish thing, not sure, but it's the norm here to invite friends to the party after the main meal, and to enjoy the evening. At around 11 there's another round of eating and tea and coffee as the cake is served, along with sausages and sandwiches, just what you need after all that dancing. We kept going well past the music as we stayed in the bar and enjoyed the fun till we finally fell into bed around 3am.

Sisters and  Brothers!

The Wedding Party

 We had a wonderful time and wish Jany and Shayne and the girls years of family happiness especially in their new life together in Spain. Shayne flies out tomorrow morning and  has some interviews lined up next week; I fly out next Saturday with Jany and the girls, and Jan will drive down with William to bring over their stuff, a van full of luggage! So we'll all converge on Catalunya in a week or so, and I will stay on for a week's holidays. I'll miss the trips to Cork at the weekend, where I could go on a whim without any forward planning, but hopefully with a little bit of planning I will be heading to Spain every few months for a long weekend in the sun and see the girls grow and the family settling into the country they love so much.  Enjoy the photos!

Barcelona - from the Bus Turístic and beyond

I already wrote here that I went to Spain last month for a short holiday to visit our son and his partner in Malgrat de Mar, a beach resort town on the Costa Maresme (which I always thought was the Costa Brava but is technically one town away from the start of the Costa Brava which goes all the way from Blanes up to the French border near Dalí's house in Cadaqués at Port Lligat). While there we met up with an old friend from my nursing days and her two teenage girls, and spent two days with them in Barcelona, doing the whole tourist thing.

Barcelona is a beautiful city with a great history and heritage. Artistically and architecturally it is probably unsurpassed in Spain, with its Gaudí buildings and the links with Miró and Picasso, and its pride in hosting the 1992 Olympic Games. I had been to Sagrada Familia, Gaudí's iconic and unfinished cathedral, and Casa Batllo and La Pedrera in a previous visit so was happy to visit new places this time. As I went to Camp Nou, the home of Barcelona Football (soccer) Club, with the kids in 2004, I didn't return this time.

We had both been intrepid travellers in the past, having backpacked all over the Subcontinent (India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka) between 1978 and 1980 when we lived and worked in Bangladesh, as well as doing Europe on Inter-Rail in our student days. So this was our first opportunity to do some sightseeing and it took us right back to our hippie trail days! As we had done all the major Indian and European cities at breakneck speed and packed in every major must-see sight in a few days back then, we didn't see why this time should be any different in Barcelona. Hence our plan to pack in as much as possible in the few days we had together.

To see Barcelona when time is limited, there is probably no better way than to take the ubiquitous Bus Turístic, the open-topped buses that ply the streets from morning to night. There are 3 colour-coded routes, red, blue and green, and at €27 for a 2-day ticket it is pretty good value. We both spent about 5 hours going on a recce on all 3 routes just to get a feel for the city and a sense of orientation, flagging what we would revisit over the few days.

We spent an afternoon at Tibidabo, the mountain to the north of Barcelona that makes a natural city boundary, and tried out some of the various rides in the amusement park. This park is not at all glitzy or Disney-esque, but has been around for years and has simple carousel rides and a 1929 white-knuckle ride - sedate by todays' rollercoaster standards - on a plane that goes out over the clifftop, a thrill at the time when airtravel was not the everyday cattletruck experience that it has become. We went to the top of the church of Sagrat Cor (Sacred Heart) where for €2 a lift takes you to the roof and you can walk further up to the statue on the top. The views were spectacular and I could see Montserrat where I had been a few times in previous years. That is a monastery atop a rocky outcrop - the serrated mountain or Montserrat - and is another great day trip about an hour from Barcelona.

To get to Tibidabo you have to get the Tramvia Blau (a lovely old wooden tram) and a funicular railway to the top. These are always good fun, although the funicular at Montserrat is much steeper and vertigo-inducing. Tibidabo features in the film Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which I have yet to see, and the city is capitalising on the connections. My first encounter with Tibidabo was in The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón where a lot of the action takes place, and as that is set in the pre-Civil War days it shows how long the park has been a Barcelona attraction, pre-dating tourism and somehow making it more real than theme parks and interpretive centres.

We spent a pleasant few hours in El Poble Espanyol, a Folk Park that was built for the 1929 international exhibition and should have been dismantled but was left there as it was so popular. It showcases house types from all over Spain, and is a really tranquil oasis in Montjuic, the mountain on the coastal side of Barcelona, which also housed the Olympic Stadium, now the home of Espanyol football club, Barca's nemesis. We took a short cable car ride to Castell Montjuic, a fortress where Catalans were executed during the Civil War for opposing Franco, now housing a military museum, which has amazing views over the port, and we took another cable car across the bay, from Miramar on Montjuic, over the port and harbour, to the Blue Flag beach of San Sebastian. This is my kind of scary ride, as I don't do white-knuckle park rides, and being suspended in a glass box 80 metres above ground and sea is quite enough thrill for me.

This cable car also features in the climactic closing sequence of The Angel's Game, Carlos Ruiz Zafón's new book, which I read on this holiday. His books are a bit too much magical realism for me, but they evoke Barcelona beautifully, and for this they are perfect location books. I have read Antony Beevor's seminal History of the Spanish Civil War and Giles Tremlett's The Ghosts of Spain on previous Spanish holidays. These books, along with George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia are must-reads for anyone interested in some background history on Barcelona and Catalan nationalism and where it all fits in today's Spain.

Another wonderful place is Parc Guell, which Gaudí also built but like the Sagrada Familia, never finished. While Gaudí is loved now as an incredibly talented maverick artist, he was probably too avant-garde for most of his patrons or their wives. This may be why Casa Mila (La Pedrera) was controversial for having no right angles or corners as well as breaching city planning laws, and along with Parc Guell has more curves than a Hollywood starlet. We wandered all over the park and posed on the famous curvilinear tiled bench atop the doric columned hall, which was to be the market.

Placa Catalunya at the top of the Ramblas, the tree-lined main drag in Barcelona, is a good jumping off spot for soaking up the atmosphere of the city. We wandered around there both evenings, went shopping in La Boqueria market, and the old city or Barri Gotic, enjoying the nocturnal buzz of street jugglers and mime artists and onto the Rambla de Mar, the Boardwalk on the waterfront. The Ramblas is notorious for pickpockets and inflated prices, which we found out when a mediocre meal of tapas and paella on a terrace there cost twice what we had expected or would have paid back on the Costa.

Two days was nowhere near enough to do justice to Barcelona but it was terrific to spend some time with an old friend and catch up on the years, and the Bus Turístic was the way to go; definitely to be recommended to anyone planning a break in this lovely Mediterranean city.

To see all the photos from my holiday, click on the Picasa slide show on the sidebar - Spain 2009 - and enjoy the journey with me!

Thoughts on summer sun holidays - and the Irish "summer"

In July I went to Spain with teenage daughter for a short break, as our eldest son has lived north of Barcelona in a seaside resort town for the past eight years. We have been there almost every year, and we only go because he's there, resort towns and package holidays generally not being my thing. However it is a great place to just chillax and unwind after the stresses and strains of the Irish "summer", which we look forward to throughout the bleak winter months, only to be disappointed yet again.

What I left behind....at home....


...and from the plane in Shannon....

No wonder we can't muster enthusiasm for the killjoy environmentalists who go on bemoaning global warming, as we'd love some to have some here, thanks very much, during what laughably passes for our summer months. We have had virtually non-stop rain since the end of June, after about two nice weeks in the middle of June. July was the wettest on record, and August looks equally dismal. So we have little to look forward to for the rest of the so-called summer.

Kids are bored, teenagers mutinous, and parents driven to distraction trying to keep sane during the school holidays. Newspapers are full of tips on how to keep the kids entertained during the Irish three-month long school holiday, which must be the longest in the world. (No wonder Irish teachers say when asked what they like about their job - June, July and August!). Irish kids are probably no different to kids everywhere in the Western world, spoilt by a plethora of Playstation and Wii and Nintendo DS game consoles, and go into terminal catatonia at parental suggestions that they go for a nice walk/cycle/read a book or something equally improving that doesn't involve MSN-ing, Facebook-ing or Bebo-ing each other. (Come to think of it, in this house those are mostly parental activities so maybe I can't afford to preach!)

....and what I saw on arrival!

Back to sun holidays - I only ever went on one package holiday to the sun; that was to Tenerife when I was 22, and it was my first time ever flying, so it was a first in many ways! I was with a group of 9 or 10 other midwives, we had just finished our training and were ready to party. I had a ball but even then was a free spirit who wasn't quite ready to be regimented in the package holiday modus operandi. I had been round Europe a few years earlier Inter-Railing and that was one of the best holidays ever, and I would love to do it again now that the age limit is gone. Time was you had to be under-21, then 26, and now with life-long learning the norm, they seem to have acknowledged that we can be perpetual students!

This year I was meeting the same friend who had done the Inter-Railing trip with me as she was in Barcelona the same time as I was visiting Spain, so we planned our reunion, and as she had her teenage girls in tow, it was a hit with my teenager as well. We had a wonderful two days in Barcelona, and she spent two days on the costa with us as well. As we caught up on the years, we both agreed Barcelona was a great place to visit and the Costa Brava a great place to spend some down time on the beach recharging the batteries for the rest of the year.

Since coming home just over a week ago it has been virtually non-stop rain and flooding, and as you can see in the photo over here when I say floods I mean monsoon-like rains! Today is the August Bank Holiday Monday and is usually associated with sun and traffic jams on the way to the beach, but alas today is par for the course and another wet day. It is also cold enough to warrant wearing jeans and a jumper (sweater) - not a tee-shirt day at all. We are debating ordering our winter heating oil in August as if this continues we will be putting on the heating pretty soon.

I met someone in the supermarket today who is just back from a sun holiday in Spain and we agreed that it didn't matter where you were, it is essential to get your sunshine fix to face down the winter here. Someone said on Niamh's post (where I was a guest blogger last Friday - take a look!) regarding Ikea and their whole concept of cheap'n'cheerful home furnishings (which I wrote about in my last post), that in Scandinavia with its long dark winters people spend more time indoors so home becomes more important and change is more common than in hot countries. Maybe there is something to that. When we lived in Africa so much of our life was spent outdoors - garden or balcony/patio - that the interior was less important than it is here. Or maybe I am not enough of a houseproud "hausfrau"!

I will post my holiday pics on a sidebar Picasa slideshow, for those remotely interested in having a look, and will blog a bit on Barcelona which was absolutely wonderful, it has to be one of Europe's best cities and I would love to spend longer there exploring and wandering. One day, maybe one day...