Worlds Apart

It's hard to believe, listening to radio and TV reports right now, that there are other worlds where financial stabililty treaties, bondholders, austerity policies and bank bailouts have no place. There are worlds where creatures live unworried by mortgage foreclosures, changing political policies or pointless class divisions.

I am reminded of this when I open W.H. Hudson's 'Adventures Among Birds', published in 1951 by J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd. of London. It was actually first published in 1913, according to what I read on the back cover. Once again, this is an old library book, with the usual stamps and marks where labels were wrenched off none too gently. Like most other people, I love birds, and this book reminds how much there is about them to love. Much of the author's prose is delicious, the words spilling out like long phrases of birdsong, the descriptions of these little feathery personalities bringing them immediately to view even to those who have never laid eyes on them. Well before linguists started to study bird-song as language, this writer understood it as that;  even when he is overcome by emotions regarding them, when his writing may seem a trifle flowery or sentimental, his love for them cannot fail to stir similar emotions in the reader. In a chapter entitled 'The Marsh Warbler's Music' he says:

“One of the greatest pleasures in life – my life I mean – is to be present, in a sense invisible, in the midst of the domestic circle of beings of a different order, another world, than ours. Yet it is one which may be had by any person who desires it. “

Naturally the writing is in many ways old-fashioned, and now that we are spoiled with recorded bird-song and countless DVDs about the life of birds, it is hard to imagine exactly how much this book about them must have meant to Hudson's contemporaries who shared his love of bird life, For that reason alone, this book should be spared becoming wastepaper. But, I ask myself, for how long? The boxes and boxes of most wonderful books at various sales or on the shelves of the recycling centres tell me that for such volumes, not first editions, not collector's items, defaced methodically in order to be scrapped, their day is done. The world of financial value is the only world in which they could survive, and if they have no monetary merit, they, and all they speak for, are as good as dead.


I don't know what to say about the Penguin Book of Lies. It is edited by Philip Kerr and published by Penguin Books, England, in 1990. It is a paperback, in very good condition, and I cannot recall where I got it. Most of the pieces included are about fairly well-known historical events, distorted at the time for public relations purposes; others deal with letters or works of literature later discovered to be forgeries. In those days, as indeed in these in some parts of the world, people went to the gallows or were otherwise executed for other people's lies. This is the problem, the real lies have probably never been discovered. At this very moment, we are in the midst of lies, told to advance political, religious or commercial ends It is chilling to consider how little of the truth may be in everyday life. Then, on the other hand, that so-called 'real life' is only one of many parallel universes. We can live in one of those and never allow ourselves to be contaminated by the evil 'society' lays us open to. Of course we will then seem peculiar or odd, but we will be freer. Thinking about this, I hope that neither animals nor birds ever learn to understand our speech. At the moment, they remain incorruptible, innocent. Some of the discourses in the book discuss what exactly a lie is, often giving various categories of lies, and even opining that a lie told for the good of another is not a bad thing. So how do we decide what is another's good? And how real is that aim, how genuine the sentiment? I am particularly thinking here of political or religious propaganda. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Plato, Samuel Johnson, Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Wesley, Immanuel Kant are just some of the countless famous persons who have an opinion on the matter in this not very cheering book. The truth is, you don't have to be famous or infamous to know what a lie is. When you are telling one, you know, unless you are dreaming or hallucinating. Others may not know, of course, that is the problem, for them.

This book is probably of use to those who like history. They, or their like in future generations, will be able to read of this year's, this decade's lies. We are not so fortunate.

I am a vegetarian, the dairy-consuming type, and 'Vegetarian Cheese Cookery' by Jo Marcangelo fell into my arms when I was retrieving books today. It describes “Making and Using Rennet-free Cheeses”, I read inside, and is published by Thorsons Publishing Group in the U.S.A. In 1987. There are lovely little illustrative drawings in it of the type I always love, by Kim Blundell. The first part of the book is about cooking with soft cheese, and the second describes how to make cheese for oneself, the equipment needed, the ingredients, and finally, recipes for the different cheeses. . I thought it was much older because it is a bit worn in appearance, the pages yellow and somewhat foxed; of course this can mean it has been very much loved and used before it turned up on the shelf of the recycling centre. One unusual thing about its recipes, including various cheesecakes, is that the ingredients are given in two lists, one for imperial and metric measurements, with the metric in brackets beside the imperial, and the other for 'American' iingredients. The puzzle is that I can see almost no difference between the lists, except sometimes 'cups' are used on the American list instead of imperial or metric measurements, and 'top of the milk' on the first list is 'half and half' on the American one. This seems rather pointless, but the recipes are nice. Here is a recipe for cottage cheese you might like to try your hand at:


Cottage Cheese

(Makes 8 oz/225g/1 cup)

Imperial (Metric)                                                                            American


2 pints (1.12 litres) skimmed or whole milk                                 5 cups skimmed or whole milk

1 tablespoon cultured buttermilk or natural                                  1 tablespoon cultured buttermilk or

yoghurt (optional)                                                                             plain yogurt (optional)

2 teaspoons vegetarian junket                                                        2 teaspoons vegetarian junket
rennet                                                                                              rennet

1. Heat the milk gradually to 100oF (38oC) and stir in the starter, if using, and the rennet. Cover and leave undisturbed in a warm place, to coagulate – up to 2 hours.

2. When the curd has set, cut into 1/2 inch (1 cm) cubes with a knife; cut it vertically and then

turn the curd over carefully with a spoon and cut it the other way.

3. Slowly re-heat the curd to 100oF (38oC), stirring all the time to keep it from sticking

together. Remove from the heat and allow to stand for 15 minutes.

4. Line a colander with a square of scalded muslin (cheesecloth) and stand it over a bowl.

Ladle in the curds and leave to drain for about 10 minutes. Hold the colander under a
running, cold water tap, and literally 'wash' the curds, to rinse off the whey. This process
produces the traditional lumpy texture associated with cottage cheese. Stand the
colander over a bowl and leave to drain for a few minutes.

5. Put the drained curds into a bowl. For a richer flavour, the cottage cheese may be 'creamed'

by mixing in a little single (light) cream or yogurt depending on taste. It may also be salted
and any flavouring added at this stage. Home-made cottage cheese does not contain
preservatives, so does not keep as long as the commercial variety. Keep in the refrigerator
and eat within 2-3 days.




I read in the foregoing chapter that “in order to make cheese from pasteurized milk, you must first reintroduce the appropriate bacteria into the milk. This is known as adding a starter – a special culture of lactic acid-producing bacteria – to sour and curdle the milk” The author says that “The best alternative”(to commercial starters) “is to use commercially cultured buttermilk.......”You can flavour your cheese with fresh herbs such as parsley, marjoram or thyme, garlic, chopped nuts, whatever you like. So there's something to do for the next rainy day.


Flora Thompson wrote “Lark Rise to Candleford”, described as a trilogy in this Penguin Books edition, England, 1973. It was published first in three parts – 'Lark Rise', 'Over to Candleford' and 'Candleford Green' in 1931, 1941 and 1943. It's a chatty book about life in England from the late1800s to the first years of the 20th century, and is in fact an autobiographical work, although it is as much the story of neighbours, villages and villagers, schools and other institutions known to the author as she grew up. Reading it is like listening to old people talking about their lives; descriptions, smalll anecdotes, philosophical asides all combine to make a work that can be opened at any page and still be full of interest, even delight. This book was made into a TV drama in the last few years, but the glimpse I took of one episode showed me that it was worlds apart from the book; there are some things that TV and movies cannot do, and conveying the joy, the feeling, the atmosphere of books like this is among them.

What I really like about 'The Woman's Day Book of Annuals and Perennials' (besides the fact that it is about plants, which straight away makes it a favourite for me) are the lovely coloured drawings of flowers of all kinds, pansies, morning-glories, poppies, forget-me-nots, many many more; these are by Fritz Kredel, and the book is written by Jean Hersey and published by Simon and Schuster of New York. There is a lovely dedication inside to a namesake of the author -
For Joan, Who grows flowers wherever she is -The work is divided into two main parts, One Hundred Annuals, and One Hundred Perennials, and describes the appearance, origins, and cultivation requirements of these lovely and well-loved cottage garden plants. At the end of the book are given diagrams with planting suggestions. It is the perfect book for a new gardener, not grandiose, lecturing nor pompous, and it is as pretty as the gardens it hopes to produce. It is in such good condition that it is amazing it came from a box of miscellaneous books at a car-boot sale.

I kept my favourite of all until last. This is such an amazing book that it is surprising to have found it at a library sale. Entitled 'Weather Lore', it is a compilation from all over the world of quotations, old sayings, proverbs, all to do with weather. Richard Inwards made the compilation and arrangements, we are told, and it was “Edited, revised and amplified by E.L. Hawke” and “republished by S.R. Publishers Limited 1969 from the Fourth Edition published for the Royal Meteorological Society, London, by Rider and Company of London, New York, Melbourne, Sydney, Cape Town 1950”. What a mouthful. But believe me, it lives up to all expectations stirred by the title page. All the weather phenomena are dealt with under chapters with names such as Sun, Moon and Stars, Wind, Clouds, Mists, Haze, Dew, Fog, Sea, Tide, etc., Rainbow, Frost, and so on. Every page is full of interest. Some might seem simple, such as, under the heading 'Insects', “Early : bees early at work will not go on all day” or “A bee was never caught in a shower.” No doubt many will be able to challenge these sayings, but that does not make them any less interesting. All the other usual insects, such as ants, spiders, wasps and so forth are mentioned. Somewhere in these sayings may well be a lot of truth, the kind of truth that we are able to test for ourselves, without worrying about the outcome.

O Ireland, My Country !

I found Ivan Illich's 'Deschooling Society' in the recycling centre. Published by Calder & Boyars, London in 1971, this copy had a footmark on the cover and the pages were quite marked, but it looked interestng and I brought it home.  Because it is quite an old book now, many of Illich's ideas have been superseded by today's technology. One example is his suggestion that rather than spend huge sums of money on television stations, a state should supply tape recorders and endless tapes and allow them to be borrowed at will by those who wished to learn and discuss. Obviously the possession of a computer, software and an internet connection is an improvement on this idea. Among his criticisms of the school systems which to his mind are the same the world over is that he feels they have a one size fits all mentality which produces education as it were in bundles, to be disseminated by teachers who all had followed the same road through education and are passing this unimaginative system on to their students; there is no creativity, the curricula are enforced, and students and teachers have to comply. He proposes that in fact the main function of formal schools is to create labour for the market and consumers for the goods in this same market. The practitiioners of skills cannot not pass them on unless they have the requisite teachers' qualifications.
Illich (dead since 2002) discusses many new ideas of his in this book He feels that schools, which need a vast financial investment on the part of a state, cater mainly for the better off in society. The sums poured into education, paying teachers, providing buildings and their necessary utilities, benefit the better off more than those who are disadvantaged. The disadvantaged often drop out of school for reasons to do with being needed to earn for the family, or because they cannot afford the hidden costs of schooling, or because they are alienated anyway from the whole system, or for any number of related reasons. . So even if the money invested purports to be equally for them as much as for others, they gain little from it.

Illich, in a development of his ideas, talks about roads, particularly in rural areas of so-called developing countries, and argues that they are not for the majority of the citizenry, but rather for the possessors of fast cars, or for lorries to ferry consumer goods to those areas which could be quite self-sufficient. He says lower speeds, and mechanical 'donkeys' would suit these populations far better and make their lives much easier. In other words, people can travel slowly but surely where they need to go. Another important point he makes is that such mechanical donkeys would be of necessity cheap to purchase and easy and cheap to repair, thus obliterating the need for another skill group to fix them, and giving independence to their owners. You may wonder what this has to do with deschooling society, but his point is that producing goods that only an esoteric group can maintain or repair is another way of institutionalising such knowledge too. Nowadays, looking at new motor cars with their complicated computers, no small deal financially or in terms of repair for their owners, (who can of course afford any maintenance or repairs needed anyway), we have to concede the point to Illich.

Personally I think that senior schools as we know them are in their last innings. Access to the internet and the web has made them redundant. Students are much maturer nowadays and would be well able to access their own learning from home, decide what and how to study, and as a result, be much better prepared for higher education. I'll bet that a grant to every secondary school age student to purchase a computer and towards the cost of broadband would cost the state a lot less money than the endless amount which is needed to maintain schools. Even the provision of a panel of mentors or advisors, accessible by phone or online for such students, would not come near the cost of providing the outmoded senior school system. All that is needed is one drop-in centre per area, where students can call in person if they wish, including a coffee shop for socialisation purposes and for participation in clubs catering for different interests. A laboratory attached to the centre, with a supervisor, would cater for practical experiments necessary for science courses. If you learn one thing from Ivan Illich's book, it is that nothing is set in stone. Every system can be changed for a better one.


I'm not one for ghost stories or conspiracy theories. But you know the shocked feeling you get when you open a newspaper and see someone you know has hit the headlines for some undesirable reason or other? You know that feeling? Well, that's what I felt when I came across Greg Palast's 'The Best Democracy Money Can Buy' on the recycling centre's shelf. Published by Robinson, London, in 2002, the first chapter was very interesting, describing a scenario we all know about now, the 'disappearing' of Texan Democrat voters, mainly black, off the voting register at the time when George Bush Junior lost an election which brought him into the White House, to paraphrase Palast. No surprises there, then. But it was the chapter entitled '   Sell The Lexus, Burn The Olive Tree' which shocked me, as I read the first pages and recognised a portrait of Ireland, my country, in disguise perhaps, but definitely Ireland. Oh, she was called Argentina and Bolivia and Ecuador, but it was Ireland, I recognised her immediately, and I recognised the Grim Reaper at her back. Our Taoiseach is right when he says we partied as a nation during the boom years, on money we didn't own. Anyone who doesn't see that is in denial. Also in denial are the many thousands who voted for 'that other party' during those same years. We took the sweets at the school gates, not recognising them for the drugs they were, and we were hooked. Okay, there's a lot of “Who we, Whiteman?” going around, and yes, there was always a particular party in those countries as well as our own that let down the drawbridge, but howsoever, it happened, and in their usual way, the World Bank, the IMF and the ECB (so much for Europe) walked in and insisted we pay the pushers. Palast describes the steps which then occur, including mass privatisation and selling off of a country's resources, wage cuts, cuts in public spending, the breaking of labour contracts and , overturning of minimum wage agreements and so forth, and how it's all in the cause of 'Globalization'. Which basically means, “What's yours is mine and what's mine's my own”. History repeats itself....the Trojan Horse with its unseen passengers got inside our gates....and it is going to be a hell of a job to get them out again. If you can face it, read this book. And, if you decide then that you want to read more of Greg Palast, here's his website: http://www.gregpalast.com/ 

O Ireland, my country !

While you're at it and if you really want to be scared, you could take a look at this too:

http://www.indymedia.ie/article/185?search_text=teachers unless of course you are already a GATS expert.

Did you notice the proliferation of books on cake making recently, and the endless newspaper articles on cupcakes – one well-known Irish author, Marian Keyes, saying that making cupcakes cured her depression?   'Any one can Bake' is an unusual one from the recycling centre, published in 1929 by Royal Baking Powder Co., U.S.A. I wonder who treasured this book and how it made its appearance on the recycling shelves? I myself can manage to bake quite well, and sustained my family on the results all the years they were growing up. What is particularly appealing about this book is that the cakes are all drawn and coloured by hand rather than photographed. I'm not sure why I like this, but I do. They have the honest and irregular shapes that mine used to have, maybe that's the reason. But all these cupcakes, during a recession and at a time that we have lost our economic sovereignty, why do I keep thinking of Marie Antoinette?

Learning Lessons

Recovering from a surprise bug and unable to do any more than read, (no great penance, needless to say), I found Liam O'Flaherty's 'Famine', which was on my shelves for some time and I always meant to read. I read it in two days and must tell you, it is an amazing, a stunning, a riveting piece of work. There are so many parts of it I would like to tell you about, but they are too many, and I really don't want to spoil the discovery for anyone who gives it a go. I urge anyone who wants a meaningful novel to read, get this book. It is a story told against the background of the Irish Famine, also known as The Great Hunger. The Famine was always given a capital letter when written about, and with reason, for it was an event written into all our psyches, albeit some are unaware of it. I would go so far as to say that it may well be at the back of the country's troubles today, for the way the country behaved during the so-called 'boom' which ended catastrophically in 2008 was definitely not the way a population unscarred by massive want or hunger would behave.

Critics who were quoted on the back cover of the book said that Mary was the heroine, and indeed she was, but underneath it all, Brian, her father-in-law, is the most memorable character. All the characters, however, are well-drawn and rounded figures. It is a horror story all the greater because it describes real times in the life of this small island, from which everyone suffered, at the very least psychologically. Most of the suffering though was physical also, living skeletons walked the roads, eating whatever the countryside provided; those who could got away to England or America.

I never can understand the wide spaces of road edges and the fields lying empty of cultivation or stock which one sees when travelling around the Irish countryside. And not too far from our local town, there are paddocks of ragwort seeding themselves everywhere. Years ago there were warning notices in the post office against ragwort and its dangers for horses and other animals. Nowadays, no-one seems to care. Surely with a history such as ours, empty or poisonous fields cry out to heaven. There is no reason for us not to be totally self-sufficient as far as food is concerned with the land and water we have. As global warming, for whatever reason, continues, others will come and show us how to use our fields.

This book about the Famine was all the more real for me because I've been digging into family history recently, and learned that a great great grandmother who died of post-famine fever was carried to Glasnevin cemetery in Dublin on a wheelbarrow by her husband for burial, because no workers would risk going near the body. Another great great grandfather who was a teacher died in Co. Carlow at the time, with his wife and two young children. Everyone was affected in one way or another. This book was written within ninety years of the horror, in 1937, and the copy I have is a paperback edition dated 1979 and published by Wolfhound Press.

Liam O'Flaherty wrote among other novels one called 'The Informer' which was turned into a film by John Ford, who was actually a cousin of his. I would think that 'Famine' would make an awe-inspiring film too, giving plenty of work to extras. The most momentous parts of the book are very visual:

What more can I say! If you can at all, do read this book.

Lots of people say they would love to garden, but they don't have time, or a big enough garden, or the know-how. Well, the latter is easily acquired from books, and also now from the world wide web, obviously. If you don't feel you have the space, and you are short of time because you must work for your bread as well as run a home and pay for the baby minder, (I'm not going to talk about that weird state of affairs just now), and you think a houseplant or two would bring dust and pests into your house (not necessarily the case but it is a widely-held view), get yourself a little sink or fish box, or make a concrete tub, stand it at your back door, fill it with good well-drained soil and grit, and buy some tiny plants. 'Collins Guide to Alpines' , by Anna N. Griffith, published by Collins London in 1972 is the type of book you need now. It gives the names of rock plants which are not in the main hard to find, tells you the type of soil they like to live in, whether they mind getting too wet or not, and when they will flower. When you find these tiny plants you will fall in love with them. The first year you garden this way, you will buy many so-called tiny plants which will take off and become giants; blame the nursery and move them to a border or give them away, and start again. Research and experience will teach you the names of the plants which will stay small. Seed sellers such as www.chilternseeds.co.uk will have seeds of many teeny plants which can be sown outside in your little garden. Or you may want to have another box just for seedlings. Eventually, you may want another sink or trough...but you will not have to walk far to tend your garden, and the plants will not have to be cossetted. You have a whole new interest in life as long as you can keep your plants out of reach of the family dog which was supposed to be the size of a Yorkshire terrier but is daily showing more resemblance to a St. Bernard. You may have to dissuade the family cat from sunning herself on the more cushiony plants, but a few sprinkles of water should do the trick. The library should have books on sink and trough gardening; rock gardening in the title is not always a good bet, as some people have monstrous sized rock gardens with five foot shrubs in them and rocks like the foothills of mountains. Books on trough gardening, though, unmistakeably deal with tiny plants which can be relied upon to stay within the stated limits. And if you ever want to garden in a larger way, all you learn in taking care of your miniature plants will easily transfer to their bigger brethern. Go for it!

'Teach Yourself To Learn A Language' is one of the famous Teach Yourself books, in this case written by P.J.T. Glendening, and published by The English Universities Press Ltd., London in 1963. Inside you will find sensible instructions on what you must do before you proceed to study your language of choice. It gives examples of the type of survey of a language which should be made before you start. The languages surveyed for this purpose are Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Hindustani, Italian, Japanese, Malay, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. I have found it a wonderful book, which inspires you with confidence in your ability to learn a language.

Irish people have the idea that they are bad at languages. Partly to blame for this is the poor teaching of their own native tongue, well, nowadays, their second native tongue, for we are almost all accomplished speakers of our first language, Hiberno-English. I recall a mature student in UCD telling me that she had just discovered that Irish had genders, Masculine and Feminine, the existence of which she was aware in other languages such as French, but no-one had ever mentioned it concerning Irish. I think that is a sin. What kind of language teaching can lead to that ignorance and confusion? There always seems to have been a school of thought in Ireland that we can learn the Irish language in a kind of osmosis because it is lodged somewhere in our Irish brains, just waiting to come out. But the teaching of languages in Ireland generally is a disgrace. The first thing which should be taught in schools is linguistics. I recall two first-year students in UCD whose first tongues were German and Spanish respectively, who had studied linguistics from the age of seven in Germany and Spain. They got Firsts in their first year university courses, while the Irish struggled with this peculiar discipline. Of course they triumphed later in their further language studies, one in Arabic and Hebrew, the other in English and Portuguese. The former was fluent also in English, Norwegian and Italian as well as of course in her native German.

You don't need me to tell you that we now have a high percentage of young people unemployed. The agencies which are delivering re-education such as Information Technology to these young people ignore the acquisition of foreign languages totally. Yet look on any job recruitment site online and key in that you can speak a language such as German, Italian, Russian and so forth, and you will be inundated with job opportunities just waiting to be filled. The fact that many require a degree should be no problem to our highly-educated populace. Try, for example, http://ie.jobrapido.com/ and put any language in the search box, and give your e-mail address. Day after day you will receive notice of jobs in Dublin or countrywide which are waiting to be filled by anyone who can speak just one foreign tongue. Any government worth its salt should be offering retraining in languages to the young unemployed, even if they only hope to export them to Europe, of which we are supposed to be so much a part. Pshaw! That's what I say. It's time to get real here! You too can learn a language. It's a set of rules which you learn to follow, and a vocabulary which you will acquire if you dedicate yourself to it. Every day people learn new words; the fact that these new words are not English, should make no difference. You can do it!

Old but still good

At a car boot sale a lovely smiley man was selling boxes of old books.  I looked through one of them and said without thinking "You know, some of these could be quite valuable."
"I'll tell you what, love"  he said. "They were my old mum's. I'm not selling them for the money.  I want them to go to someone who really wants them".  Then he looked firmly at me. " A fiver a box, love.  A whole box or nothing."
There was every sort of reading matter in there; instructions for old washing machines and Hoovers, a pamphlet on how to service an ancient-looking boiler, an inky-looking advertisement for a sale-of-work in a country school in October 1965. Underneath was the book which had drawn my attention first, a lovely copy of "Rambles in Eirinn" by William Bulfin, published by M.H. Gill of Dublin in 1908, together with a set of history books, in not such good condition:  "History Of Ireland From The Earliest Times To The Present Day", by The Rev. E.A.D'Alton, LL.d. M.R.I.A. The publishers were the Gresham Publishing Company, London and the date in Roman numerals 1912. The six volumes were described as Half-Volumes 1,2,3,4,5,and 6, a term I have never come across before.  At one time they must have been very handsome, with their green cloth covers with green lettering on a gold base and gold illumination. One had a damaged spine, and they bore the resigned air of books which had lain in an attic for many years.  However, they had been well used and loved - there were
very lightly pencilled notes in many of the margins, and here and there a pressed autumnal leaf marked a page. Looking through them again today, if the first chapter of the very first volume, entitled "Various Names of Ireland" is anything to go by, these books  are  unputdownable, although if I manage to get even part of the way through the 284 pages of the initial one, I will be doing well, for I have come across so many books I want to read since I started this blog that I would need another ninety years of life to have any hope of doing so.

In the box also, quite incongruously, were two fairly modern paperback editions of James Bond books, "The Spy Who Loved Me" and "Live and Let Die".
I handed over the money, and in the course of a short conversation I discovered that his mother was dead two years, and he had only now started to sort out her things.  She had been almost ninety when she died.  I had to ask if she was a James Bond fan.  He laughed.
 - "She were a bit of a James Bond herself".  I was interested, but he turned away to talk to someone else and then went to root in his van.  I sensed the conversation was over.

Old books are so much about the people who owned them - where and why they bought them or who gave them to them, what they meant in their lives; fiction or non-fiction, books draw other stories in their wake as long as they exist.

In the first paragraphs of his book about his cycling tour around Ireland, Bulfin tells us -
"It was the last day of June, and the weather was perfect. The people along the road said it was "shocking warm" and "terrible hot, glory be to God", but after seventeen sweltering years at the sunny South I found it just charming.......it was a splendid dawn.  We seemed to have brought with us some of the sunshine of the South, for earth and sea and air were flooded with morning gold. It flamed in the soft clouds which dotted the sky.  It flushed the blue.  It lay on the hills.  It rippled on the water."  and so on, in warm words which mitigate a little the grey blue of the winter afternoon outside my window.  The book has many photographs of Irish locations, worthy of a visit for reasons of scenery or history or archaeology.  The photos particularly fascinate because of the changes in the depicted places since they were taken; the traffic in the Dublin and Cork of this book would not have offered the same threat to Bulfin that modern vehicles do to a cyclist.  How free it must have felt to travel the country's roads without fear of the monsters which now loom around every corner.

The front cover of Bulfin's work is quite undamaged, the title and author's name illuminated in gold and decorated likewise.  The smooth, cream-coloured pages bear some inconsequential marks but in general they are sound.

The technological and scientific advances we have seen today, unthinkable only a few years ago, make me speculate that there may well come a time when it will be possible to identify the people who once opened this book, maybe all books that survive. We have already overtaken James Bond and goodness knows where it will end.

 Such, I suppose, are the thoughts of many like myself who read their books and dream.