The Way Home Read online

  As I sit in a cabin writing, I recall how, between 1811 and 1814, the actual Luddites rebelled against the wealthy industrialists and their powerful political friends who, at the time of the land enclosures, were obliterating the cottage economies which afforded the common people a familial, purposeful and pleasant life. By then the steam engine – what Carlyle called ‘Stygian forges with their fire-throats and never-resting sledge-hammers’ – was enabling one man to do the work it would have taken two or three hundred men to do only a decade earlier. This effectively reduced a once proud and independent class of skilled craftspeople who had worked in their rural cottages to, at best, wage slaves in an urban slum and, at worst, the unemployed in an urban slum. After a three-year resistance the industrialists eventually won, and the rest, as they say, is history.

  As I sit in a cabin writing about the Luddites, I fantasise about rebellion. But where to start? I look around and see that, in the twenty-first century, the machine is everywhere, even in my own head. Maybe that’s not such a bad place to start then.

  ~

  Buying books, during that twenty-year period of my life in which the internet pervaded much of what I did, was quick and simple. Go online, search for the book you want (they have it, always), click a few buttons and it’s in your letterbox within a few days. If you’re not the disciplined sort, you may even get a couple of other books in the post with it. These go on the bookshelf as intellectual wallpaper, and you reassure yourself you’ll make time to read them soon.

  Easy. Probably too easy.

  Not so easy any more. I’m looking for a specific book, A Social History of Ancient Ireland, published over one hundred years ago but out of print now. I came across a free online version of it a number of years ago, but wasn’t motivated enough to read it at the time. In it, the author describes how my ancestors lived pre-industrialism, including everything from how they grew food to the details of their legal system, Brehon Law.

  With my thumb out, I stroll down the road not long after sunrise, and make it to Charlie Byrne’s bookstore in Galway City just as its doors are opening. It’s an independent shop, selling mostly second-hand and antiquarian books that are crammed into tall shelves in its many nooks and crannies. Vinny, whom I’ve come to know a little over the last few years, is working. He seems to know every one of the many thousands of books in the shop, and exactly where it might be.

  I ask him for the book I’m looking for. He hasn’t got it – it’s rare. Very rare. It will be a week or more before he can find a copy of it. He tells me about an event, happening the following week, with the writer who most influenced my decision to stop being so dictated by clock-time. On my way out the door I notice a book on the shelf that catches my eye and calls me. It’s the most beautiful book, as artefact, that I think I’ve ever seen. It’s called Nature: or, The Poetry of Earth and Sea by Madame Michelet. Its hardback cover is embossed with an illustration which is hand-crafted and gilded, as are the edges of its pages. It closes with a good, healthy thump. On the back and inside covers there are no words of praise from the media or notable persons, only a hand-written message saying ‘From Grandpa & Grandma, 1880’, written in the same year the book was published. It contains two hundred illustrations by the artist Giacomelli (who also illustrated The Bird by Madame Michelet’s husband, Jules), a feat which took two years alone.

  I learn more from simply looking at this book – as artefact, as art, as craft – than I have done from the contents of most others. It costs an arm and a leg – as it should – but I console myself with the thought that I’d rather have only ten of such books in the cabin than an entire library of cheap paperbacks on nature and craftsmanship whose production betrayed their content.

  I say goodbye to Vinny, tell him I’ll see him after the event next week, and start out home. I make it back by lunch.

  ~

  Holohan’s pub closed its doors a few days ago. Ten years ago there were two pubs in the village of Abbey. Now there are none.

  I meet a local in the next-door shop. Awful shame, he says. Where do we go for a pint now? Nowhere, I say.

  ~

  I’ve never tickled trout before. While tickling is still commonly used to catch fish in the Falkland Islands, it has been banned almost everywhere else. Why? I’m not sure. To my eyes, it seems to be the least cruel method of fishing, and it is certainly the most primitive, requiring not a single piece of gear or bait; slowness, awareness and sensitivity in the touch, along with a good understanding of the trout’s nature and habits, are just about all you need. Some claim it’s unsporting, but I’ve no interest in gentlemen’s rules. I don’t fish for sport, I fish to eat, as outdated as that might sound. Yet even the sporting argument doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, as tickling requires greater skill and knowledge than simply casting a €4.99 spinner, with an acid-sharpened hook on a reel of monofilament line, into a lake.

  Because of tickling’s illegality, my friend is obviously only teaching me the theory of how a Falkland Islander, or poacher, would go about it today. We wouldn’t dream of catching a trout, killing it and having it for dinner. Waist deep in water, we move slowly, unconcerned about making noise or scaring the fish away. We want them to be scared, and to swim away from open waters into the apparent security of the banks. My friend tells me that good knowledge of a river, built up over years, is at the heart of good tickling. He leads me on towards an overhanging tree, the kind of place an alerted trout would take refuge; if I were being hunted I’d make it as difficult as possible for my predator too. The problem in the modern world is that it’s hard to know who our real predators are anymore.

  We run our hands nervously – there are, allegedly, crayfish in this river too – along the bank, searching out the kind of holes rats make and brown trout like to hide in. A poacher would now try to feel the smooth, fleshy, alive belly of a trout protruding out of one of these holes. He would aim not to flinch as he felt it, but instead would slowly and gently run his hand along the underbelly of the fish, tickling it, before moving his other hand in for the kill. Once the fish is relaxed and acquainted with the gentle stroke of the hand, the poacher would grasp and bend the fish with a lightning-quick motion, pull it into his stomach and cast it onto the bank, where it would be knocked over the head as quickly and painlessly as possible.

  Not being poachers, we leave empty-handed, vowing to return one day to do some real fishing with a kitbag of industrial gear. We dry ourselves off as we walk home in the late evening sun.

  ~

  The lunar landscape before me is timeless, spectacular and unique. I’m with a friend on top of a hill in the Burren National Park, a 1,030 square kilometre World Heritage Site and national park in County Clare, the edge of which is a four hour cycle ride from our smallholding.

  It’s renowned worldwide for its wildflowers, which – like the oak – appear to prefer tough terrain to tough competition. I’m surrounded by pinpricks of yellows and purples and oranges and blues and reds, coming out of the cracks in the limestone, like a rainbow squeezing its way out of the moon. Rumour has it that J.R.R. Tolkien, who spent plenty of time here, based his map of Middle-earth on the Burren and, if you compare both maps, there appears to be some evidence to back up the claim. Considering the financial rewards of being the real-life Middle-earth, however, I’ve no doubt that there are many regional tourist boards making claims to all things Tolkien. Money and truth seldom go hand in hand.

  To our west-northwest, far off in the distance, is the fishing village of Kinvarra, where the sun is making its way under the horizon, turning the world beyond it an intense pink. Not long after, a full moon is rising golden to our east-southeast, drawing the tide gradually closer to all that dwells in the fishing villages below us. Between us and the Atlantic Ocean there’s a patchwork blanket of fields stitched together by gigantic Burren stone walls. My back feels the slightest breath of a breeze, like a satisfied sigh at the end of a good day’s work, and it’s welcome. There is barely a single pe
rceptible sound other than our own footsteps, and as that becomes noticeable we sit down together on a smooth hump of this karstic terrain.

  I feel like I want to get down on my hands and knees and worship what is before me. After a short moment sitting, my friend is on her feet again, filming its glory with her smartphone, and posting to her social media accounts.

  Quite astonished, she tells me that she has just noticed that you can now buy ‘likes’ for the things you post. I suppose, under its own logic, that makes sense. Money has always been able to buy a fake sense of popularity in the real world too. It was only a matter of time before this principle would be applied to the virtual world.

  The sky ablaze with indifference, we descend the hill before the light fades out completely.

  ~

  In among the rubble of ripped-up earth, chewed-up spruce and spat-out brush, a purple blanket of foxgloves has suddenly risen up, alive and defiant and spectacular, in the place near our smallholding which is now called a clear-fell. There must be thousands. There may be hundreds of thousands.

  It’s a beautiful, miraculous sight. It’s enough to give a man hope.

  Autumn

  We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness . . . A measure of success in this is all well enough, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau’s dictum: In wildness is the salvation of the world.

  Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1949)

  September equinox. Another season. We’re having a fire gathering – or, as it’s traditionally known, a massive piss-up – this evening, and it has come to my attention that I need to knock up some outdoor seating quite quickly. We’ve got a free and easy supply of discarded pallets, and considering there’s almost nothing that you can’t do with a pallet, the stack behind the wood store is central to my plans.

  Making a pallet chair is child’s play. I saw a pallet in half at a slight angle, so that one half (the back) reclines on top of other half (the base). I attach a couple of spruce boards as supporting arms, before raising the entire two-person seat up on another pallet. That’s one done, and I’ve barely got going. It’s the type of chair that would be called trendy and rustic in London, and for which time-poor, money-rich people would pay a silly price.

  Job done, I decide to take the afternoon off and to spend it reading in the sun. It is in these moments I find myself having to battle the work ethic with which I’ve struggled all my life, the one that has always told me that such afternoons are unproductive. As the sun descends behind the ash and horse chestnut trees to the west and people begin to arrive, I reflect on the fact that I’ve spent much of my life producing little more than bullshit anyway.

  ~

  Setting the fire, part II.

  I’m using an old newspaper, which I found in a neighbour’s recycling bin, whose headlines I conclude have probably already been recycled enough across social media. As I sort the tinder layer, I open a supplement on technology. I normally ignore the print and try to see the newspaper for what it actually is – thin slivers of wood pulp that are excellent for lighting – but there’s an oversized photograph of a sex robot staring at me on the front cover. As intended, it has my attention.

  The supplement claims that, within the next ten years, the sex robot industry will be big business. It certainly will if the editors of international media corporations say it will. This piece is spotlighting all sorts of products. There’s a virtual reality machine which runs a sort of interactive porn that connects with ‘a sleeve’ that attaches to the penis and, I can only imagine, replicates whatever action is taking place on the headset. You can pick any girl you like – blonde, brunette, buxom, dominant, passive, young or old. A different girl every night, if you like. None will refuse you because you were being an inconsiderate idiot all day, and you’ll no longer have to deal with any of the messiness that comes with human relationships.

  No one is to be left out, or perhaps spared. There are plenty of options for women and the LGBTQ community too. You’ll also be able to buy an actual robot you can go to bed with, and they’ll tell you all the dirty/romantic/caring/poetic/raunchy/sweet/sadistic things you like to hear, depending on what preferences you select from his/her/its drop-down menu (at some point in the future someone will get sued for calling a robot ‘it’). There’s an interview with one woman who has fallen in love with her sex robot, and says they plan to marry. She’s not alone.

  Later I speak to a friend about it. He tells me not to worry, it’ll never get to the point where sex robots replace the need for actual intimate, human sexual relationships. He might be right, as it’s too early to tell. Either way, will it mean that sex with living, breathing women who don’t like deep-throating, or with men who haven’t got six-packs and vibrating penises, will seem mundane, unexciting and undesirable in comparison?

  One week later. A farmer from across the way comes up the bóithrín in his old red Massey Ferguson. He stops to chat for a moment, before continuing on to one of his fields, where he has to drop off a big blue drum of water for his horses. Shortly afterwards I see him back again, this time with a large round bale of silage, which he promptly puts next to the drum. I notice how, in the entire process of looking after his animals, his feet don’t touch the ground once. Rather remarkable, really.

  I’m sure if someone told the farmers of yesteryear that there would come a time when a farmer’s feet wouldn’t touch the living, breathing earth under them, they probably would have said that it would never come to that, either.

  ~

  October is a good time for small, important jobs, like sharpening your tools. Even though most won’t get used again until the spring, I like to know that they’re ready and capable of doing a neat, tidy job in advance of when they are needed.

  I start with the scythe. As it has become blunt through the endless cycle of use and sharpening, it first needs to be drawn out with a peening jig, a process that involves cold hammering the edge of the blade to give it a good cutting profile. Once it has lost a bit of its flab, it’s ready for sharpening. There are two tricks to sharpening a scythe safely. One is to keep the length of the blade secured firmly against your arm; the other is concentration. Lose concentration and expect blood. Meditative states, I’ve found, are usually easier to achieve when such existential matters are involved. A well-sharpened scythe is the difference between back-breaking hardship and a pleasant afternoon; a field of semi-flattened grass, or rows of good hay. The most common mistake people make when scything is that, in an attempt to save time, they don’t sharpen their tool as soon as it has lost its keenness, and thus spend the time tutting and cursing instead of enjoying a satisfying experience.

  The double-handed crosscut saw is up next. Honing each of its teeth with a file can take you half the morning, but it will pay you back with interest later. The rest of the tools – the chisels, machete, clippers, pruners, sickle, drawknife, axe and knives – I work with a hand-turned, rotating whetstone mounted on a workbench. This requires more concentration, as it is much easier to lose your edge than it is to sharpen it.

  ~

  I receive a letter from my literary agent (most publishers won’t even read your manuscript if it doesn’t come from one). She tells me that the Guardian articles I have been writing over the course of the year have caused a stir, and that’s she’s getting a lot of requests for TV and radio interviews regarding my reasons for unplugging and the practicalities of doing so. They all want to run interviews that afternoon or evening, or possibly that week, but none are interested in waiting for a month, which is about the length of time it would take us to organise it all via post. I once understood the rush to do these things, but I don’t anymore. She says we’re losing lots of opportunities to raise my profile and increase the potential for a good book deal (which, after almost a year of writing, I still don’t have). I’m sure she’s right.

  I wri
te back. So be it.

  ~

  It’s the first time I’ve picked up the tin whistle in twenty-five years. The woman who last taught me is long dead, as is my ability to read music. Though now that I think back, I’m not sure if I ever could. They say that if you can play music by ear it is very difficult to learn how to play by reading it, and vice versa.

  I’m sitting in The Hill. Once a week a group of local musicians gather to practise for their live session on the second Saturday of every month. But, deep down, music has always been an excuse for a social. Feeling unworthy of playing with the folk gathered around the table – they’re all accomplished musicians – I’m sitting at the bar, listening in, trying to get an ear for the jigs and reels they’re playing, and otherwise keeping my head down. The tunes are intricate. Too intricate for me.

  One of the musicians, Ned, asks me if I have an instrument with me. I pull the tin whistle from my back pocket, where I had concealed it. Take a seat, he says. I tell them that I don’t want to disrupt their session, or their routine, but the flute player Mike – a man renowned in these parts – asks me to play any song I know. Before I know it, each one of them – with their fiddles, squeezeboxes, bodhráns, flutes, tin whistles, mandolins and banjos – is playing along with me. I’m entirely out of my depth, but I’m not made to feel it. As each woman and man’s genius weaves itself together, I feel part of something bigger and more important than myself.

  Which is all I ever really want to feel.

  ~

  I come upon a deer on the side of the road. This is a more frequent sight at this time of year. As deer are rhythmic creatures and more active around dawn and dusk – exactly when commuters are busiest toing and froing around the start of November – the clocks going back means they cross roads between woods and pasture at levels of daylight during which they would have been safer staying put.