No More Stories...

There was a time not so long ago, when sitting in a waiting room chatting to the person sitting next to me, gave enough stories to fill a book and more besides...tales of childbirth out in a potato field...the sickly calf brought into the cottage to be hand fed...walking five miles without benefit of a breakfast to be churched at Mass after the birth of a baby...

Stories of donkeys going home on their own when their owners were drunk...getting married, only to see your new husband once a year from then on, when he returned from his work on a building site in England...he'd leave, after the two weeks holidays were up...leaving you pregnant again with a farm to run.

Tales of the pig killing time in early Autumn when the bladder was blown up and used as a football by the boys...

Whitewashing the cottage rooms and the sheds and barns in Spring...lighting a candle to be placed on the windowsill to guide the Holy Family at Christmas...taking the pilgrimage to Crough Patrick ...sending out the youngest child to find a new laid egg for the village Priest...

The midwife arriving on her black tricycle while the children were sent out to play and the Father was in the 'pub...

Your husband meeting a lorry driver in the 'pub toilets...paying out five shillings for packets of condoms the driver had bought 'up North'...smuggled down into the Republic he did a roaring trade...

Confessing at Mass to a horrified priest who gave you penance of ten Hail Mary's and hissed from behind the confessional curtain he'd be keeping an eye on your belly from now on...

Giving your eldest son to God...knowing your reward would be in Heaven.

Paying the local Doctor, who reeked of whiskey, a shilling to come out to your remote cottage to tend a sick Mother...he proscribing expensive medicines that didn't work and that you could barely afford...

Buying a length of hand-made lace from a Gipsy girl standing at your door who read your palm and then stole the clean sheets you'd hung on the bushes to dry...

Having baby siblings, who had died soon after birth, buried in the local cillin in the dead of night by the Father and the Uncle...

All these examples and many more are the stories people have told me while I've waited in waiting rooms...waiting for x-rays or blood tests...waiting to see Doctors...waiting for the Social Welfare person...

One would lean across and ask how long are we here...and I'd reply and say I've come home...then another would join in and ask if we had Asses...and I'd answer we do so...then another would say...do you mind the time that Paddy's Ass would come home and leave Himself in the 'pub? The stories grew from simple beginnings...from tales heard from Great Grandfathers to stories of their own...schooldays, with a baked potato in the pocket for the dinner...the tribulations of growing up with a Father away for the work...the pure joy of Fair Days and the fishing for Trout...

I still need to sit in waiting rooms...but now everyone has their nose firmly glued to a gadget of some sort or another...they're playing games I suppose or perhaps they're trawling the internet or putting updates on Facebook...I no longer have conversations with complete strangers about intimate details of their lives...I no longer need to sigh when one of us is called into to see the main man...wishing I could have had just five minutes longer to listen to the tales of going to school in the 'Thirties...

They have to have their names called twice now because they have things in their ears and cannot hear and they look up, vaguely surprised away from killing mutants in some on-line game...very few now lean towards me in a conspiratorial fashion and ask how many acres do we have and do we own any Asses...women no longer confide in hushed whispers about the sheer joy of finding out about condoms to prevent yet another baby...they are sending messages on their I-Phones...absorbed in another world.