The Wild Atlantic Way
Hey all,
DID YOU KNOW that the Irish countryside is very nice to look at? In fact it’s the perfect amount of nice to look at - beautiful, yes, in some places spectacular, but just a tiny tiny half-step short of the nice-to-look-at level of New Zealand, which I found so beautiful that it was impossible not to be constantly slightly angry about it. Ireland is like that but also you can relax a bit and have a cup of tea and not feel like you’re squandering the chance to gaze at the ineffable wonder of yet another fucking rainbow arcing over the largest waterfall you’ve ever seen.
The reason I’m writing about this is that Terry and I have just spent about a week driving from Greencastle in Donegal down to Galway, roughly along the “Wild Atlantic Way” (this label, which is only fifteen years old, seems to have been an incredibly successful bit of branding: it’s given a name and a focus to a whole lot of extremely neat bits of landscape, and encouraged people to make a very nice road trip of it).
I’ll put some more pictures up over on my instagram in a minute, but here’s some things I particularly enjoyed:
I think I’ve mentioned this before, but a lot of the hedges that edge the fields in Ireland - especially around Donegal - are secretly fuchsias, so most of the year they’re just these low-key green boundaries, and then for a few months over summer they burst out into nodding little pink-red flowers absolutely everywhere
The incredibly relaxed attitude to sheep grazing: as far as I could tell, a lot of farmers along the route just spray a splodge of a different colour on their sheep and then let them all head off into the hills, along the roadsides, into back yards, atop ruined castles etc. You even get pairs and trios of sheep from different farmers hanging out together, going off on little walks. Obviously the historic enclosure of common land was shitty in a lot of different ways, most of which I’m quite vague on, but it hadn’t occurred to me until now that one of them was: denying people the chance to casually hang out with sheep.
Seaside arcades are… pretty good again? Or maybe Ireland just has better arcades than the UK? When I first moved to the UK all the arcades were in decay but at least there’d be DDR machines and non-broken whackamole machines and a few actual arcade machines with videogames on them. But then for a long time after that all the arcades were bad: the DDR machines were broken, the actual playable game-games were gone, there’d just be claw machines and one giant-touch-screen version of Temple Run or Fruit Ninja or some other iPhone game that people were into in 2011. Maybe there’d also be a game where you could use a plastic laser gun to shoot a deer on a screen, and you’d go “hmmm don’t feel great about playing with a plastic gun tbh” but also there was literally nothing else to do, so.
But now it seems like there are a bunch of cool silly physical games on the market that are robust enough to earn their way into the arcades. We stopped into a few along the way and played what seemed to be a legitimately licensed Mariokart game with a big steering wheel! A game about smashing down buildings where you swing a (physical) wrecking ball at a screen! A good old-fashioned throw-balls-knock-down-clowns race against time! One of those games where you fire a stream of actual water at a screen full of monsters! It was great.
Another thing I spent a lot of road-trip time doing was looking at the rocks. A friend of mine who is a geologist and a painter, Emma Theresa Jude, recently did an artist residency where she made a bunch of small landscape paintings, a lot of them (as you’d expect from a geologist) very engaged with communicating a sense of the stones and earth. I think I was lucky with the timing of this drive, so soon after her residency; I’d just seen her post a bunch of pictures of her process and her finished work, and it made me notice details about how the rocks lay and jutted, their patterns and layers, unexpected disjuncts, vast surfaces disappearing and then appearing again. It was a specific type of attention I don’t think I’d paid on a road trip before. Admittedly most of the time I was thinking very geologically and artistically unsophisticated thoughts like “how on earth would someone paint THAT I wonder” or “oh I bet Emma would love that big rock”, but even so.
NON-ROADTRIP RECOMMENDATIONS
Belazu sour cherry molasses on ice-cream, strong recommend
The White Pube’s excellent novel/essay collection??/general weird book Poor Artists is coming out on 3 October in the UK, and November in the US; it’s great and funny and so full of joy and fun and spite and anger and attention and doubt, so entirely itself. I think it will genuinely change the lives of some young people who read it while wondering about going to art school, whether they go or not. And it’s also particularly great to read if (like me) you once were a young person wondering about going to art school, but didn’t.
There’s a new bookshop over Bethnal Green way, Bàrd Books, and it’s lovely: cafe, events, nice outdoor bit, big back room where they let people have book group meetings, toilets, even a big bring-one-or-take-one box of free books in the children’s section.
TODAY’S VERY SPECIFIC ADVICE
Today’s very specific advice comes from Mary Canning’s 1962 book Flower Arrangement, as follows:
Numbers are important. Avoid the number four at all costs. Two can also be a sour and unhelpful quantity.
Okay that’s all, see you next time,
Holly