When it comes to my fantasy summer, a trip West is still best

IT’S my annual summer trip home where I spend my mornings working in the Mix Co-Working hub in Clonakilty and for two glorious weeks, I basically pretend I live in West Cork. 

I wear a beanie hat to fit in and I’ve even got a replica surfboard on the roof of the car just in case anyone smells a rat. My accent also returns to its former glory.  

There’s not much I can do about the Dublin reg unfortunately, so I try to compensate for that by aggressively waving at everyone on my way into town every morning. My eyes are screaming ‘I’m not a blow-in!’ even though I kind of am at this stage.

It’s my second year in a row trying this little experiment where I work until lunchtime every day in town before heading home to bring the kids to the beach, or as is the case this year, to introduce them to Ardfield Fog™ a meteorological phenomenon impervious to climate change.

As I’ve covered in this column before, the facilities in Mix Coworking are brilliant and designed to get you up and running fast. I love it here and I love that these facilities are sprouting up all over West Cork and beyond, with welcome support from government agencies. 

And when I’m not looking down out at An Súgán drooling at the thought of the chicken goujons, I actually get quite a lot done here.

It’s strange, coming in the road every morning, along the same route I would have travelled day in and day out going to school. 

I have to admit that I got an odd feeling of dread as I passed the wheel pump in the car last Monday morning. I suddenly had flashbacks to being 16 again and I started to mentally prepare myself for a day of double-maths classes and teenage anxiety. The horror. The thoughts of secondary school still send cold chills down my spine. 

Anyway, it’s much better these days. I can nip out for a walk around town whenever I want and there’s no loud bell going off every 40 minutes sending me in some new direction. Being an adult isn’t all that bad. 

I don’t know what name to put on this annual trip. It’s certainly not the dreaded word staycation, which was all the rage during the pandemic. In my mind, a staycation is where you literally stay at home and do holiday stuff. By definition, a staycation would involve me staying in Dublin and going on a bus tour or something.

It’s not a busman’s holiday either which involves doing the same thing that one does at work while on holiday. 

I think there’s something deeper going on. You see, there’s always a little part of my brain questioning the fact that I left West Cork at all, a little existential niggle that makes me wonder - what if I was a cheesemonger on the Beara peninsula?

Or a full-time blues guitarist playing in De Barras every weekend? Or what if I took my summer job dead-heading marigolds in Clonakilty Model Village to a professional level?

This little annual trip lets me play out that little fantasy for a few short weeks without having to do anything too dramatic like sell our house and move. So let’s call it the Summer Fantasies for now, instead of holidays.

Where are you going on your Summer Fantasies this year?

Transported back to past

I SAW a great tweet during the week recalling an old graphic of a proposed Metro map of Dublin from the year 2000. Oh, the memories! So many new lines and stations were being proposed! So much potential! 

The future looked so bright back in those Celtic Tiger days with Y2K a distant memory and never-ending economic growth in sight.

We would sit on our extended decks, underneath our oversized outdoor heaters, poring over plans for new Metros, DART underground systems and national children’s hospitals … I’ve been thinking that someone should put on an art exhibition displaying the various discarded transport plans of Ireland through the decades - a wistful romp through all the plans that never came to fruition. 

Obviously, I’m not going to put on this exhibition myself. Like our transport mandarins, I just like to make massively unrealistic plans and then completely fail to follow through on them.

Rounding off with Clucko

IT’S been a week of comebacks. 

In Siberia, a female microscopic roundworm that spent the last 46,000 years in suspended animation deep in the permafrost was revived in a laboratory dish. And then started to immediately have babies. That sounds like an awfully busy morning.

I’m not sure it’s wise to bring a microscopic bug back to life in a world that is on the brink of a climate disaster and in the wake of a global pandemic. I mean, are we just living in a science fiction movie now?

However, a similar plan seemed to work last weekend when 41-year-old Stephen Cluxton was back winning All-Irelands with the Dubs in Croker after a few years in cold storage. This is one of the main reasons I’m back in West Cork this week –  I couldn’t be listening to them and the thought of Kerry winning was worse.  

It goes to show though - whether it be Dublin GAA legends or microscopic Siberian roundworm - sometimes you just can’t keep a good thing down.