Ordinary people, at picnic

Apparently Michael Jackson spent some time in Ireland a couple of years ago. He was trying to find a place to live here. None of it worked out, but some stories have emerged from that time. This anecdote was one I thought illustrated something very nicely. Something about massively different worlds, at picnic.

Pat O'Hagan of estate agents Savills showed the star and his children around a "large, important country house in Co Meath" in September 2006, then priced at "around €20m".

Picnic

He was told to arrive at the house to show around an unnamed client and that there was to be nobody else on the premises. There was also a request that the party be permitted to have a picnic on the grounds of the property. "The picnic request made sense -- they could hardly stop in McDonalds or Supermacs on their way back, and he had to feed the kids. We had salad and sandwiches and crisps and a glass of wine," said Mr O'Hagan.

"Michael chatted away . . . He spoke about doing three concerts a day from the time he was very young. He had a certain amount of resentment against his father because of the amount of pushing that was done when he was young.

"The kids were there, rolling down the lawns, which were wet, and they went to feed the chickens in the yard. They were lovely, they were very well-mannered kids and he was very attentive to them. It was a group of ordinary people having a chat and a picnic out of the boot of the car."

Ok one more

Honey, I'm home

Wagon train

A collection of Romany gypsy caravans are going up for auction next week. Since I was a kid, I have wanted to live in one of these. At least some of the time. You can take your sleek modern minimalism and shove it up your arse as far as I'm concerned. I'm all for wood, warm textures, swirly patterned soft furnishings and painted details, a horse up front, and the open road.

Molly needs a home

Molly is an almost three year old yorkshire terrier/jackrussell cross who looks like a yorkie purebred, and who has more puppy in her than sense at this point in her life. She is also one of the most entertaining, endearing pooches I have ever met. Favourite tricks include Her Famous Kangaroo Act and peeing with both back legs in the air. And she needs a new home, as of today.

Molly was saved from drowning by a very kind woman who now feels out of her depth with her. A colleague of Molly's current owner wanted to drown all 9 (9!) puppies in Molly's litter, and so Molly's owner rescued them and found homes for them all. Molly was the runt of the litter. None of the puppies had been weaned properly and Molly's first weeks in her new home were spent being syringe-fed milk. She didn't take to all this upset at all well, and still Molly is a fraught and finicky eater. She will only eat when hand-fed, gets upset around food very easily, and mostly wants to eat the food that the humans around her are eating. She has just learned poor ways. 

Molly likes to hump her favourite blue blanket and LOVES long walks in the countryside, where her kangaroo act can really shine. She is always at the very end of her extendable lead, straining to get somewhere Very Important. When you pick her up, she trembles in your arms and will look very seriously and earnestly, directly into your eyes for as long as you can stand it. She LOVES to play. She needs to be around people a lot, probably because she was half weaned by one and probably doesn't realise that she isn't half-human after all.

Molly has no sense. She will happily approach twin rottweilers and insult them in the bawdiest terms and offer to take them both on and show them a thing or two. She does not understand that she is a mere bean burrito to such creatures, and that really she is reliant on their mercy for her survival in such cases. She will also run directly out into roads without any awareness of traffic at all, so she will need to be rehoused in a home that has good security around it, in terms of walls or strong fence. 

Molly needs a new home because her owner is a single mother who is taking on further education and a fulltime job in this coming year and Molly would be at home alone all the time during the day. Molly really likes human companionship a lot. She considers them kin.

Molly seems to carry the memory of the precariousness of her origins with her, she has a certain troubledness to her, a certain complexity that is unusual in a small dog. 

I am deeply fond of Molly, and we are going to do all we can to find her a suitable home, ie. a fantastic one. Molly has special needs, and it is important that she finds someone who will be a steady presence in her life, aswell as enjoying her special skills.

If you are living in the Clare/Limerick area and you would like to join the list of eager potential Molly kinsfolk, then please, by all means, email me, or leave a comment below. Thanks.

More about home, and happiness

But happiness comes and goes, and when it's present there's nothing complicated about it at all. The only thing that's complicated about happiness is the search for it. I used to think that I needed to love everything about Denmark in order to be content living there, but that was never going to happen, because it just wasn't the right chemistry. So some people get a kick out of being stared at unselfconsciously by the local wildlife, and other people want nothing more than to feel entirely ordinary in the place that they live, not the weirdy one that lives on the corner. I think it is entirely dependent on the chemistry of the person in the place. When you find a place or a person that draws love out of you daily for it or him or her, then it's just a question of getting on with it. There is no more search, or expectation of finding happiness. There's just living.

Home

There was a post asking about 'home' on Clusterflock lately, and I found myself making a long comment reply. Here is the question, and this is what I wrote:

I've been living nomadically for a while. Right now I'm in the south east corner of Clare, Ireland. I am planning to travel to New York again soon. It's a question of layers of meaning, layers of what I could call 'reasons'. I overheard two people talking about where they lived a few days ago, and one of them said, "ah well, if it's home, it's home". I found this to be as wise and deep as anything I have ever heard on the subject.

Sometimes you just end up where you end up, and it doesn't feel like home at all. I lived in Denmark for three and a half years, feeling like that pretty much all the time. It was absolutely where I lived, and I learned the language, and made homes there, moved through the culture, but I was never settled there. Every flat I lived in had a quality of 'just for a couple of months' about it, often written into the contract. I worked on an entirely freelance basis. Having lived in a number of different cultures, I think that home for me will always be a multiple of places, that I return to, regularly.

What I've learned is that finding love and engagement in and for the place you live in is an important thing, and there is no 'perfect place'. If it's home, it's home, and you enjoy the good things and deal with the bad ones. When the bad ones overwhelm the good ones, you do everything you can do to move. Usually the blend is more nuanced than 'good' and 'bad'.

Sometimes you just can't leave a place until your time there is done. I am still living on a 'couple of months' kind of basis, whether here in Clare, or Barcelona where I spent most of the summer, or New York which I am electronically connected to daily, or Denmark which I have left but whose influence I can still feel, or Dublin where I lived for a long time and which is a rich seam of memory for me, or the internet where I spend so much of my time. It is not restlessness. It is the circumstances of my sense of home. It is a constantly evolving circumstance.

Pulp

My parents have just gotten a new juicer. They are very keen, and have been juicing fruit and veg for breakfast every day this week. I have just seen my dad go down the field with the leftover pulp, to leave down in the glade, for the foxes and badgers. Thrift and eco-friendliness in motion, my dad.