We’re expanding our horizons from our own back gardens
SNEEZE screen? Check. Hand sanitiser? Full. Two-metre tape measure? Locked and loaded. On the traditional cusp of summer, this is a Whit weekend like nothing we’ve ever experienced.
It’s now literally all about the world in your own backyard, and how you can extend its horizons.
This weekend usually bookmarks the beginning of the holidays that arc through to the end of August, this Friday should be all about the last €29.99 Ryanair seat to Santorini, dancing with dolphins in Dingle or doing the dawn walk of shame at a campsite in Buncrana. But a new kind of reality has bitten in 2020, and instead of supping the last cold one outside the Jolly Roger on Sherkin, we find ourselves gauging the horizons confined within the back garden fence. Gazing upward to “the little tent of blue us prisoners call the sky”, as Wilde might have put it, we have little choice but to submit to this strange ‘new normal’ and make the best of an utterly alien world.
Praised for showing fortitude and forbearance in the face of Covid-19, we arrive at Whit like punch-drunk sluggers hanging off the ropes and praying for the bell. After 10 weeks of confinement, we’re all Zoomed out in a universe where Facebook has been traded for face masks and the prospect of a decent hug seems as far away as a Lotto win.
That said, though, we are a race historically accustomed to overcoming adversity – and it begins by innovative individuals bringing the outside world to our backyards. Restaurants, cafés and pubs have been quickest in reacting to what Joxer would definitely have called “a state of chassis”. Denied our custom for a few weeks more, they’re putting the outside world on tap, in every sense.
David Owen and Ed Mahon of Mother Reilly’s pub in Rathmines are bringing perfectly poured pints to gardens across the city – a stout lifeline until public houses open properly in August. “It’s a treat for people getting a pint delivered right to their doors, and pulled right there on the spot in a proper glass. After being isolated for so long, a fresh pint in the hand is a real luxury, a reminder of the normality they’ve been missing.”
Pints are €5.50, minimum order is four drinks, delivery €3. For a slug of the black stuff and a reminder of rare auld times, it’s cheap at the price.
Kinsale should be packed with American golfers and cruise liner daytrippers this weekend, but instead is rocking only to the nautical rhythm of halyards chiming against the masts of empty yachts on the quayside. After a prolonged period of closure, Food U café opened cautiously for takeaway coffees last month to test the public reaction in a town otherwise in virtual lockdown.
“It took a few days for the word to get out, but then we were inundated with locals dying to see each other and share socially distanced coffees on the pier,” said owner Una Crosbie. Testing the tide further, she began packaging €12 fresh lobster boxes and crab claw lunches. “I had to get a second phone to cope with the orders, people just wanted to treat themselves. Bringing the taste to people’s homes has really been working well.”
Further down along the Wild Atlantic Way, Bumblebee Flower Farm near Drimoleague has embraced growing edible flowers as a serious commercial crop. “We use produce that has been foraged from the land around us or grown here on the farm,” owner Mags Riordan explained. Posting a tweet to counter an online grumble about the lack of organically grown flowers for Valentine’s Day, Mags garnered more than 100,000 impressions and an avalanche of enquiries.
“The response was simply unbelievable, and has continued right through March and April as we work flat out to deal with orders from literally all over the country. Our flowers have touched a nerve with people looking for something colourful and natural during the lockdown.”
At a time when 2020 dictionaries have welcomed the arrival of ‘Covid speak’, we’ve all become tech savvy veterans – and especially when it comes to the joys of ‘click and collect’. Ireland has embraced a new world of culinary communication through the delights of home delivery in everything from Four Star Pizza to Michelin stars. Campagne in Kilkenny is one such Michelin hostelry destined to brighten many a cat’s barbecue this weekend. Chef/owner Garrett Byrne’s spring lamb, black olive fettuccine, coco de paimpol beans, vadouvan spice and dark chocolate mousse are some of the joys on offer
– €25 per head for two courses.
On a weekend when we might otherwise be settling down to the magic of hurling at Semple Stadium, or tracking ‘the Dubs on tour’ in the early Championship rounds, we are instead a country sharing our collective laughter across back garden fences like our ancestors on ‘Tolka Row’ all those decades ago. Everybody has their own soundtrack to the season that’s in it, from The Kinks’s ‘Sunny Afternoon’ to Bob Marley’s ‘Sun is Shining’. For this peculiar summer 2020, my pop pick has to be Travolta and Newton-John greasing it up to a perfect ‘Summer Nights’ scene: “Summer loving had me a blast/Summer loving happened so fast/ Summer days drifting away to oohh those summer nights.”
In the end, we’re all like that TV couple who’ve captivated us over the past two months – just ‘Normal People’ trying to cope as best we can.