Aiming for Connemara

We didn't go to Connemara this past long weekend. It's the second time we haven't gone and now the guilt is growing that my husband and daughter haven't made it to Paul Henry land yet and they over three years in the country.

The last time we were going to go, about last October twelve months, it fell through because I threw a wobbly. I'd spent a lovely afternoon with Paul Hill (of the Guildford Four) and Courtney Kennedy Hill at their home in Lahinch and the resulting interview was to be graced with photos of them both and of her beautiful, if ill-fated, family. Instead, it appeared with the photos of greyhounds or cars or some damn thing. Connemara was shot as soon as I laid eyes on it. And, in place of accompanying himself and herself through Roundstone and Ballyconneely and reading out bits of Richard Murphy's poems, I stomped up and down the stairs, swearing, pretty much all the time from Friday to the Monday.

I thought of it the other day because I found a book I had bought to give the couple because their tenth Wedding anniversary was coming up, and since they had married near a Greek island, Across the Aegean, An Artist's Journey from Athens to Istanbul by Marlene McLoughlin seemed appropriate. But even though the interview was published later with the right photos, I kind of never got over the shame of it and never offered the book. And now it's not my book and it's not theirs, and it further saddens me because the lovely Frenchwoman in whose bookshop I found it, while minding the shop while she nicked out for a sandwich, recently became ill and died, leaving a warm-hearted, beautifully accented vacuum in the heart of Ennis.

The book shelves are getting fairly peppered with bits of failures. Alongside the Paulo Coelhos that I was loaned and never seemed to manage, are a few of my own purchasing that have let me down. Paul Theroux's Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro has been a non-starter. William Dalrymphle's White Mughals, which seemed like a couple of weeks of good fun, has not even had its photos looked at.

On a day-off in Dublin, after a good lunch in Donnybrook Fair, a trip to Hampton Books yielded up Being Alive, the Bloodaxe anthology of poems to follow Staying Alive. After walking home with it through the cherry blossom drifts of Dublin 4, I read it for hours in the sun-filled room but in the west on this last wet weekend, I kind of kept stashing it behind and under things, like a dress you'd bought because you liked the colour but knew it would never really fit.

And besides, the past few weeks have been devoted to only one author, Hilary Mantel. I really do believe that God does not push us beyond our capabilities and from somewhere comes the thing to sustain us through the uncertain and the bad times. There will come to you something, anything, a birdsong, a smell, a memory, a piece of music or a line or prose that forms a lifeline. Thus, have I come to be immersed in Mantel's native Derbyshire and in her memoir Giving Up The Ghost we meet the stepfather Jack who "banned Shakespeare and mashed potato" and with whom she was in trouble for sitting too close to the fire "pretending to be cold". There too is the story of her battle with endometriosis which she had diagnosed herself from reading a textbook in the University library of Gabarone, Botswana, after years of mistreatment by doctors.

After a hysterectomy at 23, she is shortly returned to pain-filled life again when the endometrioses returns. Hormones used to treat her make her balloon in weight and go deaf and bald. Luck made her chance on a doctor in Saudi Arabia who had worked on the clinical trials of the hormone-based drug she had been prescribed "speaking to me kindly" she writes, "he cut the dose by a third".

"I went home, to the dark, enclosed rooms of our city apartment. Bald odd-shaped, deaf but not defeated, I sat down and wrote another book." How wonderful it will be, now with such context in place, to re-read the book Eight Months on Ghazzah Street that came out of such courage. And to sit too and gather together the focus and the resolve that will overcome the obstacles so that one of these weeks, when the transition year is decided upon and the Junior Cert is over, we will set out on the road to Cleggan.