Hot Food, Paintball & God

One of those border-crossing days. I shot this somewhere near Newry, on the way back to Dublin from Newcastle. I love these grim biblical notices you find up north and along the border, especially when they bring friends.

Earlier we had driven to the funeral service for my uncle Niall, who died last Sunday. The service took place in a little church in Kilcoo, near Newcastle County Down. My mother died last February. Niall's death leaves only one of that generation of seven siblings still living, uncle Dermot, across the water in England. They were all elderly, in their eighties and nineties, but that's five deaths in less than three years, a kind of shockwave that ripples through each of us in different ways. My cousin Pat (Niall's eldest son) made terrific speech that somehow managed the impossible, embracing all the many complexities of that family and bringing to these a sense of warmth and wholeness, a veritable campfire in that freezing building. Pat rightly paid tribute to Niall's wife Terry, a trained nurse (and warm vivacious person) whom he was lucky to have at his side during his slow debilitation and eventual illness.

Afterwards we all met in the Slieve Donard Hotel in Newcastle, a beautiful building with views of the Mournes sweeping, as the old song has it, down to the sea. The tops of the mountains were touched with frost. In a kind of saddle between the rounded peaks the sun was going down in a smelt of gold. Later, back in Dublin, I went for a meal with my cousin Isobel. Over a shared plate of mussels and a delicious John Dory we talked about films (Isobel is an editor), then our family's ongoing extinction event, our mothers' deaths being still fairly recent and raw. Then on to (what else?) The Big Bang, godstuff and the intractable why and why-notness of everything.