Remembering

My mother is ill, but her spirit, forged in Donegal and full of that steeldust we all breathed in when I was born will carry her through. I'm full of memories tonight. Many are of Ireland, for I connect it with my parents, and more, of songs of Ireland, because she would play them in her car. Occasionally, the windows would roll up and the songs would wrap around us for fear of causing offence to the people outside.

The rolling, bubbling border hills of Leicestershire and Northamptonshire and long forgotten summers are what I remember most right now; the songs and the feel of her mini when she drove into town and dropped me off for a date with my girlfriend the summer before I went to Oxford.

That beautiful, intense summer with mum and grandad on the patio. It was the time of the Gorbachev coup; I read Ambrose's two volumes on Nixon and Middlemarch in a fortnight, and listened obsessively to Springsteen and the E-street band and worked, or lazed around if truth be told, at Texas homecare. One night I even walked seven miles home, to mum.

The song attached--Phil Coulter's Town I Loved So Well--was one of those car songs. It's more suited to my father's family than my mother's, but I associate it with her. I remember Charlie Quigley, a relative, holding forth on how he had somehow suggested a lyric or two for it on a trip to Derry when I was small; the same trip on which I frightened mum by pretending to a 'stick up' with a die-cast peacemaker and saw my father devouring a book about Brian Boru in a pub on the edge of the sea in Donegal.

Most of all tonight I think of her. There are countless songs that could have been put up to her dignity, and her concerns, and in time I might well reprise the Homes of Donegal, or some hopeful Song of how the Irish escape each drama, eventually, or Be Thou My Vision might make another trip across thirteen hundred years. Not now though.

If her eyes should fall upon these words, I would just tell her to remember all the other trials we, and she, have survived. Somehow, someone in our family up there has bribed or blackmailed their way into catholic heaven and is looking after us; them and the NHS. We, and you, are going to be OK.