Revolutionary Rants

Today, for some reason, I started thinking about when I was a child aged 12 or so. That was when I first went to visit my penfriend of six years. He was Welsh, but his family had moved to the island of Inishfree off the Donegal coast some time before. As my family had decamped to Clare by this time we were able to visit and meet.

The island was very beautiful but – like all of Ireland – prone to awful weather and on our first August trip we were meet by a grey sea and sheet-like ever-falling rain. My Dad, my brother and I all went over for a day or two. With our friends we explored the island and saw the scuppered boat on the far side, facing out in to the Atlantic ocean, as well as all the empty fishing cottages.

There was still no electricity on the island, no running water. It was a real throw-back. A weird place, as well as beautiful, it always seemd to have an atmosphere. This was only made worse by the tales of the phycholoical experiment of Jenny James (nd her group which was more generally called ‘The Screamers’ due to the primal scream nature of her ‘thearpy’), which has once lived on the island. They moved to Colmbia in the end, but all the broken crockery they smashed in order to express their anger to other memebers of the group (you had to express all feelings like this) still littered the sea floor.

It must have been sunny sometimes, as we went swimming on subsequent trips. Funny really that I remember it the way I do, with the creepy atmosphere, and the greyness, as it was a place I was very happy, but there you go…

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