Ireland: a day in the life

In the winter of 2002 I took my family on an academic exchange to the west coast of Ireland. We traded jobs, houses, and cars with a family in Galway. This letter is part of that story . . .

A few of you have asked me about day-to-day life here in Ireland, you know, things like buying groceries and going to work. So I thought I would give you a "day in the life" account. The day I’m constructing would actually have taken place a couple of months ago, when classes were still on at the university. Here goes.

Six in the morning. Still in bed with no desire whatsoever to get up. Not because I’m lazy, but because this is the only time of the day when I am actually warm. Irish houses are designed to keep the cold in, so all activities once you get out of bed revolve around staying warm. Indeed, most of Irish culture revolves around staying warm. Why do the Irish go to pubs? They’re warm. Why do the Irish drink so much? So they can’t feel the cold.

Anyway, this bed is warm because it has two huge duvets on it, one full of down. The duvets are huge because the bed is huge. Lionel, the guy who owns this house, is at least 6ft 4in tall. He needs a big bed. A guy like me, however, is lost in this thing. Back home I can usually find my wife in the bed by stretching out my hand. Here I have to use a six-foot pole if I want to touch her. She’s getting terribly bruised.

At this time of day I am listening to hear if the furnace will turn on. It almost certainly won’t. It’s on a timer that has been possessed by an evil poltergeist. Most days this demonic imp makes sure the furnace doesn’t come on when it should. By 6:20 it is clear that there is no heat coming through the radiators so, shivering and cursing, I stumble out of bed and head down the dark stairs to the kitchen. There I grab a chair and drag it over to the kitchen door. I stand on the chair so I can reach the furnace controls.

Stop. Rewind tape. Play that sentence again: I stand on the chair so I can reach the furnace controls.

Do you understand what I’m saying? Do you appreciate the cosmic lunacy of the situation?! The controls for the furnace are OVER THE DOOR! They are on the wall, over the door, up against the ceiling. They cannot be reached from the floor. You have to stand on a fucking chair to turn on the furnace!

Who thought of this?! What madman said, "Ah now lads, I’ve got a brilliant idea. Let’s put the furnace controls near the ceiling so anyone shorter than Michael Jordan can’t reach them"?

And you’ll notice I’m using the term "furnace controls" rather than "thermostat" because it isn’t a thermostat. Thermostats have temperature gauges in them so that the furnace will keep the house at a preset temperature. Irish furnace controls are on-off switches that have been made as cumbersome as possible to hide the fact that the furnace only has two settings: on and off.

Once I’ve climbed on the goddam chair and fiddled with the stupidly small and finicky furnace controls, I put the chair back and run upstairs, stopping to turn on the hot water tank. It’s a little tank, about the size of a small barrel, in a closet just opposite the main bathroom. In twenty minutes there will be just enough hot water for one very short shower. So I jump back in bed and try to stay warm for those twenty minutes.

But something is wrong. The furnace STILL hasn’t click on. Cursing and shivering again, I stumble back downstairs, put on some shoes, and step out the kitchen door into an icy rain that is being driven by gale-force winds. I fall over a garbage can that has been knocked over by the wind and, once I’m on my feet again, push myself against the wind and rain to reach the shed. I kick open the door and step into the unlit crowded little building, dripping wet and shaking with cold. Fumbling around in the dark I find the furnace.

Let us stop here for a minute. The furnace is in the shed. A separate building from the house. The furnace control is over the door; the furnace is in the shed. Why not put the hot water tank on the front lawn and the toilet on the roof? Hey, let’s move the kitchen sink to the field across the road while we’re at it. And the fireplace. What’s it doing in the living room? Let’s put it in the driveway.

On the side of the furnace, buried behind two bicycles and a lawnmower, is a button. If I reach my hand just so through the frames of the bicycles, extending my arm until it is almost torn from the shoulder socket, I can reach this button and push it. I do so and then count to ten while holding it in. Then I let go and wait to see if the furnace will catch. If it does, it makes a great whooshing sound. If it doesn’t whoosh, I have to push the button again.

It whooshes. Wonderful. That means that it is now burning kerosene. Yes, kerosene. The same liquid that was responsible for so many flaming deaths in the nineteenth century. In Ireland it is cutting-edge technology. It is stored in a big vat behind the shed. With a little bit of luck the house will be moderately warm in a couple of hours. Just in time for us to leave for school.

I push back through the rain and into the kitchen and pad upstairs. I now realize that there is no point in getting back in bed; I’ll just wake up Karen with my chattering teeth. So I head for the shower. My lips are now blue and my hands are trembling so badly that it looks like I’m mixing a cocktail in an invisible shaker. I hop into the tub, draw the curtain, and turn on the shower hoping that the hot water will warm me up.

Ha ha. Very droll. WARM ME UP. Like that’s going to happen. No, because I haven’t let the water heater warm up for long enough, so the water starts as barely lukewarm and quickly becomes frigid. Not that there’s much water anyway. The Irish have not quite got the hang of the "water pressure" thing so the tepid water sort of drools out of the showerhead. In the end, I could get a better and warmer shower by having an Eskimo spit on me for five minutes.

In the final stages of hypothermia, I dry myself, drag a razor across my face, and get dressed. The most important article of clothing? The Irish sweater that I bought in Dublin back in January. I hadn’t wanted to buy it at the time, thinking it would be too bulky, but Karen insisted since it was on sale.

I haven’t taken it off in four months.

Now I start to wake up others members of the family and while they’re beginning to shiver I head down to make breakfast and pack lunches. There’s no microwave and the fridge is only slightly bigger than a hotel minibar, so there’s never a great selection of fresh food on hand. Perhaps this is why the Irish like beans on toast so much; you don’t need a fridge to store the ingredients. I scrabble something together and then have to go back upstairs to drag my oldest son, Christian, bodily from bed. Christian is a teenager. He will sleep for sixteen hours in a row if allowed. He HAS slept for sixteen hours in a row some weekends. But today is Thursday, so I pull him out of bed.

While the family eats, I deal with the garbage. Yes, it’s garbage day. No day of the week offers more existential crises. You see, Galway County is the most proactive in Ireland when it comes to recycling. They have introduced a multi-bin system. You get two big wheeled bins for the house. One is brown, the other grey. One is for food scraps and paper towels that have either been rolled in newsprint (uh huh, I’m going to do that) or put in slimy recyclable bags that are made of tofu. The other bin gets non-recyclables. But not all of them. Oh no. Paper products (but not, mysteriously, paper towels) and plastic bottles, including pop bottles and milk bottles, go in clear plastic bags. But we’re not done yet. Glass bottles, indeed all glass products, as well as all cans, have to be physically taken by me to "Bring Banks," which are collection bins situated throughout the city. The nearest one to me is a five-minute drive away.

Okay, so I’m sorted out the garbage. It’s taken me three months to get the sorting system right, but I have. Now I have to figure out which bin goes out this Thursday. I have a chart that is supposed to tell me but every time I’ve followed it I’ve been misled. I’ve come home to find my bin standing there, alone, on the street, still full of trash, a mocking accusation of my incompetence. So you know what I do? I put my shoes on and go outside to see what colour bins my neighbors have put out. Then, and only then, do I wheel my own bin to the curb. In other words, I have to spy on my neighbors’ garbage.

We now have an answer to that perennial question, why do the Irish litter? Because it’s easier than taking out the garbage in this country. Why spend three hours a week sorting garbage when you can just throw a bag of trash into a field? And here’s another wrinkle: there are no bottle deposits. So why should I drive all the way to the Bring Banks to stand in the rain and throw bottles dripping with old beer into a bin? What is the incentive besides good citizenship? There is none, and so bottles and cans end up all over the street. There IS a 15 cent fee for plastic bags at all stores, however, so people horde those like ration coupons during a war.
And you know what? Next month they’re introducing a THIRD wheeled bin. Not only will garbage sorting become more complicated, but you will need a driveway the size of an airport landing strip to store your bins. I predict that even more garbage is going to end up in fields once that bin is introduced.

It’s now 8am and, since it’s Thursday, it’s time to wash the sheets. I strip the beds and then bundle the sheets into the car. Yes, the car. Why? Because although the house does have a washing machine, it is about the size of a hamster wheel. And because it heats the water it uses, rather than taking hot water from the hot water tank (which I have carefully turned off after my "shower"), it takes about seven hours to do a miniscule load of laundry. Plus, there is no clothes drier. All wet clothes have to be hung on a rack in the attic (you can’t put them outside because it’s raining). The sheets are too big to hang in the attic, so I drive the sheets over to a dry cleaners, ask him to wash and dry them by tonight, then drive back home to pick everyone up.

Anyway, if all goes according to plan, the family will be ready to walk out the door by 8:20. Before we do, I touch a radiator in the house and find that there is the faintest glimmer of warmth in it. Just in time for me to turn the furnace off.

As we get in the car, I wave to our neighbours, Debbie and Aemon. Debbie is taking her daughters, Orla and Kyra, to school. Notice anything about those kids’ names? That’s right. They’re the same as the names of the killer whales in San Diego’s Sea World. Debbie and Aemon are going to name their next two children Shamu and Flipper. They’re very nice neighbors, despite this fetish for naming children after sea mammals.

I drive us out through the wilds of Knocknacarra., down Cappagh Rd. to the Barna Rd., turn left, then right on Salthill. We bomb along the seaside and into the eastern end of the city, with me cursing at Irish drivers, to drop Christian off for school. Then we head north up St. Mary’s, past the hospital, and right on College Rd, across the bridge onto Nun’s Island, around the cathedral, across another bridge, then down an alleyway to Max’s school. If another car is coming the other way down this alley, one of us will have to back up its entire length. Drop Max off then drive back to the university and park beside the burned-out car. It takes a minute for me to stop hyperventilating after all the near misses in that past 20 minutes of driving.

During this marathon drive we’ve been listening to Jimmy Norman’s morning show on Galway Bay FM. If we’re lucky, this is what we’ll hear on a typical morning: a Leo Sayer song; 15 seconds of news headlines; 20 minutes of sports news; and a traffic report from Valerie, a woman who covers the city traffic by driving around town in a jeep with her Pyrennes Mountain dog, Molly, in the back seat.

A bracing trek through the wind and rain leads Karen and I to the main building of the college, a structure inspired by Stalinist architecture. It is crumbling and colourfully littered. No, that’s no true. I’m being kind. It is simply dirty.

On the way to our offices, Karen and I may stop for a coffee in the cafeteria and see hung-over undergrads scarfing bacon and beans while smoking and talking on cell phones. The people who run the coffee counter are amazingly inept. Every day I ask for a large coffee to go, with a lid for the cup. Only once in four months have they been able to fill that complicated order. Usually they are out of large cups or large lids, sometimes both. Sometimes the coffee counter is out of coffee. Today I am given a small coffee with a large lid. I scald myself as I try to carry it away. We may also stop in the tuck shop and buy some chips to go with the sandwiches that I made for lunch. You will recall that I told you that potato chips in this country only come in one flavor, cheese and onion, but that’s not true. I’ve discovered two other flavors: smoky bacon and barbecued pork.

Karen always checks to see if the small, depressed dog that we call Finnegan is in the cafeteria bumming fries. He’s usually not in till 11, but sometimes he’ll make an exception. He’s not here today so we head for the rickety elevator that takes us to the top floor of Tower 1.

We go to our offices and check our email. Since using the web to book cheap flights to the continent, I have been put on every junk-email list on the planet. I spend 45 minutes a day dealing with emails that offer me whiter teeth, a bigger penis, and shocking photos of "my cute girlfriend." I always try to answer these advertisements politely: "Dear Sir, I am deeply touched by your concern for my penis. However, at this time I am completely satisfied with its size and performance. If this should change at any time in the future, I shall be sure to avail myself of your fine products. Yrs in Christ, etc."

That done, I prepare for classes.

Now, before I came to Ireland I believed that the Irish, well, the European, secondary education system was light years ahead of that in North America. I imagined that when I walked into the seminar room I would be faced with twenty eager intellectuals, all well versed in world history and literature, several of them with conversational Latin, all eager to share their ideas and voice their young, idealistic, opinions. And since the Irish are famous talkers, I thought that teaching a seminar here would be a cakewalk: assign a text, then open the conversational floodgates and stand back. I was ready for the wit of Wilde, the learning of Joyce, the romanticism of Yeats, and the iconoclasm of Shaw, all rolled into twenty individual students.

How wrong was I? Well, let me just share with you the secret nickname I gave one class of my students: the bags of shit.

My bag of shit (BOS) class is on Wednesdays from four to six. It’s held in a seminar room in a two-story portable known as S block. The course is in Jacobean tragedy. Back home this is one of my favorite subjects to teach. The plays are full of violence and unnatural sex acts. What’s not to like? Back home students get incredibly excited when they find themselves reading tales of incest, necrophilia, and torture.

But not the BOS. Part of the problem is the way the courses are structured here. An upper-levels course involves two hours of seminar a week, for ten weeks. A first-year course involves one hour of lecture a week for twelve weeks. That’s not a lot of contact time. Teaching three courses, then, I only teach five hours a week. FIVE HOURS. That’s less than what most people back home put in before lunch on Monday. So the students are not exactly been swamped with material. And I’m not swamped with marking. The upper-levels students are graded on the basis of one essay. ONE. The lower-level students are grading almost entirely on the final exam.
Think about this from a student’s perspective. Your mark for the course is going to be based almost exclusively on one paper that you will hand in at the end of term. Knowing that, why would you bother to go to classes? What difference would it make? Skip them, then plagiarize an essay, sit back and smile. And since the grading system is set up so that anything over 70% is an "A," the chances are you’re going to ace the course anyway, EVEN IF YOU NEVER GO TO A SINGLE CLASS.

This is, then, the most Mickey-Mouse system you can imagine. With no incentive for attendance, a class at any time after 4 (when the pubs start to fill) is always going to be half-empty, and so it is with my BOS class.

But my students are BOS not just because of their spotty attendance. No sir. They are BOS because they never contribute to the seminar process. Figure, back home I’ll start a seminar by delivering a mini-lecture: fifteen minutes of dazzling wit and knowledge delivered with verve and charm. Then I’ll throw an idea or a question to the class, and they’ll jump on it like a pack of terriers on a rat. I’ll deftly steer the conversation and make sure that everyone gets a chance to speak, then I’ll repeat the process.

That doesn’t work with BOS. I talk for fifteen minutes. Then I throw out a leading question. Silence. The students look at the table. The silence continues. Dust falls. The silence continues. Hours, weeks, months pass. I can hear the grinding of tectonic plates as continental drift pulls Ireland away from the mainland. Civilizations rise and fall. New species of life evolve, proliferate, and become extinct. The sun finally begins to burn out and the earth is left cold and lifeless, a frozen planet circling through space. And still the students haven’t spoken.

Okay, I say to myself, maybe that question was too hard. Maybe I’m shooting a bit too high. Let’s try something easier: "Did you like the play?" No answer. Okay, fine. Still shooting too high. Let’s try again: "Can anyone tell me the colour of the cover on the book that we’re reading?" The students are all staring at the covers of their books but, it seems, they’re all colour-blind. No answer. Alright. One more shot: "Can any one of you bags of shit give me a reason why I shouldn’t lock you all in this room, set it on fire, then watch as you twist and burn into blackened stumps of charred turd?" Miraculously, a student tentatively raises her hand. "Yes, Kylie," say I. "I have to leave early. Can I go now?" she asks.

Indeed you can, but not before me.

My other classes are better. The kids in the Shakespeare seminar are talking. Why? Because half of them are American exchange students. And you know what? The Americans can write better than the Irish.

My last class is the first-year lecture on drama. I stand in front of a class of four hundred students, wearing a throat mike, and try to make myself heard over the constant ringing of their 400 cell phones.

Lest you think that the students are just intimidated by my towering intellect and/or Canadian accent, let me assure you that Karen had the exact same experience with her classes. And Irish professors I spoke to all agreed that it is almost impossible to get Irish students to speak. Why? In a pub they won’t shut up. What’s going on in class?

Apparently it has to do with the primary school system. Most of the kids come out of Catholic schools. The teachers at these schools encourage class participation about as much as the Vatican encourages lesbian theology. Plus the students all have to pass entrance exams, the Irish equivalent of England’s O-levels and A-levels, that are based on rote learning. The result? Irish students have no experience in expressing any sort of opinion in class and they can’t write to save their lives.

Done teaching, it’s time to drive everyone home. We pick up the kids, bundle them in the car and head back to Knocknacarra through the pounding rain. Before reaching home, we stop at Joyce’s supermarket. This is the only supermarket in a district of 14,000 people. It’s housed in a small strip mall that also contains a video store (no adult section, so what’s the point?), a shoe store, a hardware store, a cell phone store, and the dry cleaners where I left my sheets. I pick those up (10 euro), chuck them in the trunk and we head into Joyce’s to buy dinner.

Ah, the joys of the Irish supermarket. How about some "American style" wieners in a jar? Or canned beans and small pork sausages? We’ve also got Kellog’s K bread, sliced luncheon meat that has patterns worked into it (the Batman logo is popular), and potato waffles. As far as I can tell from examining the shelves at Joyce’s, the staple of the modern Irish diet is not the potato, but the frozen pizza. They have hundreds of different varieties. A big store like Tesco has a whole frozen pizza aisle. It also has a pizza bar. You grab a crust, put on a disposal rubber glove, root around in bins for the topping you like, put them on the crust, then weight the thing to get a price.

Also inside Joyce’s is an off-license: a liquor store. By this time of the day, I need a drink, so I head in here and buy beer and wine. The Irish, like the English, are great wine snobs. I’m not. After four months in Ireland, I just want something that will get me buzzed, something that will dull the pain and impart the illusion of warmth. Put some xerox-machine cleaning fluid in a 750ml bottle with a cork and I’ll drink it. Sometimes I buy wine at Lidl. This is a Europe-wide chain of discount stores that is based in Germany. It’s a pretty depressing place because a) it attracts customers on fixed incomes, and b) it’s German. But you can get some real bargains, especially on wine. Of course it’s rather obscure wine from countries like Greenland, but it’s cheap. Or I get wine at Tesco. Tesco is an English chain of supermarkets that specializes in prepared foods and pizza bars. They also have house brands of many items, including alcohol: Tesco chianti; Tesco India pale ale; Tesco corn liquor in a jug.

Too tired to resist the pleas of my children, I buy some frozen pizzas and we run through the pouring rain to the car and drive through the construction site to our estate, Manor Court.

So, we’re home. First thing to do? Put the sheets back on the bed. None of the sheets are fitted. That sounds like a minor thing, but by 7pm on a Thursday, I want my goddam sheets to be fitted. But no, so Karen and I have to break fingernails as we tuck sheets under mattresses in elaborate folds.

Head down to cook the pizzas and, uh, have a libation. The oven actually works quite well, though the knobs on it have rubber rings that aren’t really secured to the switches they cover so you have to use vice grips to turn the thing on.

After dinner if we’re feeling really really energetic, Karen and I may walk through the rain for half-an-hour to get to the closest pub. That’s what one is supposed to do in Ireland, right? Indeed, I assumed, probably like you, that I would be able to walk into any pub in the country to find a pleasant, dark, smoky room in which old-timers nursed their Guinnesses, strummed autoharps, and struck up delightful conversations full of charming blarney with every new face that walked through the doors. And in part, this is true. You CAN strike up conversations with strangers in pubs, but they are very specific kinds of conversations. Here. Let me transcribe one for you. It’s between two Irishmen who don’t know each other but happen to be sitting at the same bar together.

Paddy: Well, now that fucking Beckham’s gone and fucked his fucking foot the fucking Brits’s fucking chance at the fucking cup is royally fucked.
Sean: Fuck.
Paddy: Too fucking right, fuck.

This actual conversation reveals the two things you need to know about pub conversation. Thing one: you may only talk about sports. Soccer is the preferred sport for discussion, but hurling, Irish football, horse racing, and professional snooker are all possible conversation topics. Whatever sport you discuss you must possess huge amounts of arcane information on it: statistics, results of matches from centuries ago, player’s jock sizes. The more trivial and obscure the information the better the conversation. Thing two: you must use the word fuck in every place in a sentence where it is grammatically possible to do so. If you miss a fuck where one could have been inserted, you will become the object of suspicious scrutiny.

Paddy: Fucking Manchester’s fucking header is a dosser.
Sean: You fucking mean fucking dosser, doncha? Where the fuck you from?

Pubs all display hand-scrawled signs in their windows advertising which sporting events will be shown on their big screens that day. Since there are sporting events in Europe pretty much twenty hours a day every day, this means that the pubs are continually given over to crowds of people watching sporting events and yelling fuck every time someone makes a goal or fails to make a goal. There has been great consternation in this country because the World Cup is going to be held in Japan this year. That means that the games will be broadcast here at seven in the morning. The pubs applied to the government for special permission to serve beer at that time for the duration of the Cup because even at that hour people will flock to the pubs to watch the game and yell fuck. Bizarrely, the government actually turned them down. No beer at seven a.m. Unless, of course, you’re on good terms with the pub owner. A lot of them simply let the regulars in then lock the door so the police can’t prosecute them for serving alcohol outside of legal hours. I predict that there are going to be a lot of drunk Irishmen in the wee hours of the morn come the World Cup.

I have no interest in sports, so we decide not to go to the pub.

What to do instead? Hey! I know! Let’s try to get warm! To this end the whole family crowds into the living room and we start a fire. Not a wood fire like you would have back home. No sir. A peat and coal fire. When I first heard that the Irish burned peat and coal to keep warm, I was flabbergasted. I had never seen a piece of peat or coal in my entire life. That’s because I was born in the 20th century, not in a Dickens novel. But burn it they do.

I always imagined that peat was, essentially, a hunk of turf. In fact the peat that we burn here is pressed into regular briquettes. Imagine a brick that is jet black and made of what feels like dense styrofoam. As for coal, I always imagined that it was a type of very dirty black rock. In fact is it is a type of very dirty black rock.

First step to make a peat and coal fire, you get a firestarter. These are little blocks of condensed, flammable stuff. In civilized countries you use these when you are camping or starting a BBQ. In Ireland you use them in your living room. So you put a fire starter on the fireplace grate, then you put two peat briquettes on either side of it and two more briquettes on top of those briquettes. No you put some hunks of coal on top of this little structure. Now light the firestarter. If all goes well, in a couple of hours you’ll have a cute little fire burning away. It will produce about as much heat as a good cigarette lighter. The whole family, bundled under sweaters and blankets, crowds around this pathetic heat source, and shivers through the evening.

To take our minds off the bone-numbing cold, let’s watch TV. Many of our neighbors here have those snazzy TVs with movie-screen ratio flat screens. But not in this house. Here we have a TV the size of a toaster. There are something like 13 channels, but many of them are, inexplicably, duplicates. That is two of the channels are both BBC 1; two of the channels are both MTV. Irish TV is largely British and American programming. The biggest Irish TV phenomenon we’ve experienced was the show Pop Stars. It was a reality-TV program in which young Irish people auditioned to be part of a six-person pop group being put together by Louis Walsh, the Irish Svengali-like producer behind other pre-packaged bands like Westlife and Boyzone. The entire country was riveted by this nonsense. The band that came out of it is called Six and it offers the banal, schmarmy, shlock-pop that the Irish find irresistible. I would rather listen to Leo Sayer.
We settle on the Discovery Channel.

At some point in the festivities someone turns the water heater back on so that by 9 Christian can have a frigid shower and Max can have a tepid bath.

After the kids are washed and in bed, Karen and I return to the living room. We stick towels under the doors to keep the scant heat from the fire in the room while we mound sweaters on ourselves and try to read without getting motion sickness from our books jerking around in our trembling hands. Outside the neighbour’s dog has begun to bark. He will bark until 11.

Eventually we sprint up to bed. I make sure the water heater and furnace are turned off. I get in bed and wonder why I ever turned them on in the first place.

Twenty minutes of lying under the duvets and I feel something unfamiliar: warmth. I poke Karen with the pole to see if she’s felt it too, but she’s already asleep. The dog stops barking. The wind slams into the side of the house like a truck. I gradually fall asleep, waiting for the sound of the furnace turning back on.

Or not.