My Great aunt used to go up the fields and pick the nettles; she put them in her soups and stews and swore by their medicinal attributes. They were good for your blood and your joints. She picked the nettles in the springtime when they were young. Sometimes we went along to help her, not that she ever needed much help. We really just larked around, one year I fell into a nettle patch and stung my bum. Aunt just picked extra docket leaves and told me to stop my gurning’ threatening that ‘if I didn’t stop gurning my face would stick like that and that’ll teach me to be a wee bit more careful in future’.  She probably sounds harsh but she wasn’t, not really. Aunt Sarah was born in the late 1880’s. When I was a kid she already seemed ancient, she must have been at least one hundred when she died for she died in the late 1980’s when my daughter was about three.

For the last few years of her life she had stopped going out for her walks to collect nettles and over to the chapel and her weekly trips to the bingo she had become practicably housebound because she was going blind. The day she died was still a sad day. She was my mum’s last link to a past that was long gone the last of her fathers family so it wasn’t just the sadness of losing a loved one but the sense that an era in our family’s history was over.

I come from a family of tall tale tellers. I remember when I was very young there was a photo of John F Kennedy and Cardinal Newman in our living room. I asked my mum who the young handsome man was. “He’s the president …and your cousin’s cousin love” I believed for years that the President of the United States of America was one of my distant American cousins. As a matter of fact members of our family turned up at so many historic and famous events as far as I knew, and the Mc Alisters , O’Hara’s and Mc Caffrey’s where all over the world. When my dad told me about stories of the second world war and what had happened he told me them through the eyes of ‘uncle Shamus’ who’s life was never the same after guarding the terrible war criminals at Nuremburg. I think he fought the second world war practicably single handed because he was at so many battles! We also had a relative at the battle of Islandlwana between the Zula’s and the British in 1878  (on the Zula side). Our family build bridges and railways and give advice to the rich and famous. I believed it all for so long even though I never actually met ‘uncles Shamus’ or cousins’ Pat and Terrence and then there was great great aunt Peggy Daniels who was famous for her poteen in Ireland and helped Jim Beam  invent his famous bourbon when she emigrated to America. I believed it all, I believed my family helped to save the world, build the world and quench its thirst. Obviously I grew up with a notion that we were pretty special.