A Lambay Weekend - NYE by David Diebold​ 

 

"Kicking boots off after the boat from Dublin and squeezing past one another with bags in a corridor, we could be strangers still on the way to somewhere mysterious, except we're already here.

​

In a nearby room, a log fire crackles under a high ceiling.  Here in the kitchen, steaming teas come hand over hand across an ancient table.  Someone peels off chocolate digestives from an already open packet as bags continue to chatter past. 

There's a songwriter with an album coming out, and an author of books on business.  There's an entrepreneur, too - that's what he is, right?  In some other life already fading like a dream?  I can't remember what he told me, because none of that really matters here.

​

It takes a little time to slip into the rhythm of the island after the cacophony of arrival, but it's not something you need try too hard to do.  We even find ourselves struggling against it a little at first, patting pockets for phones and wondering about the WiFi password and the like.

​

But like a weary child in the arms of its mother, it is so easy to succumb to the island's lullaby.  There is something almost indescribably soothing about this distance from the mainland, the incalculable volume of salt water in between, the wheeling teams of birds in the cliffs on all sides, below which waves exhale through sea holes like the slow breaths of some giant beast.

​

On the island, time ticks to a slower metronome, in a vacuum of calm, far from the white noise of the 'other' shore, just as it always has.  Quieter now that we're unpacked, we begin to appreciate some of its subtleties as they gradually reveal themselves.

​

The smell of wood smoke from a popping fire.  The hot metal hum of the range cooker as some sort of poultry cooks behind its thick, blackened doors.  The sudden sound outside like someone slapping a rhythm solo on their knees, which signals the startled take-off of a pheasant.  The clack of a gate latch.  The clatter of game tiles onto a table.  A distant bull.

  

In the scullery, five small pups tumble sleepily out of a hole in the wall to investigate the newcomers as the late afternoon sky, a triptych of winter framed in the glass panes of a window now, begins to melt like a watercolour painting left out in the rain.

​

Someone picks up a guitar.  There's the distinctive rude, wet kiss of a cork being extracted from a whiskey bottle.  We're counting down the final days of the year without actually caring what time it is at all, or who we are, or where we're from.

​

Conversations tend to veer gently wide of our realities and if we talk about what we do at all, it's only in the broadest terms.  The places we occupy on shore seem so infinitesimal from the vantage point of the island, it's as though we don't want to be characterised by something so small and insignificant..."

​