I spent four days with my father on Ireland's East Coast. He and my mother live in Bray, which is the town next to the mountainside where I grew up.
I abhorred Bray as a youngster because it was the site of all my social failures: trying to be cool in the presence of my older (and naturally cool) brother and sister, and failing utterly. My sister getting all the boys I fancied - even though she couldn't care less about them. Trudging up the street to my excruciating piano lesson after school: both the walk and the lessons felt interminable. Obsessing about calories in diet books in Bray Bookshop. Endless, endless Masses, boring beyond words, with more local cool kids playing and singing in the choir, more chances for me to fully understand how socially inept I was, how my clothes were always wrong. Bray, where I got my first boyfriend and who dumped me three days later.
It was also the site of the public library, where I lost myself amongst the musty books in the freezing children's section, a damp towel on my head because I had come straight from swimming lessons; that room was an enclave of paradise. The half-glass door that separated the children's section from the adults' section rattled as it closed, leaving me and my siblings in peace to choose whatever we wanted (not that I noticed any of my siblings' presence once that door closed): for me it was science books and Willard Price adventure books...
But it's different now. My social struggles faded the minute I left Bray to start art college - proving it was the town's fault, not mine - and now I rather like Bray. I like sitting on the stony beach and watching my dog run around, and walking with my parents on the Seafront, and eating chips on the way home in the drizzle. I love walking to the station to catch the train into Dublin, admiring the gardens on the way. I love hanging out with my parents in their beautiful home close to the Seafront.
And I love the sea, and the seabirds, and the dogs and the people enjoying the seaside. All of that sounds a little tame, and it is, but it's a great deal better than those angst-ridden days of the 1980s.
My father grew up in Bray in the war years and these days we hear a lot about that time from him. I tried to record some audio of his experiences but it didn't work out: I would like to formally "interview" him as I think you'd enjoy his tales of being a lad growing up by the sea in the distant past of Ireland as much as I do. Growing up next to the sea is the reason he was always a very strong swimmer; a sailor, who built his own dinghy; a diver, who made his own wetsuit, and the man who taught me to swim and is probably the reason i am so at home in the sea myself.
Enjoy it!
Until next time, happy sketching...
Róisín X