roisin whyte

I’m that well pleased with the wordplay there it’s vulgar.

We had our family summer holiday late. Ballydavid, just outside An Daingean (Dingle), Corca Dhuibhne, in the mighty kingdom of Kerry. We have stayed there before. I practice speaking Irish there. I swam in the mornings. Had a pier to myself until 2 locals came down. One, a man in his seventies, swims from one side of the bay to the other (a good mile). He was spending his morning clearing the shore line of long strands of kelp and seaweed. “You do get caught up in it in the open water, you see”

The food and the shops and the pubs are great. Dingle itself is crowded, and the locals must be well pissed off but in need of the tourist shilling. It is built to withstand the summer heave and carry on after.

The weather is Irish, just more so. Our house looked out onto an island feature known as the 3 Sisters, and another called the Sleeping Giant. I read every morning from the sofa in the kitchen that looked out to the sea. It could, and often did, go from zero visibility to searing sunshine and back in a matter of minutes. A constant reminder that transformation is possible. And that it can be painfully slow or sudden and unexpected. I utterly love it there.

But this is not a tale of place. I’m always mulling over that one, and have yet to settle the thoughts and find the words.

No. This is about the unexpected happenings, small good/bad fortunes, pleasant randoms that lead to the creation of new things. I’m starting to feel like I require them to write songs, or more specifically to get songs written. I have always described myself as very slow to write songs, and it is true, that having done it for many years I only have about 10 I really like and 5/6 more I’m not sure of. It’s not very many, really. But I’m aware of my ability to write something fast if I have to, and sometimes I’ve liked the results of an unexpectedly swift/manic write. I do what most makers do. I write down thoughts in notebooks, voice-notes on phones (they can be mad to listen back to!), overheard conversations, intriguing one-liners, subjects or ideas from podcasts, books, family dynamics, love, hardship and on and on. I have years worth and some have served me well in song and story. But I seem to need a catalyst, something to bring it all together and force me to gather notions into a story. And I’m nothing if not full of notions.

For example, I recently wrote a song called Purple Hand Gang, about blackberry picking, (sort of). I have gone blackberry picking every year for about 5 years now, so it’s kind of tradition. The last couple of years I have gone with a friend and her daughter. It’s a wee nice gathering that yields some tasty crumble in our house, jams and other treats in my friend’s house – she’s quite the foodie whizz. Anyway, we met and chatted with other pickers last year, one of whom said of the berry crop “not as good as last year, but maybe that’s just me“. I loved this line and duly made a note of it. But it was not until I went to Dingle and failed to produce the homemade blackberry crumble I’d promised my family; (it was still August and the berries weren’t ready), that I finally wrote the song. I needed a catalyst, something that pulled all the thoughts I have on a thing together, so as to finally think it out loud. That’s all my songs are; the filtering of thoughts and ideas I have until I’m happy to think them out loud.

And it has happened this week. I had a day of unexpected little wins, observations, unexpected coincidences that have served as catalysts and now I have a couple more new songs brewing. I may check myself before I become prolific.

I won’t become prolific.

Even when it comes to serendipity I have to list. The following things all came together for me on Wednesday morning this past week, and meant I could see the world sideways enough to write something.

• I called into charity shop after dropping my daughter to school. I had to get the bus, and like the before-times, I cannot now ride a bus without a book.
• I wasn’t optimistic about the books on offer but I settled on a book called The Pure Gold Baby by Margaret Drabble. I liked the writing style from the start and in the first few pages it mentioned a ‘rain stone’.It was a ‘special stone with a hole in it‘. Special, in this case, to Batwa tribal people of Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda.
• Before we left for our family holiday in Dingle, our lovely writer neighbour brought some books around for my daughter to bring on holiday. She also thought I would enjoy Sinéad Gleeson’s novel Hagstone and lent it to me for the trip. I did enjoy it. It is a great read. I also became obsessed with hagstones, which are stones that have a full hole in them, and I trawled the beaches of the Dingle peninsula looking for one. In Irish (and other mythologies), hagstones are thought to have magical properties, and the hole, is said to be a portal through which you get a view to another world. So the unexpected link in my charity-shop book to an African Rain Stone seemed so unlikely, and a bit wonderful to me.
• I am not normally that precious about travel but I wanted some space on the bus to read my book in peace. A man sat in beside me. I was surprised to find that he smelt of magnolia. Magnolia gets a bad wrap. It is used to describe the most dull/unimaginative safe/predictable surface. Not just a blank canvas, one devoid of originality or creativity. Not for me though. I like the colour and the magnolia tree is one of my favourites, and probably is my favourite scent. It’s beautiful large white/pink flower heads heralds Spring and new life, flowering as it does in late March. Gone by May. An early bloomer. 
• On my bus journey home a woman in her 50s was humming Ain’t no Sunshine by Bill Withers. I am currently learning that song for something I’m working on and hearing in sung quietly but confidently on the Glider was another small, unexpected pleasure, duly noted.

Not all days/weeks are like this, many are not. The sometimes endless grind of life makes living it something that’s done on autopilot. I feel I’ve lost too much time to that already. But days like the one above feel like living. Noticing the random nature of things, and taking something from that.

It means I continue to create. And I have to make music/stories. Not for any reason other than I start to come apart when I don’t.

Days like this are my quiet rage against the machine.

It is the 7th of September, 2024. I’m off out soon picking blackberries with family and friends.

True story.