Dateline – Westport, Ireland
As Robert Preston once said as Toddy in the movie version of Victor/Victoria, there’s nothing more inconvenient than an old queen with a head cold. One snuck up on me today with a stuffy and runny nose, a mild headache and some mild unwellness. It’s not bad enough to knock me off my stride but I did decide it would be wise to knock off the days activities at dinner and to spend this evening in the hotel room doing very little. Tonight, I am at the Knockranny House hotel in Westport, Ireland, a rather upscale little boutique town on the west coast of the island. The hotel is spacious and my room is large enough to conduct a pilates class should I so choose. I am lounging on the bed before getting about nine or ten hours sleep. WIth luck, the viral demons will be subdued in the morning. I know it’s not Covid. I have some very specific physical feelings with that the times I have had it and they are all absent this time around so I think it’s garden variety rhinovirus.
We got up this morning, left the hotel in Donegal and headed a bit south and back just over the border of Ulster and into Northern Ireland about 100 yards in order to visit the Belleek pottery and procelain factory which has been in continuous operation in the same facility for about 170 years. I emerged from a tour of the factory with a much greater knowledge as to the creation of fine china, a healthy respect for modern kiln technology, and a new understanding of how much of the work must be hand done. Belleek is known for their intricate porcelain baskets with a multitude of china flowers and butterflies arranged on them for maximum effect. It’s all done by a team of fine crafstmen from the creation of the weave patterns to the making of the flowers to the painting of the colors. And there’s not a lot of them. Maybe a half dozen or so in each department as it’s difficult work which requires years of apprenticeship training to get right. I now understand why the pieces are as expensive as they are. Many hours of skilled labor in each. I did not buy one as everything I liked was well out of my price range.
From Ulster, we cut across the northern part of the country to the west coast through WIlliam Butler Yeats country beneath the shadow of Ben Bulben mountain, a huge table formation and through County Sligo and into County Mayo arriving at the town of Westport. Where most Irish towns grew up higgledy piggledy from medieval footpaths and lanes with streets running every which way, Westport was a planned community, laid out at the behest of the Marquis of Sligo back in the 18th century and it’s rather charming with its streets radiating out from a central octagonal market square. The town isn’t very big so it didn’t take that long to explore it. Then it was off to Westport House, the local manor house and home to the Marquises of Sligo for three centuries.
Westport House was commissioned originally in the 1730s with much rearranging and adding over the years. The grounds were laid out with an ornamental lake and canal, and woods and copses to catch the eye and at the end of the property, the tidal inlet that leads to the sea. Like most of the other great country houses, three hundred years of water damage and deferred maintenance have left significant scars on the house and the family like, most of the rest of the landed gentry, no longer had the rental incomes to support it after the great war. (It’s all very Downton Abbey). The family have sold the house to a very wealthy local family who are about to pour tens of millions into a major restoration effort for both the house and the grounds.
The house was built on the site of Grace O’Malley, the pirate queen’s castle from Tudor times. Nothing remains of this other than the dungeons in the basement. Boubil and Schonberg of Les Miz fame wrote a very bad musical treatment of her life a few years back that flopped on Broadway and has not been seen since. She’s a fascinating historical figure, especially in her negotiations with Queen Elizabeth I but not everything needs to be a musical. It might be worth coming back in five years or so to see how the restoration is getting on. I’m one of those who was forunate enough to see the Sistine Chapel both before and after it’s major cleaning and restoration in the 1990s and it was a very different experience both times.
From my perusal of the headlines, the Trump administration seems to be doubling down on trying to destroy Harvard, the most prestigious of American universities (he’s so focused on this that there has to be something he’s trying to get back at. Was it his not being accepted when he applied to college? There as speculation it was Barron who did not get in and that this is what’s driving it but Melania is denying that) in a level of petty vindictiveness that would make Roy Cohn roll in his grave. RFK Jr. has decided that the three most prestigious medical journals in the world – The New England Journal of Medicine (founded 1812), The Lancet (founded 1823) and The Journal of the American Medical Association (founded 1883) are corrupt and that government funded scientists and health researchers should no longer be allowed to publish in them. Ummm… two centuries of the brightest minds in medicine have published and monitored the research that appears on those pages. I think they would have noticed if something were seriously off. The ostensible charge is that the corruption occurs because they publish the results of clinical drug trials that were funded by pharmaceutical companies. Ummm…. it’s called research and development and peer review and others then being sure that results can be appropriately replicated. I’m still waiting for the NIH to come out full bore for Carter’s Little Liver Pills and Snake Oil. It’s where we’re headed.
There’s a new strain of covid making the rounds – NB 1.8.1. It became rather wide spread in China and has now started to pop up all over the US and Europe. It’s still an omicron strain and, from what I can tell, it’s not that different from prior circulating strains in terms of virulence, morbidity and mortality. Like all covid, it’s not a great thing to get but it doesnt’ appear to be causing new serious issues. I’m still waiting for a mutation that causes something major. It’s coming and we in the US, after the major destruction of the public health and medical systems that has been meted out over the last few months, aren’t going to be able to do much about it. Keep your masks and your hand sanitizer handy and watch the news.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 