Matters of Great Indifference

By Jim O'Brien

This is second volume of Matters of Great Indifference is another collection of weekly columns by Farming Independent columnist, Jim O’Brien. Jim’s musing on matters of all sorts, from the end of the pandemic to the start of a war, from the arrival of a new pup to the departure of a Queen. All of life is filtered through the prism of his rural roots and colours the ink of his prolific pen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Limerick Writers Centre
• Release date: Dec 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005352387

Book preview

This is the second volume of Matters of Great Indifference and includes a selection of columns that appeared in the Farming Independent between October 2020 to October 2022.

I have been writing a column on rural living for the Farming Independent since 2017 and writing for the property section of the paper since 2010. While the last collection was inspired in part by my travels around the country, I have been confined to barracks by Covid and other considerations since then and perhaps this work is more reflective and more the product of a semi-monastic existence.

My reflection is fed by observation and reminiscence; observation of the life I’m living and the context in which I am living it. It is also fed by the lives I have lived from my childhood in Kildimo, Co Limerick to my formative years in Carmelite College in Castlemartyr, Co Cork and my time in Maynooth. The places I have called and call home in Foynes, Co Limerick, Rosenallis, Co Laois and O’Gonnelloe in Co Clare are deep wells I draw from, as are the plethora of careers I’ve taken on as I try to discover what I want to be when I grow up.

In the main, the pieces are presented chronologically and reflect the things that have had an impact on my life and the world around me over the last two years. The big and the small are included, from the Covid pandemic to the war in Ukraine, the arrival of a new pup and the departure of my children.

As you will see, the climate catastrophe and our pulverisation of the planet preoccupies me, it is the issue of our time, time that is fast running out.

Don’t worry, I do find lots to smile and laugh about. I hope you find something between these covers that will comfort, challenge, amuse and touch you.

The title comes from my grandfather who went to the pub most nights to drink a few pints, play a game of cards and discuss what he called ‘matters of great indifference’.

O’Gonnelloe

October 2022

When our tractors were Porsches

Growing up in Co Limerick the seasons of the year were marked by the arrival and departure of visitors. These included the swallow, wild geese and human beings. Americans generally came in the summer, exiles based in England came in February during what they called ‘half term’, and Dubliners dropped in on their way to the beaches of Kerry or coming back from the Willie Clancy festival.

I remember one particular visitor, a German named Paul, who came once a year to service our tractor. Believe it or not, we had a series of Porsche tractors, isn’t that posh? In fact, it borders on the onomatopoeic. Like its motor car cousin, the Volkswagen Beetle, the Porsche tractor had an air-cooled engine with a distinctive tukka-tukka-tukka sound.

It was quite different from the more common Massey and Ford machines and required some specialist care. This became a problem after the company stopped making tractors in 1964, so, mechanics like Paul were dispatched around the world servicing, repairing and supplying parts for the Porsches that remained in service.

He would arrive in our backyard in a Volkswagen campervan that doubled as a mobile workshop. The front and middle of the vehicle contained his living quarters, including a couch-bed, cooker and storage. The back door opened to reveal an array of tools and parts, all neatly stored in wooden compartments where, in true Teutonic order, everything had a place and everything was in its place. As children we didn’t have to be told to stay away from that section of the van, one look at it would tell you that a child would wreak untold destruction were he or she to be let loose anywhere near it.

To us, Paul was an exotic creature, a welcome injection of variety into a monocultural and almost self-contained rural world. From what I can remember, he was completely bald, wore rimless spectacles and looked more like a professor than a mechanic. My father had complete confidence in him, treating him like a demi-god or an oracle ‘who knew what he was doing’, an accolade reserved for a certain few. For weeks afterwards he would sing the praises of Paul repeating over and over, This tractor is going like a clock, you can’t beat the Germans.

When I progressed to secondary school and made ‘townie’ friends they wouldn’t believe me when I told them we owned a Porsche tractor. As there were no mobile phones at that time, and very few people possessed a camera, I couldn’t organise a photograph to prove my story. Indeed, for a short period of time we had two Porsches, a Standard and a Super. My father had up-graded to the Super model and was waiting to have the front-loader transferred from the humble Standard before parting with it. In the meantime, my aunt and uncle lost a haybarn full of hay to fire and the little Standard, with its loader, was pressed into service and spent a week loading mountains of hay gathered by the neighbours to replace what was lost. I remember my father saying it did the work of a thousand men.

If bumper stickers had been in fashion at that time, we would have had one attached to the family saloon that read, ‘Never mind this, my tractor is a Porsche.’ As the 1960s gave way to the 1970s Paul stopped coming and we moved on from the trusty Porsche.

I digress, I was getting around to telling you about another annual visitor to our house; a man who would arrive in August, just before my parents went for their holidays to Liscannor. He would suggest that they might use the holiday to take up golf and play a few rounds at nearby Lahinch. My father would tell him the only rounds he was interested in were the ones he would buy over the counter in Joe McHugh’s pub. As the years moved on, and the children in the house progressed into young adulthood, our August visitor would wonder if any of us had even the slightest sign of marital intentions, Come on, he would say, I’m blue mowldy for a day out.

It is only now, after all these weeks of confinement, I know what he meant. The anxiety for a day out is rising in me and I can almost feel the blue ‘mowld’ gathering around my itchy feet. The absence of visitors and the limited nature of social interaction is causing the unventilated mind to fall in on itself.

Meanwhile, Christmas is coming and the Scrooge-like pronouncements emanating from Leinster House are far from encouraging, there’s more ‘ho-ho-ho’ to be found in a 1980s budget speech. We can only hope that visitors will soon be free to come and go as they please, until then we can only remember a time when they did, a golden era, when even our tractors were Porsches.

What lies beyond the mortal ditch?

It is November, a month when we traditionally remember our dead. Those of us seasoned by length of days find that, with every year, our remembering more and more, puts us in touch with the reality of our own mortality.

What happens when the great silence falls has forever exercised minds, hearts and imaginations. It’s ironic, but on the flip side of the absolute certainty of death there is complete uncertainty, an eternal question mark. Philosophies of life and faith systems have been built on attempts at answering this question. Armies have gone to war believing their answer and their connections in eternity would give them victory, if not on the battlefield, in the hereafter where their faith and courage would be rewarded. There is a transactional element to the notion of the beyond that colours many belief systems.

In our religious culture, the prospect of eternal reward was a key motivating factor in living the good life and remaining faithful to one’s religious practice and values. In that belief system, life at this side of the abyss is but ‘a vale of tears’, where existence is a thing to be endured before we enter the land of milk and honey at the other side of the cosmic Jordan.

The hardness of life and the suffering it entails, is nothing compared to the glories of eternity.

Belief in eternal happiness and fulfilment is undoubtedly a source of deep comfort. It can offer meaning to lives that would otherwise be ground down by the absurdity of it all.

Conjectures about what happens after we breathe our last vary widely. Here in the west our understanding follows the Greek model where, once you cross the River Styx into the realm of Hades, your eternity depends on how you behaved yourself in life. In the Greek understanding, the virtuous and heroic could forever enjoy the Elysian Fields in the Isles of the Blessed, while those who lived a blameless, but relatively harmless life could pass a pleasant eternity in the Meadows of Asphodel.

However, those whose lives were wicked would be sent to the Fields of Punishment where the treatment befitted one’s misdemeanours. The less severe cases were deprived of consciousness while the most severe cases had to endure particular torments. Poor Sisyphus, for example, spent eternity rolling a boulder up a hill only to see it roll back down again every time he reached the summit.

The Christian notion of eternity, of heaven and hell, have similar themes of reward and punishment, where your eternity will mirror the choices you made in life. I remember a number of years ago driving with an old friend who declared himself to be less than impressed by my fondness for the accelerator. What are you afraid of? I asked, aren’t you well prepared to meet your maker?

Given the life I’ve led, he responded, I’m afraid it’s the bucko with the horns I’ll be facing.

All belief systems don’t have such stark transactional alternatives in their notion of what it’s like at the other side of the great divide. Many have reincarnation as an article of faith providing a few opportunities to prove yourself. It’s a bit like the backdoor system in the GAA championships. The Greeks had elements of this, and many eastern religions believe life is a series of incarnations where you can elevate yourself to a higher level of being each time you come back.

If I am to be reincarnated, I want to be tall and thin the next time around, knowing my luck I’ll probably come back as a giraffe.

The question as to what becomes of us when our breath takes leave of our bodies continues to be a mystery, one that many deal with in the context of a deeply held faith. Others hold that eternity is now, that ‘this’ is as good as it gets, or as good as you make it.

Not too many of us spend our days contemplating the ultimate questions. Even those in the vortex of bereavement may not spend too much time with the mystery, but remain consumed by the loss, the absence and the finality. However, the mystery is always around us. Our books, songs, stories, hymns, films, jokes, plays, paintings, sculptures, scriptures, fears and phobias are laced with traces of death and probes into the beyond.

Contemplating the mystery, I try to avoid getting lost in the detail of what it is or isn’t like and try to avoid reducing it to a transaction.

There is a broad sweep to the story of the universe, and when faced with the enormity of it I tend to fall back on a few bits of confidence and consolation. There are three in particular; developments in modern physics, a piece of Buddhist wisdom and the words of a Christian mediaeval mystic.

A school of physics in the Einstein line holds that we are essentially energy and energy doesn’t die, it goes on and on. This chimes with a primary tenet of Buddhist wisdom which tells us Nothing is lost in the universe. Finally, the words of Julian of Norwich assure us, that all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.

Speeding through America

I’m inclined to think there was a lot of male regression last week as the marathon US election count dragged on interminably. Simple domestic tasks, which the modern male had only recently been trained to accomplish, were once again remaining undone. The toilet seat was standing in the upright position like a monument to male oblivion. Dirty dishes were heaped in unwashed mounds on the coffee table, on the worktop and the draining board. Clothes that should have been retrieved from the washing line were flapping in the wind like giant, wet, Floridian hanging chads. The male political junkie becomes almost feral when elections come around.

Last week, I was that soldier, lost between phone, computer and TV screen, wandering around unshaven, unkempt and distracted. I even had the gall to wonder aloud how come so many Americans had voted for the most misogynistic president of all time. The current consort said nothing, realising that, as well as not doing the ironing, I don’t even do irony.

Aside from the near collapse in gender equality in the home, the US election was an amazing spectacle. It was also a great lesson in the geography of the United States. By the time it was over we were all experts on the demographics of Arizona’s Maricopa County and the racial makeup of counties Erie and Monroe in Pennsylvania.

I was sitting on the couch late into the night during the marathon election, watching the news from Georgia. The current consort had retired after concluding there would be no further developments until later in the morning, it being 2.30am. I was given a list of things to be done before I too retired. I had doors to lock, a dishwasher to kick-start and devices to switch off.

I was half listening to CNN’s John King going through the counties around Atlanta until he mentioned Cobb County, the very utterance of which, caused me to freeze. I have reason to remember Cobb, its name is stitched into my psyche since December 23, 1995.

I was driving from Chicago to Florida with my aunt and a mutual friend to spend Christmas in the sunshine state. On the beltway around the Georgian capital, I hadn’t noticed the speed limit had dropped from 65mph to 55mph.

Unfortunately for me, a policeman parked in the highway median noticed that I hadn’t noticed. With lights flashing and siren blaring, he ‘pulled me over.’

I was searching my wallet for my driving license when the lawman appeared at the driver’s door. He asked me to step out of the ‘cawr’ and explain why I was speeding. We had a mannerly difference of opinion about the speed I was doing, but when he heard my accent and saw my license he said, I have no choice but to arrest you, sir, you are from out of town and unlikely to appear at court to pay your fine.

At this point my aunt alighted from the car and proceeded to berate the officer for his treatment of ‘this young man, a visitor to our country’. The policeman was impervious to her indignation, and I suggested to her that she might be making matters worse for me.

I am arresting this man and, Mam, you can follow us in your car.

Where are you taking him? she asked.

I’m taking him to the nearest place where I can process this offence, there’s a women’s correctional facility just a few blocks away.

You’re taking him to jail. To a women’s jail?

Auntie, leave him alone, I asked, I’ll be fine.

It was December 23, the night before Christmas Eve, and here I was in the back of a cop car in Atlanta, Georgia, heading for a women’s prison. I hoped Santa would be able to find me.

At the prison the officers in the reception booth didn’t know what to do with me. The policeman told them that as prison officers they were also court officials and could process traffic offenses. After much phone calling to various bodies across Atlanta and much talk about what they were doing for Christmas they eventually dealt with the charge. I paid a fine of $51 to get me out of jail. I still have the receipt identifying Cobb County as the location of my offence.

Once I’d paid up, the policeman said, You are free to go now, sir.

Excuse me, the woman behind the counter said, he is our prisoner, and we have the authority to release him.

No, he is my prisoner, the policeman protested. They fought over me for about ten minutes before I was eventually released. Outside the jail by my aunt proceeded to give the arresting officer another dressing down.

Come on Auntie, I said, let’s get out of here."

That’s the last time I was in Cobb County. I felt some