Criss-Crossing Life

My Web Of People and Poetry

My local bookshop in Cork/Ireland

Walking home past one of our local bookshops, I decided spontaneously to drop in. I needed, though, to have a better excuse than simply going in to look around and buy some random book. I have a pile at home waiting to be read and though I rarely buy poetry books I have started to do so lately. Over the last few weeks, I have bought poetry books from William Butler Yeats and Seamus Heaney.

I had been thinking of getting something to read for my godmother for Christmas and thought this to be a good opportunity… before I forgot. She lives up the country on her own and has been cocooning since March. Her reasoning is not because she’s afraid of dying, in fact, she‘d welcome it. She’s 88 and fears that there’ll be no-one there to care for her if she gets Covid-19. She wouldn’t want to put any of her family at risk.

And as my godmother often points out, she’s had a very interesting life:
In the early fifties, she left rural Ireland to study at Cork University and then emigrated to Nigeria as a very young lass to teach in a missionary school. There she met my mother, formed a binding friendship and at my birth was appointed my godmother.

Now, although both women were from Cork (city and county) and my godmother went to University at the same time as my father — who…