Another bulletin of news about Aran from Dr Eoin O Dochartaigh of Galway. You may remember some of his stories from last year - such as when he told of working in a guesthouse as a boy and accompanying a "charming little elderly lady" for her daily walk and telling her about Aran. She was, he later learned, Sylvia Beach, publisher of Ulysses in Paris, whose publishing house, Shakespeare & Co, was home from home also for Pound, Gide and many other writers. He remembered with affection this little "spideog of a woman".
He writes again this year, also enclosing two good colour photographs, one of Teampail Bheanain in the evening sun, a bijou of Irish architecture. "And to us Galway children of the Fifties, summering in Arainn, there was ever an exotic, adventurous aura about the O hEithir family", of which, to people outside the island, of course, the much-lamented Breandan was most familiar and was much loved.
The most important sailing of the year of the Dun Aengus boat, as it then was, came on Christmas Eve. All the luxuries it brought, including newspapers and the post. Interestingly, he notes that spring cleaning was never a fashion in Aran. All the spring cleaning, polishing, painting and decorating was done in the weeks leading up to Christmas. A sure sign of Christmas, indeed, was the appearance of fresh whitewash on houses and surrounding walls. Breandan used to say, he remembers, that this was the equivalent of the switching on of electric lights in mainland towns. And our letter-writer adds, "There must be no more beautiful sight than the whitewashed houses and the autumnal thatch still golden."
The Christmas Eve meal was potatoes "with delicious fish, ling, salted. And in later years when ling disappeared from these waters, pollock, usually fished from the rocks." It was the custom to eat this meal with the front door open, he writes, in memory of the first Christmas when the doors were closed in Bethlehem. (A great fishing place for one young man used to be Blind Sound, on the Atlantic side of the island and he brought welcome fare to Kilmurvey House where he was staying).
He has great praise for "Liam Mac Con Iomaire's biography in Irish of Breandan - the major Irish language publishing event of the year". It is to be hoped that the good doctor is keeping a diary with a view to writing a full autobiography. Many thanks; it contains much more than can fit into this space.