pumpkinstrokemarrow

One of the festal films was an old film about Aran, a curiosity in its own right, having taken around 3 months to turn up from Amazon. Amazon, to be fair to them, always said it would take about that long. The mystery being  why it would take so long to come from the admittedly niche operator, Park Circus. Does one have to wait until they have enough orders to be worth baking a new batch? Does one have to wait for the slow boat from China?

The film itself is a docu-drama from the 1930's, a docu-drama about people scratching a living from the edge of the world. On an island off the coast of County Clare, said to be without soil - although this did not seem to stop them having healthy enough looking sheep and goats. Also without trees. But there were plentiful supplies of stone, sea weed and sea food. Perhaps like the first humans, they mainly lived by scratching around on the foreshore for shell fish - supposed to be very good for the growth of brains.

But the whole thing looked a bit preposterous. First, it was not clear how one could gather enough stuff to sell to pay for the timber, cooking pots, clothes and what have you needed to supplement the shell fish. Was the whole operation subsidised by remittances from the boys in London? Second, it was not clear why one would stick such a life, a life which would be a continual grind, often wet and cold. Mortality due to accidents and tuberculosis (to mention just one likely malady) must have been huge. Why did they not just pack it in for London?

In fact, I was reminded of Eskimos, scratching a living from another edge of the world. But why did they not push inland a bit for an easier life? Why stick out all those freezing winters in damp igloos? Sharing the marital bed with the in-laws? There must have been a continual push and shove between the lands of those doing the Eskimo thing and those of of those doing the Indian thing. A bit of trading & intermarriage. Plenty of squabbles, raiding and worse. A bit like, I suppose, the tensions between the Bedouin of the desert proper and the more settled people on the fringes which just about support regular agriculture, tensions which get a bit of an airing in the stories of T. E. Lawrence. The population & psychological dynamics of such boundaries, zones of transition must be interesting.

And I learned this morning that abandoning ship for better parts has a very long tradition. It seems that as far back as the 10th century the then indigenous Irish were making sometimes forlorn dashes for England to escape the attentions of the Vikings, these last presumably & eventually assimilated to what remained of the indigenous. There was some fuss in England about the large slice of church revenues and benefices which the escaping Irish seemed to be able to lay their hands on and it was policy to encourage them to push onto mainland Europe, perhaps to do missionary work among the heathens of Lithuania.