Jennie Finch on the seafront at Saltburn.
Another week has flown by – another week without transport here in the depths of rural Ireland. The insurance saga grinds on though I feel we are making some progress. The garage collected the car at stupid o’clock on Tuesday and checked it over. Not surprisingly it passed the NCT (the Irish MOT) and we […]
https://www.jenniefinch.me.uk/normal-service-will-be-resumed/
What’s in a name, William Shakespeare asked and the answer can, sometimes, be “rather a lot”. Firstly, thank you everyone who commented and expressed sympathy for our car troubles. We are still without transport but I can report we are moving forward. The garage behind our first cottage have been magnificent and they will collect […]
https://www.jenniefinch.me.uk/whats-in-a-name-2/
Apologies for the delay in posting this week but it has been rather a rough few days. After several months rolling smoothly along the sheer weight of new things – people, places, procedures – caught up with me with some quite negative impacts. There is a rich and extensive bureaucracy in Ireland and it is […]
https://www.jenniefinch.me.uk/a-rough-week/
There is a lot of snobbery around education – inverted snobbery from the “University of Life” people and academic snobbery that still maintains Open is not a “real” university. I’m a proud graduate and have also taught for them and I have found a lot of useful stuff I learned has come back to help […]
https://www.jenniefinch.me.uk/things-im-glad-i-learned-from-the-open-university/
Summer has always brought “plagues” to most places and Tipperary is no different. Many of these are due to moving into a house that has always been a rental property. With the really big plague – Covid – still circulating the rental market has collapsed. This brought our house onto the market (definitely not a […]
https://www.jenniefinch.me.uk/a-summer-of-plagues-in-tipperary/
With thanks to WS Gilbert for the title In the UK everyone talks about the weather. It’s a national pastime and one we came to expect and accept. It seems it is the same in Ireland. One important difference here is you cannot go into a shop, pick up a paper, put the money down […]
https://www.jenniefinch.me.uk/yes-yes-lets-talk-about-the-weather/
We were under lock down almost as soon as we arrived and it would have been easy to feel isolated, especially so far out in the countryside. In fact the wide open spaces proved to keep us rather busy. A combination of warm weather in March and the (in)famous rain led to an explosion in […]
https://www.jenniefinch.me.uk/lock-down-life-and-unwelcome-residents/
I said a few posts ago the house seemed a long way out in the country and it is. This has some very good things. There are no noisy neighbours, for example apart from occasional tractors hurrying past and the cows in the evening. We have no problem parking as there’s a large gravel forecourt. […]
https://www.jenniefinch.me.uk/strange-infrastructure-way-out-in-the-country/
One of the most striking things about the house was the number of birds co-habiting our little acreage. We picked our way past piles of boxes to open the back door and the bird song barely hesitated. It was February but there were many birds rarely seen in England until spring or summer. In the […]
https://www.jenniefinch.me.uk/boxes-and-bewilderment/
As soon as our offer for the house was accepted time seemed to drag. Days were darker, longer and colder with the prospect of that fine house ahead of us. This was made much worse by the lockdown as there was no going anywhere. We couldn’t even go up to look at “our” house as […]
https://www.jenniefinch.me.uk/our-house-is-a-very-fine-house/
