Little Victories

Well, this is a little victory in itself.

This book took a long time to get here.

I had the idea way back when I published The Soul of Adam Short, thinking about a YA novel set in Ireland, and the part of Ireland I know best is obviously South County Dublin and North Wicklow.

The problem of fires and farmers and the protection of nesting birds was something that started back then, and of course has kept going years later….

It merged with an idea I had when I was around 17….

The characters came separately, from a different inspiration.

It took a while to get the pen to paper, but my first typed document has a date of June 2015.

Then the first draft was done in 2018.

Yes. I can be 3 years on a book that’s only around 60k words!

I gave a copy of the third or fourth draft to my family – the younger ones – asking for feedback.

Crickets.

For a couple of years.

I got on with writing my long novel, Paul and the Pyramid Builders.

Then I asked my ex-publisher of Adam Short to have a look at it, and see if it was for the drawer.

She says it’s not.

So here it is. Edited and proof-read and ready for reviews.

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Here’s the blurb….

Nicky and her two new friends, Mark and Ash, spend spring racing their mountain bikes through south Dublin – both down hillsides and hitching rides from HGVs – and exploring their feelings towards one another. They’re aghast to one day find an illegal fire on the mountain, just set by a farmer. When the police say they can do nothing about it, the three determine to catch the culprit red-handed. But life is as complicated as love, and as Nicky comes to terms with this, she discovers that sometimes you have to accept whatever little victories come your way.

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It’s dedicated to my good friend Phil, no longer with us, who was a great man for the biking round south Dublin and Wicklow, though more on a road bike than mountain bike.

It’s on Pre Order now, and will be published before my birthday – Paddy’s Day to be exact.

March is when this novel kicks off, when the fires that beleaguer the Dublin and Wicklow mountains should be stopped rather than started.

Anyone who’s interested in a review copy can email me at davidjmobrienauthor@gmail.com

Happy St. David’s Day, everyone.

Don’t forget, if you see a brush fire in Ireland from today, it’s illegal.

Kids and stuff

   

So it’s been a while…

School is back, so that’s been interesting. Ears need the weekend to recover from the mask wearing. Infection rates steadily climbing again and probably looking at a lockdown soon enough, though school should still stay open, even as the classes empty, and we have to sub classes for our sick colleagues…

I am fine, so far. Had a antibody test as part of the at risk teacher cohort but it came back negative. My own kids are grand, haven’t missed class yet. Even extra curricular activities are on, though it’s harder to get a spot…

But they finish earlier this year and afternoons are occupied with keeping them active. We went to the allotment yesterday, where my son sought out lizards to pet and take home and keep in a tank so the cats can’t kill them, and found a stick for them to hide under. Since they seemed to be hibernating already, he determined we have to go back on the first day of summer. All of which reminded me of this poem I wrote during the summer.

Kite flying in the village before school started.

         For His Fifth Birthday

For his fifth birthday, my youngest son requests:

A lion, a zebra, hyenas and a herd of elephants;

A blue whale, hammerhead, a puffer fish and dolphin;

A crocodile, a kangaroo, a hedgehog and a snake;

A forest full of monkeys, jaguars and parrots;

A toucan, antelope, stick insects and bats;

Penguins, orcas, and a pod of narwhals.

He tells me this in innocence and bliss,

And I smile and nod: granting all,

Saying, I shall arrange them in place,

Each appropriate to their needs,

Where they may await the day

He makes the trek to greet them.

I sincerely hope we will have all those animals when he grows up and we can see them outside of books…

As my new novella, set in 2081, states, we need these species to feel completely human.

But in the meantime, I hope everyone is well and keeping themselves as such by staying away from all the superfluous people and wearing masks as we clasp our friends.

Enter September

 

The Subtlety of September’s Entrance

 

The bees don’t know it’s September;

They yet forage on the flowers before the porch

Under a sun shining on, strong as August.

 

Martins and swallows still flit for flies,

Gather on the lines, unready to leave;

Unconcerned the village is deserted,

Windows shuttered underneath their eaves.

 

None have truck with the times men impose,

Their clocks and dates; assigning names

To days that are every one the same.

 

Their seasons do not turn on a tick

So they stay on, as we sadly turn away.

 

 

Yes, the kids, and I, are back to school, back to Pamplona after summer spent mostly in the village….

And the above is my lament.

 

But at least the swallows and house martins had a good year, after a slow start where I was worried we’d have a big decrease over last year. There were plenty of flies around this year, though, (really annoying ones!) after a very mild winter that didn’t seem to kill many flies at all.

A few hundred house martins and some swallows assembling on the lines above the village. 

 

school strikes this Friday morning

 

 

You know when you have that day that you just don’t want to work?

Okay, who the hell ever wants to work, right?

But really, when you just can’t motivate yourself to tackle the pile of stuff you have waiting to be attended to. Even though you’re sitting right there in the office, staring at it, with no other option than to sit there staring at it for the next few hours.

 

I’ve been feeling like that the last few days.

I can’t concentrate. Work (English and science classes, and the piles of paperwork that go with being a teacher in Spain) is just a sword of Damocles hanging over my head that I am wilfully ignoring.

Oh, I got to classes, talk to the kids, but I turn up and ask them what we were doing in the last class, or I rely on my colleagues to tell me what we are doing in our shared conversation classes, and get some kid to do the photocopies while I fill time.

Though the filling time I do is not just filling time.

I have been talking to my students about the Global Student Climate Strikes that are planned for tomorrow. I ask them if they’ve heard about #FridaysforFuture, about Greta Thunberg, about the student protests that have been happening across Europe in the last few months.

Most of them hadn’t heard of it.

I try to get them interested in it, get them to understand the stakes, the reasons they should join in.

Because I really think they should.

Because I can’t.

And that last sentence is a kind of lie.

But for years I’ve been following the climate change problem grow, like so many others, with a sense of foreboding, of frustration and helplessness/hopelessness that threatens to overwhelm.

And at the back of my mind here has been for a long time the suggestion that I should do something about it. Me. Get out and shout and scream and smash some faces in.

I was going to say smash windows, but I know that would be stupid. That kind of protest has the wrong effect. And I am not a smashing windows kind of guy.

But there are some faces that deserve to be punched.

We know who they are.

Those people who deserve to have their lives impacted by our anger, because our lives and the future of our children’s lives are impacted by their greed, their avarice, or their incompetence.

We all know that our world is being fucked over by a tiny number of individuals who could be overthrown if only we could find the collective gumption to do so.

I’m not a face-smashing kind of guy either.

I don’t know if it’s that I don’t like hurting people, even if they deserve it, or I’m worried that I’ll get my own face smashed back in return. But something prevents me from taking the extreme action that increasingly seems necessary to get any movement on this issue.

 

I’ve spent years teaching students about climate change, from back when it was called global warming. It’s just one of the things a biology teacher explains.

When I teach volcanoes there aren’t many examples to use. Mount Saint Helens, Hawaii. We still talk about Krakatoa.

Not with climate change.

Every time it comes up in the curriculum I have a new example to use to drive it home to students. Heat wave after hurricane, forest fires after floods after ice sheet breaking off….

Every year, I have to tell my students that nothing is getting done. That we aren’t doing what we did with the Ozone Hole and CFCs.

And I still tell them that.

But now, at least I can tell them to do something. That what I can’t do because of my stupid fears and worries about what people will think if I do stand outside a parliament and hold a sign, or stand up in a parliament and shout at the stupid politicians for their having their noses up the arse of multinationals and vulture funds and fears of being arrested and having my bosses decide I’m not trustworthy enough to be in charge of minors, is right now being done by a young girl in Sweden, who doesn’t give a monkeys what the politicians, or hardly anyone else for that matter, might think about her, and the thousands of other children following her example across Europe.

Standing up and shouting bullshit. Like other kids in other countries for other reasons before them.

And I got some kids to listen. I got one to petition the school to get permission to strike tomorrow. I helped him a little – but just a little, because I can’t pretend this is my fight: I already failed to fight, to put my fists up, to roll up my sleeves, dammit – and he got the school behind him.

But the principal says he, nor any student, can have permission to strike because the strike is nothing to do with Education. Apparently in Spain you can strike if the government wants to change the law to take your PE class away, but not if the government wants to piss away your entire future.

I hope some of our kids do strike.

I hope the teachers and the administration of the school see the news tomorrow.

I hope to hell the news shows the strikes – the media aren’t too much into this, apart from doing their bit to get some face time with Greta.

And I hope next Friday more just walk out.

Because they don’t need permission from anyone to fight for their future.

They deserve our support.

But they’re not looking for it.

We already failed them.

We can now only make amends.