Postscript: Aran 2000

The truth is, you can’t return anywhere. When and to what might you do so? In what precise moment? Even a place as threadbare as Inishmore changes. The laws of economics necessitate it. Here’s a once inconceivable minibus abandoned and rusting to nothing on the rocks. Its windows out and wheels off, it looks otherwise as if headed to eternity on a crazy outing, a drinking spree perhaps, without an engine. There’s another facing the opposite way, ferry link shuttle bus, going nowhere. People die. Dynasties lapse. O’Kosan v. MacCalor: what’s the score? Who’s winning now? Go round the graveyards at Kilmurvey and Killeany and see for yourself.* Buildings are abandoned and fall into ruin. The smithy at Oatquarter first to go? Conneely’s guesthouse at Kilmurvey next? With its windows boarded up, it shocks the eye to see it, whether or not you knew it thirty years ago. Then it was the mid-island hub, lit up at night like a luxury liner, to steer you home through the rip tides of Guinness. What story stands behind its ruin, its plot drawn from a Greek tragedy? How terribly the world can change. No wonder the driver ignored me when I asked to go there and took me to stay elsewhere instead. New buildings rise, new bungalows especially. There’s ribbon development at Oatquarter, urban sprawl at Onaght. Even the coffin they carry you off in enjoys, it seems, a new lease of life. That old Irish institution is an especially potent totem in the symbology of Aran, as witness its supporting role in Synge’s Riders to the Sea. Now, as I overheard on my visit, the latest drama has men taking a body out of one and replacing it with drugs, in a sleight-of-hand passage, in and out of Inishmaan (location of Synge’s famous play). Imagine the scene: Enter McCox and O’Box, with dope and a corpse, and the cops in pursuit, out in that most desolate stony place at the edge of the Atlantic. The laws of nature dictate their game too. Weeds well up in the gardens. Land’s set aside. History converts into heritage. Visitors are offered a ‘Culture Week’ away. How could Inishmore escape, and why should it? Materially these are better times for the people who remain, though the young still look to leave.

‘Everything has changed,’ said Michael Gill’s son Patrick, ‘but what has changed everything most is television, working behind the scenes.’

It was electricity that made the difference. A thing we did not have. It would take more than the occasional power cut to let you see just what that means, minute by minute, night and day, week upon week, through every season. Now as the Internet vies with the fishing net, tourists in ever-greater droves (their first port of call an Aran portal on the World Wide Web?) come with their money to see what is no longer to be seen, except in museums, with sound effects of the sea, trailing Man of Aran. While outside on the quayside and the harbour road the jarvies hustle from their minibuses, as if in Kingston or Havana, waving their maps in one hand, gesticulating, and smiling their smiles, pointing to the usual tourist hotspots with a stabbing finger, tracing a rapid route round, for a few punts, as the visitors troop by. Though the rocks and the sea outlast it all, as dramatic to the eye as ever, and as always there’s the island weather, its infinite variations of light and sea and rain and stone. Unless, that is, global warming should prove to be the undoing of us all, and the sea rise to reign once more through aeons of new geology.

It’s not true to say that the only returning you ever do is in the mind. But in that sense I was back there time and again, every day, as a hedge against the times. To go there in my head like that, as I still do now and then in wonder at the place, delivers an emotional charge, strangely compounded of longing and of loss, bittersweet to darken my gain. All my gain being what this book amounts to, and the heart’s catchment from which it’s drained? As you sow so shall you reap. The least loaded way of putting it seems to be to say, I went there a third time. But of course my going was loaded to the gunwales with my story. That was in May (now it’s early September, as I tweak this essay, and I’m on my way back from Inishmore again). As when I first went, people now wondered, as I also wondered, should I go? Wouldn’t I be disappointed? But if I would be disappointed surely I’d deserve to be? Or had I learnt nothing since November 1968? It wasn’t that I thought the gardaí would want to question me regarding the prisoner, although his name may be on the books still, charges not answered, after all these years. He might be scot free in Kilburn or California, for all I know. I just decided I’d go unannounced and incognito, for amusement, out of curiosity, and perhaps a little caution. Keep your name to yourself, I urged myself. Play the strategist for once. Just a word told under such circumstances will be a truth at least, about the playboy. Did you ever know a young fellow-my-lad lived here once, in 1968-69? (I didn’t.) Not that I hadn’t been in touch in all that time. I’d had a little correspondence. But replies could take a long time coming. One letter I sent waited three years for an answer. In which time I feared the worst. But I mostly knew before I landed who had died since my time. I learnt late of Mikey McDonough’s tragic drowning, by a chance encounter with Padraig O’Cleary of the Gaelic League, coming over on the Dublin–Galway train. Lost at sea. (What terrible words to breathe. Though no man at all can be living forever.)

When Odysseus went again to Ithaca he was aided there in his subterfuges by Pallas Athene. No great strategist myself, as you know, I can yet say I was aided by a deity too. But this was another class of being, if one no less powerful: the obscurer goddess Amnesia. You recall? No one knew who I was. (So if you include me that made all of us.) My sojourn had been as a sparrow’s flight through the great hall, as the Venerable Bede said. It meant everything to me but to the people of Kil-na-cer it flew by very quickly, as fleeting as the hour scarce heeded. Having come out of the winter, it soon returned to winter, and slipped out of sight, and out of mind. I had to introduce myself by stages but even then things seemed to hold together only briefly, before drifting apart again, like wreckage on the sea dispersing, like the bones of the drowned on the shifting seabed of North Sound. You see the world as you did when you were young. Nothing, it seems, will lastingly persuade you that the body your eyesight belongs to has grown older with the passing times. Though we know nothing to be more eternally true than that it has, even beyond recognition. I say no one knew me, but then only a handful had survived who could possibly have told who I was from Adam. Thirty years is a lifetime. The playboy had been in reality just a youth, a boy almost, and he’d had a head of hair. I was now balder and far burlier than ever he’d looked to become. You’d have to search my dial with unbecoming attention, eyes like a phrenologist’s stout fingers, feeling out bumps of knowledge, to make me out for what I was before, so long ago. I was just a ‘blow-in’, a vagrant bird.

So I checked myself in at a place near Kilmurvey, lucky to be able to do so, without booking in advance, my old preference for chance still with me. I’d thought, as I say, that I’d stay at Conneely’s but Conneely’s was no more, these ten years since. Seeing in the living-room while I waited the picture of someone I recognized, I let the cat out of the bag straightaway. Then the first thing I did, and not without great trepidation, was to go through Kilmurvey and on up to Kil-na-cer to call on Gregory. Mary eventually welcomed me in. As I stood at the door – familiar door, Yale key in place to admit whoever might try (but I thought a little formality necessary now) – I heard what I took to be someone on a stick and had a sudden vision of Gregory as an old man. But it was poor Mary, recovering, as she told me, from an illness. I saw in her, I thought, the young woman I’d known, and also something more, it seemed, of her mother. Her memory wasn’t good, poor soul, and she couldn’t recall me.

‘Ah, Gregory would remember,’ she said. ‘Gregory is away, you know, to see a man about some cattle, out in Gort na gCapall. He’ll not be back much before six, I’d say.’

It sounded like the old days. We spoke about the dead, above all of a brother tragically lost.

‘Such good fun, he was too. Such good fun,’ she said.

(‘A gas man,’ said Michael.)

Then I went exploring towards Gort na gCapall, half hoping to come upon Gregory while I stayed on the road. But I soon left the beaten track and quartered off whole acres of the island. Down towards Gort na gCapall I went and to the sea, to look again at Poll na bPeist, and back along the way to Blind Sound, reserving Dún Aengus for the morning. My mind reeled as I went, reeled and unreeled. I walked as if entranced, stepping in and out of time, up off the boreen and through the narrow ways between the fields of stone, hacking the briars with my stick. The blaze of the invisible Atlantic up ahead fired the evening sky and its din flew round me on the breeze. In an instant it was just more than thirty years ago. To my surprise, I even recognized individual rocks. I felt the familiar limpid light lighten my step, as if I’d re-become the playboy himself, crossing the karst where the sea-pinks blew and the shale rattled, where the rock looked like untarnished lead in the strong sea-light. You’d think the stone had been poured into place and just spilt over some mysterious mould. I looked in amazement at the terrible desolation, at the overhanging cliffs, at where I used to climb down to the point to fish, and died a thousand deaths to contemplate the risks, over the precipice from which I stood well back now, wobbling a nervous camera. What was it that was in me in those days?

There’d been such a sudden squall as we’d landed at Kilronan, aboard the Draoicht na Farraige (Magic of the Sea: built in Australia), it dispersed the minibus jarvies to their cabs and made the visitors huddle and hurry. But now, in one of those micro-climate switches so typical of the islands, the sky ran bright and blue, thinning slowly towards night. I wanted just to keep on walking, taking it all back in, to let everything fit together, like a jigsaw, the pieces I’d carried all these years with those of the present moment, then and now. So I went on, past the old well where Maggie Feaney took her pails, and past the new Dún Aengus heritage centre, where once stood Sonny Hernon’s store, and the new An Sunda Caoch (Blind Sound) café and little tourist shops, and the seafood restaurant, and then on and up and round to Kil-na-cer, and past my own house, now so modernized it fairly broke my heart, and on again.

I couldn’t walk enough. The evening was beginning just to fail. And then as I looked up from the road, I saw Gregory himself, riding down on a mountain bike, coming from the ball alley, behind his collie. I hailed him and he stopped. There was no mistaking him, all right, his back straight, his left eye just a little watery from the breeze and the bicycle. He searched my face for a clue. I could not believe how little he’d aged in appearance. He couldn’t believe, it seemed, the things I appeared to know about him and the people of those days. He stood there astride his crossbar, puzzling. Then gradually, it seemed, he connected things together. But he couldn’t recall the Grey Fella, in a long sequence of different horses down the years. So why would he remember me, who was so much less useful than a horse? So much lower than a Houyhnhnm? After so long, of course, there’s everything and nothing to be said. We ran through the roll-call of the living and the dead, who’d married whom and what families they’d had. Who’d left for Connemara, who’d gone to Galway, who to America (half the world), and who’d returned. He still kept a pony, a pale horse, paler than the Grey Fella this time, and cattle the length and breadth of the place.

‘You must be the richest man on Aran these days,’ I said.

‘Why would you be saying that now?’ he smiled. ‘Ah, sure,’ he said, ‘there’s no money in cattle now. You’re better off without them, like. Though prices do be better this year than anything these five years since, I’d say, anyway.’

I wondered would he let me buy him a drink before I went away. But he hadn’t taken drink in six years. He was seventy-six, some twenty-three years my senior, as I never knew before. And so we said goodbye and I said I’d come to find him the next day. He was extremely polite and gracious, but still puzzled by me. My head swam to contemplate his life in that one place, for seventy-six years, with scarce a departure anywhere. A Zen-life, almost, a spiritual-material life so plain, so that when he died you knew he’d have to go instantly to the heaven he believed in. I felt second-rate beside him, with my questions, my assumption of familiarity.

By nightfall it was raining, fine rain on the wind, sea-rain ready-salted. But feeling as ever restless, and troubled at heart too, out I went to wander round and round, up and down, in my gentleman’s Gore-Tex coat and over-trousers, and poking along with a stick, nightwalking, savouring the rain and the seaweed scents it released from the strand and shoreline. The sea was in everything. It was May and so I had my ears pricked for one thing only: to hear the corncrake, to plug in and recharge my nostalgia. But though now it was well past nightfall, not a one struck up its grating nocturne. I listened and listened. I stood still to silence my rustling waterproofs. I pulled off my hood to dampen the pricking noise of the rain. The more I listened, the greater and more overwhelming the silence I heard, the vaster the emptiness. The corncrake in its absence silenced the whole world. It stilled the Atlantic shore from here to Newfoundland, from here to Tierra del Fuego, from pole to pole. I was dismayed. Everything I had said before, earlier in these pages, about a world without them, had come true. The night was now incalculably small and dull, unadventurous, spring unsprung, the clock no longer ticking. Not a star in sight either, come to think of it. Not a crex, or a crex, but a more of crux or a crunch.

I learnt next day there had been no corncrakes on the island for at least ten years and more, maybe twenty (opinions differed). In local terms it seemed inexplicable. The people used no chemicals and no machinery on the land. In fact the land was richer than ever in flowers and grasses. More of it went the summer long untended, as never before. Perhaps it was the increased volume of traffic on the roads disturbing the environment? Or was it, as some said, that all those years back they’d started to cut the grass earlier in the season? That sounded like it to me. I tried to imagine the moment the last island corncrake took wing, at the end of a summer. I wondered how it could be that not a single one returned again, in whatever year it was they had first failed. Did one perhaps arrive and find himself alone, crexing to no challenge from another? The whole territory of Aran his oyster? Did he find it eerie and freak out? Did his heart falter and did he then pack his bags and sling his hook, before summer had a chance to show? Did he pass unknowing on his way another heading out down Galway Bay, a plump female?

As if to compensate, the cuckoos around Kilmurvey House that night went at it hammer and tongs. On they sang ‘cuckoo’ and louder sang, till ten and eleven o’clock, whirring and purring and wooing in the rain. I had never heard the cuckoo in such numbers and passion before, as I heard that night and saw in the course of my stay. Next day out at Bungowla, the aspect grey, the sea running bitter in the narrow Sound, the cuckoos, with their short wings and long tails, hunted over the walls and little fields in rapid short flight. They hawked through the air, perching abruptly on walls, before shooting away again. Once still they looked like stone, perfectly camouflaged. Then they sprang swiftly to their business, two of them with a pipit following, and a third suddenly sweeping in. What were they doing? Pairing? Luring the pipit away in some mesmeric ritual? They mesmerized me, for sure, as they flew round and round that wild rocky place, and called and called to each other, their commonplace double-stop cuck-oo, their treble-stop cuckoo-cuck, and more amorously intimate purring. Then they would emit what seemed an alarm call, more like the note of a wading bird. They were utterly beautiful, perching, poised with shoulders dropped, such beautiful shoulders and tails furling in courtship or some other territorial ritual. How absurd that we have requisitioned them for our petty fables of adultery. Will I mourn them too one day? When their hosts become extinct, if not before?*

Try as I might, I could not connect with Michael. I left a message with Katie, his wife. He left a message at my lodging. And my time now was running out, my dream up against the clock again. As I tried to hunt him out, I saw Gregory again, in the little field beside his house, cutting clumps of briars, methodically with a sickle, bending and shaping the thorns into cocks. He knew I was passing but he kept on working and I didn’t presume to trouble him there, as he stooped, bent like a set square, back as flat as a board, in his cap and big buff gardening gloves (a sign of the times). Then we met again and he spoke of his philosophy of working all the time, while he could, always with something to do, but as if appealing to me for reassurance, so sweetly modest was he, as if I knew anything about how to live. He seemed palpably conscious that he lived on borrowed time. He would make work to do, he said.

‘It is better than sitting and waiting.’

I wondered if nowadays he ever went in to the Galway cattle fair.

‘I do,’ he said, ‘sometimes, like.’

Was he ever in the plane? I was conscious of the planes skimming in and out from Killeany, conscious of knowing a time when they had yet to become a twinkle in the horizon’s eye. He was always in them if he chose to go to Galway.

‘Seven minutes in the air,’ he laughed, ‘better than any sea-crossing, I’d say, all right. They were hard days before on the Naomh Eanna if you went on Monday for Tuesday, you’d have to stop over, like, till Thursday.’

I didn’t fuss to say farewell. I said I’d be back in the autumn and hoped to see him.

‘If we are living,’ he said, ‘please God.’

There were two especially wild men on Inishmore in my time. Bare-knuckle fighters, kings of their respective corners of their overgrown schoolyard, I’d feared them in a general kind of way, I must say, and one of them in particular. He seemed to fear no one, tall and rangy, wide-shouldered Hector and Achilles in one that he was. Only a fool didn’t take care to step round him then, especially if he’d drink taken and his dander up, in those old fighting, feuding days. I know I was probably protected from him by my particular connections, at least enough to make him think twice. (I remember once, maybe on Pattern Day, standing at the bar in Kenny’s with Gregory between me and the man, who was scowling round at me, leaning forward on his elbows at the counter, and Gregory telling him to stop and leave me alone.) But now we were surely both too old for that? I learnt anyway that this particular character was around and I was keen to meet him.

‘But, oh,’ said my informant, who knew him very well, better than most, being his wife, ‘he is calmed down since, thank God.’

Calmed down or not, I meant to see him for auld lang syne. I’m not the least bit superstitious, no more than ever I was, but I knew I would see him, that same morning, as if by a seventh sense. I knew I’d catch him on the road, as he drove from Bungowla to Kilronan. It was my last day in my lodgings. My room being booked to someone else in advance of my arrival, I planned to leave for Kilronan and stay my last night there. I wanted to explore the world around Killeany, traditionally the poorest place on the island (‘But like your Harlems and your slums anywhere, it’s all been yuppified at Killeany,’ as the curator at the Dún Aengus Heritage Centre said – himself an incomer now domiciled there, a former priest, a scholar of the Celtic and romance languages). I wanted to cross to Dún Dúchathair. I wanted to stand above Gregory’s Sound. I wanted to clamber round to Glassin Rock. I wanted to see the blowholes where the Atlantic sent its spume up like a whale. They had put my bag on a bus and would deliver it to Kilronan for me. So I walked with just my stick and guessed that if I came out at the crossroad above the clochán and walked quietly along in the sunny morning, my man must come in his trap in good time. Sure enough, there he came in his white wool bonnet, trotting along behind me, gradually catching me up. I half turned when I heard the hooves, to check who it was, but then paid him no heed until he was upon me.

I called to him by name, taking a step into the road, in a manner that in the old days he might have taken for a challenge (though not a challenge from me: I was always a very quiet person but would take my risks out of curiosity, and liking, and sometimes too much Guinness, in pursuit of observation, copy for my story, as you know). He seemed more than happy anyway to stop and give me a ride. So I climbed into the trap and off we went at a dawdling trot. At once we began laughing at what a wild, wild man he’d been. I said I’d feared him, which amused him but also I think embarrassed him a little to hear me say so plainly. I think he’d have preferred it if I hadn’t said it, but I did. He asked if I’d like to go by the low road, now itself a metalled road. I was pleased to. I wanted to travel it again, and to remember, as I told him, how we broke the Grey Fella in along it. We spoke again about him and his love of fighting, and his love of Guinness. He put his head down and pummelled the air before him, laughing. But it’s no more black stuff now for him, doctor’s orders, not at least until his world goes dark. He produced a postcard from his pocket as we rode along. It was one of those cards that offers four little views. There in one of them was his young self with his black Iberian curls, mending a fishing net. He tried to identify who owned the legs in the picture of men carrying a curragh in the black-beetle-blindfold traditional manner. Was one of them Brian Hernon? Who could say? He used the card as a prop in his entertainment of the tourists. He loved to have the visitors to talk to. But you’d wonder about some of them and their interest in walls and water tanks. He had a corporate umbrella in his trap, he laughed to show me, to keep them dry if it rained.

‘There’s a water tank, I do tell them, and some of them do love to be seeing the water tanks. There’s another water tank, I say. That kind of way. But sure we’re not interested in them. We see enough of them like,’ he laughed, and laughed again, as if at himself. ‘Where they do be from, they never see the likes of a water tank.’

He’d been away himself and once he’d tried to enlist in the army but they wouldn’t take him. When he was young he’d fallen and damaged his knee down at Kilronan harbour. He went in to Galway but you had to be 100 per cent fit. He knew the wider world, however. He’d lived in Birmingham (told me the house number and street where he lived) and he’d worked at the Isle of Grain. He’d been a fisherman, taking Yanks out fishing too, and now he was a jarvey, which is what you do as you get older. I told him how once or twice I’d tottered the low road home, the worse for wear from Guinness.

‘Ah sure,’ he smiled, ‘didn’t we all, so no one could see us, staggering and falling over? I see the likes of them doing it now, you know, the young fellas.’

He named them and laughed at the thought. And then he showed me the seals off the shore below Mainistir, waiting, as he said, for the tide to ebb a little more before they’d come ashore to perch. He was very eager that I should see the seals. He identified birds for me and I got a glimpse of how much the natural world was second nature to him to know. So that was what became of the fighting man, after all: now in round sixty-three and up against age (who always punches above his weight and goes the distance).

Now the sand raced through the little hourglass for me. I found another message from Michael and yet managed to miss him again. But as I stepped out next morning, at eight o’clock, due to sail for Rossaveal at nine, down he came, rattling in his red van, and stopped and came up to me and greeted me warmly. A barrel-chested man he had become but I could still see the youth in him I’d once known, always full of laughter. How many years my junior? Only seven or eight, but at that time just those few years seem far more. Now, as I understood, he skippered his own boat, up and down from Galway, in and out of Killybegs.

There was a great deal of activity in Kilronan that morning. Michael told me why. All the fishing boats currently in the harbour were preparing to sail out to the bar of the island. They were to form a reception party to greet the first new trawler to join the island fleet for longer than anyone could remember. Surely not since the Ard Aengus? Wrecked in ’68? I wondered aloud, lost in my time-warp. But no one could remember her. Everyone was in it now, as Michael said, and the place was humming. The fishermen and jarvies were on their mobiles, chattering like yuppies in Galway. To whom? To each other? Out went the escort to the east and, as it sailed, the morning, suitably, became dramatically grey and cold. The boats shrank almost from sight into the new day’s narrow light but at last crossed broadside on, passing behind Straw Island. Then there she loomed, the Shauna Ann, proud property of Mr Fitzpatrick of Killeany. (So I think I heard say.)

‘Give her a week,’ said Michael, ungrudgingly, ‘and she’ll be just like the others.’

Flares shot in arcs across her as she turned and headed in. The other boats followed in procession, led by the lifeboat. As she neared, you could see her brilliant red paintwork and what I took to be her great deepwater bulk. But Michael advised me she wasn’t a big boat compared with some of them, not at all. Some of them were crewed by as many as fifty men. Her owner and what I took to be his sons, as well as many others, were all aboard, waving to their womenfolk and children. As she neared, the minibus jarvies blew their horns and the women shrieked and shrilled. The other boats, including the Draoicht na Farraige, blew what they had to blow. It was a kind of blessing, and made me think what such a blessing might seek to forfend. Michael had spoken to me of being of the party that had searched and searched the Sound to find any sign of the Lively Lady. She went down in ’82, a forty-footer and too slight a vessel to contend with the storm that ran there. So Mikey McDonough and Brian O’Flaherty perished with her. Think of their last gasp and sight of day in bleak North Sound. ‘He always said that was how he would die,’ said Padraig of Mikey McDonough.

But now the Draoicht na Farraige strained to be off, and so as suddenly as that last time on the Naomh Eanna, my time imploded, and soon the last sight of the island vanished again between the sky and sea.

I thought that I had come full circle. I thought the story of my going back, just three days, brief and sketchy, had found a fitting close, one to open that world for me again, and bring it from the past for ever, freeing me of it all at last. But there was yet another, unforeseeable circle to be drawn.

I had some Lilliputian business to attend to in Dublin. So I stopped over, staying in Amiens Street (at the Old Dubliner). Then on the morning I was due to sail, once more to Liverpool, I decided I’d walk to the terminal down the Liffey in the morning. I still like, as much as ever I did when younger, the uplifting prospect of a harbour and a sea-road. But soon I found myself lost in an impenetrable maze of wharves and warehouses, basins and quays. There seemed to me to be no way through. To make matters worse, it was a warm morning too, warm for wearing a rucksack on your back, heavy with a week’s wear and reading. Now in some desperation, trying again and again to get through, I turned this way and that. If there was a passage through the maze, I couldn’t find it. The time ticked by, as it seemed, faster and faster. I was in danger of missing my sailing. I realized I’d no choice but to walk all the way back into Dublin, to find a last-ditch taxi. I began to despair as I walked, now half at a run, my habitual folly threatening to thwart me again.

Then, suddenly, as I rounded a corner, beside a rundown warehouse, I looked across the quay to my left and saw, in the far corner, unmistakable to my eye, even after more than thirty years, the Naomh Eanna herself. Would you believe? There she was, moored up, rusting, listing, some blue bunting in her rigging. I could not and could only believe my eyes. It was the Naomh Eanna, I knew from just her outline. I didn’t need to see her name. I knew her so well. My eye had kept its youth. I had my camera with me, to record the evidence, but my camera had no film in. I lingered looking after her, across the dank basin. But I couldn’t reach her, and I couldn’t stay. Just so you might leave your love, your family, friends and relations, for ever in some heart-wrung, lingering harbourside farewell. As I turned away from her, I saw a man parked in a van and crossed to ask him did he know what place this was?

‘Charlotte Quay,’ he said, ‘Charlotte.’

So there the two of us met again and my mind flooded with enough memories to float her off, and myself with her, out of the lightweight Dublin breeze that clacked and rattled in her lame rigging, and out to the west. The sudden sight of her, after all that time, made me feel, as any foolish fatalist might, that the gods had written my story for me, and brought it round full circle now, not by any accident, but by design.

may, september 2000