Don't mind me with Patricia Feehily

I’M not one for marking the passing of an old year or even the passing of an old decade, at least not since someone turned up the volume and put the years into a virtual tailspin. It seems like the blink of an eye since I made my last New Year’s resolutions and I didn’t even get time to activate them. Nevertheless, at this time of year especially, I’m a terror for looking back. I’ll turn out like Lot’s wife if I’m not careful.

I’m particularly fond of reading newspaper columns from the archives. I read one of those ‘Times Past’ pieces from the archives of a neighbouring local newspaper this week and literally stopped dead in my tracks. I swung right around, rubbed my eyes and stared intently through the years. The column, looking back on 50 years, included an extract from an article about ‘moonlight distillers’. I thought I knew the original author of the piece. The trouble is I don’t really know her anymore.

Fifty years! Yikes! Surely I wasn’t around 50 years ago. But there it was in black and white, my first tentative steps on what was supposed to be a journalistic odyssey - but which turned into a bit of a damp squib in the end. I suppose I should be cringing now at the sight of such juvenilia, but to be honest, more blood, sweat and tears went into that article than anything I ever wrote afterwards. As for the author! She’s a complete stranger now, but she once was me.

It was my first week in the job and I was slightly disadvantaged because provincial women reporters at the time were as scarce as hen’s teeth and no-one knew what to expect. One thing for sure, I was determined not to be pigeon-holed into producing women’s features. So when I was asked to produce a Christmas feature, I went after a poteen maker, with all the assiduity of a war correspondent crossing enemy lines.

It took a couple of weeks, but eventually I found one willing to do an interview provided I didn’t name him or identify him in any way – even though he claimed to have been long retired from his profession. There was one other proviso. The interview was to be conducted in a local hostelry where females were never known to thread – not even in the snug. It called for a certain amount of intrepidity which I wasn’t sure I possessed, so I hauled my father along too as a bodyguard.

I bought the first drink from a gob-smacked publican, and the second, by which time I was beginning to panic over my dwindling funds and the fact that the poteen-maker was giving very little away. My father came to the rescue and bought the third drink and suddenly, like a light going on in a dark tunnel, the poteen maker opened up, waxing lyric, if you don’t mind, about memories of moonlit nights and dark glens and tell-tale smoke signals rising uncontrolled into the still sky giving the game away to the guards on bicycle patrol.

It wasn’t exactly Pulitzer prize-winning material, but it was the stuff of magic. He told me where he got his ingredients – the barley was thrown over the wall of the local malt house – and he told me who his customers were. One was a judge, whose wife apparently used it to lace her Christmas puddings. But I wasn’t to print any of that, nor was I even to allude to it in case they came after him.

Hours later, we drove him home. By that stage he was beginning to regret his indiscretion and threatening to sue the paper if there was anything ‘disagreeable’ in the article. By that stage too, he and my father were no longer on speaking terms - some contentious incident from the Civil War having been recalled in the middle of the poteen memories.

The editor wasn’t particularly impressed with the article either. I think he would have preferred if I had written a new Christmas cake recipe for the ‘Women’s Corner’ - even if it was one laced with poteen. Nevertheless, everything changed that Christmas of 1969. It was the end of the ‘swingin sixties’ and although I didn’t know it then, it was the last Christmas we had with my father. Reading the ‘archives’ brought it back, but only vaguely, because I’m not convinced that the past is ever fully retrievable in the memory. I’m not even sure if you can ever be properly acquainted again with the person you once were.

But here’s to the New Year - and the new decade – anyway, and a happy one to all of you.