Visiting the relations on Christmas Day, as you do, I found them more than usually quiet. Then again, these were 5,300-year-old relations, buried at Loughcrew in Co Meath. And in fairness, I may not have caught them at their best time.
The megalithic chamber tomb in Cairn T, the main monument on the site, is aligned with sunrise on the equinoxes.
That’s when the resident spirits are at their most voluble.
Or at least when they’re at greatest risk of being channelled by the many new-agers, old-agers, and others who gather there to greet dawn in mid-March or September.
Still, in keeping with a now-annual tradition of bringing my kids to such ancient places on Christmas Day, we added Loughcrew this year to previous visits to Tara and the Newgrange-Knowth-Dowth triangle.
And there was a steady stream of others making the pilgrimage up the steep, sheep-shorn grass slope that leads to the Cairn and its magnificent views of the surrounding countryside.
This is a time of year for looking both back and forwards, as symbolised by the two-faced Roman god Janus. In keeping with which, on the way back down the muddy slope, I performed the splits by accident, when my right leg shot forward violently in the direction of 2025, while my other leg got stuck in the past.
Luckily, I’ve been doing a bit of yoga of late, albeit usually not at such high speed.
Apart from a stiff knee and a slight groin strain for several days, there was no harm done.
***
Then last week, as a post-Christmas detox, a friend talked me into a thing called halotherapy. This involved sitting in a room that replicates the effects of a salt cave for an hour, while applying heated pillows to your body and listening to soporific music.
The effect did indeed seem to be very relaxing, up until the point just afterwards when, back in the reception area, I was taking off the plastic shoe covers you wear in the room.
I did this while leaning against the nearest wall with my free hand. But as I soon discovered, one of my fingers had strayed into the space between the door we had just exited from and the door-frame.
This became apparently only when my friend tried to close the door and persisted in doing so until my screams – invoking the name of the Christian Messiah – identified the source of the mystery blockage.
Oh well. There was blood but no serious damage. Neither of the fingers I use to type with was involved, for example, and the injured one was located on my second favourite hand.
In a top ten of my most important digits, it would rank seventh, at best. I suppose I got off lightly.
***
They say mishaps come in threes, though. So now I’m waiting for the next one, which is the worst part. Unless perhaps I can predate the current set of pratfalls to mid-December when I ran a lap of the Phoenix Park and a malicious tree stuck out a root to trip me. I was in lucky then too – the ground broke my fall, resulting in only a few scratches.
If that counts as the start of my current set of mishaps, I may be off the hook for a while.
***
In a column on Maynooth University’s annual carol service before Christmas, I suggested the college there was founded “just before the French Revolution”. Au contraire, as Proinnsias Breathnach has written to point out, it was founded just after the Revolution, in 1795, and “largely because of” that event.
Under the Penal Laws, Irish priests traditionally trained on mainland Europe. And in the immediate aftermath of the revolution, Proinnsias writes, some of the French-produced ones were “imbued with republican thinking”.
This was a worry not just to the British government but also to the Catholic hierarchy. Hence a deal, quickly concluded, whereby the government not only agreed to allow the establishment of a national seminary in Ireland “but also to provide funding”.
***
I won’t try to excuse my confusion about the Maynooth founding date on the possibility that the French Revolution never happened. But that, by coincidence, is a theory mentioned in the latest Times Literary Supplement.
The context is a debate about a competing tendency among historians, pitching “lumpers vs splitters”: those who “agglomerate” disparate events into big, unifying themes, and those who do the opposite and “disaggregate”.
The disaggregators are dominant now, one reader’s letter suggests: “They have tried to deny that there was an ‘Industrial Revolution’, just as they tried to show there was no ‘French Revolution’ (”the French Revolution never happened”, as the historian Richard Cobb once declared in a classic statement)”.
But speaking of corrections, another reader’s letter refers to recent mention in the TLS of a French revolutionary song that predicted aristocrats “soon will be swinging from lampposts”.
In fact, the reader points out, there were few if any lampposts then: “At the time of the revolution, street lighting was generally provided by lamps suspended from brackets fixed to the sides or corners of houses, or on a support strung across a narrow street”.
You can get away with nothing.