I was thinking of writing an ode to my dishwasher.  Well, if Keats could do it for Grecian Urns and Autumn, I could surely do it for the machine I love so well.

          Oh! Item of wonderful characteristics and traits

        Close bosom friend of the maturing housewife

          Conspiring with her how to load and wash

          With detergent the dishes that round the counter-tops lie. Read more

Want to know the top 20 things I’ve learned after writing a health column for 11 years?  If so, read on.

1. The human body is an awesome invention
2. Doctors are ordinary mortals too
3. Exercise is fundamental to good health – we were built to move and all sorts of things happen if we don’t
4. There isn’t a pill for every ill
5. There are the healthy, the sick and the worried well

* * *

6. Acceptance of a condition makes it easier to manage
7. You have to work at your mental health
8. There is dissatisfaction with every health service in the world
9. Eating food as close as possible to its natural state is best
10. Fish oils are good for many things

* * *

11. If there isn’t plenty of colour on your plate your dinner isn’t well-balanced
12. Farm accidents change lives – so many people regret not thinking safety first
13. Medication can save lives but some people are on too much of it and don’t get it reviewed often enough
14. Pharmaceutical companies have a vested interest in many patient support groups
15. Antibiotics are precious and shouldn’t be taken lightly

* * *

16. Admission of mistakes is best in the long run
17. Men tend to skip over the painful bits when talking about their illness
18. Expectations (of health services) are rising all the time
19. Many men have fear of doctors’ surgeries and hospitals due to negative experiences as children and therefore put off life-saving check-ups
20. Sometimes it’s the family, not elderly, ill people themselves who want the tests and medical interventions done.

* * * *

It’s silage time again and there’s the weather to make it, hallelujah, and as I write, tractors and trailers are rattling down the lane, off to harvest grass and pit it for the winter.

Sunny silage days always bring go-forring memories to the surface, though.

What’s a go-for, you may ask? Someone who goes for this, goes for that and then some – aka an important cog in any farm family wheel. And also someone who may be a tad under-appreciated. Behind every good farmer there’s a go-for – I should know – I’ve been one and I still get to wear the t-shirt sometimes!

INDISPENSABLE SPECIES

This indispensable species – the goforitas quickasyoucanacus – comes in all shapes and all sizes but is predominantly female.

A tractor breaks down – the go-for is dispatched for a part. The amount of seed needed for a field is miscalculated – the go-for is sent off for more.

The detergent in the milking-parlour runs out – the go-for is out the gate before the froth has well settled on the tank.

Often overlooked and under-valued they run the errands, pick up the slack, prop up the system and keep the wheels of industry turning. Yessir, it’s time for the go-fors of the world to unite and take their places as the farming institution they undoubtedly are.

And how can you recognize the go-fors of this world?  It’s easiest during the very, very busy seasons – spring, harvest, calving or lambing time. They can be observed sleeping with a steering wheel in their hands or the car keys in their pyjama pockets just in case they’re needed urgently during the night.

They often sport red eyes, too, due to constant demand particularly when the weather flag is up and there is a window of opportunity to get work done. Items are usually required in a hurry, causing the adrenalin to flow in style. The most commonly heard admonition to the go-for is “Don’t be there till you’re back.”

The go-for can also look a bit bedraggled on occasion as go-for demands take their toll on top of all her own work and her family duties. Calls from the yard usually come at the right wrong time, too – like when number two baby has just gone down for a nap or when granny down the lane has a chiropody appointment or when dinner is half cooked in the pot but the farm need usually has to take precedence over those of the house.

The go-for is usually an excellent driver.  Where she may not have been when she started, she is by now, due to the large amount of practice she has had since getting hitched.

Indeed, her farming swain may have quizzed her as to her abilities in this department during their courtship.  Instead of taking her clubbing he may have engaged her in trailer-reversing activity in order that she fit the go-forring bill should he eventually decide to pop the question.

It’s just as well, then, that a number of things have made the life of the go-for easier. The first one was the advent of the internal combustion engine.  Prior to this, go-fors must have died early due to exhaustion.

SMART PHONE EASES BURDEN

The second was the invention of the mobile phone. This enables her to liaise with her in-the-field hubby from her destination – the co-op, the parts supplier, wherever – when the promised item she’s gone for is not actually in the store, even though she was told it was, and an alternative has to be decided upon.

Now she can even send a photograph of an item to beloved in the field if required to establish suitability – a stress reliever all round.

But still she is needed to get the physical object itself from point a to point b at speed . . .

Yessir, the go-for is a farming institution – one that in these recessionary times, trad-minded farmers may be appreciating just a little bit more – hallelujah again – as it’s not before time. It takes a team to run a farm business and everyone’s input should be appreciated, I say. How about a monument to the go-fors of this world – a ‘woman at the wheel of a car’ statue, in bronze, no, gold, to represent the many journeys of the go-forring individual?  Maybe I should start a petition as soon as I come back. Now what was it I was supposed to get?

I was a Magdalene woman for seven weeks – six in rehearsal and one in performance. I played the part of Nelly Nora in Eclipsed, a play by former nun Patricia Burke Brogan and staged in Wexford Arts Centre in October 1997.

Getting ready to play the part of a woman put in a Magdalene home because she was pregnant outside marriage I often visited my aunt, my Dad’s only sister, in Dublin. She was 79 at the time.

As we sat around the fire in that Georgian flat I’d tell her what I was doing and about the character of Nelly Nora and about how I’d be wearing a blue dress and a white apron over it on the stage and that I’d have to take my wedding ring off and find a pair of battered black boots in a charity shop to look the part. I’d talk, too, about society and how hard it must have been for girls who became pregnant outside marriage in those times.

‘Aye’, she’d say.

‘Mmm,’ she’d say as I rattled on about the play-acting to come.

She sat there, her blue housecoat over her clothes to keep them clean, hands tucked under thighs on the red stool by the fire, her almost grey plaits wrapped around her head the same way that they’d been wrapped around her head since she was a child.

‘Time to get to bed if we’re to be up in the morning bright and early,’ she’d say eventually, rising to riddle the fire and fill the kettle.

It was only in 2004, three weeks before she died, that I realised why she didn’t engage in that ‘Nelly-Nora’ conversation.

It was because she was a woman who knew how hard life was if you became pregnant outside marriage.

She’d given birth to a daughter, not in a Magdalene home, but in a Protestant version of it – Bethany Home in Rathgar – in 1947.

Her daughter, the cousin we should have known and loved all our lives, turned up at the hospital where my aunt was dying. We’d never known she existed.

In conversations now, I listen for silence and lack of engagement and if they occur I wonder privately, each time, what it is they signal.