24th November
Ten of us this time — Racheal, Peach, Cecilia, Joan, Travis, Clara, Claire, Victor, Vlad, Caz — plus children.

A Celebration of Potatoes

We made hash. Baked potatoes with various fillings. Skins with various fillings. Mash with various fillings. A full celebration. Potato in all its forms.

Peeling vegetables together is orchestrated work — it works because there is someone conducting it. We peeled, we talked, we moved around each other.

Potato Stories

Someone remembered their grandmother. Going to visit as children, sitting at the table. What they would eat was a big dish of potatoes — whole, with the skin on, with salt and butter. Loads of butter.

"There are so many names for a potato in Ireland. In Donegal they call them Perties. Beautiful potatoes that fall apart, flowery, creamy — all sorts of different names."

In Scotland they're tatties.

Someone else remembered being in Portugal, watching a woman peel potatoes to make a kind of roast. Then out came a little snack — the skins, deep fried, just with salt on top. A massive tray of them. Nothing wasted.

"It was the one thing I remember from the whole two weeks. So simple."

And then the story of crying at the table, heavily pregnant with twins, sitting sideways because of the size of her, sobbing. Her partner panicking, thinking the babies were coming.

"I was like — I just love potatoes."

The Potato Song

The children sang. We joined in with our hands.

Why don't you — show them, grow them, pick them, pack them, drive them to the shops and stack them, buy them, cook them, eat them for your tea — chip them, roast and bake them, boil them, mash them, I don't mind, they taste good to me.

P-O-T-A-T-O-E, which kind do you like the best?

Potatoes, spuds, spuds, spuds — we love potato — woo woo yay.

One potato, two potato, three potato, four. Five potato, six potato, seven potato, more.

Are Potatoes Calming?

The question came up and nobody dismissed it.

Potato starch. Separation. Catastrophe — boil it slow.

Vodka is made from potatoes.

The Irish Famine and Colonisation

Cecilia brought it. The conversation opened up.

The Wind that Shakes the Barley. Ken Loach. The Black and Tans. Burnt Irish cottages, land clearances. The famine walks. 1847.

Sinéad O'Connor's song 'Famine' — from her 1994 album Universal Mother — speaks it plainly: there was no famine. Irish people were only allowed to eat potatoes. All other food — meat, fish, vegetables — was shipped out of the country under armed guard to England while the Irish people starved.

If there ever is gonna be healing, there has to be remembering, and then grieving, so that there then can be forgiving.

The potato wasn't just food. It was what you were left with. It was survival and it was also the instrument of a people's destruction when the blight came, because everything else had been taken.

Driver of landlordism. Sinéad. Underneath the hawthorn tree.

Opening a Window

Someone who had been a nurse for 17 years shared something. When a patient dies on a shift, she opens a window. To allow the soul to move.

There was a French film described — a nurse doing a night shift, understaffed, too many patients. One dies. She opens the window.

"It's one of my things to do. The last thing."

Jimmy Cliff had just died. Someone had seen a post about lighting a candle for his soul. There were candles already in the space. We lit one.