COVID! At the Fleadh

I finally got got at an Irish music festival. Plus an interlude for foraging

The Fleadh

We went to the Fleadh on a Friday night. Fleadh is an Irish word for “party,” pronounced like flaa. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. I understood that the event was a traditional Irish music festival, but I didn’t know yet that it was really about getting plastered in various pubs. In Ireland, many things are about getting plastered in various pubs. We got there, to this tiny town called Mullingar, and the whole place had been taken over. It was like if an American state fair was placed in the old main street of some country town and simply oozed out around all of the buildings, filling the streets, squeezing into every nook and cranny. Music was everywhere. Groups of children were performing traditional Irish dance in little thickets in the middle of the street, and the crowd poured around them, clapping and leaving respectful space as they passed by. I saw a tiny girl, no more than five years old, sitting cross-legged on the ground and playing a recorder. You couldn’t even hear her over the roar of people and the louder instruments nearby, but she was still raking in the tips due to being adorable. I love to see a girlboss winning.

A group of us walked through the streets: me and Peter and Donal, who’d come from Dublin, and two of Peter’s friends, Ronan and Fergus, who lived in Mullingar. I was starving and Peter bought me a cardboard box of chips, which he drenched in ketchup and vinegar. The US could benefit from more vinegar as a condiment. The chips were so hot that I had to hold them outside of my mouth for a moment as I ate them, and the vinegar diluted the ketchup, making it run through the pile in a pleasing way. Peter ordered himself a spud dog, which is Ireland’s response to a corn dog, since they don’t really have corn. It tasted exactly like you’d expect, so obviously we loved it. The sun started to set and we wound our way to a pub that looked unassuming from the outside but that Ronan assured us was the center of the party.  

It was an absolute party. The space was sprawling, like four separate pubs mashed together, with bands camped out in every room. The good musicians clearly chose to play indoors. We stayed there for hours, weaving in and out of each room, losing each other and meeting up again. I felt nostalgic for being with a group of women, the way women care for each other and account for each other when they’re out and how nice it feels to be a part of that. I got sad and contemplative when Ronan said that he and Peter had only seen each other twice in six years, and how wasn’t it a crime that people could be friends and go so long without seeing each other. I thought: what kind of person am I, to move so far from my own friends, to take the risk of going so long without seeing them? 

But a bunch of things made me happy, also: Donal left the group for a bit to get food, and came back carrying a huge bowl of beef stew which he’d purchased to-go. I thought, only in Ireland. It smelled amazing and I was actually jealous. We went to this old-school pub called Con’s that had wallpaper covered in a strange monkey print and saw the most amazing band, with this fiddler who was absolutely shredding his bow as he played. He’d stop every now and then, pound back a Guiness, keep going. I was sweaty and drops of beer were flinging all over me and the fiddler stood up on the bar and played over us and it was so, so fun. Then it was late and I was drunk and the band played Country Roads as one of their last songs, and I was sad again, so unspeakably nostalgic and wanting to be somewhere I wasn’t, and I recorded part of the song on my phone and texted it to my little sister and she texted back why am I crying.

And suddenly it was 2am. We made the long trek back to a parking lot on the outskirts of town - Donal had stayed miraculously sober - and drove back to Dublin, listening to a mix of country music and traditional Irish music and singing all the way.

Foraging close to home

The next morning Peter got a text from Ronan: he’d tested positive for COVID. He’d assumed he felt like shit because of all the cigarettes. Our night of indoor drinking and many drunken hugs flashed before my eyes. I knew I’d been got, and I treated the rest of the weekend like the ticking time bomb that it was. By Monday I was feeling decidedly off but tried to convince myself that the symptoms were in my head, that I’d placebo-d myself into feeling ill. By Tuesday I woke up with a splitting headache, my body feeling like each section had been individually run through a meat grinder. I got straight out of bed and took a test, which flashed positive in moments. The slog of COVID began.

I have a hard time allowing myself to rest. I don’t get sick often, or at least, not physically - my brain is broken as hell, but that’s a different story. Peter had just had COVID so he stayed well and was able to work from home, cooking me meals, bringing me medicine and tea with honey, generally caring for me in a way that was wonderful but made me highly uncomfortable. I needed to be a contributing member of the household! This lead me to make some Decisions. 

I’d recently noticed that a flowering plant in our front yard was producing huge purple berries that looked, well, sort of delicious. Not one to eat from random yard plants, I did some research and learned that the plant was a Fuchsia bush, producing both gorgeous pink flowers and edible berries. The flavor of the berries is mild. The internet described them as similar in flavor to kiwis, but sometimes also a bit peppery. The internet said, taste your particular berries and decide if you like them. I tasted one, and I did like it! (This was before I lost my taste and smell. That would come later.) I proceeded to fill a little bowl with the berries over the weekend. This was surprisingly meditative and wonderful: I got to reach into the depths of the bush, pushing aside nuzzly little bees, feeling for the ripest, darkest berries to pluck. Occasionally I’d find appealing little clusters hidden under leaves. After a while I had a full bowl which I placed in the fridge, vaguely thinking of making jam.

Days passed. I was sick, still attempting to answer emails here and there (freelance life!) but spending most of my time soundly asleep. On the third day I decided that I needed to cook, to make up for everything Peter had been doing. It was Jam Time. I cleaned and de-stemmed the fuchsia berries, then poured them into a sauce pan with a roughly equivalent amount of sugar, some lemon juice, and a small sprig of lavender. By this stage I realized that my sense of smell was gone, but I soldiered on. I brought the mixture to a boil, watching as juice escaped from the berries and turned the sugar a gorgeous hot pink. I stirred with a wooden spoon, breaking berries against the side of the pan, thoroughly enjoying myself. I’ve made jam before, so I know that you can test the final consistency using a cold spoon. But I decided not to do that, because I was actually exhausted and just stirring the jam started to feel like a lot. I just kept cooking it, until the mixture in the pot looked and felt like jam. I turned off the heat and went to sit back down on the couch, feeling proud of myself.

As the sugars in my fruit mixture cooled, they also hardened. I knew this would happen, logically, but I’d forgotten in practice just what that would be like. What remained wasn’t jam: it was almost like fuchsia berry caramel, rock-hard and cemented to the pan (and also the food processor, where I’d had a plan to blend it up for a better texture). Who cleaned up this mess? Peter did! We didn’t end up with anything edible.

But now I can smell and taste again, and my energy is coming back, and I can see that the bush in the front yard is covered with many more berries. It might be time to try again.