Guessing the size of a village called Cranny is easy just by reading it – it’s so small Facebook doesn’t think it even exists. The village, one half of the parish of Crany-Coolmeen in South-West Clare, is home to a graveyard, parish office, postbox, pub, church, few houses and national school, the last of which I attended for seven years.
Due to circumstances outside my control however, I was forced to leave Cranny when I was twelve. With that, I lost touch with everyone who knew me as a child, and three years of climbing ladders in the jungle that was Ennis secondary schools wasn’t as easy as I expected, so I supposedly moved on and expected to be forgotten in a matter of months.
However, with the serious uptake of Facebook ‘back Wesht’ during my Junior Cert, I was bombarded with friend requests from people in my clss, my school, the parish. I reacquainted with lost crushes, the GAA club, the other side of the B-Dawg, and over the next three years I would gradually rebuild connections with those whom I shared GAA jerseys, school uniforms, school tours, breaktimes and general black-and-amber banter. A real-time parish network, you might say, and add the parish notice in the Clare Champion and we were smiling.
With it though came the question: to go to Peadar or not? Oh yes, Peadar, shortcode for the Peadar Clancy Festival, Cranny-Coolmeen’s big get-together. Every third weekend in July for as long as I could remember, it was a parade in Cranny on Friday evening, children’s disco in the school hall (DJ is the local priest I may add) on Saturday evening and family fun day in the GAA pitch on Sunday. There was so much made of it that there wasn’t a blade of grass cut in the parish for the whole weekend.
Having settled into Ennis and endured adolescence, I thought about a return to the land where literally anything newsworthy was common knowledge within days. The summer after First Year in Trinity seemed like a good start, given that I had made a huge splash in my first year in the capital and especially when an old classmate mentioned a Class of 2007 reunion at the parade. That class only consisted of five people, this was going to be hilarious.
So the Friday evening of Peadar weekend, I started walking down the Cranny Road, nervous but excited. I took a brief look at where it all began. My 25-student national school, and even comparing that to the Arts Block, made me think how far I’d come in six years. Every face seemed familiar though, even the older ones. They’d remember you, for sure.
Now, the parade was your standard collection of floats – local vintage tractors, JFK, the Tesco horsemeat scandal, the new Pope – you know yourself. Throw in a setting sun, midgets and toddlers who are excited at the thought of staying up late and getting spoilt. I have to keep thinking though, when I was their age, Cranny had two pubs and a three-figure secondary school. Christ.
I take pictures of each float, just I case I never return. It seems odd, but if felt good to be back.
It’s only when the parade finishes that you get to talk to everyone you once knew. There are some girls who are hardly recognisable from when I knew them as toddlers, guys who still recognise my high voice from miles away, even people who I’d never even met, like the new parish priest, or girls who had parents from the parish but somehow had mutual friends in my secondary school! Yes, this is actually happening B, Cranny NS is so tiny that there’s thoughts the parish will only have one school in a decade.
That’s cramming about six years of catching up, with about fifty-odd people, in about an hour, while all the toddlers get amused by an actor-comedian and their parents do their own catching up. The complete reunion didn’t happen (three out of five though, decent) but the three of us remember days gone by: the time when one of the guys thought Maltesers were made in Malta, when one girl was given carrot sticks for lunch and even when I broke down on my Confirmation day. It seems so different.
However, when you hear that one of your own has made it to Trinity, it is a massive deal, particularly in Cranny.
It’s a great thing to hear when someone with whom you played Gaelic football or went to Mass is making it big in one of the best colleges in the world. It’s quite a feeling.
Thinking back on it, if I had to remember only one good thing from Summer 2013 aside from the heatwave, it would have to be going back to where it all began, being the guy everyone knew for running around the school yard in his Bart Simpson slippers, knew every European capital by the age of 10 and still made it known that deep down, I’d still pull on the black-and-amber of Cranny-Coolmeen and feel like I never left.
As the seanfhocal once went: “Níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin.” There’s really no place like home.
