Not long back from a thoroughly lovely day at the retired teachers monthly lunch. I was there from about 10:00 a.m until nearly 3:00 p.m. We do spend too much time yacking!
Seriously though, the lunch was, as usual, very good - first a huge plate of salad (as much as I would normally eat for lunch) in a raspberry vinegar dressing. This was followed by a nicely moist chicken breast in sauce with a variety of vegetables all perfectly cooked. The meal finished with ice cream wrapped in a crepe and coffee.
The topic today was "The Irish in Canada" a finely researched description of the potato famine in Ireland and the mass migration of starving people to North America. Rather a depressing and quite tragic topic as many died en route or shortly after arriving, but fascinating nevertheless. The speaker has travelled extensively throughout Canada to visit memorials to the Irish and has written a book on the subject. I'm sure it would be worth a read. However, it was ironic to be hearing of the plight of these poor people after being so well fed.
Not much supper for me tonight, just soup and a sandwich should suffice.
The Irish are such a lovely people - when we visited Ireland they made us so welcome. It must have been a hard decision for them to leave their homes and travel miles away to another land - it resembles the Highland Clearances in Scotland but their plight was more a forced emigration by landowners to begin with but then became more urgent when the Highland potato famine struck.
ReplyDeleteI did relate to the Highland Clearances but the landowners in Ireland seem to have been much more brutal, burning the houses of farmers not able to pay their taxes. So many died on the so called "coffin ships" on the journey to Canada. Typhus was rampant.
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