There is a separate post about the beer I found on this trip. This one is the actual reason we went.
Fair warning before you start. There are no photographs of my family in this post. Not of the party, not of the sixty-odd relatives, not of my aunt who is almost ninety. That is deliberate. They did not sign up to appear on a yeast company’s website, and their faces are theirs to share, not mine.
So the only person you will see here is me, generally standing in front of something looking pleased with myself. You will have to take my word for the rest.
It started in Oxford
First night in the country, jet lagged, and we did a walking tour of the Harry Potter film locations. Oxford colleges standing in for Hogwarts, which the kids in the group were far more invested in than I expected and which I enjoyed a good deal more than I had planned to.
Oxford also has a street called Brewer Street, and I am not made of stone.
Brewer Street in Oxford. Of course I stopped.
North, then south, then London
The first real job of the trip was heading north to see my aunt, who is coming up on ninety. There is a particular quality to sitting in a room with someone who remembers your parents as young people. She has stories about my family that nobody else alive has, and she tells them well, and I did not take a single note because I was too busy listening. I regret that a bit.
Then cousins. Then down to Canterbury for another aunt and uncle, their cousins, and their families. Three houses in three parts of England, and in each one somebody put the kettle on within about ninety seconds of us walking through the door.
London was the family holiday proper. We did the Warner Bros studio tour with the whole group, which was genuinely excellent and worth the ticket even for the sceptics among us. The London Dungeon. Borough Market, which I could have spent the entire day in. Covent Garden. Les Misérables in the evening, which held up.
Earl’s Court Station at dusk.
Dublin, Belfast, and the north coast
We flew to Dublin, picked up a car and my parents-in-law, and drove north.
Titanic Belfast is very good, and more sobering than I expected.
Taking the bow pose at Titanic Belfast very seriously.
Then up the coast to Bushmills for a tasting, though after four hours on the cliff walk and an hour at the Giant’s Causeway, I would have been happy with a glass of water.
The Causeway deserves its reputation. The cliff walk before it deserves more than it gets. Four hours of coastline with the weather doing three different things and almost nobody else on the path.
On the stones at the Giant’s Causeway.
The Giant’s Causeway and the cliffs behind it.
From there to Derry, where we stopped at Free Derry Corner. I am not going to write a paragraph on Northern Irish history in a post about a family holiday, and I would do it badly. I will say that standing in front of that gable wall with my father-in-law was the quietest ten minutes of the trip.
Free Derry Corner.
Sligo, and the party
Then Sligo, and my wonderful Aunty Vera’s place, which became home base for the next week and a bit.
If you have Irish family you already know what the next part looks like. You get in the car. You drive twenty minutes. You have tea and you talk for two hours. You get back in the car. Repeat until the week is gone. Sligo and Mayo, house after house, and by the end of it I had properly caught up with about sixty relatives.
And then there was the party.
Sally and I both had a milestone birthday this year, and we had said, more than once and quite firmly, that we did not want a fuss. My Conway cousins listened carefully to that, agreed with it, and then went ahead and organised the surprise of the century anyway.
I had no idea. None. Right up until the moment I walked in and understood that every single conversation I had had for about a fortnight had been part of a coordinated operation involving dozens of people across two counties, and that not one of them had cracked.
Three generations in one room, some of whom I had not seen in years and some of whom I was meeting for the first time. My aunt’s generation, my cousins, and their kids running around underneath the whole thing.
I am not going to try to describe it properly, because I would only make a mess of it. What I will say is this. You spend your working life building a business in a country your family left, and you tell yourself the distance is fine, and then sixty people put on a party for you eleven thousand miles from home and you find out the distance was never quite as fine as you had decided it was.
The Conway cousins pulled it off perfectly. I am still slightly annoyed about how well they lied to me.
The rest of the west
After that, the tourist part. Drumshanbo, where they make Gunpowder gin, and where I asked too many questions about fermentation. Westport for a few nights. Galway for a few more, which has a nightlife that does not care what time your flight is. A day out on the islands. The Cliffs of Moher.
Cliffs and stone-walled fields off Ireland’s west coast.
A tall ship on the quay.
Then back to Sligo for the goodbyes, which are the hard part of a trip like this, and which get harder the older everyone gets.
Spain, and home
A week in Nerja to stop moving. Thirty-five degrees, tapas, a cold beer that did not need to be interesting, and nobody’s itinerary to keep to. We flew out on the morning of the World Cup final, which was poor planning on my part, then two days in London and home.
What I took home
Three things.
Go while people are still here to visit. My aunt is nearly ninety and she was delighted to see us, and there is no version of that sentence that works better in five years.
Ask the questions and write the answers down. I did not, and I will be annoyed about it for a long time.
And if your cousins ever tell you they are respecting your wishes about not making a fuss, they are lying to you, and you should be grateful.
Thanks to Vera, to the Conways, and to everyone who drove, cooked, hosted, kept a secret or put the kettle on. See you sooner than last time.
Back at work, if you want to review your yeast program across your range, book a 15-minute fermentation planning call.