Moodboard: The Grand Stretch - The Gloss Magazine
KINDRED OF IRELAND

Moodboard: The Grand Stretch

The grand stretch in the evening intoxicates, leaving us dawn chorus craw-sick with a hedgerow hangover …

Summer, you go to our heads. Sun-soused, lightlangered, flower-fluthered, the grand stretch in the evening intoxicates, leaving us dawn chorus craw-sick with a hedgerow hangover. Blame it on the microbial enzymatic activity in which an energy-rich compound (eg a carbohydrate) is acted upon by busy, naturally occurring microorganisms (say bacteria or better yet, yeast) catalysing an anaerobic breakdown producing carbon dioxide and alcohol, a process known as fermentation. Fold the sweetness of summer into the Northern hemisphere’s long day’s journey into night and bingo, we’re stocious.

Irish summer is an oxymoron. Sidling up to the bigbellied Weber Kamado, as much for warmth as for the sizzle of honey mustard sausages, it’s still light out when the clock strikes July, soon to be August. We find ourselves wistful for winter, to be huddled by the fire with a cuppa and a bickie and a book as the days draw in; summer, we hardly knew ye! What are we like, we Irish? We can’t grill on, we grill on.

No, apparently Freud did not say “The Irish are impervious to psychoanalysis”, a remark attributed to him in Scorsese’s masterpiece of a film The Departed. Tempting as it is to have a go, we cannot square the circle of Ireland’s saints and scholars, the Becketts, Joyces, Tóibíns and the unpublished wordsmiths of the Irish diaspora like my dear friend Brigid’s late mother Kate Baker: “the big bouffant Kathleen, a veritable monument who made of me a valiant woman,” says her daughter. “‘Never match, always blend. Use a light hand. Figure it out. Read a book. Follow the fabric. Just cut. Stop flitting around the kitchen and flit somewhere else. Shouldn’t you be practicing? Take a genteel sufficiency. Put your brother in the wagon and take him with you. That is a very unfortunate dress. Sweet mother of the angels and all the saints in heaven preserve us. Talking to you is like whistling jigs to a milestone. Dip in the dip and leave the herring for your father.’”

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” Albert Camus

The release of Sinéad O’Connor’s Grammy-winning (Grammy-refused) second studio album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got in 1990 aligned with the year this New Yorker left Rome for Belfast to be with the man I would marry. Thirty five years is a grand stretch in the country I’ve lived in longer than any other, a country of infuriating, thrilling contradictions. Sinéad’s thrilling voice and infuriating spirit damned the music industry for rewarding commercial success over artistry, damned the church for protection of its abusers, damned her abusive mother for failing her, damned success for making a failure of her home and hell, likely damned Irish summers for not being winters. The subtext of I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got (a take on Matthew 7:7) reads like a law of physics: whatever we have, we’ve asked for, conjured, reeled in like silver salmon – the good, the bad and the unspeakable.

Like the late Sinéad Marie Bernadette O’Connor, I find myself railing against the country of my birth, its skewed politics, injustices, outrages, ignorance and downright stupidity. An Irish citizen since 1995, I’ve considered renouncing my American citizenship; forgive me, America, for hating what you’ve become. Like Chicago-born, Peruvian citizen-by-choice Robert Prevost, the newly elected Pope Leo XIV, I’m more a citizen of the world than an American. Perhaps some Mná na hÉireann are not born, but forged. @susanzelouf

I’M BOBBING my bonce; if Bob’s yer uncle, then Fanny’s yer aunt.

I’M UNDOING dark spells in a Vivienne linen dress by Kindred of Ireland.

I’M SUMMERING in the city in Dries Van Noten. www.mytheresa.com.

I’M BREEZING about in H&M’s light peach pink oversized shirt.

I’M BRAVING sea swims with a www.stableofireland.com linen towel.

I’M LOOKING sharp in a thistle and Nile green silk scarf. www.ciarasilke.com.

I’M CRYING cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh, in a gold and ceramic www.lussomediterraneo.com mussel pendant.

I’M POSING in Bottega Veneta’s BV1357S Ultrathin Squared sunglasses.

I’M SHOWING off little piggies in Dolce & Gabbana’s pompom-embellished raffia sandals. www.mytheresa.com

I’M SHOULDERING burdens in a chic Hermès Cabas Corricolo horsehair fringed shoulder bag.

I’M MATTIFYING my pout in Prada Beauty Monochrome Soft Matte Liptick in Sedona.

I’M CLEANSING with Wild Irish Seaweed and Mint soap. www.faerly.ie.

I’M RELIVING 1970s New York glitter and doom via Guy Trebay’s memoir.

I’M OPENING summer wine with a 24ct gold-plated Longhorn bottle opener. www.l-objet.com.

I’M BARBECUING on a Weber Kamado. www.newlands.ie.

I’M HONOURING the Choctaw Nation’s famine-era act of kindness. Visit Alex Pentek’s “Kindred Spirits” monument in Bailick Park, Midleton, Co Cork.

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