Welcome back to West ! Feel free to feel free!

“Your itinerary is all sorted out!”

Across the room, sitting on my mother’s sofa, my brother flinched.

“Oh no please don’t . . .”

“No no don’t be silly. I was joking and . . .”

“It’s just that we don’t want to . . .”

“I know. I know. Don’t worry.”

Sentences are rarely finished in the Jewish living rooms of north-west London. My brother once synthesised our family dynamic perfectly by interjecting “stop talking while I’m interrupting”.

In the same way that Indigenous Australians breathe circularly to play their didgeridoos, we circularly speak to and listen to several people at once. To gentle Church of England types such as my beloved Snapper, our cacophony seems at first overwhelming. However, once I explained that she’d remain forever silent, if waiting for a pause in conversation, she leaped in and never looked back.

I had been teasing my brother about his trip to Ireland. He and his wife like to take extended weekend breaks, rather than long chunks of holiday. They want to come and see us, visit our home, as well as enjoying the splendours of the West of Ireland together.

We’re very excited to see them, as due to ill-health and living in what appears to Londoners a pretty inconvenient spot, we haven’t yet been able to show our home to any members of either family.

So yes, you’ll be very welcome and beyond that, I hope you both have a wonderful holiday.

Not one bit of me wants to risk my brother’s ire by setting an agenda, but my love for this life and area of land on Ireland’s Atlantic coast demands to be shared. So don’t see this as an itinerary, brother. Just some suggestions: mere nebulous puffs of ideas that might anyway be shattered in sheets of savage sideways rain, or cloud that creeps to touch the ground, rendering nearby mountains invisible.

You’re arriving at your hotel in Salthill on Friday, so I’ll leave a copy of this for you at reception. Weather permitting, walk into town along the Prom, looking across Galway Bay to those limestone hills of Clare. I’m really glad you’re going there. You and I have already shared times in Connemara, so it’s good that you’ll both see West Clare for the first time together.

It is a magical place. When I first started wooing the Snapper we spent a lot of time getting lost in the Burren. The hills look huge, but these slopes are built on limestone terracing rather than the mountainous bog of their Connemara cousins. You can walk up them at a pleasant rambling pace, feel achievement at the top and enjoy views of the Arran Islands and Galway Bay, along with the undulating grandeur of the Burren itself.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.