Biddy McLaughlin’s life has been filled with adventure and fun but also marked by terrible tragedy. The Sunday Independent columnist who has close links with Moycullen, writes about these events in her new memoir. She tells JUDY MURPHY about the book and how a friendship with a Galway family helped her reconnect with her rural roots.

Biddy McLaughlin isn’t a fan of pubs. The Sunday Independent columnist whose descriptive powers and razor-sharp insights make her home town of Dalkey look like a fascinating and eccentric place, prefers socialising with friends at home or in restaurants rather than hitting the high stool.

But when she’s in Galway, she makes an exception, going to Regan’s Bar in Moycullen, which is one of her favourite pubs.

Biddy has had many adventures in Moycullen and some of these are recounted in Tales of a Patchwork Life, her new memoir, published by Mercier Press.

It has a unusual format in that each chapter is inspired by an object that surrounds her and with which she feels a special connection. Biddy, who is also a fine artist, has created a sketch of each item to illustrate the various chapters. They include a combine harvester, a newspaper, a star, a computer, a helicopter, a pair of shoes, a violet cream bun – and each item connects with a particular story.

Some of her stories are funny, others are heartbreaking and pretty much all are insightful.

This is a woman who has had great moments in life but terrible tragedy too, including the murder of her beloved sister Siobhán in 2006 by a man Biddy refers to as ‘The Savage’. He was Siobhán’s husband and her description of him is not incorrect.

Biddy’s own much much-loved husband, Michael, whom she married in 1999, drowned in 2003 while swimming off Dalkey, having had a narrow escape there the previous year. In 2000, shortly after their marriage, Biddy was diagnosed with breast cancer, which she writes about in a chapter called ‘The wig’. She describes her response to the diagnosis, the tough treatment and how Michael’s first wife had previously died of the same illness. Both women were treated by the same oncology team and Biddy attributes her recovery to luck.

She doesn’t shy away from these awful events and their lasting legacy, but during her interview with the Tribune, Biddy stresses that, “despite all the tragedy in my life, I’ve had so much luck. I’ve lived a full life and I intend to life a lot more”.

Based on her adventures to date, Galway will feature large in the future plans of this woman, for whom folklore is a passion.

In one chapter, Biddy writes about making lights from the rushes that grow on poor land and that once provided light for our ancestors’ homes. Her friend Pádraic Connolly from Uggool, near Moycullen who is now in his 80s, teaches Biddy how this was done.

It involves peeling the rushes, letting them dry out and then soaking them repeatedly in mutton fat which Pádraic had melted in a container over the fire.

Back at home in their Dalkey cottage, Biddy’s teenage son, Johnny, who describes the rushlight as looking like “a skinny stick of white chocolate”, lights it and places it in a rush lamp which was a present from Tommy Connolly, also from Moycullen. The 15-inch rush with its layers of mutton, glows as they sit by the fire, eating chocolate while the wind howls outside

Biddy’s 92-year-old father, Owen, who was born and reared in North-West Donegal and settled in North County Dublin in his youth, where he worked as a farm-machinery salesman, tells her she’s mad to be bothered with such things.

Despite his apparent cynicism, her research sparks Owen’s memories of those lights being used in his own Donegal youth, in the days before rural electrification. She credits her father, whom she affectionately calls ‘Grumpy’, with giving her a love of tradition and folklore, while her considerable cooking and baking skills come from her Waterford-born mother, Deirdre, who is now 83.

Pictured: Brighid ‘Biddy’ McLaughlin at the half-door of her cottage, which will be familiar to readers of The Sunday Independent.