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Radio Review: Reflections on place and friendships

A Place Between, by Henrietta McKervey, features in the series Impermanence on RTÉ Radio 1
A Place Between, by Henrietta McKervey, features in the series Impermanence on RTÉ Radio 1 A Place Between, by Henrietta McKervey, features in the series Impermanence on RTÉ Radio 1

Impermanence, RTE Radio 1

In the year that Ireland marks 50 years since joining Europe and 25 since the Good Friday Agreement, the essays in the collection Impermanence touch a chord.

There are 12 in all, by contemporary writers from or living in Northern Ireland.

They lay bare what makes us who we are.

They were commissioned by the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris and published by No Alibis Press.

They are edited by Neil Hegarty and Nora Hickey M’Sichili, director of that centre, and brought to the listening ear via RTÉ.

The idea was born in Paris when the pair were walking the streets of the Latin Quarter and noticed a huge plume of smoke.

Notre Dame – the great cathedral of Paris – was on fire.

“We watched the great spire falling into the Seine,” said Hegarty.

What might have seemed permanent was no more – and from that sprung thoughts of home where smoke and burning buildings were a familiar sight.

Hegarty said he was struck by the toughness of these essays; the context is 100 years of difficult history.

You can listen to his own story, Klondike, when he looks back to a childhood in Derry and paints the sweep of Benevenagh; the geometric lines of pylons and winches in the city docks.

He walks a landscape that was once a dump but is now a beautiful wilderness – things change, times move on.

These are beautiful reflections on place and friendships – love letters home.

In A Place Between, writer Henrietta McKervey captures her father Professor Tony McKervey – one of Ireland’s most distinguished scientists.

A friend told her that his nickname was “the typewriter” because he delivered his class one sentence at a time as he paced back and forth across the lecture theatre – returning like the roller on the old-fashioned typewriter at the end of the line.

Alongside Seamus Heaney and Allen McClay, he made this place something special, she said – altering the present and the future for the north.

He was frying steaks at home when he became suddenly dizzy and then died.

His last words were “Turn the heat off” – intricate and precise, even as he was losing consciousness, his instinct was to ensure safety. There was no other way to be in science.