Tales of the Tinker No.1. The Surveyor's Apprentice.

The accuracy of a measurement depends on many factors: The thing being measured, for example, which may or may not lend itself to the achievement of accuracy. Some measurements can be achieved to a great degree of accuracy, while other things can be measured only roughly. Some things may be measured without too much worry or fuss, or without undue alarm if an inch or an ounce is mistakenly added or subtracted. A pint, for example, is a measurement that is not overly difficult to arrive at, though a drop or two less than a full pint will, however, to the human eye, quickly become apparent and brought to the attention of the person whose job it is to pour the measure.  The length of a boat may be measured to within a sixteenth of an inch or so, while the measurement of a young boy for his first suit may not be achieved with such accuracy, perhaps owing to the fact that the young lad may fidget, or simply dislike being measured and therefore, fail to cooperate in the measuring process, making the task a difficult, if not an almost impossible one.  A horse’s gait may be measured fairly accurately, as can its height; the unit being a hand, though whose hand is not really specified; it may be a large hand or a small hand; the fingers of the hand may be fat or thin, like those of a concert pianist. No matter though, for the average hand will suffice in the measurement of a horse. 

Temperature can be measured extremely accurately, though at either end of the scale, the measurement itself may become meaningless to a human being – unless that human is, say for example, a physicist. A span of time may be measured with a fair amount of accuracy, although a man in Switzerland now tells us that even this measurement may vary, depending on the disposition of the measurer. The Classical Mayans, we are told, achieved a high degree of accuracy in their measurement of time. Their calendar was apparently far more accurate than that of say, the Romans. 

Love is an altogether much harder thing to measure. With love, the quantities are either large or small, with very little in between and can vary enormously from day to day, hour to hour, or even, in some cases, from minute to minute. So then, even with such an apparently simple thing as love, the act of measurement can prove extremely problematic.   

Distance can be measured relatively accurately and the devices employed, being standard ones, are fairly simple to use. This however, was not the case on this brisk March morning, as the wind picked up off the sea, blowing a fine salty spray across the strand which coated O’Donovans bright yellow measuring stick in a cold, slippery film. O'Donovan, dehydrated and light-headed from the previous night’s drinking session held the yellow measuring device upright with both hands as carefully as he could under the circumstances, fully appreciative of the fact that a fraction of an inch either way could prove disastrous to the grand scheme of things. The young man’s vain attempt at concentration was made all the more difficult by the fact that his partner, standing across the road by the wall, was taking an inordinate amount of time in setting up the corresponding part of the measuring device - a looking-glass that was fixed on top of a tripod of a similarly bright yellow colour. 

The instrument each was in possession of was useless without the corresponding part. In tandem (in the hands of clear-headed and intelligent men) the pair of yellow measuring sticks were capable of a high degree of accuracy: The distance between the top of the sea-wall and the spot where the road ended, for example, was exactly two hundred and twelve feet, seven inches and three fifths. The elevation at the far end of the wall, which dropped gently towards the sea, was exactly three feet, nine and a sixteenth of an inch above sea-level. The distance between the sea-wall and the corner of O’Donoghue’s pub was exactly forty six feet and three inches, or roughly fifteen paces on a more or less sober day. Sobriety, again, is something that is not always easy to get a precise measurement of. What seems like sobriety to some, may be considered a state of inebriation to others. One too many pints one day, may seem on another, to be not too many at all. On a Monday afternoon, for example, three pints of porter may seem a lot to some folk, while others would judge the amount paltry – or barely worth recording.  His Reverence Father McMahon, the senior priest, would judge even a single pint of porter to be too much on a Monday afternoon, despite his own secret delight in the taste of whisky. Father McMahon would occasionally attempt to admonish the members of his flock who enjoyed too many pints of porter, but he didn’t do it with any hope for the salvation of either soul or liver, but because he felt it was his duty, as a man of God, to point out the evils of drinking porter on a Monday afternoon.  The way he measured the goodness of a man’s heart, or the worthiness of a man’s soul was by his abstinence of the porter – notwithstanding his own taste for the whisky, which he put down to the fact that, as a mortal man, born of sin, it was allowable provided it was followed by the prescribed number of Hail Mary’s and three deep and long genuflections. The fishermen who sat on the strand wall, working on the tangled pile of nets strewn out across the cobbled slipway, smoking their pipes, were not of the same opinion however, and would soon be filing in to take their places at the far end of the bar, where the porter would be downed. 

They had been watching the two men grappling with their yellow measuring sticks in the wind and had given up their net-mending for the moment to concentrate on the younger man, who they both agreed, had given a good account of himself at the bar on the previous evening, agreeing on the number of pints he had downed as being in total five, plus two whiskey chasers.  The two men watched in silence as Father MacMahon walked hurriedly past O’Donoghue’s pub, a canvas bag, light blue in colour, carried under his arm. Each man acknowledged the priest with a tip of their tweed caps before continuing on with the work of untangling and mending the nets: The seaweed and gossamer-thin fishing line, snagged together in a knotted ball along with cuttle-fish eggs, oyster and clam shells and pieces of smooth wood, all had to be removed and the holes mended before Monday evening, when they would be going out in the St. Helena to fish for Bass, Lemon Sole and Turbot. The senior of the two, Aidan MacRory, who was the master of the boat, unwound the twine from a spool, paying out a yard which he then spliced and threaded through the eye of a large hooked needle, before neatly sewing each hole in the net together, the process being repeated countless times, and with a dexterity and nimbleness that belied his huge, calloused hands.

The musicians had begun to file into the bar by around five in the afternoon and they were soon joined by MacRory and his son, Rory Og. The Fiddler went to the bar and ordered the drinks for the others and then they each took their place at a table by the door, to the left of a large stone fireplace. It is worth noting that the piper, a man named Eamon, was an enormous fellow, more Shire-horse than human, and his appearance was made all the more odd-looking by the shirt collar which had been tangled into an uncomfortable looking arrangement by the green and red plaid tie he wore.

The bag Father MacMahon carried under his arm had gotten bigger and commensurately heavier by the time he returned, hurrying past the pub as though on business of the utmost importance. The contents of the bag rattled and made a sort of jangling sound and O'Donovan guessed that it might be cutlery to be used for some celebration or other, and he wondered what the celebration might be in honour of, or of whom. Perhaps, he thought, it might be some sort of dignitary, like a Cardinal, or other such revered person. 

The truth was there was no dinner celebration planned and no impending visit of any dignitary, apart from that of the old chieftain and his family, who, you could say, was a dignitary of sorts; inasmuch as everyone knew who the old chief was and that he was revered and accordingly shown respect as being the last representative of his illustrious family, though who, despite his ancient right, which allowed him to spend a night in every house on his circuit, never stayed in the town itself, choosing instead to set up camp within site of the old castle where his ancestors had once lived but which they had been dispossessed of some two hundred years earlier, along with their lands. The chief and his family usually arrived in the area around this time of the year, that is, early in the month of March, and their arrival had been much discussed these past three and a half weeks. Mrs. Docherty, the telephone exchange operator, Father Macmahon and his aged and deaf housekeeper, Mrs. O’Toole, were the first to learn of the chief's imminent arrival and had already collected up their knives, scissors and gardening shears, ready to be first in the queue to have their implements sharpened - even though the chief always came to each house in turn. Now bearing in mind that the telephone exchange operator was also the elder sister of Seamus O’Donoghue, the proprietor and owner of O’Donoghue’s, there on the strand, the chance of the old chief's imminent arrival remaining a secret was about as likely as seeing Father MacMahon buying a round in the pub; in other words, highly unlikely.  So unlikely, in fact, that within fifteen minutes of the call coming in from the operator in Killybegs, it seemed that half of Dunfanaghy knew. No, the cutlery was not for any grand lunch or dinner in honour of the visitor, for it was well know that the chief would not set foot inside a single house in the town.