I was upstairs last Saturday evening when I heard Sue greeting somebody at the front door.
She called me and, as I arrived downstairs and beheld our visitor, she said 'see who we have here'?
I embarked on those seconds of agony during which you know that, if you fail in the recognition stakes, you are at risk of humiliating the person in front of you and shaming yourself!
Mercifully, I got there before either of them decided to put me out of my mysery.

It was Paddy Goggins.

Now Paddy and I go back a long, long way.

The Goggins family (actually it is a dynasty) are travellers, though Paddy told us on Saturday that he no longer travels and nor do his children.
(This is interesting in itself but is a topic for another day).

Coincidentally, over the last number of weeks, as I was preparing my blog for launch-day, I thought often not only of Paddy, his parents and his brothers, Jimmy and Gerry, but also of the Berrys and the Cashes and the Connors, all of them traveller families based in and around New Ross with whom I dealt extensively, and came to know well in the late 1970s and early 80s.
This is not to mention the Qilligans and the Flynns and the Sheridans and the Gammels and the O'Driscolls and the Turkey O'Briens and many other traveller families, most of them based in Rathkeale in Co. Limerick, that I also knew well at that time, dealt with regularly and, many of whom, I counted as friends.

As I was thinking about all this I lamented that I have no photographs of those people in those times and our interactions.
Without pictures, I was wondering how I could work them into the blog without boring the trousers off my readers - which, I figured, would be a poor way to start.

But Paddy's visit has given me an idea as to how I might get round this, to some extent at least.... I will work on it and see what I can do.

For now it is just good to remember those times when Paddy and his brothers and many and many other travellers, were in and out of the gate here selling me furniture.
(I recognise that I may need to address the desirablility, or otherwise, of these transactions - in fact I promise I will, but not now). OK?

These were typical sights in front of the mill back then

A stack of settle tables...

....and of blanket chests

This is me back in those times (and before we put a new roof on the mill).

A load arriving. Check-out the carrier!!

While Paddy was with us on Saturday we all remembered that Sue, Alice and I were at his wedding, thirty three years ago.
I say we were at Paddy's wedding - which we were - but, therefore, we were also at Jimmy's wedding and Gerry's wedding and that of a male cousin of theirs. The three Goggins brothers married three sisters from another traveller family, whose name I forget, as I do the name of the cousin and who he married.

It was a huge event, in Whites Hotel in Wexford town. There were hundreds and hundreds of guests and all of them travellers, except for Sue, Alice, myself and one other person (and that may have been the priest). I must check-out all these details.

The drink was not dispensed from the bar but by the older women, who toured the tables with magnums of whiskey and brandy under their arms.

Alice, who was a very small baby at the time and was with us because she was still being breast-fed, was taken from Sue and passed from woman to woman - which she appeared to find just fine! - Travellers would be second only to the Italians in their reverence of small children.

Paddy also told us of the changes in their area of New Ross since I was last there more than twenty years ago, in particular of the houses that he and his children have built.
(And that's yet another subject to visit - there is, unquestionably, a school of 'traveller architecture' yet to be acknowledged!)

He invited us to visit. We will. And I'll report.