Almost every Friday evening right after dinner my sister Fiona and I packed up our things and waited for our lift to the farm.  Gary and Hugh young friends of Uncle Bernard came and drove us there.  Usually Rosemary, Lorraine and David McCabe and Ian Mentiply, more cousins, were already there.  This was our weekend youth group.  We thought we were there to help with the farm work and we did work but with the amount of grumbling and complaining we all did I’m sure it would have been easier to get workers in, not to mention we could all eat our own body weight in food everyday so it was probably quite costly.  What we received was fun and friendship and deep relationships that last a lifetime these things are priceless.  I have so many happy memories of these times here is just one:

I used to call Uncle Bernard the TV master because he was the only person I knew that would watch two or three programs at the same time.  We would settle down to watch something, this was before remote controls or video recorders.  Before we’d even seen the front credits Uncle Bernard would be up changing the channel, he’d say it was just for ten minutes until he saw the start of the football then in the first lot of adds he would change to another channel so we could see the start of another movie, then he’d switch back and forward every set of adds.  Apparently he could keep track of all of that but by the end I was just confused and frustrated.

I am so thankful for the generosity, lessons, guidance, fun, patience and love.  I’m sure it wasn’t always easy to have a house full of teenagers every weekend, sometimes we were yuck but they put up with us and all of our shennanigans and even seemed to enjoy it!. I will miss you Uncle Bernard x