My Weekend: They are often busier than weekdays

Tell us a little bit about yourself:

My name is Oonagh Montague. Like any self-respecting, over-worked human, I’m about 12 things at once. Right now, by day, I give courses and lectures on how to write correctly for industry, and by night I’m a writer. Basically, a really rubbish superhero. Throughout, I’m a solo parent to my daughter, Eve, who is heading into the Leaving Cert, and my son, Theo, ditto the Junior Cert.

I write in the spaces between the stuff on my to-do-list. However, I’m starting to have a tiny bit more time. My mother, Evelyn, is disabled. She’s very brave about it, but the effect has been a meteor landing in our lives, impacting every single aspect.

After 30 years of caring for her and all that means, my sister and I both hit the final wall during covid. That is when my wonderful, kind and (really rather handsome) partner, Vincent, took over much of her care.

So, thanks to him, for the first time in my life I am carving out some time to write. This summer, I escaped to the peace of the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, thanks to a birthday gift from my fabulous coven and writers’ group, The Tuesdays. We meet on Wednesdays.

I write mainly short stories – because that’s what comes out. 

The odd poem, too, but I tend to avoid that medium. Most recent highlight? I’ve won a few awards, but Marion Keyes recently said she loved a story of mine. She said it “charmed and delighted” her. I’ve erected a temple to her in the airing cupboard.

What is your ideal way to spend a Friday night?

Aren’t Friday nights the best? That delicious feeling when it’s all stretched ahead of you, yet to enjoy. I often have great plans to do big stuff, but when Friday night actually hits, what gets me excited is doing the least amount possible.

I’m bate. Unless they invent a night for old clubbers, with all the ’90s Sir Henry’s dance tunes, but the music not up too high. And an on-hand physio for if you pull something throwing shapes. Now that’s something I could get behind. But like, carefully.

Lie-ins or up with the lark.. which is it for you?

I’d love a good, fat lie-in, but middle-age has swept in like a fecker, so now I wake early. I like the quietness and peace of early morning.

So, I get up, a fact that our dog, Sid, finds deeply exciting. When Sid’s blood is up, he sneezes – a lot. Which means I travel downstairs to a loud chorus of enthusiastic sneezing.

Then, I open the kitchen door to a wall of actually blood-curdling yodelling. That’s Boo, our 19-year-old cat. Boo is deaf, has short-term memory issues, and an overactive thyroid. This trinity of afflictions combine to convince Boo that she has never once been fed in the whole of her life and it’s high time she told me about it – loudly.

I said I love quietness and peace.  I never said I find them. 

Also, Kent station has been doing works on the lines for what feels like 300 years. Most nights from 11.30pm–4.30am: Banging, screeching, thumping. It’s like techno nights at Henry’s, but rubbish. Iarnrod Éireann won’t even give us a free trip to Cobh as a sweetener for the ongoing torture. We’d kick up a fuss, but we’re too tired.

Does work creep into your weekend at all?

Ha. I have kids. Weekends are often busier than weekdays. Luckily, the kids I ended up with are really quite nice, so it’s worth it. (Eve, Theo, if you’re reading this, do your laundry fortheloveofgod. Also, may I please have a cup of tea?)

If money was no object where would you head to on a weekend city break? And who would you bring with you?

Oooh. I’d travel with my fella, Vincent, luggage-free and have some deeply talented aide meet us at the hotel with a whole new wardrobe. And place? I’d like a surprise. Anywhere someone has been that they loved.

There’s nothing quite like washing your eyes with a beautiful landscape you’ve never seen before. It’s one of the most touching things about humanity, how much we love beauty. It helps with all the lousy bits of being human, like losing your port, or wasps.

If you’re offering a couple of money-no-object weekends, then next I’d take my and Vincent’s kids to Disneyland, jump all the queues, and round it off with a stay in one of those incredible-looking luxury huts on a warm sea. With a good friend in every hut having just the holiday they need.

Closer to home, is there some place you like to head to recharge the batteries?

West Cork. I have a short story based on my childhood there. Writing it was a long exercise in walking past the hedgerows of fuchsia, montbretia, and honey suckle lining the roads, the low thrum of bees and high up bird song. 

West Cork slows you right down, loosens the knots in your shoulders, hands you back to yourself. Your best self.

I spent all my summers and most weekends in Letter, Ballydehob, when I was a kid, wandering on my own, in the crook of Mount Gabriel. I didn’t feel lonely, instead I felt like I was always just on the verge of discovering something amazing.

And I did: Abandoned houses, hidden ruins, ancient roads through mountains that led to the sea, a lone white horse. West Cork has that liminal, between worlds quality. I miss that house we lived in every day.

Do you like to catch up with family/friends at the weekend?

Has anyone ever answered this question with a ‘God, no. Feck those guys.’ Although, come to think of it, while, yes, I do rock up to meet the people I love most, I definitely need quietness first.

My job involves engaging lots of people at the same time, which I enjoy, but it really wipes me, so I need quiet time alone to recalibrate. I call it buffering. I sit in one spot on the sofa with a cuppa and something to stuff my face with. And I read. Too fast. Or watch TV. Sometimes on fast forward. Is that weird? It is weird.

Do you get to indulge any hobbies? Even as a spectator?

Interesting use of the word ‘indulge’. I knitted once – a tiny scarf for a sock-puppet snowman for my son’s school project. I was loving it, as holey and awful as it was. 

I was finding it really soothing, until a good friend on a group Zoom call pointed out that it was making me lose control of my facial features. As in, my real feelings become evident. No one needs that.

Entertain or be entertained? If it’s the latter, do you have a signature dish?

Feed me. I love food. I cook all week as a parent, so I really love a night off. I may cry if you offer to cook. I make a mean toad in the hole, and roast chicken. But other people’s food is the best.

We have so many places to eat out in Cork: Where are your go to spots for coffee/lunch/special meal?

The breakfasts in Proby’s Kitchen are a favourite, as is Good Day Deli. I wander down to Lab 82 with the kids for a brownie. Or we meet Vince and his boys, Jack and Ben, at Luigi Malones. Our restaurants are doing a herculean job of staying open these days. They are getting squeezed from all sides.

Saturdays I meet a posse of girlfriends in Cork Coffee Roasters in St Luke’s. St Luke’s has a bookshop now. Mercier Press is back. And another restaurant is opening up. We Norries are weak for ourselves.

Sunday night comes around too fast.. how do you normally spend it?

School uniforms, school lunches, food shop, then sit with a book and quietly wonder why we haven’t gotten round to a three-day weekend yet.

What time does your alarm clock go off on Monday morning?

7.00, but it should be earlier. I’m all old and creaky and could do with some yoga first thing. Or meditate. Hard to meditate when the dog is sneezing.

Anything else you are up to right now...

I’ll be at Kildare Readers Festival 2024 in September with Cristín Leach for the launch of Fire: Brigid and The Sacred Feminine anthology by Arlen House. It’s edited by Niamh Boyce and Shauna Gilligan. Cristín and I collaborated on the opening piece.

Here in Cork, on Culture Night, novelist Gráinne Murphy and I will read from the Cork Stories anthology at 6.30pm at the City Library.

I hate to use the C word, but Cork Stories is a really cute collection by Doire Press that would make a fine Christmas gift. Already on its second reprint, the stories all have a Cork theme, created by Cork-born or Cork-infected writers, like Kevin Barry, Anne O’Leary, Mary Morrissey.

Cork gets in your blood, so it does.