Giana Ferguson

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Giana Ferguson, of Gubbeen Farm in West Cork, recorded an interview with The Financial Times in June 2007, and gave unto the newspaper one of the most brilliant, most poetic, pieces of self-analysis and self-explanation that we have ever read.

Mrs Ferguson talks about her life, her travels, her arriving in West Cork, her kids and her work on Gubbeen Farm with her partner, Tom, in a discourse that moves like a dance, with jiggery bursts – “My father's odyssey had created a strong romantic and irresponsible interest in risk-taking within me but it took years to forge it into a workable creativity”  – and loud flamenco heel snaps – “I think I longed for the hot slothful evenings of wine and talk and heat”.

So, how to write about someone who can speak of themselves as if they are a character in their own novel, or the lead in their own three-act drama? Well, that is precisely the point with Giana Ferguson, and it is a point that this former ICA employee will bring to a flourish when she publishes “Gubbeen – The Story of a Working Farm and Its Foods”.

For Giana Ferguson, life is a drama, a narrative, of culture and creativity – “workable creativity”, as she says. Life is a long sentence leading into pages, of divergences and falters, influences that you believed were submerged but, then, here they come, words and sentences that weave the cloth of your being. Life is, well, a game, with all the fun that is inherent in any game, and it's a fiction, too. But there's a difference with Giana Ferguson's game: the rules are only made up as you move along. Farming is a forwards falter, where you have to gather your skirts at the same time as gathering the harvest.

That's why the foods of Gubbeen Farm she describes in the book – the cheeses; the meats; the vegetables – taste so fine: they represent the improvisers art, at work, and at play. The Japanese would call them wabi-sabi: evanescent, but unforgettable, the shadows that build the culture we breathe.

Gubbeen Farm, Schull, County Cork
028 28231
www.gubbeen.com