Kerry: Panorama Restaurant, Killarney
I ONCE knew a splendidly-mustachioed man dedicated to the study of the vast tribes of mites colonising Atlantic seabirds. His monkish dedication was as boundless as his inability to explain why the subject so absorbed him was complete.
After all, how might a person first discover that the lives of these almost invisible organisms — even if you are on friendly terms with a well-travelled gannet — warranted a lifetime’s study? What leap, what connection does a person’s curiosity provoke, so that an otherwise perfectly normal person entombs themselves in what seems a remote and possibly irrelevant mission to study the obscure? But we must be thankful that so many do, how else would we discover anything? One man’s mite is another man’s passion after all.
