Cassandra Voices

Category: Society

  • International Women’s Day: WomenXBorders

    This year marks the 109th International Women’s Day. The now universally recognized date first bore fruit after a 1908 march, where 15,000 women in New York City demanded shorter working hours, better pay and the right to vote. Clara Zetkin, a German Marxist theorist, activist – and all-round badass – pioneered the idea at an International Conference of Working Women in Copenhagen: representing the power of female voices coming together.[1]

    For this year’s occasion, I attended the Irish Writer’s Centre’s WomenXBorders event, promising motivational talks, and a platform for female writers to engage in a day-long readathon, where they would have the opportunity to showcase and read their own work from a platformed mic stand on top of the room.

    The organisers’ mission was to ‘foster connections between women and encourage professional growth for writers across north and south.’ Also involved was Women Aloud NI, with many members travelling from all over the country.

    The talk that most attracted me was: ‘Publishing with a Mission: the Story of Virago and later Champions of Women’s Voices.’ Emma Warnock, publisher at No Alibis Press, was interviewing Sarah Savitt, publisher of the female powerhouse that is Virago.

    I arrived early and was brought upstairs with a fresh cup of coffee (my fourth of the day) and notebook tucked under one arm. The all-day readathon participants were taking a short break, with hungry writers and readers now picking at sandwiches and supportively hugging one another. The sun was smiling in through the centre’s big Georgian windows , heating the crowded room. A scattering of jackets, glasses and pens with marked paper were dotted among the chairs, as the crowd had by now settled into their day-long residency.

    Women Aloud NI

    During the short interval, I nabbed a member of Women Aloud NI, a volunteer-run organization that brings women from different backgrounds together through the power of sharing words. A refreshing mixture of ethnicities and cultures was evident.

    One lady I was speaking to was a Frenchie based in Antrim, one of the one-hundred-and-sixty-eight-strong memberships from all over the world, who are living in Northern Ireland. Members expressed a strong feeling of unity and mutual support, with everything from being published on the website’s blog, to receiving feedback on works-in-progress, to day-long events.

    Ballymoney-based author Jane Talbot is the project manager and event coordinator of the organization. She said that Women Aloud NI is about “uniting each voice and creating a community. We’re adding to the cultural life of this country, but how many readers know about all the women writers in Northern Ireland?”[2] Another member reminded me “It’s in the name. We want female voices to be heard – loudly!”

    After that the final part of the readathon commenced. Writers and poets performed with passion, depth and unapologetic wit, absorbing the attention of the entire room before a timer would politely ring, keeping them within three minute slots.

    Afterwards, people shuffled away from their seats once again, and I snatched an early place for the closing talk of the day with Sarah Savitt.

    Virago Publishing

    According to the event page, the talk would be framed around two crucial questions: first, was around the social, political and financial climate that impelled Dame Carmen Callil to set up Virago Publishing, the first mass-market dedicated publisher for 52% of the population – women in 1973; and, secondly, with statistics showing that male writers remain over-represented whether print publishing continues to have a gender issue.

    Sarah tackled the story of the publishing house first. She defined Virago as feminist history makers within the literary landscape.

    Australian born founder Carmen Callil was an active force in the feminist movement. The second wave of feminism was in full force, with the Equal Pay Act having been passed in 1970. The same year witnessed Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics, published by Doubleday and Co; while the first Women’s Studies department opened its doors in San Diego State University, followed shortly by a Women’s Studies program at Cornell.

    There followed the publication of Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings From the Women’s Liberation Movement, which gathered many prominent feminists’ essays into a seminal volume. By 1973, there was a palpable need for greater representation of female voices.

    The plan was to create an openly capitalist enterprise aimed at a broad audience. As Sarah put it: “from the margins but never marginalized. Carmen ran a tight shift – even the tea towels were washed at a specific time each day. It was important for the house to be taken seriously and more so, for the writing to appeal to the masses.”

    She continued: “The primal focus was not simply to publish radically feminist work. Instead, it was about generating a wide audience for female writers who were tackling subjects and genres of every kind – from fantasy to forgotten about classics to erotica. The focal point of committing to publishing women was the radical act in itself. Even better, publishing work that would appeal to masses meant greater profit and importantly, making competitive money for the authors.”

    Sarah fondly recalled how, after the first year in business, people were asking the house: “do you have enough books to publish next year?” Yes, they did. There were plenty of female voices waiting to be read.

    Until 1978 Virago focused mainly on non-fiction works. As the house grew, so too did its range. Publishing overlooked classics was, and still is important, especially those that had gone out of print.

    The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett and The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton are recent examples revived by the imprint.

    Looking back on its early days, Sarah shared how the current boss of Virago, Lennie Goodings considers the rapid success of the company as unsurprising since,  “women wanted to see themselves on a page.”

    As the political landscape changed, the publishing world adapted. Now, the imprint only accepts submissions from agents. Crucially, it changed from its own publishing house to an imprint, having been bought by Little, Brown in 1995. But the core beliefs and mission statement endure.

    The Struggle Continues

    Notwithstanding a long record of success, commercial doubts linger around work by female authors. Sarah said that even Michelle Obama’s autobiography becoming a New York Times bestseller, and which bookshops struggled to satisfy demand for, met the doubts of industry executives as to its mass appeal.

    Similarly, their publication of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride had been turned down sixty times before it arrived at their door, after which it enjoyed great success.

    Addressing the second question of the day – whether an imprint that exclusively published female authors remains a necessity –  Sarah refers to a damning statistic. Currently in the UK, every CEO of every publishing house is a white male.

    Publishing houses worldwide still submit more books by male writers for literary prizes, and book reviews in major publications disproportionately highlight books by men. Moreover, male authors are still paid more than female peers.

    In 2017, Narrow The Gap published a report demonstrating that women writers make 89 cents to the dollar men earn doing the same job.[3] Annually, that makes up a difference of $6,552. Yet The Bookseller published a report showing women dominated the literary bestseller list for 2017, with Margaret Atwood, Sarah Perry, Elena Ferrante, Helen Dunmore, Arundhati Roy, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, Naomi Alderman and Maggie O’Farrell all in the top ten. Indeed, the only male author on its list was Haruki Murakami.[4]

    Wake Up Irish Poetry

    In response some female authors are calling for a response in a way similar to the #MeToo phenomenon. In Ireland ‘Wake Up Irish Poetry’[5] is an open letter addressed to the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht and the Arts Council calling for acceptable standards of ethics and governance in the Irish arts sector.

    In response to the talk, the room was alight with passion, with Women Aloud NI attendees responding that Northern writing was especially male-dominated. They also referred to an insulting campaign by PSNI to ‘encourage female officers to nominate male officers to help them in their careers.’

    Encouragingly, Words Ireland are in conversation with the Arts Council at the moment to work on a code of conduct policy. Separate to that, the Irish Writer’s Centre are also working internally on a code of conduct policy and customer charter, both of which are in draft stage.

    Sarah Savitt of Virago at the Dublin Writer’s Centre. Image: George Hooker

    Advice

    Meeting with Sarah, after what must have been an exhausting day representing the imprint, she exuded the same energy and enthusiasm. I asked what she would love to see come through her letterbox in 2020, and in the years to come.

    She said she believes writers tend to have a sixth sense about these things, but that it felt imperative for her to put out work from underrepresented groups. So she is interested in writing from those living with, and writing about disabilities, and from perspectives informed by maternal mental health, the female body, stem cell technology, and menopause.

    Significantly, she stated that if more of those unrepresented voices are heard, it gives greater freedom to those few currently writing from that perspective, who may currently feel an obligation to represent that position.

    Finally, self-servingly, I asked for her advice on how a so-far unpublished female novelist should go about submitting a book for publication. Her answer was wise and thoughtful:

    Don’t get too carried away, wasting time on followers and trying to build up clout. You need to know the ecosystem. Spend your time instead learning about how to get an agent, which publishers would suit you, reading work related to them. Follow the submission guidelines that are listed on an agent/publisher’s page. It gives you a better running. Most importantly, keep writing. After all this time, it still really is about the words.

    It was a hopeful closing to an important day. Tellingly, my own editor informed me that a disproportionate number of submissions coming through to him are from males. So let’s do our part; write our story, no matter how radical or not-so-radical it seems, keep submitting, and keep writing.

    [1] Untitled, ‘International Women’s Day 2020: History, strikes and celebrations’ BBC, March 3rd, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-51666668

    [2] www.culturenorthernireland.org https://www.culturenorthernireland.org/features/literature/women-aloud-ni

    [3] Narrow the Gap, ‘Women writers and authors make 89 cents to the dollar men earn doing the same job.’ https://narrowthegap.co/gap/writers-and-authors

    [4] Untitled, ‘Publishing’s gender gap is still selling women short’, https://www.ft.com/content/d7d83f6e-bb56-11e8-94b2-17176fbf93f5

    [5] http://www.wakeupirishpoetry.ie/

  • Keep Spinning until you Drop

    Never boast to your children that you had seventeen occupations before your twenty-fifth birthday. I did so with my fifth child and it was a bad call. It relaxed him into not worrying about the aimlessness – in my view – of his life. I became the kettle calling the pot black.

    ‘Oh good’, he said cheerfully. ‘That gives me a few years before I start worrying.’ He was twenty-one, had dropped out of college after first year. Why?’ I asked sorrowfully. ‘It was irrelevant’.  And he laughed.

    He had thoroughly enjoyed the life of a student unencumbered by distractions like studying. His parents were worried. But like Napoleon’s favoured soldiers, he had a marshall’s baton in his rucksack: he was lucky. Somebody spotted his real talent – he was ‘cool’, a nerveless boy racer – and he trained to be an aircraft traffic controller. At first we all worried about using air transport, but it soon became obvious he was a rounded plug in a round hole. I had spotted it first. When I asked him what the hell he was going to do with his life he calmly answered:

    ‘You must remember, father’ (my children always addressed me like this when they were being ironic), ‘I am lazy.’ I didn’t worry about him any more. Any young man who can be thus frank with an outraged patriarch has confidence in himself. Or perhaps he realised I’m just a softy. I suspect that boy may be among the minority of my extended tribe who will not be upset by something or other in this old man’s gossip.

    Years ago I delicately reminded him he was in the demographic of the four hundred males who top themselves in Ireland every year, but he reassured me: ‘Don’t worry, I’m enjoying myself too much.’ He gave me hope.

    It is time to confuse this narrative with facts. There follows a list of my pre-twenthy-five-year-old occupations, and what I learned from them.

    Age 13: Slop gatherer for my Granda’s pigs – a lesson in humility.
    Age 14: Caddie in Milltown golf club – an introduction to the Irish native bourgeosie
    Age 16: Milk bottle counter in Hughes Bros., Rathfarnham – I lost count after an hour.
    Age 18: Shipping clerk in Palgrave Murphy on Eden Quay – meeting drunken sailors and horse protestants with names like Jameson and Pakenham and Pim.
    Age 19: Clerical officer in Dublin County Council – how to surmount job dissatisfaction and survive boredom.
    Age 21: Worker in Lyons factory, Hammersmith – how to sort rapidly moving strawberries on a conveyor belt.
    Also that year: lifesaver on the Serpentine, London – how to attract bathing beauties.
    Also (it was a very busy year:, agricultural ‘praktikant’ on a farm outside Munich – learning the German work ethic.
    Age 22: Booking clerk and travel guide with Michael Walsh Travel, Dublin – how to entertain fifty-four girl guides on a trip to Rome.
    Age 23: Bottle washer with Coca Cola – I lasted a day.
    Also that year: Labourer in Gouldings Fertiliser, Ringsend – I lasted a morning.
    Also: Farm labourer in the Gaeltacht of Cúil Aodha, Co. Cork – how not to learn Irish.
    Age 24:  Commercial traveller with Rowntree Mackintosh – how to eat a four pound box of chocolate samples meant for customers, in one day.
    Age 25 – Bus conductor in Leeds – the bells, the bells!
    Also that year: Pub piano player in the same city – as near to concert pianist as I’ll ever get.
    Also: English teacher in Pforzheim, Germany.  I learned that Germans take their studies seriously. Every age: aspiring writer, singer, actor –  I realised early that a very amateur talent is as inadequate for a career on the stage as that of Mrs. Worthington’s daughter:

    …she’s a bit of an ugly duckling you must honestly confess,
    and the width of her seat must surely defeat her chances of success.

    Once I reached twenty-five I became a television technician, then a producer/director, then an independent film maker. All of those occupations passed the time while I was working out what I would do when I grew up. That is still a work in progress.

    I console myself by thinking that such a C.V. would look interesting on the back of one of my unpublishable novels; probably even superior to the novel’s content?

    Just listing the jobs makes me yawn and reach for a nicotine chewing gum. I gave up smoking years ago. The pipe tobacco had become too expensive when Social Welfare took fifteen Euros off my old age pension. I’m easing off, slowing down, reminding me of a gyroscope, a toy that amused us as children. It was a kind of posh spinning top, with a fixed protective frame and a groove in its single foot which rested on a tightrope of string held taut by us children.

    The energy of its internal spinning enabled the gyroscope to defy our altering the angle of the tightrope. It seemed to have a survival instinct, like a living thing. We could make it slide up and down as we wished, admiring its balance, its defiance of gravity and our expectations. Inevitably the initial impetus of its spin weakened, it wobbled and collapsed.

    We young dei ex machina would catch it and start the whole game again. More sophisticated versions of the gyroscope are nowadays used by rich and paranoid civilisations to keep tankers and telescopes, space ships and satellites, guns and drones on their straight and deadly paths. To me the gyroscope is still a toy but a serviceable metaphor for life: keep spinning until you drop.

  • A Rat on the Wall

    1960s Belfast

    Sat in silence on the bottom step, with my knees tucked under my chin, I fit snugly inside a ray of sunlight which penetrated the dark hallway through a stained glass window above the heavy wooden door. In the four years since my father’s death, a vindictive, sombre air pervaded the house. Harbors of warmth and light were frail, transient things.

    The girls had already left for school and the house was deserted, save for me and my mother, Ruth. She was making the most of a rest before her hard day’s work began, and I was desperate for a reprieve from school. One of the teachers had taken it upon himself to iron out the wrinkles in my character with beatings so severe that I had to attend hospital. Ruth complained about the violence done to her child, but had been told that the teacher in question was soon to be retired, and that taking the complaint any further would be a big stab in the back for Catholic education.

    I had survived that teacher’s class, but I still hated school, and by way of a plea, I faked a rasping cough, to which my exhausted mother responded in an exasperated, voice, “If I have to leave my bed to get you out to school, I’ll break your two legs.”

    I trudged up Blackwood Street, deliberately scuffing the toes of the shoes my mother had worked so hard to buy. My vain efforts to be excused from school had only made me late again. I would be punished.  But there was some compensation. Free from the school kids and workers who had already traveled to their appointed places of toil, the road was not busy and apart from two women downstairs, the empty bus granted me full reign of the upper deck. Rightly installed in the front seat, I surveyed all the little streets, shops and people below. The bus rolled down the Ormeau Road, past where the stink of the gas works leered through the windows, then through the markets to Cromac Street, where it slowed down to turn left, into May Street.

    It was just at the corner of May Street, that the bus traveled at its slowest pace, and I jumped from the open platform, running to stay on my feet, when I hit the pavement. I passed the courthouse and turned down the back of Town Hall street as far as the court cells, before turning left to face the high walled police barracks. Their huge open gates allowing a view of the large, impressive cobble-stoned courtyard.

    The back entrance to my primary school was defined on one side by the barracks wall, and on the other by a fruiterer’s warehouse, and flour mill. Inside the mill, turned an unmanned machine for loading bags of flour onto lorries. Normally the entry swarmed with boys playing hurling, handball and Gaelic football, soccer being banned on account of its association with England. They fought in the entry too, those high walls amplifying and echoing their screams. But the boys had already answered the morning bell, and the entry was empty.

    The mill workers had all disappeared for tea break and apart from the clicking of their unmanned machine, there was an eerie silence in the entry. I had heard of big bombs that can kill all the people and leave their buildings and machinery still standing. The solitary slap of my shoes on the concrete alleyway echoed back with a menacing thought. Had the end of the world come? Was there nobody left but me?

    I might have run in blind childish panic had I not seen it. The rat. Like an eighth wonder from a Marvel Magazine, defied gravity and clung four feet clear above the ground.  The rat’s body ran parallel with the length of the bricks on the corner of the barracks wall. I had never seen a rat so clearly before. It had brown fur and beady eyes. We observed each other briefly before scurrying in our separate directions. The rat made its way back to the mill, while I ascended a broad, cast iron stairway which led from the yard to the upper floor of the old stone school.

    It was a peculiar building built in the 1870s, of large coarse granite stones, with an upper floor jutting out to overhang a part of the walled off school yard. Overall, the place resembled one of the old tower houses, built for protection rather than education.

    I tried to sit down unnoticed, on a long wooden bench at the back of the class room, but the black smocked, chubby figure of Brother Andia beckoned to me. He squatted down on his hunkers beside the hearth to bend his leather strap over the open coke fire, which burnt in the center of the partly partitioned room. I stood with little defiance, save a disinterested acceptance of the inevitable.

    “ah missed the bus,” I started to say, but the excuse seemed lame so I added, “And ah stopped to watch a rat on the wall in the entry.”

    “There are no rats in the vicinity of this school,” stated the Brother categorically.

    We were a captivating diversion for the rest of the class and perhaps it was for the entertainment of my audience, that I cheeked,

    “If there are no rats in the school, then how come you put rat poison down in the cupboards?” My audience was pleased with the show but Brother Andia was not.

    “There are no rats in the vicinity of this school.” He repeated, and had me hold out my hands so that I could be punished for being late. The Brother strapped with unusual brutality, so that each stroke left a red swelling.

    After three strokes on each hand, I expected my punishment to end. Arms folded across my chest, the injuries fit snugly into my armpits and I half turned to take my seat. But the Brother caressed me lightly across the face with the strap and smiling sadistically had me extend my hands once more. This time I was to be punished for telling lies about seeing rats.

    Brother Andia did not come from Belfast, but from one of the twenty-six counties which were no longer under British rule. His years of experience as headmaster of a school, which existed under pressure, within a sectarian state had taught him the necessity of blind loyalty, and when he strapped me, that was the true message which he wished to convey. Oxford Street Christian Brothers primary school was a good, clean school which had no faults, no problems, and no rats.

    The Brother continued to strap. Blubbering, I stood there, forced by my naive, stupid stubbornness, to stick to my story.

    There was…

    a rat on the wall.

    Illustration by Malina | Artsyfartsy

    facebook.com/this.is.artsyfartsy/

  • Rugby: the Four Irish Provinces take to the Field

    I yearn for Six Nations matches at this time of year. Despite my worthier self, I cannot take my eyes off a psychological drama and physical spectacle offering respite from interminable winter.

    The violence is terrible, but it seems life-affirming that these specimens can, for the most part, withstand the battering. At its best, it conveys life-in-action, a primal dance and irrepressible human spirit.

    One man who never played in the Six Nations is the Australian of Zimbabwean-descent, David Pocock, and to my mind he has been the bravest player of this era. It is unsurprising that his political convictions are similarly resolute. Fittingly, he was once arrested after chaining himself to mining equipment in a protest against a new coal mine in New South Wales.

    Thankfully he seems to have emerged relatively unscathed from his many bouts on the field, bowing out at last from international rugby at the end of the recent Word Cup, unfortunately on a losing note against Engalnd.

    Embed from Getty Images

    Make no mistake, there are injuries which occur as a matter of probability in rugby that make the endurance of the current rules almost unforgivable. Driving straight into the back of a player, with staggering force, who is grappling with his hands on the ground is surely unsustainable, but at least the high tackle is being clamped down on by referees. This makes the current game a more enjoyable spectacle as a player can offload more easily out of the tackle, and the quagmire of rucks and mauls become less frequent.

    ‘Drico’ v O’Connell

    For this Irish rugby fan of over thirty years duration the recurring debate is whether Brian O’Driscoll or Paul O’Connell was the greater Irish player of the era. Both were giants of the sport that transcended the structures from which they emerged, subtly altering players that emerged in their wakes. Thus the sublime Garry Ringrose is the heir to O’Driscoll and the all-action James Ryan the pretender to O’Connell’s throne, an unenviable posture locking the Irish scrum.

    The provincial origin of each of these totemic player must be taken into account. Munster from which O’Connell hails is the beating heart of Irish rugby where many of its origin myths lie. Of course much of this is late magic, compared to the rarefied surrounds of Trinity College in Dublin, which is said to have the oldest pitch still in use in the world. But Munster is where a distinctive mark was placed on the sport of rugby itself in the latter decades of the twentieth century.

    Essentially Munster played above the collective athletic attributes of the team with an unprecedented unity of purpose that laid low the greatest international team of its time. Of course the All Blacks had been beaten before and since on tours, but this was generally where teams were composed of stellar internationals playing for clubs, or perhaps if the All Black team was at a low physical ebb on a long tour. In 1978 the Munster team in unison with the crowd performed a mythological feat no less: Alone it Stands indeed.

    Embed from Getty Images

    Archetypal Munster rugby players, such as the late Moss Keane, were certainly not small or necessarily unathletic, but are rarely the biggest or fastest in their positions. It was when they combine with one another, as a band of brothers, that they overhaul and outwit – with a capricious gale blowing behind them in the second half – any opponent who dares enter their Thomond Park redoubt.

    This group togetherness – comparable to what the medieval Arabic writer Ibn Kaldun termed asabiyyah in describing the warlike Bedouin tribes of North Africa – allied with tactical awareness and sheer bravery yielded two European Cups in the early years of professionalism (2006 and 2008), at a time when French and English teams could not easily pluck talent from the outer regions of the Southern Hemisphere, as occurs today.

    That is not to say that Munster was closed to foreign influence; the team embraced the new wave of professionalism, recruited wisely, and established a brand that had a halo effect on Irish rugby as a whole, before the limitations of a small population made it impossible to sustain the conveyor belt of talent required for success.

    As a player Paul O’Connell possessed what is commonly referred to as Munster ‘dog’ in spades, but he allied this with often quite outrageous feats of skill in the air. He was not, however, for all his capacity to take a game by the scruff of the neck and play it his way – fast rucking and relentless pick and drives – the complete player. His handling in the loose at times let him down, and he never developed the dexterity commonly seen in Southern hemisphere players of his ilk.

    Embed from Getty Images

    This was perhaps the product of an upbringing where rugby was explicitly training rather than a form of self-expression, as where kids ‘play’ with a ball in a game such as ‘tag’ on a sun-baked field or beach. One could point the finger at the wet climate of the south-west of Ireland which required outdoor activities to be more structured.

    Perhaps this background in hard graft and adversity accounts for what seems to have been a tendency on O’Connell’s part to see the ball as means to an end: putting points on the board. As a leader, he seemed untroubled to amaze a crowd in the process of scoring points, calculating that a try from a rolling maul counted for as much as the giddiest of wing play.

    O’Driscoll, on the other hand, was a trickster, who played with a smile on his face, and burst on the global scene as a superstar when scoring a bravura hat trick of tries in Paris in 2000, before in 2001 seducing British and Irish Lions fans in Australia, who waltzed to his tune.

    A brash, cosmopolitan boy from the capital city of an increasingly prosperous country and class, ‘Drico’ ended his career to great fanfare, winning a second Six Nations Championship medal in 2014. He was the swashbuckling hero who performed feats on a rugby pitch that amazed a crowd, but he was as physically brave as any Munster contemporary. His capacity to recover from serious injury, especially the cruel assault on him as captain of the Lions in 2005 against the fearsome All Blacks, was also nothing short of remarkable.

    It is, however, as a team captain that one might prefer O’Connell. One senses that other, lesser, players reveled in O’Driscoll’s star turns on the pitch, but perhaps relied overly on his individual brilliance.

    O’Connell on the other hand appeared to exercise the force of a demagogue over his companions. Under his guidance, players offered the same relentless hunger for confrontation, and group togetherness in the Munster tradition, as opposed to the elusive capacity for individual brilliance that O’Driscoll imparted.

    Leinster Schools Rugby

    I grew up in the province of Leinster and my formation as a rugby fan arrived in the school’s game where we viewed the likes of Dennis Hickey when he was a young buck. It is now one of the world’s great breeding grounds for new braves, as the remarkable recent consistency of Leinster in European competition demonstrates, with four European Cup wins to date: 2009, 2011, 2012 and 2018.

    I have heard it said that the relatively flat lands, and slightly drier conditions, of the east of Ireland produce a different, swifter, physical specimen, meaning the archetype of the Leinster player is generally a purer athlete than the Munster equivalent – players such as Jordan Lamour and Andrew Porter conforming to this type, in contrast to grizzled Munster legends such as ‘the Claw’, Peter Clohessy or ‘Gaillimh’ Mick Galway.

    Embed from Getty Images
    ‘the Claw’, Peter Clohessy or ‘Gaillimh’ Mick Galway in action for Ireland.

    The all-round excellence of O’Driscoll remains the high water mark, but the number of players of great ability breaking through is quite astonishing to behold. I admit to a vain pride in a step cousin Caelan Doris – a wunderkind number 8 – who is now a regular part of the international squad.

    If only I had a few of young Caelan’s genes my rugby career might have got beyond the muddy far pitches of Gonzaga College. Although admittedly a reluctance to allow my head to be left in close proximity to rapidly moving legs, and little appetite for the punch-ups that marred many encounters in the 1990s, made even a moderately successful career unlikely.

    A Nation Once Again?

    A polite argument broke out among a few friends recently on the subject of nationalism, and whether it is a destructive force in the world. That led me to consider what motivated the appreciation I have for a sport that is often quite dull as a spectacle, with constant repetitions of drills and risk aversion all too often evident. Indeed, to the uninitiated the game of rugby, with its puzzling array of rules, is not the most accessible.

    Competition between national groups reminds me of the psychodrama of a contest between competing forces, which take on the simplistic roles of good and evil to the viewer. Thus, even if an opponent displays skill or impressive composure I cannot enjoy it, and positively shrink from the sight of his success. Meanwhile even if my own side are playing in a stolid fashion I can still appreciate the effect, and even look beyond any skullduggery, especially if it is part of a wider strategic plan, weakening the opponent before striking in an unexpected way.

    Likewise, it seems to me, nationalism can be an ugly, zero-sum game of winning and losing, whether it is the aspiration for a united Ireland – albeit there are distinct practical and civic advantages – or having one language dominant over another under the law. Similarly, we are generally inclined to disregard whether nationalistic aspirations are achieved by fair means or foul, ignoring the cruelty of earlier conquests, just as the Americans laid claim to virgin territory, glorifying the first settlers and ignoring those who once populated the land in relative harmony.

    There is, however, a more edifying side to nationalism, where we achieve a form of greatness not in terms of others, i.e. winning as the be-all-and-end-all, but simply in the way we exist, and play. Lest we forget, few states of the Old World appear to be content where different ethno-linguistic groups co-habit – even the prosperous Belgians of different languages only grudgingly co-exist.

    It is in the songs we sing, in the food we prepare, and in the nature we adore and protect that the best expression of group solidarity is found, and in sport at times too. This is the nationalism of an O’Driscoll, where magic happens, but where the processes derived from tradition, which we might associate with an O’Connell figure, are upheld.

    Maybe conflict is in the nature of humanity, and in that respect sport serves a purpose that George Orwell overlooked when he peremptorily described it as ‘an unfailing cause of ill-will.’ But perhaps it really just channels or acts as a conduit for ill-will, and is not the cause itself. Of course the contrary argument that discord is actually magnified by these latter-day gladiatorial contests might, paradoxically, also hold true. It seems as if the meaning of sport is as varied as any other field of human endeavour, and forms of it are always likely to excite us.

    The Four Proud Provinces

    In Irish sport the code of rugby is almost unique in generating genuine all-Ireland national fervour,crossing political and sectarian boundaries. Notably, ‘big’ Davy Tweed, a former Unionist councillor and alas a convicted paedophile, played on a number of occasions for the Irish team, and with great energy it should be said. It was Tweed who demanded an alternative to Amhrán na bhFiann, the anthem of the Irish State, which bequeathed us Phil Coulter’s ‘Ireland’s Call’, a rather primitive song. But for all its harmonic deficiencies it has nonetheless proved a popular, and unifying dirge that is belted out with great emotion by crowd and players alike.

    It has snobbishly been said that rugby is a game for thugs played by gentlemen, while soccer is the reverse. Clearly there is a class basis to each of these sports across Britain and Ireland. The food calories alone that an elite rugby player requires every day must be quite an investment throughout early adulthood. But it is perhaps more accurate to say that rugby is an institutional sport, requiring the availability of pitches and training facilities all too often absent in working class districts, and more likely to be found in a rural setting. Yet the example of the Southern Hemisphere demonstrates that even working class kids can develop into professional players.

    During the amateur era Ulster were the most successful of the Irish province, and fittingly the Ulstermen were the first to win a European Cup in 1999, using a group of players drawn overwhelmingly from the region. But the province has latterly struggled to compete with the number of new players available to Leinster every year, and the great spirit that Munster players still derive from playing in the red jersey.

    Moreover, the recent displays of toxic masculinity in Ulster rugby shocked the entire country, and brought an existential crisis to the game. This is a stain that has not been fully removed, at least publicly, from the public – as was the case in New Zealand where less worrying incidents led to the development of a respect and responsibility programme for players.

    Yet all but the most curmudgeonly of Irish rugby fans rejoice when Ulster performs on the European stage, unlike the more divisive Leinster-Munster rivalry, and the success of Ulster players in the Irish shirt provides a bewitching fellowship recalling the United Irishmen of Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter.

    Like the Leinstermen of lore, Ulster’s greatest warriors tend to be fleet-footed athletes but with a Nordic edge of physical brutality epitomised by the incomparably tough Stephen Ferris. The new Ulster hero is the powerful Jacob Stockdale, who has made scoring tries at the highest level look easy.

    The Western Province

    One can only admire the durability of the men of Connacht, withstanding probably the wildest weather in the rugby world in their Galway citadel. Against the odds, they have created a spirit unique to themselves that culminated in victory against Leinster in the Celtic League in 2016. My father comes from Sligo on the Western seaboard, so I have a particular sympathy for their plight as underdogs in the Irish game.

    As an immigrant for a time in London I did my own impersonation of one of the province’s greats, the rampaging number 8 Noel Mannion who, it should be said, was not the most fleet-footed.

    Living in Bloomsbury in the heart of the capital, I went out for a stroll one night that took me to the back of the British Museum, a tranquil spot amidst the maelstrom of the capital. I proceeded down the road, lost in reverie. Luckily, however, just in time it dawned on me that a small crowd of youths, who didn’t seem like a welcoming committee, were about to surround me. There were no other pedestrians, or cars, in sight. Then, as I recall, one of them requested a cigarette.

    I responded that that I could not provide him with one, which seemed to perturb him, so without pause I turned heels and began to walk back up the street. At that point another one enquired as to why I had taken that course of action. I replied that I was being surrounded. Then I took off at a gallop as fast as my ruddy thighs could carry me.

    It was then that I summoned the spirit of Noel Mannion in 1989 at the Cardiff Arms Park when, after he charged down a kick he found it in his possession with a clear run to the try line, almost the length of the pitch away. Like Noel before me, I pinned back my ears, and hoped the chasing pack wouldn’t catch me. But by this stage one of the youths was abreast. He tried to trip me up, but I strode on with a power and pace hitherto unknown.

    At last I heard the youth scream in despair before I reached the well-lit sanctuary of Gower Street, and in my mind I heard the away supporters in the Cardiff Arms Park roar their approval.

    Although he hails from a land far down under, Bundee Aki now carries the flame of Connaught resistance in the Irish team and one must admire a guy who brings his family to an ethereal place such as the City of the Tribes, and gateway to the Never Never Land of Connemara. Romantically, I expect the next great hero of Irish rugby, in the mould of an O’Driscoll, O’Connell or Ferris, but of a distinctly Far Western character, to emerge as the heir to Bundee.

    Twickenham Awaits

    So let us gather Irish people, new and old, to enjoy the spectacle this weekend. I for one am avoiding any sense of guilt at enjoying this crucible of unabashed manliness. All sports should of course be open to both genders, but the failure of educational institutions to provide adequately for women over the course of our history should not inhibit the simple pleasures we derive. After all it’s not a zero sum game between the respective sports of the two sexes.

    Win or lose, let us hope the Irish team carries itself with pride on the pitch. If they do lose, and we cannot expect the team to win every game, away from home, against a rugby union with a far greater playing pool than our own, let them hold their heads high in the knowledge they played with pride in the traditions laid down by those who once played their parts, and with the individual brilliance which each has been endowed.

    For the men of Leinster, Munster, Ulster and Connaught must play with a unity of purpose and great skill to overcome the English team, summoning the spirits O’Driscoll, O’Connell, Ferris and even Noel Mannion.

  • A Monk Manqué – ‘what a young girl in love will say to keep her man’

    Disregarding chronological order, this is the tenth episode of A Monk Manqué, Bob Quinn’s unpublished (unpublishable?) memoir A Monk Manqué, following

    A Monk Manqué – Prologue

    A Monk Manqué – Thaura Mornton

    Making Films

    Early Days in RTÉ

    Waiting for Colonel Ghaddafi

    Culchies – An Excerpt from A Monk Manqué

    Last Days in RTÉ – ‘I have come to kill you’

    Lament for Áirt Uí Laoire

    The Conman and Correspondence with Kurt Vonnegut

    Old Man Talk – ‘I used to ride young wans in here’

    Job Interviews

    Trudie Fursey, a 7th century Irish saint, was born on Lough Corrib in Co. Galway. He had a church named after him and like many others expanded his missionary operations to Britain and the Continent, dying in 652 in a village called Mezzerolles which was renamed Forsheim and eventually became Pforzheim.

    Looking across the Lough towards Inishlannaun/Inis Fhlannain from the churchyard of Our Lady of the Valley Church. Image: Trish Steel.

    We Irish were always wanderers. Ending up as a teacher in Fursey’s adoptive town brought my tally of successive occupations to seventeen.

    The advertisement in The Guardian resulted in an interview in Manchester University, where a laconic man showed no interest in my previous teaching experience. This was fortunate because I had none.

    It seemed sufficient that I could distinguish between standard English and say, Urdu. It was a bonus to actually speak one of the King’s dialects –  even without a Home Counties accent. The fact that my contemporary, Ronnie Drew, was also teaching Dublinese in Spain gave me confidence, at least enough to satisfy my interrogator.

    I travelled back to Dublin to collect a couple of books and inform my parents. They had meantime taken note, on my behalf, of a quite different job opportunity.

    I had time to fit in an interview with some men who were recruiting for a brand new Irish television service. I greatly enjoyed the interview, cared little for the result and assured them that with people of their good humour in charge, the service was sure to be a success. Promptly dismissing the matter from my mind I headed for the promised land, Germany.

    Berlitz teaching techniques

    Happily en route on the long train and boat journey and still daydreaming, I fell asleep, and did not awaken until the train stopped in Stuttgart, many miles beyond my destination. I had to wait on a cold platform until sheepishly boarding the next train back to Pforzheim. The unsmiling head teacher, the Frau Oberst who met me, was not impressed.

    Pforzheim: View from Horse Bridge (Rossbruecke) along the Enz river.

    I was given a month of learning Berlitz teaching techniques. My companion on the introductory course was also Irish. Her name was Colleen and she had just graduated as Miss Elegance, Trinity College in that same year, 1961.

    Ours was a short and innocent interlude (a repressed Irish background ensured that). The reason Colleen and I were accepted for training was the sudden erection of The Wall. It had caused many expatriate English teachers to scurry back to Blighty.

    A Third World War seemed possible. Being Irish, and innocent of world politics, Colleen and I had no bone to pick with the East Germans nor with the real villains, the Russians.

    Our xenophobia was confined to the traditional Anglo-Saxon foe and sprang from a more ancient quarrel than that of the Cold War. Although she and I were doused in competing versions of Christianity, we shared the vague bond of Irish neutrality, such as it was.

    We wandered contentedly by the river Enz, footloose because we were unshackled from the tight reins of culture and family, free to discuss anything we liked.  Alas, once we had completed our short training course in Karlsruhe and were considered to  be qualified Berlitz teachers, our fraternising was judged to be pedagogically unsound and she was retained in Karlsruhe while I was stuck in  Pforzheim. Once we were separated I never saw Colleen again, one of the themes of my life.

    Herr Dinkelbaum

    That weekend I spent my entire week’s food allowance in the Goldene Adler pub and was consequently reduced to a diet of a single apple over three days. Hunger encouraged the hallucination that my life was over and food superfluous.

    What was needed was an anaesthetic. The Goldene Adler supplied this in litres. Countless other hostelries have since been equally generous to me. I also came across Heinrich Boll’s ‘Irish Journal’ and its penetrating picture of 1950s Ireland made me homesick.

    The interval of gloom was relieved by the arrival of a new student in my classroom. Her name was Trudie and she helped me forget. To relieve the earnestness of the classes I bought a yellow hand puppet which I called Herr Dinkelbaum and introduced him as a proxy teacher. I like to think Wittgenstein gave me the idea: think for yourself and trust your instincts. They’ll often get you into trouble but you’ll have a lot more fun.

    Herr Dinkelbaum lightened the Teutonic gloom. One evening a student brought in a case of Coca Cola and a bottle of Vodka and the lesson became even more raucous.

    But my Berlitz training course had omitted the vital detail that there would be a concealed microphone in each classroom. Despite my defence that to educate you must first entertain – which is an impeccable formula for television – my supervisor, the same Frau Oberst was unconvinced.

    The subsequent rap on the knuckles – a deduction from my paltry pay – was, I felt, unduly harsh and I protested. Making a vague reference to Gestapo surveillance practices was also not a good idea. Only the scarcity of English teachers saved my bacon.

    lovers’ corner

    Trudy had a Botticelli shape, thoroughbred ankles, had lost her father in the war and clearly needed a father figure. Six years her senior, I seemed to fit the bill.

    We spent many happy hours in the Goldene Adler pub/restaurant where in lovers’ corner there was a sign in German saying, ‘Here it is permitted to tell lies’.

    After a couple of delightful months, however, a letter from Ireland reminded me of that long forgotten interview in Dublin. The new TV service was offering me a job, to start immediately.

    In no hurry, I wrote back saying my contract would not allow me to leave yet. I lingered for a month in Pforzheim to enjoy Trudie, consider my options and save up the train fare. Would I stay in Pforzheim with Trudie and become a penniless would-be writer or would I please my parents by taking this job?

    For once I decided they deserved a break, bade Trudie a tearful farewell and returned home. A month later I got an even more tearful letter claiming that she was pregnant and I must return, otherwise she would set her GI brother-in-law on me.

    I ignored the letter and dived into the exciting world of television. But the past was always on my mind. Exactly thirty years after that parting I diverted from a filming expedition in Germany and paid a flying visit to Pforzheim.

    With some basic research in the basement of the town hall I was given Trudie’s present married status, address and telephone number – a tribute to German thoroughness as well as their weakness for my elaborately romantic cover story.

    Is that Robert?

    I rang the number and in my half-remembered German said: ‘Is that Trudie Bopp?”  She replied in German: ‘That was once my name.’  ‘Do you remember Herr Dinkelbaum?’ I asked.  After a long silence, Trudie replied: ‘Is that Robert?’

    Over coffee in the Goldene Adler which still existed (although the Berlitz school did not), I noticed she was still beautiful and spoke no English – a reflection on my teaching talents. She was clearly taking no chances with this blast from the past: she had arranged for her daughter to pick her up in one hour. They were going shopping for the girl’s imminent wedding.

    Trudie remembered everything, even her threatening letter of three decades ago, to wit: if I did not return and face my responsibilities I would die. I asked her how old the daughter was now. Just twenty eight, she said. A quick exercise in mental arithmetic whetted my interest. Was it possible that I might have a half-German offspring?

    There was not time to press the matter as the daughter duly arrived to whisk her mother away. I could hardly interrogate the girl or study her features for a resemblance. I felt a little disappointed, and not convinced either way.

    The following morning, just before departing my hotel, curiosity overcame me.  I rang the number again and asked Trudie to tell me the truth about her old letter. Now, decades later, she laughed and dismissed her white lie and the empty threat: ‘You must know what a young girl in love will say to keep her man.’

    The realisation that she remembered our romance as clearly as myself was consolation. The Arab mantra ‘Man is the animal with the short memory’ is quite mistaken. I now remember ancient, significant things with more clarity than my breakfast this morning.

    Now, where did I leave my coffee?

    Feature Image is of the so-called Venus of Willendorf an an 11.1-centimetre-tall (4.4 in) figurine estimated to have been made c. 30,000 BCE.

  • Siberian Blue

    Prokopyevsk, 1974

    SNOW is everywhere. So much of it, that the whole world looks like an old black-and-white movie. Through the grey haze, a pale and tired winter sun tries to warm the frozen land but only succeeds in turning water crystals into some kind of sparkling fairy dust.

    Snow piles on double-sloped roofs like gigantic fur hats worn by Tartar warriors. It covers orchards and gardens with one unspoiled crispy sheet, broken here and there by naked trees and brush. Blackcurrant and raspberry bushes stretch crooked twig-fingers in a feeble attempt to gather some snow from the air as protection from the bitter cold.

    Snow lies in huge mounds on the sidewalks where the cleaners have pushed it aside. Flakes of it fly in the air, which gives it colour and a shape resembling Grand-Dad Frost’s long silver beard to be tousled by the strong northerly gusts. Snow spirals up and off the tops of snowdrifts just as a desert breeze blows sand off the crest of dunes. But it’s not warm here, far from it. It’s freezing, and all things come alive if only to cloak themselves in the fluffy white mantle against frost-bite.

    Snow Castle

    I’m a real Siberian child, enjoying myself outside in sub-zero temperatures. Melted snow on my mittens cakes up into a layer of large ice diamonds. It’s impossible to brush them off now, as the ice clings to the wool fibres. I don’t really care though – I’m all covered in snow, from head to toe. But I’m not cold, having warmed up from playing with my friends, building a snow castle in an enormous snow bank built by the bulldozer at the side of my house. The castle looks more like a hobbit-hole, inhabited by four tiny, white, furry creatures, popping out here and there on the sides of a snowy hill.

    It’s probably -25C. But so what? Our castle of snow is being invaded by evil mercenaries from the neighbouring building, two-storied and posh. But the castle belongs to our post-war barrack, mine and Anyuta’s. We live in the barrack and the castle is ours by God and all man-made laws. We won’t surrender it while we’re alive!

    Anyuta is covering the north exit, viciously attacked by an older more experienced soldier, Ruler, while I deflect a heavy snowball bombardment from the south. Ruler thought he was very clever when he started the attack of the gate defended by a ‘woman’ three years his junior. Nasty bastard! But Anyuta proved to be a tough nut. She’s spun around in the narrow exit to kick Ruler with incredible energy. Her tiny ice incrusted woollen boots are called valenki. That round face, outlined by the fake fur of her pink coat’s hood, is so close to mine, upside down, laughing. Her big brown eyes are shining through the cloud of vapour like two ice-glazed cherries, cheeks bright red, lit by the cold and the fight.

    I’m throwing back the snowballs to my red-headed opponent, Toast, trying to cover Anyuta’s exposed face. The fat Toast is as evil as Ruler, because he’s purposefully aiming at Anyuta. But I’m a warrior! I’m a knight! A bogatyr! I will save my sweet maiden and our beautiful home, even if I have to die in the battle. I’m picking up a snowball in each hand, springing up and running towards my enemy screaming “Huraaaaaah!”

    Toast has not expected that. With the first snowball I knock his hat off and his red hair bursts like a flame among the all-consuming whiteness. The second snowball smacks right into his scarred cheek and he immediately pleads for mercy, because I’m already at his bastion. All his snowballs, which he was preparing so patiently before the battle, are mine!

    “On your knees, you disgusting creature! Kiss my boots, as you surrender!” I say, pushing his red head towards my valenki.

    “I’m already on my knees, you dope! Stop pushing my head! My ears are freezing!”

    “Plead for mercy, and I will give you back your useless helmet!”

    Toast starts crying and I stack his rabbit-fur hat on his flaming head. It immediately falls down and he’s not picking it up, hoping he’ll catch cold and it would be a perfect excuse for him not to go to the kindergarten in the morning. His grandma would be fussing around him day and night, feeding him like a piglet for slaughter and pouring hot tea with raspberry jam down his throat. Plus, he could always blame me for his misfortune.

    “Typical Germans,” I grumble. “Just a little kick in the ass, and there you are, crying like a girl!”

    “Yeah, right, I didn’t knock your hat off, did I? Now, if I get ill, it’ll be your fault, and I’ll tell my grandma you did it!”

    “Well, tell her whatever you want, you sneak!” I reply defiantly, even though I’m not looking forward to Toast’s grand-mother’s visit to my home and accusing me of all the imaginable sins that a five-year-old boy could have done. I know that my mom would just laugh it off, but my granny would be very disappointed with me, and I hate when she tells me she’s disappointed.

    “I’m not Fascist!”

    ”I’ll tell your grandma that you were throwing snowballs at Anyuta’s face. It’s a miracle you didn’t hit her, you nasty fascist sneak!”

    “I’ll tell my grandma you called me a “Fascist!” I’m not a Fascist!” Toast started crying in earnest.

    Anyuta and Ruler are standing beside us.

    “Stop blubbering, Zhenka,” says Anyuta, “he didn’t do anything bad to you!”

    “He knocked my hat off!”

    “You’re such a sissy!” says Ruler. “If you keep sniffling and go complaining, we’ll never play with you again. And when you go to school some day, everybody will know you’re a sneak and a traitor, and nobody will ever talk to you! Ever!”

    Sasha, the Ruler, has already started school, and he was quite an authority among us, the kindergarten kids. He already knew how to count ‘til one thousand, and could even properly hand-write his name.

    I could only count up to ten and print my name with huge crooked letters (even though I was pretty proud of my achievements and even intended once to print my initials with pee on the snow).

    We’ve always liked to listen to his stories about the teachers, uniforms, broken pen-boxes and other kids in such an ‘adult’ institution as THE SCHOOL. Everything seemed to be so magical and appealing in his ‘grown-up’ world. We still have to wait for two years to enter that wonderland called THE SCHOOL and stop being called ‘kids.’

    Toast has stopped crying as if a divine illumination had descended on him from the gathering snow clouds and the early winter dusk. The last rays of sunlight tinted the snow around us fuchsia-pink, like the magical blood of the fallen heroes who were fighting for our hobbit-holes (pardon, CASTLE) so bravely and now are no more.

    We can almost see them, our imaginary knights, archers and common soldiers, dying in the field for our lord and ladyship’s honour and our home. Zhenya the Toast’s head is covered with fallen snowflakes that make his red flaming hair burn with an ominous pink sparkle.

    “I was joking, you dopes,” he finally says, shaking the tears off his colourless eyelashes and putting his hat on. He realized he may indeed catch cold and it won’t give him any advantage now. “It’s so easy to scare you! Would I ever give my pals away? Is that how you think of me?”

    “Friends then,” says Sasha the Ruler. “Peace to this beautiful unspoilt and unconquered castle! Long live the king and the queen! I have to go home now. The blasted Crow (his primary school teacher’s nickname) gave us loads of homework to do. Enjoy the potty training in your kinder-garten tomorrow.”

    Little Germany

    “I have to go too,” sniffles Toast. “My grandma will be awfully worried. It’s getting dark. Plus, she’s been cooking apfel-kugel today. Yummy!”

    Zhenya looks like an apfel-kugel himself – all round and “toasted”. His red hair, freckles and a scar on his cheek make him resemble a plump, freshly fried doughnut, stuffed to the brim with the German delicacies his grand-mother fills him with all day long. Zhenya is not stingy – he brings his granny’s culinary production to the street in amounts that could feed a small battalion of the Red Army – and we all gorge ourselves on pies and sweets cooked according to the ancient German recipes.

    Zhenya’s grand-mother is indeed German, but not one who was born in Germany. She’s Volga settlement German – eighteenth century.

    Tsarina Catherine II signed a decree allowing  foreigners who so desired to colonise unspoilt Russian territories. More than 30,000 Europeans were recruited, mostly from Germanic kingdoms and principalities. Most of those Germans and their descendants settled on the River Volga, living in their own communities unmolested until the Second World War.

    Jealously they guarded their traditions, language and cuisine, carrying in their hearts a nostalgia for their forefathers, who’d left their homeland centuries ago to find happiness and prosperity in wild and cold Russia. In spite of having been born in their new ‘Motherland’, somewhere deep in their consciousness, they always missed their ancestors’ walks on the Rhine, Christmas Markets, mulled wine and roasted chestnuts.

    But when the war broke out, ‘Little Germany’ attracted unwanted attention from Stalin. The Great Leader thought Germans on the Volga might easily side with the enemy – they were Germans after all – even though they’d lived through two centuries of Russian history and become as Soviet as anybody else in my huge country.

    But their foreign blood made them potential traitors, and the whole settlement was sent to Siberia, the Urals and Kazakhstan, where they were thinly dispersed amongst the locals. Thus, my little town in the middle of nowhere, has real foreigners in its midst, speaking Russian in a German accent so thick, that we can hardly make heads nor tails of what they are saying.

    I laughed to myself, when Zhenya’s Granny was telling my own babushka, that she finally bought herself a nice pair of sobaki – our word for dogs. When obviously she meant to say sapogi about her new boots. Evidently the subtleties of our so-called barbaric language eluded her, so uncorrected she carried on bragging about the warmth and comfort of her new winter dogs.

    She comes to our humble home complaining about me. Because I bring her Zhenya to tears quite often. I call him a fascist, especially when he makes me mad. That happens a lot, because he is too girly, and one girl, Anyuta, in our company is more than enough. But to his face I’ve never called him ‘Toast’, ’doughnut’ or ‘fat-factory,’ because it would be a dig below the waist.

    However, post-war, the fallout from fascism is still felt by all, and calling someone a fascist just because of his German heritage isn’t nice either. Toast’s granny detests the fascist label as much as he does.

    But when she visits us for a chat with my grandma, and brings us a big slice of straight-from-the-oven apfel strudel, then I bless the Germans (and Germany) for remembering how to bake those delicious pies, and wonder where Toast’s granny gets apples in the middle of the winter.

    The carrots I have at home are no match for her warm pie and its golden crust covered with melted sugar. Granny gives it all to me, wiping a tear from her eye; while, like a starved puppy, I lick its sweet filling from my fingers.

    Once, when Zhenya’s grandma had just left, I proceeded to devour the pie my eyes had been feasting on for hours, and she sat beside me, stroking my hair.

    ‘Gemography’

    “Eat, sweet child, eat. It’s not your fault we’re so poor. I wish we had money and connections to get you some bonbons or a chocolate bar. I wish your father came over more regularly and took care of you. But soon, you’ll grow up, go to school and learn how to read and write, even gemography…”

    “I already know how to read, Babushka. They taught us in kindergarten! And it’s “geography”, not “gemography”. Ruler told us he will study geography next year.” I saw myself as practically a scientist, since I knew how to pronounce the word “geography”, and an adult like my grandma didn’t.

    “Oh, that’s good! It’s so good indeed. You’re such a clever boy, Mishenka! Now, the school will be so easy for you! And then you’ll study hard and you can be whatever you choose to be! Imagine, you’ll be a doctor when you grow up? You’ll wear a white gown and a stetho … stethacope … that thing to listen to the chest. Everybody will respect you, and the people will greet you on the street “Good morning, Mikhail Gennadyevich”, and you will have your own office and a nurse … Imagine! You just have to study hard at school and get good grades.”

    “I will, Babushka. Can’t wait to go to school! Can I go next year?” already seeing myself dressed in a white gown with a stethoscope around my neck.

    “Not yet, sweetheart. You’re only five. Just wait for two years.”

    “But why? I can already count to ten.”

    My grandma hesitated: “You have to grow up a little. Otherwise the school desk will be too big for you. You won’t see what the teacher writes on the black-board.”

    My dream of becoming a doctor soon burst like a soap bubble. I’d have to study first. On top of that, I’d have to wait for two long years before even beginning my studies.

    So unfair! I turned back to the apfel strudel, finishing the remains of the slice in two seconds and started to feel sleepy, with the images still floating in front of my eyes: a white gown, a stethoscope, a blackboard (whatever it is in reality, but I see a black, charred by the fire board from a pirate ship), a doctor’s office and me there, behind the school desk.

    Bride-to-be

    Toast’s round shape, and Ruler’s tall and lanky one, start to disappear in the snowfall. It’s become a little warmer now, and snowflakes glide through the air like extra-terrestrial insects, waltzing around in their mysterious mating dance. They finish and die, covering the earth with their tiny bodies to protect it from the winter cold. The entire world is blanketed by their heroic sacrifice. I don’t know anything else beyond our barrack, orchards, kindergarten and the two-storied buildings where Toast and Ruler live.

    Anyuta takes my hand. A year younger than me, I consider her a perfect candidate to be my bride when I decide to get married. She’s pretty, sweet, and she plays with boys, while other girls in the kindergarten only play with stupid dolls and don’t go out to the street without their parents

    My grand-dad doesn’t like Anyuta. He calls her “little gypsy”, and says Anyuta’s mother is a “slut.” Trying to defend the lady of my heart and her mother, I told him once that I’m a slut as well.

    “That boy is properly stupid! Honestly! Now, he’s a slut too!” he turned to my grandma. “I tell you once again, don’t let him play with that gypsy girl! She’ll be the exact copy of her mother! Mark my words.”

    “He’s a child, for God’s sake. You shouldn’t use those words in front of him. What if he goes and says to Ninka “Good morning, Mrs. Slut?” What then? Are you going to explain to her where he heard the word and why he called her so?”

    “She knows it herself that she’s a slut, your Ninka woman. Did you see her with a new tall guy the other day? She just dumps the little gypsy at her mother’s and jumps on anyone with a cock and a pulse,” my grandpa grumbles. “What else can you call her? Virgin Mary?”

    “Don’t mention the Virgin Mary, for God’s sake! God forgive us,” my grandma made a quick sign of cross on her chest. “Please, don’t say that in front of the child again! There’s no need for him to learn all those words of yours!”

    “He’s a boy! He’ll learn them sooner or later, won’t he? Especially if he keeps playing with that little gypsy girl,” retorted my grand-pa. “He doesn’t understand what we’re talking about anyway. Do you, Mishok?” He turned to me.

    “Of course I do!” I was really eager to show my grand-dad that I’d already grown up. “I also have a cock! And Anyuta has a cunt!”

    I rushed to demonstrate all the information I’d learned about sex from Ruler. He’d told us once, that both Toast and I had cocks so small, that we could do nothing with them but pee. That was how I came to comprehend that strange object on my body. Obviously  aware of it, I  didn’t know it was called a “cock”.

    He’d also said that women had cunts which I interpreted as merely the absence of having a cock. Consequently, I’d undressed a doll in the kindergarten, confirming my theory that girls had indeed absolutely nothing there. Just a small hole at the bottom.

    “Mishenka, my little boy, don’t say those words. There are bad, really bad. Only drunkards and criminals use them. You won’t use them, will you?” My granny looked like she was going to cry.

    “I told you!” my grand-dad seemed to be pleased. “Little gypsy! She’s teaching him all this stuff. And these are only flowers – the berries will come later.”

    Scared, I was sure I’d said something awful. Granny was about to cry and I hate seeing my grandma crying. I told myself, that I’d never ever use those words in front of her again.

    An ugly beast

    Anyuta and I stand in the gathering darkness in front of our barrack. She lives in number 6, and I – in number 1. There are ten one-room flats in total in this long, dark, red-brick building. The snow on the roof almost blends into the snowdrifts, as if the building is even bigger.

    I don’t want to go home yet. Neither does Anya. The falling snow sparkles yellow in rectangles of light cast from the apartments. Above the half-curtain that covers only the bottom part of the window, I can watch Anyuta’s grand-mother cooking dinner.

    Standing in front of her flat, I feel far away from my own home. Unable to see what my own granny is doing, I get a physical sensation of being miles away, in a raging snow-storm at the North Pole. I’m gripped by fear that I’ll be lost and because of me, grandma will cry with grief.

    Anyuta is holding my hand. ‘We’d better make ourselves a house,’ she says. ‘I’ve never seen such a snowfall in my entire life.’ I agree. I’ve never seen such a snowfall either. I couldn’t even distinguish the windows of the barrack from the building now. What I saw resembled a series of pale suns secreted behind gossamer.

    We walk towards the row of toolsheds built in front of the barrack. A sheet of freshly fallen flakes lay undisturbed, and clean ahead of us. Hand in hand; we’re knee-deep in the snow. Pioneers in uncharted territories, the first to spoil the virgin beauty of land that hasn’t known a man. At least today. The last wind left a snowdrift to tower in front of the sheds and for us it’s like the Himalayas!

    When we approach the danger zone, at the gap between those sheds leading to the public latrines, Anyuta stops me with her hand.

    “Let’s not go there. Mom says an ugly beast lives there and he has very stinky breath. Do you smell it?” She sniffs the air, but the usual summer stench can hardly be perceived in the freezing cold. “She says he likes to eat small children, especially girls!”

    “I’m not a child, Anya! I’m five! And I’m a whole year older than you. You don’t even know what five means yet! You still show your fingers when they ask how old you are. But I’m a grown up man! Don’t be afraid, my princess, I will protect you!”

    I know exactly where the stench comes from, because my mum tried to teach me how to use the latrine once. Petrified with fear, I refused even to approach a big gaping hole on the floor, full of excrement and flies.

    But I don’t tell that to Anyuta. Besides, her mother may be right. The beast might live inside that stinky pit. I pull her a step forward, then, after a moment of thinking, I decide to make a snowball for good measure. ‘If the beast comes out, I’ll throw the snowball right between his eyes, and he’ll die forever!’

    Easier said than done, though. I suddenly smelt the putrid stench of the latrine monster. Did someone cough out there, in the gap? Or roar? The snow is waist high and we’re so far from home! We can’t run fast either. We’re stuck in the snow. Scared, I see Anyuta’s eyes wide with terror. Has she seen the beast? Can the beast cast a freezing spell?

    Anyuta’s tomcat, Shaitan, jumps out of the shed with a piece of sausage in his snout and dives into the gap. Something inside the shed falls down with a loud metallic clatter. In a split second, we see two bright green spots. Shaitan’s eyes are glowing in the forbidden gap, until he turns his head back, listening to the night. Everything returns to normality. The total silence, interrupted sometimes by a howl of the wind under the rooftops, and the barking of a dog somewhere.

    Anyuta smiles.”Oof, Shaitan scared me breathless! I’ll tell my grandma now who steals her smoked sausages from the shed. She thinks mum drinks wine with her boyfriends there, and they eat the sausages for a snack,” she’s looked away.

    “You know that Shaitan means ‘demon’ in Turkmenish? I saw it in a cartoon. I called the cat Shaitan, because he was scratching me badly even when he was a kitten. I love him though, when he’s not hungry. He can be very friendly. He doesn’t like when I pull his tail though. Or touch his belly.”

    The Perfect Spot

    We’ve decided not to climb the Everest, but walk around it, to the toolshed’s doors, where the wind, for some reason unknown to us, has blown all the snow away. And there, we’ve found a perfect spot for our home: the wall of snow makes a mountain on one side, the shed-door on the other, and the ‘snow-hat’ hanging from the roof above us.

    It almost touches the peak of the Everest, and so it isn’t snowing here. It’s warm and cosy. We make a huge table on the mountain side, two cubical chairs, and as a final touch, I cut the window into the outside world. Anya starts ‘cooking dinner’ – snowballs with sugar, and I’m making cookies from the harder pressed sheet of snow I’ve cut on the side of the mountain. The cookies look so good! I rub them against the door to perfect them in the shape of stars, crescents and circles.

    “How did you do that?” Anya’s brown eyes are again wide open.

    “When you marry me, I’ll make these cookies for you every day. Even in the summer. I’ll find snow for you…”

    I suddenly feel that I should kiss her and give her a snow doughnut as an engagement ring. She’s so near. I reach out and kiss her on the lips, like I used to kiss my mum before I grew up to the mature age of five. Anyuta’s lips were wet and covered with snot. I barely stop myself from spitting out and saying “Oof, yak!”

    “Don’t do that again,” she says angrily, “I’m too young to be a mother! You know where all this kissing leads!”

    I honestly don’t know. How could I?

    “First, it’s all this kissing-wissing, and then – oops, you’re pregnant. That’s what my grandma said to my mom,” she explains patiently. “You can get pregnant from kissing, you silly.”

    “Pregnant?” Even the word bewildered me. It sounded so funny.

    “Yes! Belly with a baby! How do you think you were born? Found in the cabbage patch?”

    Wasn’t I? Until this moment. My mum always told me, that as I was born in the middle of the summer, I was found among the cabbages on my granny’s orchard. She said she went out to bring a cabbage for soup, and found me, big, fat and pink, but with a head of long black hair. She always said that I was born with long black hair. However, the contradiction of “being born” and “found in the orchard” never bothered me until now.

    “Do the men get pregnant?” I ask her trembling with fear.

    “Mmmm,” she touches her chin with her mitten and looks up thinking. “I’m not sure…”

    In shock now I realize, I’m way too young to be a mother as well. On the other hand, why are men called fathers? I’ve never heard anybody call a man Mother. Even though, Uncle Semyon has a really big belly. God, he must be pregnant. My heart sank. What will my grandma say when my belly starts growing? Why on earth have I kissed her? And Anyuta’s still trying to recall what her grandma said.

    “I think so,” she says finally. “Do you think only we women have to suffer?” She takes my snow doughnut though. “It’s beautiful! Are those mini diamonds?”

    “It’s just snow!” I immediately forgot about my little ‘pregnancy problem’, more concerned by an imminent slap from my grand-dad, when he finds out I’m having a baby.

    “Snow is mini-diamonds, you silly. Look!” She catches a drifting snow-flake. “Look at it closer. Do you see how beautiful it is? It’s like a little flower, only pointy. Look!”

    The snow-flake is indeed the most beautiful thing I have ever seen so far, and I immediately decide to immortalise it on paper for Anyuta. As soon as I get home, I’ll draw it!

    “Mishenka, where are you, sweet kitten?” I hear my granny’s voice from far away. “Come home, child! It’s freezing cold out here!”

    “Can I play a little longer, Bab?” I said sticking my head out of the improvised window to see granny, but the sash collapsed and our sweet home flooded with millions of mini-diamonds that smashed my childhood dreams. Still vivid. In snow.

  • On Procrastination

    2019 has taught us all we need to know about Mortality. So many writers, musicians, and actors that we loved passed away this year. Some left us far too soon and others bowed out with a fine stash of years under their wings. I suppose, all we can learn from this, is that our time is now.

    The best way to remember and honour the dead is to live our own lives to the fullest; pull up the anchors of dreaming and set out with our sails full of doing and reach out beyond ourselves. It’s only in the doing that things get done. 2020 Ahoy! Here I find a few old words of mine on the seductive dangers of not doing.

    Procrastination is a very cunning mistress. She masquerades so expertly at being a muse; seducing me with an ever expanding array of tantalizing tasks that acquire greater urgency with her every whisper and sensual suggestion.

    “Hey, Boy … why not tidy the kitchen, it’ll look great when it’s done,” she coos.

    Slipping her deliciously slow fingers into mine she continues to tempt me. Her voice and reason are pure alchemy, transforming the meaningless and mundane into pure, vital essence.

    Procrastination’s devastating twin sister is OCD. When they both conspire against me, I loathe myself for being unable to resist their time wasting charms.

    They sprawl decadently on my sofa, dressed in the most time-consuming lingerie, all is slow with these sisters. Sister Sirens, time suckers, flunky cleptos, robbing hours, days, minutes, always adding to their secret stash of stolen years.

    They annihilate calendars with their every breath and dine on menus stuffed with meticulously squandered weeks, dessert is a slow century drizzled with wasted opportunity. From the lethargic folds of my sofa they sink into a Valium trance of speech and so begins another game of Fifty Shades of Delay.

    My self-loathing comes to a boil, then slowly simmers as yet again I obey. We have no “safe word,” me and the Sirens so our sessions can last for months at a time and they are cruel task masters.

    OCD whispers and giggles into Procrastination’s ear, “No, no you tell him…” she drawls in her finest coquette snail voice.

    “Billy (both syllables stretched to breaking point so as to make me sound almost Chinese, Bi-Lee), it’s been such a long time since you rearranged all those vinyl LPs into any meaningful order,” she points her tired languid fingers towards my unruly collection. “How about alphabetically or even by genre … we love it when you do it by genre as you get lost and start over and over again with all the persistent denial of completion so beloved of a perfectionist like you … we’ll flash you a little stocking if you do it, the ones you like, the ones weaved from broken clocks and stitched with stolen moments and studded with frozen minutes plucked from every unfinished thing you ever touched … just think of us and learn to forget that task that’s begging to be done … Good boy … and when you’ve done that, come lie with us here and meditate on how clothes dry, and feel us warm by your side, the three of us sinking in the moment, watching the wind drag its heavy cargo of clouds from day to night … don’t move, don’t say a word … stay with us from here to eternity…”

  • The Doomsday Machines

    Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film ‘Dr Strangelove’ dramatizes the still not-altogether-remote scenario of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). It begins with a deranged U.S. Airforce General, Jack D. Ripper, overriding Executive Command and ordering a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. The Russians, unbeknownst to the Americans, have developed a deterrent – the Doomsday Machine – that automatically detonates, with devastating global effect, if a nuclear device explodes in Soviet territory.

    Kubrick masterfully conveys the absurd conformism of a military organisation obeying orders to a point of self-annihilation. In the end, Major T. J. ‘King’ Kong, the B-52 commander delivering its payload, straddles the bomb, whooping as he descends to his own, and humanity’s, demise. Despite its apocalyptic message, the film remains enduringly hilarious, reflecting its alternative title: ‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.’

    A recent viewing in Dublin’s Lighthouse Cinema left me wondering, though, whether Kubrick derives too much comedy from an appalling vista we still confront. Laughter remains a safety valve, permitting an audience to carry on with business-as-usual, while the ultimate stupidity of nuclear war remains a real possibility. Are we, unconsciously, making light of President Donald Trump’s recent euphemistic warning of an ‘official end’ to Iran?[i] As Friedrich Nietzsche puts it: ‘in laughter all evil is compacted, but pronounced holy and free by its own blissfulness.’[ii] Regular doses of humour are one of life’s balms, but sometimes we laugh along to the exclusion of more serious engagement. Fittingly perhaps, the serious work of producing Cassandra Voices generally occurs in a studio above a crowded comedy club in the heart of Dublin, from where laughter often wafts upstairs!

    Millenarian doomsday scenarios have haunted humanity since time immemorial. A ‘Great Survey’ of England and Wales in 1086, used to ascertain the proportion of the national wealth owing to King William ‘the Conqueror’ (also less flatteringly known as ‘the Bastard’), was subsequently labelled the ‘Book of Domesday’ (Middle English for ‘Doomsday’). This accumulation of data in the hands of a monarchy had terrifying connotations at a time when many perceived the end of the world, and its Final Judgment, to be nigh.

    Today humanity confronts varied doomsday scenarios – generally gleaned from scientific analysis rather than metaphysical speculation – with anthropogenic climate chaos, mass extinctions and the still unresolved danger of a nuclear Armageddon topping the list. We remain in many respects, in Carl Jung’s phrase, technological savages[iii], operating machinery with capacities far exceeding our wisdom as operators. It just takes one fat finger to push the button, or an unimpeded algorithm.

    But perhaps it is not nuclear warheads, or even coal-powered stations, that represent the Doomsday Machines of our time. After all, humanity could quite easily seize control of its fate, elect reasonable leaders, bring about a Green New Deal and decommission nuclear weapons. So what is holding us back from taking the action required for the benefit of the great mass of our species, and the rest of the natural world? Another mechanism, operated by most adults in developed countries, is, I believe, befuddling our wits and deterring a collective shift in consciousness.

    Developed simultaneously in the early 2000s by a number of manufacturers, the smart phone is replicating the Book of Domesday by tracking our movements and online preferences to the benefit of vested commercial interests, and shadowy state emanations.

    Of greater concern, perhaps, than the hollowing out of our privacy is the addiction the vast majority of us have to the narcissistic, solipsistic and often pugilistic ‘social’ media of Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat and Twitter, conveyed through apps on our smartphones. Staring into the void of communication-without-end from dawn-to-dusk, successive ‘hits’ are delivered, revealing who messages us, ‘likes’ our image or words, or offends us. Notably, Donald Trump is the acknowledged master of the soundbite Twitter update (maximum length two-hundred-and-eighty-characters), heralding the short-attention-span-politics evident in most countries.

    Social media is the thief of time and an agent of homogenisation. Writing in the early twentieth century, the

    Fernando Pessoa 1888-1935

    Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa seemed to anticipate the contemporary malaise. ‘Given the metallic, barbarous age we live in,’ he wrote, ‘only by methodically, obsessively cultivating our abilities to dream, analyse and attract can we prevent our personality from dissolving into nothing or identical to all the others.’[iv]

    The smartphone provides a simulacrum of varied technologies, such as an automated camera providing the semblance of a real one, but where the necessary application to understand the apparatus is no longer needed. The capacity to share easily what we have created has overtaken the creative process. The necessary isolation of the artist has been abandoned in favour of the instant hit of validation from our peers.

    Likewise, through digital attenuation, music is debased and choice diminished when we succumb to the algorithms of Spotify and YouTube that are carried with us everywhere we go on our Doomsday Machines.

    Of particular concern is a generation of teenagers who know of no other life other than that mediated by the Doomsday Machines. What is missing from their lives is the crucial ingredient of tedium, which again according to Pessoa is ‘that profound sense of the emptiness of things, out of which frustrated aspirations struggle free, a sense of thwarted longing arises and in the soul is sown the seed from which is born the mystic or the saint.’[v] Being bored can have its advantages.

    I would like to say I had the willpower to renounce my own device, but as is so often the case in life, the end of the affair occurred by accident. Fiddling with its AMAZING properties, for the umpteenth time that day, as I double-jobbed playing with my young nephew, the Machine slipped from my grasp and hit a hard stone floor. The glass did not shatter exactly, except in one corner which felt the full impact, and from which a few glittery shards crumbled away. But, faintly detectable, three deathly cracks ran up from where it had landed, strangely mirroring the lifelines on my hand. When I tried to switch it on, all I found was a faint blinking light, which soon lapsed. Still looking sleek and powerful, though now veiled in a black hood of inoperativeness, it appeared to me like the corpse of a young soldier, handsome features intact, save for a bullet wound to the neck.

    I felt deflated, angry and increasingly tetchy. How was I going to survive without it after a decade-long reliance? Like any addict, I felt pangs for the addled communication, information-gathering and idle scrolling that had become my early morning ritual, as I lay prostrate in bed.

    As it transpired there was still some life in the Machine — I had simply smashed the screen, which I replaced at a reasonable price in a shop on Capel Street. But the liberation of a few days had changed my perspective. I had an unmistakable feeling of a great weight being lifted off me. In the meantime, I had purchased a ‘brick’ phone for next to nothing and now alternate between the two,  only using the Doomsday Machine, now shorn of most, though not all, social media apps, when strictly necessary. I am a work in progress.

    I know many people, more sensible than I, who have deleted all social media apps from their smartphones save for WhatsApp. This is, however, the Gateway Drug that maintains the addiction, leaving the impression that you cannot live without the Doomsday Machine. In a sinister twist, WhatsApp cannot be used on  a laptop, for example, without already being connected to a Doomsday Machine.

    Facebook has become the lightning rod for much of the bad press around social media – those pesky Russians again – and its distorted algorithm is a distinct nuisance if one is attempting to share meaningful content, as the cutesy image will always win out. Used strategically, however, it has its advantages, especially as a means of staying in contact with a large number of people, and for the purpose of events. It only really becomes problematic as an app on a smartphone that sends out regular notifications, prompting idly scrolling. I can live with it on my laptop, although I have given up on the hope of using it as a conduit for radical journalism.

    As regards the confessional nature of posting our thoughts, I was struck by further prescient words from Pessoa: ‘What could anyone confess that would be worth anything or serve any useful purpose? What has happened to us has either happened to everyone or to us alone; if the former, it has no novelty value and if the latter it will be incomprehensible.’[vi] I am coming to recognise that most of the online outbursts I am prone to are perhaps better left unsaid.

    Instagram offers a good medium for photographers to display their work, but is overwhelmingly narcissistic, not only through that ultimate expression of Doomsday Machines, the selfie, but also via the look-at-my-beautiful-life imagery that abounds. Planet Instagram is full of beautiful people who overcome life challenges, reveal plenty of tanned flesh and speak in a patois of hashtags.

    Selfie by name.

    Pessoa would take an uncompromising view:

    Man should not be able to see his own face. Nothing is more terrible that that. Nature gave him the gift of being unable either to see his face or to look into his own eyes … he could only see his face in the waters of rivers and lakes. Even the posture he had to adopt to do so was symbolic. He had to bend down, to lower himself, in order to commit the ignominy of his seeing his own face … the creator of the mirror poisoned the human race.[vii]

    There are times when access to the Internet while on the move is of great value. Google Maps makes travel immeasurably easier. But are we comfortable with all our movements being tracked? Smart-phone maps also reduce the sum total of our interactions with fellow human beings, and makes us less observant of the world around us.

    A good rule of thumb is that, unless we are sitting upright, communication is unsatisfactory. The same applies to reading news sites – I had become all-too-prone to only partially reading articles. Indeed, the ‘most read’ articles on most sites tends to be prurient ‘click-bait.’

    I suggest you forget about the hurried message and make time for real expression in communication. There is no point attempting to stay in touch with everyone, because it is impossible. Leave more time for reading books, making music, being present to friends and family, and allow space for the tedium that brings daydreaming.

    The Internet can open new horizons of knowledge, bringing to fruition Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s (d. 1716) dream of a bibliotheca universalis, a ‘universal library’, where expert insight is available to all, everywhere. It could lead us into thinking more globally. But this beast needs considerable taming. Its great potential may be more easily realised by abandoning Doomsday Machines altogether. The wider consequences of a less mediated society could be profound. If enough of us can escape the clutches of the Machines, perhaps we can eventually develop the focus required for collective action.

    Follow Frank Armstrong on Twitter

    [i] Seung Min Kim, ‘Threats would mean ‘official end’ of Iran, Trump warns in tweet’, May 19th, 2019, Washington Post.

    [ii] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, translated from the German by Graham Parkes, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007, p.202.

    [iii] See Laurens van der Post, Jung and the story of our time, Vintage, London, 1976, p.200

    [iv] Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa, The Serpent’s Tail, London, 2017, p.107

    [v] Ibid, p.363

    [vi] Ibid, p.197

    [vii] Ibid, p.91

  • Twenty Questions for Bob Quinn

    We sent twenty questions to Maverick film maker Bob Quinn who published ten excerpts of his memoir A Monk Manqué with us last year.

    The featured image is of Bob Quinn meeting Colonel Ghaddafi in 1988 from one episode that can be viewed here.

    What advice would you have for your eighteen-year-old self if you were to meet him in an alternative reality?               

    Treasure your ignorance. It’s the only thing that’s unique to you.

    What is love?

    Nature’s trick to keep the species going.

    Why do you live in Conamara?

    Can’t think of anywhere else that would tolerate me.

    Why should anyone learn Irish?

    A person with two languages is twice the person.

    Which decade that you lived through gave you most pleasure?

    The Fifties. Ah, Youth!

    Do you find evidence of a divine intelligence at work in the universe?

    That’s a matter of belief, not evidence, thank god.

    What advice do you have for Leo Varadkar?

    Learn something about life outside The Pale.

    Who is your favourite writer at the moment?

    Christine Dwyer Hickey & Charles Bukowski

    Will Ireland ever make it past the quarter final stages of a rugby World Cup?

    Yes!

    What is the worst thing anyone could say about you?

    The truth.

    Do you think a united Ireland will come about any time soon?

    As day follows night, yes.

    What changes would you make to the educational curriculum?

    Make Natural History the main subject.

    Who should become the next president of Ireland?

    Fr. Peter McVerry

    Fr. Peter McVerry for President!

    Which one of your films best represents your oeuvre?

    “Cloch.”

    Was there a film you saw last year that you particularly enjoyed?

    A biopic about Gore Vidal called The United States of Amnesia.

    What difference would it make if more women were in positions of authority?

    They would embrace and intensify the balls-up of Patriarchal Capitalism.

    What reforms would you make to public service broadcasting?

    Slim down, abolish commercial advertising and cherish the real creatives on your staff.

    Do you expect Donald Trump to be re-elected President?

    I’m a pesssimist. Yes.

    What is your party piece?

    ‘Me father was the keeper of the Eddystone light and he slept with a mermaid one fine night..’

    What, if any, are your New Year’s resolutions?                       

    Hang in there.

    Follow Bob Quinn @LumberBob on Twitter.

  • Randal McDonnell – ‘I’d gladly strike the first match at his cremation and spit paraffin on his embers’

    I was sickened to read a fawning obituary to an absolute creep and impostor Randal McDonnell. It fails to mention that he was a predator and pederast with an insatiable lust for young boys.

    He made a misery of my late teenage years and I carried for way too long the shame and guilt for what he did to me as though it had been my responsibility.

    Twice he seriously abused me, even once video recording the abuse so he could press pause and marvel at the highlights of his wickedness. I didn’t have the luxury of pressing pause on what was happening to me, nor was I later able to scrub the tape of my life clean.

    In my own delusional way, I put it all down to a wild adventure, but I know now that was just a hopeless coping mechanism. They say not to speak ill of the dead but I’d gladly strike the first match at his cremation and spit paraffin on his embers. When a few years back I wrote these lines, it was him I was referring to. Go rot in hell!

    ***

    As the calendar grew thinner and the water colder, I swam further out into October and November’s waves….cold. Cycling down to the Forty Foot on the green bicycle my mother had bid on in Buckley’s auctioneers, Sandycove. The bike locked with a combination of my age my year in school.

    Undressing, the breeze all salty around my jangling Autumn bollox. Holding the hand rail, my feet on the went granite, down into the waves, nerve enough to swim out to the buoy.

    Arms of rock on either side, at low tide, laced with green weed, kelp and periwinkles, full tide, they were harbour champions, granite guardians.

    And I swam out beyond their embrace, a wink from the Bailey light house, staining their wet side in crushed orange, a neon wink from Howth.

    The currents singing their own wild liquid song and me tossed about like drift wood, soaked, fucked, dream song. My arms, all fifteen years of them, ploughing through the dark spilt ink waves.

    Into the neon Dún Laoghaire, sea-salted, cold blankets of water.

    I saw the spires of the Town Hall, Saint Joseph’s and Saint Michael’s, the clock on the Town Hall, a tiny pale moon chained to Time. The lit front rooms of the houses that looked out on Scott’s Man’s Bay as I swam further into the night.

    And there I saw him first, a shadow on the shore. Me bobbing like a seal, him, fawn coat, tall and dry.

    Late night eel in the water, I weaved through the water, home to the railing that would hoist me back to land again.

    And there he was with his hard leather glove applause, chiming with the wave lapped steps.

    Shaking with the cold, I stepped out of the water.

    “You are a brave young man, you must be freezing…such a brave young man”

    He had my towel, all ready in his hands. Up the jelly fish licked steps I climbed towards that blue Dunne’s Stores towel that had just a while ago been in my bag.

    Rubbed down like a gold medal otter. Who was he? Why me?

    “Such a brave young man, and so cold, let The Count warm you up”

    My shoulders first, then my shivering ass. The Count knew well how to warm up a trembling lip biting lad.

    I saw the smudged lights of Dalkey as he grabbed my pleasure.

    I came with shame. My white seed floating on a wave that bit my toes with a fresh assault of cold. Who was he? And why did I let him? He held me tight around the neck as I wept into the waves, tears in salt water. His huge leather gloved hand over my mouth, a dark cloud hiding the moon. Forty Feet of silence and salt sprayed shame.

    I dreamt of a knife, a blade that would rise out of the water, a sharp tool of the tide that would slice him.

    I passed out, so as not to feel his Terra Ferma paws on me. I am a wave not a boy. I am not here.

    And then he let me go and all fifteen years of me clung to the rail that led down to the deep and I watched my vomit float, an angry broth on on the night water…..

    Obituary: ‘The life and death of Randal MacDonnell – the most remarkable Irish figure you’ve probably never heard of’ – Independent.ie