There were times when I thought that I would never get to write this blog. It was as though I were part of a crazy, Marx brothers’ movie these last few weeks, with me in perpetual prat-fall mode, a puppet, with no control over the sadistic puppeteer who was pulling its strings; all of this when my life seemed to have stabilized a little, to be hinting at a safe harbor just within reach. Then Covid struck, sort of, well depending on whom you ask.
But before that happened…
My sister Moya was here at the time, aiding and abetting me with my mother. Between us schedules were drawn up, dinners made, shopping done, and doctor’s appointments kept. Anybody my age knows the routine. Where once my generation talked of Leaving Certs, College courses, Career advancement, friends’ weddings, kids, and dogs, and mortgages, we now explore the process of aging. Not ours of course, that would be ridiculous. You see, for many of us, our parents have become our charges, and, for a while at least, this role defines us. In a way we are rather like young mothers in a toddlers’ group talking about their smiling, burping burdens of joy. Only where teeth and potty training are discussed with pride in a mothers’ group… Well, we discuss those too, only without the pride and we follow up with remarks about cataracts, kidney function, mental robustness and the curse of cheap hearing aids. And where we might share a young mother’s sleep deprivation, ours is not caused by teething, or other physical issues. It is generally caused by nightmares, where, perhaps, we might find ourselves contestants on The Chase; a quiz show which seems perfectly harmless until watched four hours a day, for months on end. And in these dreams, we are alone, on stage, staring up at The Governess, who is as grim and plump as any Victorian, hospital matron Dickens could have conjured up to freeze the blood in the veins of his readers. If lucky, we wake up before we are asked a tough question on Greek Mythology, or a simple question on bunions. By comparison, what mental harm can come from the kids’ song, ‘And the Wheels on the Bus go Round and Round,’ played, non-stop for three or four months, or until the child loses interest.
And all the while, as this role reversal continues, there is a sad and horrifying thought never far from the surface. How long have I got before I join the ranks of the terribly old? If I ever get that far.
If I were to pick a moment when things began to go wrong, I would say it was when my sister Moya, a nurse, took my mother’s temperature and reported that she had a very high fever. That was not a serenity-inducing moment as this is Ireland, where hens’ teeth are easier to find than a hospital bed, especially on a Friday afternoon.
From there, it was anything but a hop skip and jump before my mother was admitted to hospital. The 5-bed ward was filled to bursting point with life, hospitals are weird that way. Drips hung beside three beds, a fourth patient carried an oxygen bottle with her everywhere she went, and a heart monitor regularly accompanied another patient to and from the smoking area outside. There were guests galore, and chat aplenty. The only thing missing, it seemed to me, were masks. Thankfully, with or without them, my mother was soon on the mend. She was discharged on a Tuesday, and it seemed that we could finally relax, not worry about visiting hours, spare nighties, or emergency sweet supplies. Only there was no time to relax, because by Wednesday my sister and I were complaining about hay fever but, when we tested on Thursday, our hay-fever turned out to be Covid.
We would have tested my mother too, but she refused, she is not a fan of having cotton buds shoved up her nose. However, there was more to her resistance than first appeared, and it was only later that we realized her refusal to be tested was in fact a tactical decision. So, my sister and I suffered our way through Covid, testing regularly until we got the all-clear. Our mother, however, slept. There was nothing wrong with her, you understand, she just needed to sleep. And she needed to sleep, night and day, for the best part of a working-week.
Moya and I were clear of the virus quickly enough, but it took weeks before the final stay-behind policy of the virus left us. Meanwhile, visitors and medical professionals began turning up to see my mother again. This is when we finally realized why my mother refused to be tested. As each person came and went, she would tell them all, “Moya and Jim got Covid.”
“Really?” they would ask, “And what about you?”
“Oh, no, no,” she would shake her head, “I didn’t get it.”
And she would smile, the smug smile of a strong man watching a weak one struggling under a load he himself could carry without any trouble. A Mona Lisa smile, hinting at a genetic advantage she had somehow failed to pass on to her own children. A reminder to us that behind the façade of old age ticks the calculating mind of a chess master. And if you think I’m fanciful here, you should have watched her eyes flash in our direction every time she repeated the words, “Oh, no, no. I didn’t get Covid.”
Covid is no longer novel, but it is still here. Of course, you have to test before you can prove this fact. Jim Clarken’s mother is not a fan of being tested.
My mother has gotten to the stage in life where she freely shares her opinions about everything, with anybody close enough to hear whatever is on her mind. In the past she might have recognised a likeminded friend in a crowd before whispering a discreet observation, one which would have caused many people’s eyebrows to buckle upwards in surprise, if heard. Nowadays, however, she shares her every thought with everybody she meets, having with no consideration for the ears her words might fall into. Sailing under the flag of old age, you see, she feels she is immune from any form of censure and revels in the freedom it affords her. For instance, Billy, our newsagent, must regularly listen my mother’s views on his beard; not to mention her sage advice. ‘Lose it, otherwise, you’ll look like something out of the Taliban,’ She gives him the same advice whenever she steps into the shop to hunt down a mass card, or a scratch card, or maybe even a cigar, depending on her needs. ‘And what would your mother have to say on the subject?’ she asks.
She usually continues her criticism of beards, at this point, by drawing a comparison between his beard and that of a local priest who has only recently sprouted a, ‘dark, hedge-like monstrosity.’ ‘I told him it ruins his good looks.’ She explains to Billy, ‘And it’s not as though he is a weak-chinned wonder who has something shameful that needs hiding beneath a blanket of hair.’ This outpouring of beard aversion is especially interesting to me as in all the thirty years I cultivated one, she never once seemed to notice the thing. Only now, since its disappearance, has she become such an open critic of facial hair.
A few years ago, such talk was limited to the breakfast table, where I got to listen to her thoughts on modern fashion trends over brown bread and marmalade, but lately she is taking her opinions to the streets and freely airing them with anyone standing before her.
Where in the past, she has always been a political animal, she could be relied on to save her most savage comments for Trump, or Boris Johnson, Isis, or Putin, these days any conversational filters she may once have had have been cast aside, and her field of criticism has expanded greatly. However, I must say that she saves her best work for the medical profession. The young doctor who refused to give her antibiotics on demand, either has asbestos for ears, or his ears are as misshapen as a retired rugby international’s due to the over-heating caused by been talked about behind his back. Another doctor, who shouted across a crowded waiting room that, ‘I’m sorry to hear your bad news,’ comes in a close second on her doctors’ verbal hit-list, but as for the doctor who sent her to A&E, to, ‘Improve her ‘Quality of life…’ Or the one who denied her a wheelchair parking permit at 93 years old… In the past my mother would have been angry when faced with what she saw as unprofessionalism, but in her new, post-filter-world, she likes to share her thoughts on the subject with any medic unfortunate enough to be sitting in front of her for over thirty seconds.
While an all-out-war with the medical profession may be justified, my mother now seems intent to tell the truth at all times, on all subjects, when in the past she might have played dumb. For instance, at the recent viewing of a neighbour, my mother pushed her way through mourners to the grieving sons, ignored the coffin, and told the eldest son that she expected him to turn up for her wake, which can’t be far away now. As shock therapy goes, it worked a treat. The red-faced stammering, chief mourner could do nothing but watch, slack-jawed, as my mother dodged her way around the milling crowd and made a fast getaway.
At another viewing, my mother enjoyed a reunion with people we had not met in an age as we waited outside to pay our respects to a ninety-year-old teacher who worked with my father for years. When my mother eventually met Mary’s brother and sister, people she had never met before, she regaled them, as she stood beside the coffin, with stories of the deceased. The retired teacher had been a non-drinker all her life. As a drinker herself, this concept was foreign territory as far as my mother was concerned. However, with Mary’s corpse practically nudging her in the back, playing the role of silent witness, my mother entertained the family with a story which the deceased had chosen not to share with her family in the intervening 45 years. Presumably, she had her reasons. Soon however, her family discovered that Mary had once accompanied my mother to a pub quiz, helped her raise funds for a good cause, and promptly sat down at the piano to provide music for the singsong which followed. However, the singalong began after hours, which was illegal. My mother’s stamina gave out at about one in the morning, so she left Mary at the keys of the piano and headed home. This is why my mother did not have her name taken by a Garda who raided the pub minutes after she had left the premises. Mary was less fortunate; and her name went into his little black book. Mary’s brother, looking almost as old as his sister, became intrigued and began an interrogation of my mother beside the coffin, causing a traffic jam among the mourners in Ma’s wake. With no hard shoulder to step into, nobody was getting past the coffin until my mother told her story. It was a triumphant woman who stepped into the night a few minutes later saying, ‘Imagine, she never told them.’ She simply could not understand how Mary had never told the story against herself. It was a good one after all, and a good story should always be shared with those around you. As should any thought which enters your head, it seems. After a lifetime of being discreet, my mother appears to have concluded that sharing your thoughts is always better than being miserly with them. And, as she is always right, what harm can come of it? Thank God she doesn’t use social media to share her thoughts with the rest of the world.
This is a strange one, a bonnie, bonnie strange one. Be warned, now is the time to avert your gaze, or plug up your ears. Be advised, we’re entering Joyce territory. God, but I’m going to feel really stupid reading this blog.
You see, Bloom’s Day is upon us, ‘Yes, Yes, Yes!’ Or maybe no, not for you. Perhaps you are one of those who refuse a breakfast of devilled kidneys, not because veganism is the latest short cut to enlightenment, but because you can imagine that the lingering taste of urine, hinted at by Joyce, haunts kidneys you might otherwise enjoy. Ulysses and urine, there is so much of the stuff one wonders if Myopic Jimmy is taking the piss. Allegedly, James Joyce’s masterpiece is full of humour, but ask yourself who these critics are before agreeing with them.
First, I must say that this blog is prompted by my mother’s reaction to RTE’s promotion of all things Bloom, no, not the annual flower show in the Phoenix Park, Bloom as in Ulysses. Our national broadcaster is obsessed by the work. The D4 crowd are so taken by it that they believe Molly’s famous potty-sex monologue is a perfect marmalade and toast accompaniment. Thankfully, the yes, yes, yesing in the background never seems to penetrate my morning mind-fug. The advertisements would go unnoticed, pass me by, as though they were news headlines, except that they wake up the critic in my mother. RTE’s harmless potty-sex fetish, no doubt a tonic to Joyce scholars everywhere, makes this one-hundred-year-old book, or its promotion, a problem for me. You see, just a snippet of the monologue can irritate my mother for hours on end. And she shares her irritations with me, which is why I’m writing this blog. This is a stress relief exercise on my part, one which should keep me sane until the 16th of June has passed.
“Doggerel,” is often my mother’s, pre-nine a.m. opening gambit. And she is not criticising me for a change. “I heard someone call that book poetry, but another critic said his poetry is pure doggerel. Not a poetic bone in his body. You can’t have it both ways.”
My mother likes the romantics, so I stay dumb by way of keeping my head attached to my shoulders. As the add rumble on she becomes even more annoyed.
“Nothing more than an alcoholic.” She tells me, “And as for that Nora Barnacle, her ignorance probably made him feel big about himself.”
“Would you prefer them to be promoting a reading of ‘Normal People’?” I ask by way of distraction. “They say she’s the new Joyce.”
In fairness my mother will not be distracted, so I get an extra ten minutes of criticism on Joyce.
Reflecting on her comments and sometimes comparing Ulysses, in my own head, to ‘Normal People,’ (yes I realise that this is a ridiculous activity,) I had a sudden, Eureka moment. You should never listen to critics; you will find life much more enjoyable without looking over your shoulder to see if they are watching before allowing yourself pick up an Agatha Christie. Having said that, here is something you might want to bring to Joyce’s masterpiece.
Joyce is nothing more than an intellectual Benny Hill, a man with a urine fixation, a purveyor of bum jokes disguised as literature. A man of his times in fact, a time when you had to make your own fun, when neighbours were for laughing at and bodily waste-fluids were stored under your bed at night. Stepping in dog do-do was a cause for laughter among friends and, as for falling on your bum, that caused hilarity all round for months on end.
My grandmother was born at practically the same time that the Bloom’s Dublin odyssey took place. For most people, this was a time of outdoor plumbing, with chamber pots serving as primitive ensuites. Say what you will about them, squatting over one every night was a great form of granny yoga, a way to keep the old supple enough to function on a daily basis. Fancy potties were decorative to the point of competing with Ming dynasty vases, tin sufficed for poorer bums. It was a time when limps, squints, and stammers were openly mocked, and as far myopic young lads were concerned, they were the joke.
My grandmother and her friends were all practical jokers and none of them would have needed to read Joyce to improve their minds. Their minds were active enough already and their neuroses formed the foundations of their individuality. Potties would have featured in all of their lives. But they would never have considered writing a doctorate paper on the symbolic significance of Molly straddling one. There were other, more humorous uses for the potty in their lives. My grandmother, about the time Joyce was presenting Ulysses to the world, came up with a novel use for the chamber pot. This was a new pot, I hasten to add, a decorative one. My grandmother was having guests to dinner, and this was a special occasion. The food was good, it was always good where my grandparents were concerned. My grandmother made her famous onion soup (as served in her restaurant) and poured it into her tureen for the day. She then walked into the dining room, placed her new chamber pot on the table and invited everyone to present their bowls.
As gags go, I’ve seen worse.
As writers go, Joyce would miss the cut on my comic writers list. But at least a woman on a potty, scratching an itch, and screaming yes into the night is a positive scene. Molly knows what she wants and does something about it. Yes, she does. Yes, yes, she does.
The millennial tale Normal People might be considered a masterpiece by many, but I ask you, where is the fun in the work?
Imagine a millennial style sex scene in Ulysses: Bloom enters Molly’s chamber late at night, drunk but standing, he tells her to get off the piss pot. This might be the conversation which follows.
Molly: “Do you want to fuck me?”
Bloom: “Yes.”
Molly: “I want to fuck you too.”
Bloom: “We will need each other’s written consent first.”
Molly: “Yes.”
Bloom: “And have to get naked.”
Molly: “Yes.”
Bloom: “And to…”
Molly: “Yes”
Bloom: “And…”
Molly: “Yes.”
Bloom: “And an orgasm?”
Molly: “No. No. No… Not for me. For you maybe, but not for me. For me sex and disappointment must forever remain linked.”
Would Molly ever dream of being so drearily normal? Maybe Joyce is not a lost cause after all. Still, I will never convince my mother to change her mind on the subject. Nor would I want to. And as Bloom’s Day approaches I can not imagine my mother incanting the words, yes, yes yes: unless, of course, she discovers a free, wheelchair parking place at the steps to the library.
Friday mornings, I go shopping with my mother, whether this is an ordeal or a pleasure I have never quite decided. The ordeal begins, oops. Anyway, before the shopping can begin, the wheelchair parking badge must be removed from my mother’s car and displayed in mine. This badge warrants a blog of its own, let’s just say that at 93 years of age my mother has finally been granted a wheelchair parking permit. The downside to this is that, although there may be many car parking spaces available in the car park, I must take on Friday’s inevitably chaotic traffic and do a drive by of the wheelchair parking spaces close to the supermarket’s entrance. Only after we are certain that they are full, and that nobody is leaving any time soon, am I allowed to park elsewhere.
We don’t shop in one of the multiples, but the store is relatively large, well-stocked, and the staff are pleasant. One advantage of the store is that there are more than a few grey-haired clients who are all as regular as my mother in visiting it on a Friday. This means that it can take some time to get around the supermarket, no matter how small our shop. There are many hellos to be made, inquiries about hips and cataracts to be satisfied and news of funerals missed and discussions about mass cards to be sent. Some people may call this gossip, however, for me, gossip always entails the invention of salacious facts, so I just think of this as a community news event. After topping-up on the news front, we head to the farmers’ market, which is only about 500 yards away, though this involves a drive past another couple of occupied, wheelchair parking spaces. The market is hidden as far away from the public as the County Council could make it, without taking steps to ban it outright. And it varies in size, depending on the season and the weather, but you can always rely on at least seven regular stallholders being in attendance.
The irregulars may very well sell the best homemade chocolates around, but they tend to be fair weather hawkers. There are experienced knick-knack sellers who occasionally turn up, but the County Council site does not offer the exposure they need, the footfall required, to make a profit, so they quickly depart to busier pastures. This footfall issue is a pity, because local would-be entrepreneurs open and close-up-shop on a regular basis, never getting a real chance to properly test their stall’s full potential. Meanwhile, some people do surprisingly well. All last summer we had an exotic regular, a poet selling his wares, three books of his own poems, but he disappeared for the winter, presumably there is only so much suffering a poet should have to undergo for his art.
Of the regular stalls, three offer homemade baking, jams, honey, and eggs. There is a cheese stall too, where many of the cheeses are made by the stall’s owner. There are also two vegetable stalls, one primarily selling homegrown vegetables, direct from the stall owner’s land. But for the purposes of this blog today, I’m going to concentrate on the fish van.
Jason is known far-and-wide (according to himself,) as the Fish & Tip man. Though, in reality, he should be known as the Fish & Banter Man because, as well as trucking in fresh fish from Wexford every Friday, he always has an endless supply of chat, cooking advice, and jokes at the ready for customers. For many, he is the market’s main attraction. And many of those would never be caught dead in a betting shop. Jason, you see, is a passionate horseman, and like all passionate people, he loves to spread the news.
His stall is our first stop every week. We may need bread, or jam, or honey, but not until we have secured our bet for the day. Even if there is a queue ahead of us, we get in line. My mother invariably rumbles through her bag to find her notebook well before we reach the counter. There may be the name of a book, here or there among its tiny pages, perhaps even a telephone number, but a quick flick through it would make you think it is the form page from a newspaper. There are times noted, venues recorded, and the most exotic of equine names carefully written down in my mother’s elegant hand. The odds are never noted, starting prices only come into play later. Many of these horses proved to be also rans, but the winning side of the ledger favors my mother. Ma has pen in hand and notebook at the ready by the time the man ahead of us has bought a lobster, filled a bag full of prawns and has decided between the salmon and the hake. Then it is our turn.
“I have one for you today,” Jason normally says to my mother, before turning to me and asking what fish we want. Once I have given him my order and he is fulfilling it, he talks to my mother, takes out his phone, calls out the name of a racecourse, the race time, and the horse’s name.
The people around us normally are intrigued by the events unfolding before them. Some see my mother and smile, thinking poor, wee, lost, old woman. Some frown, wondering what they’re missing out on. An old friend, who was behind my mother last week, asked her to place a tenner each way on the tip of the day. Sometimes, you can even see a person’s lips move as they try to remember the name of the horse, intending, no doubt, to check it out later.
The funny thing is that my mother is still on the winning side of the Ledger this year. But the horse from the week before last was not even placed. This may be the reason why Jason felt a little bit shy about offering my mother a tip on Friday morning. However, he was determined to do well by her, and asked her to text him later, he most certainly would have a winner today. I entered his telephone number into my mother’s phone, texted him using her name, asking him for her tip for the week. The horse won. It makes up for the winner we missed out on, on Good Friday. The tip was good, you understand, but the bookie was closed. Still, the fish was delicious.
Jason texted us the good news last Friday, confirming the win only minutes after the race was run. Now, that is some service. And the winnings more that covered the price of the hake, the monkfish and even the bag of crabmeat we bought.
When most people think writer, they imagine hands hovering over keyboards, they see eyes staring, unblinkingly, at a rapidly moving cursor. They visualise coffee stains on an Ikea desk, or nicotine-yellowed fingers pawing helplessly through notebooks for a forgotten phrase, or an idea in need of transcription. For those of you who have not sat there yourselves, staring at a blinking, stationary cursor, there may be romantic visions of high-backed chairs, behind opulent, antique desks which sit in expensively decorated offices. Others of you may conjure up a writer’s den which is a low-ceilinged, uncarpeted bedsit, with a miserable desk off to one side, and an unkempt bed pressed hard against an unpainted wall.
Few of you would imagine the writer as a bald, sixty-something crowded into an airing cupboard, reading his blog from a laptop which is balanced precariously on a mountain of freshly laundered underwear.
A microphone stands before him, mute and accusatory. It seems alive and takes the place of all the sarcastic teachers who ever berated him as a child for stammering over uninspired textbooks.
You may remember that feeling, the panic which spread through you as you counted-off heads and sentences in an effort to find the one you would have to read out loud to the inmates who make up the rest of your class. While you found your reading, other junior scholars opened mouths and stumbled through passages and your index finger turned white, bloodless as it ran back and forth under the sentence you were destined to share. At moments like this you muttered the words to yourself, silently incanting them, prayer-like, in your head, in the vain hope of memorising them. Finally, you were as ready as you anybody pumping toxic levels of adrenaline was ever going to be.
Everybody else’s readings had passed you by, the meaning of the text was lost to you, but you were prepared, or were you? Your name was called, your palms became hot puddles of sweat, and suddenly your tongue was tripping over words which were a deformed version of the incanted ones, a spell gone wrong. Your index finger flew backwards more often than forwards on the page, progress through your sentence was painfully slow, but you got to the end of it with minimal sarcastic shrapnel hitting you head-on. The full stop was reached, and you hung onto it like a drowning man might cling onto a life jacket after jumping from the Titanic, with little hope of long-term survival. Although there may have been icebergs to the left of you, icebergs to the right, you were alive, safe for now. That’s when your teacher invariably asked you to read the next sentence.
By the time I reached my teens, my phobia of reading out loud had reached its zenith. By now, I was fumbling my way through Latin, French and Irish texts, and no matter who the teacher was, or what the subject, everybody in the class was expected to contribute. The written word, itself, held no demons for me any longer. I spent many nights tucked up in bed with a good book, a reading lamp illuminating words which kept me awake into the early hours of the morning. However, once pressed to share the joy I normally took from this solitary practice, the old tongue-tied-ness regrouped. During English class, my contribution to the public reading of our prescribed novel was a stammering, incoherent, deconstruction of a brilliant text into its disjointed parts. Somehow a working engine seemed to be transformed into scrap metal as I read. These readings can best be thought of as my contribution to dystopian storytelling at its best. The emotional scars ran deep. By the time I left school I was sworn off ever reading in public again, yet here I am, a mountain of clean linen behind me, a microphone before me and a script challenging me to a duel.
I first hit the un-mute button for my video work. A silent how-to on making apple jelly, or recovering a lampshade, sort of defeats the purpose of empowering others to follow suite. So, I wrote a script and set to work. The results have been hearteningly well received. Apple jelly fans are a passionate lot, lampshade lovers, less so, but very much more appreciative, in a quiet sort of way.
This podcast came about because people I knew preferred to listen to, rather than to read blogs.
While writing was an obsessive-compulsive disorder in my case, reading them was something I was reluctant to do. There was little point. My bleatings would get lost in the wilderness that is cyber space as it competed with millions of other writers who vied for your attention. But others were adamant, which is why I am standing in a linen closet, talking to myself right now.
The reason I am here is that getting the sound from the writer’s lips to the listener’s ears is fraught with difficulties.
Some people believe that so long as they possess an I-Phone they hold the key to worldwide, podcast domination. They believe that the phone is a multi-media, Swiss army knife of sorts, capable of keeping you current on your twitter feeds, posting pictures on Instagram, or filming, and editing, award winning documentaries. Can there be any doubt that recording a podcast must be simplicity itself?
The answer is yes. Sound is a devious creature. Without proper acoustic dampening, a bedroom recording sounds like one made in the deepest, darkest cave ever discovered. It becomes an echo chamber where whatever you say reverberates for eternity, even if you use a proper microphone; one shielded from direct contact with the p sound, which left unguarded, hits the eardrum like an out of tune base drum.
Whenever I sit at my desk and type, the outside world makes itself heard. Birds spread the message that they ready to settle down with any mate eager enough to respond to their lusty warblings. The wind today is from the east, and every April shower that comes along announces itself by hammering against my window, making this room unsuitable for recording anything, other than a shopping list.
Anybody who has read my blog about my writer’s desk will remember that I am a guest in my mother’s home. She has the ultimate say on any changes which get done to her house. And she is a no-changes-to-my-house kind of a person. This is ok with me, but it means that improvisation is required, if I am to record anything which meets even the most basic audio standards.
This is why I record my podcasts in the hot press. It is the only room in the house without a window, which means that the winds can blow as hard as they like without rattling glass panes, and birds can have the most raucous of orgiastic feasts, and my mic shall remain deaf to their antics. The clothes, too, are useful, as the washed linens, piled high on shelves all around me, dampen reverb, and make this room the only echo free chamber the house has on offer.
It is a strange feeling, though, standing before a microphone, script before me, underwear piled up high all around me, to read my work into a microphone in the hope of capturing something of the spark which tickled my imagination and brought me, willingly, to my writer’s desk with an urge to share these thoughts.
What drives me to splutter into the microphone, I cannot say. It is not an easy process. There is the problem of breath control. Really, an actor is more suited to this job than an author. A writer may hear voices as he writes, but that does not mean he can read them back to you as they were imagined. There are the coughing fits too, hay fever in no friend to a man locked in a hot press with a manuscript and a microphone. And what will people make of my voice? Is my accent off-putting? Perhaps it speaks of white privilege. Is it too male? To deep? Too squeaky? Body image may cause all sorts of neurosis, but when you are stuck with a voice recorder, watching audio levels rise and fall with your voice, in a stuffy little room, you can get well past neurosis and enter the gates of total funk.
And if you supress that panic all the way to the end of the blog, the process is only half-way through. Now comes the edit. Your first opportunity to listen to messages from a linen closet. Only, now you get to see your voice as well as hear it. Waveforms appear before you and accuse you of whispering here, or shouting there. If you are like me, you cannot tell a lut from a decibel, so the screen you face is more like an art instillation than anything else. It seems deliberately obscure. But with the help of YouTube videos, you eventually have a file ready for podcast. Whether anybody will listen to your finished recording, is not really a question that bothers you. You have had your say. You have read every word of your blog without interruption, sarcasm, or laughter stopping you. You have given voice to the words on the page, sometimes, that is the only thing that matters.
According to my sisters, no Gemini should ever contemplate giving birth to a Pisces. Thankfully my mother ignored this advice, in the way she ignores most advice, not that her choices (many of which brought permanent frowns to the faces of the tut-tutting classes,) seem to have done her any real harm. As a result of such independent thinking, she failed to consult an astrologer before being so feckless as to conceive me. I am also fairly certain that she failed to consume folic acid as part of the baby having procedure. Folic acid was not in fashion back then. The harvesting of amniotic fluids would also have seemed barbarous science fiction to her generation, scans unnecessary and as to discovering the sex of the child before it was born, that would only have ruined the surprise. Remember, those were the times when naming a child before it was born was considered tempting fate.
So, she had a Pisces, poor thing, at least according to my sisters. Whether this is true sympathy for my mother, or some sort of accusation levelled against me, I cannot say. Suffice it to say, that according to them, it completely explains my mother’s relationship with me. What this is, is impossible to say, but according to my astrology hooked sisters, our relationship is fraught with confusion and misunderstanding. This may be so, but if it is, I explain it to myself as a generational gap, or personality differences. My sisters think otherwise. They tell me that we are merely actors in some Greek play; comedy, or tragedy they never say. Mostly, I ignore such talk, but sometimes I have cause to pause and wonder.
For instance, when my mother asked me to jump from an aeroplane, just what had she in mind? She had never, herself, expressed any desire to leap from a plane at five thousand feet and allow gravity do its worst. What was this about? Had her stars aligned her against me? Was the moon holding water? Was Neptune up to no good? Perhaps Mars was even redder than usual. Her request baffled me on so many levels.
My male role model, my father, was afraid of heights, enclosed spaces, being buried alive, and gardening (least it ruin his golf swing.) This may make him sound like a wuss, but he was no wuss, so long as his feet were firmly on low lying ground, and nobody was nailing him into a coffin while there was breath still left in his body.
However, he was generous with his neurosis, sharing them with anyone who would listen. Maybe because of this, I fancied that I too suffered from a fear of heights. Whatever the reason, when my mother went on a charity drive and asked me to jump from an aeroplane, for whatever cause she was supporting, I said yes. My theory being that, by facing my fears they would retreat to the side-lines and therefore be less of a nuisance.
It is all very well to sit on a barstool and indulge such a theory, but to turn up on a cold Spring morning as sheep are being herded from the runway tests one’s resolve. Seeing them ushered into a holding pen might have given me pause for thought but looking at the small aeroplane close to them was reassuring. Dowdy and humble sure, but it seemed airworthy. Just as this thought crossed my mind, a minibus pulled up beside it. Men got busy, jump leads were produced, an electrical umbilical cord was attached to the plane and my palms began to sweat, despite the cold. Still, I reasoned once the engine was started and up to speed… I shivered, gave up on reason and continued to the clubhouse. It is, after all, emotions, not reason, that drive people to greatness or their doom. My emotional investment was twofold, money had been raised for a good cause, backing down would have meant no money. There were also friends who had jumped before me. There would have been no end to the slagging if I turned and ran away now. I am sad to say I was driven by shame.
I would like to say that the reason I was feeling fragile as fifteen first-time jumpers huddled together in a cold shed, was the early hour, however that is not true. My confidence had been lowered by what I had seen outside. Remember, these were solo jumps. We were not going to be conjoined with an instructor. We were going to have to find our own way down, though gravity would lend a helping hand, as our instructor pointed out when he stood before us and said,
“This is an adventure sport; people die doing it. Anybody who wants to leave, do so now.”
Heads turned; frightened eyes scanned the room for people brave enough to leave. But we were all cowards, more willing to jump from a small aircraft, than to look tiny in our friends’ eyes.
We then had a twenty-minute lecture about the joys of being splattered on tarmac, of having our legs broken, what to do if our parachute failed to open, and how to open our emergency shoots, as we dropped like a stone, when our main chutes failed. Fifteen sets of ears listened, and some brains may have absorbed the information. However, having teaching experience, I would imagine that at least five of those present heard nothing above the, ‘What-the-hell-am-I-doing-here,’ voices screaming in their heads.
You may wonder why I was still willing to go through with the jump, aside from the shame of dropping out. The answer is that everyone I knew who parachuted from a plane had survived uninjured. In other words, the technology was proven. I also remembered an evening spent with a one-armed golfer as he reminisced about being in a parachute regiment during the second world war. His scariest jump, he told me, was from a balloon basket. It was a straight fall, as opposed to jumping from a plane at one hundred miles an hour. Which means that you are moving one hundred miles an hour sideways as gravity takes hold of you and begins to pull you down to earth. The balloon jump was even scarier, he believed, than a night-time leap into the darkness. Based on his opinions, I would be pumping less adrenaline than if I were jumping from a basket.
Eventually, after learning how not to break a leg when landing, how not to castrate myself with the parachute harness – by tightening the straps correctly – the instructor pulled me aside for the hand inspection. Hand might be over stating things, hook would be more accurate. He asked me to raise my hands to see if the hook was high enough to catch one of the toggles which steer the parachute. We agreed that the hook was up to the job, it was all systems go.
Lots were drawn, soon myself and the others of the long straw brigade were watching the first batch of jumpers huddle together in the aircraft. You could argue that it is better to get the ordeal over with quickly but be assured none of us lotto winners wanted to exchange places with any of the sardine-like creatures now squeezed into the plane. My heart practically bled for the jumper who would be first out of the aircraft, first to count to three, to wait for the chute to open and slow their descent.
Finally, the aircraft was fully loaded with scared, novice jumpers. Our instructor issued last minute orders and was about to join his students when confusion arose in the ranks. People spilled from the plane and a protesting; would-be parachutist crawled from the bowels of the aircraft. White-faced, he removed his helmet and handed it to the instructor, who immediately turned and gave it to me. Likewise, I was handed the main chute, along with the emergency one and, with no time to think, slipped into the harness and tightened up the straps.
There was no time to consider whether Saturn had gone retrograde in my chart, or if the stars had decided that, like a Final Destination victim, it was my time to die horribly for cheating Death some time before. There were quite a few moments to choose from. Whatever the reason, it was time to jump. Worst of all, using the ‘last-in-first-out’ rule, it seemed as though there was a big number one written on my back, I was going to be the first person out of the plane.
The aircraft would, no doubt, have been comfortable enough if it had passenger seats, or a door. Aside from the pilot, nobody got a seat, a lesson Ryan Air could learn from. As if confirmation were needed about the number on my back, I found myself sitting in the doorframe, half-in-half-out of the aircraft, the instructor, a lead weight on my feet keeping me from tumbling from the plane at least until we were airborne.
There were a minimum number of pre-flight checks where the passengers were concerned. There were no airhostesses prattling unintelligibly about storing your possessions in the overhead lockers. All I heard was the shout from the instructor, “Keep your feet off those pedals.” That’s when I saw the terrified jumper sitting beside the pilot. There is no way of knowing what size his feet were but, clad in walking boots, they seemed enormous and perilously close to the pedals before him.
The engine roared into life. The plane rolled forward and gathered speed. I watched sheep droppings fly into the air as the plane raced towards a hedge at the end of the field. My imagination was dwelling on fireballs as my mind flew into nightmare mode. All I could think of, as my shoulder dug into the doorframe, were size 12 boots pawing at the controls, keeping us on the ground just a second too long. Oddly enough, I now thought that it would be safer to jump from the plane at five thousand feet, than to stay on board for the landing.
There are things no novice jumper is ever prepared for as they take that leap of faith. The silence for one. Then the view. When you look down everything is flat. Two dimensional. Disorienting. You feel lost. You find yourself asking, where did that big X you were told to aim for get to? Then you find it. The chances of you landing near it are slim, but there is a feeling of triumph at having found it. There is no doubt in your mind that you won’t land in the same field as the big white letter which marks the spot. The odds are in your favour. It is a big field after all, but with the wind at your back…
Then you spot the twenty-thousand-volt power lines beneath you. It is time to panic. You frantically pull a toggle and, instead of turning in a different direction, you become a human spinning top. So, you ease off on the toggle and drift away from the cables only to find yourself about to straddle a barbed wire fence.
Now, if a harness can damage you digging into your crotch, what can a barbed wire fence do to you? It is far tougher than nylon after all and sharper too. This is a rough translation of the OMG thoughts which ran through my head seconds after my twenty-thousand-volt power line incident. Unasked for scenes flashed behind my eyes.
It seemed that an accident and emergency ward featured in my imminent future. Young nurses swarmed into my imagination, gathered around my trolley, and eyed up the damage. They were wide-eyed, their heads craning forward to better inspect my injuries; their eyes both horrified and fascinated in equal measure. I could have spent all day in my imagination, watching them watching me, getting high on hospital smells, but thankfully my parachute training kicked in.
By now I was an old hand with the toggles. Not that I understood them, but they gave me an illusion of control. I pulled and prayed, missed the fence by a few yards as I landed safely. Who cared that this was the wrong field? I was finally down, my legs appeared to work, even if they were weak. It was time to stand up, look around, assess where I was and make my way back to the adjoining field. Somewhere in the back of my mind the there was only one question that needed answering, were the pubs open yet?
I arrived home a little later than expected, and right on the legal drink/driving limit – they were much more generous back then. This is ok, Pisces are known to like their drink. And as for my Gemini mother, she was her usual smiling self as she greeted me at the doorway before waving goodbye and heading into the night. I was home safely, she had places to be, the world was back to normal.
It was only later that my sisters told me that my mother had rung them, wondering where I had gotten to. The sun had gone down, after all, and only the foolhardiest would parachute in the dark. It was reassuring to learn, that no matter how the stars aligned, my mother did wonder at the folly of throwing her Pisces son from a plane.
I gleaned one lesson from this ordeal. The next time somebody asks me to jump, I will ask ‘how high?’ before agreeing. As for my phobias. I still have a problem with heights. But that’s probably just vertigo.
A boxer from the nineteen fifties once famously said after losing a fight, “I should’a stood in bed.” All of us know this feeling, all of us have had days where, by the end of it, we wish that we had cancelled all appointments, disconnected the doorbell, turned off all wakeup alarms, curled into the foetal position, under the sheets, and let the day pass us by. Days like that often begin well enough, with you springing out of bed, haring down the stairs and feasting on a cooked breakfast. It is as though the weather forecast is for a bright, sunshiny day; only somebody forgets to mention the scattering of tornadoes on the horizon.
However, this was not one of those days. The clouds of doom had already gathered around me, even as the alarm clock sounded.
I felt like a Duracell Bunny that had run a marathon, all my battery juices were used up. The only thought that got me out of bed was that to arrive in the kitchen after my mother would be a mistake. Like most older people, routine plays a major part in her life. Kettles must be boiled as cod-liver-oil is drunk, cough bottles administered before inhalers are breathed-in and the tablets sorted through. Nobody wants to be in the kitchen queue behind my mother, at least not before coffee runs through their veins. And so, I rushed down the stairs ahead of her, organised coffee and sat down with a slice of brown bread to consider my position. It seemed terminal to me; by any objective measure, whatever ailed me, would prove fatal.
Being a man, stoic and all that, I decided to finish breakfast before writing up my last will and testament, lying down, crossing my hands over my chest and allowing my spirit to depart uninterrupted. I had a second cup of coffee and worked out the logistics of my death, (the where being uppermost.) Should my corpse be discovered on the living room sofa, or on my bed? Were the sheets clean enough to die on? Or should they be changed first? Which would leave the best impression on the undertaker? For some reason, consideration of my mother’s reaction to my sudden demise failed to register. I scarcely noticed her arrival at the breakfast, my mind being busy working through a selection of handle choices to compliment a budget coffin.
Hobbies change depending on our age. This thought occurred to me when my elderly mother joined me and gave me her itinerary for the day. The list ran something like this: bloods to be drawn at ten thirty, harass library staff for a political tell-all about Boris Johnson after eleven, find a coffee companion before lunch, see doctor after lunch.
Doctors and nurses play a large part in the social life of the elderly; competition is fierce. Where women gain social status in their youth by comparing caesarean scars, they rely on larger scars in later life. Having only one hip replacement is the equivalent of losing your virginity, it hardly shows any real interest in life, or men, or sex, or anything at all.
“You have to exercise,” my mother regularly advises a neighbour whose progress after her first hip replacement fails to impress my mother. “I was back driving six weeks after mine. Six weeks. Use it or lose it, as they say.”
In a quick counterattack our neighbour proves her body more decrepit that my mother’s by stating, “They want me to have one of those… Those…” words fail her, and she squirms in her chair until she finds a way to continue. “Those pro… Things with the camera.” She pauses, eyebrows quizzically high, how can she say what she can’t even contemplate; polite society would never allow such scandalous talk. With some sketchy hand gestures, she leans forward and slowly continues. “Up… Your…”
“Colonoscopy,” my mother is a fan of the colonoscopy, there is a lot of social credibility to be gained having coffee with friends while comparing and contrasting the effects of taking ‘that stuff’ the night before having the procedure. “There is nothing to worry about,” my mother reassures her before bragging, “Had it done dozens of times, myself.”
“They are not sticking anything into me,” protests our neighbour, “I had three feet of my bowel removed, there is nowhere for the camera to go.”
What a boast! Almost as good as having both hips and knees done, with the hint of a shoulder operation on the horizon.
“That’s nothing,” my mother splutters, “You have thirty-three feet of gut remaining.”
She resisted telling her how many full-grown pythons that might be. Pythons were last week’s bowel measurement yard stick.
Today, my mother had less-reptilian things on her mind and was not in open competition with any of her old friends. She was only having bloods done and a quick review of her meds later in the day. Move along, nothing to brag about here.
When she went to see the vampire nurse, I took a covid test and plumped up the cushions on the sofa, my deathbed would at least be comfortable. What can I say, I’m a man, we worry.
The test was negative, not even the hint of a line. And that after putting a long stick up my nose, against my better instincts. No sensible medical practitioner would ever recommend such a course of action. But the test hailed from China, which is why the instructions suggested a conspiracy to have all westerners self-lobotomise. A far more convincing conspiracy theory, you must admit, than to imagine that the US taxman is arming up, and planning to murder tax defaulters in Iowa. Oddly enough, I did not question the test results, just the method of getting them. The human mind is a strange place to hang out.
Feeling more wretched as the day dragged on, I stayed as far away from my mother as I could by hiding in my office. False readings are known, and us men are sensitive about such things. I was not taking any chance of infecting another person. It was a shock, therefore, when the door to my office burst open and my mother entered, demanding that I take her to A&E.
The question why, resulted in a terse, ‘Doctor’s orders,’ by way of reply. No amount of direct questioning, or around-the-bush probing, resulted in any further explanation as to why my mother was being sent to A&E.
There followed a drive to the hospital, windows open, masks on; maybe I did doubt the test results a little after all. Once there I did what everyone else does, I parked on two yellow lines, behind a deserted taxi, and unloaded my mother. There was doubt in my mind about entering A&E while in a twilight zone between covid states. I dithered for about 30 seconds too long on the yellow lines; car to the left of me, mother to the right. This was all the time it took for my mother to escape. “I’ll call you when they’re done,” she said over her shoulder, before disappearing behind a temporary prefab. If only my mind, or body, had been working, but they were not…
I heard nothing from my mother until I received instructions to put a bottle of white wine into the fridge at about six o’clock. It took a million questions to discover that there was a drip attached to her arm, though she had no idea why. Then she was gone. For once, the Chase went unwatched. I packed a suitcase with nightwear and reading material – just in case – and tested negative once more.
Then the phone calls started. How’s Ma? What’s wrong with her? What did the doctors say? Has she been admitted? When is she getting out? ‘Ask her yourself,’ I told my sisters, only to be told, ‘We have.’
The strangest communication came at ten o’clock when mid-call my mother captured a passing nurse and pressed her for an update.
“Am I being moved to the hospital, proper?” my mother asked.
“You are in the hospital,” replied the nurse. “This is Portlaoise hospital. You’re in the hospital. Don’t you worry. Why don’t you sit down here?” Having dismissed my mother as demented, she left her to her own devices. In her own way the nurse muddied the plot, rather than clarified it.
The witching hour approached and passed without news. Then, five minutes after midnight the call arrived, the Jim taxi was required, so I hit the road.
It seems to me that hospitals are designed to be impenetrable by anybody except maze runners. Despite this, there were parking spaces in the set down area of the A&E. I abandoned my car, leaving the parking lights on to indicate my intention of leaving immediately, and headed into the surreal world that is the emergency department. Patients were half-glimpsed through windows, ambulance doors were ajar, voices whispered reassurance on the night air. A young man walked past me heading up the ramp to freedom as I was drawn deeper into the bowels of the earth. Thankfully, my mother appeared before I reached the doors to A&E, accompanied by a male nurse. That’s when we heard the crash. I looked over my shoulder and realised that the sound could have come from only one place.
I indicated to the nurse, whose head was facing in towards the set down area, that he’d find me there. A short sprint later and I found myself at the top of the ramp staring at two young men who stood beside a taxi. Of all the warning plates to be seen on cars, (L plates, N plates, or taxi plates,) the taxi plates are the ones that make the driver in me shudder. They are the reddest of warning signs. The pull off the road, signs. Lunatic at large, they seem to shout. And looking at the crash site, it occurred to me that the level of evil genius required to hit my car was astounding. There had been three car lengths between us when I pulled into the set-down area and yet the driver had managed to cover that distance at speed, in reverse, and used my car to stop his progress down the ramp, straight to the doors of A&E. A closer inspection showed that my bumper was battered but unbowed. My mother appeared by my side, ready for battle. She looked from the battered bumper to the two young men who faced us and managed to get only in a few argumentative words before I convinced her to sit into the car and allow me to handle the situation.
The young men who faced me as the church bell rang one AM were obviously immigrants. Goofy and contrite they reminded me of the Irish of my generation, when we first landed in England, Europe, or the USA. Looking at the crash site, it was practically impossible not to smile at the bloody-minded stupidity it had taken to hit my car. Anger and amusement vied for dominance, but anger had no chance here. Details were exchanged and they drove into the night with a promise to phone me the next day. I no more believed that they would phone, as I buckled up, than I believed that a hair-fairy would reseed my bald scalp during the night.
But phone they did, with offers to fix the car if necessary. Smiling, I hung up and looked at the positive line on the test kit. I still believe that there is only one person who could have given me covid. But who will ever believe that some ninety-year-olds have a busier social life than their sons? Still, despite all the positives, there was no sign that a hair-fairy had visited in the middle of my night’s REM cycle.
The harvest is in, the days are getting colder, the nights shorter and clock hands roll back one hour. Is it any wonder that we begin to speculate on the dark side. It seems to be part of the human condition, to ponder darkness when all is light. Afterall, the larders are full, the rooves waterproof, yards tidy, and yet our minds are uneasy. It is a time to rest, but instead we contemplate death and terrify ourselves with stories of sinister ghouls, ghosts, and creatures from the underworld. Maybe these tall tales are the equivalent to an emotional roller-coaster, cheap thrills for people not yet ready to face the harsh realities of the Winter neigh upon us. Or maybe it is something more, the primal need to imagine the darkest pathways of our minds. Maybe we are investigating ourselves when checking the porous boundaries between good and evil, wondering how firmly we believe what we think we believe, and what it would take to turn us from half-way civilized to barking mad barbarians. (Sorry to those who are offended by the word, I realize that your beard-sprouting tribe is merely a fashion victim tribe, not an empire smashing one.)
Sifting through our folklore, one can only wonder at the almost limitless boundaries of our Celtic ancestors and ask which mushrooms they were taking when inventing the Pooka, a shape shifting figure of a sinister nature. But then, even our fairies are sinister. My grand mother would never say that a baby was beautiful, just in case the fairies were listening. As they could not have children of their own, they resorted to stealing them. The Red man, a Leprechaun on steroids, kidnapped people late at night and carried them off to his secret hiding place in a red sack. He then beat them until the sun was ready to rise, when he released his prey with no memory of what had happened to them. There are others, many others, but all come with a warning, stay away from the netherworld, nothing good ever comes from there.
Knowing this, as Halloween approached, our ancestors recognised the danger of this night, when spirits roamed the earth with malice on their minds. They took precautions, lit lanterns in windows and wore disguises to trick the spirits as they walked among us. They were not stupid men and women, our ancestors, they knew evil abounded and took precautions against it. So, be warned, dress yourselves up as an evil spirit, least you are recognised as human and become the host for a lost soul in need of a warm body.
There is ample proof that Halloween originated in Ireland before emigrating to the US with the starving hordes of the nineteenth century. There, it and the Irish thrived, before the celebrations were returned to us as an American festival. But sadly, their festival is only a cartoon version of our own, a children’s festival, a ‘Halloween Light,’ a ‘No-Cal,’ emotional event with nothing to engage the imaginings of a slightly depressive Irish person, who has only a candle for light, a turf fire for heat and a glass of poitin for spiritual guidance. God knows what answers will come to such a person if left to their own devices. Better for them to join a crowd, to play music on the fiddle maybe, bang heels in time to a dance tune and listen to soulful, traditional melodies sung late into the night. If nothing else the noise may keep the spirits away for another year and keep all here, in middle earth, safe until they return once more.
It will not come as a surprise to anybody who knows me, that my main interest in Halloween is food related. The barmbrack caught my imagination early, as it seemed to be more of a storage unit than a foodstuff. As a child, I loved fruitcake and was puzzled by a cake that one had to sift through before eating. Nowadays, the tradition of filling the barmbrack with greaseproof covered gifts might seem crazy, but to any child of my generation it was a given. The fruit bread was more treasure trove than cake.
Barmbracks were also traditionally fortune tellers whose palms you did not have to cross with silver. They came laden down with discreet packages. There was the ring, which foretold marriage. Every year my sisters used the barmbrack as a supersized pincushion while they stabbed it to discover the metallic sound they hoped indicated where the ring might be found. Of course, they might only discover the penny, which meant wealth. Not as warm-blooded as the man of your dreams, but for me, in truth, it was what I was looking for. No one wanted the cloth. This meant poverty. But what about the matchstick, the unluckiest omen of them all, the harbinger of Death, wood representing a coffin. And in our childish way, we thrilled at the thought of people chocking on the matchstick, thus immediately fulfilling the prophesy. Chances were though, that you discovered it halfway through chewing on your slice of cake and simply lost a filling rather than your life. Though in many cases the matchstick was as easy to swallow as the stalks left in the dried fruit. In fact with the cheaper barmbracks, you could easily eat the matchstick and hardly notice, because the cake was nothing more than fruity sawdust. Sadly, the tradition of making cheap barmbracks persists, decent ones are expensive, baking your own might be an idea.
Ignoring bangers and bonfires and the howling of dogs driven mad by the noise, the best way to celebrate Halloween is to sit in a darkened room and curl up with a scary book. The taller the tale the better. The further it stretches the imagination, the more likely you are to gain an insight into your own darkest secrets and desires. Let your inner monsters roam the channels of your mind, let them scare you, let the goosebumps stand out proud. It is only one night after all. Everything will be forgotten with the dawn, the monsters put to bed, your fears purged. However, your feelings of foreboding may have deeper foundations than you realize. Your feelings that reality has lost its footing is nearer the truth than you might like to admit. Perhaps, even as you wake up to the lingering smell of bangers on the air, you feel the shift. Like the hero in a horror film, bloody and limping from the carnage of the night before, there is still that dread that evil has only been temporarily put in its place. Your suspicions are correct. Hell on earth is about to break free. The most evil of spirits, faux humans from the marketing industry, have organized a media coup. As of November 1st you will bombard by Christmas advertisements for the next two months. Somehow this is a scarier thought than anything dreamed up by our ancestors to spook us as the spirits roamed the earth on Halloween.
This blog was going to be a gripe, given a special category all to itself, hidden somewhere-off-to-the-side. Let’s face it, the ramblings of a menopausal male are best kept hidden, out of sight, deniable. The inspiration had all the ingredients for a non-glamourous investigation into the world of interior design, where common sense often flies out the window as marble kitchens are flown in. It was just supposed to be a minor, steam-releasing moment, until I realised why naming a paint ‘Spanked Bottom,’ so annoyed me.
You see, I love colour in all its variations, its shades, tones, tints, and hues. My gene makeup generously allows my eyes to filter through the visible light spectrum and distinguish the tiniest differences in light frequencies. Colour-blindness would be a nightmare scenario for me. The idea of not absorbing the full impact of vibrant works of art, the delicate intricacies of a starling’s amazing plumage, a busy bee working hard to extract pollen from the heart of a flower is a concept too large for my brain to absorb. The notion that some people will never distinguish between the bright yellows, deep purples, or darkest reds found on the stamen of flowers is enough to make me sigh. Flowers, after all, offer such a wide variety of primal, vivid, and luscious colours as to leave one practically speechless.
My awareness of colour probably began in the late sixties when floral patterns abounded in the world of fashion, when orange was the new black, and tie-dye was a rage that had managed to migrate thousands of miles, from the West Coast of the USA, all the way to Portlaoise.
Awareness does not mean that I loved the psychedelic antics of filmmakers or fashion designers back then. It was as though they had all learned only one rule in college, the rule of complementary colours. Then, stealing only this tiny fraction from Johannes Itten’s seminal work in the field, they streamed onto the streets like four-year-olds clutching their latest toys. Unfortunately, their investigations into the world of light were as shallow as their insights. And armed only with colour wheels they did not wholly understand, using the only rule their minds could half-way comprehend, they delved the world into a garish, visually clamorous universe. Clothes of the time were suddenly patterned from washed-out oranges set against undistinguished blues.
But maybe we can forgive them, this was the late sixties afterall, a time where technical aspiration had yet to fulfil on its promise. However, this was not as true of colour as you might suspect looking at photographs from the era. The creation of colour pigments had been mastered by the mid-twentieth century. Even if the paints themselves were still chemically toxic the colours were pure.
Having said that, the printing of colours onto fabrics has often been hit and miss. It is as though not all colours are created equal when it comes to the dyeing process. This maybe why, as a child, the Irish flag baffled me. From a colour point of view, what was it supposed to be? Green, white and gold, as we were told by a gold-fáinne-wearing Christian brother? Or green, white, and orange, as my freedom-fighter grandfather declared? It did not help that half the Irish flags I saw had a bright yellow stripe, while the more official flags had an orange one. At the time I put the difference down to weathering and cheap dyes, as opposed to a deep denial among republicans that anything orange might possibly exist on the island of Ireland.
Colour is important. Flags attest to this, which is why they never stray far from prime colours. But what of the lesser ones, those which add comfort to a living room and restfulness to a bedroom? Everybody has their own idea on what works for them, or what might impress their neighbours, or a real-estate agent. But, when faced with a multitude of charts, most people still panic. Postage stamp colour strips are not enough to win over the heart and minds of vacillating homeowners. Painters are often booked before colours are decided upon. Then it is decision time. Panic gives way to desperation, logic takes a hike, signs are sought at the bottom of a teacup and mystics often offer as much hope as a colour consultant does. At this crunch point, when at your most vulnerable, the name of the paint may be the ultimate persuader. The decision maker.
And that name may very well come from a marketing company somewhere. This is where the world goes black, where darkness rules, where little men pun. Together with irony-filled women these cynics sit down and desperately pretend to have discovered a potential client’s unique selling point. This is where they argue their case, where they shout each other down to win a contract and get to name your paint. If only you could silence marketing executives: but then, a silent marketing executive would be an oxymoron.
Shakespeare asked, ‘What’s in a name?’ Marketing men would argue, everything. To them the rose is an insignificant thing, the petals invisible and the scent ignorable. The only thought on their minds is how to trademark the word and deprive others the use of it. To them, branding is everything. And while Pavlov could have predicted how some people would salivate at the sight of a dinner plate heading in their direction, he could never have foretold the visceral response of marketing people to the thoughts of new corporate accounts and the performance-based bonuses they promise.
It is as a result of their work that half of Dublin 4 is smothering in ‘Elephant’s Breath,’ a colour so beige as to offend nobody. This over-hyped colour pigment promised so much when I first heard of it from a fashion-conscious, social-climbing lawyer. Having heard the name, but not seen the paint, my imagination was ready for a murky brown at the very minimum, with a large hint of fuggy green, but, no, it’s beige. Am I the only one calling it as it is? Asking why the king has no clothes? Only to be told that he wears the most magnificent suit ever designed by man. Maybe it is time that somebody told him that he is naked, completely exposed for all to see, and pot-bellied at that. But, so long as marketing men sell sizzle, not sausages; sex appeal, not deodorants; freedom, not cars; silliness, not pigment, any hopes of sanity entering the equation any time soon are very low.
These thoughts led me to reverse the normal process of creating a product in need of a name, and instead to wonder what colours marketing men would come up with to match these names, ‘Eve’s Shame?’ ‘Adam’s Apple?’ ‘Botox Eyes?’ And what would they make of, ‘Crocodile Tears?’
A special thanks to Fiona Mallin for allowing me use this birthday inspired blog and to Audry O’Reilly for the anotomically correct illustration of a potato.
For me, the dinner table has always been as much about boisterous conversation as it has been about food. Reeled in from the four corners of the house as teenagers, my siblings and I were expected to be excited by ideas and to contribute to dinner table discussions. These could be on the issues of the day; the need to understand history and why it was important; novelists and their contribution to literature; crime novels with their twists and turns; the lives of poets when compared to their poetry. There was also much animated discussion of drama and dramatists, one of my father’s favourite topics. The only thing we did not discuss at the table was food itself. But somewhere on my journey through life food became important to me. If certain anecdotes are to be believed, this happened early. It seems, that by four, I objected to the taste of gravy made from the same water which had boiled the carrots.
There were cookbooks everywhere about our living room. These migrated from one table to another as my mother looked things up, wrote down recipes for friends or, simply, savoured the idea of eating some extravagant dish or other. All these books were filled with slips of newspaper cut-outs. These contained new recipes, the latest in culinary ideas, and trendy, party foods. It came as no surprise, therefore, when my sister told me that she was putting together a cookbook to celebrate a friend’s birthday. She was collecting personal memories from family members and acquaintances and hoped to interleave them with recipes for her friend. This was to be a very personal cookbook and she wanted me to contribute. After a little brainstorming all my ideas were dismissed, so I decided to dedicate this blog about the humble potato to Fiona, who I hope enjoys reading it as much as I enjoy writing it.
It may seem like an opt out, an Irish cliché to talk about the potato. To even mention something so mundane to a reader of Sunday supplements could almost be classified as a criminal offence these days. To write a complete article about our starchy friend for an accomplished cook, might even be classified by some as a capital offence. But it is not a crime to talk food to a cook. We love to share more than a meal and a bottle of wine. Just as physicists get excited by muons we salivate at the thoughts of everything gastronomic from layered flavours to raw ingredients.
You may think that the potato offers nothing to talk about and that once I have discussed Boxty, Chomp, or Colcannon have exhausted all the spud has to offer. However, that is to underestimate this versatile tuber. And as for the potato being only an only Irish staple, think again. Ever since Christopher Columbus returned from “India” with this new vegetable, Europeans have slavishly worked on branding the potato with their unique, national mark. The Russian Banana sounds interesting, until you realise that it is not a tropical fruit but an oddly shaped spud. The King Edward is not only a cigar, but also a potato, determined to identify with its country of origin. The Duke of York is another piece of chauvinism, as is the French Fingerling. And when it comes to the Irish potato, we had a gem of a spud in the 18th century which the patriots of the time let down when it came to naming. Instead of the St. Patrick or, perhaps, the Finn Mac Camhaill (Mc Cool,) our legendary hero, the potato became known as the Irish Lumpy. It seems that the marketing men of the time had never heard the adage, when marketing a sausage, you sell the sizzle, not the porky bits.
Audry O’Reilly
This versatile tuber comes in many forms, waxy or starchy, boiled or baked, roasted, or mashed; for every need there is a spud. Whether your tastes run to Duchesse Potatoes, or you simply like your potatoes boiled and steamed, a knob of butter melting down its sides, with a parsley garnish to top it off; I bet that your thoughts never stray from the savoury to the sweet. I am not talking about the sweet potato, technically a yam, I mean using the potato as the main ingredient in a dessert.
I have seen chefs pour rhubarb into a potato well. But they were not intentionally creating a dessert. They were using the rhubarb as an extra taste in a savoury dish, in the way an apple sauce is used with pork. I am talking about replacing the pavlova with potato. I agree, it sounds improbable, but that is what one Victorian, Irish housewife apparently did. Sadly, the recipe for this dessert still exists as it was recorded in the kitchen cookbook and passed down the generations. It shows the importance of not recording our mistakes. Check out some YouTube cooking videos if you doubt me on this. Anybody following some of these would-be tv-chefs are doomed to a bad case of indigestion at the very least.
The inventor of this dessert lived in a time when ice cream was a seasonal treat and when strawberries had a two-week window in June. But it was also a time of scientific investigation. A revolution was underway, which could be why this innovative woman strayed from the tried and tested Bread and Butter Pudding, dismissed the Spotted Dick, and had an aversion to milk puddings.
We will never know what drove her down the road to potential infamy. Maybe, she had enough French to have heard the phrase pomme de terre and, being inquisitive, she wondered how stewed apple would compare with the apple of the earth.
Whatever drove her, she would soon have realised the mammoth task ahead. And she did not have the industrial might which could eventually have led to a successful conclusion. (It takes huge resources, afterall, to milk a nut.) While she may have asked herself, if an omelette can be both sweet or savoury, why then not the potato? She evidently did not wait for an answer to reveal itself, because the answers are both obvious and plentiful.
The first objection would have been that of texture, which for a spud is undisguisable. No amount of sugar and lemon can hide the origin of such a dessert. And no matter how heroic the effort in the kitchen, the presentation of such a dessert presents problems. Should it be served hot, or cold? For instance. Hot, lemony, mashed potato does not sound good; cold sounds even worse. Also, imagine it in a bowl before you. What do you see? You see potato, with the jaundiced, unappetising appeal of cold turnip. Is there any way to give it eye-appeal?
Thankfully, nobody ever picked up on the idea of a spuddy dessert, the recipe remained hidden in a family archive for 150 years and the inventive housewife was never ridiculed for her starchy experiments. Today, Ireland’s most famous mashed potato dish is still Colcannon. We may argue over the name when it comes to kale, or scallions, but we do not argue about its taste. It is crunchy and savoury, all the things you expect from a potato dish. It is not a dessert, nor a gold mine -some parents hid pennies in Colcannon when I was a kid. Not that I ever needed bribing to rip into a plate of lemon-free unsweetened spuds. However, it would take a considerable bribe before I pondered a dessert trolly, at the end of a substantial meal, and reached out for a Lemon Potato Pudding.
