A Time to Mourn

A good friend of mine who reads this blog has had a major bereavement.

In sympathy, I'm turning the blog's colours to black, and I'm going to pause blogging for a while as a mark of respect.

May perpetual light shine upon my friend's loved one.

A Bit of Fry and Laurie

Today I found myself thinking about this sketch from "A Bit of Fry and Laurie" , a series which ran from 1989 to 1995. I can't easily find when this sketch dated from.

Basically, it's about a guy who goes to a psychiatrist and loudly announces he's mad and wants to be cured. The psychiatrist is sceptical until the client mentions, in passing, that he writes letters to the newspapers. The psychiatrist picks up some newspapers in his office and asks him if he wrote two (very banal) letters which appeared in them, to which the client cheerfully admits. The psychiatrist then asks him his chest size for a straitjacket (much to the client's satisfaction).

I find this funny because I've had a longstanding fascination with letters to the editor. For a good few years I was an assiduous writer of them. I'm rather proud of my letter-writing days because it's proof (in cold print) that I was pushing against political correctness and other progressive manias when I was relatively young and when such pushback was less common than it is now. (They were mostly written in my thirties. I am now exiting my forties.)

Someone who worked on a letters page once told me that she was, indeed, convinced that many letter-writers were mad.  I don't think mine were missives of madness. But then, I wouldn't, would I?

By the end of my letter-writing days, I had a very good publication rate. I'd guess three-quarters of my letters (or even more) got published, in national newspapers. Of course, I don't know how many letters they get, so maybe there's nothing special about this.

My days of writing letters to the editor were, possibly, a good training in concision of expression. People would often mention them to me and sometimes I'd get correspondence from strangers (always positive).

I'd imagine it's much more difficult to have a letter published in a British national newspaper, given the population is so much larger. I did send a couple of letters to a British film magazine, but those ones didn't get published.

I also enjoy reading the letters pages in archived newspapers.

Once, when talking to a colleague, I expressed disappointment that my letters had never provoked replies along the lines of: "Your correspondent Maolsheachlann Ó Ceallaigh is a complete idiot". He very wittily replied: "Well, it's like phoning for the fire brigade. Everyone presumes somebody else has done it already."

Friday the Thirteenth on my Traditions! Traditions! Traditions! blog.

Longtime readers might remember the Traditions! Traditions! Traditions! blog I set up a few years ago (in 2018, actually), and then promptly abandoned after a few posts.

My idea was for a blog about every sort of tradition, just for the fun of it. No pontificating, moralizing, flights of (attempted) lyricism, kvetching, or anything like that. Just a chatty, magazine-style blog, like Snopes.com (the urban legends blog) before it went all liberal and propagandistic.

I've decided to revive it, and I've begun with a post on Friday the thirteenth (considered as a tradition).

Yes, I know it's not Friday the thirteenth, or anywhere near it. The next occurrence of that date isn't until February. What the heck.

Read it here, if you like.

Belfield

I work in the library in University College Dublin, on the Belfield campus. (Its main campus is Belfield, though it also has a campus in Blackrock and various satellites in other places, even far abroad.)

Belfield is a large greenfield site. The architecture is sixties brutalist, there are lots of trees, several lakes, and a lot of statues. UCD moved here from the city centre in 1964. I've read that one of the biggest champions of the move was John Charles McQuaid, the Archbishop of Dublin, who has become a symbol of everything that is bad and reactionary in Catholic Ireland, but who won praise from many surprising quarters on individual issues.

Belfield is in Dublin 4, the most famous postcode in Dublin, which has been synonymous with the liberal intelligentsia for decades. (RTE, the national broadcaster, is also located there.)

There were various landed estates around Dublin 4 in the past. Belfield was one. Montrose (the plot of land on which RTE stands) was another.

Here's something I find very interesting. I have spent almost twenty-five years working in Belfield, and I've noticed that hardly anybody ever uses the name in Belfield itself.

You might not think that statement deserves italics, but I do.

Nobody ever talks about Belfield, only about UCD. Belfield is only ever really used in a historic context (the move to Belfield), or to distinguish between the Belfield campus and other parts of UCD.

Interstingly, people do use Montrose as a metonym (or stand-in) for RTE, nearly always in a snarky tone. But they don't use Belfield as a metonym for UCD.

How people use place-names is very interesting to me. For instance, it's fairly well-known that, after independence, various Irish placenames were changed for patriotic reason. Queen's County became Laois, and the harbour settlement of Kingstown became Dún Laoghaire (often pronounced Dunleary).

However, although Bagenalstown in Carlow had its name changed to Muine Bheag, the change never stuck. Nobody calls it Muine Bheag. Everybody calls it Bagenalstown. I've just read that there was a plebsicite to change it back in 1975. The "Yes" vote won comfortably, but there wasn't enough of a turnout to reach the threshold.

So why did all those other placenames change, but not Bagenalstown?

In a similar way, I've often wondered why, long after the West had been Christianized, the names of the days of week continued to honour pagan gods. Why was there no attempt to Christianize them, or indeed, to Christianize the months of the year?

I'm rather glad there wasn't. I like throwbacks. But it makes me curious.

March for Jesus

I was on a bus passing through Dublin city centre today when I saw a march leaving the Garden of Remembrance. As there were a lot of red banners, and I'd seen posters for an "anti-racism" march this week, I assumed that was what it was all about. But when I looked closer, I saw the name "Jesus" on the banners. I hadn't heard about this.

I got off the bus and joined it. It went from the Garden of Remembrance to Stephen's Green. There were several big screens, a lot of Christian rock music, prayers, speeches, and so on. RTE, Ireland's national broadcaster-- which rarely inflates figures when it comes to any religious event-- put the crowd at ten thousand. That seems right. There were people of every kind there. The event certainly had an evangelical flavour but there were also plenty of Catholic symbols on display.

It was great to see, and great to join in. To echo a phrase that was on many peoples' lips: praise Jesus!

The Sixth Work

Last night I dreamed I was transferring a small boy, a toddler, from its pushchair to a couch. It wasn't my child. I was taking care of him for somebody else.

The child could speak almost as well as an adult, for some reason.

As I put the child on the couch, he said: "I want the sixth work".

"What's the sixth work?", I asked.

"The Lord of the Rings", he replied.

I handed him the book, which was conveniently nearby. At that moment his mother came in and I woke up.

I've been mulling over this dream, and dreams in general. Why did the child call The Lord of the Rings "the sixth work?". What was my subconscious getting at...if anything? It's not the kind of thing toddlers do in real life.

Why didn't the child just ask for the book by its name? Why did my dreaming mind introduce a complication here, an apparently pointless mystery? Does the subconcious mind seek to reproduce to texture of real life, in which so much of what we experience is mysterious or at least unexplained?

I checked Tolkien's bibliography (once I was back in the waking world). The sixth book that Tolkien published (including both fiction and non-fiction) is The Two Towers, so it doesn't really fit.

Is The Lord of the Rings sixth in some other order of works, by authors other than Tolkien?

Or was it just gobbledygook? Probably.

Dreams are fascinating. Sometimes dreams have a lasting influence on me. I don't believe there's anything supernatural or paranormal going on, but I do believe that some dreams give a profound insight into one's own soul. I don't think this was one of them, but it's still curious.

Postcript: It occurred to me after writing this that it shares a similarity with my recurring dream of the fifth mall. In this dream I am back in the old Ballymun shopping centre, which had a cruciform shape with four covered rows of shops radiating from a central square. They were labelled the North Mall, the West Mall, etc. I found this usage fascinating as a child because I had never encountered the word "mall" before, and I don't think I encountered it till well into adulthood. (Of course, we say "shopping centre" rather than "shopping mall" in Ireland.)

As I mention in the post, in my dream the fifth mall is a much less busy mall, almost unvisited, and with far fewer outlets. It has a strange atmosphere; somewhat forgotten, even somewhat unreal. Its spatial relation to the other "malls" is never very clear, but it's not part of the cruciform.

And that reminds me of another recurring dream I've had, although I get the impression this is a more recent recurring dream. It's the early hours of the morning and I discover a small cinema which is still open (it's open all night) and which is a long way from anything else. I'm surprised to find it open, but I'm somehow aware that there might be another cinema-- even smaller and even more remote-- some distance away. I never go there in my dream, though I want to, and I'm never entirely sure it exists.

Bonkers, right?

Five Thousand Comments!

I never look at my blog statistics any more. Mostly because they're discouraging, but also because I suspect they're fairly meaningless with all the bots crawling through cyberspace. (Which makes them even more discouraging, in my case!)

However, I happened to look at them today, and saw that, as of now, I've had exactly five thousand comments! (On 2083 posts.) It seems like something that should be marked.

Many, many thanks to anyone who has ever commented (most of whom won't read this post, I'm sure).

I do attach considerable importance to comments. A post with no comments always seems a bit of a damp squib-- whether that's justified or not. (For instance, I was surprised and disappointed that there were no reactions to my recent post on why I'm increasingly drawn towards American conservatism. Doubtless it was healthy for my self-importance and pomposity to be deflated!)

Interestingly, I rarely get comments on old posts. I'm somewhat intrigued by that. They're still out there, how come nobody comes on them via random searches? 

The biggest exception to this is my post on why Groundhog Day is my favourite movie.

And also my memories of the Allen Library, since it seems like the only substantial record of the Allen Library online. (Although, funnily enough, I currently have a colleague who also passed through the Allen Library.)