Parlour Games in the Jury Room

This is an article I wrote for the magazine Leaven, which is now (as far as I know) defunct. Yes, it's an old hobby-horse of mine, so I hope regular readers don't groan. I really like the title-- it has a certain ring to it.

Six years ago, I was called for jury duty. The case was quite dramatic and dragged on for two weeks. Much of that time was spent in the jury room, as the barristers duked it out among themselves. Juries are not supposed to discuss the case until it comes to discussing the verdict. Most of my fellow jurors discussed it anyway, but we still had a lot of time to kill.

There was a whiteboard in the jury room, which was presumably intended for the serious business of sifting evidence and presenting theories. One day, the boredom became such that we decided to put it to a less civic-minded use; playing Hangman and drawing visual riddles.

After days and days of boredom, I suddenly felt energised. It had been a long, long time since I played Hangman. It brought me back to childhood, back to the eighties when the only computer in my life was my cousin's Spectrum console-- which I never actually got to use, being restricted to watching my cousin and my older brother play games like War of the Worlds and Back to Skool. (I remember the games took longer to load than they did to play.) It felt good to be back to playing games that didn’t require the mediation of a glowing screen; “making our own entertainment”, as the saying goes.

I assumed my fellow jurors were experiencing the same nostalgia, the same relief from the tyranny of the passive. Then one of them said: “They should have televisions in these jury rooms”. It felt like a kick in the teeth.

All my life, I’ve felt an anxiety about this matter. But what exactly is “this matter”?

It’s difficult to put a name to it. The decay of oral tradition? The loss of folklore? The tyranny of entertainment? The triumph of the electronic? None of those exactly seem to cover it, although all of them apply.

It seems fair to say that, since the advent of radio and television, mass media have become a bigger and bigger part of everyday life. We all live in a mental universe of pop culture. The passivity of radio and TV may have been mitigated by the arrival of the internet-- now anyone can write their own blog or start their own online forum, on any subject whatsoever. However, the mediation of the electronic screen remains, eliminating barriers of time and space in a way that surely has costs as well as benefits. Today we can send a message across the world in a moment, but what of the local legends and sayings and customs that were once protected by those very barriers?

Take, for instance, the case of Irish ballads. Ireland has a phenomenal heritage of ballads-- patriotic, sentimental, local, humorous, and of many other kinds. Up until very recently, as far as I can tell, most Irish people would have had a wide repertoire of these ballads, which often seeped into the written literature of our country. My own father could sing hundreds of them, or so it seemed. Now and again he would recite a verse or two from some obscure ballad, and then comment: “It must be fifty years since I last heard that”. I remember many sing-alongs, during which he and his friends would belt out song after song, from “Monto” to “James Connolly, the Irish Rebel”, never hesitating over a single line.

By the time my father died in 2019, the situation had changed. After his funeral reception, in the Brian Boru pub in Glasnevin, those who lingered over drinks made an effort at a sing-along. Now, however, the words did not come so easily. The youngsters knew no ballads at all, and even the older mourners-- who would have had innumerable ballads on the tip of their tongues twenty years ago-- struggled to get through more than a verse or two. Smartphones were produced to call up the lyrics. “Do you remember when we didn’t need phones to have a singalong?”, asked one person, gloomily.

We don’t sing songs anymore. We don’t tell stories. We don’t swap riddles. We don’t play parlour games. This may be an exaggeration, but it’s not much of an exaggeration. Even joke-telling seems to be on the decline. When is the last time you told or heard an actual joke? When did you last encounter that once-familiar trio, Paddy Englishman, Paddy Irishman, and Paddy Scotsman?

Surely you don’t have to be a galloping reactionary to regret this. You don’t have to deny the virtues of television, cinema and comic books (or even computer games and memes!) to feel that we are losing something.

Where does oral culture persist today? The only vibrant examples I can think of are terrace chants and popular devotions in religious communities. “Ooh, Ah, Paul McGrath” and “Who Ate All the Pies?” may not exactly be poetry, but at least such ditties have their own independent life, passing spontaneously from mouth to mouth without any debt to the culture industries. And it’s comforting to think of the tens of thousands of worshippers, across the face of our land, who can rattle off “Hail Glorious Saint Patrick, the Saint of our Land” or “Sweet Heart of Jesus, Fount of Love and Mercy” at the drop of a hat (or the ring of a bell).

Whether skipping chants and “haunting children’s rhymes” still exist in schoolyards is a question I’m not qualified to answer. I’m rather afraid to find out.

Surely this is something we can all address in our own ways. For my part, I have been memorizing poems for the last few years. I have about ninety of them stored in my brain now. I mentally recite them when I am washing dishes, walking to work, even (though perhaps I shouldn’t admit it) sitting in boring meetings. As long as I keep them refreshed, they’re all mine-- even on a desert island.

Poems I like: The School in August by Philip Larkin

This is a rather tongue-in-cheek poem that Larkin wrote when he was twenty-one, but it always comes to mind in the summer. I work in University College Dublin library and, as you can imagine, there's row upon row of empty desks from early May to late September.

(Anyone who's read this blog for any length of time would realize I work in UCD. But I have a bit of an allergy to people presuming others are familiar with their circumstances-- more particularly, to people who assume that I'm familiar with their circumstances. It seems so self-important.)

Anyway, I wrote an analysis of this poem for the Philip Larkin Society website, which can be read here. I wrote it twenty years ago this year! (The Philip Larkin Society used to have a forum which was one of my very first internet "haunts". I've memorialized it here.)

I'm not claiming this is a great poem, but it definitely catches an atmosphere.

The School in August by Philip Larkin

The cloakroom pegs are empty now,
And locked the classroom door,
The hollow desks are lined with dust,
And slow across the floor
A sunbeam creeps between the chairs
Till the sun shines no more.

Who did their hair before this glass?
Who scratched 'Elaine loves Jill'
One drowsy summer sewing-class
With scissors on the sill?
Who practised this piano
Whose notes are now so still?

Ah, notices are taken down,
And scorebooks stowed away,
And seniors grow tomorrow
From the juniors today,
And even swimming groups can fade,
Games mistresses turn grey.

An Extraordinarily Accurate Prediction

This passage is from an article that appeared in The Irish Press on 12th April 1966, in the midst of the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising. It was written by Charles McCarthy, the secretary of the Vocational Teachers' Organisation, and it's remarkably prescient:

"There was in the men on 1916 a sense of destiny. In these rather concrete and somewhat cynical times I imagine our organized commemoration this year, with its renewal of emotion and almost of sanctification, may well be followed by a period of more critical assessment, inevitable anyway as personal involvement gives way to history, and all the more inevitable as a reaction to romantic restatement.

"Both the messianic patriotism of Pearse and the socialistic patriotism of Connolly will come in for sharper intellectual examination than they have before; and both will be faulted, I have no doubt, very intelligently and quite validly. But while this will be appropriate to a lecture-room, we must remember that these were not lecture-room men..."

(Whenever someone ties a discourse or attitude or atmosphere to a particular setting, like a lecture room in this case, it gives me a thrill. I like the idea that reality shifts-- or at least, shimmers-- according to what space we're standing in.)

The reaction McCarthy was predicting was accelerated by the outbreak of the Troubles in Northern Ireland three years after he wrote. Of course, he couldn't have predicted that.

I'm always impressed when people can see past the atmosphere of the moment. For instance, St. John Paul II was by no means misled by his triumphant reception in Ireland in 1978. If you read the speeches he made on his tour, he could quite clearly see that secularism and materialism were on the rise in Ireland.

Favourite Poems: "Death of an Irishwoman" by Michael Hartnett.

This poem is a bit of an anomaly in my list of favourite poems. It was published in 1975. Other than the work of Philip Larkin and John Betjeman, I don't really bother with poetry that recent. (And, by a strange coincidence, I've just learned that Betjeman and Larkin's last collections were both published in 1974.)

I haven't read a huge amount of poetry by Michael Hartnett, either, although I can't really explain why. I've just looked at some of his other poems now, and they seem pretty good. I should give him a proper look. I guess I expected all his other poems would be typical modernist dreck, and that this one was just a moment of pure inspiration. His other most famous poem is "A Farewell to English", and I thought that one (or the excerpt I read from it) was pretty poor.

This poem, at any rate, is utterly magnificent. And heartbreaking. Some of its lines are actually unbearable-- in the moment that you read them, or think of them. Indeed, this is a poem that, whenever I find lines from it coming into my memory, has me turning my face away from other people, since I expect they'll ask: "Are you OK?". The sort of poem that doesn't just bring a tear to my eye, but makes my whole face crumple.

Lines such as: "She clenched her brittle hands around a world she could not understand."

Or the very next line: "I loved her from the day she died". (Like a kick in the stomach from a Doc Martin boot.)

Or the final line, pure perfection, a line as good as any written in the history of poetry: "She was a child's purse, full of useless things."

I know nothing about the circumstances of this poem's composition and I've read no critical analysis of it. But I very much suspect that it's not just about the death of an Irishwoman, but rather about the death of Ireland itself. The "child's purse full of useless things" being replaced by office blocks, indoor shopping centres, life coaches, play dates, world cuisine, designer labels, rap music, and...

Well, and all the rest of it. It's a familiar litany, and we're all tired of hearing it. Indeed, it seems self-indulgent at this point to even indulge in it. None of us are going to do anything about it, if we even could.

And yet, despite this, every now and again, we get a fresh stab or grief or horror-- at least I do. Even things we assumed would always be there start to disappear. (I've noticed that the line "There won't be a Shire, Pip", from the Two Towers film, has become proverbial in certain online conservative communities.)

Today one of my colleagues-- who describes himself as centrist-- was lamenting that he goes abroad on holidays only to find that everything is now the same as at home. I made my usual Eeyorish prediction (which I fear is really true) that Ireland will be gone in twenty years. He agreed with me.

Was this the prophecy in "Death of an Irishwoman"? I don't know. But, in any case, it's a masterpiece.

("Púcas" is pronounced "pookas" and means "ghosts").

Death of an Irishwoman by Michael Hartnett

Ignorant, in the sense
she ate monotonous food
and thought the world was flat,
and pagan, in the sense
she knew the things that moved
at night were neither dogs nor cats
but púcas and darkfaced men,
she nevertheless had fierce pride.
But sentenced in the end
to eat thin diminishing porridge
in a stone-cold kitchen
she clenched her brittle hands
around a world
she could not understand.
I loved her from the day she died.
She was a summer dance at the crossroads.
She was a card game where a nose was broken.
She was a song that nobody sings.
She was a house ransacked by soldiers.
She was a language seldom spoken.
She was a child’s purse, full of useless things.

Happy St. John's Eve!

It crept up on me this year. I might make some goody later. My attempts at goody have been pretty messy and tasteless, but what the heck?

Here's a reasonable description of the tradition from RTE. It's pleasing to know that people still make St. John's Eve bonfires.

The Poetry of Cliché

I was reading a book this morning and I came across the phrase "the mists of time". As always I felt a frisson of pleasure. It's one of the many clichés that strike me as intensely poetic.

What is a cliché, anyway? We can't be entirely original with every utterance. Why is it OK to use an idiom and not a cliché? What's the difference?

There are some clichés I just hate, such as "life-hack" and "bucket list". (The critique in the link is from Professor Bruce Charlton.) But that's not so much because they're clichés. I hate them because they're so inelegant and banal.

I'm not saying we should always speak in clichés. I'm defending the use of clichés that are especially poetic.

Here's some of my favourites. I know I've mentioned many of them before, in other posts. But what the heck.

The morning after the night before.

A walk down memory lane.

The wit and wisdom of...

Till the cows come home.

The dead of night.

The back of beyond (and the middle of nowhere).

The cold light of day.

Calling a pub a "hostelry", "tavern", or other jokey name.

The last chance saloon (much loved by sports commentators).

Dreaming spires (of academia).

In at the deep end.

As old as Father Time.

The best thing since sliced bread. (What did they say before sliced bread?)

A bumpy ride.

Goes to the movies (as in the titles of innumerable books: Stephen King Goes to the Movies, Philosophy Goes to the Movies, etc. etc.)

The silver screen.

The stroke of midnight.

I'm sure I'll think of more, and add to this post 

A common feature of all these favourite clichés of mine is that they are (in my view) aesthetically pleasing, both in the sounds of the words and in the image they use. I don't like clichés that are coarse or grotesque. For instance, instead of using "the back of beyond" or "the middle of nowhere", people increasingly seem to use phrases such as "the armpit of Ireland"-- or a part of the body even less pleasant than the armpit. I think that's yukky and not at all something to be encouraged.

I also dislike venerable clichés such as "I have my eyes peeled", clichés that are not aesthetically appealing and don't conjure up a pleasing image.

The pleasure I take from clichés actually enriches my life. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and think to myself: "This is the dead of night", which fills me with pleasure. And, on a lazy morning after an eventful day, I relish the phrase "the morning after the night before". (I barely drink so it doesn't really apply to me in the sense of a hangover or a night of carousing.)

Alickadoo!

I encountered this word for the first time yesterday, while reading a memoir. It describes a member of a sports club who doesn't actually play, but who helps out and hangs around the clubhouse. It comes from Irish rugby, although the guy who's memoir I'm reading used it in the context of a rowing club.

You can read a discussion of alickadoos here, from a rugby fan forum.

There's a charming theory of its origin, which seems too good to be true. It's explained in the Dictionary of Irish Biography entry for the person who supposedly first used it, William Ernie Crawford:

One of the great characters of Irish rugby, Crawford is credited with inventing the word ‘alickadoo’ (meaning a non-playing rugby aficionado): when a team-mate preferred to read his book about an oriental potentate than to play poker, Crawford, in his annoyance, exclaimed, ‘You and your bloody Ali Khadu.’

Another theory is that it comes from the phrase "it's all I can do", as spoken by overworked club hangers-on.

The memoir I was reading was written by an Irish doctor, who began his career after World War Two. He mentions that, at that time, it was customary for a doctor to give his first fee from a private client to his mother. But he didn't, both because he was too hard-up and because the banknote was too grubby.

Words and traditions! Two subjects that fascinate me endlessly. I have realized, from sad experience, that other people are less interested. But hopefully my blog readers will indulge me.