A Candle's Flame

 

In Memory of Pope Benedict XVI

 

A Draft Manifesto of the Suburban Romantics

It's been a long-standing ambition of mine to be part of a poetry school (by which I mean, a movement or group such as the Lake Poets, the Pylon Poets, or the Fireside Poets).

I even I had an extended jeu-d'esprit on this blog regarding the Unicorn School of Poetry, which was really just a daydream.

Well, I've finally come up with a serious idea for such a school, and a name for it: Suburban Romanticism. And here is a draft manifesto, which I wrote in collaboration with Dominic N of the Some Definite Service blog.

Suggestions and input are welcome, and anyone wanting to join in this nascent or (pre-nascent) movement is very welcome.

Of course, whenever I write about poetry, I brace myself for the deafening silence. But what can you do? (To be fair, I shared this manifesto on Facebook and, to my surprise and pleasure, there were a few comments.)

1) The Suburban Romantics are on the side of life.

2) The Suburban Romantics favour all the poetic conventions that were the poet's stock-in-trade up to the day before yesterday, especially rhyme and metre.

3) The Suburban Romantics believe that traditional poetic forms (such as blank verse, the sonnet, the ode, the villanelle etc.) are just as valid in the twenty-first century as they were in the seventeenth, eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.

4) The Suburban Romantics do not agree with Thoreau that “the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation”, or with Wilde that “most people exist, that is all”. We celebrate the routine, the ordinary, the workaday, the familiar.

5) The Suburban Romantics are not afraid of sentimentality or nostalgia, nor are we afraid of challenging or subverting sentimentality or nostalgia.

6) The Suburban Romantics do not genuflect before any transitory socio-political orthodoxies.

7) The Suburban Romantics want to evoke mystery, not practice mystification.

8) The Suburban Romantics are nourished at the wells of myth, legend, archetype, the sacred, the proverbial, the folkloric, the sacramental, and so on.

9) The Suburban Romantics do not disdain the topical, the ephemeral, the colloquial, the commercial, and so on.

10) The Suburban Romantics accept that the great majority of people (and perhaps an ever-increasing majority) are destined to live in suburbs, conurbations, commuter towns, housing estates, and so on. We insist that these can be the subject and setting of poetry; not just the poetry of satire and protest, but the poetry of affirmation and celebration as well. We seek the re-enchantment of the world, the transfiguration of the commonplace.

11) The Suburban Romantics have a special respect for Philip Larkin and John Betjeman, who demonstrated beyond all doubt that traditional forms can be used to explore contemporary life.

12) The Suburban Romantics are quite willing to use irony, but not to live in it as our natural element.

13) Suburban Romanticism is not a straitjacket. We do not preclude forays into free verse, rural themes, bleakness, misanthropy, obscurity, or any of the things against which this manifesto is a riposte. But they should be the exception, not the rule.

Not-So-Vital Statistics

Encouraged by an archivist friend, I've recently made back-up copies of everything I've ever posted on this blog. It was a big undertaking.

It meant that I could finally count how many words I've actually written here. I've long wondered about this, but as far as I can see, you can't get this information from Blogger's software.

Well, here goes. Up to my last post, I had written 1,503,723 words on this blog.

I was rather surprised the wordcount wasn't considerably higher.

As for other statistics: I've published 1,962 posts, I've had 4,305 comments (thank you), and I've had 974,995 pageviews (go raibh maith agat).

Sometimes I feel a bit disconsolate at how "niche" this blog has remained. However, I remind myself that it's possibly more widely read than I can tell from comments. I was engaged in some library-related correspondence with an academic in America, some months ago, and was surprised when he recognised my name from this blog, which he told me he'd read in the past. A handful of times, down the years, students in UCD have recognised me from the blog. So I take encouragement from that.

(The picture is Angus Loughran or "Statto", the resident statistician from the 1990's TV show Fantasy Football League.)

The Comics

It occurred to me today that I'd never written about comics, and the role of comics in my own childhood. I've touched on it, but I've never dedicated a whole post to it. This strikes me as extraordinary, given how important comics were to me.

I can't remember when exactly I started reading comics (on a weekly basis), or when I stopped, but I'm guessing it would be from around the age of nine or ten, up until well into my mid-teens.

I read British comics. There were no Irish comics. (There still aren't, as far as I know.) I think these British comics fuelled my anglophilia, they had a very British (and more specifically English) flavour. I'm sure that they used to feature Guy Fawkes cut-out masks in early November.

British comics were very different from American comic-books. They weren't as reliant on superheroes; in fact, they didn't really feature superheroes at all. They didn't have the complex mythology and backstory which American comics had been accumulating for decades.

Thursday was comic day. How fondly I remember it! It was the highlight of the week. I would buy my comics in a newsagent called Miss Mary's, where they would be kept in a box of reserved comics and magazines, always with Kelly scribbled on an upper corner. I would get them while doing the shopping with my mother, and I would be so eager to get stuck into them that I would read them as I followed my mother through the supermarket aisles.

I always got two comics, but they changed over the years. I can't remember the sequence exactly. I'm pretty sure I began with Transformers and Battle. Transformers was based on the toy franchise of robots that transformed into vehicles, weapons, and other things. Battle was (as the title suggests) a war comic that had been going since the seventies.

One of the stories in Transformers involved time travel and was called Target: 2006. It was set twenty years in the future so I must have been reading Transformers by 1986, when I was nine.

Battle eventually merged with Eagle in 1988, and was soon absorbed by it. Eagle was actually much more to my taste; rather than war stories, it concentrated on science-fiction, horror and general adventure. Eagle was always absorbing other comics. At one point, it absorbed the legendary horror comic Scream!, which only lasted for thirteen issues (appropriately) but is very fondly remembered, all these years later. Eagle inherited some of its best stories from Scream, including The Thirteenth Floor, a pleasantly nasty story about a computer called Max which runs an apartment block...an apartment block which doesn't have a thirteenth floor, except one that strangely appears when some malefactor has to be dealt with...

Then in 1990, the Irish soccer team went to the World Cup Finals in Italy and transformed Ireland. I started reading Roy of the Rovers, a soccer comic. At some point, I transferred to a soccer magazine instead, Shoot! I suppose that was the end of my comic-reading days.

Of course, I read other comics. My older brother would sometimes read 2000 AD, a much grittier and more adult-oriented science fiction comic, which featured the famous (or infamous) Judge Dredd. So I read it, too. Its cynicism both excited and disturbed me. There was another war comic called Warlord, which I encountered in the form of annuals. (British comics would release a hard-backed annual issue every year. They still do. These were always a part of our Christmas.)

Funny comics like The Beano and The Dandy weren't really a part of my childhood. I would have seen those as baby stuff. I only knew them through annuals. (I came across a lot of annuals in sales of work, or jumble sales, or whatever you call such events-- there seems to be an extraordinary number of different names for them.)

Although Transformers was a British comic, it was set in America-- Oregon, for the most part, where the Transformers landed when they fled their home planet of Cybertron. Transformers was mostly written by a chap called Simon Furman, and he didn't write down to his juvenile readers. I'm convinced that the comic had a beneficial effect on my vocabulary, as Furman frequently used "grown-up" words in his stories. They weren't very cartoony and they were often quite dark.

They were smart, too. For instance, one story involved one of the Transformers going back in time and getting killed in the past. Letter-writers to the comic pointed out that the character was now stuck in a time-loop. I think this was the first time I encountered a time-loop in fiction, a concept that has never ceased to fascinate me, especially in my favourite film Groundhog Day.

Readers' letters appeared on a letters page where they were answered by one of the Transformers, usually in a humorous manner. When I started reading t it was Grimlock, the leader of the Dinobots-- robots that transformed into, you guessed it, dinosaurs. The letters page was called Grim Grams. I owned the toy version of Grimlock-- he was one of my favourites.

(I could write a separate blog post about Transformers toys, and I might well do so some day. They were my favourite toy as a child, and I collected them avidly. I feel a bit guilty about just how materialistic I was when it came to Transformers. I still have dreams (literal sleepy-time dreams) of owning a complete set of Transformers-- which would, of course, be impossible, as new models are always being released, even still. One of the reasons I liked Transformers was that adults were impressed by them. My sister's friends, in their late teens and early twenties, used to enjoy transforming my Transformers during parties, absent-mindedly, as they chatted about whatever they chatted about. Grown-ups often declared: "They're really clever toys", which gave me a sense of pride. My collection would probably be worth a fortune, except that it was filched by my nephews and nieces without me realizing it. I never kept them in good condition, anyway.)

In fact, one of my favourite things about the Transformers comic was all the editorial content. There was always a sort of prologue on the first page, and a "sneak preview" of the next issue on the back page, as well as the letters page. It gave the whole thing a clubbish atmosphere. I especially liked the sneak-preview; it always showed one image from the next issue, surrounded by a frame of circuitry. This aroused my love of frames, a love that was shared so intensely by G.K. Chesterton that it's the entry-point of his autobiography. I write about this idea here.

I'm having far too much fun writing this post, and I could probably keep it up forever. So, instead of describing each comic in detail, I'll skip to the stories that I liked (and disliked) in each comic.

The most famous comic-strip in The Eagle was Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future. It was a science-fiction story, a sort of Biggles in space. When I started reading The Eagle, it wasn't the original Dan Dare (the story had actually begun in the fifties), but rather a descendant. However, I hadn't been reading it too long when they went back to the original Dan Dare, with a sort of steampunk flavour-- the artwork was extraordinarily good. But I never really liked Dan Dare much, although I did like his arch-enemy the Mekon-- a green, bald creature who floated around on a flying saucer.

Perhaps the most prestigious and serious story in The Eagle was inherited from Battle. It was called Charley's War, and it followed an English soldier called Charley Bourne through World War One (and, later, World War Two). In contrast to most boy's war comics, Charley's War was a very realistic depiction of battle-- it was more of an anti-war comic than a war comic. It was always historically accurate, even something of a history lesson, and the Eagle often printed letters from impressed parents-- which made it all the more compelling to me.

Eagle also had a science-fiction/horror strip called Doomlord, about an alien who comes to Earth to judge it and destroy it. He subsequently changes his mind and tries to defend it from his own race. Doomlord was a pleasingly dark serial, and the alien himself had an impressively scary appearance. (It began as a photo-strip, before I started reading it, then became a drawn strip by the time I came along.)

But my favourite Eagle story had to be Computer Warrior. This featured a kid called Bobby Patterson playing computer games for real-- as an actual character in the games. His friend had been captured in the computer and he had to free him by winning a series of games. The realm in which all this was taking place was called The Nightmare Zone, presided over by a Warlord. Bobby Patterson himself eventually became a Warlord.

I've always been a sucker for anything involving different levels of reality, and Computer Warrior might have been one of my first encounters with this sort of story. It was also typical of the eighties' fascination with computers. They weren't a part of everyday life yet, but they certainly loomed large in the collective imagination.

Roy of the Rovers had a famous story called Billy's Boots. This featured a boy who owned a pair of magical soccer boots, which had belonged to a brilliant striker many years before, and which enabled him to excel on the soccer field. Many websites point out the questionable moral of the story-- don't succeed by your own efforts, but by having a secret advantage! Despite this, and despite the fact that the premise seems quite limited, it managed to hold my interest week after week.

The Eagle comic grew more cynical as the eighties wore on, whether that reflected the zeitgeiest or the presumed increasing maturity of its readers. In 1989, it began to run the story Toys of Doom, in which a rather obnoxious teenager finds a remote-controlled army of toys created by his late grandfather. They might have only been toys, but they could cause real trouble, and provide real protection-- or revenge! The premise was wonderful-- which kid wouldn't love to have such an army? And, even though Nicholas Jardine was a brat, you rooted for him because other kids and adults always seemed to be picking on him.

Comics at this time were full of stories which promoted toy lines, but Eagle featured a rather strange twist on this phenomenon-- Storm Force looked as though it promoted a range of toys, but it didn't. It came about when Eagle (or was it Battle?) lost the license to run stories based on the Action Force toy range. So they came up with a substitute, which was Storm Force. It featured a group of elite mercenaries, led by a square-jawed action hero called John Storm, who had a gun in the place of a missing arm. They included a Scottish ninja (ninjas were big in the eighties), a guy with an "exo-skeleton" which gave him immense strength, a nerdy kid who knew all about guns and computers, and (this was the most original character) a chap called Porcupine, who wore a suit made of knives which rose up when he was angry, or ready for battle, or something. Storm Force was pretty good. Readers even got to asking when Storm Force action figures would become available, but they never did.

Is anyone still reading? I could go on all day. Perhaps some people who loved these comics back in the day will come upon this post. Just writing it brings me back to that far-off, strange country, the eighties. I remember reading my comics as I ate my favourite snack-- three sausages rolled up in buttered pieces of bread, like hot dogs. (I'd never had a hot dog, as far as I remember.) I can almost hear the melted butter dripping onto the pages.

I don't read comics anymore. As unfashionable as it might be these days, I do tend to think that comics are for kids-- for dipping into nostalgically now and again, perhaps, but not really suitable reading for adults. The whole idea of "graphic novels" is very unappealing to me. But perhaps I am narrow-minded.

It's interesting to me that these comics have left a very faint popular culture imprint. You can find a few websites dedicated to the Eagle and other titles, but I never (or extremely rarely) hear about them unless I go looking. It's a huge contrast to American comics, Batman and Spiderman and all the others being familiar to everybody. None of the kids I knew read comics, and certainly not the comics that I read.

One more thing. I can remember coming across a girl's comic once, when I was on holiday on my aunt's farm in Limerick. I don't know where it came from. I remember it featured one story set in Tibet (or some Tibet-like mountainous country), which involved magical holy men, and an avalanche set off by noise.

Ridiculous as it sounds, never in my life was I struck by the delicious and shocking otherness of the feminine as I was when I read this comic. I'd never suspected there was such a thing as a girl's comic. It was just like a boy's comic...except completely different! I think the paper was even pink (or maybe orange). No experience in my life, including those involving actual flesh-and-blood women, has ever startled me so much with the strangeness of sex and sex difference. I think it was the sudden awareness of female subjectivity, that girls had their own adventures and heroines and imaginary worlds, that did it. Perhaps the setting of the Tibetan mountains added to the sense of discovery and exoticism.

And then there is my dream of Legacy, and the Snow Issue of Transformers...but I have to end somewhere...

Happy Easter!

I won't get another chance to blog over the Triduum, so I wish you all a happy Easter.

As I've often said on this blog, I love special times and seasons. And which is more special than Easter? Indeed, it surpasses the capacity of human language.

In the lives of the saints and visionaries, we see ample proof that God takes the liturgical calendar very seriously. For instance, the death of St. Gemma Galgani seems to mirror Christ's Passion in a very mysterious way.

Going with my recent practice, I've tried to change the blog's theme to gold and white (which will sadly be incongruous with the sombre nature of Good Friday), but I can't seem to work out how to change the colour of the blog post titles this time. Oh well.

Letters to Malcolm

I remember reading an Amazon review of C.S. Lewis's Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer which confidently asserted that the "Malcolm" of the title was Malcolm Muggeridge, the English journalist and writer who became an outspoken Christian in his later life. (It's still up.)

This isn't true, of course. The Malcolm to whom Lewis was writing was imaginary. But just yesterday I came across a book which is full of letters to Malcolm Muggeridge. It's called Searching for God in Britain and Beyond: Reading Letters to Malcolm Muggeridge, 1966–1982. The author is David G. Reagles (what makes someone decide to use their middle initial, incidentally?).

It draws on the thousands of fan letters that Malcolm Muggeridge received for his religious writing. Unlike some authors, Muggeridge was very appreciative of this fan mail, and very responsive to his readers; not only writing back, but even sending them copies of his books, and meeting with them in person. He kept the letters in the hope that someone would write a book such as this one.

Muggeridge is a strange case. He has nothing like the stature of C.S. Lewis or G.K. Chesterton, perhaps because he was unwilling to engage in traditional apologetics. I rarely hear anybody quote him, even conservative Christians. Nevertheless he seems to have spoken to many people in his own time, and his resistance to the tide of liberal secularism was most courageous.

He's regularly mocked for his debate with the Monty Python crew over Life of Brian, but I think he acquitted himself very well. He was quite obviously fighting a lost battle. The Pythons' insistence that they meant no disrespect to Christianity is not terribly convincing, and even seems like a cop-out.

Despite a certain amount of academic jargon, this is a fascinating insight into the lives of British people living through the liberalization and secularization of Britain, and how they reacted to that. The letter-writers had a great deal to say about their own histories, and it's deeply interesting.

It's a pricey book, so it might not be worth actually buying first-hand. I came across the e-book on the library catalogue while looking for something else, and I've been printing chapters out to read them on my tea-breaks.

Aren't books wonderful? So many different things can make material for a book.

New Year's Eve 2019

In the last hours of a decade with no name
I flicked through channels, looking for some show
Where guests would put the decade in a frame
And hang it. Surely there’d be one…but no.

The fifties, sixties, seventies…had they
Expired like this, uncommented upon?
I didn't think so, even though they say
You never see the Zeitgeist till it's gone.

My father hated end-of-year reviews
Nostalgist though he was, the same as me.
A dinosaur addicted to the news.

This was the first New Year he wouldn't see.

Tonight, bizarrely, he’d be missing from
The New Year's hooly that his best friend threw
Year after year. So I’d agreed to come
Although I felt uneasy in that crew.

They sang all night and drank to beat the band
And I'd heard decades of familiar tales
About them (sometimes more than I could stand,
Weary of tracing their well-trodden trails).

All socialists, republicans, and such,
Children of Pearse and Connolly and Sands.
Their slogans (though not mine) were double Dutch
To this new Ireland of Big Tech and brands.

We’d moved to Sillogue Gardens just a bit
After my mother’s death, when the Twin Towers
Were newly fallen. Though we’d lived in it
For eighteen years, it never quite seemed ours.

Our New Year hosts had lived there all the time
I’d been alive. It was their realm. And yet
Its atmosphere was not the sad sublime
Of rebel ballads, rosy with regret.

To me, at least, the Gardens still preserved
Their nineteen-eighties vibe, all teenage pop
And roller-skates and bubble-gum. It’s where
I’d seen most of that kid’s stuff, growing up.

Who would recall the twenty-teens like that?
And what about the noughties? Just a name.
The view down twenty years was almost flat.
I strained for images and nothing came.

Well, New Year’s Eve. I took my corner spot.
The early-party awkwardness went by.
(They spoke more Irish than I thought, this lot.)
I listened to a story from some guy.

The night advanced. The rebel songs began.
The grievances of decades filled the air.
Songs lend us life beyond man’s natural span.
My father sang these songs. He wasn't there.

And as the night wore on, the party seemed
Almost a wake…the old spoke of the dead.
So few this year, where once this house had teemed
Each New Year's Eve. That's what my father said.

The rebel ballads ended, and they sung
“The Boxer” and “the day the music died”.
The decade's final hour was almost done.
We went to see the fireworks start outside.

Kisses and hugs and phone calls and bad jokes.
“Next Year in Jerusalem” my father said
Each New Year's Eve. We stood and tried to coax
Some sense of wonder. Someone went to bed.

My father, mythmaker, was now a part
Of that uncertain sure thing, history.
Covid was next. Oh, hapless human heart,
What hopes and fears you fix on memory!

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

 

The ideal Ireland that we would have, the Ireland that we dreamed of, would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit – a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. The home, in short, of a people living the life that God desires that men should live. With the tidings that make such an Ireland possible, St. Patrick came to our ancestors fifteen hundred years ago promising happiness here no less than happiness hereafter. It was the pursuit of such an Ireland that later made our country worthy to be called the island of saints and scholars. It was the idea of such an Ireland - happy, vigorous, spiritual - that fired the imagination of our poets; that made successive generations of patriotic men give their lives to win religious and political liberty; and that will urge men in our own and future generations to die, if need be, so that these liberties may be preserved.

Eamon De Valera, St. Patrick's Day 1943

(A little in advance, but it's become a bit of a festival rather than a day, anyway...)

Blessed Angela Salawa

Today is the feast day of Blessed Angela Salawa. I'd never heard of her before this morning and I found her story quite fascinating.

Read about her here.

Deo Gratias!

Yesterday saw an overwhelming rejection by the Irish electorate-- or those who bothered to turn up-- of the government's attempts to remove Ireland's constitutional protections for motherhood and marriage, and to swap those terms for terms which were nebulous and indefinable.

In fact, it was a record defeat in one of the referenda.

Irish referenda are very mysterious. Why did the abortion referendum have a bigger "yes" vote than the gay marriage referendum? Why does an electorate which is so liberal on many social issues seem quite conservative when it comes to proposals such as abolishing the Seanad or lowering the age at which someone can run for President?

I've voted "no" in every single referendum in my lifetime. I've only regretted it once-- I wish I had voted "yes" to the referendum on the Good Friday Agreement. At the time I thought it was a mistake to relinquish our constitutional claim to the North. Now, I think it was necessary for the peace which followed.

I took a walk to the Dublin count centre in the RDS, close to where I live, to see if I could lap up any of the excitement from outside. But there wasn't much to see. I've always loved interviews and footage from the count centres. It's one of my life's ambitions to be present in one at some stage.

This referendum was the first time I've voted as a Southsider. I crossed the Liffey in 2019 and there was a local by-election in my constituency in that time, but I didn't change my address on the register soon enough to vote. This time I managed it just in time.

(I thought of turning the blog background pink for Laetare Sunday, but it doesn't seem worth it for one day. St. Patrick's Day is a Sunday this year, so since I rarely have desktop access at the weekend, it might be green for a few days on either side-- if I don't forget.)

Vote No, and No

It hardly needs saying, but anyone who can should vote "No" to both referendum proposals on Thursday.

A country's Constitution is serious business. Our government (and we have had essentially the same government for decades now) seems to think it should be changed as often as a hand-towel.

Here's the statement from the Catholic bishops (good on them) and here's a video from Fr. Brendan Kilcoyne making the arguments against the proposals.

It seems most likely they will pass, given the voting record of the Irish public. But there's some hope; as recently as 2013, a proposal to abolish the Seanad (the Irish upper house of parliament) was narrowly rejected.

Leap Day

Today is the 29th of February, a day that only rolls around once every four years, or so.

As readers will know, I'm very interested in days, holidays, seasons, and so forth. But especially days. I've written about it in many posts. This one, for instance.

Leap Day is an interesting one because there's so little fuss about it. I think there should be. It's a day when the intersection between the day-to-day and the year-to-year-- different "streams of time", that is-- comes to the fore. A mysterious liminal space, like a crossroads or a lobby.

Perhaps it should be a day when we all look back on the last four years (or however long it's been since the last leap day). This could be the subject of articles, TV and radio shows, podcasts, etc.

Or perhaps we should have leaping competitions. Or leaping dances. Or eat salmon, which is well-known for leaping. (Vegetarians could have salmon-shaped pastries or chocolates, as indeed could non-vegetarians. Maybe we'll just leave the real fish be.)

I did hear some people talking about it in work today. One person suggested we should have an extra day's pay for an extra day's work. This caused some hilarity and was repeated from person to person.

Happy Leap Day!

Purple for Lent

Remember I used to turn the blog's background green for St. Patrick's Day? Today I decided to turn it purple for Lent!

A revived tradition is even better than a tradition, and an expanded tradition is even better than a revived tradition.

Ash Wednesday

For the day that's in it, a little poem I wrote two years ago:

Ash Wednesday

The priest rubs ashes on my head
And tells me to repent.
My sins are very far from dead,
My lusts are far from spent.

That ancient bonfire burns apace,
That blaze of sin and lust.
God send me hotter flames of grace
Before I fall to dust.

Today is also Valentine's Day. Here's a little poem taken from the novel Weaveworld by Clive Barker, which I think is very appropriate to today's double-bill, and is a pretty good poem. I hope Barker's people won't come after me for copyright violation, especially since it's freely available elsewhere on the 'net.

One part of love is innocence
One part of love is guilt
One part the milk, that in a sense
Is soured as soon as spilt
One part of love is sentiment
One part of love is lust
One part is the presentiment
Of our return to dust.

And, since that's all very grim, here's something that made me laugh yesterday. The full title of a joke-book from 1771, which I came across on my library's online catalogue:

The Complete London Jester, or, wit's companion: Containing all the fun and all the humour, all the learning and all the judgment, which have lately slowed from the two universities, from the two theatres, from White's Chocolate-house, from the Bedford Coffee-house; or, from the spouting clubs, and choice spirits clubs in London and Westminster. Including all the fashionable jests, epigrams, merry tales, humorous jokes, bon mots, conundrums, Irish bulls, comical humbugs, droll narrations, smart repartees, new adventures, funny epitaphs, and witticisms. Which will expel care, drown grief, banish the spleen, improve the wit, create mirth, entertain company, and give the reader a light heart, and a chearful countenance. The whole teaching the agreable art of story-telling, and furnishing pieces of wit, for the amusement and improvement of both sexes. The sixth edition. To which is added a genteel collection of the various toasts, sentiments, and Hob-Nobs, now in fashion

Annus Mirabilis (by a Spirit of Vatican II Catholic)

This is just a bit of fun. I am very much a Vatican II Catholic myself-- and even a spirit of Vatican II Catholic (St. John Paul II actually appealed to the "spirit" of the Council on several occasions.) This poem isn't mocking Vatican II, or even its spirit, but those misguided Catholics who expected the Church was going to go full hippy.

It is, of course, a pastiche of a famous Philip Larkin poem which begins with the words "Sexual intercourse".

The real Catholic Church began
In 1963
(Which was just in time for me)
Before the contraceptive ban
And the second Pope J.P.

Up until then there'd only been
A lot of mumbling
And guilt and shame and bling
That started out with Constantine
And screwed up everything.

Then suddenly the Spirit spoke
And everyone felt the same.
Goodbye to guilt and shame;
God was a thoroughly decent bloke
Who'd been given a bad name.

So life was never better than
In 1963
(Still years before H.V.)
Before the contraceptive ban
And the second Pope J.P.

Poem for St. Bridget's Day

Your fire has never ceased to burn
A glow by which we live and learn
And when spring dawns our thoughts return
To Bridget, Mary of the Gael.

You are no pagan deity
But God bathed you mysteriously
In lights of ancient piety
Dear Bridget, Mary of the Gael.

Within the Bridget's Cross we find
The fabric of the Gaelic mind
Folklife and faith securely twined
Dear Bridget, Mary of the Gael.

With Patrick and with Colmcille
You guided us to do God's will
In these dark days, be with us still
Dear Bridget, Mary of the Gael.

Ar uair ár mbás bí linn go fóill
To watch, to comfort, and console
Spread out your cloak upon my soul
Dear Bridget, Mary of the Gael.

A Petition for More Public Bathrooms in Dublin

This has become something of a hobby-horse of mine in recent year, so I decided to start a petition on the subject.

Who knows whether it will reach the dizzy heights of my previous petition, asking RTE to bring back the national anthem at the end of the day's programming? Five people signed that!

Can we make it six this time? Help me out, mates, and sign here.

Popes in a Year Email Service: A Recommendation

For a week now, I've been subscribed to the "Popes in a Year" email from Flocknote, and I recommend it to you.

You can sign up here.

I've been greatly enjoying these emails, and hopefully benefitting from them. There's a capsule description of one Pope every day. It's just the right length, if it was any longer I might not read them. (I find the jokey tone a bit annoying, but that seems to be the fashion these days.)

Yes, you can just look the Popes up on Wikipedia, or anywhere else, but it's nice to have these pen portraits delivered to your inbox every day.

I'm frequently amazed at how little I know about papal history. I learned only this week that there was an Anti-Pope Christopher who reigned from 903-904 and who was considered a legitimate Pope all the way up to the twentieth century.

It's also quite astonishing that the Vatican itself concedes that, at certain periods in history, it's impossible to tell who was the legitimate Pope when there are various claimants.

There's a great deal of discussion on the nature and limits of the papacy these days. Learning more about papal history can only help us in navigating such debates, whether as participants or as audience.

My Talk at the Library Staff Day

On Tuesday I gave a talk at the annual library Staff Day. The library Staff Day has become an institution and a tradition in its own right. I've just delved into my diary and found that the first one happened in 2014. I've often been on the organizing committee for the event, including this year. This is the first time I've given a talk.

UCD Library is spread over one main library (the James Joyce Library, where I work) and four branch libraries-- the veterinary science library, the architecture library, the health sciences library, and the business studies library. They're all on the Belfield campus apart from the business sciences library, which is in UCD's other campus in Blackrock.

Between the five different locations and the fact that people work in different departments, the staff is quite dispersed. So the Staff Day is one day in the year when the whole staff gets together. The day usually starts with a "State of the Library" address by a librarian, and often an address by someone high up on the university hierarchy, like the Deputy President. Inevitably we're told what wonderful work we're all doing and how important the library is to UCD.

After that there are talks on other subjects, some library-related, some not. In previous years we've had guest speakers, though we didn't this year. There's usually a nice lunch, a fun quiz for people who want to take it, and activities like Scrabble or tai chi.

This year the decision was made to round the day off with "lightning talks" by library staff. We could talk on whatever we wanted.

I chose to talk on the subject of Ivy Day, which will be explained in the transcript below. (I always read from a script.)

It's a strange thing. I don't really get very nervous about speaking in public. I do get nervous to some extent. Five or ten minutes before, my heart is hammering. But once I get up there I'm usually OK, and even enjoy the experience.

In contrast, I dread the coffee breaks at events like this. Just as I dread "coffee mornings", or "finger food" parties, or any social occasion where people are "mingling" and "circulating". Just walking up to someone and starting to talk to them randomly has never been easy to me.

Even with people I know! I have different strategies for dealing with this. Sometimes I actually pre-arrange with people to go and chat with me, so I'm not standing on my own. Sometimes I go find a corner to sit and read. Sometimes I get so sick of the whole thing that I stand in the middle of the floor and sip my tea, not even making an effort. (Very often this results in somebody coming to chat to me, which is fine.)

Anyway, the talk went down very well, for which I'm grateful. Here it is. I began with some poetry, which will surprise none of my readers here:

Come gather round me, Parnellites,
And praise our chosen man,
Stand upright on your legs awhile,
Stand upright while you can,
For soon we lie where he is laid
And he is underground;
Come fill up all those glasses
And pass the bottle round.

And here's a cogent reason
And I have many more,
He fought the might of England
And saved the Irish poor,
Whatever good a farmer's got
He brought it all to pass;
And here's another reason,
That Parnell loved a lass.

And here's a final reason,
He was of such a kind
That every man that sings a song
Keeps Parnell in his mind
For Parnell was a proud man,
No prouder trod the ground,
And a proud man's a lovely man
So pass the bottle round.

There’s never a bad reason to recite Yeats. Those verses are from “Come Gather Round Me Parnellites”, a poem Yeats wrote in 1936, a few years before his death. As we all know, the Parnellites and the anti-Parnellites were factions that emerged in Ireland after the fall of Charles Stewart Parnell in 1890, when he was revealed to be having an affair with a married woman. The split has left quite a distinguished literary legacy, which includes this poem and the famous Christmas dinner scene in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.

Parnell died a year later and his funeral, on the sixth of October, was attended by an estimated crowd of two hundred thousand. He was buried in Glasnevin cemetery and the crowd took ivy from the cemetery walls and put it in their lapels. This led to the sixth of October being commemorated as Ivy Day.

Rather incredibly, there’s been an Ivy Day commemoration in Glasnevin Cemetery every year since Parnell died. Since I first learned about this, a few years ago, I’ve been meaning to attend, but one thing or another prevented me. I finally succeeded last year.

“Low key” would be an understatement to describe it. I was there an hour ahead of time, to avoid the rush. Only the presence of a makeshift podium and some workmen sitting on the fence around the grave indicated anything would happen. About fifteen minutes before kick-off, a few elderly people drifted in. The sound of bag-pipes was heard at the cemetery gates at ten to twelve. Within a few minutes, a small gathering had assembled, a wreath had been laid on the grave, and former Fianna Fáil TD Martin Mansergh gave a speech about political plularism. I was given a sprig of ivy by one of the members of the Parnell Society, who all seemed surprised but pleased at my presence. I’d guess there were fewer than fifty people there, and they all seemed to know each other.

Why did I feel such an urge to go? It’s not that I’m particularly keen on Charles Stewart Parnell. I expect I would have sided with the bishops and been an anti-Parnellite back in the day. No, I had another reason.

I have to admit to a certain anxiety that gnaws at me, and has done for many many years. I have a dread of homogenization, of globalization, of a consumerist monoculture flattening all the precious diversity of the earth. A world of MacDonalds and Starbucks and Netflix. Where every place looks like every other, and where every day looks like every other, aside from the ever-expanding commercialized frenzies of Christmas and Valentine’s Day and Halloween. A world of everything everywhere all at once, which doesn’t leave much room for the national, the regional, the local, the seasonal, or the distinctive, unless you flee to the farms of the Amish and the Mennonites.

I worry about this every minute of every day, including when I’m asleep or running for a bus.

Is this actually happening? It’s very hard to tell objectively. We are always in danger of confirmation bias, the same way everyone thinks good music stopped being made after their own youth. There are even some counter-indications. For instance, Cornish was considered a dead language until recently, when people started to learn it and speak it again. Then there’s the internet. In the heyday of TV and radio, a few editors decided what millions and millions of people did with their leisure hours. Now you can log onto a rubber duck lover internet forum, or a flat earth discussion group, or whatever you want.

Despite all this, many observers seem to agree that the world is getting more and more samey. For instance, though the news about Cornish is encouraging, it’s estimated that ninety per cent of the currently spoken languages will be extinct by 2050.

So, just in case, I propose that we all do as I did this year, and find some equivalent of Ivy Day to support. Memorize some folk ballads, and sing them to your embarrassed friends and family. Re-introduce some old pub game to your local, if you can drag people away from their smartphones. Get your kids to say “Help the Hallowe’en Party” instead of “Trick or Treat”. Hold a bonfire and eat a bowl of goodie on St. John’s Eve. Or even come with me to the next Ivy Day. As library staff, we spend all our working lives preserving things. What’s the point if we never revive anything?

I’ll leave the last word to Yeats, who deserves the last word on everything:

The Bishops and the party
That tragic story made,
A husband that had sold his wife
And after that betrayed;
But stories that live longest
Are sung above the glass,
And Parnell loved his country
And Parnell loved his lass.

Go raibh maith agaibh.

Some Christmas Leftovers

Well, I'm back from my Christmas break. I hope all my readers had a good Christmas and New Year.

Here's something I posted on Facebook during the break, purely as a kick-off for 2024.

I have long been of the opinion that the "in-betweeny" moments of life are the best.

Yesterday our neighbours, literally across the hall, who we've only become friendly with recently, treated us to Christmas Eve dinner at their apartment. It was delicious. Then we went to the Blessed Sacrament Chapel in Bachelor's Walk for Midnight Mass actually at midnight. A cup of tea upstairs afterwards.

Then this morning, Christmas Day Mass in UCD chapel.

Then breakfast in our neighbours' apartment, on the very extensive leftovers from the dinner. 

Just with the husband, as the wife is working today.

Leftovers are always delicious and it was very peaceful and relaxed, sitting looking out the window and eating a late and ample breakfast, having meandering and easy conversation. Those low-key moments always seem like the nicest to me. I mean, I like formality and bustle and occasion and a sense of event. But I like the respite from it, the contrast to it, even more.

Happy Christmas!

And Happy New Year! This is the thirteenth year of this blog!