My Article on Mary Aikenhead and the Irish Sisters of Charity...

 ...is the cover story of this week's issue of Ireland's Own!

Shocking attack on a Priest in Ballycosgrove

 

Startling reports today of an attack on Fr. Jack Cheevers, parish priest of Ballycosgrove in Tipperary.

An enraged parishioner ran down the aisle and, according to witnesses, "rugby-tackled" the popular priest to the altar, causing him shock and distress.

Fr. Cheevers had just begun his homily. His last words were: "A man woke one morning to find his house surrounded by a flood..."

The Gardaí have decided that a prosecution is not in the public interest.

Fr. Cheevers is said to be unharmed.

Eyewitness Gemma O'Bringlóid said: "Thank God somebody realized the seriousness of the situation and responded immediately." 

When asked "So a third person rushed to the altar?", Gemma looked confused and said: "What do you mean, a third person?"

Full story here.

Happy St. Bridget's Day!

To mark the day, here's an interesting blog post by one of my colleagues in UCD.

https://ucdculturalheritagecollections.com/2025/01/23/a-crown-of-lighted-candles/

I had somehow never heard of "Biddy Boys" before, but I already want to revive them.

St. Bridget's Day has become a much bigger phenomenon in Ireland recently, especially with the introduction of the bank holiday. This is a wonderful thing. It's true that contemporary Ireland has big difficulties with celebrating a Christian saint, so it does it's best to repackage her as a pagan goddess or some kind of feminist symbol. What the heck. I've always been inclined to think that any festival is better than no festival, unless it's celebrating pure evil. The theme of this year's "Brigit Festival" is "celebrating women", and I can certainly get behind that, even if I might celebrate women differently (that is, celebrating their femininity and their glorious differences from men, as well as all their achievements in arts, culture, science, and so on).

My favourite poem that mentions St. Bridget's Day is this wonderful translation by Frank O'Connor of a famous old Gaelic poem by Anthony Raftery, "the last of the wandering bards". O'Connor's version has a marvellous vernal gusto it, that seems to mirror the return of life to the winter-wearied world. Of course, St. Bridget's Day is traditionally the first day of spring in Ireland.

As with all my favourite poems, lines from this one frequently come into my mind unbidden. Generally, it's the very first words "Now with St. Bride's Day the days will go longer", and I think of it whenever I hope things are on the up in some way or other.

"I give you my word that the heart in my rises" is a wonderful line, and there's an immense poignancy in the phrase: "Could I but stand in the heart of my people". I'm increasingly of the view that "nationalism" is a stupid and even objectional word. It's like having a formal term for the social philosophy that people should wear clothes, or that children should be innocent, or that human beings should occasionally laugh. To be a member of a people has been so much the universal experience of humankind that it was a very crafty and nasty trick to claim that this idea first came into currency among German intellectuals in the nineteenth century. (Yes, the poet is talking about his local people here, rather than his nation, but we tend to have concentric circles of "peoples". Globalism and international wants to eliminate them all.)

Anyway, here it is. I could only find the Frank O'Connor version in one place on the internet, and there were some significant differences from how I remembered it. I've "corrected" it to my own recollection of it, unapologetically. The poetry of the place-names in it is also very beautiful.

Now with the springtime the days will grow longer,

And after St. Bride’s day my sail I’ll let go,

I'll put my mind to it and never will linger 

Till I find myself back in the County Mayo

'Tis in Claremorris I’ll stop the first evening,

And at Balla beneath it I’ll first take the floor;

I’ll go to Kiltimagh and have a month’s peace there, 

And that’s not two miles from Ballinamore. 

I give you my word that the heart in me rises 

As when the wind rises and all the mists go, 

Thinking of Carra and Gallen beneath it, 

Scahaveela and all the wide plains of Mayo; 

Killeadan’s the village where everything pleases, 

Of berries and all kinds of fruit there's no lack, 

And could I but stand in the heart of my people 

Old age would drop from me and youth would come back.

My own poem on St. Bridgit is one of my better efforts and got some traction last year.

A Biblical Parallel in Dracula?

 I've been re-reading Dracula, the original novel by Bram Stoker, which unleased the unkillable Count on an endless spree through literature, cinema, theatre, and every other form of culture imaginable.

I'm rather excited to notice a Biblical parallel which has, I think, eluded everyone so far. (At least, I can't find any reference to it on the internet, and surely everything is on the internet.)

In this passage, Professor Van Helsing is beginning to suggest to his protegé and fellow Man of Science, Dr. John Seward, that something vampiric may be at work in the strange events they have experienced.

He subjects Dr. Seward to a series of rhetorical questions:

There are always mysteries in life. Why was it that Methuselah lived nine hundred years, and ‘Old Parr’ one hundred and sixty-nine, and yet that poor Lucy, with four men’s blood in her poor veins, could not live even one day? For, had she live one more day, we could have save her. Do you know all the mystery of life and death? Do you know the altogether of comparative anatomy and can say wherefore the qualities of brutes are in some men, and not in others? Can you tell me why, when other spiders die small and soon, that one great spider lived for centuries in the tower of the old Spanish church and grew and grew, till, on descending, he could drink the oil of all the church lamps? Can you tell me why in the Pampas, ay and elsewhere, there are bats that come at night and open the veins of cattle and horses and suck dry their veins; how in some islands of the Western seas there are bats which hang on the trees all day, and those who have seen describe as like giant nuts or pods, and that when the sailors sleep on the deck, because that it is hot, flit down on them, and then—and then in the morning are found dead men, white as even Miss Lucy was?”

“Good God, Professor!” I said, starting up. “Do you mean to tell me that Lucy was bitten by such a bat; and that such a thing is here in London in the nineteenth century?” He waved his hand for silence, and went on:—

“Can you tell me why the tortoise lives more long than generations of men; why the elephant goes on and on till he have seen dynasties; and why the parrot never die only of bite of cat or dog or other complaint? Can you tell me why men believe in all ages and places that there are some few who live on always if they be permit; that there are men and women who cannot die? We all know—because science has vouched for the fact—that there have been toads shut up in rocks for thousands of years, shut in one so small hole that only hold him since the youth of the world. Can you tell me how the Indian fakir can make himself to die and have been buried, and his grave sealed and corn sowed on it, and the corn reaped and be cut and sown and reaped and cut again, and then men come and take away the unbroken seal and that there lie the Indian fakir, not dead, but that rise up and walk amongst them as before?”

This, to me, seems clearly inspired by the Book of...

Well, reader, what do you think? Which Book?

(I've just discovered that I'm not, alas, the first to notice this parallel. Well, it was too good to be true. It's still interesting, though.)

Thoughts on this Blog

I've always hated it when anybody claims to be very busy. It seems self-important and pompous. If you're busy, you don't have to tell everybody how busy you are. After all, we all have the same amount of time in the day, and we're all doing something with it.

So I won't say I've been very busy recently. I have, however, been preoccupied with other things than this blog for the last month or so.

Today was actually the first day I had time to contemplate writing a proper blog post. The longer I contemplated, however, the harder I found it to think of something adequate to write.

There's no shortage of subjects, really. Life is a dizzying kaleidoscope. It would be easy enough to pick a subject at near-random and set my keyboard clacking.

But I was trying to think of a subject that's important to me, and that might be important to other people.

Every time one occurred to me, I thought of a previous blog post (or many blog posts) that I'd written on that topic previously. Everybody has themes that exercise them. If you're a painter, or a poet, or a musician, you can revisit those themes endlessly, since artistic expression has the power to make the old (or the timeless) ever-new. But it's not really the same with the essayist (and a blogger is essentially an essayist). The essayist risks becoming a bore.

One remedy to this might be to write more feature-style, informational articles. Like the articles I wrote for my short-lived Traditions Traditions Traditions! blog. This requires time for research, though.

I'm actually quite proud of this blog. It's been going since 2011, which I think makes it something of an institution, and I'm all in favour of institutions. More than that, it's proof that I have, in some small way (and I'm under no illusions as regards to its smallness), fought the good fight and raised my banner on behalf of precious things.

In some ways, I think I've been ahead of the curve. Organized religion was very much on the defensive when I started blogging. Today, the New Atheism is a fading memory, and we have a whole wave of high-profile conversions to Christianity. One assumes that something similar is happening with ordinary people, except you don't hear about it. Meanwhile, the debate between atheists, agnostics and believers has become much more respectful and friendly than it was in the days of New Atheist sloganeering.

(Even on a purely personal and anecdotal level, I've seen the congregations in the UCD church becoming more reverential and traditional over the last few years. A mostly-student congregation that now regularly features several young women in mantillas, and usually one or two babies, is quite remarkable.)

Similarly, the pitiful thing that called itself "conservatism" back in 2011 (the era of Mitt Romney and David Cameron) has almost been laughed out of existence. In 2012, I wrote this trio of blog posts explaining why I was a traditionalist conservative. I think it's fair to say that conservatism today is much closer to my own vision than the sort of conservatism that was ascendant fifteen years ago. Indeed, you could even say society itself has moved much closer to my vision. Tradition and character are back, baby!

(Ireland remains an outlier. But then, we are always several decades behind.)

On the debit side, my campaigns for the revival of traditional poetry have been completely fruitless. I can't get anyone to care about poetry-- proper poetry. People listen respectfully, agree, and then go on ignoring it. Conservatives are every bit as indifferent as liberals. I see no imminent prospect of this changing.

Added to that, this blog has shown no sign of growing its audience. I'm grateful to the few people who comment, but I have no evidence of new regular readers. I've become aware that blogs themselves are going out of fashion. Which to me is just another reason to keep soldiering on. My archive is now quite extensive, but I rarely even get new comments on the old posts. I'd always harboured the fond hope that more people might discover this bIog through coming across this or that article that interested them (there are well over two thousand), but it doesn't seem to have happened. I find this discouraging.

I was delighted, however, that this blog received a lovely tribute on the excellent Some Definite Service blog, which I venture to call a sister blog to this one.

The blog will continue, one way or another. I'll just have to mull over what direction it should take. I am grateful for everybody who reads it.

Some Lesser-Known Irish Phrases

It's surprising how much flies under the radar when it comes to national differences. (Such differences as remain, I must gloomily add.) Whenever we discuss, for instance, Irishisms (or Irish idioms), it tends to be the same few that come to mind. Everybody knows "eejit" and "craic", and these are indeed used all the time in everyday life.

But there are many others that are so less-remarked that, frequently enough, I don't even realize they are Irishisms until this comes to my attention, for whatever reason.

I've been collecting these for a few months. Finding myself using one in a comment I left on the most recent post on the Some Definite Service blog, it occurred to me to share them. So here goes.

You’re some flower (or "you're some boy"): You're a piece of work! (Usually said in a tone of reluctant admiration.)

O'Reilly, the builder with the blarney from Fawlty Towers

Sent from Billy to Jack: Sent from pillar to post. "Your customer service department has sent me from Billy to Jack." Somewhat dated and rare, but I used it myself for a long time before I realized it was purely Irish.

You’re a star: You're a mensch, you're a brick. Very, very common, to the extent that it's the title of an Irish talent show on TV.

Tell me this and tell me no more: Rather old-fashioned, and now used more ironically than otherwise. Usually used in the context of something one has puzzled over for a long time, or finds baffling. I think it's more a Dublin usage than a general Irish usage, though I might be wrong. I can only "hear" it in an old Dublin accent.

Get out of that garden: Similar to Kenneth Williams's "stop messing abaht!". Used more ironically and self-consciously in my experience. Very much a Dublin usage.

You’re very good: "Thank you, you're very kind." This is probably said millions of times all over Ireland every day. It's so common I was surprised when I realized it was an Irishism.

At all at all: An emphatic ending to a statement. "He doesn't know what he's doing at all at all." Generally used for humorous effect, and even affecting a "culchie" or rural accent. I used to find this very irritating, rather randomly. The dropped comma is crucial; there's no pause.

Goodbye goodbye goodbye: This is almost the standard way to end a phone-call in Ireland. It's a form of insurance against not responding to somebody else's final "goodybe": to simply keep repeating the word until you hang up. Generally just three, though. I've observed this is especially common among women, but it's widely used by men, too.

He's a total looper: He's nuts.

In the ha’penny place: Doesn't hold a candle to. "I'm only in the ha'penny place to you when it comes to mischief." Used in the movie Michael Collins: "

No bother to you! You could accomplish that easily. Generally a compliment or an encouragement. "You should go up and sing a song. Go on, no bother to you!".

A Short Story for the New Year: The Second Hand

Happy New Year! I'm going to be very busy in the next few weeks, so I probably won't have time for blogging. To keep the blog ticking over, here is a horror short story I wrote a few months ago. A few of my regular readers have read it already. Nobody is predicting I'm going to be stealing Stephen King's crown any time soon, but I hope it's worth a read.

I love being a family man, but I still hanker for time on my own. So when Marion and Eamonn flew off to my niece-in-law’s wedding, and I couldn’t go– it was the weekend of the Yeats conference, and I’d already committed to give a paper– I’ll admit I was looking forward to the time away from them.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my wife and son more than I’ve ever loved anything. Would I sacrifice myself to save them from a fire, or a terrorist attack, or some such situation? Without a moment’s hesitation. I’ve been in love with Marion since we were both fifteen years old, and my whole universe changed when Eamonn came into the world, that blizzardy January evening six years ago.

But…well, I can’t help it. Sometimes I hanker for brief but total isolation. I like pottering and daydreaming and looking at the reflection of a lightbulb in a cup of coffee. I like listening to the ticking of a clock, the whistle of the kettle. Marion is always listening to the radio, and Eamonn is already enraptured with the computer screen— something I’d resolved to protect him from in my idealistic days of early fatherhood, but which became (to be honest) an all-too-convenient pacifier before long. Really, I don’t think I’m any more indulgent with technology than most harried parents. At least I can say he’s well ahead in his reading age.

I drove them to the airport around eight. Eamonn was excited, but I wonder how he’d hold up on the six-hour flight to New York. Or, for that matter, on the hour-long stopover in JFK, before they fly to Rhode Island. I was glad he was having an adventure.

He’d had a tough year of it, with the fall and the broken leg this time last year. He’d fallen down the stairs one night, making his way to the kitchen to get a glass of water. It must have been hereditary, as I’d done the same thing about ten years ago, breaking my wrist.

And, in the meantime– the house was all my own, for two glorious evenings! I could do anything I want– watch any of the DVDs Marion never wanted to watch (mostly historical dramas), read uninterrupted for hours, or just soak in the bath all night and listen to some podcast. Actually, that sounded like just the thing.

So, ten minutes after I’d got home from the airport, I was laying back in a just-hot-enough tub while half-listening to a podcast on Yeats. I’d decided I should make it a Yeats podcast, given the conference this weekend, but I made it something as light and frothy as the bubble bath– a fairly middlebrow account of his unrequited love for Maud Gonne.

Lying there, feeling my body responding gradually to the warmth, I realised that I'd always felt sorry for Yeats. No, not just sorry….but a little bit condescending.

I was convinced that winning the love of your life was the jackpot prize in life, by far the best thing that could possibly happen to anybody. Even genius and fame and a Nobel Prize paled in comparison. I would never say such a thing out loud– it sounds horribly smug–  but I couldn't help my conviction that I was a member of a very small fraction of amazingly lucky people. From the first moment I'd laid eyes on Marion, I knew she was It. Yes, I've had plenty of other crushes down the years, both before and after we’d married. But it wasn't the same, it wasn't even comparable. 

I'd never had to settle, like most people had to settle. I never had to lie awake at night thinking of “the one that got away”. Poor old Willie Yeats! Poor everybody that ever had to do that!

All this gushing about my wife-- what about Eamonn, you might ask? Well, my feelings for Eamonn seemed like a natural overflow of my feelings for Marion. The two loves were like the light and heat of a flame (to take a comparison I would probably dismiss as hackneyed in my professional capacity).

I sunk deeper into the tub so that the water was up to my ears. I found myself enjoying the podcast, not for its narrative of Yeats's great passion– that was old hat to me, and the podcast added nothing new– but for its description of the love-letters he wrote. All of a sudden (this kind of reaction was quite common with me) the very idea of handwritten, personal documents seized my imagination; each one a unique expression of a distinctive personality, a moment in time and place. Not living in a computer server somewhere, in the digital ether, but in satisfying, tactile paper and ink.

So strong was this impression that I had a hankering to put my hands on handwritten documents at that very moment.

It only took me a few moments to remember the filing cabinet in the attic. It was full of my parents’ old papers, and I probably hadn’t looked into it (aside from the odd cursory glance) in over ten years.

Within moments I was in my bathrobe and slippers, and making my way upstairs.

The attic was a place I rarely entered, and the panel opening onto it was stiff. It took some effort to push it open, after finding the wooden stepladder to make my way up there. But I hoisted myself up without great difficulty. It was a fairly roomy attic, though nowhere near roomy enough to be converted to a bedroom. We had left an electric lamp up there, which I found after a little groping. It threw a pale white light in the little space, though it wasn’t bright enough to reach the corners.

Aside from boxes of books, there wasn’t much in the attic other than the filing-cabinet. Neither Marion nor I were clutterbugs– although we were both voracious readers.

The filing cabinet was small, metal, and olive-green. It had a very seventies or eighties look about it. It was mostly full of my father’s papers. A professional historian, his one book The Irish Huguenots was still a standard text in universities. There had been three different editions, and with his typical perfectionism he’d written draft after draft after draft of each one; I’d proofread the last one. In all honesty, it was a solid but dull piece of work; my father saw books as receptacles for knowledge. He was baffled by my love of poetry and literature.

My mother was no great writer, either, but she was a fairly dutiful correspondent. There were dozens if not hundreds of letters to her sister in Australia and her parents in Cork, written in her characteristically spiky writing.

I spent about two hours going through the papers in the filing cabinet, savouring the smell of the old paper and the dusty air. The only sound was the ticking of the second hand of my watch. It was such a soft sound, it only made the silence seem deeper, more peaceful.

I smiled at my mother’s frequent references to my health. I’ve never been seriously ill in my whole life, but she was a confirmed hypochondriac. I found it irritating at the time; now, with both my parents gone, their foibles suddenly seemed endearing.

It was then that I found it.

It was standing on its spine against the left-hand edge of the bottom drawer, hidden behind piles of other documents. It was a hardback copybook with a marble-effect cover.

The first page read The Personal Diary of S.J. Ward, 1995.

I was taken aback. I vaguely remembered having written a diary once– not for very long– but I’d assumed it had disappeared forever ago.

I turned the page, and there was a notice on the next one, in block capitals: TURN BACK, UNWELCOME READER! NOTHING GOOD WILL HAPPEN IF YOU KEEP ON READING!

Smiling at my teenage self’s sense of drama, I turned the page.

The diary was from my sixteenth year. It was written with the intensely self-conscious purple prose of a teenager just discovering the magic of the written word. There were three whole pages describing the rock of Cashel during a school visit.

A little later, on the tenth of March, there was this entry: “Went to see Outbreak with Marion Treacy. Pretty hokey. Eddie Rocket’s afterwards, hot dog and milkshake. Kept talking till seven p.m., walked her home. She seemed to have a good time.”

I couldn’t help smiling at my adolescent understatement. This was a truly life-changing day, our first date. There was a sense of unreality about it, a sense of unreality that endured for weeks afterwards, as I waited for her to discover what a dud I was. It never happened, miraculously. I’d probably been so matter-of-fact because I didn’t want to jinx it, or some such notion.

For the next few couple of days, there was nothing other than the trivia of the school timetable, television, and my first encounter with Hamlet, reading it off my own bat.

Then, on the thirteenth: “Shocking news this morning. Finn Marlowe was hit by a truck in the early hours of the morning. Dead instantly. Very weird atmosphere. Lots of whispering, girls crying. All sorts of rumours.”

All sorts of rumours? I strained my memory, trying to recall them. Oh yes…Finn was supposedly on LSD when he was hit by the truck. Or magic mushrooms. Or something.

It wasn’t hard to believe, because he was a bit of a weird kid. He didn’t speak much, and when he did speak, it tended to be a long monologue. He was ordinary height, thin, and always seemed very stiff. He had very fair hair, almost white-looking, and a sort of whiny expression. He always did up his shirt’s collar button, which most of the boys (including me) left open.

He wasn’t really bullied, that I know of, but he wasn’t popular, either. He didn’t seem to want to be popular. I do remember girls crying that morning his death was announced, but I’m pretty sure it was from shock rather than grief. 

Finn was fairly bright, and unquestionably talented when it came to art. He was always drawing between classes, but his pictures tended to the weird and macabre: the Grim Reaper, gargoyles, that sort of thing. I think he was into heavy metal or something.

Marion told me about a time he’d actually shown her his sketch-book, out of the blue. They were alone in the art class at the time, just after putting their portfolios away, and everybody else had cleared out. He seemed excited, she said. There were a few normal pictures, like studies of birds, but mostly it was really dark stuff. She remembered a picture of a witch being burned at the stake; the witch was a beautiful woman and flames were barely obscuring her abundant bosoms.

Marion remembered telling him his drawings were were great, then clearing out as quick as she decently could, embarrassed.

Of course I remembered Finn dying– a kid dying at school seems like a radical departure from the script of normality– but I had no idea it had happened so soon after I’d started dating Marion.

The funeral didn’t come till the 26th. My entry was: Finn’s funeral today, in St. Laurence’s. As ever, death comes along with a stream of platitudes, the horror masked by conventions, not to forget the inevitable sick jokes. 

The memories were coming back to me, clearer now. 

Decades later, I could admit to myself something that I was barely aware of, at the time; that death, especially premature death, gives a certain added relish to life. I noticed the same thing in the wake of 9/11. The shock and horror  were quite genuine; but, somehow, daily life around that time seemed sharper, heightened, more palpable. (I suppose if my work as an English academic has done anything for me, it’s made me more sensitive to atmospheres, even atmospheres we don’t like to admit to.)

The silence of the attic was broken by the jingle of an ice-cream van, coming from streets away. It’s always seemed to me a perversely melancholy sound. I found myself, randomly enough, remembering the refrain of the Wallace Stevens poem: The only Emperor is the Emperor of ice-cream.

I turned back to the diary. A sixteen-year-old in love took death in his stride, to say the least. I could watch myself, in entry after entry, becoming more confident that Marion (miracle of miracles!), actually liked me. 

On July the ninth I wrote: “Long conversation with M. outside the library, all about life and joy and honesty with yourself. She told me she can speak to me better than she can speak to anyone. Joy unsurpassed!”

As the diary went on, and aside from the ever-pressing business of tests and essays, my mentions of Marion became more lyrical, sometimes not even tied to any incident.

Then, when I turned the page to August, there was a shock.

Under a description of a morning’s browsing in bookshops with Marian, I’d written: “I have to admit, I can’t imagine feeling about anyone the way I feel about M. And– can it be true?-- I think she feels the same about me!!

Written underneath, in somebody else’s handwriting, were the words: Scum scum scum.

Incredulously, I examined them. They were unmistakeable. They were so neat and even, they looked almost like print at first, but a second look showed them to be handwritten.

I stared at them for minutes on end, baffled. Who on earth could have put them there? Why? My brother or sister? I couldn’t imagine it. They were always absorbed in their own lives. It was hard to imagine them ever reading my diary, much less writing a nasty comment. Besides, it wasn’t their handwriting.

I sat there, staring at the light from the electric lamp, listening to the gentle ticking of my watch.

Could it have been me? Could I have written it? Was I harbouring some kind of sub-conscious self-hatred that manifested itself in the very place where I finally admitted Marion liked me? Pop psychology, codswallop, I would have said at any other time…but how else to explain the thing?

I began to scan through the pages more urgently.

A few pages on, I had written: “How is it possible to feel this happy? It’s a horrible cliché to say it feels like a dream. I would never stoop to such cliché. But it feels like a dream!”

And, to the edge of those words, in the same block letters: Scum filth die.

Feeling cold all over, I thumbed through the rest of the diary. There wasn’t much left of it; it ended in early May. And there were no recurrences of that weird, horrible writing.

Tucked into the middle of the hardback copy, however, were some photographs.

About half of them were of me and Mairon; at the beach, on a park bench, just hanging out in her parents’ gardens. The others were all sorts: Christmas, the school production of The Tempest, a sports day.

One, however, showed a group of us on the school trip to the Rock of Cashel, standing with it in the background, on a sunny day.

There were about fifteen of us. I was standing towards the left of the group, smiling dutifully but not very enthusiastically at the camera.

The second from right from Marion, who looked like she had been laughing.

And right beside her was Finn. 

For once, he was smiling. It was as though all the sullenness had dropped for him, and he looked like a normal, happy-go-lucky kind of kid.

I felt a twinge of pity, of sympathy. Had he positioned himself just there for the group shot? He was grinning into the camera, with no idea that he only had weeks left to live. Ecstatically happy just to be standing beside the girl he liked, I guess. I knew how that felt.

Downstairs, I heard a thud. My heart began to hammer.

I looked around the attic for something heavy, something I could have in my hand as I went down to investigate. I couldn’t. Wildly, I found myself imagining a brass candlestick.

Then I heard a beautiful sound– the miaowing of Barty, the cat from 38.

I must have left the kitchen window open, and the cat must have knocked down– a book from a table, most likely. Barty frequently wandered in when he could find a way, looking for strokes and attention.

For now, he’d have to be disappointed. I was too intent upon the mystery of the diary.

I looked at those two grotesque entries again, trying to convince myself it was some kind of sick joke. But by what hand? When? And why?

I’d always considered myself a sceptic, more or less. I was grateful that a great man like Yeats could believe in his fairies and spirits, since it resulted in such great poetry– something that was rarely created by rationalists. But they weren’t to be taken seriously.

Or were they?

I flicked through the copy-book again, drawn back towards the morning where we’d heard the news that Finn had died.

March the thirteenth.

March the thirteenth!

The very day Eamonn had fallen down the stairs, a year ago. I remembered now.

I looked at my watch, which had a date reading just below the six on the dial.

Today was the twelfth.

I felt cold all of a sudden, a coldness that had nothing to do with the temperature in the attic.

The early hours of the thirteenth of March. Eamonn falling down the stairs. Finn walking under a truck.

I had fallen down the stairs in the early hours of the morning myself, all those years ago. I couldn’t remember the date, but I was pretty sure it was spring.

Then I started remembering other things.

One day in my twenties, walking home from the chipper after a night out, well after midnight, a motorbike skidded and slid into a tree just in front of me. The guy wasn’t hurt, and neither was I, but it was a close thing.

And then there was that holiday in Salzburg, where I celebrated St. Patrick’s Day with Irish students and emigrants. The tile that had slid from a roof just as I was walking under it, in the early hours of the morning. A freak accident, everybody said. It missed me by inches.

My mind was racing now, trying to think of every possible misadventure that might have struck me, Eamonn or Marion in the early hours of March the thirteenth. It was ridiculous, but I couldn’t help myself.

I couldn’t think of any others.

But the thing was, I had always been one for an early bedtime, and so was Marion. So I guessed that, most years on the thirteenth of March, in the early hours, I was fast asleep in bed. And so were Eamonn and Marion.

I sat there in the pale white light, staring at the face of the boy who had loved my wife, and trying to convince myself that he was now consigned to oblivion. Or, at least, to some other world, safely distinct from this one.

Then something occurre to me. It didn’t even make sense. If I was really onto something, if this boy could reach beyond the grave in the early hours on the date that he had died– because that’s what I was contemplating, insane as it seemed– why would I be safe even in bed?

Why wouldn’t he just block an artery in my heart, give me a brain aneurysm, make the ceiling fall on top of me, something like that?

That’s unanswerable, I thought, feeling a slow release of tension from my body. If this kid from the forgotten past really had the power to get to me, even one day a year, I would have been dead long ago.

But then…I flicked through the pages, looking at those horrible words again.

Scum scum scum.

Scum filth die.

They seemed barely coherent, like the welling up of some volcanic disembodied rage.

What did I really know about such things? How did I know what this force could do, what it couldn’t do? Whether it was Finn as we had known (or barely known him), or some horrible remnant of unreasoning hatred, jealousy and rage?

Why did I assume it made any sense, that it had any consistency, that our human logic applied to it at all?

A line from “The Dead” by James Joyce came to my mind. What was it? Ah, yes: “Some impalpable and vindictive being was coming against him, gathering forces against him in its vague world.” I’d always loved those words. I didn’t love them now.

And then– only at that moment, somehow–  the worst thought of all occurred to me.

In the early hours of March the thirteenth, Eamonn and Marion would be exactly where they were right now: tens of thousands of feet above the Atlantic Ocean.

I looked down at my watch. It was a little over two hours to midnight.

The sound of my watch’s second hand, counting down the moments with horrible precision, filled the shadowy attic. They stretched ahead of me, filling the horizon with dread.